On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman

encouraged others to protect them from the authorities. In particular, they made sure
     that those neighborhood residents with frequent dealings with the police didn’t feel
     angry or resentful toward them. The older brother explained it like this to a younger
     boy on the block:
    What makes a nigga call the cops? Hate [jealousy]. It’s only a matter of time before
     they see your picture or your name comes up [during a police questioning]. You want
     them to pass right by [the picture], you want them to choose the other guy, the guy
     who never did nothing for them.
    Mike and Chuck regarded this practice with admiration, acknowledging that it’s smart
     to send money to a man in jail who, if he gives you up, will see his commissary account
     quickly dry up. But like a marriage, this relationship requires consistent income,
     and most men in the neighborhood have only sporadic work in either the formal or the
     informal economy, with quite uneven and low returns.
    Mike and Chuck certainly couldn’t afford to maintain long-term relationships in which
     a steady flow of cash or other resources guaranteed the ongoing cooperation of neighborhood
     residents. But they did occasionally scrape together enough money for one-time payments,
     mostly to witnesses during trials.
    According to Mike, about two years before we met, he had been walking home from a
     dice game with a large wad of cash when a man put a gun to his head and ordered him
     to give up his money. 10 Mike told me that he refused, and attempted to draw his own gun when the man shot
     him. Other accounts have it that Mike attempted to run away and shot himself by accident,
     whereupon this man took his money and then stripped him of his sneakers and watch.
     Whatever the details of this encounter, Mike emerged from it with a bullet lodged
     in his hip. His mother looked after him for five months while he was unable to walk,
     and then drove him to the outpatient clinic twice a week for months of physical therapy.
    By the time we met, Mike could walk normally, though he said his leg hurt when he
     ran or stood for long periods, or when the weather changed. He believed this man had
     left the neighborhood, but about amonth later he thought he spotted him driving around in a Buick. Mike told me that
     the man looked at him, he looked at the man, the man tensed, and Mike opened fire.
     Mike said, “I ain’t know if he was going to start chopping [shooting], you know, thinking
     I was going to come at him. Better safe than sorry.”
    Two days later Mike saw him again, this time while driving with Chuck and another
     friend. Although I wasn’t present, Chuck told me immediately afterward that the men
     in both cars opened fire, shooting at each other as they drove by in opposite directions.
     I couldn’t confirm the shots that Mike, Chuck, and another friend fired, but the glass
     in the side and back windows of Mike’s car was shattered, and I counted seven bullet
     holes in the side doors. Mike quickly towed the car to a friend’s garage, worried
     that the police would see it if they hadn’t been alerted to the shootout. This was
     around noon.
    That afternoon, Chuck and this friend came to my apartment, took some wet (PCP), and
     lay on the couch and floor with covers over their heads. 11 They didn’t eat, drink, or get up for almost twenty-four hours, occasionally murmuring
     curses at Mike about how close they had come to death.
    Two nights later, the police came to Mike’s old address, his uncle’s house, to arrest
     him for attempted murder. Mike’s uncle phoned his mother to let her know they were
     coming for him, so Mike left her place and hid out in various houses for the next
     two weeks, including my apartment for four days. The police raided his mother’s house
     twice, then his grandmother’s house, and then his children’s mother’s house. After
     two weeks he scraped together what money he could, found a lawyer, and turned himself
     in.