“You want a ride?”
He took an instinctive step backward and his large eyes got larger. “I don’t get in cars with strangers.”
“You tell me who you think had Terrell killed,” Demond Jones said.
He was a rangy kid with a bushy Afro, a slow smile, and a shark’s eyes. He sprawled on the icy metal bleachers near a fenced-in basketball court, his long legs stretched out in front of him, a Kool dangling from the corner of his mouth and a 32-ounce can of Icehouse beer resting by his side. One row up, Bop-Bop Drake perched over his friend’s shoulder like an overgrown parrot.
I wasn’t sure what I thought about any of what they had said. I looked away, watched the four-on-four game on the court. Most of the players were good, but one was spectacular, quick and surefooted with a smooth jump shot and a crossover dribble that could blow out a defender’s ankle. I recognized him from sports reports on the local news. A sophomore in high school, he was being recruited by half the major universities in America and destined to be an NBA star, but none of the kids gathered around the courts were paying him any attention. Down here Demond and Bop-Bop were the stars, the heroes that all these thirteen- and fourteen-year-old kids wanted to be. It made sense. None of those kids had the talent of Kyrie Taylor, but they all knew they could learn to deal drugs or use a gun.
“You’re telling me you guys firebombed that truck for political reasons.” I finally said.
“We ain’t saying we did anything illegal at all,” Bop-Bop said. “I’m telling you that Terrell threw that Molotov because he was drunk and angry that they was killing us.”
“Genocide is the word Bop-Bop’s trying to think of,” Demond said. “That’s what Terrell kept saying when he was drunk. They’re committing genocide, just like in Rwanda, but nobody knows it. T-Bone was smart. Educated, you know?”
“He was in your gang.”
“What gang?” Bop-Bop asked. “There ain’t no gangs around here.”
“Terrell wasn’t in nothing. He just came to us because he knew I’d listen to what he had to say.”
“Why?” I asked. “Was there money involved?”
He gave me a slow grin. “You act like ‘cause I do a little business I don’t care about nothing else. Making money is the American way, ain’t it?”
“He told you what was going on at the industrial park? Enlighten me.”
“I’m not clear on the particulars but I know something ain’t right around here.”
“He said they were dumping?”
“Chemicals and all kinds of shit like that. Illegal stuff from all over. T-Bone said it’s why his granddad died of bone cancer.” For the first time, Demond’s eyes softened and I remembered that he wasn’t just a gangbanger or a monster but also a nineteen-year-old kid. “He said it was the reason my baby sister got leukemia.”
“There’s all kind of people sick down here. The apartments where I stay? I know at least six families got kids with cancer. You just go down to the Med, you’ll see,” Bop-Bop said.
“T-Bone had all kinds of numbers and things he’d gathered,” Demond said.
“He called it some foreign word,” Bop-Bop said.
Demond gave him a look. “Dossier. It ain’t foreign, man. It’s American.”
“Ain’t no word I ever used.”
“Damn, Bop-Bop, I know you went to school. Maybe you should have paid attention.” Demond looked back at me. “Terrell had pictures he’d taken on his cell phone while he was working there, notes about things his granddad had told him, this research he’d done on the Internet. He showed us that stuff ‘cause he knew I’d be interested, since I watched my baby sister die of cancer.”
“What happened to it?”
“We ain’t got it. That’s for sure.”
“Why did you firebomb the truck?”
“Let’s just say Terrell might have put away a few too many and claimed he was going to take care of things his own damn self. A couple of his buddies might have gone with him, you know, maybe ‘cause they thought he wasn’t really going to do anything.” He closed his eyes for a second. “Or maybe they went with him ‘cause they were hurting pretty bad and wanted to strike out the same way he did because a little sister had died. Say this little sister was just six years old and crying for her brother to hold her hand but he was too scared because it hurt too damn much to see her that way.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“We all sorry, man.” He took a long drag from his cigarette and then elbowed Bop-Bop’s knee. “Tell him all of it.”
Bop-Bop cleared his throat and fidgeted. He seemed as nervous as an actor on opening night.
“Well. It’s like this.” He halted, coughed into his fist, tried again. “Okay, say these two friends and Bone are...”
“Just tell him what happened,” Demond said. “He ain’t a cop no more. Besides, if he says anything, it’s our word against his.”
Bop-Bop thought it over a moment and then shrugged. “We were all wasted, you know, and T-Bone, that’s what we called Terrell ‘cause he was always talking about steaks, he kept saying they’d killed Paula, Demond’s little sister, kept saying they poisoned her and wasn’t no one going to do nothing but us. We were going to throw them bottles of gasoline through the front gates at the Park, but on our way, we saw the broken-down truck. T-Bone went crazy, yelling at them that they were child killers and as bad as the Nazis. Then he threw the Molotov and the truck caught on fire.”
“You keep saying ‘them,’” I said, remembering Don Ellis saying “we broke down.” “Were there two people in the truck?”
“That’s where things get complicated,” Demond said.
“Yeah, there was a guy in the passenger’s seat. He jumped out of the truck with a gun.”
“Maybe he had a gun,” Demond said. “But it don’t matter. He came out of the truck running towards us, and I put three bullets in his chest.”
Bop-Bop glanced around and then leaned a little closer. “Guy’s name was Giacomeli. We ran into him here and there in the kind of business we do.”
“Sam Giacomeli?”
“Called himself Sammy the Saint,” Demond said, snorting his disgust.
“You guys killed Paul Cardo’s nephew,” I said. “And Cardo is...”
“He’s with the Montesis,” Bop-Bop said.
“Not just with,” I said.
“We know who he is,” Demond said. “That’s why we sent for you.”
Bop-Bop nodded. “Word on the street is you’re in tight with Montesi.”
“That’s not...”
Demond cut me off before I could finish. “Just name us a price, man. I ain’t saying we’ll pay it but it’ll give us a place to start negotiating.”
“You want to hire me?”
“We don’t care what you call it,” Demond said. “We just want you to make it go away.”
My first thought was that this was some kind of joke, but their eyes were desperately earnest. They kept watching me, waiting for me to say I could do something to help, the shaky smiles on their faces caught somewhere between hopeful and damned.
At eleven o’clock the next morning, I sat on a bench outside of the Physical Rehabilitation and Therapy building on the campus of Baptist Memorial Hospital and tried to make sense of it all. After I’d left Drake and Jones, I’d headed for the main branch of the Memphis library. Two hours later, I’d walked back out into the cold night with words like benzene, dioxin, and dichloromethane buzzing in my head. One sentence echoed: twenty-two billion pounds of toxic and hazardous chemicals released each year through illegal disposal. From New Jersey to Alabama, the mob had used its experience in late-night burial to make millions by handling sticky and usually toxic messes for corporate bosses who were more concerned with profit margins than questions. Whether they were in urban industrial wastelands or backwater burgs, the dumpsites had at least two things in common: They were always located on the edge of poor, usually black neighborhoods and they continued to poison generations long after the dumping had been forgotten and both the mob’s and the corporate shareholders’ profits had been spent.