Midnight Club Read Free Page A

shut the fuck up. Just shut your mouth, understand?”
    Perhaps for the first time in his life, the bullying Orange Julius boss shut up. There was something about the look on Parker’s face that said he was a lot more serious than any ordinary counter guy ought to be.
    Suddenly, Isiah Parker vaulted up and over the counter. There was a powerful animal spring in his body.
    The usual loiterers inside the juice stand looked up as he burst out of the scarred Plexiglas doors. He was holding a .22-caliber revolver up toward the sky and the molded stone rooftops of nearby buildings.
    Across 125th Street, one of the cocaine dealers had already seen him coming.
    Damn, Parker thought to himself.
    The drug dealer and his buddy suddenly began to sprint down Frederick Douglass Boulevard. They went due east on 125th Street. Then south. And east again.
    A cabbie honked at him angrily. Parker’s hand whacked down hard on the yellow cab’s hood. Take absolutely nobody’s shit on the street. That was the lesson he’d learned a long time ago in Harlem.
    Then Parker was running at full speed. He was running wildly, like yet another hyped-up junkie or thief. He was doing what he had once loved to do, in another time and place. Something he’d done well enough to get into a Texas college on a track scholarship. College, where he learned to deal with his anger a little, learned to mask it better, anyway, talk around it.
    At thirty-five years old, he could still run. Maybe not any record-breaking hundred-yard dashes, but he could run faster than two pitiful drug pushers who had just tried to sell a slab of coke to fourteen-year-old kids on 125th.
    Faster than two total scumbags who strolled the Harlem neighborhood with no respect for anybody or anything. Like the people here were nothing, and not a single thing mattered except their making money off the sadness, off the need for a little flash of hope and painless escape.
    Parker started to smile as he ran. Wild sense of humor up in Harlem these days. One of the dope dealers must have pulled a muscle, because he started limping and grabbing at his left thigh. Now that was hilarious.
    Isiah Parker flashed by him as if he were standing still on a relay block. He pistol-butted the drug dealer on the side of his head as he went by. The dealer went down in the gutter in a heap of flashy clothes.
    Parker was almost sure the other dealer was named Pedro Cruz, a Colombian cowboy who had been slumming in the 125th Street neighborhood for the past few months. Pedro Cruz could really run.
    As if to underscore that fact, Parker felt a fire exploding inside his chest. His thighs were starting to burn. His heart was slamming around, and things were getting congested and painful. Eight blocks already. C’mon, man, get tired.
    Some people standing along 124th Street recognized Parker. Isiah Parker had been around the neighborhood for a long time. A lot of people knew Isiah. Even more of them had known his brother, Marcus.
    Familiarity aside, nobody was going to stop the scum dealer he was chasing. You stopped some South American-looking guy in Harlem, you could wind up dead, or in even worse trouble.
    Besides, chase scenes were fun to watch on a slow-moving summer afternoon, better than a Sylvester Stallone movie at the Loews Theatre.
    One Hundred Twenty-fourth Street was like a graveyard for old, busted-up Plymouths, Chevys, Fords. A few neighborhood dudes clapped for the footrace going down on the otherwise hot and boring afternoon. Nobody seemed to care why the chase had started.
    Finally, Parker was running almost side by side with the Colombian drug pusher. He looked over at the other man—almost like he wanted to pass, instead of catch him.
    The drug dealer was Pedro Cruz, all right. The bearded Colombian tough didn’t even know how to look frightened. He was trying to figure how to go for his gun and keep running full speed at the same time.
    His right hand was clawing furiously inside the flapping