Memoirs of an Accidental Hustler

by J. M. Benjamin

  “Yo, Betty knows something about Ant and Trevor.”

  “Oh, shit!” He climbed into the back of my whip.

  “Pull off, Mil. I don’t want nobody seeing me in here with y’all, especially them niggas.” We didn’t know what niggas she was referring to, but we were more than eager to find out. I pulled up into the park and killed my lights.

  “So, what you know about Ant and Trevor?” I asked Betty.

  “Hold up! I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ until I know how much you gonna hit me off wit’ for what I’m about to tell you,” she said all tough.

  In a blink of an eye I had my 9 mm in my hand pointing it right to her head. “Bitch! Ain’t nobody got time to be playin’ no muthafuckin’ games. Now either you run ya mouth or I’ma be cleanin’ ya blood outta my shit tonight,” I told her.

  “Mil, chill, kid. Betty tryin’ to help us out; she just wanna know what she getting for helping us, right, Betty?”

  “Yeah, that’s all. I’m gonna tell y’all what I know. I just want mine ’cause I could get killed for this shit if them li’l crazy niggas find out it was me who told y’all.”

  “Betty, listen, if what you feel you about to tell us makes sense and had any truth to it, then we gonna take care of you on the lookout tip and make sure don’t nobody fuck wit’ you,” Mal told her. “We just makin sure you ain’t bullshittin’ us cause you wanna get high.”

  “Nah! I ain’t bullshittin’ y’all. See, I got some shit already,” she said, showing us a couple bags of dope and a few crack vials.

  Mal went into his pocket and pulled out his knot. I saw Betty’s eyes light up. “Look, I’ll give you three hundred dollars in cash and three hundred dollars in product when we get back to the projects. Now tell us what you know,” he said, handing her the three hundred-dollar bills.

  “Make it four hundred dollars in cash and four hundred dollars in product,” she said.

  I cocked my burner. “Betty, this ain’t Let’s Make a Deal and we ain’t Monty Hall, so what you gonna do? You gonna take door number one or door number two?” I said, putting the steel against her head so she could feel that shit was real.

  “Mal, tell him to get this gun out of my face.” Despite the threats, she was not afraid. She spoke calmly.

  “Mil, come on, man, cool out.”

  I hesitated for a minute and then put my gun in my lap.

  “I’ll take door number one, as you put it,” she said sarcastically. “Mal, your li’l brother is crazy,” she added.

  Mal ignored her remark. “Betty, what do you know?”

  We sat there as she began talking. “You know my daughter Belinda? Well, she messin’ with this boy, well, at least I think so, ’cause he always comin’ around getting high with her, shootin’ up and smoking weed, and she ain’t got no job so I know he supplying her. At first I thought he was a drug dealer and just used on the side ’cause one day I came home and seen him counting lots of money about two months ago. He noticed that I saw him and he gave me a hundred dollars and told me to keep my mouth shut, which was kind of strange ’cause who would I tell? But I still didn’t think nothing of it.”

  She paused, sniffled, and wiped her nose. “Not until tonight did it dawn on me that he could’ve had something to do with your friend’s death. Tonight when I came in, him and my daughter were in the living room. They didn’t hear me when I came in ’cause they was too high. Belinda was lying across his lap nodded out, while he was stroking her hair talking to her. I couldn’t really hear what he was sayin’, but just out of being nosey I got close enough so I could really hear him. He was sayin’ something to her about not being worried ’cause after him and his boy do another job like before, he was gonna take her away with him. Then I heard him say this time he ain’t gonna let his man shit on him again like he did last time, and only give him thirty Gs while he kept sixty, especially when he did most of the work. I knew that them boys was getting a lot of money around here so I figured he had to be talking about them. I wouldn’t have thought that they was holding like that though if I didn’t hear it wit’ my own ears. I know a lot of people who would kill for less,” she finished saying. We knew that they were holding like that because we had twice as much.

  “Betty, what’s the kid’s name who mess with your daughter?” I asked her.

  “Let me think. She calls him something like Ka or Qua, something like that.”

