A customer came in, the only one in the last couple of hours. The man had the shakes and was looking around like he’d lost a child at the county fair. He was a regular, somewhere between forty and sixty, his face sagging like Auntie May’s basset hound, his eyes yellow and bloodshot from seeing too much of his own life. He was a typical customer these days, older and a longtime addict. Youngsters were staying away from crack. They’d seen too many crackheads wandering the streets all stank-ass nasty, groveling for change and trying to sell you a toaster oven with the power cord cut off. Crackheads weren’t cool and if you wanted kids to stay away from something, uncoolness was all it took.
Which was a problem for Dodson. Without new people getting on the pipe he was competing with every other dealer on the block for the same dwindling pool of dope fiends. The only way to make a buck was repeat business. Fiends shopped around. To make them come back you had to have the good shit. Dodson’s shit was hit or miss and today was a miss. To make the same money he’d have to stay longer, serving it up to the fiends who were too sick and desperate to walk six blocks and buy from the Locos. It was Kinkee’s fault. He was Dodson’s supplier and a burly surly Ice Cube clone who scowled even when he smiled and treated everybody except Michael Stokely like an intruder. Kinkee didn’t weigh the cocaine before he cooked it into crack and cut it with too much baking soda, always in his favor. To make up for it, he added what he called flavorings: vodka, furniture polish, bleach, laundry detergent, kitchen cleaner, whatever he had around. Dodson felt bad for the crackheads. “The fuck you put all that shit in there for?” he said. “You trying to get ’em high or kill ’em off?” Kinkee never answered.
Dodson went to 7-Eleven and bought grapefruit juice to get the crack taste out of his mouth. He dreaded going back to work but he was the sole breadwinner at the apartment now and it pissed him off. He should have been rolling in dough. In the two weeks since the Ruby’s job, they’d hit the Sunglass Emporium, Tight Lines Fly Fishing, and Luogo Di Lusso, a shoe store in Studio City. The take was crazy. Three hundred pairs of Oakleys, Ray-Bans, Maui Jims, and Michael Kors, none of them under a hundred dollars, most of them closer to two. Dodson was skeptical about Tight Lines until he found out a Sage four-piece carbon-fiber trout rod weighed an ounce and a half and sold for five hundred and ninety-five dollars. Dodson said for five hundred and ninety-five dollars he could eat at the Red Lobster every day for a month and never get his feet wet. They took twenty-nine rods. The shoe store was a diamond mine. Jimmy Choos, Pradas, Valentinos, and a bunch of other designer brands at five-six-seven hundred dollars a pair. Dodson wasn’t getting paid because of eBay.
“EBay?” Dodson said. “The fuck you talking about eBay?”
“Marcus had a seller’s account,” Isaiah said. “PayPal too, for buying his tools. I got the passwords.”
“Fuck the passwords. That shit takes forever.”
“You have to be patient.”
“Yeah, well, come on down to the House and tell me about patience, in there all day with a bunch of messed-up niggas ought to be wearing that Frontline and where the fuck are you? Sittin’ in here playing with your laptop. Let me call my boy Pook. He’ll scoop up the sunglasses and pay us cash today.”
“No middleman.”
“Why the fuck not? EBay’s a middleman.”
“EBay can’t roll over on us. The only ones who can do that are you and me.”
Dodson stood idly by while Isaiah jumped headfirst into the eBay world, writing detailed item descriptions, checking the comps, setting the prices, keeping track of sales on a spreadsheet. He tripped out on the photography. Dodson watched him fuck around with a fly rod, standing it upright, laying it sideways, shooting close-ups.
“How many pictures you gonna take of a stick?” Dodson said.
Despite the excellent photography sales were slow. People bought things one at a time. The shoes, the sunglasses, the fly rods. Isaiah thought the dog supplies would sell fast but there was a lot of competition and the prices were really low. Made you think everybody was ripping off pet stores.
“Let me help you with the eBay stuff,” Dodson said. “Make the shit go faster.”
“I got it,” Isaiah said.
“I know you got it, just show me what to do.”
“I said I got it.”
Dodson was tempted to knock Isaiah off his high side, put a knot on his head, put the boy in his place. The only reason he hadn’t done it already was because Isaiah seemed breakable, like a steering wheel lock sprayed with Freon. Hit him and he’d shatter into pieces and Dodson would never see real money. Another irritation, Isaiah kept adding tweaks. Defogging pads for the sunglasses, flashlights with wider beams, and fishing clothes he’d picked up at Tight Lines. Pants and shirts in pastel colors, the kind rich guys wore bonefishing in the Bahamas. Dodson tried them on with the ski mask and sunglasses. “I ain’t wearing this shit,” he said. “I look like some kinda homo terrorist.”
“They’re lightweight, breathable, and they dry fast,” Isaiah said. “You can wear your own clothes if you want to.”
“I can? That’s big of you.”