30
30Rock stops in front of a derelict apartment building on the corner of Chapel and Rutgers Avenues.
In the shadow-drenched hallway, Rock jams an elevator button that never lights, so he tackles the stairs.
When he reaches the fourth floor, his blood is so hot that his palms sweat. He knocks on the first door beyond the elevator, and one of Shaminique’s eyes appears in a crack held at length by a security chain.
“He ain’t here,” she says.
“You don’t even know what I’m here for.”
Shaminique rolls her eyes. “You obviously don’t understand, Rock. Ain’t nobody scared of you no more. So you can’t just show up at people’s house like you used to and expect them to do what you say. I told you Cyclops ain’t here!”
Shaminique slams the door, but Rock lowers his shoulder and lunges forward before she can get it completely shut. She tumbles back onto the living room floor.
Rock’s broad shoulders clog the threshold of the apartment.
Clops steps out of the bedroom at the back of the house. “What you doing here, Unc?”
No words. Rock rushes him and lifts him off his feet. Clops stiffens his legs to regain his footing and plants blow after blow on the back of Rock’s head, which does nothing to loosen his iron grip. Rock wedges his forehead into Clops’s chest and rams him into the wall. The force of the impact enables Rock to tip Clops off his feet and ram him into the floor.
Shaminique grabs a knife from the kitchen and screams, “Get off him, Rock! Don’t think I won’t cut you! Get off him!”
Rock rises and squares his back to the front door.
Clops scrambles to his feet. “Put that knife down, Shaminique! I can handle mine!”
She keeps the dagger pointed at Rock.
“I said put it down!”
Shaminique places the knife on the kitchen counter well within her reach.
Clops turns his attention to Rock and throws his fists up. Rock charges him again. A loud pap-pap bounces off the walls as Clops catches Rock solidly on each side of his jaw. But Rock doesn’t flinch. He goes low and grabs Clops around the waist, slams him to the floor, wrestles his way on top of him, and hammers him hard, twice to the face.
Shaminique charges Rock, slicing wildly through the air. He shields his face with a sofa pillow an instant before she fillets it.
Rock jerks Shaminique to the floor, twists the knife from her hand, and stands. A trickle of blood streams from the corner of his mouth. He points the knife at Clops.
“Word’s already on the street that you did it.”
“I’ve been here since last night, so I don’t know what you talking about.” Clops nudges Shaminique. “Right?”
She stares at him, looking bewildered, her confidence in him now shaken.
“If either of them die, I’m coming after you,” Rock says. He points the knife at Shaminique. “And harboring a fugitive is gonna get you a bid too. You better ask yourself if it’s worth it.”
Andre’s closed eyelids render him trapped inside a loathsome darkness. He slithers along the edges of lucidity, convinced that he’s still somehow in the land of the living.
From the bottom of this place, Andre screams, I’m alive! but only reaps an earful of the emotionless bleep of machine. He senses distant pains rippling across nerve endings drunk off of stiff shots of fentanyl and hydromorphone.
Suddenly, bursts of orange slice across the black veils that mask Andre’s sight. Then he remembers that he has eyes and that he can open them. He beholds three teenagers on the cleft of a craggy, graffiti-marred palisade across from the hospital. They reflect sunlight into Andre’s face with hand mirrors.
The teens notice Andre noticing them and immediately engage in the sophisticated hand ritual that identifies them as OGC. Finished throwing up gang signs, one teen presses his thumb and pointer finger together and zips his lips.
A second teen points at Andre, cocks his thumb, and fires an imaginary shot. “POW!”
The three teens crack up like broken glass and evaporate.
Andre blinks.
Was that real?
A regal Iranian doctor enters the room, and Andre’s insides melt because he’s now aware that he’s conscious, and convinced that the gangster phantasm was true.
Everything rushes back at him. Sandra, Little Dre, gunshots, screams—the pain.
Andre attempts to sit up, but the lines and tubes running everywhere leave him tethered to the bed. He gags on a catheter shoved down his throat.
The doctor touches his hand. “Please relax. I am Dr. Hammurabi, and it is good to see you waking. You are very blessed, my friend.”
Andre chokes on the tube as he attempts to cough up a host of questions.
“You were hit four times,” Hammurabi says as he points to Andre’s right pectoral muscle, left thigh, left forearm, and right calf. “Pain will be your companion, but tragedy is not likely to visit you. You have all soft tissue wounds, my friend.”
Hammurabi’s smile makes Andre nauseous. Despite the discomfort of the hose in his throat, Andre gurgles and half-spits what sounds like, “My wife and son . . .”
Hammurabi deciphers Andre’s frothy bleat and frowns. “Your wife didn’t make it.”
Andre shuts his eyes so tight his face hurts.
“I’m sorry,” Hammurabi says softly.
Andre’s eyes snap open, and he’s attacked by pain so severe that tears drain his eye sockets. He looks out of the hospital window, and the three teens are back on the palisade stage with a fourth OGC. They point Andre out as if he’s on display in a meat case. He can hear them yell faintly, “Snitch on a crime, you get clapped in a ditch ’cuz you dime!”
The teens scatter when Hammurabi enters. Andre is struck by the irony of gang members fleeing when a white coat enters the room—as if in the midst of vice and violence, they retain the qualities of schoolboys who play “knock on the door and run.”
“Yes, yes, my friend,” Dr. Hammurabi says. “You are waking again. This is good news because I have reduced your dosages. You seemed to start hallucinating in the middle of our last conversation.” He places his stethoscope on Andre’s chest. “You must relax. Your heart rate is greatly increased.”
Andre stares at him and chokes out, “Sandra.”
“Yes, she is a couple of rooms down. But I cannot tell you more because you are not married. There’s someone here to see you.”
Mr. Horton looks like a fraction of himself when he enters the room. He squeezes Hammurabi’s shoulder as he departs.
It’s as if Mr. Horton anticipates Andre’s question. “Little Andre is fine. But Sandra . . . not so much.”
It’s a peculiar sight for Andre to see Dr. Hardness creased with emotion.
“Her brain is swelling,” Mr. Horton says. “They’re pumping her full of steroids, but it’s not working. It’s all kinds of pressure in her head.”
Andre swallows, and the catheter moves up and down in his throat. Acute pain returns, particularly in his chest, and inspires tears.
“It’s okay,” Mr. Horton says. “We’re going to pray.”
Andre doesn’t hear the prayer because his mind detonates with questions that have no ready answers. He is taunted by an abiding desire to scream—at God, and call him evil, because once again he has allowed something terrible to happen to someone he loves.