The Tragic Flaw (17 page)

“Why do I have to deal with this bullshit,” he says to himself, as the rhymes continue.

“T.D. Jakes can't save us, we prefer snortin' cocaine and takin trips to Vegas. We used to earn slave wages, now we dump X and meth every time them white bitches page us.”

Cornrows on his head rock back and forth to the beat, as moments of self-pity end and the unforgiving urban landscape reappears in his windshield. Kameron puts his game face on. There's work to be done. The time for tears and sadness has passed.

 

Kam enters the city on Holmes Road and makes a smooth right on Seventy-Fifth Street, heading west. He gets thumbs up from other hustlers and waves from flirting women. They love his style. He's a bona-fide K.C. baller.

Kam is high as a kite, loving his life as bass lines rock. He cruises to Prospect Avenue, the city's ghetto thoroughfare, and turns north, nodding his head to the beat of hip-hop simply enjoying the weather, when his phone rings again. He checks the caller ID. It's Cicero.

“Yea?”

“What's crackin'?”

“B.I.Z. fanito.”

“You went to the Bayou Classic?”

“Grambling won.”

“Cool.”

“Peace.”

They hang up just as Kameron's Chevy is pulling to a stoplight on Thirty-Ninth Street, just a few miles from his apartment. He cracks the windows and sits in the turning lane with his blinker on. He waits at the stoplight, watching the neighborhood's disenfranchised residents going through their daily motions.

Homeless people wrapped in dirty blankets and crack addicts with blank stares and unkempt hair wander about. Aging grandmothers with multiple shopping bags wait at the bus stop as Kam offends them with his abrasive rap music.

“We choose to abuse the families of our enemies, chop they nieces to pieces and get real low, use pillows to smother they mothers, grab the steel then blow.”

At that moment, a beat-up red minivan pulls to his right and stops. A beautiful dark-haired woman sits at the wheel checking her makeup in the rearview mirror.

She's Italian, maybe Hispanic, and Kam glances over at her. He turns back toward the red light just as the woman in the minivan sticks a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun out the window. Seeing it at the last minute, Kam ducks to his left as the beauty pulls the trigger in broad daylight.
Boom!

Buckshot shatters his windows and sprays the interior; several pellets hit Kam in his midsection.

Injured but undaunted, Kam quickly reaches under his seat and pulls out a nickel-plated pistol.

“Don't fuck with Jimmy's money!” the woman yells, then pulls off through the red light swerving to narrowly avoid a collision.

“You stupid-ass wop bitch!” Kameron yells as he sits up and squeezes the trigger on his weapon. He rapidly fires seven slugs straight through his windshield at the minivan.
Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop
.

He's too late. The van is gone, and he has a dozen hot pellets in his body.

“Ah, fuck,” Kam grumbles, gripping his side. He's only a few blocks from Truman Hospital, so he mashes the gas pedal and heads there in his damaged candy-blue Chevy.

Kam, fuming as he drives, talks to himself to take his mind off the pain.

“These fuckin' punk-ass dagos! These fuckin' dagos are gonna pay for this shit. That's real talk.”

Bleeding and feeling weak, Kam reaches the hospital's ER, and luckily for him it's not yet overcrowded. A young physician fresh from his residency quickly sees Kam and removes the buckshot. No organs were hit, so within a few hours Kameron is patched up and watching reruns of
Seinfeld
in a hospital bed.

Later that night, recovered and seething, he makes a phone call while a tray of lime Jell-O turns warm next to him.

“Hello,” Cicero answers his cell phone. He sits comfortably next to his chocolate princess watching DVDs on a plasma television in an upscale hotel room. It's 10:20 p.m.

“They got at me,” Kam calmly says from the hospital room he's sharing with a flatulent gray-haired senior citizen. “Tried to smoke your boy, cuz.”

“Where are you?”

“The nurse's office,” Kam replies.

“Who was it?”

“Jose's peeps. It's about that scrilla. They sent a bitch after me. Can you believe that shit?” Kam says, sitting in his sheer hospital gown. “They probably found out dumb-ass Brad was fuckin' with other cats with long money, too.”

His bearded roommate grumbles, then breaks wind and the smell is gut wrenching. It quickly wafts over to Kameron's side and he gets a big whiff.

“Damn! You stink, mothafucka,” Kam yells at the old man. A thin transparent sheet separates them.

“Damn. Well, don't go to the game,” Cicero advises. “Watch it at home.”

Kam's voice turns angry.

“You know I'm a big fucking fan of the fucking Chiefs, dog. I gotta go to the game!”

Kam's roommate squirms and farts again. This time the stench is worse.

