Oakland Noir by Jerry Thompson

Author:Jerry Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2015-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

March 21, 2009, 1:08 p.m.

The first cop that Mixon shot knew him, and knew he was a gun runner. It was a routine traffic stop, but it’s unlikely the cops knew his level of desperation. Every cop generally knows, on a first-name basis, the criminals on his beat, and the head criminal knows who’s short on the money. They’re in it together, this one pays that one, that one pays this one. That’s why there are so many street deaths in prison, acts of retribution. I think Mixon was buying time. He wanted to bag up money and weapons, go to LA, and disappear. A great many people in the inner cities have no ID, no SSN—they’re nonentities. You think you fingerprinted everybody, but you can’t fingerprint the entire population. He probably knew that some of his schemes would lead him back to jail, where he was already a marked man. So that brings up—how did they know precisely where he was and who they had stopped? One of his known refuges was his sister’s apartment, where the second battle took place.

Incarceration was not the major problem for Mixon. He was trying to avoid retribution. For an African or Latino man from the hood, incarceration is not the worst thing that can happen. You find friends, associates, and mentors in the prison system. It’s just another neighborhood when you’re sent to jail, leave one hood and move on to the next. Three squares and a rack on the inside, three squares on the outside. He didn’t kill the first two cops because he was afraid to go to jail, he had decided to affect his own retribution. Understanding the end was near, he did not want to depart this world alone. He knew those cops had been sent by his superiors; he was just a pawn in the game now, traded off for something else. How many pimps are killed so that someone can acquire their hos? In the arms trade, how many runners are killed so that someone can acquire their guns?

In the Warsaw ghetto, how many Jewish husbands were turned in so the snitches could take their wives? It’s an old story, been going on for hundreds, thousands of years. Squeal on somebody so you can get their land. Mixon’s death was part of an old script, not such an individual thing as people thought. The things that didn’t add up, though, are Who did he know? and When did he know them?

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