The Setup (in the news)
Previously on Old Man Young;
Detective Paul Young lives and works in Knoxville, TN. One day, a local gas station explodes, killing an officer from Young’s precinct. The incident is determined to be an accident, but Detective Young questions a man in a hospital who he later finds out was at the gas station around the time of the explosion.:
Detective Young and Sandra are enjoying a nice dinner. Well, Young is, Sandra is drinking her dinner despite Young’s suggestions that she sober up with water. After her first drink, Young had pulled the waitress to the side and since then, she’s been bringing Sandra virgin drinks and Sandra doesn’t seem to mind at all.
“So it was him on the tape?” Young asks Sandra.
“He say it was, but that boy didn’t have no gun. He ain’t the type. Not like my bad ass son.” Sandra had gotten over missing her son while she enjoyed Young’s presence and now she is mostly bitter at all the trouble her son has caused her throughout the years. He wanted to be like his bum cousins, Sandra explained, that’s why he was so scared to leave Knoxville, “because he think he something he ain’t.”
“You want me to see if I can find him for you?” Young is not entirely sure why he is so interested in Sandra. At first he wanted to find out why she had lied to him about the man he’d interviewed after a recent explosion at a gas station, but maybe it was seeing her all alone, and she wasn’t hard on the eyes.
“I ain’t dragging that boy nowhere he don’t want to be. He gon’ end up just like all them other boys out there, following that stupid ass Yuri, boy. Just cause his daddy from Russia, all them dumb ass drug boys think he a crime boss or something, but if he was a boss, I think he would be somewhere other than here.”
Yuri, from Russia, Young thinks in disbelief. “How you know Yuri? They been trying to pin him for a while now. From what I hear he is something like a boss.”
“I know that boy mama. She a hood rat just like the rest of ‘em. Like I said, they think they better cause she got knocked up by some Russian, but Yuri went to school with my younger brother, and I used to know him back in the day. I ain’t even know he could talk back then, everybody thought he was dumb. But once he got older, he did whatever you gotta do to be the kind of man he is now.”
“You know if he ever kill anybody?” Young asks, almost excited. This woman could get him a huge bust.
“You want me to snitch? Listen here old man,” Sandra says and Young interrupts,
“You can call me Paul. I’m Paul Young.”
“Listen here old man Young,” Sandra says, “I ain’t no snitch.”
This week, Old Man Young is on the trail of the drug dealer Yuri:
Detective Paul Young smiles his genuine smile at Sandra. “I don’t want you to be a snitch. I know you better than that. But I bet you wish you could shut that boy up.” Young remembers a conversation with Detective Colston in narcotics, that the boy Yuri is a local syndicate for a bigger web of drugs and murder that stretches along the US’s entire east coast. And Young suspects a connection to a human trafficking case he had broken in the small town of Wendover.
“I don’t care what happen to that boy, or nobody else in Knoxville…” Sandra hesitates and Young sees sorrow in her eyes. “I’m leaving detective.”
“He took your son, Sandra. That drug life stole your boy’s childhood away from him. You can help put a stop to all of it.”
Sandra wants to trust Young. He is right that drugs had stolen the youth of her son and many other black boys just like him in small towns and big cities all across the country. But working with the police doesn’t seem like the best way to help them, not when it was the police who seemed to be the worst enemy of all those black boys. Sandra had seen her father, her brothers, and her husband disrespected by police officers over the years, but maybe they all had it coming, she thinks. Her father beat her mother about as much her husband had beaten her, and her brothers stole things and raped women, none of them were blameless.
“I’ll help you as much as I can, and I ain’t saying I can be all that much help to you, but I will do what I can if you make me a promise.” Sandra leans her elbows on the table and she eyes Young seriously. “Only person I put in jail is Yuri. You can’t arrest nobody else based on my help.”
Young eagerly accepts. He knows that Yuri will be the key to the higher ups Detective Colston has been looking for, and he knows that there will be bodies that need identification.
Sandra gives Young an overview of things she knows for sure about Yuri, that he manages the supply of almost all the drugs in the state of TN and it was a job that was given to him by his Uncle Fire, who mostly did business in NY and other northern states. “Fire older than me so I can’t tell you much about him, just that everybody I knew, and I mean everybody, knew that man was trouble. I heard a lot about him over the years and I don’t know how much of it is true, but he supposed to work with some scary people.”
“You grew up with some of the worst criminals in the state? How you think that happen?” Young asks.
“It ain’t no coincidence. Black men ain’t got that many choices if they don’t play sports, or sing, or they smart enough to go to college. Some can’t even choose the military ‘cause they ain’t healthy enough or they doing drugs. And when you got mouths to feed, you do whatever you got to.”
Young nods quietly, unsure if he fully understands.
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