by Brick
Once Oya parked the truck, Freddie hopped out. He’d been trying to make conversation with her the whole time. She’d been giving him the short end of the stick, though. She would say only enough to keep him guessing. I had to laugh at the effort Freddie was putting in. He was used to women bowing at his feet. He’d never had to work for a woman’s attention a day in his life. I had serious doubts that he would get far with the regal beauty.
Freddie opened my car door for me as Oya did the same for Boots.
“What can I say to get her to give me more than two words?” Freddie asked me in a whisper as he closed the door behind me. “I’ve tried talking about everything, from guns to sports. She won’t say too much shit to me.”
“Don’t try too hard, niño. The best way to attract bees is to leave a flower for them to pollinate. Give her a reason to talk to you, sí?”
He only nodded as we walked up to building fifty-five. Boots pushed the door to the building open. He and Freddie allowed me and Oya to pass through first. We went by the first two apartments on the left and the right—C and D—and headed up the five money-green carpeted stairs to the next two apartments. Oya went through door A, then came back out to open door B. Once I saw that Oya would be in the apartment across the hall from us, I told Freddie to go with her.
“You sure?” he asked me as he eyed Boots.
“Yeah. You know I can handle my own.”
“If something happens to you, Papa will have my head.”
“Freddie, who am I?”
“She who fought in white clothes while riding upon a white horse, with divine inspiration to guide the way.”
I nodded. “Exactly. Now go. I’ve got business to handle.”
Once Boots and I got inside the apartment, I just stood there for a second. Didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t the mundane scenery before me. There was one mocha-hued oversize sofa. A sixty-inch flat-screen smart TV had been mounted on the wall. The carpet wasn’t clean, but it wasn’t dirty. It was nothing that a run-over with the vacuum wouldn’t fix. An empty Chinese container was on the round glass end table, along with a Corona that was half full. Roaches—smoked blunt tips—laced an ashtray. The breakfast bar had little black chef statues sitting about.
Someone named Alize had left a message on the small menu chalkboard for Shango to kiss her entire black ass. Another message, this one from Oya, told Shango to go fuck himself. I quirked a brow. The place may not have been as clean as I was used to things being when I dealt with the old man and his OCD, but oddly enough, it smelled like bleach and Pine-Sol.
Boots tossed his hat on the coatrack, then started to unbutton his shirt.
“Take a seat,” he told me.
“Nah. Where are my computers first?” I said.
He tossed his shirt on the coatrack with his hat, then glanced over his shoulder at me. Now, I was a lot of things, but blind wasn’t one of them. Boots was a man’s man. He had a laid-back personality that reminded me of André 3000, but his build said he would have sold for top dollar on the slave auction block. The long beard and waves on his head set him apart from most of the dudes walking around the hood with locks and fades. He was dressed in a black wife beater and jeans that sat grown-man low on his hips and were held up by a thick leather belt with the initials BK on the huge buckle, but what stood out the most was his boots. I’d never seen a nigga in the hood wearing snakeskin cowboy boots, and I couldn’t get over that. I smiled. I was sure the twinkle in my eyes gave away what I was thinking.
It took me a minute to get my thoughts together, because he wasn’t what I had expected on the grand scale of things. He stood well over six feet tall. Without my heels, I would have to strain my neck to look up at him. It wasn’t his looks that got to me per se; it was the scowl he carried as he looked down at me that rattled me.
“You’re so paranoid about trusting me, when something tells me I shouldn’t be trusting you,” he remarked.
I was of no mind to split hairs with him, not when he still had our property in his possession. “So now that we have that understanding, where’s my shit?”
“We’ll get to that. I had a chat with Chandler, as you may well remember.”
I nodded and watched as he poured himself a glass of amber-colored liquor.
“And?” I asked.
“Since I figured it was him the traitors had to go through to get this ball rolling, I also thought it was only right for me not to kill him and to let you have your time with him.”