“Okay, I'm about to go get my fucking gun and shoot you in the face, cuz,” Kam screams in his deep voice, flashing his diamonds and platinum.

The old-timer grumbles, then mumbles something under his breath.

“Okay. Fart one more time, mothafucka, and see if I'm playin'.”

Cicero, who's resting in a luxury suite sipping a drink, chuckles, then pauses, as his chocolate princess in her T-shirt and panties slides down and begins to give him head. He somehow continues talking without missing a beat.

“Look, the franchise had a terrible draft, but we got some good prospects for the future,” Cicero says. “Right?”

Kam thinks for a second while a discombobulated Kramer once again bursts into Jerry's apartment, then he answers.

“Yea.”

“So we'll be all right. Get well. Then go to the crilla and chill. Get some pussy or something,” Cicero says, as the beautiful face bobs in his lap.

Kam is slow to reply.

“Is that cool?” Cicero asks with his hand on the back of his girl's head, pushing it back and forth.

“Yea. Yea, all right. Holla,” Kameron says, then hangs up, pissed and unable to respond the way he wants: with gunfire.

But Cicero knows how Jimmy operates. If he had wanted Kameron or any of them dead, they'd be dead. He just wanted to send them a little message. That's probably why Kam was shot with pellets used for quail hunting, and not kidnapped or tortured.

At this point, though, it's serious business, no more playing around. Cicero knows Bradley needs to come through on his end, or they are all dead.

Moments later, a phone rings.

“Yea,” Bradley answers from his BMW, rolling south down Broadway.

He steers with his left hand as he dips his pinkie nail into a small auburn vial and scoops out some coke. The night is cloudless and beautiful. Stars twinkle everywhere. Bradley places his fingernail under his right nostril and takes a snort.

“When you gonna handle that?” Cicero asks, having just discharged a million potential children into the mouth of a beautiful woman.

“I'm glad you called. We're going to check things out in a couple days.”

“Be sure you do, our friend is laid up in the hospital because of you.”

“Oh shit, are you serious, man?” Brad sounds startled. His light gray suit fits to a tee. “Man, I'm on top of it. That's real.”

“Dude, you're my boy. But you fuck this up, and I'll have a T-shirt with your picture on it.”

Brad is silent as he makes a left on Forty-Seventh Street.

“Holla.”

The line goes dead. Brad places his phone on his lap and takes a deep breath.

“Shit,” he mumbles to himself as he speeds through a yellow light, thinking about his life and its fragility. He can only hope things go as planned with the product. If not, the next time he sees the Bayou may be from a small box labeled “remains.”

C
hords from an electric guitar drill the eardrums of generations X and Y inside a dark inner-city nightclub. The crowd moves like an ocean of humanity, swaying to and fro. Raves such as this can last all night long, but this one is just warming up. The band's shirtless drummer bangs away at the percussion instrument as he eyes a busty redhead jamming in the front row. The music blasts.

Outside, showers pour from the sky. Sweaty, rain-soaked mosh pitters make the center of the incivility resemble a whirling typhoon; they repeatedly encircle one another as if testing the manhood of their potential adversaries.

There is another test being conducted tonight, however. It is the test of a new, nameless hallucinogen. The test subjects have no idea what's in store for them.

Neon-green glowsticks wiggle back and forth for the acid and LSD users' enjoyment. Furry pink elephants wrestle with giant blue doves in their heads. Those just starting out sweat and grind their teeth off the E. Those who are more experienced chew bubble gum.

The rain sprays the city, leaving huge puddles on sidewalks and causing car accidents on westbound interstates seventy and southbound thirty-five. Phones at GEICO's downtown office will be ringing off the hook in the morning.

Suburban kids from well-to-do Johnson County, Kansas, often come to the Missouri side of the state line for a little fun and excitement and tonight is no different.

Fortunately for some, the Safe Drug Coalition has set up a booth in the Xcess Club's foyer to test for fake Ecstasy tablets, against the mayor's wishes, of course. Nonetheless, SDC has no test for the light-blue capsules that a resolved Bradley Micheaux will be trying out tonight. Needless to say, Brad's clinical trials are not FDA approved. And with a sinister character like Kameron Brown bearing down on him, the appropriate paperwork will just have to wait.

Raindrops pound the paint job of a small German-made four-door parallel parked in front of the club.

“Here, take these,” Brad tells two young guys sitting in the backseat of his blue-gray BMW. “Only one per customer.”

They both nod.

“Charge them twenty dollars per pill. If they bitch, go down to ten dollars. You got it?” Brad asks.

The scruffy-faced Jack Lee nods, as does his friend Collin.

“This is gonna be sick,” Collin yells with excitement as he puffs a generic square. His voice is light and feminine.

