The Last Street Novel (38 page)

Finally, Shareef came to his senses and shook his head.

“I don’t deal with guns, man. That’s not my thing.”

He didn’t even move to touch it.

After he said that, Meesha was able to breathe again.

Jurrell left the gun out on the table and didn’t touch it himself. He said, “What are you gonna do then? You wanna fight me? We too old for that shit now, too.”

Shareef looked at him and cracked a smile. He said, “It takes a lot of heart for you to put your life on the line like that.”

Jurrell responded with no smile. “That’s how serious I am about this shit, man. This ain’t no fuckin’ game. I’m try’na get my life right.”

Shareef joked and said, “Is it real bullets in that gun?”

Jurrell eyed him before he grabbed the gun off the table and pulled the cartridge of bullets out the back in one quick movement.

He answered, “Like I said, I’m dead serious about my life. I got a lot of shit I still wanna do, and I don’t want my prison record to stop me. So maybe it was divine intervention that G got killed today.”

He said, “He was my last line to the streets. I wasn’t really dealing with anybody else. I ain’t have to. G did good business. I’m gon’ have to square his sisters away now like they’re my own.”

Shareef nodded and wondered how anything would work with Jurrell. What exactly was his plan?

“I mean…what do you want me to do?” he asked. He was still confused by it all.

For Jurrell it was simple. He said, “First of all, fuck Michael Springfield. That was divine intervention, too. You didn’t really need him anyway. So first, you want to write a book about a young blood trying to be famous on the streets of Harlem, and how that shit led to his end. And that’s all based on G. I’ll give you more of the details on him. Then, after that, I’ll talk to the people on the streets who got the hot stories to tell—I mean, and I got a lot of them myself—and then I’ll sit down with you about the best way to tell them, and you write the books and kickback my percentages. Then I’ll hook up with the street and prison niggas to make sure these books sell. Or at least up in Harlem.”

He said, “But if you buy off them hip-hop magazine niggas—and you can buy them off if you know the right people—you can get them to do full-page ads on our shit. And once these rap niggas get used to seeing our shit selling in their magazines, we can step to them about getting these film deals poppin’. You feel me?”

Shareef cracked another smile.

He said, “You make it all sound like clockwork. But it ain’t that easy.”

Jurrell didn’t budge. He said, “Let me ask you a question then, Shareef?”

“What’s that?”

“Do you consider yourself one of the best writers from the black community right now?”

Shareef smiled again and started laughing.

“Come on, man, don’t fuck with me like that. I’ll write circles around most of these clowns out here.”

Jurrell said, “Exactly. Now let me ask you another question.”

Shareef paused and waited.

Jurrell said, “Would you consider me one of the most gangsta-ass niggas you ever met in your life?”

Shareef looked and grinned. There was no question about it. Harlem was one of the most vicious communities, not only in America, but in the world. So if Jurrell Garland could scare other criminals half to death in Harlem, then he
had
to be one of the toughest street gangstas alive. Shareef could see exactly where he was coming from.

Jurrell told him, “Real recognize real. We could be that next level shit out here.” He stopped with excitement in his eyes and asked Shareef again, “So, what are you gonna do, man? Are you in or what?”

Shareef looked down and thought about it. Then he looked back up and asked, “What would you call this first book?”

Jurrell didn’t hesitate. He answered, “
To Live and Die in Harlem.
That’s the only title I want for this first one. ’Cause that shit is real. That’s how gangsta-ass niggas think. Either we livin’, and that mean’s living how we want to, or we dying out this motherfucker. Because we won’t have it no other way. That’s why Baby G was so fuckin’ hardheaded.”

Jurrell sized up Shareef and said, “That’s why
you
so hardheaded. And that’s why
I’m
hardheaded. ’Cause I’m not lettin’ no motherfucker tell me I’m not gon’ have one of those Park Avenue condos. Fuck that! I will be up in that ma-fucka with my feet kicked back.”

Meesha smiled from the kitchen doorway. Jurrell caught her and said, “Yeah, and I might let you come over, too.”

