A silver PT Cruiser rolled slowly down the hill. A busted suspension made it lean to one side. Its finish was scratched and dull, like it had been rubbed all over with fine steel wool—the work of too many Pittsburgh winters. Not exactly the kind of wheels I would expect from a drug lord.
It pulled up alongside, the throbbing reggaeton going silent as an untinted window rolled down. Two Latinos in their late twenties glared out at me with a cultivated menace that almost seemed comical. The driver wore a soul patch so tight and dark it could have been a tattoo; his passenger had a pencil-thin chinstrap of a beard that stretched from ear to ear.
“You the guy with the yayo?” said Chinstrap.
“The what?”
“Llello,” said Soul Patch, inflecting the word with its full pizzazz. “He means blow.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I got the yayo.”
“Check him out.”
Tonio came over and patted me down kind of haphazardly. “He’s clean. No hardware.”
“Get in the back,” Chinstrap barked.
I hopped in without hesitation. These guys looked agitated, but it was probably mostly bluster. Their eyes betrayed a diffidence that had been absent in those assholes from Cleveland.
The doors slammed shut. Tonio squirmed around, pressing his back against the door, facing me. Was he actually worried I might attack him?
The car pulled out and went cruising down the street, the back left suspension creaking with every bump, bottoming out in the potholes.
“Tonio says you come to sell,” said Chinstrap. “That right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s right.”
“Zángano!” said Soul Patch. “Where you come from? East End? Shadyside?”
“Florida.”
“Shit. What makes you think you can just stroll into our hood and do business with our customers?”
“Didn’t Tonio tell you? I didn’t come to sell to them. I came to sell to you.”
“Say what?”
“So … are you guys Crips?”
“Crips? Who told you we was Crips?”
“Those guys on the corner.”
“George,” said Tonio, rolling his eyes.
“Them guys. They don’t know shit,” said Chinstrap. “We ain’t Crips. No disrespect. They some fine dudes, but we just some cacos. We got our own thing going. The Crips on the Hill got busted couple months ago. Big ass clampdown. FBI. ATF. Whole shebang. Since then, been kind of a vacuum here. We just trying to fill it. Taking advantage, you know, of the opportunity. Course, Crips want their turf back, they welcome. We just filling the void. Temporary-like.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I don’t really care about the details. I just want to unload my stuff as soon as possible.”
Soul Patch made a turn onto the major street that formed one of the Hill’s ramparts.
“That’s all nice, but the question I got is, who you wit?”
“Nobody. I’m a free agent.”
“Shit don’t work that way, man. Where you get your supply?”
“Um. Out of state,” I said.
“What cartel you work for?” said Soul Patch.
“None of them,” I said.
