Used to be that when you wanted to run north, you rented a U-Haul and you drove. These days, we use Federal Express. This is an expensive proposition, since you have to buy off a few guys to borrow a van and some uniforms, but it’s one that cannot lose. You see these FedEx vans all the time, they’re blue, they’re white, they’re so fucking everywhere that they’re invisible, another part of the background. They’re also street legal, and you can do about anything you want with them and nobody’s going to care. Double park, take a handicapped space, block some traffic, who cares? It’s fucking Federal Express. Plus you can’t really speed in those vans, and if you could, the cops would cut you a break because you’re doing something other than just cruising down the New Jersey Turnpike with your halfwit wife and children. You got a job, just like them, and you’re doing it.
Inside the van you’ve got a guy, two guys on a highway run, and they’re in uniform. Instant authority, instant respect, not just working guys but working guys in uniform. And in the back of the van you’ve got these neatly ordered stacks of shipping crates, signed, sealed, and set for delivery to Saudi Arabia, with more paperwork than an Act of Congress.
Anyone can stop this shipment. That’s a dare. Stop the van. If you can make a legal search—a big if, about as big as King Kong—what will you find? A FedEx van with the right plates and the right registration and the right emissions inspection, and in the back of the van: Weapons. New weapons. Legal weapons. Maybe they’re not legal for the streets of our cities, but they are good to go, thank you very much, for our friends and allies overseas. With an inch of paper to prove it. No matter who you gonna call—FBI, ATF, state troopers, local yokels, even the Ghostbusters—you got jack nothing. Just a squeaky clean shipment from UniArms to the Port of Boston, and th-th-that’s all, folks.
Then: Our FedEx van vanishes somewhere into the mighty bowels of NYC while those papers take another ride, this time farther north, where they will cover another truckload, tucked safely in some suburb of Beantown with the proper contents, ready to hit the docks, start clearing Customs and make sail for sun and sand and a shooting surfari in Saudiland.
You want to look hard, really hard, you find some problems. But who’s looking? We’re working for truth, justice, the American way, right? I mean, the Saudis need this iron so they can powder whoever we need them to powder this time or next time. So:
The law is no problem. Not on the run. It’s the jackers, maybe, if some fools find the cojones to try, but the real problem is the clients. Meaning that you go to all this trouble to bring home the bacon for some folks, and then they decide they don’t want to pay. What a wonderful world. That’s why we play carefully, and even then we run north in a funky motorcade, with a Dodge minivan somewhere up ahead with CK’s guys and then the FedEx van and then our Oldsmobile and then another car, something hot, a speedster, with two more of CK’s guys, that sort of buzzes around the caravan like an angry bumblebee, looking for trouble.
North is where we’re headed, north on Interstate 95, the concrete spine of the eastern seaboard, way too many miles of highway weaseling up from Miami and checking out somewhere high above Derry, Maine. North from Dirty City to Manhattan, I-95 to the New Jersey Turnpike and then the tunnel or the bridge. That two hundred and fifty miles, D.C. to NYC, is called the Iron Highway. Not for the hard road or for the cars and trucks it carries, but for what’s inside the vehicles: the guns.
Because New York, in its grim and grimy let’s-get-ahead-or-let’s-get-dead glory, needs those guns, wants those guns, it’s got the jones for those guns. It’s the city with the most guns in the world, and maybe the most stringent gun laws in the world. There’s a word for that, and it’s called irony. The irony of iron.
Once upon a time, those guns came from South Carolina, and then things toughened up, so now the guns come from Virginia, and when things toughen up there, well, maybe we’ll move on to Georgia or Indiana. But for now, if you live in New York and you want a gun, you go to that distant suburb called Virginia. The FBI says that more than half the guns used in violent crimes in Manhattan are bought in Virginia. No shit. That’s my state. My turf. Those are my guns, CK’s guns. Sure, there are a lot of free agents out there, a lot of gang stuff—you know, let’s take a ride to Richmond and pull a few straw men—but with UniArms, business is business.
And we never close.
These days we run shipments to New York, no more spot deals, no more going north to find a buyer. The buyers find us. Establish their bona fides. Make their down payments. Then, and only then, we run. Just like any other distributor: Menswear, melons, machine guns.
The U Street Crew is riding this out on their own. We brush shoulders here and there along the way, but there’s nothing to connect the dots, us to them. Just a couple cars, a couple guys on the Metroliner, the shuttle to LaGuardia. CK’s idea. And you know something? It’s a good one. About the only thing that’s going to draw more suspicion than a car with four black guys is a car with two black guys and two white guys.
Still, I worry. That’s my job, to worry. Right now I worry about three things. The Yellow Nigger is dangerous. And he’s got a posse of cold kids who have nothing to lose. He’s also fearless, and since he’s armed, sooner or later he’s going to use his piece. It’s my job to see that this happens later, meaning after this job is done and he’s back doing drive-bys or drug dusts or contract kills or whatever he does for Doctor D.
And Doctor D’s half brother, this Juan E guy, seems kind of long on brotherhood and short on sense. Thinks this is a game, nice way to spend the weekend, go raise a little hell in the Apple, drink some Red Bull and get buck wild and, oh yeah, go shake some hands with the 9 Bravos. But that’s the way it works; these are the guys, the young fame, they get their money and their pagers and their Porsches and sooner or later, usually sooner, they get their guns. Streetwise is not the word for these guys. They own the street. And if somebody has a different idea, they just pull on the ski masks and get even.
Mackie the Lackey is driving, which is fine. I check out the scenery again and keep the rest of the conversation to myself as the miles move on by, losing my thoughts to Fiona and, after a while, to sleep.
When CK wakes me, stiff-arm to my shoulder, we’re at the Vince Lombardi Rest Stop and he’s holding a half-eaten hamburger.
Hey, sleeping beauty. He calls over his shoulder to Mackie and Renny Two Hand: Look who’s awake. His head shakes, and he leans in and whispers:
Shit, man, how do you stay so loose? You take something?
No, I say, shrugging out the ache at the bottom of my neck. I don’t take nothing. Especially your shit.
Across the parking lot, the FedEx van huddles with a herd of RVs. Closer, one of America’s favorite minivans, a Dodge Caravan, slips into a space next to a Jeep Grand Cherokee with handicap license plates. It’s almost too easy.
I nod toward the rest stop. Got to go check the plumbing, I tell CK.
Plumbing’s fine, he says. But do check it out.
Inside, tourists are wrestling with kids and road maps and boxes of fried chicken. The two black guys at the yogurt stand don’t think I notice them, but they have U Street spray-painted all over them. Then there’s the plain-clothes security guard at the newsstand, pretending his way through an Esquire magazine, and the pickpocket who’s cruising the men’s room. All these people acting like nobody’s noticing them, when they ought to be acting like me. Acting like everybody and their brother, maybe their half brother, too, is noticing them.
After I pee, I wash my hands and ask this guy I don’t know who is suddenly standing next to me, combing his hair, if he has the time. He does.
Quarter to three, this guy I don’t know says.
Except I do know him and his name’s Rudy Martinez and he’s part of CK’s crew.
The meet is still on.