Free Suitcase City by Sterling Watson

portions and cut them into lines. “Now, you got to take it easy with this. It ain’t that high school shit you used to.” Blood knew the people who supplied the shit Tyrone and his friends used, and he knew what he was talking about. Tyrone took out his wallet, removed a ten-dollar bill, and rolled it with shaking fingers. Blood let his voice go soft, made the sound of an older brother, the sound of caution, good reason. “Just do a line and wait a minute. See how it takes you.”
    The boy leaned over and inserted the rolled bill into his nostril. Too eager, too eager by half. Blood loved that youthful eagerness. It made the world go round. It made business run smooth and the money roll in. He watched the boy draw in the line of cocaine and then jerk back with the shock of a pure dose. Pull back like his skull had been seized from above by the talons of a giant, ravenous bird. Well, it had been seized, and so had his spinal cord. Every nerve in his strong, young body was singing the Cartagena conga. Ta, ta, TAH . . . BOOM! Oh my, my, yes.
    Blood always cut some lines for himself. Good customer relations. But with the boy, he hadn’t yet. And the boy didn’t seem to notice: that eagerness, Mr. Impatience, telling the boy there was more for him if Blood didn’t take any.
    Two weeks ago, Blood had brought the boy back here among the boxes and the crates and told him he had a choice. He could do what Blood asked him to do with James Teach, and Blood would continue to supply him with the thing he loved most in the world, the Special Reserve, or he could go without the drug (Blood described some of the physical unpleasantness of this to the boy) and Blood would see to it that certain people were made aware of some of Tyrone Battles’s activities. Blood had expected some of that phony football anger, some of that young-buck-raging-around-and-confronting thing, but the kid had just looked at him and thought about it, realized that Blood had his balls in a vise, and said, “All you want me to do is confront the guy, piss him off, and see what happens?”
    “That’s right, my friend,” Blood had said. “You just get in his face a little like the mean little nigger you are and see what he does. He does nothing, you just walk away. No problem. But he bows up on you, gets in there eating your breath, goes dog to your dog, then you improvise, see where it goes. I told you, the guy has a history of losing his temper. But remember, we want him in trouble, not you.”
    The truth was that Blood didn’t know what Teach would do, but he figured it was worth a try, this thing with Tyrone Battles. Even if Teach didn’t take the bait, Blood might learn a thing or two. What had happened, the story Tyrone had just told, was righteous beyond Bloodworth Naylor’s wildest dream.
    Tyrone fell backward into a Barcalounger that was about to be shipped out to some whores in an apartment in Suitcase City. The football star sprawled there with his mouth gaping, his hands twitching, his eyes the size of cocktail coasters, muttering, “Oh man. Oh shit.”
    “I told you it was good shit.” Blood didn’t think the kid heard him. Whatever. The kid knew what to do next. The kid would hear him when the time came. And if he didn’t, Blood would crank the vise a little tighter on those eager young balls.
    It was hot back here in the storeroom, hot and private. Blood left the boy sitting in his coca-leaf hyperdrive dream and walked out to the loading dock. He rolled open the big steel door and let the evening breeze blow across his face. He looked at the two-acre fenced lot where the delivery trucks were parked, Naylor’s Rent-to-Own painted in bold black letters on their sides. He glanced up and down the alley.
    To the west, where the sun was setting now, he could see the two whores who usually stood under the jacaranda tree behind the laundromat moving into position for the night. They’d stand there under the tree in a litter of cigarette