"You float me?" Tavon asked, suddenly more lucid. "I'm a little light."
"Yeah, I got you."
Lott arrived at Mr Dan's first. One in the morning and he was eating here; his belly and backside would pay for it tomorrow. Actually probably later tonight. He rather enjoyed the simplicity of his life. Having just got off his mandated shift, the gentle skritch of the fabric of his uniform with each step reassured him. He had a little job, was saving a little money, had himself a little place. With no drama and more importantly nothing he couldn't walk away from at any point, he was content within his lifestyle. That was the secret to life, he'd discovered. Folks fell in love with a certain way of living, things they had to have and wouldn't be anything without. That meant they'd do anything to protect it, get all crazy about shit that made no sense. Not Lott. When shit started stacking up, he could cut out any time and set up somewhere else.
Wayne came in next, a fiend trailing behind him. A head nod to Lott, Wayne marched to the counter to place his — and Tavon's — order, not playing when it came to his food. Lott could guard the booth if he wanted. Wayne was still waiting for his order when King arrived.
Lady G and Rhianna pointed at pictures of burgers — though they'd be disappointed by the reality that would show up on their plates later — then joined Lott at the table. Lott seemed to sit up straighter at their arrival.
"He with you?" King asked Wayne, but eyed Tavon.
"Yeah, sorta."
"Always bringing your work home with you."
"You one to talk." Wayne glanced at homelessass Merle who trailed King. The irony was not lost on Wayne considering his line of work versus his feelings for Merle, but some folks were hard to like. "Extra grace" folks, his pastor called them. Merle always irritated him, as if Wayne was the object of a joke only Merle got.
"I am ever the servant's servant," Merle offered.
Wayne sucked his teeth in response.
"I was hoping we could chat in private," King said.
"You the one with an entourage." Wayne nodded toward Merle and the girls. "I didn't know you knew Lady G and Rhianna."
"It's not like that." King glanced over at Lady G, mildly jealous that she sat next to Lott. "Things been going on and I'm trying to piece things together."
"And I thought 'let us ask he-with-the-woundedneck'," Merle added.
Wayne rubbed the keloid scar on the back of his neck. "Well, I couldn't leave him alone. I'm trying to get a story out of him, myself. Thought maybe time, fresh air, and a full belly might chill him out enough to be straight with me."
Tavon stabbed several French fries into the gooey mess that was the Mr Dan's Open-Faced Chili Cheeseburger. Gulping down the fries and licking the remaining chili cheese sauce from his dirt-caked fingers, he chanced a peek at Merle and, feeling uncomfortable, he returned his attentions to his plate.
"Curious." Merle stared with mild fascination. "Who are you, my guy?"
"Tavon. Tavon Little." Tavon peered up with distrustful eyes, arm guarding his plate, then went back to mealing.
"Never bring strays where you lay."
"He kinda ain't got it all," Lady G said, more of Merle, not all too sure of Tavon, though fiends she had a better sense for.
"Nah, he good," King said.
"Can I get a new fries? These are greasy." Rhianna pushed the object of disdain away from her, sat back, and folded her arms.
"What you expect from Mr Dan's?"
"Girl, you better eat those fries and be grateful," Lady G said. "It's not like you paying for them."
Rhianna buried her head in her plate like an ostrich.
"What's this about, King?" Wayne asked.
"The gathering of knights," Merle said, ignored by the group.
"I'm not sure," King said. "It's like I have these flashes. Like things aren't what they're meant to be. And I have this feeling like I'm supposed to be doing something."
"Why you?" Wayne pressed.
"He is the dream of a waiting dragon," Merle said.
"Does he ever shut the fuck up?"
King waved off Merle's comments, or rather, Wayne's reaction to them. "Not me. Us. It's like I can almost see the whole story, but when I think on it too hard, it all slips away from me. Merle told me you've all seen something and I thought if we got together, maybe we could sort it out."
"How does Merle know what we've seen?" Wayne glared at him with distrust.
