by Kiki Swinson
“Excuse me ma’am,” she said between coughs as she stood up from a green metal utility box. “Do you think you can spare some change?”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t have any,” I told her and began to pick up my pace.
That didn’t matter to her, because she wanted to get my full attention. She got it when she reached out and grabbed my arm. The shit startled the hell out of me, and I honestly wanted to jump out of my fucking skin. I mean, to have this lady get up enough balls to grab me with her abscess-infected hands made me damn near pass out. Without even thinking twice, I stopped in my tracks and snatched my arm away from her.
“Please don’t do that,” I warned her.
“I’m sorry,” she said, releasing my arm. “But all I want to do is tell you not to do it.”
“Do what?” I asked, wondering what the hell she could be talking about.
The lady got closer and said, “I used to walk around here looking just like you, wearing nice clothes, thinking I was high and mighty because I was beautiful and had a long, healthy head of hair. I had a nice body and all the men wanted to be with me. But at the blink of an eye, my world got turned upside down when I started hanging out in places like this.”
“But I don’t get high,” I interjected.
“Yeah, that’s what we’ve all said. Now look at us.” She pointed at different drug addicts in our immediate vicinity. “We all got a story to tell. But mine is by far the worst, if you ask me, because I was an assistant principal at a performing arts school, making good damn money. But because of my heroin addiction and hanging in that motherfucking candy shop over there in Norfolk, I lost my husband, my daughter, and my home in Virginia Beach. The repo man took my 2007 Jaguar after I let the dope boys tear it up. I used to rent it out to them for days at a time, for a couple measly pills of dope,” she continued as water began to build up in her eyes.
“I’m sorry to hear about your loss, ma’am, and I would love to stand here and listen to you, but I’m sort of in a rush.”
“Don’t call me ‘ma’am’. My name is Faith.”
“I’m sorry, Faith, but I’ve got to go,” I told her and abruptly walked off.
“I hope you take heed to what I said,” she yelled.
“Oh, shut the hell up, Faith! That lady ain’t thinking about your dopefiend ass!” I heard a male voice shout.
I refused to turn around to see who made the comment. I figured he wasn’t talking to me anyway, so why bother? As I walked farther down Dale Drive, I finally saw Seth’s car. It was parked right in front of a tree, but again, he was nowhere in sight. There were at least three-dozen apartments that he could have gone into. To stand there and wait for him to come out would be insane. I turned around and headed back to my car. Immediately after I got in it, I drove right back out the way I came and circled around to the other side of the horseshoe. All I wanted to see was which apartment he was in, and then I’d leave. As soon as I found a parking space with the perfect view, I parked. Then I had to sit and wait. I sat back and listened to every CD in my six-disc changer, which ran for about three hours, and still Seth remained in hiding. I called him a couple of times, hoping he would come outside to take his call, but he refused to answer, so I chalked it up as a loss.
As I was about to give up and call it a day, the guy from the white house pulled up in his Hummer and parked it right beside Seth’s car. My heart jumped for joy. Hopefully, it would only be a matter of seconds before I found out where that motherfucker was. Before I could count to ten, that guy walked right up to an apartment on the far left side of the building, carrying a brown paper bag in his right hand. Before he could reach out, someone from the inside opened the door for him. I couldn’t see if it was Seth or not because of the dark screen on the door. At that point, though, it didn’t matter because my mission was accomplished, and now I could carry my ass home.
SETH
I Get Money
Ay yo, Melody, I know you fucked that coffee grinder up on purpose,” Mike said the moment he stepped foot into the spot. “Nah, Mike, it wasn’t her fault,” I said as I approached him. “Where’s it at? Let me see it,” Mike insisted.
Melody and I both led him into the kitchen.
“See? It wasn’t my fault,” she pointed out. “The blade is dull now, so it isn’t grinding anything anymore.”
“How much shit did you lose?”
“Not much,” Melody said.
