Authors: Rio
~Chapter 3~
Cresha had let out an
other involuntary scream at the sound of the last two gunshots, and she held her breath until she heard a vehicle speeding away in the alley. She stayed silent for a moment, praying to God, trembling fiercely. Then she stood up and walked slowly to the bedroom doorway, stopping to pick up an ID card from the blood-spotted carpet.
She looked out at Mone’s
bullet-riddled corpse and gasped.
“Jesus Christ,” she murmured, quickly moving her eyes back to the ID.
‘One of them niggas done dropped they ID,’
she thought, not even bothering to read it as she turned and ran to the window. “Lord, please just let me make it out of here alive,” she prayed.
Lifting the window, she looked outside just as her brother’s Tahoe came screeching to a halt behind Mone’s Chevy Donk. Several neighbors and a clique of teenage gangsters occupied the length of Peoria
from 63
rd
to 64
th
; they were all jumping into their cars and fleeing the area.
Lacresha climbed out the window and sprinted to the Tahoe, tucking away the card in her bra.
“What the hell happened?” Her brother asked as she dove head-first into the open rear passenger’s side door and landed on the laps of three of his friends. He sped off immediately.
“They killed Mone and robbed his stash,” said Cresha.
She didn’t mention the ID she’d found.
~Chapter 4~
The bullet wound in Big Mike’s leg turned out to be nothing more than a deep gash on the side of his right thigh. While he held a stack of Subway napkins to the leaking wound, I drove nervously down Halsted, gripping the steering wheel tightly and holding my breath every time a CPD (Chicago Police Department) squad car flew by.
“Wanna go to the hospital?” I asked, glancing over at him as we passed the Walgreens on 30
th
and Halsted.
He shook his head no. The expression on his narrow brown face was a mixture of slight pain and resolute determination; we’d hit the lick and all he wanted was for us to get away with it.
“Nigga, this ain’t nothin’ yo’ momma cain’t fix,” he said. “Just get us home so I can get cleaned up.”
I nodded and moved my eyes back to the road. Thirty minutes later, I parked in front of our west-side home in the middle of 13
th
and Troy.
My nineteen year-old sister, Latrice, was sitting in her dusty old Dodge Caravan in the vacant lot beside our two story home, smoking weed with a few of her friends.
A group of young boys were lighting firecrackers on the sidewalk in front of our porch.
I laid an old bath towel over the AK-47 on my back seat, handed Pops two of the
duffle bags, grabbed the other two, and stepped out of the car. I was anxious to examine the stacks of cash I’d seen back at Mone’s place.
Latrice—known throughout the ‘hood as “Treecy”—pushed open her driver’s door as Pops and I were jogging up the porch’s concrete steps.
“Where y’all coming from?” She shouted loud enough for half the block to hear.
Pops and I ignored her and hastily barged into the living room of our three bedroom first-floor unit.
“Assata!” Pops shouted as he plopped down on his raggedy old Aztec-patterned easy chair. He dropped the two duffle bags next to the chair and pushed his jeans down to examine the wound.
I was hunched over the
duffle bag the girl had opened in Mone’s bedroom when my mother, Assata Love, entered the living room holding Michelle Alexander’s
The New Jim Crow
hardback in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. Like Pops, she was tall and lean with brown skin, and she still had on her threadbare black robe.
“What in God’s name are you yelling about,
Michael?” She grumbled. Then she eyed his bleeding thigh and shouted, “If you don’t getcho black ass off my furniture! The hell happened to you?!”
“Bullet grazed my damn leg,” he said, standing up and kicking off his jeans.
While Momma rushed to the bathroom for her first aid kit, I locked the front door, sat on the plastic-covered black leather sofa, lifted the duffle onto my lap, and opened it.
“Mmm, mmm, mmm,” Pops smiled as I grabbed a stack of hundred-dollar bills and
fanned through it.
“How much you think this is?” I asked, looking up at him.
“Gotta be at least ten grand in that one stack
alone. Ain’t no tellin’ how much in that bag.”
“Michael!” Momma shouted. “You bett’ not be in there bleedin’ all over my carpet.”
Pops chuckled. “Let me get back here and get cleaned up,” he said, and headed off to the bathroom.
I got up and checked the other three bags. One of them held seven kilos of cocaine, another held nine pounds of what looked and smelled like Purple Kush, and the last
duffle was stuffed full of cash like the first one.
