American Gangster by Max Allan Collins

house looked like Dorothy’s tornado had picked it up and set it down hard; but this wasn’t Kansas and it surely wasn’t Oz. This was Greensboro, where crickets and bullfrogs were announcing the coming night, and a couple of black teens were playing catch.
    Playing catch was understating it: one kid had a catcher’s mitt, sixty yards away, and the other had a piston for an arm. The dark yew trees weren’t impressed, throwing longer and longer shadows, making it hard for the kids to see; and the yard was an unlikely practice field, littered as it was with car parts and the scavenged, discarded vehicles that had given them up.
    Within the shed, Melvin Lucas, in overalls and his early twenties, was reading
Players
magazine and paying no attention to the greasy, ringing phone on the workbench where he sat.
    His brother Huey, working under a car nearby, yelled, “Will you please
answer
the bastard?”
    Melvin took his eyes off Pam Grier’s bosom and got the phone, saying into the receiver, “Yeah,” unenthusiastically.
    â€œLet me talk to Huey,” a voice said.
    Melvin didn’t argue, merely said, “For you.”
    â€œWho is it?”
    â€œI dunno.” Melvin set the phone down on the workbench and his ass on his stool and went back to Pam Grier.
    In overalls he’d just gotten dirty today (as opposed to Melvin’s, which had a month’s buildup), Huey Lucas—bright-eyed, good-looking, a young thirty—came over, wiping his hands with a rag.
    â€œYeah,” he said into the phone.
    â€œHuey?”
    He frowned. “Who’s this?”
    â€œFrank.”
    He gave Melvin a “what the fuck” look. “Frank who?”
    â€œFrank your brother.”
    â€œ. . . Been a while since you called. Mom could use a damn phone call, time to—”
    â€œYou want to bust my ass over that, or come up north and get rich?”
    Huey’s smile was so big and pretty, it drew Melvin’s attention away from the skin mag.
    â€œFrank,” Huey said, butter wouldn’t melt. “What a damn treat hearing from you.”
    The brand-new two-story house in the housing development cost Frank fifty thousand dollars. Any misgivings the Realtor might have had, selling to a man of Frank’s complexion, were overcome by the sight of an open briefcase containing cash payment in full.
    On a sunny spring afternoon, Frank was setting up Bumpy the German shepherd in the backyard with a doghouse and a fenced-in run when he heard the unruly caravan of cars arriving like the opening of
The Beverly Hillbillies
. All of his neighbors were white, and Frank had to grin to himself, thinking of the dozens of conversations his ragtag family’s arrival would inspire around here this evening.
    But his brothers and cousins would all learn to fit in. This wasn’t Dogpatch, USA, it was Teaneck, New Jersey, and they would adapt. They would have to.
    Still, their very lack of sophistication recommended these country boys to Frank. With what he had to accomplish, how could he turn to the usual sleazy Harlem suspects? But a country boy wasn’t used to flashy cars and flashier women and diamond jewelry and expensive threads.
    A city boy would take your last dime, then swear on his mother’s grave he never touched it. A country boy wouldn’t steal from you if his wife and kiddies were starving. City boys were selfish sons of bitches, but country boys were loyal as that German shepherd in Frank’s backyard.
    Assorted cars and pickup trucks soon lined the curb and jammed the driveway. Frank’s five brothers, three cousins, their wives and kids and of course their gray-haired mother in cardigan and string-of-pearls climbed from the vehicles looking almost as excited as they did exhausted.
    Just as Frank was coming out the front door with thebig dog trailing, Huey was arguing with Melvin about whether this was the right address or not: Huey