I folded my arms across my breasts. I watched the way he licked his lips after taking a swallow of the drink in his hand. I didn’t want it to show, but I had to admit that finding out they had gotten to Chandler before I did made my ass itch.
“So, where is he?” I asked.
Boots drained the rest of his libation. Inhaled as he watched me, then nodded toward the back room. Anxiously, I made my way down the hall. I pulled the Sig Sauer 9 mm from the back of my pants, where it had been tucked away against the small of my back. I wanted Chandler dead, but not before he told me what I wanted to know.
I opened the door to find Chandler hog-tied in the middle of the plastic-covered floor. The windows had been covered, so the only light came from the hall. He’d pissed himself, and the smell of it almost burned my eyes. There was no sign of defecation, so it was safe to assume they had been taking him to the bathroom while they were here. I barely recognized the man. For as big as he was, he had been seemingly reduced to the size of child with the way he was whimpering from obvious pain.
He looked like he’d dropped a few pounds. “Damn. Did y’all even feed the man?” I yelled.
Boots answered cryptically from the front room. “We don’t fatten frogs for snakes.”
I sighed and shook my head and turned back to the shell of the man who’d once told us stories about how he could trace his ancestry back hundreds of years ago to pirates.
The hole in his head where his glass eye had once been unnerved me.
Seeing the blisters, burns, and cuts on his body up close gave me a sick satisfaction. There wasn’t much more I could do to him at this point. His mouth was taped shut, but with the way he was trembling, eyes wide, and mumbling, I knew he was deathly afraid of something. I knelt down beside him, then yanked the tape from his mouth. The man was sweating, and I couldn’t tell if it was electrolytes or puss from the blisters on his face.
Tears streamed out of the corners of his eyes. He was trying to catch his breath, but it seemed as if it pained him to do so.
“Just tell me who paid you to be a turncoat on me. Then I’ll kill you and put you out of your misery,” I coolly explained to him.
“Co-Code,” he stuttered. His eyes kept darting around the room, like he was seeing ghosts or some shit.
Just what in the hell had they done to the bastard to have him so afraid?
“Chandler, stop playing with me. Tell me what I want to know, and all this shit will end,” I demanded.
I could hear footfalls behind me. Boots was watching from the hall. I could tell by the way Chandler glanced over my shoulder. But he also looked at the corner of the room behind me, like there was something there. I slapped the man for bullshitting me around. Stood up and kicked him in his nuts for playing with me. Was set to blow his fucking brains out when I heard something hissing, then rattling in the corner behind me.
I swiftly turned, only to be confronted by the biggest fucking diamondback rattlesnake uncoiling that I’d ever seen before in my life. Those shits weren’t found in Georgia, so it told me that someone had placed it here. For a second, I was frozen in fear. Nothing in life scared me more than a snake. For mere moments I was seven years old again. In the basement of Papa’s sprawling Spanish estate in Cuba, ten snakes lying before me. I had to overcome my fear of guns and snakes in order to survive.
The old man sat there and watched me damn near piss myself as the snakes slithered around me.
“Papa, please,” my seven-year-old
self begged.
“Chose life or death, Maria Rosa,” he taunted me.
I looked around for my mother and found that she was staring at me without blinking. There was no emotion in her eyes. The one thing I knew for certain was that I’d better not disappoint her, or there would be hell to pay once we got back to her wing of the mansion. She knew I was afraid of snakes, so it didn’t take a genius to figure out she’d told the old man what to use against me. One snake in particular seemed to stare at me head-on. For minutes it seemed that snake and I stared one another down, and then it leapt out to strike at me.
Just like before, I had seconds to react. But when I did, I chose life over death. The first bullet blew the rattlesnake’s head into pieces. I screamed out, almost in a delirious panic, as more and more hisses and rattling joined the fray. I started shooting blindly into the corners of the room, sure I’d hit some and missed most because of my blind rage.
