The Cool And The Dead

by Raymond Embrack

RAYMOND EMBRACK. Paperback writer, USA.

THE COOL AND THE DEAD

Blonde City has a unique police structure. The image-conscious Blonde recruits her policemen on the basis of their looks, their steroid abuse draped in hip-hop gangsta crossed with Nazi storm trooper black with blinging gold badges and nighttime sunglasses. Above the police is the Blonde Intelligence Agency. Blonde Intelligence has many specialized subdivisions, like the Erotic Counter-Terrorism Unit, Schoolgirl Intelligence, Hentai Vice, Transgender Narcotics.

The Blonde has a short attention span so most of those divisions are superfluous, do zero police work, do zero intelligence, have zero employees, the residue of years of her careless whispers existing only as empty folders on the desktop of Blonde Intelligence. And, technically, they’re a secret.

The subdivisions come into existence for various reasons. The Erotic Counter-Terrorism Unit of Carnal Intelligence was formed after the Patriot Act turned up a dominatrix on the Blonde Strip traced to an Al-Queda operative. Schoolgirl Intelligence is the product of a school shooting by two members of the worst girl gang in Capri Beach, the Vespers. The Urban Intelligence subdivision exists as part of the settlement made between the city and the Rev. Al Sharpton to chill out the Palm Strip Case (A pair of Blonde City cops convicted of hiring a black male stripper in a queer bar, tying him up, leaving forty-three bite marks on him, then, using white paint, painting a swastika over his face and a swastika over his junk.)

Incorporated in 1997, Blonde City is the youngest city in America. Blonde City is hot. A PSA runs with a special message from P.H.

Blonde City is about hotness, not hateness.

(For that she got her own Blonde Intelligence subdivision, PH Intelligence.)

Sometimes there’s work to be done. The subdivisions out source work to secret agents on an as-needed basis. One of them is a private secret agent named Peter Surf. He knows Blonde Intelligence is a joke but it’s work that can still get him killed or get him laid. After that, when he gets a chance, then, maybe he laughs at the joke. Maybe.

Miss Black is my go-between with Blonde Intelligence. Miss Black is better than a Hollywood agent. They talk to her, she sets the terms, then she talks to me. This time it was Urban Intelligence. Urban Intelligence was two years old, another top secret unit, this one specializing in collecting intelligence concerning anything that might fuck up Blonde City’s image as a racial paradise, or just the site of the next VMA.

The meeting was at the V.I.P. table of a strip club. Where else would Urban Intelligence have its precinct station, its base of ops? This strip club was near the airport. The bouncer led me past the stripper. Among her tattoos was the logo for the HBO series Entourage, one for Viagra. I was admitted past the velvet rope to the V.I.P. section to a table where sat a Latino in a soul patch, dark glasses and black leather, his bald head bobbing to the beat from the showroom, "In Da Club," champagne flute in hand. The Blonde blurs reality and entertainment.

"Yo, Surf," he said. "I’m the QM."

When you’re a private secret agent in Blonde City, you get your assignments from QM. "QM" is a rank unique to the Blonde Intelligence divisions. The minds behind this picked the title "QM" as a homage to Quinn Martin, a TV producer who put out every cop show in the 1970s. If L.A. is film noir, Blonde City is an Esurance commercial.

We were meeting for the first time but QM acted like I was his homey from way back. It was like a scene in acting class where we were playing two homeys from way back. QM stuck out a massive brown fist. I stuck out my fist. We bumped knuckles.

"I told them," he said. "Get me Surf. They got me Surf."

I took the seat across from him. QM’s performance had the sheen of a well-rehearsed gangsta pose. He poured me champagne. We lit menthols. The club bouncer with his headset caught it, looked like he wanted to do something but our badges were bigger.

"You go back to L.A.," QM said. "Back to the Nineties."

"Yeah."

"Back in the days of The LG," he said. "You knew The LG?"

