Murdergram, Part 2

by Nisa Santiago

Sharon a police officer. Who would have thought? They had been good friends growing up. Like hers, Sharon’s life had changed dramatically. Years ago, neither of them would have even thought about becoming a cop or a paid murderer. They once lived normal lives doing teenage things and having teenage problems. They were into the boys, especially the bad boys, and committing illegal acts to come up in their neighborhood.

  Cristal didn’t have any beef with Sharon becoming a police officer. In fact, she was proud of her. With what she had been through, her friend deserved some happiness in her life. Sharon was the only one who’d made it out of the ghetto unharmed, despite witnessing her boyfriend’s murder. She and Tamar had taken away the best thing Sharon had in her life, Pike. They were obviously in love, but because of choices that were made, offing Pike was unavoidable.

  The cab went through the Midtown Tunnel and emerged into midtown Manhattan. The early hour made the traffic tolerable. The cab continued to head west, toward the Waldorf Astoria.

  When the cab pulled up to the luxury hotel on Park Avenue, Cristal already had his fare in hand. She passed him a hundred-dollar bill and said, “Keep the change.”

  “Wow! Thank you, miss,” he said joyously.

  She couldn’t help but smile for a fleeting second as she removed herself from the cab and walked toward the hotel. At six a.m., the Waldorf wasn’t yet completely alive with activity. She sauntered into the grand lobby with the giant crystal chandelier and marble flooring amid the architectural grandeur and sophisticated style.

  She went to the front desk to check in. She looked like a tourist in the city for personal reasons, but it was business. Her target was staying there so she wanted to be close. Lincoln Center wasn’t far from the hotel.

  She walked into her hotel room, which featured an oversized marble bathroom, and gazed out the window from the tenth floor. It felt good to be back in the city again. She had missed it.

  Now that Cristal was there, it was time to put her skills to use. Taking someone’s life for profit had become the norm for her a long time ago. She never lost any sleep over the people she had killed through the years. It had her thinking, Why was I born to do this?

  ...

  Being back in New York for the moment and having some time to spare, Cristal took some free time for herself. She took a taxicab to a place to the last place she expected to be. She had no idea why she’d come, but she was there, standing in front of Pike’s grave. He was her first kill outside of the Farm. He was her friend, but yet, for advancement in their coldblooded careers, she and Tamar had taken him out like he was a bug on the concrete. She stared at his headstone and remembered the good times they had together as friends. At one point, Cristal liked him and wanted to fuck him, but Sharon beat her to the punch. She had been happy for her friend.

  So much had changed since that summer. But now wasn’t a time to reflect on the past. The past was dead to her, and all of her friends, Mona and Lisa, were dead too. Sharon was living a new life, and Tamar, though she was still alive, the bitch was dead to her. Cristal wanted that meaning to become literal.

  She crouched lower to Pike’s grave and exhaled. The summer sun was bearing down on her, and the environment was tranquil. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “It was a job, and you truly didn’t deserve this.” Thinking back was painful, so she tried not to do it. She didn’t shed any tears. Her well had dried a long time ago. Each passing day seemed like it was harder than the next, but she carried on.

  Cristal rose to her feet and turned, making her exit from the cemetery. She climbed back into the idling cab waiting for her outside the gates of the cemetery. She sat back and told the driver, “Take me back to the city.”

  He nodded, put the cab into drive, and drove off slowly.

  While riding in the backseat, she closed her eyes and drifted off to a place before the turbulence and the bloodshed. She popped a few pills into her mouth without any chaser. With her eyes closed, the window down, and the cool breeze blowing against her, she tried to cure her issues. The medication was a temporary relief.

  The stress of another contract to fulfill wasn’t much of a burden; the more bodies, the easier the killing became. It only took patience and cunning movements to become a devious contract killer. She couldn’t afford to make any mistakes, so every movement she made was well planned. A Chinese diplomat would be one of her most difficult assignments. Chow Ling Tao was a popular and wealthy man with a lot of enemies. He walked around with security, with all of his movements recorded and watched. It was going to take someone with balls, great tactical skills, wits, and patience to take him out. Cristal was all of the above.

