One of her favorite clients was Kareem, and he was from Kenya. He worked in a brokerage firm and owned quite a bit of real estate in the greater Chicago area. He traveled nearly six hours back and forth from Chi-Town to the Lou to see her. He usually paid in advance for the privilege of spending two or three nights with her. Although he had the perfect equipment between his legs, he had some very annoying habits. He spent at least three hours every morning in the bathroom. Jewels had no idea what he did in there all that time. Out of curiosity, one morning she'd put her ear to the bathroom door and listened.
“God bless America. These are good people!” He had kept repeating that phrase over and over again. It had sounded like he was praying.
Jewels couldn't help it. She'd had to ask him why he did that every morning. He'd told her that she had grown up in America, so she wouldn't understand, and that if she had grown up where he had, she would be doing the same thing every morning.
He had proposed to her after their first date. Jewels had told him that she wasn't about to go to no hot-ass Africa and be one of ten wives living in no damn tent with goats and shit. They didn't have high-end department stores or huge malls like the ones she loved in the Midwest over there, so she'd posed the question, where the hell was she supposed to shop? She was so oblivious to the motherland that she believed they didn't have cable. She couldn't see herself not being able to watch
The Maury Povich Show
and
The Real Housewives of Atlanta
. Those were must-see TV shows for Jewels. She was getting really tired of his ass, but the dick was just too good, and the money was even better.
With some of her older white clients, she would play the struggling college coed who was “just doing this” to help pay her way through college. She would put on a college sweatshirt with a pair of faded jeans. She would wear the bare minimum of makeup. Her hair would be pulled back in a ponytail. She looked the part. She'd had her “college tuition” paid for quite a few times. The tricks loved to save her, and she loved being saved. They always gave her a little something extra to help her get by.
It was good money for a minimal amount of work, and she did mean minimal. Some of her clients barely had two inches of dick. The white and Asian men were so small that their dicks were barely noticeable.
If I were a man, I would be embarrassed to be so unfortunate
, thought Jewels at times. Sometimes they didn't want sex. They wanted to talk about their wives or their jobs. Jewels didn't mind. It was their money.
She had come across her fair share of weirdos too. Some clients wanted to be shit on, while some of them liked to be tied up and beaten.
Whatever floats their boats
, thought Jewels. All she was concerned with was her money.
Besides the money, the best thing about being an escort was the acting part. She had to be so many different characters for her clients. She became whomever they wanted her to be. If they wanted her to be a slut, she would be a slut. If they wanted her to be a dominatrix or a struggling college student, she would be that too.
She was so used to being someone else that she sometimes completely forgot who she was. But at the end of the day, all she knew was that she was a whore and a damned good one too.
With Kareem, it was something different, though. Once a month he sent for her and paid ten large for the weekend. He paid not only for her body, but for her company as well. He treated her like she was special to him. She almost felt sorry for him because she knew she couldn't and would never give him what he really wantedâall of her.
Normally, this weekend would be one when Kareem sent for her, but when he'd called in, it was to inform the agency that he would not be sending for her this weekend. For a quick moment, she had felt some type of way. Not because she was looking forward to seeing him, but because she was looking forward to what she stood to make from their weekend rendezvous. Now here she was, about to step out for the evening with some white trick whose fetishes were some of Jewels's specialties. She knew it was going to be a long and disgusting evening, but she told herself, like always, that the ends justified the means.
Jewels stood up and took one last look in the mirror. “Let's go make this money, bitch!” she uttered, then puckered her lips and blew herself a kiss. She snatched up her MK clutch and made her way downstairs.
“You always taking fucking long, like you the shit,” chided Ralph, the agency's house supervisor, who was also a flaming gay Latino man.
Jewels ignored the comment. She had been working with this particular agency for only a month, but she was already used to his snide remarks. Despite the fact that she was young, this was not her first house, so she was used to the hate, period. She knew it came with the territory. In the world of escorting and prostitution, Jewels was one of the most wanted and baddest bitches in the game. The fact that she was a freelance escort made her even more valuable to any agency she went through, so she was also used to the red carpet being laid out, meaning that she would get first dibs on big spenders.