I backed out of the room quickly, leaving a terrified, yelling Chandler behind, and then I slammed the door closed. I screamed as I jumped around in a circle in the hall. My chest heaved up and down rapidly. Sweat beaded at my temples and in my armpits. I kept screaming like it would help my frightful state, until my eyes turned to Boots. It was my turn for my eyes to turn to slits. Heated breaths exited my nose. He’d known the fucking snakes were in that room. He probably didn’t know I was afraid of snakes, but he’d known they were in there. He’d sent me into that room, knowing another threat was lying there in wait, one that I couldn’t see, and that angered me.
I flipped my gun so the barrel was in my hand, knowing that I was out of bullets, or I would have killed him, then pitched it at his head. He dodged it effortlessly. I charged at him like a madwoman. Tried to send a punch to his mouth, but he blocked it. He caught my wrist, spun me around, then shoved me back down the hall. I kept my footing, then went at him again. I swung high. He ducked low. Left his body open, so I used my wedged-heel pump to make him regret leaving his body open. I kicked him so hard, trying to crack a rib and puncture a lung.
The kick pissed him off, because he returned the favor. Sent a meaty fist into my ribs that knocked spit from my mouth.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he yelled at me.
The fact that he was feigning ignorance of what he had done turned my anger up a notch. There was a pull-up bar in one of the doorways in the hall. I took a running leap and grabbed the bar, then sent my heels into his chest. He stumbled backward, fell to one knee, then growled low, like the fight was annoying him. While he was off balance, I tried to run and knee him in his face, only to be speared like he was Roman Reigns from WWE.
We both went flying into the table in the middle of the front room, with me taking the brunt of the blow. The front door to his apartment swung open. The dude I remembered him calling Shango came barreling in. That didn’t stop me. I saw my gun was just within my reach. I could hear Freddie yelling my name as he came running across the hall. The handle of my gun in hand, I aimed the barrel at Boots’s head. I mean, it was empty, but they didn’t know that. Shango’s gun was on me. Freddie had pulled his gun out, only to have Oya’s and Boots’s guns aimed at him.
“Just what the fuck is going on in here?” asked Shango, his voice booming.
“Boots, is this how you get women to have sex with you?” Oya chimed in.
“I swear to the saints, if shorty takes this gun off me, you’re dead,” Freddie threatened Boots.
I heard feet stampeding on the stairs. A chick with micro-braids, denim booty shorts, brown cowboy boots, and a Cowboys midriff on came barreling around the corner. She took a look at us all, with her guns pointed at me and Freddie. We were outnumbered. Behind enemy lines. I was so hyped off adrenaline that I didn’t realize Boots was between my legs. My shirt had been ripped open. No bra on, so my golden breasts and brown nipples were on full display. I could taste the blood in my mouth.
Boots was in no better fashion. His wife beater had been torn. Blood trickled from his eyebrow the same as sweat trailed down his face. His face held the same look as mine. We both wanted to kill one another.
“I’m going to need one of you to explain before we kill somebody just because you two on some other kind of shit when it comes to fucking,” the girl in the booty shorts spat.
“This nigga tried to kill me,” I blurted out.
“I did not,” Boots countered.
“Bullshit. You sent me into a fucking room filled with fucking rattlesnakes,” I said through clenched teeth while swinging at him again.
Shango rushed over to grab my hand with the gun in it, while Boots grabbed my other one before standing. He got up and yanked me up with him, then shoved me away. I tried to swing on him again, only to have Shango body block me.
Boots yelled, “I told you we didn’t fatten frogs for snakes! What the fuck you thought I meant?”
“You asshole,” I screamed.
I didn’t even realize I was crying. Actually, the situation would have been funny had I not really been scared out of my mind.
“I need to talk to my people,” Freddie said with his hands still in the air, like he was being stuck up.
“Naw, you just chill right there,” Shango told him.
Fredie ignored him and looked at me. “There are really snakes in the room, chiquita?”
“Snakes. Fucking big-ass rattlesnakes!” I answered.