"Magic," Merle said.
"Magic?"
"Magic."
"Bullshit. Chronic maybe," Wayne said.
"In my day, magic was much more commonplace. There's no room for magic in your lives, only darkness. You've forgotten how to dream. To imagine possibilities. All you know is this." Merle knocked on the table. "Continue to make your mud pies and never think to dream of the ocean. Now, some still serve the Old Ways, but there are the Old Ways and ways older still. It is the eternal struggle. The struggle chooses its vessels and we fight where we are. I warn against the beast that sleeps."
"Did that make a damn lick of sense?" Wayne asked.
King steepled his fingers in front of his face and sifted through Merle's words. Like everything else of late, they made sense, an inelegant poem, again, as long as he didn't think about it too hard.
"Sometimes, it seems, we fight the same fight over and over. The players essentially the same, as if light and dark battle to rule each age. The beast changes his form to suit the needs of the age, but the goal is the same: to usher in an age of darkness."
"And the form of the beast?" King finally asked.
"I don't-" Merle started.
"Drugs," Tavon interrupted. "It all always comes down to money and drugs."
"And the sons of Luther," Merle said.
"Sons?" King asked.
"Luther had a second son. Your half-brother. He goes by the name Dred."
The revelation slapped King in the face. It was as if he'd jumped into the deep end of a pool only to be caught in a riptide. He pushed away from the table, suddenly unable to catch his breath. A dark shiver ran along him. His half-brother had lived in his shadow for so long. Everyone continued their chatter without notice.
"Dred? He the one always beefin' with Night," Tavon said.
"OK, someone's going to have to slow this down for me. I can't keep all of this straight," Lott said.
"Shee-it. Any fool knows this." Tavon sat up straight, class suddenly in session. "Right now, the two biggest players in this here game are Night and Dred. Night stays over at the Phoenix. No one knows where Dred hangs his head, but rumor has it that he's been a west side nigga for life."
"So Night runs the east side and Dred runs the west side?"
"It's not that simple. You got to think of the city like a checker board. Dred has the red squares and Night has the black ones. Li'l Nam belongs to Night. Down by where you stay," Tavon turned to Wayne, "that's Dred's. But with all the real estate these two have, they steady beefin' over Breton Court."
"You know why?" King asked, though gripped with a sudden claustrophobic sense about his reality.
"No one knows. No one sees Night or Dred on the streets."
"Egbo. No go. No more," Merle offered. "They are whispers in the nightmares."
"They lieutenants do all the real work: Green for Night and Baylon for Dred," Tavon said.
Baylon. The name stung with the familiar pangs of betrayal. King thought that after all this time, hearing the name wouldn't bother him. Yet with the fresh mention, it all came rushing back. All the time they'd spent together coming up. Running through Breton Court with the air of ownership, the young princes of Breton tearing up shit until…
"What about B?" King asked Tavon.
"Who?"
"Baylon. How he fit into this?"
"He's Dred's number two. To be honest, I can't figure out why Dred reached out to him in the first place. It's not as if he had a long resume of overseeing the soldiers, not the way Dred could, even from… his situation. His name ri
ngs out like that. Baylon, though, he ain't got no name. He ain't got it like that. Everybody knows he's Dred's errand boy, eyes and ears anyway. Baylon's feeling the heat. Junie and Parker were his people. The troll brothers were called in cause Dred was looking weak."
"Sounds like the shit is building up," Wayne said.
"Yeah, that's the vibe I got," King said. "Like things are about to go to the next level."
"What you think?" Baylon stepped aside so that Michaela and Marshall could view the array unimpeded, the finest merchandise laid out for display along the table. Sig Sauer. Glock. Desert Eagle. Boxes of corresponding bullets stacked like bricks in a pyramid of violence above each. Baylon had even gone so far as to drape the table with a red velvet cloth. Presentation was important. Michaela picked up the Desert Eagle, the light glinting from it.
"They look pretty, but they a waste for us," she said.
"Why?"
