Hard Candy

by Amaleka McCall

  That made sense to Candice, who had listened intently. Then she begged Rock to teach her everything he knew about being a cleaner.

  Reluctantly, Rock went about training Candice, little by little, showing her the real way to hold a gun and how to use her sights. He also warned her against using the “sideways cowboy style” that hood niggas liked so much, where they ended up always missing their intended targets and shooting innocent bystanders. He also taught her the two-handed, thumb-over-thumb hold and worked with her for hours on her grip.

  “Squeeze with your support hand and relax your strong hand,” he told her, after explaining the different role each hand played.

  Candice found that this method was quite effective at keeping the weapon from flying up out of her small hands whenever she shot.

  Uncle Rock made her stand with the gun in her hands in the proper hold and with her arms extended for long periods of time.

  “This is so you never get tired in a gunfight,” he explained. “You need to be able to shoot until the threat is eliminated.”

  He also tested Candice on the nomenclature of several types of weapons, including the MP5. Rock took Candice to a gun range in New Jersey and trained her until all of her shots were center of mass on the targets. He even taught her about different types of cover, showing her how to blade her body behind something as skinny as a pole and become nearly invisible to a distant target.

  Candice had the most fun when Uncle Rock showed her how to shoot from a prone position and from a fetal position with the gun between her knees. Hitting a target center of mass while lying down on her side and stomach was exciting.

  “See, as long as you use your sights and have the proper trigger pull, you can hit anything from any position,” Uncle Rock told her.

  Uncle Rock spent an entire week using himself as a crash test dummy as he taught Candice how to make a person catatonic with pressure points on the body, like the jugular notch and brachial stun. When she placed her index and middle fingers into his jugular notch and applied pressure, she forced his large body to his knees.

  Gasping for breath afterwards, Uncle Rock told her she was a natural. He’d even tested her on the arteries she needed to hit “to make someone bleed out in less than ten seconds.” Candice had remembered the term femoral artery by equating the word femoral with female, she being a female that now knew how to kill someone in ten seconds.

  Rock didn’t know if it was his overwhelming sense of loyalty to Easy or guilt that made him take care of Candice and guard her with his own life. Today he watched his protégée prance toward his apartment door as she prepared to leave. She’d grown into a beautiful young lady, a far cry from the rail-thin tomboy that had shown up on his doorstep.

  Rock had protested initially when she first told him she planned to move out. He knew deep down inside that one day she’d grow up and leave his home. He also knew of her intentions on the streets. Rock had failed to take revenge on the people responsible for the massacre of the Hardaway family. At the time, he felt he was too emotional after the murders to exact revenge, but he’d also been very preoccupied with caring for Candice. He refused to carry out hits while his emotions were running wild. Being emotional while working could cost him his life. Rock’s philosophy was that emotions weakened one’s natural instincts.

  In the end, all of the suspects ended up literally getting away with murder. Rock knew who they were and their street affiliations. The streets were always talking. He had even taken pictures of them and done a history workup on them, complete with addresses and criminal histories, and had stored the information in a secure hiding spot from Candice. Or so he thought.

  Rock watched Candice as she walked out of the door. He started coughing fiercely as soon as she left. He coughed until he began to gag. He looked down at the towel he held to his mouth and stared at the Rorschach inkblot pattern of bright red blood. He didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to hide his illness from Candice, whose face he could see in his mind’s eye.

  He closed his eyes and felt nostalgic about how far he’d come and how much he had grown to love the little girl who had shown up at his door so many years ago.

  Rock had been drafted into the United States Marines when he was just seventeen years old. He never protested the draft because he’d grown up extremely poor. When the United States first went to war with Vietnam, he’d heard on the streets that the soldiers were being paid high salaries and provided with great benefits, so he didn’t bother to dodge the draft like some of the guys he knew from his neighborhood. When he left for the war, his mother never shed a tear for him. He had been a great burden to her, another mouth to feed. He’d been sent to Vietnam a boy and returned a man.