  “Qua!” It instantly came to us as soon as she said the name, and it all made sense to us now. It was Quadir, the same Quadir we grew up with, who moved up out of the projects about five or six months after his moms met some man with a little bit of money back in the day.

  The last we heard he was getting high, but we didn’t know for sure because we never saw him, and he never came around our way to cop anything if he was. I began to get a headache just thinking about the fact that some niggas we came up with did this shit and not some strangers. All types of thoughts were racing through my head, and I knew that the same thoughts were going through Kamal’s mind, but we couldn’t let Betty know what we were thinking or how we were feeling right now.

  “Did he ever mention his boy’s name?” I asked.

  “No,” she answered.

  “All right, Betty, we gonna look into it,” Mal said, as calmly as he could.

  I kept my composure as best I could too, but on the inside I was on fire.

  “He didn’t say who his boy was, but I saw them together once and I recognized him,” Betty said out of nowhere.

  “Who was it?” Mal asked.

  “It was one of them boys y’all used to run around here with when y’all was kids.” Mal and I looked at each other. Before we could figure it out she answered for us. “It was Black!” she spat.

  “Muthafucka!” Mal exclaimed.

  “Bitch-ass nigga!” I followed up with. “Yeah, Betty, we appreciate that,” I told her as I started the car. “And pardon me for treatin’ you like that before.” I was thankful for the information and felt bad that I had treated her the way I had. I went into my pocket and gave her the extra hundred dollars that she wanted earlier because it was well deserved, and then some.

  After we gave Betty the clips, we paged Shareef. As far as we were concerned our New Year’s had been cancelled. We didn’t have partying on our minds, only revenge. Either Shareef didn’t have his beeper with him or he just wasn’t answering, because we called him over twenty times, and even put in our code, 505, to let him know that it was important. Mal and I stayed up drinking all night, both deep in our own thoughts.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  “Hello?”

  “Yo, what up?” I heard Shareef’s voice on the phone saying.

  “Where you at?”

  “I’m at the Loop.”

  “You didn’t get our beeps? We been trying to get at you all last night.”

  “I heard my shit goin’ off, but I was in some guts and shit was too good to be comin’ up out of. I was tryin’ to cum in it,” he said, laughing at himself. “I seen the five-oh-five this morning though. What’s going on?”

  “We found out who’s behind the shit that went down wit’ Ant and Trevor.”

  “Oh, shit, yo! My bad, kid, that’s my bad for not answerin’ my shit last night. Who the fuck was it? Anybody we know?” he asked, upset.

  “Yo, we’ll talk when you get here.”

  “I’m on my way. Trina, get dressed,” I heard him say as he was hanging up the phone.

  I just laughed.

  * * *

  “Them crab-ass muthafuckas,” Shareef barked when we relayed to him what was told to us by Betty. “Yo, I’m gonna murda them niggas. Nah, fuck that, I’m gonna torture them niggas’ punk asses when I catch them. I should’ve known it was somebody we knew, ’cause Ant and Trevor don’t be slippin like that, ’cause they always got heat on ’em. Damn, we broke bread together wit’ these niggas, and slept under the same roof.”

  “We know, kid,” I said. “We just as mad as you about
this shit and we ready to hunt these niggas down.”

  “Yeah, but we gotta do this shit right, ’cause that bitch Betty can tie us into shit if it comes out something happened to these chumps. The way she sold them out is the same way she’ll sell us out, so we gotta be smart about this,” Mal said.

  The way I was feeling right then and there, I was capable of doing anything. But I couldn’t believe that we were plotting to commit murder, especially of somebody we were once friends with; but like Mu told me a long time ago, when you in the game some friends become foes, so what we were planning had to be done because that was one of the rules of the game: an eye for an eye.

  What we came up with sounded like it would work. It was just a matter of following through with it. Finding Quadir and snatching him up would be easy, but Black was a different story, because he’d been sticking up niggas left and right for so long now that he had eyes in the back of his head, and he kept at least two burners on him at all times, so timing had to be everything when it came to him.