"The type of move you talking about making… it ain't a gun type of play. Even if it was, we ain't exactly gun folk. We enjoy getting our hands dirty."
"I'm serious about Green," Baylon said.
"Dred cool with this? I mean, way I see it, we barely got this ship righted. Ain't no one in a position to go after Night's folk direct."
"We ain't." Baylon's face grew hot at her "we barely got this ship righted" comment; the insinuation being that he had anything to do with the ship being off-course. "We are taking out one man."
"Green's…"
"Whatever. If you ain't up for it, say the word."
"And Dred?"
"I got this. If we can handle the job."
"You don't know shit about what's what, do you? Got no idea who we are and what Green is?" Michaela squared up against him. She had a few inches on him, worse was her mien of sheer aggression. Close up, he could see each wart, each errant hair on her chin. The frenzied anger in her eyes. He'd back down if he could and noted his error in directly provoking her.
"Here's what I know and what I need to know: Night and Dred have a truce that will last as long as it takes for one of them to slide a knife into the back of the other cleanly. As I, no, we owe a lot to Dred, we have a vested interest in making sure his is not the back ventilated. As Night owes everything to Green, should he be taken out, Night becomes little more than a shadow puppet. All you got to do is tell me if you can take out Green."
"It'll be like old times," Michaela said.
The booth mates munched in relative silence. Tavon twitched, craving some candy or something else sweet to ameliorate his body's mild trembling. Lady G picked at her food, already full, calculating how to save the rest of her plate for later. King neither ate nor made eye contact with anyone.
"King," Lott began as gingerly as he could, "didn't Green kill your father?"
"That's one story," Merle said.
"What does that mean?" King felt an invisible noose continue to tighten in his life. A wave of nausea swept through him, as if he floated outside of himself while strangers dissected, and then put back together, his life story. Coincidence couldn't explain the players in the game being close enough for them to reach out to him whenever they wanted, yet he be oblivious to their presence. Shadows in plain sight.
"That's all I know, really. One story, the one the streets made legend, had Green slaying the elder Pendragon, but that never made any sense to me. Green had nothing to gain and he never operated without something to gain. Wasn't his way."
"You sound like you were there," King said.
"To you, the arrow of time points in one direction," Merle said.
The rest of the table exchanged sideways glances with one another, not knowing what to make of Merle and Tavon. Bullshit artists of the first degree, probably, like griots of African tribes telling stories for their keep. Lott and King, however, paid extra attention.
"Thing is, Green could and should be running Night's crew," Tavon continued, smacking his mouth loudly as he ate while talking. "He has the name, he has the muscle. He even had the real estate. But he lets Night run things."
"Green prefers the shadows. That's irony," Merle said.
"Green's eternal."
"That's one story. Another goes that for every spring there must be a winter."
"I'm about sick of your riddles," Wayne said.
"We all have our roles to play. I'm only a guide. He's the hero." Merle pointed his dirty-nailed thumb toward King.
"I'm no hero," King said.
"That's why we're here. Heroes, love, and spiritual quests. The story's still the same."
"Any of you know a light-skinned sister, braids, pointy ears?" King asked.
"Thus enter the fey," Merle said.
"You mean Omarosa? What you want with her?" Tavon picked at his remaining fries.
"Seen her around. She fit into any of this?" King asked. The heat of Lady G's body made him all too self-conscious. She continued to eat her fries in silence, making no claim on him. Or any man.
"She's strictly independent far as I know."
"Never accept a gift from her kind," Merle said. "And don't raise the terror of their anger."
No one believed in fairies anymore. With no belief to sustain them, most faded away to the land of Nod, the wellspring of ideas, there to remain forgotten and unmourned. When most folks thought of fairies, the image of gay sprites and winsome pixies sprang to mind. There was the whispered caution to never accept a gift from one, but for the most part, people thought of them as prancing merry-makers. Because few survived to tell the tale of the fey once angered.
