Another crime story. The name comes from a Sonic Youth song called Trilogy, from the album Daydream Nation.

———-

Hyperstation
by Joel Durham Jr

I’m walking through a barely-lit parking lot. The handgun in the small of my back, tucked into my pants, makes me feel safe, even though if I actually found myself in a situation in which I needed to use it, I’d probably be shot before I drew it. The only place I’d ever fired my gun was at the range. I bought it for protection, but this is the first time I ever thought I’d actually need it.It makes me feel powerful. Dizzy, immaculate. Go ahead, fuck with me.

*

The parking lot, a municipal lot full of beer bottles intact and broken, and gravel and potholes, is deserted. Only two cars are parked on the acre lot; way off to the left is an old Pontiac whose windows had all been busted out, and ahead of me is a rusty conversion van missing hub caps. Across the parking lot is East Elm Street. Across East Elm Street is another parking lot with lots of cars in it, and past that is a government subsidized apartment building.

*

The gun’s positioning at the bottom of my back reminds me of my posture. I straighten up, shoulders back. This part of the city stinks like warm urine. The recent days had been hot and the nights humid. I was sweating, but not because of the humidity.

There aren’t any cars going by on East Elm Street. There’s no sign of life anywhere. It’s three in the morning. Somewhere in the city there’s an after party with a bunch of 20 year olds tripping on ecstasy. Somewhere in the city there are strangers having sex with each other.

Somewhere, there’s a guy rocking a colicky baby, frustrated, but at least he doesn’t have to be to work in a few hours because it’s Saturday. Somewhere, a car alarm is wailing, pissing off everyone that lives nearby. Somewhere, newspaper carriers are picking up stacks of weekend rags to drop on doorsteps.

Ahead of me there’s an apartment, and someplace inside is exactly what I need, and I’m going to leave with it–one way or another.

*

I was wrong. I’m not alone. As I approach, the back doors of the conversion van open up. I’m still twenty yards away, and I can’t make out the features of the person who gets out. He’s looking at me, though. I can feel it.

I keep walking. My direct path to the complex will take me past the van about ten feet from its driver side. I think about my gun. I keep walking.

I hear the shuffling of feet on loose pavement. As I get closer, I see an imposing figure at the rear of the van. I feel his eyes on me. I think about shooting him outright, but I don’t stray from my path. The gun makes me feel powerful. A crunch underfoot startles me; I’ve just stepped on a hunk of glass.

“What you doing here?” asks a gruff, gravelly voice. I hear sliding footsteps, crackling on pebbles. The hulking figure gets closer. He’s a very large, black man, and a gentle gust of wind carries a heavy scent of body odor to my nostrils.

“Mind your business,” I reply quietly, and keep walking. The smelly man maneuvers himself into my path. My hand darts behind me, touches the grip of my pistol through my tee shirt, a reflex, not a calculated action.

“You is my business, motherfucker,” says the voice, pregnant with anticipation.

I stop. My heart’s in my throat. He takes a step toward me. A mere ten yards separate us now. I say, hoping my voice doesn’t quiver, “I’m here to see Speed Surti.”

The man stops immediately. “You goin’ to see Speed?” asks the heavy voice.

“I have business with him,” I reply, feeling a little safer.

“Well shit, why didn’t you say so?” the voice says, a little lighter.

Apparently, Speed carries weight around here. My right hand stops fingering my gun and returns to my side.

“Because it’s not your business,” I say. “Now let me by.”

He raises his hands to his chest, palms toward me. “Go on, man. I ain’t gonna stop you.”

Trudging, sliding his feet along the ancient pavement and gravel, he returns to his van. He climbs in, and a second later the doors slam shut and I’m alone again.

*

Speed Surti isn’t expecting me. The van guy’s reaction to his name startls me a little.

Suddenly I feel out of my league, considering Speed’s name alone commands such respect. I start to fear his aura.

But my shaking hands and sweaty brow egg me on. I start walking again, perhaps a little more slowly, but on course. I cross East Elm Street and walk through the parking lot, down the sidewalk toward Speed’s apartment.

I reach the security door. Speed’s buzzer isn’t marked, so you have to know which number to buzz. I know. He told me. Number four. I buzz Speed’s place.

