“The what? You’re kidding me, right? There was not a gang named after Little Richard’s do?”
“It’s a real gang. I promise you. Funny name. Nothing funny about their methods.” Mike turned and began walking down the sidewalk. “The address we’re looking for is Rayburn Way,” he reminded me. “It should be a few more blocks this way.”
I caught up to his long strides. “So what did they do? The Jheri Curls?”
Mike continued to glance up and down the street, taking in our surroundings. “Rafael Martinez and his four brothers ran a major cocaine trafficking operation out of Washington Heights, committed several murders, including a gang-style hit of a witness.”
“What happened to them?”
Mike shrugged. “Some undercover guys got the goods on their cocaine operation from the inside, and they were taken down. Rafe and his hermanos are behind bars for good.”
There was something about the way Mike told me the story, the hint of pride in his voice. “You had something to do with that, didn’t you?”
“No comment,” he said, but the faintest upturn at the edges of his mouth told me that he was glad I’d guessed. A second later, however, the grim line was back. “That’s the trouble with police work. It’s always one step forward, two steps back.”
“I don’t follow…”
“Within a year, the Wild Cowboys and the Young Talented Children had taken the Curls’ turf and their business.”
I frowned. “But Dean Martin warned us, didn’t he?”
“Excuse me?”
“You never heard him sing, ‘You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Loves You’?”
“The song?”
“Yes, Lieutenant. Most memorable line: ‘The world still is the same. You’ll never change it.’”
Mike thought it over, grunted. “Good line. Good song. I’ll grant you that. But if you want to talk Rat Pack, my guy’s Sinatra.”
“I should have guessed. You’ve both got that Ol’ Blue Eyes thing going.”
Mike smiled, then he stopped us on a corner. The green street sign read Rayburn Way. Under it, a bright yellow metal sign warned the alleyway was a dead end, and under that I spied another Red Razor gang tag. Mike pulled the brown prescription bottle out of his overcoat pocket.
“The address we’re looking for is seventy-nine,” he said, squinting to read the tiny letters.
I stayed close to Mike as we entered the dead-end alley.
On the left of us were cinder-block buildings; on the right was a sprawling junkyard, surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. There was a fence at the end of the block, too. Beyond it, I could see the cold, uneasy waters of the Harlem River.
My attention returned to the stark gray buildings on our left. They seemed to be decaying before our eyes. The nearest building was topped by a faded sign that read Big C Plumbing. Under that, a smaller sign proclaimed the space For Rent. The building itself had high, broken windows. Its door was shuttered by a steel gate splattered with graffiti. The building next door had housed a Rapido Washing Machine Repair and Service business, which had also gone bust.
“Are you sure we’re going in the right direction?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Mike said, his eyes busy scanning the empty street. “Look for the numbers. Big C Plumbing was seventy-three. This repair place is seventy-five. The building at the end of the block should be seventy-nine.”
We continued down the dead-end street, and I noticed a gap between the buildings. Another structure had been here once, but it was torn down now, leaving a flat patch of dirt between the cinder block buildings. As we approached the empty lot, the bitter smell of woodsmoke floated lightly on the brisk wind. The second Mike smelled that aroma, he slowed his pace and rapidly unbuttoned his overcoat. But the sun was behind a cloud now, and the blustery temperature near the Harlem River was downright frigid.
“Are you warm?” I asked (naively, as it turned out).
Mike reached out, touched my shoulder, gently but insistently pushed me to his right side so that his body was now standing between me and the lot we were about to pass—shielding me, as I realized a moment later, when the loud clang woke me up to what Mike already knew.
Someone had whipped a beer can so hard it flew from deep inside the empty lot, all the way across the street, bouncing against the junkyard’s chain-link fence.
We took a few more steps forward, and I finally saw the bonfire blazing inside the steel drum, the half dozen Hispanic-looking youths in black hoodies and red sweatpants gathered around it.
“Stay to my right,” Mike whispered, continuing with easy strides, as if we were strolling through Times Square at noon.
One of the punks noticed me anyway and whistled. Other catcalls followed. I braced myself for some crude comments. These came in ugly succession. Then three youths broke off from the pack and approached us, the flunkies flanking their obvious leader.
The leader looked about seventeen. He had light cocoa skin, a wispy soul patch on his chin, long sideburns, and short black hair covered with a red knit cap. The punk on the leader’s right was clutching a can of Mexican beer. The one on the left spun a long chain that dangled from his pants. The leader’s hands were free, and he was clenching and unclenching his fists.
“Hey, papá,” he said. “You lost, man?”
“No, junior. I know where I’m going. Do you?” Mike said, staring the leader down. That’s when I noticed he’d carefully drawn back one side of his overcoat, making sure the punk saw the large-caliber handgun strapped to his shoulder.
The leader spied the weapon and stopped in his tracks.
The gangbanger with the beer stepped forward. “Screw you, man! You don’t scare us! How would you like—”
“Don’t do nothin’, hijo!” the leader shouted. He rolled his eyes. “Dude’s a cop.”
At their leader’s gestured command, the youths retreated back to their bonfire, where they eyed us warily as we approached the final building on the decrepit block.
Something in me still wanted to turn around, go back to those young men, ask them who was responsible for designing and painting that Red Razor gang tag. I wanted to tell the boy that he had potential, tell him he could have a life. But Mike would have strangled me if I’d tried anything close to a stunt like that.
I was naive sometimes, but I wasn’t an idiot. I stayed to Mike’s right, kept my eyes averted from the young men.
We finally reached the end part of this dead end. The building marked 79 was a three-story brick structure covered in soot. There were cracked windows on the ground floor that had long ago been painted over. Two of the upstairs windows were covered with cardboard; dirty curtains dangled from a brass pole in the third. The building itself had once been part of the electric company’s massive holdings. This I knew because of the words set in stone above the front entrance:
RAYBURN WAY CONSOLIDATED EDISON MAINTENANCE STATION 116
Another sign had been added to the black steel door, painted in gleaming silver letters in a delicate, flowing script:
THE SHERMAN CREEK ART COLLECTIVE
The door itself was rusty and pitted, and looked like it hadn’t been opened in decades. Mike tried the handle, pulled as hard as he could, but it was locked.
We both spotted the mail slot beside the door and read the names scribbled in no particular order on white tape: Saul Maxwell, Dexter Ward, Maryanne Vhong, T. De Longe, Nancy Roth.
Mike looked for a doorbell or an intercom, but there was none, so he pounded on the metal door with his fist. He was about to knock again when we heard muffled sounds from the other side, then the door opened.