  Rock joined the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command and became a trained Scout Sniper. He had served the United States proudly until he was assigned to a POW (prisoner of war) rescue mission. Rock was to be the countersniper assigned to assist the Force Recon officers, a group of elite reconnaissance Marines who carried out deep reconnaissance operations.

  When he and the other highly trained Marines arrived in the remote village in Vietnam, they had instructions and intelligence information necessary to find the American POWs. But all of those plans went out of the window when they arrived and found nothing but women and children in the camp. Some of the Recon Marines, believing that the women were hiding and covering up for the Vietnamese soldiers, began beating and torturing some of the women and children, cutting them with knives and pouring salt on their wounds, and removing fingernails and toenails. Of course, these methods didn’t work. The intel was bad from the very beginning, and the Vietnamese civilians suffered enormously because of it.

  Rock witnessed a Marine attempt to rape and sodomize a five-year-old Vietnamese girl. The white Marine had been behaving erratically throughout the entire mission. He would laugh at nothing in particular, and he liked to collect bones from dead bodies they’d pass in the jungle. The Marine grabbed the little girl, kicking and screaming, from her mother’s arms. He used a hunting knife to cut away her clothes. Then he threw her tiny naked body down on the ground and dropped to his knees in front of her, as her mother let out bloodcurdling screams from behind.

  “Shut the fuck up!” He cracked the mother in the face with the butt of his gun.

  Some of the Marines watched, while others turned away.

  Rock’s heart throbbed against his chest bone as the Marine attempted to mount the girl. He quickly took action, by grabbing him by his neck and dragging him away from the little Vietnamese girl.

  Some of the white Marines yelled at Rock.

  “What the fuck you doing, Barton? You nigger!”

  Rock ignored them. He took the Marine by the scruff of his neck and proceeded to bang his head face-first into a huge tree trunk, rendering him unconscious instantly. The Marine’s face split open like a watermelon.

  But Rock was possessed. He continued to bang the Marine’s head on the tree. When he fell to the ground, he started to kick him all over his body.

  Rock ended up beating his fellow Marine to death and shooting two others who tried to stop him. Rock went on the run in the Vietnamese jungle for two weeks after that, surviving on sheer instincts and highly classified countersniper training he’d received from the military.

  When American soldiers finally found him, they treated him worse than some of the Vietnamese prisoners being held by the Americans. He was beaten and tortured. Rock was dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps and held in a military prison for a courtmartial.

  However, it wasn’t long before the CIA heard of his superior abilities to move alone in the jungles of Vietnam. And they offered Rock a deal he could not refuse. Rock became a covert operations officer for the CIA in lieu of being court-martialed and sent to prison for the murder of his fellow soldiers. Serving as a CIA covert ops officer was ultimately where Rock learned how to make himself invisible and to make people disappear. The government had trained hi
m to be a first-class “cleaner.”

  When Rock finally returned to the United States after the war, he chose to live a demure, circumspect life. He ended up in his hometown of Brooklyn, New York, where he rented a small apartment and began his very low-key life. Rock would leave his apartment once a day to purchase food and staples he needed for that day, frequenting the same store each day, a small bodega two blocks up from his apartment, which was where he’d first met Eric “Easy” Hardaway. Rock always felt that their meeting was predestined.

  It was a hot summer night, and Rock had already turned in for the day. He’d gone on his morning store run and purchased some of his usual food items, like green tea, whole wheat bread, and skim milk. On that particular day, after the sun had gone down, Rock started feeling slightly ill. Rock was never one to get sick and could count on one hand the number of times he’d had so much as a common cold. But, that day, he had an incessant pounding in his head and a very high fever. He’d tossed and turned for hours before deciding he needed to get some pain relief.

