Now I’m thinking, okay, we got ourselves a fucking car chase. On the streets of fucking Boston, we got ourselves a fucking car chase! I don’t like it. Cops might be around, might catch all our asses, but that’s what we have on our hands because my guys speed after him, which is what they’re supposed to do. That joker wasn’t about to just drive off and they just let him leave!
But then, as if they’ve lost their minds, too, they start shooting up his car. What the fuck? Me and Boss look at each other, and I tell you he’s mad as hell. He’s looking at me like it’s my fault. Like I ordered that shit personally. I didn’t give them any order to shoot. Boss didn’t either. That fucker owes us big bucks, that’s a fact, but it’s never worth killing over!
I’m about to get on the horn, to tell their asses to cut that cowboy shit out, but it looks like it’s already too late. Because Ty’s Beamer runs off the road, into a ditch, and slams hard into a tree. Damn! It was a hard hit.
Our guys pull up behind that wrecked Beamer. Max pull the car me and Boss in up behind our guys. But there’s no movement from Ty’s car.
My heart sinks. Because now it’s not about payback for what he took from us, but now it’s all about making sure his ass is dead to save our own hides.
That part: I hate.
But when our guys get out of the front car, and the boss orders me to get out of the back car and make sure they handle it, that’s when I see her. A female bolt from Ty’s wrecked car like a fucking ninja and starts running for the woods. But she’s holding what looks like a baby to me. A woman with a baby was in that car? A baby? My insides are going ballistic now. I run to our guys.
I’m my own man doing shit in Boston my family back in Jericho has no idea I’m doing. And every fucker out here, in my world, is scared of my ass.
But I’m scared of my old man’s ass.
And if my old man ever finds out I’m involved in this kind of Uncle Mick shit, as he calls anything criminal, he’d kill me. And that’s no fucking exaggeration.
But I got my own problems right in front of me because, as if to prove just how Twilight Zone this really is, one of our guys, knowing Boss’s rule on witnesses, lifts his gun to shoot the woman that’s running away with the baby in her arms. But I damn near break his own arm stopping him!
“Are you nuts?” I yell. “Are you fucking crazy? Get your ass in the fucking car!”
We start hearing sirens in the distance, and then we start hearing screams coming from the woods. That woman with the baby is screaming. Why is she screaming? What’s going on in those woods?
But we can’t ponder that shit, or go and check it out, because of the sirens. We have no choice but to run to our cars, get in, and get the hell out of there. Only I get in the first car, this time, with our guys. I jump in the front passenger seat, where this dude we call Dance was originally sitting, and Dance jumps in behind the steering wheel and we drive off. The boss and his driver Max, in the back car, speeds off too.
But I’m pissed. This shit should have never gone down like this! And the fact that a woman and a baby was in that car? “I thought you said he was alone in that motherfucker,” I’m yelling at Dance. “You said he was alone!”
“He was alone when I first spotted him,” he’s yelling back. “I saw him leave Jureka’s apartment and he was alone. I told you we lost him. That’s why we been driving around looking for his ass. How was I to know he picked up some other chick after he left Jureka’s place? He’d only been out of our sight five, ten minutes tops!”
“And she had a baby in her arms,” I say, shaking my head. “Was she his side chick?”
They think so, but nobody knows for sure.
“Why didn’t we take her out, too, though?” Dance, the only one with that kind of nerve, asks me. “It would have been Tyrell’s stupid-ass fault. He’s the one put her and that baby in the position of being gunned down in the first place. We should have mowed her down. That’ll teach these fuckers out here not to mess with our money ever again.”
But I’m looking at him and my anger is just boiling over. “You really think it would have been a good idea to gun down a girl with a baby in her arms? You really believe that shit, Dance?”
“Yeah, I believe it!” Dance says, his small brown eyes looking defiantly at my big blue eyes. “Why your ass don’t?”
“Pull over,” I say to him.
“But what about the cops, Bobby?” one of the guys in the backseat says to me.