She finally spoke out loud. “Whatever. I’ll be more than your
maid,
I know that much.”

Jurrell joked and said, “Yeah, you’ll be the maid, the cook, the door girl, the sex slave. And it’s all good.”

Meesha shook her head and grinned. Her good-natured loyalty was what Jurrell liked about her. Otherwise, he would have never trusted her in his inner circle. A girl had to be more than just pretty. She had to know when to respect the world of the man she chose to be with.

Shareef smiled for a minute, but then the pain from his left side reminded him of the violence they had just escaped from.

He asked, “So, how do we clean up this mess that we’re in?”

Jurrell became serious himself. He said, “Well, you know the cops are looking for you. But they don’t know I have shit to do with it. And that’s how it needs to stay. So you tell them the truth about what you can, make up some shit when they get too close to the truth, and whenever the truth gets too complicated, then you tell them you don’t fuckin’ know. It’s that simple.”

Shareef tried not to grin across the table, but he couldn’t help it. Jurrell sounded like a much smoother criminal now. So Shareef nodded and said, “I’ll keep that all in mind.”

M
EESHA DROVE
Shareef back to 125th Street alone, while Jurrell remained behind at the house. There was no sense in Shareef trying to run. Every finger pointed back to him, and there was no way the NYPD was not going to catch up to him for questioning. So the plan was to allow them to capture him. Then it would be up to Shareef to handle himself accordingly.

Meesha stopped and looked at him before he climbed out of the Explorer. He was wearing his ragged, bloodstained, light blue tennis shirt again.

“Are you okay?” she asked him.

He nodded. “Yeah, I’m all right. I’ve had bruises before. It ain’t no biggie. So let me get back out here and go take care of business.”

Meesha placed her hand on his left knee with care and told him, “Be safe.”

“You too.”

When Shareef climbed out of the black SUV, Meesha made a U-turn and headed quickly away from him. Shareef walked back toward the hotel on 124th and Frederick Douglass. He passed the Hue-Man Bookstore and the Magic Johnson Theater without much notice. He didn’t look like a superstar author at the moment, he looked more like a down-on-his-luck panhandler who had fallen off the back of an eighteen-wheeler on the highway. So no one bothered to notice him.

However, when he arrived at the entrance of the hotel, the NYPD knew exactly who he was. They ran right up behind him with their guns ready.

“Shareef Crawford, we need to take you in and talk to you at the station. You have the right to remain silent…”

Shareef turned to face them and slowly raised his hands. “Can y’all get my luggage from the front desk of this hotel. I was just coming back to get it.”

They put handcuffs on him and responded, “Yeah, sure, somebody get his luggage.”

All of a sudden, all of the pedestrians’ eyes on the sidewalk were on Shareef as the police led him into a squad car to take him to the station. Fortunately, the Harlem police station was right around the corner, literally one block away, near St. Nicholas Avenue, and less than five blocks south of the park.

Imagine that. Harlem life was that bold. The police station was right there in the thick of things. Nevertheless, desperate people did what they felt they needed to do.

Once Shareef was secure inside an interrogation room on the second floor of the precinct, he sat in a lone chair behind a small table. Then he watched as the arresting officers went through his luggage. But unless someone at the hotel had tried to frame him for something, he was clean.

A plainclothes detective walked in next and asked the uniformed officer, “Did you find anything in there worthwhile?”

He was a large black man in an ugly, dark sports jacket. What the hell did it matter when you were dealing with violence, despair, lying, stealing, murder, and criminals all day? Twenty-five years of that would make any man glum. So his wardrobe matched the mood of his business.

His partner walked in next, a smaller Latino man with a cleaner, sharper dress code. At least he looked like he tried. But he hadn’t been in the profession as long.

The two of them were the same tandem who had investigated the execution-style murder at the storefront on Adam Clayton Powell that week. And that case hadn’t led anywhere yet.

The uniformed officer shook his head. “Nah, he’s clean.” He left the room and closed the door back.

Shareef looked up at the black and Latino detectives and immediately thought about a million cop movies and television shows that he had watched since he was a kid, including his all-time favorite,
Across 110th Street.