“How much is not much?”
“Probably about ten pills, if that much.”
“You sure you didn’t stick that shit in your pocket?” Mike questioned her, giving her one serious look.
“Come on now. You know I wouldn’t play with your dope like that,” Melody tried to assure him.
“You better not, because if I ever find out you stealing from me, I’ma kill you, bitch!”
“Nah, dawg, I was standing around her the whole time. She didn’t try to throw salt in the game,” I told him.
“She better not!” Mike handed her the brown paper bag.
“Is this a new coffee grinder?”
“Yeah. So go ahead and handle your business, so I can get me some motherfucking money rolling through here. You know I hate having good dope and ain’t nobody coming through to cop it.”
“Oh, believe me, plenty of fiends been coming through, but we had to turn ’em away because we couldn’t get the coffee grinder to mix the dope up properly,” I said.
“Well, we ain’t gon’ worry about that anymore. That problem is solved. What I want to know is, where is everybody at?” Mike looked out the kitchen window. “I didn’t see any of our runners standing at their posts when I pulled up. The only nigga standing out there is Omar, and that ain’t a good look.”
Wearing the surgical mask, Melody turned around and said, “I sent Ian to the store to get me some milk and a box of sandwich bags. I’m not sure where Ran is.”
“Did you ask Ian or Omar?”
“Yeah, and they said they hadn’t seen him since he left from around here last night,” she replied.
“Well, we gon’ have to recruit a couple more niggas, because I can’t have y’all in the spot with all this shit and not enough niggas on the outside watching y’all back.”
“Shit, all I need is a burner and I’ll be able to hold the spot down by myself,” I interjected.
Mike laughed. “Yeah, that burner will slow down a couple of cats from trying to run up in here to rob you, but it ain’t gon’ do shit if Narcs bust up in here.”
I became defensive. “Oh so, you don’t think I’d bust my gun at them crackers?”
“Come on, Seth. I was locked up with you and I know how hard you can go. But we still need more niggas outside. I can’t afford to have police run up in here. I got too much shit to lose.”
“You sure do,” Melody spoke up.
Mike smiled at her and said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” He looked at me and said, “Let me holler at you for a minute.”
Curious about why he wanted to speak to me in private all of a sudden, I got up from the table and followed him into Melody’s bedroom. I thought he would shut the door behind us after we entered into the room, but he didn’t. “What’s up?”
Mike said, “You know I ain’t a petty-ass nigga. I am loyal to any cat that’s loyal to me, and I love to see everybody eat, if they’re hungry enough to go after it. I just got hit off with a huge load of raw heroin about an hour ago, and it’s enough where we could build an empire with it. Niggas could get rich off this shit in a matter of months. You could walk away with a half million in profit, easy. All we got to do is get a street team of niggas who ain’t scared to lock this place down, and we could be on our way.”
“What about Jay?”
“I got him over Norfolk right now, trying to recruit some go-hard niggas, so we can lock the whole Tidewater Park down.”
“So, y’all are serious about this, huh?”
“Hell, yeah! This shit ain’t a game! I’m trying to get
rich!”
“Shit! Me too!” I said, without hesitation. The thought of making a half a million dollars in less than a month sounded real good to me. I could do a lot of shit with that dough. If I invested it right, I wouldn’t have to work or hustle again.
“You sure? Because I’m gon’ tell you right now, if you really want to get that type of paper in a month’s time, you gon’ have to work around the clock.”
“What’s around the clock?”
“I’m talking about you gon’ have to be out this joint from sunup to sundown,” he explained. “You know fiends be up searching for pills of dope early in the morning, so you gon’ have to be out here at least by five AM. But as far as the time you close down, that ain’t gon’ change. You can still shut shop down at nine o’clock.”
“Ahh man, my girl is going to kill me.” I sighed, thinking about all the shade Maxine was going to throw at me.