*

The complex doesn’t have an intercom. I hesitate to think what Speed would say, being awakened at three AM. But only seconds after I buzz, the chirping signal that the door has been unlocked perks up. I open the security door and enter the vestibule, which smells like an ashtray. The faux brass mailboxes are there in the left wall, each with its own key lock. In front of them, on the ground, lies a pile of ad fliers.

I open the glass door to the apartment hallway, which is decorated with graffiti. Some of it is elaborate, colorful, artfully styled, and some is hastily scrawled gang symbols in black paint on the beige walls. I fear the gangs. Speed, I think, does not.

*

I hear music. It’s coming from upstairs to the left.

He’s in unit C4, like the explosive. Each lettered section has eight units, one through four on the left, and five through eight on the right. Four was upstairs. I climb the open-air stairway and approach the door. The music, bass-heavy rap, is coming from Speed’s apartment.

As I extend my hand to knock, the door opens. There’s a diminutive white girl with straight, light brown hair tumbling from her head over a grey sweatshirt. The skin around her eyes is red and her pupils are dilated. She leans against the open door and stares at me without saying anything. The smell of marijuana smoke wafts out of the apartment.

After a moment, I start to feel awkward. A sequence blasts through my imagination of me pulling my weapon and busting a hole in her forehead, kicking the door the rest of the way open as her limp body crumples to the floor, and shooting everyone I see.

Instead of doing that, I say to her, “Is Speed here?”

She rolls her eyes, turns like a rag doll with her body against the door and sways into the apartment. I take a couple, cautious steps in. A small group of people in the living room is staring at me. Not one of them is Speed. The group is a mix of whites and blacks, male and female. There’s a big glass bong on the coffee table, and a mirror, and baggies, and beer bottles, and a giant hardcover book entitled The World’s Longest Bridges.

A very muscular black guy in a white tank top sitting in an overstuffed recliner says, “Sup yo?”

I stutter for a second and finally spit out, “Is this Speed’s place?”

Everyone laughs. The girl who answered the door has flopped onto the couch, which is facing away from me; she raises her hand and limply points down the hallway. I peer past the kitchen, on my right, and see a closed door at the end of the hall.

“Speed’s indisposed,” a white kid in a CAT Tools baseball cap says, and everyone snickers.

“He conducting a business deal,” says the guy in the recliner.

“In the bathroom or the bedroom?” I ask earnestly. This causes everyone to burst out laughing. A curly blonde girl leans out of a papa-san chair in the corner and picks up the bong. “Sit down,” she says in a singsong voice. “We don’t bite. Want to party?”

There’s an empty spot on the love seat next to a chubby black kid in a shirt that says “I’M FAT BUT I’M NOT FUCKING JOLLY.” He’s glassy eyed and vacant. That’s the only place to sit besides the floor.

The blonde notices my discomfort and says, “I’ll sit there. You can have the big chair.” She puts the bong back on the coffee table and sinks into the love seat. The fat kid she sits next to doesn’t seem to notice. As I walk toward the papa-san chair the muscular guy in the recliner gets up and blocks my path. “What do you want with Speed?” he asks pointedly.

“That’s between me and Speed,” I say, visualizing myself pressing the gun to his head and forcing him to sit the fuck back down.

“Anything that goes down with Speed is my business too,” he replies. The blond girl starts to say something, but he shoots her a mean look and she shuts up instantly. The skinny girl who answered the door is staring at us, smiling with lips tight and a hint of a sneer.

“I worked with Speed at a temp job,” I reply.

“Where?”

“Midtown Golf. We put in the putting green.” The labor job had taken a couple of weeks.

Speed didn’t do much work. I knew why he was really there–not to get paid by the construction company, but to make connections and prospect for marks. Such as me.

“And?” asks the muscle guy.

“And he said I could find him here,” I reply.

He raises his voice and presses a surprisingly strong finger into my sternum. “You’re really starting to piss me off. Let me ask you straight up, motherfucker: what the fuck do you want with Speed?”

My right hand slips behind my back. He doesn’t notice–this time.

*

Just then, the bedroom door opens. There stands a shirtless Speed. He’s a tall, muscular man, skinny but wiry, with a thin beard. Wearing only purple shorts, he saunters out of the bedroom and smiles. One of his upper front teeth was missing. He announces to no one in particular, “Damn! Knocked the bottom out of that one! I need a beer!”