  She was in the man’s head, already knowing his routine and his schedule. She had hacked into his computer, observed him and his security detail from afar, and studied his favorite places to eat while visiting the city. Now, all that was left was when and where to strike with the least risk.

  She had assessed different locations, from the Waldorf to Lincoln Center, and tried to determine which site in Manhattan would be most conducive to a long-range assassination.

  Earlier, she had gone to see her handler—Mr. Zero was what they called him—at an undisclosed location in New Jersey. The handler worked various locations throughout the nation. He was something like a moving parts store, except that he moved deadly weapons, from handguns and grenades to long-range sniper rifles and bombs.

  Mr. Zero pulled up in his black old-school Lincoln Continental and stepped out, pulling on a cigarette and looking harder than any man Cristal had ever known. He was an older Italian man who moved with confidence. His face was blunt, with harsh features, like he’d been chipped from rock and all the rough edges left untouched. The lines in his pale face looked like wrinkled paper, and his eyes were colder than the Arctic and exhibited a man who been there and done that—a retired stone-cold killer. He was of average height, stocky, and dressed in nondescript dark pants and a dark jacket, the gray in his cropped hair a testament to his age.

  With his keys in his hand, he opened the trunk to reveal the goodies he had for Cristal. The trunk of the Continental was filled with guns, guns, and more guns. While standing by the trunk, smoking his cigarette, Mr. Zero eyed Cristal from head to toe and said, “Take your time, and let the weapon pick you.”

  Cristal nodded.

  She opted to go with a Blaser R93 LRS2 sniper rifle. It had to be assembled, but that wasn’t a problem for Cristal. She removed it from his trunk and placed it into a briefcase.

  Mr. Zero nodded. “Great choice.” He closed his trunk, walked toward the driver’s side, and climbed into his car.

  The deed was done. No more words were exchanged between them.

  Cristal walked the opposite way with the briefcase in hand. Now that she had the weapon, it was time to make headlines.

  For the next two days, Cristal acted like she was a tourist and went sight-seeing to kill some time. She visited Times Square, walked through Central Park, went up to the top of the Empire State Building, and wined and dined herself in some lovely restaurants. It was her job to act unassuming, and she did a very good job at it. Regardless of the troubles and demons plaguing her mind, she pulled off being the perfect easygoing character. No one would’ve suspected she was in town for something sinister.

  Ten

  The clear day, with a warm sun pitched high in the sky, looked like a postcard moment. Tamar found herself engrossed in Melissa Chin’s new book as she sat butt-naked on her balcony. She became infuriated reading through the remaining pages of the latest novel. It was all there, their story, from beginning to end, but it was being told as fiction. It read like a Donald Goines novel, well written and detailed. Laced within the pages were the exploits of her former crew, once known as the Cristal Clique. Tandi and Olivia, two characters in the book, obviously represented herself and Cristal, the difference being the characters all grew up in Harlem, while Tamar and Cristal had grown up in Brooklyn. Tamar was reading the same events they went thro
ugh with only the names and locations changed.

  In Melissa Chin’s first book, it was all about boosting, sex, stealing, fighting, and growing up rough in the jaws of Harlem, trying not to be swallowed and forgotten. The writer was way too familiar with Tamar and her friends’ lives. In one chapter of the book, one secret was spilled that only Tamar, Cristal, and Mona knew about.

  Tandi and I came up with the plan to rob the Chinese man late that evening, and Sarah had no choice but to go along with it. We were hungry like an African village, and with only three dollars between the three of us, we decided to commit our first wicked act. The deliveryman seemed like an easy mark. We would always see him delivering for Great Wall throughout our hood on his colorful moped with his own ghetto pass to come through untouched because niggas were always hungry. Tandi made the call. Sarah and I were nervous, but ready to go through with it. We were fifteen years old, bored, hungry, and broke, and we wanted to have some fun and feed our stomachs at the same time.