At the time I was in L.A. getting in on the hip-hop security boom. 90's West Coast rapper The Long Green Long Green was notorious for his track "Cop Shooter." He invented the 90's dead rapper boom. He was gunned down in ‘95, a year before Tupac Shakur. The homicide had gone just as unsolved.

"A little," I said. "We met for a second or two."

"You were in his posse," QM said.

"Not long."

"You covered the same ground," QM said.

I nodded.

"Knew the people who knew him . . . "

I nodded.

"I grew up on his tracks," QM said. "Back then I was high school football and grand theft auto."

The 90's were becoming the new Eighties. But QM wasn’t through. He was about to say something that would make me feel even older: "His kids are grown now."

I remembered hearing The LG had kids on both Coasts. But you never heard anything about the kids since the murder. Thirteen years might make them grown by now. Second generation 90's West Coast hip-hop.

"Two surviving kids," he said. "The LG’s shit was not together when he died. There was like ten years of madness between the family and the babymommas, then the kids got trust funds and a piece of the estate. These are their legal names, dude. Lemme say these names right. Black Phallus Neferhotep. Brother Osiris Dolemite. Both in music, keeping the flame and shit."

QM took a drink of bubbly. "Tell you something fucked-up, ey?"

QM leaned back, tilted his soul patch upward, followed that with a pensive silence, stone-faced behind the shades before he picked the right moment and the right note to continue.

"His kids been getting death threats. Everybody gets death threats today. But these not no typical death threats. These claim to be from the killer of The LG. They say the contract is still on."

"On the kids?"

"Yeah."

"They say why?"

"Guess there some fucked-up people in the world," he said. "Your assignment is to make a threat assessment."

I was watching him slip from the gangsta pose into cop guy mode.

"But," he added, "there may be objectives to the assessment."

QM seemed to hear himself, how far he’d stepped out of character. He took a drink of bubbly, settled his thick neck back into a gangsta chill.

#

"Get her out of here."

In 1995, I was a member of the Long Green Long Green’s posse for nine days. That’s how long I lasted. LG security had duties like clearing out a club men’s room when The LG wanted to get head from an underage TV actress. Or stomping niggaz who wore the wrong colors. That week we were in a hotel in L.A. The LG was in his suite, passed-out. In the surrounding suites was the crew, the entourage, the security. The security was hired by the pound, mostly smoked dope, drank forties, told gang stories, ganged up on the wrong dude and stomped him bloody under their Timberlands. It was a jungle. I got out before I had to kill people. The chick was stoned, drunk, naked and skinny, maybe age fifteen. She was with the guys, the security, their buddies, the dealers who brought the shit, the dudes who brought the dealers. Five of them had her on the floor face-down, about to pull a train on her. They’d get the snatch, The LG would get the rape charge. That’s what had put Tupac in Clinton for eleven months.

"Get her out," I told them.

"Be cool," they said.

"Get her the fuck out."

I took her by the arm, threw her clothes at her.

A sumo sized security dude named Shoukie Jackson rolled up to me like the front end of a Mack truck. He said, "Look, nigga. Don’t ever get in the way of some pussy."

"Get her the fuck out," I told him. "Last time I say it."

He took her by her thin arms, held her.

My right hook nailed Shoukie’s mouth, dropped him, the girl tumbling with him. Three of the others came at me. I was coked-up but they were drunken and stoned. Rocko Freeman went head-first through the closed balcony glass door. The other two disappeared. When I looked for the girl, she was gone too.

The next day The LG called me in to stand before The Man. Literally, before him, him on the hotel bed between the legs of the naked chick cornrowing his black cloud of Afro. I had protected him, prevented a rape case against him, probably kept him from swapping tats with Mike Tyson, but it meant zero to him. LG’s indifferent raspy voice drifted between smokes of a blunt, the air thick with 90's chronic.

"Surf. What the fuck was you doin’?"

"My job."

Like I’d said something corny, The LG snickered, then the chick snickered.

He said, "You think you a motherfuckin’ pro? Would you take a bullet for me, nigga?"

"Yeah, I’m a pro. My mistake. Get a fucking dog."