“Pull your ass over!” I scream from the top of my lungs. After Boss, I’m the boss. “Pull over!”
Dance pulls over. The boss car drives on. He knows I know how to handle his business.
And as soon as we pull over, I handle his business by taking the butt of my gun and pistol-whipping Dance’s ass. I hit him upside his head and upside his face. I hit him till he’s bleeding. I wanna destroy his ass. Gun down a woman with a baby? And leave the baby to do what? Or was he gonna kill the baby too? Was he out of his fucking mind?
After I finish my assault, I lean back in my seat. I hate when it gets this bad, but I had to straighten him out right then and there. It is not okay to kill an innocent woman and her baby. That will never be okay! It’s bad enough what they did to Ty. Damn! Don’t he realize how bad that is? But to want to kill a woman and kid too? “Drive,” I say to him.
He can barely see, his face and eyes are so swollen, and everybody in the backseat are quiet as hell. But he knows me. He pulls back into the road and drives.
But I’m queasy and uneasy. What the fuck just happened? They actually killed Ty? Over money? They killed our own guy? My old man said he’d kill me if I went the way his kid brother went, but yet I’m out here, in my early twenties, already so deep in this shit that I’m drowning in it. And for what? What am I doing? That girl might have seen one of us. What if she identifies one of us and all of us go down on her word? My head is spinning with what ifs.
I pinch the bridge of my nose fighting off a migraine as Dance drives faster and faster, nearly killing us a couple of times.
But I can still hear the screams of that girl, of that innocent girl with an innocent baby in her arms, in the innermost recesses of my mind. Like she’s haunting me. Like she’s trying to get my attention. And I don’t know why.
CHAPTER ONE
ELEVEN YEARS LATER
“It doesn’t matter anyway.”
“What don’t matter?”
He says nothing.
“What don’t matter, Ayden? What’s wrong?”
“Why can’t I go, Ma?”
I know that’s not what’s really bothering him, because I know my child. He’ll get around to what’s really on his mind when he’s good and ready. “I told you why you can’t go. I don’t have the money for nothing like that.”
“But my teacher said you can pay a hundred dollars a month.”
A hundred dollars, he says. He might as well say a million cause I can’t pay that either. I’m driving slow through the streets of Boston, because we’re early, as usual. But also, because my old-ass Nissan Sentra overheats if I go faster than forty. “I don’t have it, Ayden.” But he already knows that.
He looks out the window. He has to digest what I just said. That’s my kid. He overthinks everything, and then he reaches a conclusion based on what his mind tells him is sensible. “All the other parents are letting their kids go. They have the money. Why we don’t never have any? You work just like they do. You make money just like they do.”
“I make enough money to keep that roof over our heads, food in our bellies, and this car on the road.”
“And after that?”
“There’s no after,” I say. “There’s nothing left after that. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t have it.” I wish to God I did. He deserves to go on every trip that school offers. But the truth is always going to be the truth.
But Ayden’s just turning thirteen. He’s just, officially, a teenager. But after what happened to him when he
was two, I’ve sheltered him on purpose. Which makes him a very young thirteen. The ways of the world are still murky to him.
He doesn’t say anything else, but I know my kid. He’s still overthinking it.
“There’ll be other field trips that don’t cost so much,” I decide to say. “You’ll go on those.”
“It won’t be Disney World though. I’m thirteen already and I’ve never been. The kids at school say it’s outrageous. They say three hundred dollars to go all the way to Florida to go to Disney World is nothing. They say they get that much for their allowance.”
“They’re lying.” I don’t know if they are or not. But three hundred dollars for an allowance, when I barely bring home that much in a week? Sounds like a lie to me.
But then Ayden lets out one of his drawn-out sighs. I look at him. That sigh gets to the meat of the matter, and some field trip to Disney World ain’t it. “What’s wrong?” I ask him.
