Pipe Dream Read Online Free PDF Page A

Pookie. “You worry ’bout gettin’ that cash outta that wallet and throwin’ the rest of that shit outta here.”
    “Shakedown, breakdown,” Leroy said, smiling.
    Rock passed five caps to Leroy.
    “That’s a down payment,” Rock said with authority. Then, as if he were trying to confirm that he was in charge, he added, “Now, shut your dumb ass up.”
    Leroy glanced in the rearview mirror, wondering if Rock and Butter still had the gun.
    “Dig this here, man,” Leroy said as he pulled the car over at 21st and Erie, about two blocks from the 39th Police District. “You think I don’t know where you got all that dope? I was comin’ up in the house when everything jumped off. I know wussup.”
    Rock glanced at Butter to see his reaction, but Butter seemed oblivious to the fact that there was now a witness to Podres’s murder. He just sat completely still, wearing a blank stare. Pookie, on the other hand, seemed to hang on Leroy’s every word.
    “You can play that hard role on Butter and them, but that don’t move me,” Leroy said matter-of-factly. “Now, you can either get out and tell five-o how that Puerto Rican got slumped, or you can throw that gun and all that I.D. down the sewer before we all get popped.”
    With that, everything stopped, until Pookie tore her gaze away from Leroy and looked expectantly at Rock.
    Rock glanced at Pookie and then turned his murderous stare on Leroy. Then he pulled the gun from his groin and chambered a round with an ominous double click.
    “I’ll splatter your brain against that windshield. Now, shut up and drive.”
    Leroy glanced leisurely at Rock, bent down, emptied two caps into his straight shooter, lit two matches, and pulled the smoke into his lungs. He held the smoke in for half a minute, then released it slowly through his nostrils, filling the car with the sickeningly sweet smell of burning crack. He turned around, his eyes the size of half-dollars, and stared at Rock.
    “Do it,” Leroy said, reaching for the barrel of the gun and placing it gingerly against his own forehead. “Do it now, while they still lookin’ for you from the last body.”
    He paused and pressed the gun more firmly against his forehead.
    “I just hope you know how you goin’ somewhere in a car with blood all inside the windows and a gun with at least two bodies on it.”
    Rock stared back at Leroy and decided to kill him. But as his finger began to tighten around the trigger, a police car rode slowly down Erie Avenue from Hunting Park. He lowered the gun, allowing the police car to pass, and eased his grip on the trigger. Then he glanced away from Leroy.
    “Man, you know I was just bullshittin’,” he said, grinning nervously. “Let’s get outta here.”
    Leroy stared at Rock for a second longer. Then he turned around, put the car in drive, and pulled off slowly, his jaw moving from side to side, as it always did when he took a hit. There was silence as everyone took in what had just occurred.
    Butter thought that it might be a good time to change the subject. All the gunplay was blowing his high. And in this, his first moment of clarity since the shooting, the thought of the white hand pulling back the curtain came roaring back to him in Technicolor. He could even see the heavy gold bracelet dangling from the wrist.
    “Yo, Rock,” he said suddenly. “You see a white boy come in the house tonight?”
    “No, I ain’t see no white boy tonight,” Rock said, his voice a little harder because Leroy had embarrassed him. “You know them white boys don’t come through after Friday. What, that shit got you hallucinatin’ again?”
    “I don’t know,” Butter said, but the image stayed in his mind as he handed Podres’s I.D. to Rock. “Throw this out the window on your side.”
    “All right,” Rock said, already feeling his authority slipping away. “Pull over by this sewer, Leroy.”
    Leroy pulled over. Rock got out, stood with his back to the car, and threw the I.D.