"Yo, you dumb motherfucka. Niggas get smoked that way, nigga."

He mad-dogged me for a few seconds. The stare cooled and shifted until he was seeing me through prison bars. He tossed me a roll of hundreds. He always kept at least one roll of hundreds on him.

"Get back to me in a few months," he said. "Shit be cool by then."

Four months later he was dead.

I moved to Blonde City, bought a converted Surf service station on Jetstream Beach. I moved to Blonde City to find the Blue Level masters. I found them, their priesthood. Now I’m a priest. That’s my true work. But I still have to make a living.

###

Through the glass rear wall I watched a wild nude white girl on the beach playing with a kendo sword. Known as a shinai, it was a bamboo practice weapon used like a sword. I had two adult male size. Foxy Black struggled with the sword, working out her thin tattooed arms attacking a vertical bamboo pole in the sand. Each strike that connected made a banging bamboo sound. Don’t worry, this won’t turn up later where she swings into action when it counts most. This is only about my secretary doing strange shit in the background.

Her black heroin pixie bangs framed a delicate pointy-nosed paleness. The moon willow of her body was largely covered in tats. No ornamental porn star bullshit for her, her tats were contour art, tiger stripes along arms and legs, dragons across her narrow back and forearms, flames up her flat belly, cupping her flat chest. Her limber little body moved with a combination of high school gymnastics, ballet study, some kendo training from the Kims, playground flips. Mostly, her moves were intuitive, as though martial arts can be improvised.

I lit a menthol, booted up. I had a look at the Urban Intelligence intel, the Long Green Long Green story. The short version: born to single mother in Galveston TX, trouble-prone, relocated to L.A. in early teens to live with a cousin, became a drug dealer, became a member of Bloods, got into west coast rap, made the big time.

I looked at the files on the kids. The two were located in Blonde City. Black Phallus Neferhotep, 20. Brother Osiris Dolemite, 18, was his head of security. So far Neferhotep’s rapping career had been a weak attempt to ride on his father’s cred. Neferhotep had minor dope busts. Brother Osiris Dolemite had assault charges. Brother Osiris Dolemite had firearms charges.

Between its borders, Blonde City only allows hotness to thrive. Today, high-profile Blonde crime is for wealthy white chicks. Black dudes are too 90's, too "urban." The Blonde doesn’t want the wrong role models to send the wrong signals to the right demographic. Urban Intelligence moved in for pre-emptive damage control. Its investigation had turned up the death threats. This is the City from U.N.C.L.E., a Patriot Act beach party stretching the meaning of domestic terrorism into whatever is good for the Blonde. We went after the death threats. Call it counter-terrorism while chilling the press. The Blonde is good.

The threats had been filed and dated, sent to the kids starting six weeks before. I read the e-mails, played the voice mails. The e-mails and voice mails said the same thing. In both was the same chunky beat under the same urgent young black male voices in the same rap:

Yo!
Yo!
Yo!
Yo!
Black Jihad, war is old.
Yo!
We lined up LG. We shot him cold.
Yo!
That snitch-ass rat bitch had to go.
Yo!
Your blood is his blood. Yours got to flow. Got to flow flow all over the floor floor. For you to live is a no no, you got to go go.
No piece of green for peace for Green.
War don’t end,
war wage harder
colder to hotter
Martyr to martyr
Like the father go,
son go like the father.

Foxy cartwheeled across the beach view.

So what was this, retro-assassination? The LG hit crew from the 90's making a comeback? Why? To take a 90's beef to the next generation? For what? What then? Where was the profit? An extortion plot to work the kids’ paranoia, to tap the estate. This hustle had an original spin, using hip-hop history to back it up.

Was the threat real? My job: make a threat assessment. Find out if it was real. If real, find the source, neutralize it.

Foxy Black came in panting, shiny with sweat, headed to the shower installed in the expanded washrooms, the office, garage, and washrooms connected. Back when I was working for The LG, Foxy was maybe five, combing Barbie hair.

###

Copyright © Raymond Embrack 2008

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