  When he got to the bodega, he noticed several guys hanging around talking and several skeletal-looking men and women passing the guys every couple of minutes. Rock wasn’t stupid. It was clear to him that there was drug dealing going on. He wasn’t judgmental about anyone’s hustle. Some of the guys noticed Rock, and a few of them made comments.

  “Look at old dude walking around like the grim fuckin’ reaper,” one of the young guys commented about his all-black clothes and his size, garnering laughs from the others.

  “I see that big-ass nigga e’ery day, and he always look scary as hell. That m’fucka taller than Shaq,” another one of the guys joked.

  “I don’t care how big that bitch-ass nigga is. His ass better be scared of this,” the first guy said, lifting his shirt to display a firearm in the front waistband of his pants.

  Rock continued to walk into the store. All of his life people had commented on his size—six feet nine inches tall and a good two hundred and sixty pounds. Rock’s skin was like onyx, and his eyes were perfectly round, like big dark brown marbles. His hands were so big, he could palm a basketball and get his fingers around the top and bottom of the ball.

  Rock took notice of all of the men and made mental notes of their most prominent features. He locked eyes with one of the young guys who didn’t make any comments about his appearance. Rock noticed that the guy was quiet, stood alone, and did his hand-to-hand sales very discreetly. Rock could tell this young dude didn’t want fame and glory, unlike the other loudmouth punks on the corner. Something about the quiet kid bothered him.

  Rock entered the store and stood at the counter buying his BC Powder for the pounding pain in his head. As the clerk rang up his purchase, Rock kept his eye on the corner boys. Rock shook his head left and right, the pain nearly blinding him. But he continued to watch the quiet boy, sensing that something was very wrong. Finally, Rock waved it off, silently scolding himself for being paranoid. He decided to go home and mind his business.

  As he was preparing to leave the store, he noticed that the quiet kid had suddenly started arguing with a girl. The skinny, poorly dressed girl looked like she was on some serious drugs. Her clothes hung off her bony body, and dirt was visible on her pants and the front of her shirt. And her hair was a wild bird’s nest atop her head.

  Rock could see her wagging a skeletal finger at the quiet boy, who was up in her face by now. He stopped for a minute and watched the exchange, but he couldn’t hear the words.

  The quiet kid, a scowl on his face, suddenly grabbed the horrible-looking girl around her neck and picked her up off her feet. She was dangling like a choked chicken.

  The other boys on the corner laughed, jumping up and down, egging the quiet boy on.

  Then, out of the corner of his left eye, Rock noticed a strange man in a swinging black trench coat rush up from the corner behind the quiet kid. Rock was immediately on alert. A trench coat in the sticky August heat was a definite red flag.

  The quiet corner boy dropped the girl back to her feet and gave her a kick in her ass, and she scrambled up off the ground, still screaming and arguing with him.

  The stranger in the trench coat seemed to pick up his stride.

  Rock noticed the gun that the man had secreted up against his leg. All of a sudden, Rock was on the move. He dropped the BC Powder on the floor and rushed out of the bodega. He took five huge strides and was standing behind the quiet kid as the trench coat stranger got right up on him.

  The trench coat stranger with the gun was caught off guard by Rock’s interference, but he still attempted to raise his weapon hand. He never got the chance, though.

  Rock grabbed the man’s wrist and clamped down on his “God’s notch,” and the bones in the man’s wrist immediately crumbled under Rock’s grasp. The man cried out in pain as the gun fell to the ground.

  When the guys on the corner noticed the commotion, they all began to scatter.

  “Oh shit! A gun!” one of them yelled.

  Rock realized his first impression of the so-called tough guys on the corner was right. They were pussies.

  The girl who was engaged in the argument with the quiet corner boy immediately stopped screaming and rushed to the aid of her man, who was rolling around on the ground in severe pain. “Baby, you okay?” she cried out.

  Rock picked up the man’s gun, dropped the magazine out of it, dismantled the slide, and threw the bottom half of the gun at him.

  “Oh shit! That bitch tried to set me up!” the quiet corner boy screamed, his heart racing as he realized what had just happened.

