Black is back
Authors: Russell BlakeNarrator: R.C. Bray
Duration: 7H 40m
My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐🌑
Tags: Detective - Comedy - Thriller
This one is better then the previous. Rappers & music industry, more (funnier) jokes, another meeting with Barista. Voodoo stuff, unpleasant neighborhoods, shooting.
Quotes:
He raised his glass and drained half in two swallows, then attacked his sandwich like it had stolen his wallet.
Black cranked the volume back up … wondering why anyone would want to listen to anything else. Try as he might to understand it, he’d long ago resigned himself to the idea that there was no accounting for taste. What passed for music these days was as much a foreshadowing of the End of Days as anything he’d seen.
Reality was that rap had been going strong for over twenty-five years, in the mainstream, and showed no sign of stopping. For better or worse, Black was an anachronism, a throwback to an earlier time when music had been entirely different from what someone like Roxie had grown up hearing. Even when Black’s band was breaking big, rappers of all shapes, sizes, and colors had been selling tens of millions of records, and the world had voted with its wallet, regardless of what the musician in Black thought.
An old country and western song played on the ancient jukebox – a Garth Brooks favorite, Friends in Low Places – and Black appreciated the irony of the choice in what could only be described as an armpit of a bar.
Sylvia drew closer every time Genesis walked by; to Black it was clear that battle lines had been drawn. Not that he was tempted to take Genesis up on her unexpected offer. Still, it was always nice to be invited to the dance by more than one partner.
The area known as South Central L.A., made famous by rappers – as well as race riots and gang warfare – had been renamed South L.A., as if calling an area something different would make it less dangerous. Crime had been steadily declining for two decades, but the Hyde Park area was still considered one of the most violent in the city, and for good reason. Gunfire was common, and the police routinely lost men in the neighborhood to the gang activity, which ebbed and flowed as older members went to prison or the morgue, only to be replaced by younger, more vicious versions.
as he navigated rush hour traffic, which clogged both the highways and surface streets for three solid hours every weekday. Los Angeles became a parking lot under the steadily sinking sun, contributing to the muggy thermal layer of smog that blanketed it.
Black prayed silently for the floor to open up and swallow him – or better still, all the other guests – but when it didn’t
A young Hispanic man with a shaved head and covered in gang tattoos emerged from the rear of the building, his attitude contrite, someone having made bail for him so he could have his freedom for at least a little while longer. He signed out and collected his things, and a pair of matching thugs who had been sitting at the far end of the waiting room stood to greet him. His shoulders kicked back, and the beaten perp who’d been lucky to see the outside world again transformed before the watching room’s eyes into a swaggering punk without any hint of remorse, a laugh on his lips as the motley group emerged into the night, free to prey on the citizenry until the slow wheels of justice ground them into bloody pulp, or rivals ended their strutting with the definitive bark of a 9mm in some cold alley.
Black watched it all without comment, the parade of life’s losers a familiar sight in his line of work. He didn’t see how guys like Stan did it, and knew that an alarmingly high percentage wound up addicted or hopeless alcoholics – those that didn’t wind up eating their pistols on the nights when the horror came home to roost, the weight of what they’d witnessed pressing on their chests like anvils, when the bottle of rotgut or pills failed to banish the ghosts that always waited on the periphery of their awareness. It was a crap job by any measure, and it took a special kind of personality, one that Black knew well enough that he didn’t have, and which demanded his respect.
He’d been around the block enough to be honest with himself – he had a certain charm, but it wasn’t ‘tear my clothes off and take me now’ level charisma, more a ‘maybe if I was drunk enough’ or ‘what the hell, I’ve done worse’ caliber game.
Potato and macaroni salad abounded, as did rice and beans and a bevy of fried items that had been prepared earlier, and had Black’s cholesterol in the danger zone just thinking about them.
True, she was less than half his age, but he was in a position to help her, and she had her youthful beauty to barter – a common enough transaction in a town that ran on the heady fuel mixture of power and money.
Good attorneys didn’t want to know the whole story, just enough to represent their clients with a relatively clear conscience.
He smiled as he put the Rolex box inside, happy to see that the metal drawer was just wide enough to accommodate it. The watch had been a nice gesture, but it wasn’t him, and he felt like an ass-hat every time he saw it on his wrist. He reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved his vintage Hamilton, which merely displayed the time rather than making a social hierarchy statement
Which was all part of the price if you wanted to roll with the big dogs. Black had been there, done that, had the DVD, and knew all too well how fleeting the life could be – and how long it could take to fill the hole its absence left in a man’s soul. Some, like him, eventually made peace with themselves and moved on. Others couldn’t, and continued to chase the flitter of a dream that had never been more substantial than water vapor rising off a simmering pot, and still others drowned their sorrows with a little sniff or smoke or sip, only to discover that remorse was more corrosive than any acid.