“Just tell her how much dough you gon’ make in that thirty-day period and see how she acts. I guarantee, she gon’ sing another song then.” Mike laughed. “Shit, bitches love money!”
“Not my girl! She’d rather have me working a nine-to-five, busting my ass for pennies, than to see me out here stacking up retirement money.”
“Oh, you got one of them goody two-shoes chicks, huh?”
“Shit, I don’t know what to call her. But I do know that she’s starting to get on my motherfucking nerves!”
“Come on, dawg; don’t ever let a chick stress you out.”
“Shit, it’s too late for that.”
“Well, whatchu gon’ do when Samantha gets out?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure that shit out for the last few months.”
“When she getting out, anyway?”
“She called me this morning at my mom’s crib and told me she got twenty-nine days and a wake up.”
“Oh shit, for real?”
“Yep.”
“So, is she gon’ have to go to the halfway house?”
“Yeah, but it’s only going to be for a four-month stretch.”
“Well, this dough you about to get is going to come in handy because by the time she gets out of the halfway house, you can set her up in a nice spot.”
“Yeah, I know. She gon’ be happy as hell, too. All she keeps talking about is how she can’t wait until we can be together again. But it’s gon’ be really hard, ’cause the chick I’m fucking with now is the type that would do some underhanded shit if she found out Samantha was home and that we was back together.”
“Look, dawg: don’t ever let a bitch get the upper hand on you! It’s too many hoes out here to be putting up with dumb shit! Look at me; I got my wife, Lacy, and two side chicks. So, if one starts giving me a motherfucking headache, I’ll dip on her ass in a minute and go be with the other one. It’s that simple! And I ain’t gon’ have it no other way,” Mike said. “You see how I be handling Melody in there? I don’t let her get away with shit. I come here and make my money, get some pussy, and before I go, I’ll hit her off with some dough. That’s the extent of it. See, she knows about Lacy and my other chick Trina, but she also knows that she can’t question me about them, either. And if anyone of them ever stopped by here to see me, she knows she better not open up her motherfucking mouth about shit that goes on in this house. If she ever tried that, she knows I would shut her down.”
“Damn, nigga. You ain’t playing, huh?”
“Hell nah, I ain’t playing! I got too much shit invested out here to be letting a chick come in and fuck everything up because she’s caught up in her feelings. I promise you that I ain’t gon’ have it!”
Once Mike touched on every issue concerning the business venture and how he wanted shit to run around there, I sealed the deal with a handshake. Before I realized what I had done, he reminded me by saying, “Nigga, you are about to be the third richest hustler in the Tidewater area!”
I laughed. “I take it you and Jay got the number one and the number two slots?”
“You sure learn quickly,” he said, patting me on my shoulder before he left.
After Mike left me in Melody’s bedroom, all I could do was stand there with a smile on my face and daydream about that brand new Bentley coupe I was going to be pushing in the next thirty days. I also pictured buying myself a whole new wardrobe and going into a jewelry store to cop a couple of custom-made diamond pieces. I was going to make sure Samantha was all right, too. I couldn’t have her struggling like I did when I first came home. Nah, I couldn’t have that. She was still my shorty, and I loved her to death. I didn’t know what I was going to do for Maxine, other than give her the start-up money for her business, because she seemed to have everything. She was the most independent and controlling chick I’d ever dealt with, and most of the time we butted heads because of it. The shit I went through with her, I never had to go through any of it with Samantha. Sam was a sweetheart and would do anything I asked her to do. She’d been down for me since the first day we met, which was over seven years ago. But for the first two years of our relationship, shit was beautiful. We got money together and we lived together. We practically did everything together, so when the heat fell down on us five years ago, she had no problem going down for the cause. She stayed true to a nigga, so I was going to do the same for her. That was my word!