  Rock nodded in agreement.

  “Fuck! Thank God you were here. That nigga woulda shot me right in the back of my fuckin’ head,” the quiet boy said to Rock.

  Rock nodded again, but still no words.

  “I’ma fuckin’ kill him!” the boy screamed.

  Rock put his hand up to the boy’s chest to stop him. “Not here. Not now,” he said calmly.

  The boy backed down. Something about Rock’s words, the way he said them, had calmed him. “I’m Eric,” he said, introducing himself, “but everybody calls me Easy.”

  “Rock.” He shook Easy’s hand firmly.

  “Yo, man, how can I repay you for that shit?” Easy asked as he eyed the girl and the guy scurrying away.

  “No need.” Rock handed Easy the magazine full of .40-caliber rounds and the slide of his would-be assassin’s gun.

  “Nah, there has got to be something. Some money, some food, clothes, something,” Easy said.

  “Just go inside and get my BC Powder. I have the worst headache,” Rock said.

  Easy scrambled to do as Rock asked, and their friendship was sealed after that day.

  Rock had never given Easy a price for saving his life, but as Easy moved up in the game, he continued to look out for Rock. Every day when Rock went to the store, Easy would pay for his groceries, and they’d walk and talk.

  Soon, Easy graduated in the game from corner boy to boss, but he continued to frequent the neighborhood just to visit Rock. He and Rock had gone from walking and talking, to riding in whatever luxury car he had on a particular day. Easy and Rock would have long, serious talks about life.

  Rock grew to trust Easy, which wasn’t an uncomplicated undertaking. Easy also grew to trust Rock. In fact, Rock was the one person Easy trusted with his life. Easy trusted Rock so much, he shared his childhood with him, specifically his being born into the game. Literally.

  Easy’s mother was one of the first female drug dealers in Brooklyn. His father had turned her on to the game, and they were an unstoppable duo, until jealous rival dealers executed them both. Easy grew up with his grandmother, who he believed died of a broken heart shortly after his mother’s murder. Then he moved in with an aunt, who treated him like shit and let her husband beat Easy at will. Though Easy didn’t have an easy life, he was convinced that he knew how to hold his own in the streets.

  Rock wasn’t impressed.
Easy still had a lot to learn. In turn, Rock revealed to Easy his talents as a professional cleaner for the CIA.

  Easy was impressed. Sometimes he would joke with Rock and say stuff like, “Get the fuck outta here, Rock! That’s some shit out of the movies.”

  Then came the day when Easy’s life hung in the balance once again. A rival hustler had threatened his life and murdered one of Easy’s workers, to drive home the point. This time, Easy hired Rock to take care of his problem. The job was done so well, the police never found the man or any trace of him, despite the number of missing persons posters hanging in the neighborhood. Rock had made him ghost and had quickly become Easy’s personal hired cleaner.

  Easy used Rock to carry out his most high-profile hits, but no one on the streets knew about Rock, who was like a ghost himself. He’d appear when Easy needed him, and disappear just as quickly. He could wipe out a person’s entire identity, but he did have one rule that he never broke—no women and no children. That became Easy’s street creed as well. Rock didn’t mind carrying out Easy’s hits because, unlike the government, for which he carried out hits on people simply because they had information that made the government look bad, Easy killed only people who tried to harm him or his family.

  When Easy met Corine, he went to Rock for advice about whether or not he should trust her. Corine, the daughter of a retired NYPD homicide detective, had been forbidden to see Easy. Easy desperately needed Rock’s advice, but Rock, unable to speak about women or love with Easy, clammed up and cut his visit with Easy short when the subject of Corine came up. And Easy didn’t push the issue.

  It was a sensitive topic for Rock. The one woman he’d loved had gotten pregnant by another man by the time he returned from the war. At least that was what she told Rock when he returned home to find her with a son. Rock was devastated. The entire time he was at war, she had been his motivation to return home.