The living room crowd laughs. His eyes scan the room, and then fall on me and Muscles.

“Yo!” he calls, grinning at me. “You made it! What up?” He walks directly to me and holds out a hand. We grasp and shake. His hand is clammy. His muscle man steps back.

“I know it’s late,” he says, “but we just gettin’ started!”

“I’m not here to party,” I say.

“Oh, down to business, yeah? You can’t sit down and have a beer?”

“It’s not beer I came for,” I reply.

“Hey baby, come out and have a beer,” Speed says toward the bedroom. A curvy brunette is emerging from the room, clad in a babydoll tee shirt that says “Hustler” and a pair of extremely short cutoffs.

She walks straight to the door. Her eyes are red. A tear is rolling down one cheek. “I have to go,” she whispers. Her face is smooth with pronounced cheek bones and nary a wrinkle: she can’t be a day over seventeen years old.

Speed turns to her and holds his arms out wide. “You know where to find me,” he says. She sobs silently and makes a speedy exit, slamming the door. The rap album ends and there is silence. Everyone in the living room had watched the crying girl exit, and they shift their eyes to Speed.

He smiles at them. They grin and go back to whatever it was they were doing.

“Now what can I do for you, sir?” Says Speed, turning back to me.

“You know what I came for,” I reply.

“Of course,” says Speed. “Payment,” he chirps a little too happily, “takes place in advance.”

“You know we didn’t get paid yet,” I tell him.

He frowns. The muscle guy puffs out his chest. Speed holds a hand up to him, calling him off.

“I’m afraid I can’t extend a line of credit,” says Speed. “Look, I don’t know you, brother.”

“You know that our checks are in the mail,” I reply. “Look, I need…I, just one hit.”

“I can hook you up, but how do I know I’ll ever see you again?”

I clench my teeth. “You know damn well you’ll see me again. I got nowhere else to get it, man.” My hand wanders around my back and caresses my gun through my shirt.

Big mistake.

Mr. Muscle sees it this time.

*

In a second, he’s twisting my arm, holding my hand all the way up to the back of my neck and he’s got me on my knees in front of his recliner. I’m bellowing at the pain in my shoulder. With his other hand, he yanks up my shirt and pulls the firearm from my waistband.

Speed’s saying, “What have we here?”

Muscles is calling me a string of obscene names. I beg him to let my arm go. With one hand, he deftly ejects the clip from my gun and tells Speed, “He was reaching for it.”

Speed’s demeanor changes instantly. “Just what the fuck is this?” he demands. “Were you planning on robbing me, motherfucker?”

All I can say is “Please, let go of my arm.”

Muscles finally relents and says, “Sit down in that chair.” He snaps the clip back into my gun and points it at my head. I notice another gun at his right side tucked into his belt. I sit. My shoulder throbs.

“You come into my home lookin for a freebie, and you got a fucking nine?” demands Speed.

“I’ve never been in this neighborhood before!” I scramble, putting together my justification even as the words are leaving my lips. “I never been to this neighborhood! I didn’t want to be defenseless–”

“Oh, so you were wearing it for protection?” demands Speed, towering above me. Muscles has my own gun trained at my forehead. “That your story?”

“It’s legit!” I demand. “It’s a legal gun. I got a permit.”

“Oh, a permit,” says Speed. “You don’t bring a gun into my home, motherfucker!” He turns to Muscles. “Take the asshole out back.”

“Get up,” muscles says to me.

“What are you gonna do to me?” I say. The taste of fear permeates my tongue. My head feels like it’s being split open by a lightning bolt. “Speed, come on, your customers, some of them gotta carry.”

“You reached for your motherfucking nine when I asked how you’re gonna pay!” Speed says.

“Was that your answer, bitch? Pay me with a bullet? You think I’m one dumb nigger, don’t you?”

“I didn’t–I don’t–I don’t even use that word! I–I–” I scramble to say anything that might save me. Muscles forcefully turns me toward the door.

I try to turn back to Speed, but Muscles pounds his left fist into my ribcage. I see stars.

“Move! Out the door!” says Muscles, and I feel my own gun barrel on the back of my head.