Only Freddie knew my pain. He knew what it was to have what you feared most used against you just to do the old man’s bidding. When we were younger, I had had to watch on in horror when he was tossed into the deep end of the pool. Being that Freddie was deathly afraid of water, Papa had made water his specialty when it came to hired killing.
It took a good twenty minutes for me to calm down enough to get Boots’s people to take their guns off Freddie. Another twenty to get things back to normal. Between Chandler’s yelling and me cursing Boots to hell, it had turned into a circus. Boots said he’d told me snakes were in the room, but how the hell was I to know snakes were really in the room? I wasn’t used to the riddles shit. So, the fact he’d used one annoyed me.
By the time they got back to the room to check on Chandler, he’d been bitten six times. His death was slow and painful, but no more than he deserved.
Chapter 15
Boots
Some women know how to test a man’s resolve. I had such a woman in my apartment. I was fighting not to wrap my hands around her lovely throat and land several blows against her skull. All in the desire to give back to her what she’d done to me. Yeah, I had sent her into the Garden of Eden without a clear layout of what exactly was waiting for her ass. However, I had told her there were snakes in that there room. Not my fault she hadn’t listened or understood.
Rocking back in my chair, I rubbed the side of my face, then tented my fingers in front of my lips. Everything I’d done was all her fault. She’d chosen to come with me and my team, while acting like a boss bitch. Believing that the world was hers, when in fact it wasn’t. She held secrets. One of which wasn’t hard to break down and determine when I saw her right-hand, a dude she called Freddie. That fool currently was testing my last nerve with how he kept trying to holla at my sister-at-arms, Oya.
However, being who I was, I couldn’t just bring her into my world, my second apartment in this city, without testing her. I mean, I wasn’t going to even do that much until I overheard her conversation with Freddie. I mean, who was she? She who fought in white clothes while riding upon a white horse, with divine inspiration to guide the way.
Ah yeah, right there, that one phrase signed the deal for me. See, in my training and growing up, I had listened to a lot of stories about my pop’s past. Specific long tales, myths, histories, additional intel, and then the truth to it all. These specifics were necessary for me to understand in order to survive with the legacy I had inherited.
Wiping a wet towel down my face, then over my chest and abs, I shook my head in thought.
M
aria Rosa.
Yeah, I had known her name the moment she exited the Garden of Eden and came at me like a crazed bull seeing red. I had had to listen to my pop’s informant speak about all the people associated with her familia, including her old man’s gang of wives, sons, daughters, grandkids, other relatives, and more. Her name was revered in the underworld circuit. Not many knew her face, but they knew her name, because she was named after a fifteen-year-old Spanish warrior.
The one thing we knew about her that not many other people knew was that she was afraid of snakes. That was what had given her away. Pop’s informant had given him all the names of those in her family who were most trusted. Because of that information, I had had to not only train in the way of my pop’s lineage, but I had had to train like the enemy trained. I had had to experience everything they all did, just to get into their heads and understand the psyche of the man who made it his mission to birth and educate killers.
I had never known a face, had known just the names, sex, and ages. I was getting closer to my agenda. I knew what I wanted to do with all of it. I couldn’t kill them. No, I had to keep getting close, but the funny thing about it all was my dick.
How my dick was set up had me wanting a dip in the venom that was between the thighs of a woman who had tried to take me down like another nigga in the street. In other words, I wanted to fuck a crazy chick, and that right there was something I had never expected to happen—to have desire for my enemy.
If I didn’t know my history so well, I’d say my ancestors would be rolling in their graves at this desire. A man with my bloodline wanting a woman of her bloodline would always mean war. Our two families didn’t mix. The man sitting on the throne of the empire that had created the woman I desired would see me dead first, just as I wanted him to be. So, as long as I kept my focus on that, then the rest I’d have to chill on, and I’d have to say, “Fuck it. I’m young, and I enjoy the crazy.”