“I know. Make a little cash. Maybe meet some sluts,” Jack Lee says with a deep, more mature-sounding inflection. The twenty-year-olds begin to chuckle.

Brad just stares at them. Rainwater on the windows blurs the world outside the dark-gray leather interior.

“Look, be discreet, and be sure to watch their reactions,” Brad instructs. “If anybody starts freaking out, get the fuck outta there. You feel me? I'll be waiting right here.”

“No problem, dude,” reassures Collin before taking another puff of his cancer stick.

“Dude, yea, we got this,” Jack Lee weighs in. “Just chill out.”

They exit the car and get drenched before reaching the nightclub's awning. They're carded by the bouncer then make their way inside, where a sea of bobbing heads greets them. Butterflies flutter in the stomachs of the X users.

Collin, the shorter of the two, wastes no time and immediately approaches a sexy five-foot-five blonde and her cute brunette friend standing near the coat check.

“Hey, what's up with you guys?” the fresh-faced Collin asks the two.

“Not much. Some bitch fucking elbowed me in the face,” the blonde with straight, shoulder-length hair blurts. She thinks the young-looking Collin is hot, so she quickly responds to him.

“Damn, that's fucked up,” responds Collin in his navy-blue sweatshirt still smoking his square. “Hey, you guys do X?”

He wastes no time getting right to the point, just as the house band's lead vocalist stage dives and is passed around the sunk-in dance floor like a living joint. Roped pacifiers dangle from the necks of white whirling dervishes.

“Yea, you got some?” the brunette asks. The club's music is loud. Curly locks hang just below the large gold hoops dangling from her earlobes.

“Nope. I got something better,” Collin tells her. He tosses the cigarette butt to the floor and smashes it with his Diesel sneakers. Girls of European descent jounce through the populace with colorfully beaded cornrows, resembling Bo Derek.

“What? Coke? Coke's not better than X, man,” the blonde interjects, rubbing her eye.

Collin grins.

“Fuck coke! This shit is new, and it's better than coke,” says Collin.

The girls smile.

“This shit fucking rocks,” he adds.

For years, Kansas Citians have endured being last to get new things: movies, clothing, music, food, soft drinks and even drugs. They always seem to hit K.C. last. So these young girls jump at the opportunity to try something new; to be the first. Even with a new drug, it's worth the risk.

“Hell, yea, I'll try it,” the brunette says. Her tight little hips are hugged by her stretch jeans.

“Yea, fuck it, me too,” the blonde replies, midriff exposed. “Maybe it will make my fucking eye feel better.”

The bass guitar hums as Jack Lee leans against the wall with arms folded, watching his young partner-in-crime work.

The three walk over to a bar and purchase bottled waters to take the dope. Collin pulls three capsules from his jeans' pocket and the girls stare at them with suspicion.

“They supposed to be twenty bucks each, but I'll let you guys get them for ten,” he says. They agree and each slide him ten-dollar bills from their tiny party-sized purses.

“Are you going to take one too?” the brunette asks.

“Hell, yea,” answers Collin without hesitation. Rain can be heard striking the club's blacked-out windows.

The girls smile; that's good news. Mind-altering capsules grace tongues and natural spring water washes them down to be digested and absorbed.

Poorly lit, the nightclub is a cesspool of drug experiments and same-sex escapades. Many firsts have taken place at this midtown location, just to the east of the flat, western plains.

Bradley Micheaux sits in the parking lot in the rainstorm facing the nightclub's front door, simply thinking. He needs these drugs to work, to be effective, and to be safe. As he ponders a fallback plan B, six guys spill out of the club throwing fists and cursing like sailors. The falling rain immediately baptizes them.

“That was my girlfriend you were hugging, motherfucker!” a drunken brawny guy yells as he swings wildly, connecting several blows to the temple of a leaner, more inebriated man in a form-fitting white button-down shirt.

The fracas catches Brad off guard, so he scans the faces of the combatants to make sure it's not one of his boys. Brad sees it's three Mexicans and three white guys, but one just happens to be Jack Lee. He was somehow swept into the melee as the five others rushed past him. And none of them know him, so they all think he's with the other clique. Now Jack Lee finds himself in the middle of a drunken slugfest, and he is forced to throw punches at both crews.

Rain comes down on everyone. Fists fly. Soaked shirts rip and jaws are punished by flying knuckles. The large Mexican who started the shit slips to the pavement, and when he hits the ground, the two white guys begin delivering kicks from their Doc Martens into his fat stomach. Unbeknownst to him, his girlfriend had just returned from sucking both Caucasian dicks in the bathroom.

