Come on, Broyn's contorted face seemed to say. He hunched his shoulders.
'A girl's got to earn, too,' she grunted with annoyance.
He forced himself to turn from the shotgun, taking it on faith that she was professional enough to not twitch and send his brains spraying onto the passenger-side window. Still, over and over, his mind imagined the clap of thunder before his world turned black. Suppressing a shiver, he reached under his seat for the trunk release. Too scared to know what to do with them, unable to move, possibly in shock, he held his hands out, his mind so disconnected from the action, it was as if they floated on their own. Probably more trying to wrap his head around what to tell Colvin. His eyes were drawn to the pulsing red lights. Almost hypnotic. Then she was gone.
Subtle wasn't in Lee McCarrell's vocabulary. The door exploded open with his first kick. Shock and awe were his calling cards, not because they worked especially well, but more because he enjoyed the rabbit responses his entrance brought. Them 'uh-oh' eyes. The dazed lucidity of junkies caught mid-cop. The fear and panic of a dealer. The copper tang of adrenaline on his tongue.
'You raising up on me?' Lee roared to the halfdozen young bucks lounging around the room. He often sprinkled his words with a liberal dose of street affect, letting them know he understood them and spoke to them in a language they understood. Them. Not us. These were nameless pukes. Omarosa had fed him their names, little more than chum in the pool of sharks. The possibility of her growing bored of him distracted him. Not that it mattered. There was no warranty on relationships and this one had about run its course. He'd made a meal on the tips she'd given him over the months. And he never questioned how she knew so much, or so accurately, for fear of busting a cap in the ass of his fine golden goose. She assured him this would be a bust worth his while, even if these were low-level players.
'How's business?' Lee smirked. He gave the first boy a long, inventorying look. A good kid, long and lean with bright, intelligent eyes. Even lying on a couch, with the chaos of cops bursting in, he didn't panic and exuded a commanding presence. Skin like smoked meat, he had child-like dimples though he tried to suppress a charismatic smile. In other words, a waste.
'Good, I guess.' The boy sat up slowly.
People became cops for only a handful of reasons. To carry a gun and tell people what to do (the deputized bully), money ('a job's a job'), freak (too drawn to the badge), or a white knight complex (the hero's calling). Sometimes it took a bully to get things done. There was still plenty of room for Cantrell to play hero.
'You hear what happened over at Phoenix?' Cantrell asked the second boy.
'Some folks got got,' the second boy said. Young, white, red-headed, the boy had a heroin thinness to him. And he had the disposition of someone who would sell out his dying mother for his next fix to avoid prison. One of his eyes didn't track properly. That area of his face webbed with healed-over scars. The eye was probably glass, Cantrell realized.
'What's up?' Cantrell's flat voice rumbled without humor. He ran his hands up the boy's socks and then legs. 'You know we own this piece now. You operate at our pleasure.'
'What we got here?' Lee stood over the boy's desk. A scree of papers cascaded across it.
'Homework,' the first boy offered.
'Oh, so you in school now.' Upon closer inspection, Lee spied the childish scrawl on papers and the remedial reading text. Lee had the common decency to not comment on this. There was belittling and then there was cruelty which aimed at stripping away all attempts at manhood and dignity. The latter only led to more problems.
'Come on now,' the second boy said. 'You fucking up my time, Cantrell.'
'Oh, so now you know my name? All right. Let's chat about that.'
Cantrell led him out of the room with a firm hand to the small of his back. Always out to save someone. Half recruiting informants, half trying to save these boys from themselves.
'So you fine upstanding boys were merely pursuing your academic interests.'
'Just do what you came to do. Might as well earn yours for that trick smoking your joint.' The boy knew he crossed the line as all the play left Lee's eyes and he blistered under his stare. Word on the street suspected Omarosa of having the peckerwood on drug patrol in her pocket. Perhaps throwing it in his face wasn't his best play.
