to the snickers of disrespect from my peers and I’d pick up the gun again. My pride would always make me choose gunshots and blood over humility. Even if it was the blood of people the same color as me.
Huey was right. I was a sell-out. I was working for a blue-eyed devil committing genocide against my own people.
— | — | —
Chapter 11
—Roy F. Baumeiste, PH.D,
««—»»
Scratch was feeling desperate. Sweat bulleted down his pale face as his eyes darted from one side of the street to the other, probing every shadow for signs of life. His expression was no different than that of the drug addicts he passed. Each shambling corpse-like crack-fiend alerted his senses like a shark smelling blood in the water. His prey was somewhere close. He could almost smell her.
Trash blew down the street like tumbleweeds pushed by a gentle breeze. Packs of mongrel dogs hunted through the alleys for garbage, growling cautiously at the dope fiends who proliferated there as well. Most of the streetlights had long been broken and only one or two on each block remained lit. The night was concentrated into solid opaque curtains of black on either side of his headlights. He felt like an invading army as he accelerated through the dark, cutting a swath through the night, reveling in his alienness. Both his conspicuous affluence and his skin tone set him apart from his surroundings. He was out of place amid the honest working people who lived here as well as the welfare recipients and drug addicts. Even among the other criminals his lack of ethnicity set him apart. He liked it that way. Everything about the ghetto disgusted him. Even though it was the source of his wealth he was glad he’d never truly be a part of it. His relationship with the people who lived here was simply a predatory one. They were the nourishment he thrived on. They kept his pockets and his stomach filled.
Tonight Scratch was out alone. He had to find the whore and kill the baby without interruptions or long explanations to any of his underlings, not even Yellow Dog. Scratch was still hoping he could murder the bastard before it was born. He’d raped and killed nearly two dozen crack-whores in the last few years and still he could feel the baby’s presence. It was alive and it would be born soon.
The streets were desolate. The same five-dollar whores shambled along peering wide-eyed into the Beemer hoping for a drug-dealer who’s dick they could suck for a rock or two. The extravagantly dressed crack dealer waved them away like flies, his platinum custom Rolex reflecting starlight into their half-conscious faces. They were all too far gone. Their wombs were barren and dry from drug abuse and would probably never hold a seed again, least of all the one he was looking for.
Scratch drove the side streets deep in the heart of Germantown. He was far away from the Avenue now, but crackwhores could be found anywhere in G-town. He knew where every crack den and shooting gallery was for six miles in every direction. Rock cocaine’s influence here was nearly omnipotent. Mothers lit up after sending their kids off to school. Fathers hit the pipe after work before coming home to face their depressed and disappointed families. Kids smoked rocks behind the gym at school. And every one of them was just one or two hits away from sucking dicks in alleys for the next rock.
Even in the more residential areas nearly every alleyway flickered with the glow of heated glass and boiling cocaine. The corners on every major intersection were crowded with dealers, talking on cell phones and eyeing every passing car for a potential customer, rival, or cop. Most of them worked either directly or indirectly for Scratch. And wherever the dealers were, crackwhores circled like buzzards sniffing carrion. But none of them were who he was looking for.
Scratch turned onto Tulpehocken Street passing row after row of small rundown houses crammed together like dominoes waiting to fall. Their windows were darkened except for one or two on each block where the flickering blue light of television sets illuminated sleeping figures or where lights were left on in front rooms and on porches to discourage burglars who preferred to work under cover of night. A massive old church squatted on one corner looking dark and ominous like the structure itself was the embodiment of God, waiting to pass judgement on the sinners proliferating around it. Scratch shook his head in amusement as he peered through the front window of the church at the enormous statue of a crucified Jesus with skin as pale as his own. He wondered how it felt to worship a God rendered in the image of the race that had oppressed your kind for centuries. Perhaps the Black people who lived here took some comfort in seeing the most powerful white man on earth nailed to a cross and bleeding to death. Scratch laughed out loud when he saw the familiar glow of a crackpipe coming from behind the tall hedges surrounding the church. Crack had made church all but obsolete. Both heaven and hell were now just one hit away.
The BMW turned down Ambrose Street and Scratch smiled. This was where his most feared enforcer lived. He wondered if Snap was still awake. He thought maybe he should take the kid with him if he was going to start crashing crackhouses, but he knew that Snap and his partner Tank had just finished taking down a rival drug crew and were probably already drunk or high and trying to sleep it off. He cruised silently past Malik’s house chuckling over the irony of the man working.
“I should have that nigga, Snap, snuff the baby. I’ll see how down he really is. Even after all the fools he’s bodied, he still believes in some kind of redemption. I bet you puttin’ a bullet in a pregnant woman will kill all that noise.” He laughed again as he turned the corner.
His headlights slashed across the road illuminating a woman wearing tight jeans that had probably been baggy at one time, but were now so restrictive that she couldn’t button them or zip them up in front. Her swollen belly protruded through the open fly with her T-shirt riding high above her navel. She wore plastic flip-flops on her feet and Scratch could tell by the way she shuffled that she’d been hooked on drugs for a long time. Scratch pulled the car up next to her.
“Want to smoke with me?”
He held a glass pipe out the window with a rock of cocaine already loaded inside. He watched the pregnant woman’s eyes widen and seize on the crackpipe.
“Nuh, no. I can’t. I’ve got to stay clean for my baby.”
She was still staring at the pipe and almost drooling.
“When was the last time you had a hit, huh? A week ago? Two days ago? Quitting now ain’t goin’ to do a damn thing to help your baby. The damage is already done. So why don’t you get in here and suck on this dick. The glass one and this one.” Scratch unzipped his fly and pulled out his penis.
“I ain’t no fuckin’ whore! I got a job. You suck your own dick. Now get the fuck away from me!”
“Sorry, bitch, but I ain’t got no more time to play around with you.”
Scratch slid out of the BMW. The woman tried to run, but being in her third trimester slowed her down and Scratch seized her by her hair and dragged her to the floor.
“Helllllp! Raaape! Raaaape!”
Scratch smiled at her revealing two rows of gold plated teeth. Then he brought his fist down into her face sending several of the woman’s teeth tumbling down her throat. He struck her again and again until he realized that she wasn’t going to stop screaming until he killed her. It didn’t matter anyway. People tended to mind their business in this neighborhood.
He used his hands and his teeth to rip off her jeans and shirt. The woman’s breasts were enormous, bloated with milk. Scratch latched onto them with his fourteen karat canines greedily sucking them dry and biting into the massive glands until both blood and milk drooled down his face. He caressed her swollen stomach with a hand studded with platinum rings as he slid her jeans down to her ankles. He then took himself in hand and forced himself inside her tearing his own foreskin as much as her vaginal walls and caring equally little about either. Scratch sucked all the fluid from the woman’s breast as he drilled up inside her. His modest erection continued to