Mike hung out at the spot with me and Melody for the rest of the night. While he was there, he recruited a handful of thoroughbred cats from around the way. Most of them were young boys around the age of seventeen and eighteen. They were known around Portsmouth for having heart, and that’s what we needed for this mission. They got hired on the spot. After everybody got into position, Mike and I ended up raking in over twenty grand, and were happy because of it.
Before the young boys left, Mike hit them each off with a couple hundred dollars and promised them that he was going to arm a couple of them with burners, just in case they ran into some heat. They got all gassed up about the idea of toting a pistol around the spot, like they were in a little army. The enthusiasm in their faces made Mike’s day. It made my day too, because I knew we had a ruthless set of soldiers in our midst, and it was going to be hard to break them.
As I was about to leave, Mike hit me off with my cut and gave me precise instructions about how we were going to operate our organization. “From now on, I’m gonna have the dope capped up for you before you get over on this side. All you got to do is show up at the spot out on Prentis Park and I’ll have everything ready for you, including the pistols for the young’uns.”
He also said he was going to have his side chick, Trina, come by twice a day to collect the dough if he or Jay weren’t available to do it themselves. Also, if we ran out of product before the end of the day, he was going to have Jay drop off a small package to carry us over. I okayed this arrangement, shook on it, and headed out the door.
When I got into my car, I started to call Maxine, but decided against it. As much as I missed hearing her voice, I knew that if I got her on the phone, we would end up arguing, and I wasn’t in the mood for that. It had been a long day, and the last thing I needed was a headache. Instead, I headed on to my mother’s crib.
On my way there, I made a quick stop by the Chinese place on the corner of Virginia Beach Boulevard and Newtown Road and picked up an order of General Tso Chicken. While I was there, I ran into this nigga named Monty I had beef with back in the day. He shocked me when he didn’t say a word to me when I first walked into the restaurant. The way that nigga came at me when he found out I was fucking his girl, it was a wonder why I didn’t end up killing him. I guess it wasn’t his time to die, and since he acted like he had some sense this go-round, I spared him once more and bounced.
MAXINE
Back To The Drawing Board
I tried to get Seth on the line this morning, but he elected not to answer his phone yet again. I told myself, whatever, and blew it off as another one of his immature tactics. All was not lost anyway, because I got a
ll the information I needed yesterday. I wrote down the license plate number to the Hummer Seth’s friend was driving and the address of the house he entered. Now that I was back at work, I was about to find out the name registered to that vehicle and who was leasing that apartment. It was going to take a couple strokes of the computer keys and one phone call, and I was going to have it all. Seth was not going to be able to hide anything from me from this point on.
Click, click, tap, tap, click, tap, tap, click was all you could hear through my silence-filled office. Right after I got into the Department of the Motor Vehicles secured information system, I typed in the license plate number of the Hummer and hit the ENTER key. The name Lacy Carrington appeared. Her address was listed as 1756 Concourse Lane in Virginia Beach. There was also a 2007 Acura RL registered in her name. From the looks of things, this woman had to either be this guy’s wife or girlfriend. Of course, it didn’t matter. I had her information, so it was just a matter of time before I had his.
Next, I logged onto the city of Virginia Beach’s tax assessment website and found out that the residence of 1756 Concourse Lane was a home assessed at $423,000 and it belonged to Michael and Lacy Carrington. Seeing all this information put a huge smile on my face. I jotted all that information down and then called the rental office of Dale Homes and was told to fax over a release form in order for them to release the name of the person leasing the apartment. I did. Ten minutes later, I got my fax back with the lessee’s name written big as day. Melody Powell was her name, and the form also stated that she was a twenty-six-year-old Section Eight applicant and mother of one school-age son. According to this document, she had never been convicted of a felony and she had sworn never to allow any drug activity inside or around the dwelling of her apartment. If she violated this, she would be arrested and evicted immediately. After reading all the content on both pages, I knew right off the bat that I could do some serious blackmailing if I wanted to. However, since I planned to handle this matter a little differently, I put the information away in a safe place.
