Page 52 of Wings of Ebony
“How you know I don’t have some tricks up my sleeve?”Literally.
“Unless you hiding some Feds special ops type shit under your sleeve, you out of your league.”
We laugh. A gust of wind from his cracked window flutters the du-rag hanging down his neck.
“I’m just getting information. I know how to lay low. You act like these streets ain’t raise me too. I’m not stupid.”
“I know.”
“Aight then.”
Silence hangs in the air for several moments as we zip past more older houses, and they get newer and nicer the farther we go. Every few blocks is a cluster of brick two-story houses with columns and half-circle drives. Something about the outside of the houses looks old but the insides are brand new—not just the walls and floors, but the people too. We roll past the gentrified area. Dezignz is on the edge of the East Side and a solid half hour away if we catch the lights right.
Cop sirens blare in the background and my hands dig into the door handle. The cop car speeds past and I exhale. The streets are full of people walking to and from the bus stop. But something’s different. There’s more people than I remember, standing around loitering. Every bus stop bench is piled with people rolled up in blankets sleeping.
“I don’t remember it being quite like this,” I say. “Was it always so many people?”
“The crew’s stepped up the game on this side. You got people losing houses trying to make money any way they can, and trouble is as easy to find as a gas station ’round here. Litto keeps what he calls stations on damn near every corner.”
“Stations?”
“Yeah, there’s one.” He points at a white woman standing outside a weave shop tapping her phone.
“She’s white.”
“Yep. Cops ain’t bothering her.”
“What’s a station? What does she do?”
“What you think she do, Rue?” He laughs at me.
“She look like some fancy developer type, just sitting there on the phone.”
“Nah, the stations serve the area over here. They’re eyes and ears. Suppliers.”
The light turns green and we jerk into motion, but I can’t take my eyes off the lady. I crane my neck over my shoulder to see if she has a tattoo.
She meets my eyes and my stomach flutters. She doesn’t look away. No expression. Just eyes, on me. Like she knows I’m staring, like she sees through me. We roll past and she grows smaller in the distance.
“I didn’t see a tat on her neck,” I say.
“And you wouldn’t. She ain’t busting in doors, shooting up folks. She’s the silencer on the gun, the enemy you don’t hear or see.”
“So the snake tattoo?” I ask.
“I heard only Litto’s dawgs get that. His inner circle, most trusted crew. You not gon’ see them standing on corners. Shit, you not gon’ see them at all.”
But I have seen them.
Twice.
I try to swallow the lump in my throat, but it won’t go down.
Julius plants his hands at ten and two, his sleeve of tats flashing. Colorful feathers from the tail of a phoenix wrap around his forearm. His grandma’s face and name stare from his shoulder, with the year she died underneath. “Since I’m clearly not going to be able to talk you out of this, it’s my turn to ask a question.”
I chuckle. “Sure, what you wanna know?”
“I missed a lot of the shit y’all were talking about back at the house.”
