Free Underbelly by Gary Phillips Page A

buddy.
    Magrady had spotted this and with some others had already run over and stopped the altercation before blood flowed.
    The sergeant shook his head afterward. “JAFS,” he said. To Magrady’s puzzled look he illuminated, “Just Another Fucked-up Situation.”
    They both chuckled as the man went off to get dressed in his uniform. What ever happened to those two chuckleheads, Magrady couldn’t say. But that JA sergeant, whose name was Yoshida, became a public defender. This he knew as during one of his lost periods, by the randomness of the cosmic wheel, Yoshida had been assigned by his office to represent Magrady after he’d been arrested for trespassing—while tore up on coke and booze.
    â€œYou don’t remember,” the attorney had said after interviewing Magrady in jail about his case.
    â€œI do,” he admitted, ashamed. “I just hoped you didn’t remember me.”
    The other man nodded his head. “It’s JAFS, Magrady. You’re not the first one of us I’ve helped whose had some bad luck after coming back to the world. We’ll get past this and take it from there.”
    Sure enough he got a return engagement back in rehab coupled with a community service sentence reduction. Yoshida had him placed with Community Now, a grassroots organization his wife sat on the board of in those days. Eventually, due partly to strategic planning and partly to infighting, Community Now would become Urban Advocacy
    Daybreak, he in his boxers and Baine in a slip, the two lay together in bed listening to a Bartók CD. Her head on his torso, Baine asked him, “You think about your kids?”
    He massaged her butt. Considering her seven-plus decades, it was quite a lovely sensation. But at his age, Magrady could squeeze fresh bread and get a thrill. “Yeah, a lot recently.” It probably would break the mood to tell her partly because he had his gun at his oldest’s house out in Diamond Bar.
    â€œYou?” She had a grown son she hadn’t seen for some time. A lying, cheatin’-ass doper he recalled from bitter experience.
    â€œChad got word to me. Says he’s clean and lean.”
    â€œWho says?”
    â€œHis chick who came by.”
    â€œThat you lent a twenty to, I bet.”
    She kissed his chest. “Thirty, darling.”
    â€œSheeeet.”
    â€œHe was at work. She showed me a picture on her cell phone. He’s a security guard at the Emerald Shoals site.”
    â€œThen he should be able to come by and see you.”
    â€œHe will.”
    Magrady didn’t want to cause static. We all needed something to hang onto.
    As several strings and drums went wild on the record then settled into a moody dissonance, Baine let her hand go low on his body and damned if he wasn’t able to soldier up. This was also why he didn’t argue with her about her son. He figured she might be feeling frisky and why mess with that? Cialis? Viagra? Heh. He was Kong, son of Kong, baby.
    When they were done he promised to call Baine this coming weekend, if only to prevent her taking up with that bastard Jeremy again he half-joked. Magrady got all stealthy coming down the hall and could see, as he feared, the one-armed Asher on the desk. He was doing a card trick with his pincer to keep himself amused. He flipped the king of hearts over in his metal grip then back and suddenly the face card was now a ten of clubs. Magrady was impressed but certainly wasn’t going to clap.
    At one point staying at the Chesapeake was a former stage magician who went by the name Greystone. He occasionally did gigs at the Magic Castle in Hollywood when his arthritis permitted. Being a magician who specialized in close work, like making coins fall through solid tables, required nimble fingers, yet he’d taught Asher a few tricks before he died of emphysema.
    Going back the way he came, he passed Baine’s room. From inside he could hear her