  A few days had gone by before we finally saw Qua. At first we didn’t recognize him because he had gotten a lot taller and much skinner since the last time we had seen him. He used to be the biggest out of all of us when we were growing up, but now it was obvious that the drugs and the streets had taken a toll on him, because his jaws were sunken in; you could see his jawbone line. We knew he was high now because his eyes were all wide and he kept looking around like he was paranoid, as he stepped out of Betty’s crib. Had he been sober he might have spotted us sitting across the street in the old Buick, but it was to our advantage that he wasn’t. Not that it would’ve mattered anyway because either way we weren’t going to let him get away, even if it meant gunning him down right then and there. We wanted to get him while he was still on Sycamore Avenue, before he hit Front Street, to avoid anyone seeing something.

  “Yo, you ready?” Shareef asked us.

  “We ready,” Mal answered.

  “Well, let’s get this nigga then.”

  We all pulled our masks down and jumped out.

  “Yo, Qua!” Shareef yelled.

  Quadir stopped in his tracks and turned around. Shareef caught him right in the mouth with the butt of his nine and knocked him out. He never knew what hit him. I leaned over him, put a rag in his mouth, and then blindfolded him. His face was bleeding; Shareef had split him open from the blow. Mal secured his hands behind his back with duct tape while Shareef did his legs.

  After that, Shareef snatched him up and threw him over his shoulder. Mal went to go pop the trunk and I ran to start the car. One down, one to go.

  “Yo, what the fuck is this?” Qua said, regaining consciousness, seeing that he had been taped and tied to a chair the same way he and Black had done to Ant and Trevor. I took the rag out of his mouth and the blindfold from off his eyes once we got him to the abandoned building.

  “Shut the fuck up!” Shareef said, throwing gasoline in his face.

  “Aah!” Qua yelled. The gas stung the open gash he had on his mouth and lip. “Yo, what I do?” he asked.

  “Nigga, you know what the fuck you did,” Mal shouted, spitting on him.

  “Nah, word up. I don’t. I don’t even know who you niggas are.”

  Qua must’ve done so much stuff to niggas that he couldn’t think of who could be holding him like this, but we wanted him to know.

  “Muthafucka, you know us,” I said as I pulled my mask off. By the look on his face I knew that he knew why he was there now, but the nigga still tried the best he could to play it off like he didn’t.

  “Mil, what’s up? What the hell is this shit?” he nervously asked.

  I walked over to him and smacked fire out of him. “Qua, come on, man, don’t play on my intelligence. You know why you’re here,” I said, as Mal and Shareef pulled their mask off too.

  “Man! Mil, I swear to God I don’t know what the fuck is goin’ on or what you talking about, kid,” Qua said in an almost convincing manner. If he were a nominee for an Oscar that night, he would have won an award for best actor, but this wasn’t the Oscars; this was the streets, and we weren’t trying to hear that shit. I smacked him with an open right hook.

  We knew that he was lying to try to score some points and protect himself, because Betty had already told us about how he was talking about his and Black’s next job. He probably was talking about us.

  “What he did to them I didn’t agree with, and I tried to stop him before he did it, but he threatened to kill me. I’m telling you, the nigga is crazy. He even crossed me up on the dough they had up in there, givin’ me only thirty Gs and keepin’ sixty.”

  Just hearing him talk about it made me want to blow his muthafuckin’ brains out the back of his head, but we needed him alive for now, until we found Black.

  “Where’s Black staying at?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know.”

  Shareef flicked his lighter and put it to Qua’s face. “What the fuck you mean you don’t know? That’s your partner in crime, nigga.”

  “I’m telling the truth,” Qua said, trying to move his head away from Shareef’s lighter. “I usually beep him and he calls me back; then he meets me wherever I tell him to pick me up at.”

  Mal pulled out his cell phone. “What’s his pager number?”

  Qua gave him the number “555-9276. It’s a 201 area code.”

  “Is there any type of code you put in to let him know it’s you?”

  “We still use the old code we had when we were kids: five-oh-five.”

  I wanted to snap his neck when he said that. “Nigga, you better hope you telling the truth, ’cause if this some funny shit, you gonna be in the dirt.”

