He saw me and slammed the door. The line scattered. Some screamed when they recognized the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s green raid jackets. “Grab yo babies. Grab yo babies.”

I threw the ram through the door just as it latched closed. It sprung open so hard the knob imbedded in the wall. Inside, Q-Ball ran up the stairs. I chased him, clubbing him over the head with my gun.

The second time, out on bail, he was back at it in the same apartment. I wrote another warrant and we hit it again. This time he’d changed his MO and thought he was safe. With the front door locked and barred, the line of customers ran out from under the second-story window. Q-Ball hung precariously out his second-story window, his heels locked under his bed to keep from falling. He dropped a fistful of money when he saw the team deploy on his apartment. He yelped, struggled to pull back in as I rammed the door barricaded on the other side. It took ten or fifteen strikes, putting everything I had into it. The door came down. I ran up the same stairs and found him lying on his bed, feigning sleep, his head bandaged from our first encounter. What else could he do? On the floor, piled two feet high were the wadded-up greenbacks he’d been throwing back into the bedroom from his perch dangling precariously out the window. I said, “Peekaboo, asshole,” a saying that became immortalized in the BMFs, and fell on him with both knees, the barrel of my gun again educating his noggin in how it was not a good thing to sell dope to kids.

Dora Bascombe didn’t venture in without permission. She’d been on the street long enough to know better. Q-Ball came to the open door, a big smile on his ferret face. He knew what stood before him. Bascombe didn’t have any money. There was only one thing he’d take in trade. I only hoped she wouldn’t do it in front of Tommy.

Out front on the street, gunfire erupted, sounding like popcorn in a microwave, a common occurrence this side of Central Avenue.

Q-Ball paid it no mind, put his arm around Dora’s shoulders, and with his other arm outstretched, ushered her in. He hesitated, looked over at me, trying to remember where he’d seen me before, the Band-Aids doing their job. I didn’t look away and held his glare for several long seconds before he took out a cell phone, dialed, and spoke. They went inside, all of them.

Even Tommy.

I knew I didn’t have much time to do what had to be done. He’d just called in his ghetto dogs.

Chapter Twenty

Q was bold and left the door wide open. He’d moved up in the world he’d chosen. He was now a VP, head of a district, probably five square blocks.

Just before I got to the doorway, he reappeared, gun in hand, his eyes locked on mine. I continued to move toward him as he brought the gun up, pointed right at my belly, a pistol barrel, large and round, one I knew from experience could wink fire and pain. His smile dropped. His expression transformed to fear as recognition set in and stole his common sense and false bravado.

Because he recognized me, the caper wasn’t going to be a clandestine snatch. The loss of the element of surprise turned into a real problem that in the end would jeopardize everything we’d worked for. Nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t leave Tommy to the life he’d been dealt. No way.

Pale and quaking, with his free hand, Q reached over, took hold of the door, and slammed it shut. Before he had time to throw the deadbolt, I rose up on the ball of my left foot, at the same time bringing my knee up to my chest, and kicked as hard as I could. The door banged open a second after it closed. The edge caught Q in the face. It mashed his nose flat. His raggedy ass flew back against the wall where he slid down with a sappy expression on his blood-smeared face.

Inside, Dora held Tommy up in front of her as she backed up. Using him as a shield.

“Put the boy down.”

“Get away from me.”

Tommy caught his mother’s terror and began to cry, a long, slow wail.

“Now you’ve gone and scared the kid. Just put him down and go in the other room.”

“What? You going to take my boy? Is that it? You some kind of baby raper?”

“Put him down, now,” I said through clenched teeth, the thought of her accusation, the nerve.

She set him down on the floor, but held on to his shoulders. “Okay, okay, gimme five hundred dollars, and you can have him.”

She read my mind, saw the sharp edge of hate in my eyes. “Okay, okay, three hundred.”

I squatted. “Tommy, I’m your friend. You don’t have to worry about me. I won’t hurt you. I won’t ever hurt you.” I reached out a hand. “I promise. I only want to be your friend.”

Unafraid, he stopped crying, toned it down to a whimper, and stared me right in the eye. He had a lot of grit. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw mama back up, her hand going behind her, searching for a weapon. I couldn’t break the contact too soon, not and have him on my side. His small hand came out slowly reaching for my big mitt. “That’s a boy. You’re a brave little man.”

Outside the apartment I heard footsteps. The ghetto dogs trailed in to protect their master.

Tommy’s hand was ice cold. I noticed his lips were tinged blue. He shivered from fear and cold.

Dora found her weapon. Her hand wrapped around a heavy, green glass ashtray. I stood in one long fluid motion so it wouldn’t spook Tommy and stepped around him as his mother pulled back with everything she had and swung. I ducked my head and took the blow on the shoulder. The frightful pain rippled up and down my spine. With my left hand, I tucked little Tommy inside my great coat, covered him up. At the same time, I swung a right fist backward at his mother’s face. My fist connected solid to her forehead. Her body let out an involuntary sigh as she wilted to the floor, unconscious. Tommy, on the other side of me, never saw it. His body an ice cube, burrowed into the heat of my body, his little arms going around my chest, as I squatted, the arm with the cast a little awkward.

There wasn’t time. Q’s crew would be coming to back him up. I stepped over to the moaning Q, his eyes now wide with fright, leaned down, and took the Colt .45 from his limp hand. Too much gun for a punk like him to accurately control.

The doorway shadowed with a throng of Blood gang members. In an after-action, beer drinking tailgate party, the BMFs would have called it a “blood clot.” I automatically turned my shoulder away from them, putting my body in between the threat and Tommy.

“Step out of the way, boys. I got no beef with you.”

Four of them, just outside the door, backed up almost to the chain-link fence that surrounded the defunct pool. Only one held a gun, a sawed-off double-barrel twelve-gauge. Enough fire power to cut me right in half. The largest by far of the thugs had on a red tank top. His thickly muscled right bicep wept blood from a fresh bullet wound, the result of the earlier gunshots, a drive-by. Fearless, loyal, and brave, he said, “Where’s Q-Ball?”

I kept the gun down by my side, half looking at them over my shoulder. “You don’t want any part of this. Back on out and—”

“I said, where’s Q?”

Behind me on the floor, Q said, “Man, are you crazy? Doan you know who dat is? Dat’s Bruno Johnson, the poooleeese. Let him go ’fore he kills all’ve us.” Q’s voice rose as he spoke until it was almost a screech. He crab-crawled deeper into the apartment. On the top of his head, ropy strips of scalp laid bare where the hair never grew back from when I had tried to educate him in the ills of drug dealing. I guess I’d been a poor teacher.

The four thugs looked at one another. The big, mean one with the fresh bullet hole in his arm remained undeterred. “Fuck this punk, man, dere are fo’ of us and only one a ‘m.”

Q screeched from deep in the dim apartment. “Dint you hear what I said? Dat’s Bruno, The Bad Boy Johnson, and I swear to gawd, he’ll kill us all. Let him go, let him go, let him get his sorry ass outta here.”