Okay, here we go,
he told himself.

The Latino partner started on him first. “So, ah, Shareef…what do you have to tell us today?”

Shareef sighed and said, “About what?” He figured it would be a long, grueling interrogation, so he wanted to pace himself and take it all slowly.

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess we can start off with fourteen homicides in two days, including a stripper who was just found raped and shot to death inside of an apartment building leased by a guy named Spoonie, aka Wallace Lattimore, who I believe was seen walking with you toward St. Nicholas Park earlier today, before we found him dead on the scene at the park. And this is after two armed men were found dead after shooting at you just up the street last night. Now I know you have something to tell us about all of that, Shareef.

“I hear you’re an, ah, writer of some sort,” he added.

The older black man, who was the lead detective, corrected him.

“He’s a
New York Times
bestselling author. That’s the big leagues in the book world,” he noted. He said, “That’s equivalent to a platinum-selling artist in music, or a blockbuster actor in a film.”

The partner nodded. “Oh, is that right? Well, Shareef, I like stories. So let’s see if your story on this matches mine.

Shareef nodded back to them. He wanted to start off with the truth.

He said, “It all started after I went to visit a guy named Michael Springfield in prison about writing his life story. And I still didn’t know if I wanted to do it or not, but then all these people I never saw before started asking me questions about it. And them two guys last night tried to shoot me over it. So I took off running before they got in a shoot-out with somebody else.”

Then he began to mix his truth with lies. He said, “And I didn’t look back behind me to see who it was. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. So once I made it to Adam Clayton Powell, I jumped into a cab and told him to take me downtown. Then I got down there and checked into the Hudson off of Broadway.”

So far it all made sense to the detectives. Shareef hadn’t said anything to alarm them. But they were far from finished with him.

“So, why did you come back up to Harlem, to get your luggage?” the lead detective asked him.

Shareef dropped his head. He had to look remorseful. Then he raised his head back up and said, “Spoonie called me up and told me that he knew who was after me. He said all they wanted to do was make sure I wasn’t planning on putting their names in anything. And he said they wanted to see me face-to-face.”

He said, “Now at first—I mean, I’m not no fool, man—I figured they gon’ try to kill me again. They were just shooting at me last night. But at the same time, if they really wanted to meet me face to face—I mean, I know I’m not no snitch—so I told myself, ‘Look, I’m just gon’ tell them I’m not trying to do that and get it over with.’ I mean, I’m from Harlem, man, I know how it is. And I figured if they looked me in the eyes and met me, they could tell.”

The two detectives looked at each other. They didn’t expect Shareef to talk so much voluntarily. They expected to have to pull every bit of information out of him. But maybe he was a good writer. His story was longer and more detailed than expected.

The partner nodded and said, “Okay, so then what happened?”

Shareef sighed and slowed down to get everything just right.

He said, “We get to the park, and we meet up with four guys on the hill, and they got guns with them. And this is in broad daylight. I mean, I figured they wouldn’t try no shit like that in broad daylight. That’s why I agreed to meet them there.”

“Okay, then what?” the partner asked again. This guy Shareef was amusing. His story all added up so far.

Shareef answered, “Then they started talking about going to the car to take a ride. So at that point—I mean, I’m not jumping in no fuckin’ car, man, and they already got guns out—so I told them I would follow behind them, ’cause I didn’t want nobody behind me, while I tried to figure out which way I wanted to run.”

He said, “Well, they didn’t like that too much. So we got to arguing about who gon’ follow who. In the meantime, I figured out I didn’t have anywhere to run, but since we were right near the hill, I told myself, ‘Look, I’m just gon’ roll off this hill and take my chances.’”

As he spoke, he turned slightly in his chair to the right to show them the injuries to his left side.

He said, “So once we got to a stalemate on the hill, their main guy said, ‘Fuck it. Kill ’em both.’ Once I heard that, I hit the ground and started rolling. That’s when the bullets started flying.”

