Scavenger Hunt Read online

  He didn’t know, and he didn’t aim to find out.

  After a few blocks, he stopped staggering and fake puking. A few blocks after that, he started to run. He figured he had an hour, maybe two, before Pattinson’s greed and suspicious nature won out over his disgust. He’d look at the money, see a few hundred instead of twenty thousand. He’d know Solomon took it.

  And then Two-Teeth and the rest of the Five-Deuce would be after him.

  9

  He felt the minutes burn away as he ran. He hadn’t really known what he was going to do, only that he couldn’t do what Two-Teeth wanted. Not anymore. Not in a world where diversification meant making little girls into hookers.

  Now, though, Solomon needed to think. He needed a plan.

  (“Livin’ the dream,” said the man in his mind, the man behind the curtain with his mommy, the man who hurt her and made her love him at the same time.)

  First thing: he ran as fast and as far as he could. The Five-Deuce turf was growing, but it still had its limits. He ran to the closest one. That was passing into a rival gang’s territory, and that was risky, too, but better that than Two-Teeth.

  As soon as he stepped over the invisible line that marked the end of Five-Deuce turf, Solomon stripped off the bandana he always wore. Crip colors, and to ditch them was a straight-up diss, that no Crip would dream of doing.

  Solomon dropped the cloth in the gutter and ran on.

  He knew he needed distance, first and foremost. He thought about boosting a ride, then realized that would cause even more trouble, because if he was caught then he’d be in prison and there was no way a traitor like him survived the first month.

  Traitor.

  I’m a traitor.

  He was surprised how much that thought hurt. And surprised how quickly he was able to shove it to the back of his mind and turn back to the question of what to do next.

  He couldn’t boost a ride, so how was he going to get out? How could Solomon Black escape this –

  He almost smacked his own forehead in that moment. He’d been thinking of how to get away, but thinking the way Big Wise would have thought: all about thieving or maybe even forcing someone to drive him out of the city at gunpoint. But he wasn’t Big Wise. Not no more.

  And Solomon Black? Why, Solomon was a law-abiding citizen. He’d get around the same way any other law-abiding citizen would.

  He ran a few blocks. Then ran some more as he saw the bus pulling away from the stop. Didn’t have a bus pass, but he had plenty of money, and it was the work of a moment to shove a bill into the till and then pass to the back of the bus. Even better, there was only one other person on the bus: a housewife-lookin’ sister who got visibly nervous when he sat near her.

  He smiled at her. A Two-Teeth kinda smile.

  She got off at the next stop. Solomon waited until she was gone, then moved to the front of the bus. The driver was a fat chick with beady eyes, a unibrow, and a peach-fuzz mustache that would have been the envy of any teenage boy. “Can you take me to the terminal, no more stops?” Solomon said to her.

  She didn’t even glance at him. “I look like a freakin’ taxi?”

  She didn’t glance at him when he held up two hundred-dollar bills, either. Didn’t even look at the bills. “I ain’t no freakin’ taxi,” she repeated.

  Solomon added another bill. She took the money. Still without looking. “No passengers up front,” she said.

  Solomon sat down in the back. He stood up again when the woman pulled the bus to the curb. “What are you –”

  She silenced him with a glare that woulda made Solomon’s mother proud. “You think I can just roll into the terminal without stopping? I’d get fired, man.” She grabbed a wrench from under her seat and hopped off the bus.

  A moment later, Solomon saw her in front of the bus. He heard the sound of metal hitting metal, then a moment later the driver got back on. She switched off the digital sign that spelled out the bus’s next destination, and pulled a CB from under the dash. “Mike, the freakin’ bus is making that noise again.”

  “Mike” sighed audibly on the CB’s speakers. “Shit, Maria, can’t you –”

  “Don’t you cuss at me, you freakin’ idiot. What am I supposed to do if the LA Transit issues piece-of-crap buses to hardworking people? Huh? HUH?”

  Mike had no answer, other than, “Bring ‘er in.”

