down at Tank’s jeans and spotted a little green light flashing on and off. It took me a second to figure out what it was.
“Jesus Christ, dog! Are you trying to get us fucking killed?”
I snatched the cell phone off his hip and ripped the battery off of it. Then I shoved it back in his pocket. My heart was banging on my chest as if trying to escape.
“What?”
“What? Are you fucking retarded? What the fuck are you doing with a cell phone when we tryin’ to creep on some mutherfuckas? Fuck would have happened if that shit had gone off and them niggas came out to see who was in the hall? There goes our element of surprise.”
“My fault, dog. But you ain’t gotta get all loud. What if they had heard
“I’m still whisperin’.”
“Just barely.”
“Fool, stop tryin’ to take the blame off your ass.”
“The blame for what? Ain’t nothin’ happen. You just paranoid.”
“Just keep quiet for you get us both killed, will you? Alright, I kick the door in and start bustin’ with the Berretta. You follow with the AK and spray the whole room. Don’t leave shit breathin’ in there. Not even a fuckin’ goldfish. I don’t want nobody walkin’ out that room but us.”
Tank raised the AK then hesitated. He turned and looked at me with an expression on his face that was completely indecipherable. If I didn’t know Tank better I would have thought it was fear.
“What’s up, man?”
“I can’t believe we still doin’ this shit. Four years, dog! Four years of this shit. If there’s drugs and money up in there we should just break with it and get our own thing goin’”
“Of course there’s drugs and money in there, and don’t you think Scratch knows that? You think you hard, nigga? Scratch could pay a ten-year-old to body your dumb ass. Now stop playin’ and let’s do this. These mutherfuckers probably heard us by now. All the fuckin’ noise you’ve been makin’. If I get shot I’ma fuck your fat ass up!”
I kicked the door in and the smell of stale beer, sour urine, fried chicken, and cooked cocaine, tore up through my nostrils, straight down my throat, drying up my taste buds and gluing my tongue to the roof of my mouth. The first thing I saw when I looked around were two ghost-like females sitting naked in the corner of a near empty room, hollow-eyed, souls long fled their wasted flesh, passing the glass dick back and forth sucking it dry. Both of them combined wouldn’t have made 30 years or a hundred pounds. Then I saw the four overdressed hoods who were stumbling over each other trying to get to the table where their guns lay piled up; thrown there haphazardly like one would toss a set of car keys.
I knew why Tank never took this shit seriously. I get myself all worked up like we’re about to bust in on Scarface or Nino Brown and what we find every time are a bunch of kids, in over their heads, playing gangster. The speed at which profits multiply peddling a product that pushes itself had catapulted many losers into the big-time. But staying there was never as easy as getting there.
These four punks had openly challenged Scratch’s authority by setting up their little rock house in the same projects that Scratch dealt out of and without a purchase agreement from him, which meant they were buying from someone else, which meant they were competition, which meant they were corpses too dumb to know they were dead, just waiting to be bagged and tagged.
As I looked around I suspected that they had done it not because they thought they were hard, but because they were stupid. And here they were slippin’ hard in a room filled with product, guns, and enough money to buy textbooks, school lunches, and new blackboards for an entire high school, getting their nuts off in two stank-ass teenaged pipers. I think I fired the first shot just to fight off the revulsion I felt.
The first bullet struck a fat kid with dreadlocks wearing black denim FUBU jeans with a matching jacket. He was this crew’s equivalent of Tank. The kid who had nothing before he became a dealer, no clothes, no cash, no car, no bitches, and no respect. The kind of guy girls ignored and guys laughed at. Now he had blown up and had all he could conceive of with his limited knowledge of what the world had to offer. He would’ve rather died than go back to being a zero again. And so he did.
He had barely grasped the cheap looking Tech nine-millimeter in his chubby hands before my nine-millimeter Beretta bored a tunnel through his face. I was impressed that he’d even gotten that far. His friends were mowed down where they stood. For a second I was hypnotized by the Rorschach design the fat kid’s blood and brains created on the greasy, water-stained, institution green walls. It looked like spaghetti with marinara sauce. Then Tank flew into the room behind me and the AK 47 belched death at the other three dealers. At such close range they stood no chance at all. They were torn to shreds by the torrential downpour of heated metal. I pumped bullets into them as well and they danced in the rain of heated alloy before collapsing lifelessly to the floor. Not one of them made it to their weapon.
Tank gave me that “I told you, you worried for nothing” look and winked at me as he spotted the money that was piled up in the open closet on the other side of the room where fat boy had dropped. It was like they had run out of things to buy and had just started tossing the money in the closet like dirty laundry, not knowing what to do with it.
“Yo, Tank, go check in the kitchen for they stash. I smell that shit cookin’ in there. I bet they got it piled up on the kitchen table. These trick ass niggas ain’t know shit about slangin’!”
Tank looked toward the kitchen and then back at the two naked whores who were staring wide-eyed at their massacred tricks/dealers. I followed their gaze and tried to make sense of the gruesome collage of bullet-riddled flesh to see what they were looking at. I thought I saw something, but the girls’screaming was muddying my thoughts and making my head hurt.
“Shut the fuck up! Stupid ass hookers. I said, shut the fuck up! Tank, go scoop up those fuckin’ rocks and let’s get ghost.”
Tank’s eyes fondled the two silent girls sitting bare-assed on the piss smelling floor, savagely invading every inch of their exposed bodies, before he stalked off to collect the dope. Violence had that affect on him. Perhaps his murder-stimulated libido was just the need to perform a life-affirming act to wash his mind clear of the awareness of his own mortality. Maybe he was just a sick fucker who got off on death. Either way we didn’t have time for that shit. The way his eyes molested the two young crackwhores made me squirm uncomfortably. My stomach lurched when I noticed the erection tenting the front of his pants as he passed me on the way to the kitchen.
“How
I turned back to staring at the bodies to be certain of what I thought I’d seen earlier, then I turned and shot the two whores dead. One of the bodies flinched as the gun went off then lay still again.
“Da fuck was that?”
“Nuthin’ nigga, just grab them rocks and get your ass in here.”
“Tell me you ain’t shoot them bitches?”
“Damn straight I did!”
“Aw, man! Fuck did you do that for?”
“To keep your dumb-ass from getting’ us both capped or busted tryin’ to get a quick nut in one of these nasty stank-ass bitches.”
“Damn, they was kind of fine too. I would have been down with some of dat young pussy.”
Fine? What the fuck was wrong with tank? Those girls were emaciated and reeking of disease.
“Just do your fuckin’ job, fool.”
I walked over to the body of the dealer I knew was still alive and pressed the Beretta to his temple.
“Get your bitch ass up, nigga! Get the fuck up
My heart was jack-hammering in my chest. My nerves were live wires shooting sparks up and down my spine. I could feel the maliciousness building and rising to the surface like an undersea explosion. This fool was about to catch a bad one. He was about to wish that he had caught the first bullet right between the eyes.
I had missed one and if he’d had a gun I wouldn’t be around to ponder the shit. I had gotten lucky and luck isn’t a very reliable way to survive. I was scared and my fear was turning me mean.
“Alright, man. I ain’t strapped so don’t shoot.”
“Fool, I should waste your punk ass right now. Now get your ass da fuck up!”