Jewels rolled her eyes, made her way out of the lavish home, made a beeline to the awaiting silver Phantom, and climbed in. She couldn't help but chuckle when she saw Ralph standing in the doorway, with one hand on his hip, looking like Cinderella watching her step sisters go off to the ball. She gave him the middle finger as the enormous Rolls-Royce drove off.
Don't hate the player. Hate the game
, Jewels thought as she leaned back and melted into the plush leather of the luxury car.
Chapter Two
Twenty-seven-year-old Rome navigated his way through the city, toward downtown, while he nibbled on a fresh batch of catfish nuggets and a side order of fries, which sat in his lap, from one of his favorite chicken spots in town. On his right sat a cup of grape juice. He picked the drink up and took a swig as he thought about what he was going to get into today. Besides the block, he loved drama. He had been on the same block practically all his life: twenty-five of his twenty-seven years, to be exact. He could've moved, but for what? He was getting paper where he grew up. He was addicted to the drama of the streets. He couldn't sleep at night if he didn't hear gun shots and sirens outside of the bedroom window of his lavish studio apartment.
A lot of people thought that he was just some nickel-and-dime thug. He was glad that they thought that way. He capitalized on this misconception. Rome was actually one of America's worse nightmares: he was young, black, intelligent, and ignorant as all hell all at the same time. He had been exposed to the best of both worlds. His parents were the classic story of a good girl liking a bad boy.
Outside of his crew, he cared for no one and nothing other than gettin' paper in a major way. He was a strategist and a perfectionist. If something or someone stood in front of that, he moved it or them, simple as that. He stayed on point twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and caused havoc, if necessary. You could never tell what was going to go down when he popped up on the scene, but it was never anything good. He was just barely legal, but he'd already made a name for himself as one of the most ruthless, murderous young money getters ever to touch the streets of the Lou.
If he wasn't out making it, he was plotting and planning on taking it from somebody who had it. That was just how he came for it. But lames were making it harder for him than it used to be. He believed the game was so twisted now, as the jealous niggas would put the police on his ass within a blink of an eye. He knew that if the streets really knew how much money he was pulling in, they'd be hating and trying to get rid of him quick fast. They couldn't possibly know that despite his age, he was one of the main players in the streets. He kept it real low key and let his crew stand on the front line. He had a team of young, wild goons pitching work for him on four different blocks between East and West St. Louis. Plus, he had a few old heads moving heroin for him out of the projects. He was seeing major paper. He didn't waste his time or his money on bullshit. He didn't need a fleet of luxury cars and a neck and wrist full of diamonds. He believed that all that shit did was draw heat.
Rome wasn't too much older than some of the dudes in his crew, so he sometimes felt the need to go out there and grind and chill with them. You might catch him pulling all-nighters with the same clothes on for two days, but at the end of the day, both his and his team's pockets were fat. He didn't do drugs like that; he did a little weed here and there, but nothing harder or stronger. He got high off of chasing paper; he didn't hustle to get high. Besides, he was already a natural live wire. He didn't need anything to alter his already fucked-up state of mind.
One thing about him, about which there was absolutely no dispute, was that he was about that drama. He also played with them pistols real heavy. He had no problem with that “gun talk.” He spoke that language very well. Ever since he had caught a twenty-month bid at fifteen, for a Tec-9 and letting off a round at the cops, his name had been ringing bells as a loose cannon all through the streets of the city. During his incarceration, he had added to his rap sheet. He had put in work not only on other inmates but on the staff as well. Some so-called Gs were tough only on the street, when they were around their boys or with guns, but Rome was tough, period. He was nice with his hands and had to beat up a couple of fake tough guys during his first two weeks in the juvenile detention center of St. Louis. When he got sentenced and transferred to a juvenile prison, he immediately learned that knives and razors were the guns in jail. The last eight months of his sentence at the facility were spent in the hole for stabbing a teen who owed him two bags of potato chips for the one he had sold to him.
He'd been in and out of jail since he was thirteen years old. Doing time was second nature to him, so he wasn't afraid to do it. But he had told himself that after that juvenile bid, he would not return to jail. Not if he could help it. He knew his love for guns increased his chances of incarceration, though, so he moved cautiously. There was something specifically about choppers that he loved. He always had a chopper somewhere within reach. He had been picked up and questioned by homicide detectives numerous times whenever one was involved in an incident. They knew he favored this assault weapon. But he had never been charged with shit.