With a dry mouth, I fumble with the doorknob.

Once I have the door open, Muscles kicks me in the small of my back, where my gun had been, and I tumble down the stairs. At some point, my knee hits the cast iron railing and sends slivers of pain through my leg. I come to a stop at a landing, where the stairs wind.

“Get up!” says the muscle man.

I stand, and my knee buckles from the pain. He kicks me again, and I fall headlong down the rest of the stairs. I come to a stop on the ground floor on my stomach, with my legs still on the stairs. My ankles hurt.

“Get up!” yells my captor. “Out the fucking door!” With more fear than I’d ever experienced in my entire life, I limp toward the back door. My heart is beating so fast and hard it’s filling my entire consciousness. “Oh god,” I manage to say, and my knee buckles again. I fall to the ground and my world goes briefly black. I’m only aware enough to hear Muscles mutter something under his breath, and to feel him dragging me over the door threshold.

*

Then I hear a car backfire three times, and I’m awake.

I’m sitting on grass, leaning against something cold. My head is foggy. In a window in the back of the apartment building, I see a figure. Speed Surti is watching us.

The noises weren’t backfires. The man standing over me was holding a gun. Had Muscles shot me? I don’t know.

He ejected the clip from the gun. “You been shootin’ at me, bitch,” he says. “Take it.”

Confused, I hold my hand out. It’s my weapon, minus its ammunition…

“Stand up,” he says. My body aches in so many places, my ribs, my ankles, my knee, my shoulder, my back. I smell gunpowder. I groan as I rise to my feet, still holding the gun out in front of me. Behind me is a car on blocks, in the middle of a grassy strip.

“You been shootin at me,” he says again, and draws the weapon from his side. “That makes this self-defense.” And he aims the gun at my head.

And something inside me says, shoot him.

He removed the clip from my gun.

But he didn’t clear the chamber.

He didn’t clear the chamber.

There’s one bullet in my gun. Maybe. Maybe?

It’s still in my outstretched hand. Will it fire without its clip?

I raise it quickly, without forethought, and I pull the trigger.

*

There’s a streetlight behind us. I can make out the look on his face as he’s jolted backward. It’s pure shock. His gun goes off, and I’m blinded by the flare and deafened by the noise, but it’s angled upward, and the shot goes harmlessly over my head.

Muscles falls flat onto his back

“What the fuck?” I hear from a distance.

Speed’s in his window. So are two other people, that vacant girl who answered the door and the white kid in the CAT Tools cap.

“Orlando!” yells Speed from the window, and I have no idea what he’s talking about.

“Orlando, get up!” I realize that he’s calling Muscles’ name. I suppose have seconds to get out of there before Speed’s downstairs and outside. I look around the grass quickly for my weapon’s clip, but I don’t see it. Orlando is still breathing. I don’t know where the bullet hit him: it’s not like the movies where big splashes of blood explode from gunshot victims. But there is blood, coming from Orlando’s mouth, and his eyes are wide and his jaw is moving.

I can almost see his life slipping away.

I shot a man I don’t even know, and he’s dying, and it’s my fault. I think, he would have killed me, but my next thought counters, not if I hadn’t come here.

A man named Orlando is about to die, and I did it.

I’m a killer.

Speed is no longer in his window. He’s coming was coming.

Orlando’s own gun is on the ground next to him. I drop my gun and grab his.

Speed’s away from the window. I don’t want to shoot anyone else, so I run.

I’m behind a long building, and my car’s in that big parking lot across the street. I run, my knee throbbing, aches in my elbows ribs and ankles awakening nagging at me. I hear a door open, and I’m running. I race for the corner of the building, eager to be out of line of sight, so Speed can’t shoot me. I run past other back doors, probably units B and A. Lights in windows are turning on.

I glance back. Speed is kneeling over Orlando. He’s yelling. Orlando’s dead. My heartbeat fills my ears and I can’t tell what else he’s saying.

I run. If I can make it to my car, I’m free. I’m a murderer, but who would know? Do the police really care about a drug dealer’s muscle?

The thought of prison jumps into my head.

In a sudden blind panic, I throw away Orlando’s gun.

It lands in the tall grass.

My fingerprints are on two guns now.

Oh God.

I run.