“Alright, man. I ain’t strapped so don’t shoot.”
“Fool, I should waste your punk ass right now. Now get your ass da fuck up!”
Tank came rushing in carrying a half-empty garbage bag that I knew carried the rocks.
“Yo, what’s goin’ on?”
“You missed one,” I said, trying to deflect the blame onto him.
Tank’s eyes darted from me to the kid in the red and black Air Jordans who was slowly rising to his knees, shaking himself out from under the bodies of his two homies who had died right on top of him. He was wearing a goosedown bomber jacket that had taken several hits leaking feathers out of the bullet holes.
“I ain’t miss shit! The mutherfucker’s wearing Kevlar. I guess he wasn’t totally stupid.”
Tank dropped the garbage bag and leveled the AK at the kid’s head.
“Don’t worry about this shit. This nigga ain’t goin’ nowhere. Just grab the money over there by the guns.”
I turned my full attention to the lone survivor of our assault.
“Now, muthafucka, you tryin to play possum with me? What was you just goin’ to lay in the cut until we turned our backs then try to blast us? You ain’t got to answer that shit. That’s what I would have tried to do myself.”
Tank called from the kitchen.
“All this money in here ain’t nuthin’ but ones and fives and bags of change and shit.” Tank called out, throwing down a big handful of bills like it was cheap confetti.
“That’s the money they must have got dealin’ off the street, but they had fools workin’ for them which meant they was handlin’ weight. There should be some larger bills in there too.”
“I’m tellin’ you bro, there ain’t shit in here but a couple thousand in small bills.”
“Bullshit!”
I slid the Berretta into the kid’s mouth.
“Where the fuck is the real money? Don’t make me have to ask you twice because I know I don’t stutter.”
“It’s in the freezer man.”
“Check that shit, Tank. If he’s lyin’ I’m gonna’ blast this fool a second asshole.”
“I ain’t lyin’. I swear.”
“Yeah? Well we’re about to see.”
“Ay, the money’s here, bro. Let’s take this shit and get ghost.”
“Naw. Me and this muthafucka got shit to discuss. He owes me some pain. Now, bitch, do you want to live?”
“Y-yeah, yeah, man. I don’t wanna die.” He began to sob.
“Fuck you cryin’ for? I’m about to give you a chance to live. You should be celebratin’. I could have just capped your ass. Now let me tell you about these two movies I saw once.”
A crowd had gathered outside the door. I needed to do something that would shock all of them into silence. Make them too petrified to ever think about talking to the cops. There was another reason for what I was about to do though. I wanted to send a message to the other crews as well. I wanted to make sure that no little punk ass upstarts ever got it in their heads to try dealing on our turf again.
It had become common for the police to find gang murder victims who had been horribly tortured with razorblades, cigarettes, who had teeth and fingernails missing where they had been crudely yanked out with pliers, mutilated genitals, broom sticks and glass bottles rammed into their rectums, anything to send the proper warning to the next man. “Don’t fuck with us!” I personally knew guys who had disposed of enemies by letting pitbulls tear them to pieces. I wasn’t into all of that. Honestly, I wouldn’t have had the stomach for it despite my roguish reputation. Still, I had to stay current in my methods, which meant a certain amount of creative flair had to be employed now and then.
I knew someone had called the cops, but it would be a while before they arrived. No cop was in a hurry to come to the projects and they weren’t about to come until they could assemble damn near every unit they had; not for a drug bust with shots fired. This gave me some time to deliver my message.
“See, in this one flick, there was these Japanese gangstas. One of these dudes disgraces himself and dishonors his crew so he cuts off his finger and gives it to his boss as a sign of respect. Because he did that, even though he fucked up, they didn’t smoke his ass. They forgave him because they knew what kind of guts it took to cut off his own finger. It showed loyalty and balls. But then see, there was this other movie. It was about these Haitian drug dealers. Well, they castrated this mutherfucker for dissin’ them. Cut his whole shit right off and tossed it to the dogs. You see what I’m tryin’ to tell you here, man? You got two choices, bro. You can either be Japanese or Haitian.”
I pulled out one of those cheap buck knives they sell everywhere and handed it to this petrified kid. He was just staring at it trying to pretend that he didn’t know what I was getting at. But he knew. I could see it in his eyes. I saw his eyes light up as a thought came into his head. This fool would have gotten cleaned out in poker because his face betrayed everything. I knew what he was thinking before he’d fully apprehended the thought himself. I realized then that I hadn’t reloaded but I didn’t think the kid had the heart to do what he was contemplating anyway. I cocked the hammer back on the Berretta just to bluff him, besides, I had seen Tank pop a new clip in the AK and he was once again standing right beside me. He had all the money stuffed in a trash bag along with the rocks and the powder and was looking impatient.
“That knife ain’t gonna do you much good in a gunfight, bro,” I said, putting the Berretta up against his temple and watching that light of hope snuff out like a candle the instant he felt the metal touch his skin.
“C’mon, Snap! Let’s just body this coward and break tha fuck out.”
“Fuck dat! If he wants to live he’ll give me a finger or else word to God I’m gonna shoot this nigga’s dick off!”