He sighs again, but he doesn’t answer me. We’re at the school now, and I’m pulling up at the curb to let him out. Which gives us little time. Which doesn’t make it any easier.
But I need him to verbalize his feelings, not keep them bottled up. “What’s wrong, Ayden?” I ask him again.
“Just those stupid kids,” he says.
“Don’t tell me they’re at it again.”
“They’re so immature. They won’t leave it alone.”
Now I’m mad as hell. I talked to his teacher about it. I talked to the dean of boys. I even talked to the principal. But they’re still pulling that shit?
But I don’t baby Ayden. I shelter him, and try to keep him from bad people, but he has to fight his own battles. Especially since the school’s not doing shit about it. “What’s their problem this time?” I ask him.
“Same thing it always is. They keep picking at the way I walk.”
When he was two years old, we were in a drive-by shooting where his father was killed and a bullet went through his car seat and injured his spine. It affects the way he walks to this day. But trying to explain that to that sorry-ass school, or to his classmates doesn’t seem to be working.
“You just have to stand up for yourself, Ayden,” I tell him. “The school’s not gonna do shit. We already seen that. But you can’t let those idiots bully you into thinking something wrong with you.”
“I don’t.”
“If you have to fight, you have to fight. I pray you don’t. Nothing good comes out of violence. But in this life, you got to stand up for yourself or they’ll knock you down and try to keep you down.”
“I know. And I do. I kicked one boy’s butt already. I’m just tired of it, that’s all. It’s so stupid! It’s like picking at a girl because she’s a girl. Or picking at a man born with no legs because he was born with no legs. How is that his fault?”
“Right,” I say.
“It’s so stupid.” Then he looks at me. “Can I ask you a question?”
We shouldn’t be at this curb this long, but since nobody’s saying anything, I let him keep talking. “You can ask me anything,” I say to him.
“Have you ever been bullied?”
“Heck yeah!”
“What did you do about it?”
“What my grandma told me to do. She told me to find the biggest kid picking on me, and the next time she come at me with that bull-crap, beat her ass. That’s exactly what I did, and they left me alone after that.”
“What were they picking on you for?”
“Something stupid. They said I was too skinny.”
He smiles, and then he laughs. He has his father’s big brown eyes and that’s a good thing. He doesn’t have his father’s ways, and that’s a good thing too. “You’re be okay,” I say to him.
“I know I will too,” he says to me.
“Sure about that?”
“Positive about that.”
I smile too. He’s a fighter. Surviving that gunshot wound when he was just a baby proved that. “And above all else?” I say to him.
“Ah, Ma!”
“Above all else? Just say it.”
“You love me.”
“That’s right. And?”
“And I’m your hero.”
“That’s right.”
“And I’m your perfect little man.”
“Oh, hell no you aren’t,” I say and he laughs, knowing he took it too far. “You’re my wonderful, but not-so-perfect little boy. When you become a man, I’ll let you know. You have to earn that shit.”
He’s still laughing. “You stupid,” he says as only a kid still trying to find himself would say, kisses me, and gets out of my car. He’s little, like me, but he’s scrappy as hell when he has to be. He won’t start none, but he’ll do what he has to do if it goes down. Just like his mama.
I watch the kids watching him as he walks down the hallway. His limp used to be far worse than it is now. But when his joints ache, and sometimes they do, it’s a very serious limp. Right now, he’s just lifting up on his right-foot toes, walking on them, to give him that extra push he needs to move forward. Other times, when the pain is there, he’s almost dragging that foot.
And I’m feeling guilty again because I know it’s my fault. I should have left Tyrell’s ass alone long before I let him knock me up. He just wasn’t a faithful person, or a truthful one either. But then again, if he wouldn’t have knocked me up, I wouldn’t have that ray of sunshine in my life, the only sunshine I’ve ever had in my life, by the name of Ayden Hopson.
But Ty might not have been perfect, I’m thinking as I pull away from the curb, but he didn’t deserve what happened to him either. But I got revenge for him and Ayden too. I made sure that at least one of those jokers paid for what they did to them. I made sure of that.
