The Highway Kind(75)

An LAPD helicopter and two others from competing news outlets followed the Jag on its roundabout course while in-studio news hosts supplied the hyperbolic narrative. They knew that Kershaw was talking with a police negotiator. He had both hands free to drive and shift as he was using the then fairly recent Bluetooth device, which the talking heads made sure to mention for the enthralled afternoon viewers. Activity stopped at numerous workplaces throughout the city as people gathered in lunchrooms or offices to watch the chase. Kershaw had been a well-paid and well-exposed pitchman for the Bluetooth device. Later, after his capture and trial, after his stabbing death during a prison riot had spawned multiple conspiracy theories, a transcript of the communications during the slow-motion chase was released.

Guidry: Hey, man, it’s Tim again. You’re getting close, huh? Hello? I’m losing you. Hauler, you still there? Hello? Hauler, you still there? Come on, man, talk to me. Hello? Hello? Hauler? Hello! Hello, don’t freeze me out, man...We can resolve this. We’re almost at the goal line, right?

The transcript noted in parentheses that the phone cut off and the negotiator redialed.

Guidry: This is Tim again.

Kershaw: Oh, hi, Tim—

Guidry: Are you going up there, Hauler? What do you want to do? I know you’re not running.

Kershaw: I just need to clear my head is all, Tim.

Guidry: I know you do, man, but you got everybody scared.

Kershaw: I just want to get to my house, Tim. You know what I’m saying? I just want to walk through my front door and lay my head down in my own bed. You hear what I’m saying?

Present

Before the sun went down, they strung up four mechanic’s lights to see. As uncle and nephew put the Falcon back together, having essentially removed only the interior fixtures, niece and aunt sat on upended milk crates talking.

“When Hauler died in prison in ’04, there had already been plenty about how the cops had framed him for his girlfriend’s murder because of his brother.” Debra sipped from a can of beer. “Or that, what’s his name, Brody Deets had done it because she’d left him for Hauler.”

“He’s an actor, Aunt Deb. And a second-rate one at that.”

She spread her arms, holding on to her beer. “I know, but us colored folk think all them white folks in the public eye congregate together plotting on us, so you know.” She snickered.

Her niece chuckled too.

“Really, this mess started the night of that raid before you were born.”

The younger Hastings knew the story. Her aunt and members of the extended family were living in a house in South Central in the late eighties. This was during the time of the infamous—at least in black neighborhoods—administration of police chief Daryl Gates. That night the cops tore down the door and tore up the house—a home that wasn’t a rental and just happened to belong to a great-grandmother of Pebbles Hastings. The family subsequently sued the department and settled out of court for a sizable sum.

“How do you mean?” she asked.

Her aunt took another sip. “Jerome was doing his rap tapes then, selling them all over town and at swap meets. Back then NWA, Toddy Tee with his ‘Batterram’ song, they was all hot and had started like that so he caught some of that wave.” She winked at Pebbles. “See how I threw in that surfer reference?”

“Uh-huh,” her niece said, smiling.

“Okay, that night the cops bust him with less than an ounce of crack, which he didn’t indulge but used as, you know, bribes to get his tapes played at certain clubs like the one Ro had, the Crimson Lounge. Anyway, they also grabbed some of his tapes, thinking the lyrics contained secret code among gang shot-callers.”

“Who would be stupid enough to believe that?” the younger Hastings said.

“That’s what the cops testified to in court during the suit. But it was just Jerome’s raps on the tapes, at least when he had hold of them.”

“What do you mean?’

“The tapes supposedly disappeared from the evidence lockup at the Seventy-Seventh Division, where there were several renegade members of the CRASH unit. Dudes who were robbing the drug dealers they busted, framing suspects consorting with prostitutes, and on and on.”

Her aunt paused. The niece knew that the now disbanded anti-gang initiative had been the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums.

“When Jerome started to get a name in the rap game, he became friends with one of those CRASH dudes who liked to bling-bling, an undercover cop who got all caught up in being a gangster his damn self, Jimmy Moore.”

“He did time, right?”

“A bank robbery. He’d been dating one of the tellers. The money was never recovered and he disappeared when he got out, having done his full stretch ’cause he never said boo about where the take was.” She looked over at the two men. “That’s what y’all saw on the mystery show, wasn’t it? That he was last seen in his mother’s Falcon wagon.”

Waid said, “Yeah,” as he and Weathers bolted the rear bench seat into place using socket wrenches.

His uncle remained quiet but when the Falcon was brought up on that show, this being the first time he’d heard of a connection to the wagon and Moore, he’d recalled years before hearing from a chick he knew from back in the day when he ran the lounge. She was a party-girl type, always working an angle. She’d been looking for a car but hadn’t said what kind. But on Astonishing Mysteries they’d re-created a scene with the woman and Moore, a connection Weathers didn’t know about till then as well.