  Maria slammed the CB mic home in its cradle, then grinned at Solomon through her rearview mirror. “Can’t just roll into the terminal. I ain’t a freakin’ taxi.”

  Solomon grinned back. She wasn’t royalty, but Maria was definitely street, and he could respect that, even if he was running from that world himself.

  They pulled up to the terminal a half-hour later. Maria stopped the bus a block before she got there, pressing the button that opened the back door of the bus. Solomon didn’t move for a moment, until she glared at him in the mirror and said, “I ain’t no –”

  “Freakin’ taxi,” he finished. “I know.”

  “Can’t just roll up with a passenger in a busted bus.”

  Solomon nodded and bounced. Maria pulled away from him, but he kept walking to the terminal. He had to get away from the hood – far away. Going home was a bad idea, and since his mom died there wasn’t anything waiting there anyway.

  So he was going as far from home as he could get.

  The terminal had a few short-line buses that were pulling away, most of them going back to the places Solomon wanted to avoid. There were two buses going farther, though. He bought a ticket on the first one leaving. It took him to San Pedro. From there, he hopped on another bus. A longer trip this time, after which he grabbed another bus and another. He ended up in Sacramento. Crashed a few hours on the benches there while he waited for the bus that would take him to his final destination, because he figured that a place like Boise, Idaho, wouldn’t have much in the way of gangs, and that meant he wouldn’t have to look over his shoulder quite so often as if he went to a bigger place like Chicago or New York.

  The Five-Deuce was strictly local, but the Crips were nationwide. Wouldn’t be beyond belief if Two-Teeth arranged for some brothers to visit Solomon Black if he went to a big city.

  Idaho sounded about right.

  10

  For a while, he thought it might work.

  Nineteen thou and change wasn’t enough to live on forever, but it went a helluva lot farther in Idaho than it did in California. He figured he had a few months, easy, before things got dicey on the money front. That had to be enough of a cushion to start life as a regular guy.

  The trouble was, as he quickly found out, that while Big Wise had a resume on the street, when he was being Solomon Black he had something called a “rap sheet.” No felony convictions, but he’d been arrested a dozen times, and everything from international companies to the local Baskin Robbins ran background checks that turned those kinds of things up.

  He got a polite “no thank you,” at a lot of places. A handful of “I wish I could hire you but….” A half-dozen responses of “there’s no way in hell.”

  He was living in a place that let him pay cash down, in advance. A crappy little apartment in a crappy part of town. Not dangerous, really, but everything about the street he lived on screamed “no prospects.”

  He ended up at a job assistance place run by a local church – the folks in Idaho all had religion, it seemed – and after three weeks of no joy, one of the thousand-year-old people who volunteered at the place asked for his story. Solomon told as much as he thought he could without being kicked out or brought up on charges somewhere. The old dude nodded and said, “You should be a motivational speaker.”

  “Nah. Shit – I mean, stuff – ain’t for me.”

  The dude shrugged. He wore a nice suit and a watch that probably cost half of what Solomon still had in cash. “I knew a guy who made it work. Internet.” Another shrug, and he added, “Though I have to confess the only thing I do online is FaceTime my grandkids and play
Candy Crush.”

  Solomon spent another day at the job search place. Then he bought a computer – another thousand gone! – and set up a YouTube site. He worried about it at first, wondering if there was any way that Two-Teeth could find out about him. Then he figured if it wasn’t a rap video with at least one chick in a thong, the chances were slim Two-Teeth or any of the rest of the crew would bother with it.

  He recorded himself, just talking about his thoughts. He put makeup on – that was humiliating, going into the WalGreens and asking for that shit – to cover the tats on his cheeks, but other than that it was just sit down, turn on the computer, and start recording. Talking about growing up near Skid Row, talking about the gangs.

  The video gathered a grand total of three views.

  Solomon did it again the next night. And the next. He didn’t expect much, but what else was he going to do? Get drunk at one of the five or six bars in the area and then get tossed in the slam for drunk and disorderly? He was still a black man, and now he was a black man in a city that seemed like it was one hundred percent white religious folk, so his chances of avoiding jail while going to a bar seemed slim.

