Deacon King Kong(78)
“You want an extra bag of Big H?”
She looked at him and smirked.
“I don’t need no extra,” she said. “I’m doing too much now.”
Deems liked that. He thought later, much later, that this very first exchange told him more than it should have. It was the body language more than anything. She didn’t seem nervous when she copped her dope. Up close there was a directness, a tautness to her that was unusual. She was tight, almost stiff, and alert. He attributed that to an attempt to hide her nervousness, being a small-town girl from the South who confessed to him the very first day he’d asked her to meet him at the dock that she was, that she had once been, and still was, a church girl. He liked that. That meant she was a wild girl inside, all bunched up like him. He had a few church regulars, working junkies. He’d been a church boy himself. He knew that bunched-up feeling. He needed someone all coiled up like him. Everybody in the Cause knew him now. His rep had grown since he’d been shot by Sportcoat. He was bigger and better than ever. Everybody knew he was gonna rock old Sportcoat. Deems knew it too. It was just a matter of time. Why hurry? He was in no hurry. Hurry got you busted. He would deal with Sportcoat at the right time. Sportcoat wasn’t a problem. But Earl? Now that was a problem.
There was a distance now, between him and Earl. He felt it. Earl, after his initial rage and displeasure with the whole Sportcoat business, now suddenly seemed to shrug the whole thing off. He insisted Mr. Bunch was pleased with his work. “The Cause is your area. You handle it like you want. Just keep moving the dope.”
That wasn’t like Earl. Everybody knew Earl got his head bonked in by a baseball at the Watch Houses after trying to bust down on Sportcoat. And then that doofus Soup Lopez was seen carrying Earl to the subway station after Earl tried to bust up Soup’s homecoming party—with Sister Gee walking behind them like a damn schoolteacher. He’d also heard Earl got dragged out of Building 17 by Sportcoat and Sausage—after the two old fuckers supposedly tried to electrocute him in the basement of Building 17 but screwed up and put out the building lights for two hours instead. Earl was getting punked. There was something wrong with that.
If Mr. Bunch was so cool about his screwup with Sportcoat, why was he letting his main man, Earl, get his ass kicked up and down the Cause District? And why was Earl so cool about it? It felt like a trap. He’d copped heroin from Earl twice a week for four years. He’d watched him work. He’d seen Earl stick a fork in a guy’s eye just for looking at him wrong. He’d once watched Earl pistol-whip a rival drug dealer to unconsciousness over a ten-dollar short. Earl did not fuck around. Something was wrong.
He couldn’t get it out his head. There was a play involved. It was just a matter of time before it showed itself. But what was it?
The waiting didn’t bother Deems, but the uncertainty of strategy did. Everything to him was about strategy. That’s how he’d survived. He heard that other big-time dealers called him a boy genius. He liked that. It pleased him that his crew, his rivals, and even at times Mr. Bunch marveled at how someone so young managed to figure things out on his own and keep ahead of older men, some of whom were vicious and clawing to get his business. He liked that they wondered how he could stay ahead of the competition, knew when to attack rival drug dealers and when to back away, what to sell and when and for how much, what button to push and who to push against. Mr. Bunch once told him that the drug game is like war. Deems disagreed. He watched people, observed how they moved. He saw drug dealing as a kind of baseball game, a game involving strategy.
Deems loved baseball. He’d pitched all the way through high school and could have gone further had not his cousin Rooster lured him into the fast money of the heroin game. He still kept track of the game, the teams, the squads, the statistics, the hitters, the Miracle Mets, who, miraculously, might be in the World Series that year, and most of all, the strategy. Baseball was a pitcher’s game. Your basic batter knew the pitcher had to throw the ball over the plate in order to get him out of the game. When you did, the batter would try to clobber it. So you had to keep him guessing. Was the batter looking for a curve? A fastball? A curve outside? Or a fastball inside? Hitters, like most people, were guessers. The good hitters studied pitchers, watched their moves, anything that might give them a hint of what pitch was coming. But the good pitchers were smarter than that. They kept the hitters guessing. Throw inside? Outside? Curveball? Splitter? Fastball up and away? Guess wrong and the hitter knocks your pitch out of the yard. Guess right and the guy’s out and you’re a baseball millionaire.
Drug selling was the same. Keep ’em guessing. Is that dealer coming at me this way? Or that way? At night? Or during the day? Is he selling smack now cheaper than me? Or the Big H? The Asian stuff? Or the stuff from Turkey? Why was he giving away the brown smoking shit out in Jamaica, Queens, for practically nothing and then selling it at triple cost to buyers in Wyandanch, Long Island?
That kind of thinking had vaulted him to the top of the game in South Brooklyn, and it allowed him to push into Queens and even parts of Manhattan and Long Island. He felt good about that. He had a tight crew and, most important, a baseball mind. He’d been trained by the best. A man who knew the game.
Fucking Sportcoat.
Sportcoat was, Deems thought bitterly, a fucking idiot and a sticky issue to be dealt with later. He had to focus on Earl now, and Mr. Bunch. Had to.