A nervous smile spread across my face as I carried the four
duffle bags to my bedroom.
~Chapter 5~
Three hundred seventy-eight thousand five hundred forty-two dollars is what the loot amounted to and Pops and I split it down the middle.
It was a quarter past eleven when we finished counting the money on my bedroom floor. By then Momma was in the kitchen seasoning the meat for our Independence Day barbecue and Treecy was in the living room smoking weed with her friends.
Pops sat on my unmade bed and stared down at the piles of cash. I leaned back against the bedroom door and did the same thing.
“A little over a hundred and eighty-nine thousand apiece,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. He dug into a pocket of the jeans he’d changed into and pulled out a pack of Newports. “Listen to me, Junior. You can’t tell a soul about this money. And don’t spend too much at once. Go over to Kisha’s house and put this money up. I don’t want nothin’ here.” He paused to light his cigarette. “Just in case the law get onto us, you know? Proper preparation prevents poor performance.”
I nodded and took out my own pack of Newports. A million questions were bunched together in my mind
like sardines in a can. Could my girlfriend, Lakisha Sanford, be trusted with so much money? And how could I have so much cash put up without spending it? I was already considering getting rims for the Chevy, maybe even
another
Chevy—an old-school Donk like the one Mone had driven.
The most daunting question of all surfaced as I put fire to the end of my cigarette and sucked in a mouthful of cancerous smoke:
Would Pops and I even get away with what we’d done?
“You dripped blood from that bedroom to the car,” I said, watching him toss his portion of the cash into one of the
duffle bags. “You know they can trace that shit, Pops. Saw it on
The First 48
. It’ll only take ‘em a few days.”
“Well, you need to take care of that. Pay some niggas to burn the house down later on tonight. Give ‘em a pound of that Kush.”
“You know it’s too late for that, Pops. Detectives probably got that whole house taped off right now.” I shook my head and sighed. Pops had to leave Chicago; he knew it like I knew it.
Picking up his bag of money, Pops looked at me with the hardest expression I’d ever seen on his face. I assumed he was trying his best to conceal the pain he felt for having involved me in a murder. Or maybe he was worried about the possibility
of us spending the rest of our lives in prison. I wasn’t sure.
“Let’s just celebrate this Fourth of July holiday. Don’t spend no more than a rack or two.
I want you to drive me down to your brother’s house first thing in the morning,” Pops said, sounding defeated. He stared me in the eye for a brief moment. “You ask God for forgiveness?”
I nodded my head yes. “Did right before we gave him those head shots.” I went to the rest of the money and started loading it into an empty
duffle bag.
“When you get a chance,” Pops said, walking to the door, “open your Bible to Job, chapter seven, verse one. If my memory serves me correctly, it reads
, “The life of man upon earth is a warfare.” Don’t ever forget that.”
“I won’t,” I promised.
~Chapter 6~
By noontime I had changed into a white Armani Exchange t-shirt, black Armani Exchange jeans, and a fresh pair of black and red Jordan sneakers. I put on a black White Sox hat and banged it to the left, a testament to my undying love for the branch of Vice Lords I represented: the TVLs.
I cleaned and organized my bedroom. Then I unplugged my phone from its charger and checked the missed calls. Kisha had called twice and my ex-girlfriend, Alycia, had called once. I peeled twenty-five hundred dollars off a bundle of hundreds and dropped it in my pocket with the phone, grabbed my Glock 33 from the drawer in my nightstand, tucked it under my shirt, and picked up the three duffle bags.
Someone knocked on the bedroom door just as I was opening it and suddenly I found myself face to face with Shay Cooper, a slender-bodied, Indian girl with a caramel complexion that had been kicking it with my sister ever since they’d met at Malcolm X College a year ago.
Shay was twenty-one, same age as me, and she had on a pink and white Polo shirt with matching short-shorts and Pumas. Her soft smile made me smile.
“I smell that loud pack,” she said excitedly. “Bust that shit out Lil Mike. Let me get a blunt or two
for me and Treecy.”
“Nigga,” I said, looking at her long sexy legs, “Treecy already got some weed and I gotta go somewhere right quick.” I stepped past Shay and headed up the hallway. She followed me out to the car, giggling like the weed-head she truly was.
Ignoring Shay proved to be impossible; she was sexy and slim, kinda like Rihanna, and she always smelled good enough to eat. I’d had the pleasure of fucking her several times already. But as bad as I wanted to do it again, I knew that getting the cash and drugs to a safe place had to come first.