When they said, “You have the right to remain silent,” that was exactly what the fuck they meant. Whenever Rome got picked up, all he said was, “Fuck y'all!” followed by “I want a lawyer.” That was it, and that was all. “Dead man tell no tales” was his theory. In the streets it was rumored that Rome had at least eight bodies to his credit. He hadn't confirmed or denied it. He let them think what they wanted. He came from the code and the rules of the streets. “Real niggas didn't talk about what they did. They left all that talking and rapping to the suckas.” He had been taught that bad boys moved in silence. Besides, he never knew if the Feds were listening or watching.
Rome loved taking care of his mother. His father wasn't shit.
Rome was the product of a gangsta-ass father, who just happened to be a woman beater, and a young, naive mother. His pops was nearly twice his mother's age, which meant his moms was a minor at the time he was born. His father's MO had been armed robbery, so when he'd robbed a bank and got away with it, they ate lovely, but when he hadn't, they'd been at neighbors' houses, eating what they could spare. Rome's pops hadn't been into little money schemes or hustles. He had just had a habit that would take him to his grave in the years to come. His mother, on the other hand, hadn't really been ready to be a mother, but at the time she had done what she could do. For him, being an only child and a male had had its ups and downs.
Rome hadn't been an average kid, and by the time he was in first grade, he'd been the biggest kid in his class. To be honest, he'd been the biggest kid in grades one through five, and at the time that had made him a target for all the kids with “little man” complexes, so he'd had a lot of fighting on his hands. He could remember one day in particular out of the many days kids had tried to jump him after school. He'd been in the fifth grade, on his way home from school, and these cats who always used to pick on him had come to the school just to jump him. They were all brothers, so you never got a fair fightâwell, at least Rome never didâbut on this day a lot would change.
Rome had gotten tired of being a punching bag and had stood his ground on this day and had decided that this day would be the last day he let anyone think he was a punk. And if that meant he would have to fight all three of them, then that was what it would be.
He saw them walking up on him. The first thing Rome did was grab the biggest one out of the bunch and beat his ass until half his crew was on Rome's ass. He kept fighting and earned enough respect from every last one of them, and from then on all his problems would be handled with his hands. He got good at it too.
But he wasn't using hands these days. He had traded in busted-up knuckles for pistols, and with those, he had earned his bones in the streets and had climbed the criminal ladder. Once he started getting money, he didn't let his mother hurt or want for shit. She didn't have to pay any bills; he took care of everything.
Rome would remember her struggling every day when he was younger. She had worked two jobs so that her only son could have the best of things. She had never graduated from high school, so she had had to work a lot of dead-end jobs.
She stayed on Rome about being in the streets so much, but she really didn't know how deep he was in them. He had thought about moving out and being on his own, but he couldn't stand the thought of leaving his mother alone.
He had been thinking about making a few major moves lately, but he hadn't really decided on when to make them happen or which moves to make. What he was sure about was that the streets weren't forever. Hustling was just a means to an end. He wanted to hustle for two or three more years and then exit the game. He believed he was nice with rap. He had dreams of being the next Jay Z or Lil Wayne. He wanted to come into the game already having money, like Young Jeezy. A lot of hard-core hip-hop listeners he respected had told him that his flow was tight.
On a more practical side, he had been thinking about investing a little money in the real estate game. He had even purchased a couple of books on the subject. But that was for later. Right now, he had more pressing issues.
This nigga must think his shit is sweet,
Rome thought, seeing a familiar SUV cruise past his own ride. He couldn't believe who was in his hood.
He must got a death wish or something,
thought Rome, reflecting on an incident that had taken place earlier. This guy had robbed one of Rome's workers, knowing that he worked for Rome.
This joker has lost his damn mind,
he mused. There was no way that Rome was going to let this opportunity pass. He checked the time on his watch.
Just enough time.
He nodded right before turning around in the middle of the street.
It has to be quick, and there can be no witnesses.