The Avenger
Previously on Old Man Young;
Detective Paul Young doesn’t have anything these days but his job. It’s lucky for him that he’s very good at it, but maybe it isn’t at all about luck. Maybe over the long years working for the Knoxville, TN Police Department he has honed his instincts and that alone has made him what he is. It’s hard to deny that he is one of the best, and recently he convinced a local woman to help him track down one of the biggest drug dealers in the state. Sure he was a homicide detective, but from what the woman was telling him, there were bound to be bodies.
Young isn’t that old, he’s only in his fifties, but he’s not as young as he once was and he knows that he has less time than ever to make things right. His wife would never take him back, but he could make the streets of Knoxville safe for her and his daughter and that would have to be enough.
This week, in the Empire State;
Sonny and his friend Corey smoke weed late into the night. The two sit in Corey’s room in the Bronx, NY with the bass from music vibrating the walls. Corey lives in the basement of a small, two story apartment owned by his father, so they don’t worry about the noise bothering anyone. Corey is stretched out on his bed with his hat over his face. He only lifts it when Sonny passes him the blunt, and he breathes deep, then lies on his back and replaces the hat so that when he exhales, the smoke will be the only thing for him to inhale when he breathes. Corey is not particularly tall, but his limbs are long and he is thin compared to Sonny. With his hands resting under his head, his bony elbows bob up and down to the music. Sonny sits in a chair near the bed, rocking it despite the fact that it isn’t a rocking chair.
Sonny was born in Winston Salem, NC in the eighties, but he moved to NY when he was about eighteen, in search of a life that no man in his family had managed to make for themselves. His father was killed when Sonny was still a boy in Winston Salem; apparently his father had tried to rob the man the man that sold him crack in big enough quantities to sell in his neighborhood. Sonny was never able to find the man who killed his father, but he swore on his life, and the lives of the children he’d fathered in two small towns in the state of NC that he rarely saw but sent money to their mothers, that one day he would jam a knife into the heart of the man that took his father from him. Not that Sonny and his father had a particularly good relationship. Sonny had grown up with two of his siblings and they were raised by their mother who was a drug addict that managed a job and the cost of caring for her children with the help of government assistance. He only saw his father when he was old enough to work for him and the man had been very hard on Sonny in the beginning. He made Sonny beat a boy who didn’t pay him back in full for the drugs he had been given to sale. Sonny had known the boy when they were children in school, before Sonny gave up on education for ever. Sonny broke the boy’s nose and his eye socket; the boy was unrecognizable after that. That act of violence really helped his relationship with his father, but only in regards to their business. His father treated him like a very good employee and when Sonny tried to have conversations with him that a son might want to have with his father, the man would always find some excuse not to. After his father was killed, Sonny realized that he wanted to be more than the man who managed a reputation in his own town, but was nothing just a town over. Sonny wanted to be a kingpin.
In Corey’s basement apartment, the two are listening to a new CD, start to finish. It was Corey’s idea that they sit in silence to really evaluate each track. Neither have anything better to be doing tonight and they are just getting over hangovers from partying the night before. When the CD is done, they are still smoking and Corey sits up on his bed.
“I ain’t like it,” Sonny said. “The beats was good, but that nigga can’t rhyme to save his life.”
Corey laughs, “It was alright. It wasn’t worth buying though. I gotta stop buying this shit before I listen to it.” He turns off the music. “What we gonna do now? I ain’t sleepy.”
“It’s still too early to go talk to your uncle,” Sonny says. Corey’s uncle, Darker, is the kind of man Sonny came to NY to be. He coordinated drug smuggling from Colombia and other countries, and he supplied drug dealers in all of NY’s boroughs. Sonny and Corey worked directly for Darker, doing whatever business he asked them to do. Neither of them have ever killed anyone, but they had beaten their fair share of men to piles on the sidewalk. Corey liked the feel of snapping bones and he would torture men for his uncle, snapping fingers like twigs. Sonny liked to use his fists. The two were feared by most and every employee of Darker would get nervous to see the two of them together.
“Well lets eat something.” Corey says and they walk to a nearby deli for sandwiches.
It wasn’t long ago that Sonny and Corey were kicking in the stomachs of some boys that worked for Darker’s former associate, Fire, in front of the deli where they go for sandwiches. Fire had expanded Darker’s reach into the south but in recent years their relationship had grown contentious. Neither Sonny nor Corey ever fully understood the cause of their disagreement, but some boys loyal to Fire had words against Darker one weekend and the two gladly shut them up.
As they walk into the deli, Sonny laughs at the memory of the boys on the ground, crying like girls. They had talked so tough before the fight, about how they were done with Darker and how he wasn’t the man everybody thought he was. Sonny looks back at Corey to remind him of the fight and just as he turns, he sees a car move slowly on the street, and when the window rolls down, a gun aims at the two of them and shots fire. There is commotion and Sonny hears the car speed away. Corey is hit. Sonny sees the blood staining Corey’s shirt and a pool of blood collecting. Sonny stands over Corey, unable to help. A man in the deli calls the police and Sonny leans against a wall staring at his unconscious friend. He knows he’s seen the car before, the one that did the drive by. He just has to remember who it belongs to. And when he does, he’ll add another name to his list of people to kill.
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