Shay grabbed the back of my shirt as I was dropping the
duffle bags in the trunk and she didn’t let go until I walked to the driver’s door and opened it.
“You make me sick,” she mumbled, angrily pushing her palm into my back.
“Why do I make you sick?” I started the engine, pulled my door shut, and then looked out at her. She had her hands on her hips.
“You know damn well why,” she snapped
. “It’s the Fourth. I came over here to kick it with you. A bitch ain’t had no dick in two weeks and you wanna leave as soon as I get here. I should cuss yo’ ass out.” She rolled her pretty brown eyes and sucked her pearly white teeth. “That’s why I can’t stand your bald-headed ass now.”
Adjusting the rearview mirror, I glanced at my reflection and displayed a brief grin. I had shaved my head bald this morning before hopping in the shower and now it was shining in the searing-hot sunlight like a smooth, tan bowling ball. There was a long scar running from just above my right eyebrow down to the side of my mouth, a permanent reminder of the time I’d recently served in the Illinois juvenile prison system.
“Come on,” I finally said, opening my door and sliding my seat forward. “You gotta get in the back seat, though. Got blood all over the passenger’s seat.”
“Blood?” Shay climbed in and sat behind the passenger’s seat, pushing the barrel of the AK-47 to the floor. “How’d you get blood on your seat?”
I shrugged and drove off. My mind was still on the money I’d just gotten. The twenty-five hundred dollars in my pocket was begging to be spent. I wanted some rims for my car, some new video games for my PS3, a few pairs of Jordan’s, and I definitely needed a fifth of Hennessy to get Kisha and Shay in the mood. But first I had to stash the duffle bags.
Turning onto Roosevelt, I was nearly rear-ended by a green Tahoe; it veered to the right just in time to avoid hitting me.
“Stupid ass nigga,” I said as I watched the SUV turn left on Kedzie.
“Don’t worry about them,” Shay said, snaking her head around my seat and pressing her soft lips against the side of my neck. “I should be the only thing on your mind.”
My dick got hard instantly and I quickly forgot about the dark green Tahoe.
~Chapter 7~
“Slow the fuck down Cresha! You almost hit that car back there!”
“My bad, James, I was looking at this Google Maps app. The house should be right around this corner,” Lacresha said as she made a left turn on 13
th
and another left onto Troy.
She had made James drop off his friends before telling him about the identification card that she’d found on Mone’s bedroom floor. Now she and her brother were alone in his Tahoe vigilantly flicking their eyes around at the unfamiliar environment. Neither one of them had ever frequented the west side of the Windy City except for those rare occasions when they came to visit their aunt Crystal.
Cresha spotted the house first: 1248 S. Troy Street. There were two girls sitting on the porch steps rolling blunts and laughing. An older man in jeans and a t-shirt was setting up a barbecue grill in the vacant lot next to the house; while a woman who looked to be about the same age was filling a cooler with beers and sodas.
“Pull over and park right up here,” James said. He reclined in the passenger’s seat and slid a thirty-round magazine into his 9mm Ruger. His coffee-black face was calmer than usual—the calm before the storm. “Whatever happens, don’t leave me out here, a’ight?”
“Boy ain’t nobody gon leave you.” Cresha parked the SUV one house down from Michael T. Love Jr.’s address and then killed the engine. She held her Samsung Galaxy 3 in one hand and the Illinois State ID in the other, studying them both. “Yup, the address matches the one on this ID, and the ID looks brand new.” She eyed the man at the barbecue grill through her side-view mirror. “That nigga standin’ by the house kinda looks like the nigga in this picture, must be some kin to ‘im.”
“Tell me how many faces you see on this block,” James said, cocking his heavy black gun.
Far behind them on the corner to their left, Cresha counted five teenage thugs and three adults. Drug-dealers, she assumed, out serving their product to the early morning addicts. A small group of young girls were playing a game of hopscotch on the sidewalk behind the Tahoe, and a brown-skin teenage boy on a bike had just appeared at the corner of Roosevelt and Troy.
“Too many people, James. Too many eyes. We should leave and come back later.”
“Nuh-uh.” He sat up and peered out at 1248 South Troy Street, then sank back down in his seat and said, “Drive around to the alley behind the house. We ain’t leavin’ without that money.”