  He must’ve thought we were going to let him live, like he had some chance in hell of making it up out of this in one piece. Little did he know that today was the day he would be taking his last breath.

  “When this nigga call back, you better be real convincing to make him meet you somewhere,” Shareef said. “Tell him to pick you up on South Second, across from the Motor Vehicle, just before Rockland Avenue. Tell him to blow the horn when he gets there and you’ll come right out.”

  “What he drivin’?” I asked.

  “A gold Legend, the old body style, four door.”

  We discussed our plan while waiting for Black to call back, to make sure we were all clear on how it was going to go down once he called back. It only took five minutes before Mal’s phone rang.

  “Yo, what up? Where you at?” we heard Black asked, while Mal held the phone up to Qua’s ear.

  Qua spat everything verbatim like we had told him to, and Black said he’d be there in about twenty minutes, which was more than enough time for us to get situated. He had brought it and it was about to go down.

  “What about me? I did my part,” Qua said.

  “Go to sleep,” Shareef said back, punching him in the jaw, knocking him out again.

  We saw the Acura pull up, just the way Qua described it. Black blew the horn and then waited. I snuck up on the passenger’s side and smashed the front door window with the biggest rock that I could find. I saw Black look in my the direction as he reached for his guns, not seeing Shareef come up on his driver’s side and put the nine to his dome.

  “Put ya muthafuckin’ hands on the steerin’ wheel, nigga.”

  By then I had opened the door and grabbed the .357 that he had reached for lying on the seat. I knew he always kept at least two guns on him, so I patted his waist to make sure he didn’t have another one and there wouldn’t be any surprises along the way; and sure enough he had a .38 tucked in his belt. I snatched it out and took it, as I got in and closed the passenger’s door.

  “Move over, nigga,” Shareef said, disguising his voice while opening the driver’s door.

  “You niggas trying to rob me? I’m in the same game as you. We ain’t got to go through all of this. I’ll give you the dough I got in my pocket,” he said, calm, cool, and collected.

  �
�Nigga, shut the fuck up. It ain’t ya money we want, it’s ya muthafuckin’ life,” I told him, pointing my burner with the silencer at his eye.

  He laughed. “What, you tryin’ to sound hard or somethin’? ’Cause you ain’t scarin’ me. It sound like you tryin’ to disguise your voice, so I must know you niggas up under them masks.”

  “Didn’t I tell you to shut the fuck up?” I said, smacking him in the eye with the barrel.

  “Aah, shit!” he yelled, grabbing his eye.

  “Nigga, put ya fuckin’ hand down,” I said, poking him in the side with the .357 I took off of him.

  “You niggas better kill me, ’cause if I make it out of this you’re dead.”

  “You won’t,” Shareef told him. “Come on, nigga; get the fuck out the car.”

  We all had our joints ready to gun Black’s ass down if he tried to get on some superhero shit, but he just walked in the building peacefully. It wasn’t until he saw Quadir sitting there tied up that he began to act up.

  “You bitch-ass nigga!” he shouted at Qua. “I knew you was a weak link. I should’ve smoked ya punk ass like I started to.”

  I caught him in the back of the head. “Sit the fuck down.”

  He started to laugh again, as he sat in the chair next to Qua.

  “Put your hands behind your back, nigga,” Mal said.

  He started putting his hands behind his back as Mal walked behind him; then all of a sudden he grabbed for Mal’s mask. Just as it came off, I pulled the trigger.

  “Aah! You muthafucka, you shot me,” Black screamed, holding his right shoulder with his left hand with Kamal’s mask in it.

  Black took a look to the side and saw who had been wearing the mask, and began to laugh out loud. “I had a feelin’ it was you niggas ’cause it would take a bunch of stupid muthafuckas to try to pull this off.”

  Shareef and I took off our masks off. “Nah, nigga, you the stupid one for thinking you was gonna get away wit’ that punk shit you did,” Shareef said to him.

  “Muthafucka, gimme ya hands,” Mal yelled, snatching both of Black’s arms behind the back of the chair.

  “Take it easy, killa, you see ya scary-ass brother shot me in the arm.”