CHAPTER ELEVEN
2000 – Dead This Time
I wanted to tell Hopeton about the Brownsville garage and get his take on the whole thing, but it just felt too close to snitching. I’d be over at PanStar and we’d be talking about some other business and it took every ounce of my self-control not to open my mouth and let it all spill out- all the fuckery going on behind the scenes, how I kept telling Mundo we had to shut shit down ASAP, how I knew I was gonna be left holding the bag.
But I kept my stupid mouth shut. And surprise, surprise- I was left holding the bag. Errand boy AND janitor.
It all happened when I took a trip out to the garage one weekday in late May. I’d brought Biz and one of his ever-present Dell laptops with me. The goal was to do a thorough inventory, tally up the value, plan out a sales calendar, then destroy the evidence.
But when we got there, something looked off. I unlocked the security gates, opened up the building and turned on the overhead lights. The entire place had been cleaned out. The fuck? That place was like Fort Knox- how did it get hit?
Biz held it down by the front entrance while I went to investigate- the breach came from the roof.
I walked over to the upstairs office closet and discovered that the hidden wall safe hadn’t been compromised. I punched in the code and saw that the inventory it contained hadn’t been disturbed. It wasn’t a big surprise that whoever had broken in hadn’t bothered to do a thorough search- there was so much still stockpiled right there in plain sight.
“Well, Biz,” I called down the stairs, “inventory’s gonna take a lot less time than we expected.”
We were left with 20 handguns- a mix of Sig Sauer, Walthers and Brownings totaling around $25k on the street. I bundled the guns up and shoved them in a Louis Vuitton duffle bag, locked up the now-useless garage and Biz and I got the fuck out of Brownsville.
As soon as I dropped Biz at Eula’s, I doubled back and went straight to PanStar.