  After placing the order, the only thing left to do was to wait. Forty minutes later, there was a knock at the apartment door. It wasn’t our place; we weren’t stupid enough to give him our real address. The apartment we occupied that evening was a former crack den that had been vacant for weeks. Police had raided it a few weeks back, arrested everybody, and didn’t secure it well enough. So, we took advantage of the place. We had sex and sucked dick there, smoked weed, drank, joked around, and loitered in the apartment, making it our own ghetto haven.

  Tandi was always the wildest and most promiscuous one out of all of us. With the delivery man knocking, waiting to make his delivery, she looked at me and Sarah, and said, “Watch how I get this nigga’s attention.”

  Unexpectedly, she stripped down to her panties and bra and went to answer the door raw like that. That was Tandi, unpredictable and crazy to do anything for attention. She opened the door, and once that China deliveryman caught a good look at the fifteen-year-old showing off her curves, ample breasts, and brown skin, he was utterly shocked.

  “You got my food, right?” Tandi said, smiling at him.

  He nodded. “Twen-tee fif-tee,” he said.

  “Okay, let me get the money.” She pivoted and walked away, luring him deeper into the apartment.

  Once he stepped foot inside, I hit him in the back of the head with a brick from outside. I didn’t think I had hit him that hard, but he tumbled over like a tree, falling face-first against the dusty floor. I saw blood and panicked. He wasn’t moving at all.

  “Oh shit!” Sarah uttered, looking wide-eyed and scared.

  “Yo, get the food!” Tandi said.

  Sarah quickly snatched the plastic bag of food from the floor.

  Tandi had another brainstorm. She was ready to knock out two birds with one stone. “Yo, go through his pockets. I know this nigga got money in them.”

  I went through his pockets and removed ninety-five dollars. I was so nervous, I could feel my heart trying to beat through my chest. It sounded like the loudest thing in the room.

  “He dead?” Sarah asked.

  “Nah,” Tandi said, dressing quickly. “Olivia just fucked him up, but he ain’t dead.”

  We rushed from that apartment like it was on fire and about to disintegrate. We had our food and some spending cash. As we were trying to ease all of our nerves and forget about what we’d done, we filled our stomachs with free food and got high from two blunts. The next day we went shopping on Pitkin Avenue.

  Tamar clenched her fist, her blood boiling. After reading that chapter about her life from years ago, she wanted to tear the pages from the book and burn them, but there were plenty more books where that came from. She remembered that night so vividly in her head. The man wasn’t dead, but Cristal had really fucked him up. It was on the news that he had to be taken to the hospital and received seventeen stitches in the back of his head. Subsequently, he’d suffered some brain damage.

  But they’d never told anyone about that incident. They had all gotten away with it. Detectives did a thorough investigation, but never came sniffing the girls’ way. The call was made from a public payphone, and the address was a vacant apartment commonly used by everyone living in the projects. So who was snitching suddenly? Both Cristal and Mona were dead . . . unless Mona told someone before her death.

  In Melissa Chin’s second novel, she wrote about when they were seventeen and a friend of theirs was murdered brutally:

  I can remember standing on the Harlem corner with Tandi and Sarah one summer afternoon, when suddenly cop cars came flying by us with their lights blaring. They came to an abrupt stop in the vacant parking lot. A body had been found in the dumpster. The word had gotten out that it was a young girl our age, dead. She was naked, brutally beaten, raped and thrown out like she was yesterday’s trash.

  We were all taken aback by the news, but we were even more taken aback when we found out the identity of the girl. Her name was Shakiyla Davis. We went to school together, and she lived around the corner from me. I couldn’t hold back my tears after hearing about what happened to her, Sarah too. But Tandi remained aloof and showed no empathy at all.

  That day, I saw something in Tandi, something sinister, like she could be a serial killer in the making. What I saw in her didn’t scare me, but it intrigued me. Death didn’t seem to bother her; in fact, I think she was fascinated by it. Was I too? We were all subversive creatures from the ghetto, trying to find our way, trying to survive somehow, some way.

