Just off Fulton Street and immediately south of the Keesler Bridge, the Leflore County Courthouse is a grand piece of old architecture surrounded by magnolia trees and the ghosts of racial injustice meted out before the shift of power brought by the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
It still houses the sheriff's department and the jail, which gives the building and parking lot a 24/7 buzz of activity that does little to suppress the drug dealing and companion violence plaguing the mostly black city beyond.
On this evening, two dark, unmarked federal government sedans sat among the sheriff's cruisers, their engines ticking away the heat of their swift journeys, one from Jackson, the other from Memphis. The highway patrol cars that had accompanied them on their high-speed trips on 1-55 sat nearby next to the personal vehicles of the sheriff himself and the chief of the Greenwood Police Department.
The occupants of those vehicles and a host of others jammed a third-floor conference room. A tall, lean federal agent with close-cropped, gunmetal-gray hair and a thin, red birthmark slashing into the hairline on the left side of his forehead addressed the group. He wore pinstripes with knife-sharp creases, an immaculately knotted red power tie. He had declined to tell the gathering much at all about his position or precisely whom he worked for, only that he had been sent by Homeland Security.
John Myers stood in the back of the room next to the sheriff, a fit, linebacker-like man with 'high-yellow' skin and deep freckles that took an edge off the menace of his otherwise impressive presence.
'Check out how the Fibbies and the brass from the Pentagon defer to him,' the sheriff whispered to Myers.
'Doesn't bode well.'
'We should have a tactical unit in place by noon,' said the man from Homeland Security. 'If any of your personnel make contact with this man, do not-repeat do not — take any action whatsoever. Bradford Stone is a deadly capable man and has shown his ability by killing at least seven people in the past forty-eight hours, six of them highly trained Special Forces members, and one man from his own search-and-rescue team.
'This is the cover legend you need to remember: Stone was involved in a drugsmuggling operation with a vicious cartel headquartered in Guadalajara. Our personnel attempted to apprehend him and he killed them all. We do not want a general alert. We will not be issuing mug shots, and our operation here should be restricted to the personnel in this room. We will take all the risk.'
Myers raised his hand. 'Sir?'
The man from Homeland Security frowned at the interruption. 'Yes?'
'As you know, I talked to this man not two hours ago. He'd just saved the life of a gunshot victim and appeared pretty normal.'
The man from Homeland Security smiled indulgently 'Yes, Stone can seem normal. But we believe he's cracked after six years of dealing with his wife's injury and coma. He's like a serial killer, only he's a serial thriller. The rush from the danger associated with the drug running gives him a release allowing him to lead a normal life. Until it builds up.'
He looked around the room, tried to meet every set of eyes, then focused on Myers.
'Does that make better sense, Sergeant?'
Myers glanced at the sheriff, who raised a skeptical eyebrow only his subordinate could see. Myers put on the 'Yassuh, Mr. White Man' mask he had perfected as a young child, looked at the man from Homeland Security, and lied.
'Yes.'
CHAPTER 45
Cedric Valentine eased his bronze Monte Carlo to an industrial-park turnout along southbound Highway 49 north of the Rising Sun crossroads and cranked up the volume on Dr. Dre's 'Some L.A. Niggas' and sang along with lyrics he knew by heart. L.A. niggaz rule the world nigga!..
He'd been to Compton once, a visit with his uncle two summers before, and hung with some Bloods. They'd sold him a Glock 9 one of them said he'd taken right out of the dying hand of a pig he'd shot while the sucker sat in his black-and-white on Slauson.
He remembered driving through South Central and using the Glock packed with hollow-points to peel the cap off a Rolling 60s rickey. The rush still stirred him when he remembered how the Crip's brains came out the holes in a reddish gray splatter all over the concrete wall behind him. 'Yeah!' he yelled to the world. 'We L.A. niggaz rule! Fuck all the fuckin' muth'fuckers!'
They called him Dr. Glock after that. He made damn sho' the pissant niggas in Snowden-Jones called him Dr. Glock and not some small-town country-nigga name like Cedric.
He felt a passing flash of guilt when he remembered how it hurt his mama to dump the name she'd given him and how she was always on the rag about him being a player. Always after him to go to bed at nine, get one of those minimum-wage jobs working for some cracker go to church, listen to her damned gospel music. She wanted him to rot out from the inside like a fucking Tom, like his uncle-her brother-who lived in Long Beach and spent his life sweating all week for less than an average day's worth of dealing crystal.
'Yassuh! Nosuh! I be fetchin' fo' Mr. Charlie-fuck that!' he said loudly. 'Not this nigga!' Cedric shook off the guilt and thumbed the electric controls on his seat. He manipulated himself upright, readjusted the rearview minor, rolled up the windows, and hit the toggles that adjusted the suspension lifters, raising the chassis now into what he called 'country nigrah' mode. It was better for the rougher roads and made him less of a target for the country Jakes and Penelopes. Tonight, he needed to be invisible. First the TEC-9. Then the money. Then the bitch. He'd bought the TEC-9 off the street in Memphis for the occasion, right after he'd sealed the deal with the bitch with the bucks.
I seal da deal, wid the bitch wid the bucks, you respect this niggah or you shit outta luck
Cedric tapped on the steering wheel as he rapped.
This playah gonna take what rightfully mine, When I start kissin' you wid my Glock and da Nine
He had to remember that because bitches liked gangstas who could rap. He ejected the Dr. Dre CD and slipped in Snoop Dogg. While the CD player searched for the first track, Cedric put the Monte Carlo into drive and pulled carefully into traffic. He didn't need no Jakes pulling him over for some traffic violation. Not far south of Rising Sun, he turned west toward Quito, across the Yazoo River bridge, and left on a gravel road. He didn't like the dust and the stones chipping his paint, but work was work, and when your work was killin', you needed to do things right and that meant no witnesses.
The 'Down 4 My Niggas' cut on the Snoop Dogg CD started. This was the one with C-Murder rappin' wid the Dogg. Fuck them other niggas, I ride for my niggas, what I die for my niggas, fuck them other niggas, what
Cedric rapped with the lyrics as he drove roughly southwest toward a tall fucking bridge in the middle of nofuckingwhere where he could ditch the Nine.
'Tha's me, motherfuckuhs,' he said. 'I'm a nigga with the big balls. I'ma put my fucking name on the wall wid my Dogg! I'ma pound those bitches till they can't even crawl!'
When he crested the top of the bridge northwest of Tchula, he knew he had the right spot. Snoop Dogg was singing about niggas who run but they couldn't hide.
When Cedric slowed to a stop at the top of the bridge, he pulled on a latex glove, reached under the seat for the TEC-9, Not a headlight in sight. He opened the window and let in a stiff, cool wind smelling of approaching rain, maybe hail and a tornado. He tossed the gun over the railing, then drove on into Tchula and back up 49, where he stopped short of the 82 overpass to adjust his seat and lower the suspension. He got out, squinting against the wind as he walked around the Monte Carlo with a flashlight. Satisfied no damage had been done by the gravel, he opened the trunk and grabbed the shoe box his Clarks had come in. He opened the lid and smiled at the stack of hundred-dollar bills rubber-banded together in the trunk. Half a stack, actually. The bitch had cut ten g's worth of C-notes, an even hundred of them, right in half. Federal-fucking-Expressed them to him in a box that arrived at his crib a week to the day after he'd made bail over the drive-by on West Gibbs Street. Wrapped around the money had been a printout of the article about his arrest printed off the Greenwood Commonwealth's Web site.
Cedric smiled now and enjoyed the glow in his belly. He was a true gangsta, famous enough that some