But the other two Mexicans think they're doing damage to the other clique's friend, when in reality they're trading blows with Jack Lee, an innocent bystander.

Brad's eyes go big when he recognizes the kid, but he's calm. Jack Lee grew up in an Irish household with four older brothers that were known around Kansas City as big-time bar brawlers. Jack Lee is a scrapper, holding his ground against two guys.

Jack Lee takes several shots to the face from the quicker of the two guys, but delivers a powerful body shot to the guy's kidney, and he buckles.

Grinning, Brad fires up a cigarette and watches from the safety of his Beamer.

Then
crash
.

While his boy was taking a body blow, the other guy grabbed a beer bottle and cracks it on Jack Lee's head, and he falls. Now the feet set sail, and Jack Lee is forced to cover his face and head.

Meanwhile Collin is inside, high as a stealth bomber.

“Two thumbs up!” Collin yells to the girls on both sides of him, and they all laugh.

“This shit is awesome,” the blonde says. “I guess this is what a wet dream feels like.”

They all laugh again.

Back outside, Brad sees Jack Lee take cowboy boots to the back and chest. He decides he needs to act, not because he's courageous, but because he knows it will guarantee Jack Lee's devotion.

He opens the car door and pops the trunk. Rain smacks his face and sullies his all-black Italian-tailored suit.

He moves his tennis racket and gym bag to the side and pulls out an aluminum baseball bat.

The guys kicking his friend don't see Bradley approach, but they would have surely run off if they knew the former college shortstop was armed with a metal baseball bat, of all things.

“Hey, what's up. J.L.?” Brad says. The guy nearest him turns around and Brad steps into the swing. The sound of the aluminum bat striking his cranium is similar to that of Tiger Woods teeing off on a five hundred-yard course.
Ping!
He immediately drops and blood pours from his busted head.

Unfortunately for his friend, there are no streetlights on the block, and with the darkness of the night and the pounding rain he doesn't see Brad.

But his midsection soon feels the full strength of a cleanup hitter as Bradley crushes his rib cage. The guy screams and grabs his side. Bradley strikes his body again and again, breaking his ulna, radius, femur, and several small bones in his wrists and ankles. The guy falls. Bradley stops swinging.

“J.L., I can't take you anywhere, man,” Bradley jokingly tells his comrade, who is now soaked in blood and rain.

“Dude, fuck you,” J.L. says with a grumble as Brad helps him to his feet.

The three Mexicans lay on the ground holding their injuries, as the other fighters bail.

Yet in club Xcess, a trio of young adults has stumbled upon the next big thing; quite possibly the Earth's next scourge. Tequila shot after tequila shot, their highs remain unchanged. They could drink fermented fruits all night and not feel any adverse effects.

“Barkeep! Barkeep!” Collin yells, grinning. His face is flush and rosy. “Is today your birthday?”

Screeching riffs dart unhindered into inner ears. The middle-aged bartender looks annoyed by the kids he knows are on something.

“No, it's not my birthday,” the barkeep responds.

“Well, it's not mine either, but I'm going to party like it is!” Collin screams with gusto.

The girls giggle loudly. They're just as animated.

“Can I get you another drink?” the bearded bartender inquires.

Collin looks confused.

“Now, you
know
I want another drink,” says Collin. “What kind of barkeep are you?”

The girls again burst into laughter, and at that moment, Collin's text message communicator begins to tremble on his hip.

“Whoa,” Collin says, startled. He glances to the blonde.

“You are so nasty!”

She just grins. Then Collin looks down. “Oh.”

He removes the device from his hip and reads the message: “CUM OUTSIDE ASAP. ROUND THE CORNER.”

He closes the silver box and returns it to his side.

“Well, ladies, it's been real,” Collin slurs. “But I gotta split.”

“What? Hell no, man. The party just started,” the blonde says as she sticks her tongue down his throat, tasting the Wheaties and milk he had for breakfast. They begin kissing wildly.

Jealous, the brunette stares at them and feels left out.

“What the fuck? You guys just gonna forget about me?”

Collin gazes over at her, then they begin swapping spit and increasing the likelihood of developing cold sores. But he suddenly pulls away.

“Look, I really have to go. But you guys rock! Write your numbers down and we can hook up real soon.”

“Promise?” the blonde asks.

“I swear,” he replies.

The girls jot names and numbers on napkins and send Collin off with more tongue and spit. Elbows fly into shoulders and chests as sweat circulates between hallucinating future doctors and lawyers.

Brad and J.L. sit silently in the Beamer down the street and around the block as Collin jogs out of the club and is immediately doused by the downpour.

He searches for the car then finds it and immediately hops into the backseat, soaking wet. A lumpy-faced J.L. turns to face him.