  It didn’t take long for Shakiyla’s mother to hear about her daughter’s gruesome death, and she came running from her apartment in an undignified haste. The tears had already started brewing in her eyes, panic on her face; it was a look that I will never forget. When she reached the crime scene, her daughter’s body had already been removed from the foul-smelling dumpster and covered with a white sheet. She collapsed in the arms of her neighbor, falling to her knees in grief. She shrieked and cried so loud, her wail pierced all of Brooklyn that afternoon.

  Tamar continued reading the second book. It was only the beginning of more secrets, lies, motives, and murders that were never to be told again being revealed through works of fiction. One chapter was particularly worrisome to Tamar. It delved into the details of the Commission, but was renamed the Syndicate in the trilogy.

  The third book was the one E.P. had left on her bed. This one was the biscuits and gravy of the trilogy. The drama between Tandi, Olivia, and Sarah escalated. Supposedly, it was the last book, but at the end, it hinted at another book being written.

  The area in Texas was a hamlet and census-designated place, almost on the tip of Texas in the town of Galveston. White people were everywhere, smiling, looking jolly like Santa Claus, and hurrying to their purpose of the day. We all felt like fish out of water, everything being strange and new to us.

  The instructions given to me once we arrived in town were to go to a Baptist church located five miles from the railroad station. There wasn’t any pickup service for us. We had to find our own way to this church where our lives were supposedly going to change for the better.

  We finally arrived at the white-steepled Baptist church on Johnson Avenue in the quiet suburban area with the picketed fences, tree-lined streets, and sprawling green lawns. We had to split the fare between the four of us, a worrisome feeling, since we were on our last dime. Shit, we’d never been outside of New York before, and now we were over a thousand miles away from home in some small Texas country town without a clue what to do next.

  The cab driver gazed at me evenly. “Is there a problem here, ladies?”

  “Nah, no problem,” I returned unworriedly, focusing on the driver.

  “You sure there’s no problem here?” the driver reiterated evenly.

  I told him, “Look, we pay you to drive us around, not to be in our fuckin’ business.”

  Why I had the sudden irritation, I didn’t know. I was scared, but didn’t want to show it. I was told to come to Texas believing the words of a
man I really liked.

  The driver laughed out of the blue. He lit a cigarette and fixed his attention on me and my friends.

  “You girls need help, I see,” the man said.

  “We don’t need help,” I spat.

  “You sure about that, Olivia?” he asked.

  “How did you know my name?” I exclaimed.

  He puffed on his cigarette and breathed out smoke. He looked into the eyes of all of us, a steady calm about him. He wasn’t in any rush to answer my question. I wasn’t important to him. Like L.T., he had a job to do. He was paid by the Syndicate to subtly observe our behavior upon our arrival in Texas and give a vital report on each and every one of us. Unbeknownst to us, the testing had already started. We were potential recruits, and once recruits arrived into the town, they were watched as if by a hawk. The people watching could be anybody: the cab driver, a sanitation worker, a cop, the conductor, a housewife, or a teenage girl. It didn’t matter. The Syndicate employed people of all ethnicities, creeds, and occupations.

  I asked sternly again, “How did you know my name?”

  “Because, I was paid to know about you,” the man replied with nonchalance.

  It suddenly dawned on me that he was part of the Syndicate, or hired by them. My heart jumped, my fiery attitude changed suddenly, and I quickly apologized to him for my behavior.

  We entered the Baptist church and saw about thirty other people inside, black, white, and Hispanic, mostly young and eager-looking, supposedly new recruits from all over vying to work for the Syndicate. Everyone in the room stood around looking lost and out of place, until they were told to find a seat in the pews.

  An hour after entering the church, conversations going on, and strangers trying to become familiar with each other, a well-dressed but hard-looking white man with a faded teardrop tattoo under his right eye that looked like it was in the process of being removed by laser and a strong German accent came out to greet us.

  “Willkommen jeder!” the man said loudly to the crowd in German, which meant “Welcome, everyone.”