Freedomland

PRAISE FOR
FREEDOMLAND

“CHILLING…We have come to expect many rewards from Price’s work, yet none of his previous novels have quite prepared us for the force of sympathy he is able to generate on behalf of the complex, contradictory yet entirely plausible characters in Freedomland—and especially for Brenda Martin, his most nervy and unsettling fictional creation thus far.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Freedomland is an enormous achievement—a novel as entertaining as the best of Charles Dickens and with the moral resonance of An American Tragedy. The story it tells IS an American tragedy, one that is impossible to put down or look away from…. Price writes dialogue better than George V. Higgins, perhaps better than anyone. Freedomland is Bonfire of the Vanities without the laughs, New Jersey as the ninth circle of hell, and in the end everyone burns.”

—Stephen King

“A SOMBER AND HARROWING NOVEL, BUT IT IS ALSO A BRILLIANT AND HONORABLE ACHIEVEMENT… Price is fascinated with a wide variety of humanity… and he brings these people to life in ways that are both heartbreaking and riveting. He is a writer with uncommon brains, heart and nerve.”

—Seattle Times

“A TOUR DE FORCE OF CHARACTER AND PLOT…Freedomland teems with such dead-on detail and briny authenticity that its language must have been inspired by stairwell eavesdropping.”

—People

Please turn the page for more extraordinary acclaim….

“NERVE-RACKING… Price conjures the depressed urban landscape better than any other contemporary novelist. To read Freedomland is to squirm…. It’s better than most of what you’ll read this year. And here’s why: Although Dempsy may not exist, the story of Freedomland is all too real.”

—Austin American-Statesman

“A MEMORABLE NOVEL…Freedomland seems to be a piece of sociological artwork—a finely shaded portrait of life in an urban black housing project that abuts a touchy white area.”

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“[Price’s] stories are as gritty as a windswept ghetto street corner, with huge casts, complex urban themes of grace and redemption and conflicted men and women.”

—New York Daily News

“[A] RICH, TEXTURED THRILLER…PRICE EXCELS AT CREATING SURREAL ACTION.”

—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“RICHARD PRICE HAS STRUCK GOLD WITH HIS LATEST NOVEL…. A gripping read… a good deal of the attraction is Price’s deft ability to use a good tale and great prose to explore the times we live in.”

—Bergen (NJ) Record

“A GREAT READ.”

—Raleigh (NC) News & Observer

“RICHARD PRICE IS AMERICA’S DICKENS, Dempsy and Gannon his Two Cities, and race his Industrial Revolution…. Price is a masterful orchestrator…. In the detective novel, where pace is everything, [he] dares to slow the tempo.”

—Los Angeles Times

“FAST-PACED, TENSION-FILLED… Price has written his most powerful novel yet, a novel that transforms today’s headlines into a forceful, harrowing drama…. Freedomland has the social detail of a Zola novel, the jazzy synesthetic rhythms of a Scorsese film, the slangy street moxie of a Mamet play and the dark, sardonic humor of Wilder’s classic Ace in the Hole”

—San Diego Union-Tribune

“VIVIDLY BRILLIANT … a fierce and complicated story about crime, race in the inner city.”

—Charles Osgood, CBS Sunday Morning

“PRICE KEEPS THE PRESSURE ON. [He] renders action, atmosphere, character and motivation with marvelous detail, compression and complexity.”

—Memphis Commercial Appeal

“VIVID, UNNERVING … [Price] brings us perilously close to the street life we usually roll up our windows to avoid.”

—Newsday

Also by Richard Price

The Wanderers

Bloodbrothers

Ladies’ Man

The Breaks

Clockers

Samaritan

           To Judy, Annie, and Gen
      with all my love

I would like to thank the following people for their generous help on this book: Calvin Hart, Jose Lambiet, Larry Mullane, Mark Smith, and Donna Cutugno.

A broken and a contrite heart,
   O God, thou wilt not despise.

                                          PSALMS 51:17

Prologue

The Convoy brothers, hanging in the soupy stifle of the One Building breezeway, were probably the first to spot her, and the spectral sight seemed to have frozen them in postures of alert curiosity—Caprice, sprawled down low in a rusted dinette chair, his head poked through the makeshift bib of a discarded shower curtain, and Eric, standing behind him, four fingers stalled knuckle-deep in a wide-mouthed jar of hair-braiding oil.

She was a thin white woman, marching up the steep incline from the Hurley Street end of the projects, appearing headfirst, like the mast of a sailing ship rounding the curve of the earth, revealing more of herself with each quick, stiff step across the ruptured asphalt oval that centered the Henry Armstrong Houses. That sloped and broken arena, informally known as the Bowl, was usually barren, but tonight it lay planted with dozens of new refrigerators awaiting installation, resting on their backs in open crates like a moonstruck sea of coffins.

“Where she goin’,” Eric said mildly.

The woman was carrying one arm palm up, cradled in the other like a baby.

Caprice leaned forward in the chair. “Bitch on a mission,” he said, laughing.

“Huh,” Eric grunted, faint, tentative. It was a quarter past nine in the evening, the grounds mostly deserted because of the rally being held at the community center to solve the double homicide of Mother Barrett and her brother. But despite being in the wrong place at the wrong time, this white lady didn’t seem right for a fiend—wasn’t looking at them, looking for them. In fact, she was ignoring them, coming off neither dope-hungry nor afraid, just taking those brisk little steps and glaring at the ground in front of her with an expression somewhere between angry and stunned.

Tariq Wilkins, scowling in the swelter of this end-of-June Monday evening, came hunkering out of One Building, his hands crossed and buried in the armpits of his Devils jersey

“That meeting over yet?” he drawled. He took in the still-lit windows of the community center, made a clucking noise of annoyance.

Tariq, like Eric and Caprice and just about everybody else, knew who had killed the two old people exactly one year ago to the day. But also like everybody else, he was keeping it to himself, because what goes around comes around.

“Look like a cemetery out there,” Tariq said, gesturing to the mute field of refrigerators. Then he spotted her climbing the asphalt Bowl and reared back. “Dag …” His mouth hung open, his hands moving to the back pockets of his hang-dog jeans.

She wore dungarees with fresh dirt stains at the knees and a black T-shirt sporting the naggy legend IT TAKES A WEAK MAN TO DISRESPECT THE STRONG WOMAN WHO RAISED HIM. Her hair was shoulder-length and lank, her face pale and thin. She had no lips to speak of, but her eyes—the building-mounted anti-crime spotlights picked them up as a startling electric gray, like a husky’s, so light and wide as to suggest trance or blindness.

She came within conversational distance of them, and Tariq stepped parallel, sizing her up. “What you lookin’ for…” he said. Then, just as Eric snagged his sleeve and pulled him back, he caught the reflection of something both bloody and glittering in her upturned palm.

Without so much as a hitch in her stride, the woman sailed right past them and was gone—out of the Henry Armstrong Houses, the heart of that section of the city given the side-mouthed tags Darktown, D-Town, and into the world.

“What you be pulling on me…” Tariq snapped, without any real heat, jerking his elbow high to free himself from Eric’s grip.

Eric didn’t answer, just got back to working on his brother’s head. A withdrawn silence came down on all three of them now, each having caught sight of that cupped bloody dazzle, each of them pulling in, as if to be alone with his abrupt and mystifying discomfort.

The woman marched through the city of Dempsy on a determined diagonal, with the same pinched yet rapid stride with which she had climbed the Bowl, up and out of the Armstrong Houses. Cradling her arm, she tramped through red lights and green, the traffic next to nothing at this hour of the workweek.