He looked up into the faces of both detectives with remorse. He said, “And you know, rest in peace to my man Spoonie, but he just wasn’t thinking as fast as I was. So I made it off the hill, took the fall like a man, climbed back to my feet, and started running for my life again.”

Again, the two detectives stopped and looked at each other. Either this guy was an undercover super hero, or he was lying his ass off.

The detective asked him, “Whose idea was it to meet at St. Nicholas Park?”

Shareef didn’t hesitate. “It was their idea.”

The partner said, “Okay, so what about the other guys?”

“What other guys?” Shareef asked him.

The lead detective looked again to his partner. Was Shareef claiming he knew nothing about anyone on his side. Incredible.

He asked him, “Let me get this straight. You come back up to Harlem by yourself, knowing that these guys are trying to kill you, and you don’t bring a gun or anything, and nobody’s around trying to protect you? Is that what you want us to believe?”

Shareef opened his empty palms and said, “That’s just what it is. I mean, you don’t see no gun residue on my hands. It’s just dirt, sweat, and blood.”

The Latino partner began to get impatient. He said, “This is bullshit. You’re sitting over there…” He stopped and told his partner, “This guy could pass the lie detector test. He
is
a fuckin’ writer. He set this whole thing up and now he’s trying to get away with it. Fourteen people were killed on account of him, and he claims he doesn’t know anything about it.”

He looked back at Shareef and said, “What are you,
Angel Heart
over here?”

Then he looked back to his partner. “You remember that movie with Mickey Rourke? That’s the one where people end up dead every time he leaves the scene, and he claims he doesn’t know anything about it. Then he finds out that he sold his soul to the devil.”

The lead detective nodded. “Yeah, with Robert De Niro as the devil. I remember that one.” He looked back at Shareef himself and asked him, “Did you sell your soul to the devil, Shareef?”

Shareef played it seriously and frowned. “Come on, man.”

“Well, let me ask you something else,” the detective followed up. “Do you know a guy by the name of Baby G, aka Greggory Taylor?”

Shareef was as straightforward as he could be. He said, “Of course I know him. He’s the most popular guy in Harlem right now.”

The partner corrected him and said, “You mean
was
the most popular guy in Harlem.”

Shareef looked confused by it. “What are you sayin’?”

The partner squinted his eyes in concentration. “Okay, so I guess you don’t know anything about his death at the park, either.”

“I mean, I don’t know the guy like that, I just know who he is,” Shareef told him. “I haven’t been in Harlem long enough to know him like that.”

“Well, how do you know him?” the detective questioned.

“I saw him at the basketball tournament. The Kingdome. And people were talking about him. So, you know, I listened, like anybody else would. I didn’t know his real name though. Most of the time when they say
G
they mean like, ‘gangsta,’ like in Baby Gangsta.”

“Yeah, we know the street lingo. We don’t need lessons from you,” the partner responded.

The lead detective asked, “So, you never had a conversation with him?”

“About what?” Shareef asked.

“About him and his boys protecting you,” the partner interjected.

Shareef shook his head and said, “Look, man, this whole situation is crazy. You say fourteen people were killed on account of me. For what? For writing a fuckin’ book? A book that I ain’t even started yet. I just got off tour, man. I’m not even near a computer up here. Black men don’t read my books no way. I got an audience that’s ninety-five percent women. So why would these guys be chasing me over some book? I’m still try’na understand that myself. Do y’all have any answers for that?”

Shareef was trying to turn the tables on them using his own frustrations, steering them away from the Baby G subject. But at the same time, he didn’t understand it. What did Trap and his guys have to hide? He knew Shareef wouldn’t write anything about him. Was it all about ego? Were Trap’s feelings that hurt that Shareef wouldn’t back down? It was all insane?

The black detective responded, “You tell us. What did you plan to write about in this book?”

Shareef said, “It was a prison love story,” just out of spite. Then he told the truth again. “Come on, man, the guy wanted to tell his life story, but I didn’t even get to talk to him about it yet.”

“Yeah, and then
he
ended up dead. That just happened a few days ago. So that makes
fifteen
bodies now,” the partner responded.

“And I had something to do with that, too, right?” Shareef asked him.