  No, it was just the video. Just the computer and his thoughts going into the nowhere of the internet.

  The fourth night he recorded, he signed off with a murmured, “Gangs eat you up. They shit you out.”

  It was an angry sign-off, given in a dark apartment where he felt more alone than ever in his life. The girl with the blue eyes seemed a bit farther away, a bit less real with every passing day, and Solomon knew if it wasn’t for the fact that he’d stolen from Two-Teeth, he probably would have gone back.

  The next day, when he signed on to his video feed, he saw that the last video had fifty views. Ten comments, half of which commented on his “eat you up and shit you out” sign-off. “Great catchphrase, brother!” one shouted.

  Three more videos. Now they were getting hundreds of views each. A few more, and they were picking up ten thousand and more. Which, of course, made barely enough in advertising on YouTube to buy a package of Ramen noodles or Mac and Cheese, but… damn, could he do this? Could he warn people away from the traps he’d fallen into, and also make a living at it?

  Seemed like the answer was yes, when a few days later he got an email from a teacher in Kuna, a little school a few miles away. She’d seen his videos and knew he was local, and asked if he could come speak at her school. “We can’t pay much,” said the email. “But maybe if you would be willing to accept a $100 honorific you could come out for an hour.”

  A hundred dollars? For an hour?

  Solomon Black was dialing her number before he finished reading the email.

  A few more gigs followed. One of his videos hit a hundred thousand views. A prep school in New Hampshire flew him out to talk about his life, which made him laugh ‘cause the kids he saw there were about the farthest thing from “at risk” he’d ever seen. But they paid for his airfare, a hotel, and five hundred dollars as a speaking fee.

  Six weeks after that, he started Wise Words, LLC – a company that billed itself as providing “a real look at real life to at-risk youth.”

  The videos got more popular. And then more popular still. Solomon found himself speaking all over the United States. He had a manager for his speaking gigs, and a few years in there was talk of a book deal. It never happened, but Solomon didn’t care. He’d never been a books kinda guy.

  Five years. Six. Living in an actual house now, and wondering if he should buy one instead of renting.

  And he met Ramona.

  He was out walking that Saturday night. The nightlife in Boise was pretty nonexistent after eleven o’clock, and Solomon still worried about getting grabbed by some cop for the crime of being too black in a white state, so when he was out on a Saturday night it was usually just a walk around his neighborhood. Nothing past eleven, and nothing in the downtown area where the few bars could be found.

  This particular night, he was walkin’ in the park.

  Just a walk in the park. Livin’ the dream.

  He knew most of the people who were there; mostly late-night joggers or dog walkers who he’d seen enough times that they weren’t much scared of him anymore, and a few even nodded and smiled when they saw him.

  The one person he hadn’t seen before was a tiny gal in yoga pants and a crop top which showed off a fine body, and when she turned her gaze on him he saw that the whole package was topped by a face so beautiful it literally stopped him in his tracks.

  “What you want?” she said. “I got mace.”

  That made Solomon smile, mostly because he couldn’t think of a single place where she’d have the room to stash mace. She frowned at that, and he held out his hands. “Nothin’, nothin’,” he said. “Don’t want nothin’. Just out taking in the breeze.” He cocked an eyebrow at her. “What about you?”

  She looked surprised and a little confused. “What about me?”

  “What do you want?”

  She looked even more confused for a moment, then apparently realized that Solomon was turning her own question back on her. “You being a smart-ass?”

  He grinned. “Only when I’m talking.”

  She laughed at that. “You’re funny.”

  “Only when I’m talking.”

  That was good for another laugh. A few more jokes earned him the right to walk with her. The walk earned him a first date – a meet-up at a place where she said there were free electro-swing classes. Solomon had no clue what electro-swing was, but the girl – “My name’s Ramona Mirada, but you can call me Ramona,” she’d said with just the right mix of attitude and flirting – was going to be there, so he was in.