Then it happened. A loud scream tore from the kid’s throat and he brought the knife down on his thumb, cutting clean through the bone. Tears were streaming down his face as he held the finger out to me.
“Please, don’t kill me. Don’t kill me. Please. Please!”
He was sweating like a runaway slave and tears mixed with snot and saliva drooled from his mouth in long ropes. His eyes were bulging and fidgeting in their eye-sockets. I couldn’t have imagined a more pathetic site. He had lost his mind just like that. Scared stupid.
“Yo, man, shoot this nigga. He done bugged da fuck out!”
I shook my head, trying to get the image out of my mind before it could take root and form another unwanted memory. It was too much. This shit was getting to me. I was losing the plot. It wouldn’t be too long before I was a gibbering buffoon just like this fool. This shit had to stop. I had to get out.
“You shoot him. I’m out of bullets.”
I snatched the bag from his hand and stumbled over the bodies and out of the apartment, my Timberlands sloshing through the puddles of blood. I walked into a hallway crowded with spectators. I was mindless of their stares. It was a given that they would all lose their memories by the time the police rolled up. Scratch ran shit in the projects and I was his most feared enforcer and you didn’t drop dime on either one of us if you placed any value at all on your life.
The AK erupted seconds after I had left the room. Tank was right behind me as I took the stairs two at a time. The whole thing had taken less than fifteen minutes, about ten minutes longer than it should have, but I knew that we still had at least another five minutes before the cops arrived. Niggas killing niggas didn’t make for an emergency in North Philly. The cops down there didn’t like the idea of getting in gunfights inside the buildings. Everyone in the projects hated cops, almost all of them were armed, and police were their common enemies. Every door they passed on the way up to the crime scene held the potential for a hero’s funeral. All the police who patrolled these slums did was steal from the younger dealers and shake down the crack whores for pussy and head. Whenever anything serious went down they would wait until they were sure the gunmen
had fled the scene before they went busting in. It was better to catch the perpetrators hours later when they were hiding under their grandmother’s bed than to step into some violent drama.
When Tank and I got back to G-town I was determined that I had done my last job for Scratch. I had said that before. But this time was different. We had never done anything this crazy before, walking into the middle of a drug den with no obvious means for a quick escape and blasting away like cowboys. We had done plenty of drive-bys and even close up and personal shit. But nothing this dangerous before. If I could have gotten a job sweeping floors and cleaning toilets right then I would have taken it without hesitation, but I knew that a day or two listening to the snickers of disrespect from my peers and I’d pick up the gun again. My pride would always make me choose gunshots and blood over humility. Even if it was the blood of people the same color as me.
Huey was right. I was a sell-out. I was working for a blue-eyed devil committing genocide against my own people.
If God truly loves Black folks I’ll die in my sleep. I thought as I laid down in my bed and tried to cry myself to sleep. It didn’t surprise me at all when neither sleep nor tears would come.
— | — | —
Chapter 11
“…Nothing undermines the Christian belief in God more than the existence of evil. If God is all-good and all-powerful, how can God allow evil to happen?”
—Roy F. Baumeiste, PH.D,
EVIL, Inside Human Violence and Cruelty
««—»»
Scratch was feeling desperate. Sweat bulleted down his pale face as his eyes darted from one side of the street to the other, probing every shadow for signs of life. His expression was no different than that of the drug addicts he passed. Each shambling corpse-like crack-fiend alerted his senses like a shark smelling blood in the water. His prey was somewhere close. He could almost smell her.
Trash blew down the street like tumbleweeds pushed by a gentle breeze. Packs of mongrel dogs hunted through the alleys for garbage, growling cautiously at the dope fiends who proliferated there as well. Most of the streetlights had long been broken and only one or two on each block remained lit. The night was concentrated into solid opaque curtains of black on either side of his headlights. He felt like an invading army as he accelerated through the dark, cutting a swath through the night, reveling in his alienness. Both his conspicuous affluence and his skin tone set him apart from his surroundings. He was out of place amid the honest working people who lived here as well as the welfare recipients and drug addicts. Even among the other criminals his lack of ethnicity set him apart. He liked it that way. Everything about the ghetto disgusted him. Even though it was the source of his wealth he was glad he’d never truly be a part of it. His relationship with the people who lived here was simply a predatory one. They were the nourishment he thrived on. They kept his pockets and his stomach filled.
Tonight Scratch was out alone. He had to find the whore and kill the baby without interruptions or long explanations to any of his underlings, not even Yellow Dog. Scratch was still hoping he could murder the bastard before it was born. He’d raped and killed nearly two dozen crack-whores in the last few years and still he could feel the baby’s presence. It was alive and it would be born soon.
The streets were desolate. The same five-dollar whores shambled along peering wide-eyed into the Beemer hoping for a drug-dealer who’s dick they could suck for a rock or two. The extravagantly dressed crack dealer waved them away like flies, his platinum custom Rolex reflecting starlight into their half-conscious faces. They were all too far gone. Their wombs were barren and dry from drug abuse and would probably never hold a seed again, least of all the one he was looking for.