Lee flicked open a pocket knife and let the blade catch the light and the boy's full attention. Eyes still locked on him, Lee stabbed toward the boy's head. The boy closed his eyes and flinched, muscles locked until he heard the knife bury into the wall next to him. When the boy chanced opening his eyes, Lee maintained his cold gaze, not bothering with the charade of a search. He let him know he knew exactly where to look and didn't bother to offer the courtesy pretense of surprise at what he found: bricks of saranwrapped cash. More money than he'd see in his check in a year.
'Whose money is this? This yours?' Lee asked. The boy turned away as his response. Lee turned to the next boy, but the question of 'Yours?' was met with shrugged shoulders.
'Guess it's my lucky day then.'
Leaning over him like a boyfriend doing the obligatory chat before an end-of-date make-out session, Cantrell chatted in amiable low tones to the skinny, one-eyed crackhead. A snitch he'd refer to as Fathead. As Lee exited the house, Cantrell couldn't help but notice the shrink-wrapped bundles beneath each arm. With a nod, he dismissed the boy, who slunk away without a backwards glance.
'What's that?' Cantrell asked.
'Street tax.'
'We're going to have a problem.'
''We' don't have shit.' Lee tossed the packages in the back seat. He stood in the shielding confines of the open car door, the roof of the car a gulf between him and his partner.
''We' better voucher whatever 'we' expect to sign off on.'
'Chill out, brother.' Lee pronounced 'brother' with every bit of the 'er' on the end and with every bit of tinny cracker in him. 'They simply volunteering to be your benefactor. They had a sudden stirring of conscience and decided to do something positive in the community. Perhaps donate to a mentoring program. They want to be, how did they put it? Ghetto sponsors. Don't that sound good?'
'Uh-huh.' Cantrell remained unconvinced. The temptation of rationalization rattled around in his head, a nagging voice which grew louder with each minute he spent with Lee. The bust would have been no good anyway. They had no warrant and no probable cause. They were simply trolling for information, based on intel provided by Lee's mysterious snitch. The way Lee went about his business made him nervous. It was why Cantrell worked so hard to develop his own network of information. The fresh-out-of-theacademy rules which had been hammered into him had long since been tossed out the window, but Cantrell certainly was not out to take anyone off.
'Good. Cause the kids will be grateful. Real grateful. And that's who we do it for. The children.'
Colvin was a pretty-ass nigga. He had skin the complexion of heavily creamed coffee and almond eyes, with full eyelashes which had an almost feminine quality beneath threaded eyebrows and set above his high aquiline nose. His good hair didn't have to be straightened, his teeth were scrubbed to a brilliant pearl, his nails buffered to a neat acrylic sheen, his skin lightly oiled with a lavender scent he favored. The idea of self-hate amused him. Many perceived him as being closer to white with that diluted blood being the standard of beauty, the features that defined his African roots as obliterated as the Sphinx's nose. But he had no time for intra-racial contempt; their hate was too small just like their love was too small. He was fey. He was the standard of his own beauty. A drop of fey blood made him one hundred percent fey. He was The Principle Beauty. Favored by his mother, he viewed his sibling — all women and for that matter, all that he surveyed — as an extension of himself. If the woman who writhed underneath him had a name, he hadn't bothered to learn it nor did he care to. She was a series of orifices who bucked in all the right ways, a piece of meat who offered herself as a paean to himself. A flesh-and-blood sacrifice on the altar of his dick. Sex with him was an offering of worship. He admitted to himself what few did: that people formed relationships that were altars to themselves. People sought out those who they had a lot in common with, who were like them, or who simply liked them; an external validation of their need and worth of being loved. The vanity of humanity. There were truths he dared not face. Like how sex was a balm. That it took another to give him meaning, make him feel like a man.
Born with intelligence, luck, and the confidence of transcendent beauty, he didn't consider himself one of the light-skinned princesses who thrived on the attentions of others and then pretended that it annoyed them. Relationships were the comfort of another being only a hip turn away, a staunch of the open wound of loneliness they hoped to bandage. Colvin would never know the void of unfilled spaces within his heart because he trusted in