  Turned out that electro-swing was some kinda oldie-style music with a house beat under it, and that the people learning it were mostly gawky teen boys dressed like Mafia dudes from the 1920s. Solomon watched The Untouchables once, and thought that was pretty legit – Al Capone was an original street king, and the dude who took him down was a badass, if a bit straight-arrow for Solomon – but these kids looked like they’d have lasted about ten minutes on the streets of Chicago.

  Damn, but they knew how to dance, though.

  Solomon expected to just laugh when they started moving. But those skinny teenage boys knew how to make the most of long legs and stick-thin arms. They did some stuff that Solomon had seen before – a lot of electro-swing was variations on pop-and-lock moves that Solomon knew well – but some of what they did was just this side of magic.

  He tried to mimic some of it. He failed miserably. Ramona laughed at him, and he laughed back at her when she fell on her ass after trying a high-kick move.

  They moved in together six weeks later. Solomon had enjoyed something of “normal” life for years now – work, taxes, eat, sleep, repeat. He’d settled into life in his neighborhood, in his work, and in his own skin. But now, with Ramona in his life and waiting when he came home after a trip or a local gig, he started to think maybe he actually belonged in this place, and in his life.

  That was the beginning of the end, and had he been Big Wise he would have seen the writing on the wall. Only took four months for it to happen. Four months of domestic bliss, four months of work at something he loved, then coming home to the woman he loved even more. Four months of being in love – he’d even started learning Spanish, for no other reason than because he wanted to please her – and then a month more of happiness when he found out Ramona was pregnant.

  At the end of that month he found her in their bathroom, weeping. He tried to comfort her and couldn’t. It wasn’t until he’d been in there with her for over two hours that she finally admitted why she was so upset.

  “I don’t believe in abortions,” she sobbed. “I’m Catholic, dammit.”

  More weeping. “It’s okay, baby,” Solomon said. “Not like we was planning on a kid, but it’s okay. Gonna be a mix of a hot momma and a bad-ass dad, so I figure –”

  Whatever else he was going to say w
as drowned by even louder sobs. He couldn’t figure why at first. He was making enough to pay for a family. And Ramona definitely was a hot momma, and he was sure as shit a bad-ass –

  He froze. He was holding her in his arms, but what had once been a loving, hopeful embrace now became as rigid and cold as if Ramona had had a statue carved around her.

  “I don’t believe in abortions,” she said.

  And then she cried even harder when I said the baby would have a bad-ass dad.

  “It ain’t mine,” he said.

  Ramona stopped crying. He hoped she would scream at him, would shriek “How dare you say something like that?” and then make him sleep on the couch for a month of Sundays.

  She didn’t, though. Just stared. Just started crying again, but quiet this time. Looking at him like she was full of hope and fear and wasn’t sure which one was going to be in charge of the moment.

  The only voice he heard was that of Big Wise. Bitch be crazy. Bitch be a loser. Bitch just lost the best thing she never really had.

  Solomon nodded, and didn’t know if he was nodding at the situation, or nodding because he agreed with that part of him that had suddenly surfaced after so many years.

  He knew what Big Wise would have done in this situation. Big Wise would have knocked her around, maybe even put her in the hospital. Then Big Wise would have found out who it was knocked her up and put that unlucky soul in the ground.

  But he wasn’t Big Wise.

  Big Wise never woulda been cheated on in the first place. Big Wise was the shit, and no one cheats on the shit.

  For a moment he missed it again. Missed the brothers, missed Two-Teeth. The little girl in a suitcase didn’t matter in that moment. All that mattered was the hurt he felt, and the knowledge that, bad or good, such hurts had never come to him in his time as a Five-Deuce.

  He wanted back in. So much, he wanted back in.

  He stood up. Walked out of the bathroom.

  “Solomon, please, just –”

  He didn’t hear the rest. He was out and away. Running from Ramona, from their apartment. From the life he’d dared to hope for, and the life that he knew had been nothing but a short-lived illusion.