Scratch drove the side streets deep in the heart of Germantown. He was far away from the Avenue now, but crackwhores could be found anywhere in G-town. He knew where every crack den and shooting gallery was for six miles in every direction. Rock cocaine’s influence here was nearly omnipotent. Mothers lit up after sending their kids off to school. Fathers hit the pipe after work before coming home to face their depressed and disappointed families. Kids smoked rocks behind the gym at school. And every one of them was just one or two hits away from sucking dicks in alleys for the next rock.
Even in the more residential areas nearly every alleyway flickered with the glow of heated glass and boiling cocaine. The corners on every major intersection were crowded with dealers, talking on cell phones and eyeing every passing car for a potential customer, rival, or cop. Most of them worked either directly or indirectly for Scratch. And wherever the dealers were, crackwhores circled like buzzards sniffing carrion. But none of them were who he was looking for.
Scratch turned onto Tulpehocken Street passing row after row of small rundown houses crammed together like dominoes waiting to fall. Their windows were darkened except for one or two on each block where the flickering blue light of television sets illuminated sleeping figures or where lights were left on in front rooms and on porches to discourage burglars who preferred to work under cover of night. A massive old church squatted on one corner looking dark and ominous like the structure itself was the embodiment of God, waiting to pass judgement on the sinners proliferating around it. Scratch shook his head in amusement as he peered through the front window of the church at the enormous statue of a crucified Jesus with skin as pale as his own. He wondered how it felt to worship a God rendered in the image of the race that had oppressed your kind for centuries. Perhaps the Black people who lived here took some comfort in seeing the most powerful white man on earth nailed to a cross and bleeding to death. Scratch laughed out loud when he saw the familiar glow of a crackpipe coming from behind the tall hedges surrounding the church. Crack had made church all but obsolete. Both heaven and hell were now just one hit away.
The BMW turned down Ambrose Street and Scratch smiled. This was where his most feared enforcer lived. He wondered if Snap was still awake. He thought maybe he should take the kid with him if he was going to start crashing crackhouses, but he knew that Snap and his partner Tank had just finished taking down a rival drug crew and were probably already drunk or high and trying to sleep it off. He cruised silently past Malik’s house chuckling over the irony of the man working.
“I should have that nigga, Snap, snuff the baby. I’ll see how down he really is. Even after all the fools he’s bodied, he still believes in some kind of redemption. I bet you puttin’ a bullet in a pregnant woman will kill all that noise.” He laughed again as he turned the corner.
His headlights slashed across the road illuminating a woman wearing tight jeans that had probably been baggy at one time, but were now so restrictive that she couldn’t button them or zip them up in front. Her swollen belly protruded through the open fly with her T-shirt riding high above her navel. She wore plastic flip-flops on her feet and Scratch could tell by the way she shuffled that she’d been hooked on drugs for a long time. Scratch pulled the car up next to her.
“Want to smoke with me?”
He held a glass pipe out the window with a rock of cocaine already loaded inside. He watched the pregnant woman’s eyes widen and seize on the crackpipe.
“Nuh, no. I can’t. I’ve got to stay clean for my baby.”
She was still staring at the pipe and almost drooling.
“When was the last time you had a hit, huh? A week ago? Two days ago? Quitting now ain’t goin’ to do a damn thing to help your baby. The damage is already done. So why don’t you get in here and suck on this dick. The glass one and this one.” Scratch unzipped his fly and pulled out his penis.
“I ain’t no fuckin’ whore! I got a job. You suck your own dick. Now get the fuck away from me!”
“Sorry, bitch, but I ain’t got no more time to play around with you.”
Scratch slid out of the BMW. The woman tried to run, but being in her third trimester slowed her down and Scratch seized her by her hair and dragged her to the floor.
“Helllllp! Raaape! Raaaape!�
��
Scratch smiled at her revealing two rows of gold plated teeth. Then he brought his fist down into her face sending several of the woman’s teeth tumbling down her throat. He struck her again and again until he realized that she wasn’t going to stop screaming until he killed her. It didn’t matter anyway. People tended to mind their business in this neighborhood.
Let the bitch scream. I’m still taking that ass.
He used his hands and his teeth to rip off her jeans and shirt. The woman’s breasts were enormous, bloated with milk. Scratch latched onto them with his fourteen karat canines greedily sucking them dry and biting into the massive glands until both blood and milk drooled down his face. He caressed her swollen stomach with a hand studded with platinum rings as he slid her jeans down to her ankles. He then took himself in hand and forced himself inside her tearing his own foreskin as much as her vaginal walls and caring equally little about either. Scratch sucked all the fluid from the woman’s breast as he drilled up inside her. His modest erection continued to grow in proportion to his excitement as if engorged by the same blood he was draining from her breast. When he finally grew tired of her screams he withdrew his cock, pulled out his knife, and cut open her belly. He reached up inside of her, pushing aside her intestines and stomach as he felt around in her womb. He then pulled out the fetus, covered in blood and amniotic fluid, sliced its head off and tossed it into the street. The woman’s screams redoubled.
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