Fuck that. Jax went out on his own. Less money. But a hell of a lot safer (despite spraying his tag on places like the Verrazano Bridge and a moving A train car – which was one phat story that even brothers in prison had heard of).

Alonzo Jackson, unofficially but permanently renamed Jax, dove into his craft. He started out simply bombing his tag throughout the city. But, he learned early that if that’s all you do, even if you lay it in every borough of the city, you’re nothing but a lame “toy,” and graffiti kings wouldn’t give you the time of day.

So, skipping school, working in fast food restaurants during the day to pay for paint, or racking what he could steal, Jax moved on to throw-ups – tags written fast but a lot bigger than bombing. He became a master of the top-to-bottom: doing the entire vertical height of a subway car. The A train, supposedly the longest route through town, was his personal favorite. Thousands of visitors would travel from Kennedy Airport into the city on a train that didn’t say Welcome to the Big Apple; it offered the mysterious message: Jax 157.

By the time Jax was twenty-one he’d done two total end-to-ends – covering the entire side of a subway car with his graffiti – and had come close to doing a whole train, every graffiti king’s dream. He did his share of ’pieces too. Jax had tried to describe what a graffiti masterpiece was. But all he could come up with was that a ’piece was something more. Something breathtaking. A work that a cluckhead crack addict sitting in a gutter and a Wall Street trader on New Jersey Transit could both look at and think, Man, that is so fucking cool.

Those were the days, Jax reflected. He was a graffiti king, in the middle of the most powerful black cultural movement since the Harlem Renaissance: hip-hop.

Sure, the Renaissance must’ve been def. But to Jax it was a smart person’s thing. It came from the head. Hip-hop burst from the soul and from the heart. It wasn’t born in colleges and writer’s lofts, it came right from the fucking streets, from the angry and striving and despairing kids who had impossibly hard lives and broken homes, who walked on sidewalks littered with cookie vials discarded by the crackheads and dotted with brown, dried blood. It was the raw shout from people who had to shout to be heard… Hip-hop’s four legs delivered everything: music in DJ’ing, poetry in MC rapping, dance in the b-boy’s breakdancing and art in Jax’s own contribution, graffiti.

In fact, here on 116th Street, he paused and looked at the place where the Woolworth’s five-and-dime had stood. The store hadn’t survived the chaos after the famous blackout of 1977 but what had sprouted in its place was a righteous miracle, the number-one hip-hop club in the nation, Harlem World. Three floors of every kind of music you could imagine, radical, addictive, electrifying. B-boys spinning like tops, writhing like stormy waves. DJs spinning vinyl for the packed dance floors, and MCs making love to their microphones and filling the room with their raw, don’t-fuck-with-me poems, pounding in time to the rhythm of a real heart. Harlem World was where the throw-downs started, the battles of the rappers. Jax had been lucky enough to see what was considered the most famous of all time: the Cold Crush Brothers and the Fantastic Five…

Harlem World was long gone, of course. Also gone – scrubbed or worn away or painted over – were the thousands of Jax’s tags and ’pieces, along with those by the other graffiti legends of the early hip-hop era, Julio and Kool and Taki. The kings of graffiti.

Oh, there were those lamenting the demise of hip-hop, which had become BET, multimillionaire rappers in chrome Humvees, Bad Boys II, big business, suburban white kids, iPods and MP3 downloads and satellite radio. It was…well, case in point: Jax was watching a double-decker tour bus ease to the curb nearby. On the side was the sign Rap/Hip-Hop Tours. See the Real Harlem . The passengers were a mix of black and white and Asian tourists. He heard snatches of the driver’s rehearsed spiel and the promise that they’d soon be stopping for lunch at an “authentic soul food” restaurant.

But Jax didn’t agree with the claimers bitching that the old days were gone. The heart of Uptown remained pure. Nothing could ever touch it. Take the Cotton Club, he reflected, that 1920s institution of jazz and swing and stride piano. Everybody thought it was the real Harlem, right? How many people knew that it was for white-only audiences (even the famed Harlem resident W. C. Handy, one of the greatest American composers of all time, was turned away at the door, while his own music was playing inside).

Well, guess what? The Cotton Club was fucking gone. Harlem wasn’t. And it never would be. The Renaissance was done and hip-hop had changed. But percolating right now in the streets around him was some brand-new movement. Jax wondered what exactly this one would be. And if he’d even be around to see it – if he didn’t handle this thing with Geneva Settle right he’d be dead or back in prison within twenty-four hours.

Enjoy your soul food, he thought to the tourists as the bus pulled away from the curb.

Continuing up the street for a few blocks, Jax finally found Ralph, who was – sure enough – leaning against a boarded-up building.

“Dog,” Jax said.

“S’up?”

Jax kept on walking.

“Where we goin’?” Ralph asked, speeding up to keep pace beside the large man.

“Nice day for a walk.”

“It cold out.”

“Walking’ll warm you up.”

They kept going for a time, Jax ignoring whatever the fuck Ralph was whining about. He stopped at Papaya King and bought four dogs and two fruit drinks, without asking Ralph if he was hungry. Or a vegetarian or puked when he drank mango juice. He paid and walked out onto the street again, handing the skinny man his lunch. “Don’t eat it here. Come on.” Jax looked up and down the street. Nobody was following. He started off again, moving fast. Ralph followed. “We walkin’ ’cause you don’ trust me?”

“Yeah.”

“So why you ain’t trust me all of a sudden?”

“‘Cause you had time to dime me out since I saw you last. What exactly is the mystery here?”

“Nice day fo’ a walk,” was Ralph’s answer. He snuck a bite of hot dog.

They continued for a half block to a street that seemed deserted and the pair turned south. Jax stopped. Ralph did too and leaned against a wrought-iron fence in front of a brownstone. Jax ate his hot dogs and sipped the mango juice. Ralph wolfed down his own lunch.

Eating, drinking, just two workers on their meal break from a construction job or window washing. Nothing suspicious about this.

“That place, shit, they make good dogs,” Ralph said.

Jax finished the food, wiped his hands on his jacket and patted down Ralph’s T-shirt and jeans. No wires. “Let’s get to it. What’d you find?”

“The Settle girl, okay? She goin’ to Langston Hughes. You know it? The high school.”

“Sure, I know it. She there now?”

“I don’t know. You ask where, not when. Only I hear something else from my boys in the hood.”

The hood…

“They be saying somebody got her back. Stayin’ on her steady.”

“Who?” Jax asked. “Cops?” Wondering why he even bothered. Of course it’d be them.

“Seem to be.”

Jax finished his fruit juice. “And the other thing?”

Ralph frowned.

“That I asked for.”

“Oh.” The pharaoh looked around. Then pulled a paper bag from his pocket and slipped it into Jax’s hand. He could feel the gun was an automatic and that it was small. Good. Like he asked. Loose bullets clicked in the bottom of the sack.

“So,” Ralph said cautiously.

“So.” Jax pulled some benjamins from his pocket and handed them to Ralph and then leaned close to the man. He smelled malt and onion and mango. “Now, listen up. Our business’s done with. If I hear you told anybody ’bout this, or even mention my name, I will find you and cap your fucked-up ass. You can ask DeLisle and he will tell you I am one coal-bad person to cross. You know what I’m saying?”