On rare occasion, a rogue fairy roamed the land of mortals, engaged in a tryst of some sort, and continued their wanderings heedless of the consequences.
Omarosa was such a consequence.
The Marion County Juvenile Detention Center had grown accustomed to scandal over the years. From their issues with overcrowding to the allegations of sexual abuse (many of those charges were later dropped, but the stain remained). In the wake of the ensuing reforms, guards, inmates, and visitors wore arm bands which could even alert staff when rival gang members were in proximity to one another. Certain events caused minor cracks in the system, such as the general scoops of kids in the wake of the Breton Court shooting. With public pressure for an arrest, many kids were detained overnight as the mess sorted itself out. Parker's luck never was too good. He was merely "spectating" as he explained to the cracker-ass po-lice who questioned him. As the detective explained, "spectating" did not explain the vials he was caught with. Personal use became his mantra, a charge to be all but dismissed by over-worked judges and a crowded system, and recognized that this was little more than a charge used to remind him of his place in the greater criminal justice scheme of things. The hillbilly cop tried to half-sweat him about Dred and Night's operations ("who?") with any further questions ready to trigger his Miranda-given rights ("Law. Yer."). So he was put in a cell to give him time to think about things. A peaceful night's sleep not worrying about getting got on a corner. That was the game then.
In the game now, Omarosa stood over the sleeping Parker, letting an arm of her set of handcuffs ratchet through the main body.
Click. Click. Click.
Parker didn't stir. Asleep, he was still very much a child, a man-boy, not quite the hardened killer he wished to be. Asleep, he was someone who could be loved, who'd let someone love him. Asleep, the possibility of dreams, of a better future remained.
Omarosa knelt down and whispered in his ear.
"Parker, your destiny calls you."
He smiled upon hearing the feminine voice, the sound of rose petals against naked flesh; a tease of promise in the night and his dick hardened. A few moments later, his eyes fluttered — he required several moments to be convinced that he wasn't dreaming — not quite making out the form, enough to register that he wasn't alone. Before he could react, Omarosa grabbed him from his bed. She had him in a choke-hold, but adrenaline-fueled panic soon flooded him. He had nothing to flail against besides her as she dr
ew him to the middle of the cell. Her height advantage on him meant little compared to the blood and strength of the fey in her veins. His eyes bulged, his face reddened with his last gasps and dawning realization that he had reached his life's endgame. His arm shot out, grasping at nothing in particular, his other fist slamming weakly into Omarosa's side. Consciousness fled him and his body fell limp into her arms.
Tearing his bedsheets, she fastened a noose and propped him against the bed to let the body fall. The investigation — such as it would be since no one would look too closely for fear of the phrase "dereliction of duty" entering their job performance jackets; and with suicides being more common than anyone wanted to believe — would conclude suicide. Still, she wanted folks to know that she could reach them anywhere. She placed a black rose on the shelf above the sink. It would be a note in a file somewhere, but it would find its way into Parker's personal effects. And people would know. The fey were not to be trifled with.
You let them go about their business unless you want their terror to rain down upon you.
"Wait," Wayne said, still putting pieces together. "ESG was independent."
"Not that independent. There are a few dozen gangs here and everyone has their ties somewhere. ESG's loyalty was to Night," Tavon said. "I hear the trolls got into them."
"We were there." Wayne shifted in his seat. Lady G and Rhianna studied the napkins in their laps. Wayne told the tale of the trolls' attack on Rhianna's friends.
"And the police didn't do anything?" King asked Tavon.
"Oh, it's hot out there, for sure. Po-po out in force. But what they gonna do? Can't investigate with no body. And the trolls eat their prey. So Prez's boy is just another missing nigga. They wouldn't be looking too hard no ways."
"You know Junie? Him and some young dude he's been rollin' with," King said.
"Junie and Parker?" Tavon asked. "Yeah, I know them."
"I saw them trying to muscle Green."
"Once a fuck-up… Junie and Parker were replaced by the trolls. I hear they been demoted. Out slinging where ESG used to."
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