Tiger by William Richter

Author:William Richter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

18.

“JUST LIKE OLD TIMES,” JAKE SAID WHEN THEY

boarded the uptown B train, which would take them all the way into Harlem.

“Yeah, it’s strange going back to Panama’s,” Wally said, the idea of returning to the smoke shop already putting her on edge. “It feels like time travel.”

Back then—before everything came apart—Wally and the crew went to Panama when they wanted phone cards to sell on the street. When they had something to sell, Panama fenced it for them, and when they needed fake IDs or wisdom about what was happening on the street, Panama was their guy. What they didn’t know back then was that the 131st Street Smoke Shop was “up,” meaning it was under surveillance by law enforcement who were trying to sting gun dealers off the street. The man they knew as Panama—a huge, menacing man of nonspecific race—was actually an undercover ATF agent named Cornell Brown.

Wally had watched two people die that November morning on Shelter Island—Panama and her mother, Claire.

They got off the train at 125th, and five minutes of walking took them to the intersection of Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 131st, on the southwest side of Harlem. The neighborhood had cleaned up some, but Wally and her friends knew that the criminal undercurrents of those streets had never gone away, and probably never would.

The 131st Street Smoke Shop was shut up and dark. A hand-lettered sign hung on string behind the door—CLOSED. Loose trash and smoked-down cigarette butts had piled up against the doorway, likely swept there by the wind. The debris gave the impression that no one had entered the shop in a week, at least. Wally peered in through the window and could see that the shop looked the same inside as always, fully stocked and ready for business. She banged hard on the door, hard enough to clang the bells hanging inside to announce a customer. But there were no signs of life inside.

“Well, that pisses me off,” Wally said.

“Closed in the middle of the day,” Jake said. “Good way to go out of business.”

“Unless your business is something else,” said Wally. “Let’s check out back.”

They stepped over the low chain running across the entrance to the small, empty parking lot beside the smoke shop. When Panama had been running the place, most of the real business had been run out of the back entrance, which bordered on St. Nicholas Avenue and the park beyond. They walked to that entrance, not surprised to find it locked with a strong dead bolt.

“Do you have something?” Jake asked Wally, and she fished around her messenger bag, coming up with a Leatherman multi-

tool. She handed it to him, and he used a combination of the main blade and his plastic ID to work on the dead bolt while Wally and Ella stood watch.

“Are we sure this is a good idea?” Ella asked, sounding practical, not scared. “Even if they did sell the phones, they do everything in cash. I don’t see them keeping a list of their customers.

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