But now, I’m pulling up at work. Work is the Marshall Factory, where I work the assembly line first shift. My line consists of forty people, and I’m the team leader. But it’s not as grand as it sounds. I make a buck-an-hour more than the people who work below me. But a buck is a buck.
But this morning, it’s not normal around here. Because by the time I arrive, they’re already forming lines and won’t let anybody just walk on up and clock in like we always do. I park my car, grab my lunch bag and my keys, and I hurry and get in line too. And my heart’s racing. There’s been a rash of layoffs all over the country. The economy stinks right now and everybody’s talking about it could be as bad as the Great Depression: that same depression I read about in history books. But so far, our factory hasn’t been affected.
I ask the girl in line in front of me what’s going on, but she has no clue either. She just got here herself. But then Ollie gets in line behind me. Ollie Dunne’s one of my line workers and somebody I consider a friend. Although he just showed up, he probably already heard some talk. He’s always hearing talk.
“Hey, Scott, you know what’s happening?”
“Layoffs, girl.”
When he says this the girl in front of me, and two more in front of her, turn and look at him.
Since Ollie likes to be seen, and loves telling the news, he tells what he knows. “From what I’m hearing,” he says, “they’re either letting you in the building to go to work, or they’re giving you a pink slip and telling you adios amigos. I was so scared when my friend in management told me that’s what’s going down today, I got to work on time, you hear me? On time!”
“Did they say which crews are getting the ax?” I ask him. What I really wanna know is did they say if our crew was getting the ax.
“It doesn’t work that way,” Ollie says before I can say anymore. “They aren’t laying off based on crews. And not even based on who’s the best workers either. They’re laying off so many people, like half of the workforce over all the shifts, that they’re drawing names. You get to keep your job based on the luck of the draw, girl. Based on luck.”
Now I know I’m fucked. Luck has never been a friend of mine.
“The good news is,” Ollie says to me whe
n the others turn back around, “nobody in our crew has been given the ax yet. At least that’s the last thing I heard. We should be okay.”
And we are okay. We make it all the way to the front, and from what we can see, nobody from our crew has been called out of line at all, or given any pink slip. We’re okay. Until we aren’t.
Ollie gets a pink slip.
“Renita Hopson!”
And then I get one too.
CHAPTER TWO
The elevator doors slide open and we walk in. We include myself and members of my team: my chief of staff, Gerard “Rod” Bakker, a black guy who also happens to be my best friend, and three of my aides. One aide worked for the former mayor, and two I hired when I was elected to a full term. All three, like the rest of my aides, are young and energetic, and all have been with me the entire term.
But my term is almost up. Election day isn’t for another four months, but everybody’s gearing up already. It’s that time, that dreadful time, all over again.
Can you imagine? Me, Bobby Sinatra, is now the mayor of Jericho. Eleven years ago, I was a thug’s thug. Living in Boston and living my worse life possible. Into all kinds of illegal shit. Shit my family had no clue about. Now I’m the mayor of a town. Was its police chief for a brief period too. But on the backs of a lot of prayers, and with the help of my old man and his kid brother Mick, I landed on my feet.
But now I have responsibilities that keep my feet so busy I don’t even have time for a social life. Me, Bobby Sinatra, with no social life? But that’s how it’s been. And I had the nerve to announce, just a couple days ago, that I’m running for reelection. Just announced it. But when I make it to my office, and get behind my massive desk with my staff around that same desk suffocating me, I finally realize what it is about my announcement that’s driving me up a wall.
“The city council is not going to approve the afterschool funds for needy kids, sir,” one of my aides, Neil Kantwell, says. “They aren’t going to vote on it at all.”
And that’s the reason. Who in their right mind would want four more years of this shit? Yet I just signed up to run for reelection.
Bobby Sinatra: In All the Wrong Places (The Rags to Romance Series Book 1) Page 2
