by K'wan
“And where’d you say these niggaz was from again?” Tech asked, jiggling his keys in the pocket of his loose gray sweat-pants.
“Amsterdam projects, my G. On some real shit, them niggaz be trying to make movies, but they ain’t built like that. Duke lucked up and got a mean play on some work and some guns from a nigga that’s about to go up and needs some quick bread. There could be anywhere from one to three keys, including the paper if you move during the drop.”
“That’s quite a piece of change,” Tech did the math in his head, “but I gotta ask you something, Rock. Me and you ain’t ever done big business together, so why throw me the lookout?”
“I’m trying to bring something to the table, my dude; you know I been trying to hook up wit’y’all for a skinnet,” Rock Head told him.
The look Tech gave him clearly said he wasn’t buying the story. “So you just gonna let us move on this deal on some goodwill shit?”
“I’m saying I wanna eat, too, but I’m too connected to the situation to avoid the headache that’s gonna come from it. My angle is the fact that it’s gonna be turf and work to go around once y’all clean house, and I’m trying to get in on the ground floor. You know how it goes, Tech.”
“Yeah, I know how it goes, and that’s just why I smell more to the story. How you know so much about this kid’s business?” Tech asked, still not sure how to feel about Rock Head. He had heard some stories about the kid being a greaseball, but Tech gave everybody enough rope to hang themselves, so that way there was no doubt in his mind when he came to feed you your head.
Rock Head paused for a minute, trying to decide whether to lie or just be straight up with Tech. “Look,” he lowered his tone, “the main nigga got a kid wit’ my little sister, so I know his MO.”
“That’s some cold shit, Rock. You ain’t gonna feel no way if we put the lean on your little sister’s baby daddy?”
“Man, fuck that shit. It ain’t like me and Duke got history. The only thing we got in common is my crying ass nephew that he don’t do enough for anyhow. My sister is just too fucking stupid to take the nigga to court. We can pluck this nigga’s stash and call it back child support!” Rock Head laughed, but Tech didn’t.
Tech stood there for a minute, staring at the spade’s game that had come to a halt on the curb. “A’ight.” Tech turned back to Rock Head. “I’ll have some of my peoples look into it. If everything pans out, then maybe we work something out. I’ll get with you.” Tech turned to leave, but Rock Head grabbed his arm. It wasn’t an aggressive gesture, but Tech still stared at his hand as if it were a tumor he’d just noticed.
“Yo, Tech, I think we should move on them niggaz sooner than later,” Rock Head urged him.
Tech’s facial expression didn’t change, but there was something dangerous dancing behind his eyes. He glanced over at the truck and saw that Silk was now standing outside it, smoking a Newport. Her alert brown eyes bored into Rock Head’s, but Tech recognized the question behind them. Life or death? Tech turned back to Rock Head and spoke. “I said I’ll have my people look into it and get back.”
Realizing his mistake, Rock Head quickly removed his hand. “Right, right. Well, you know where to find me when you’re ready, T.”
“Indeed I do,” Tech said before stepping off the curb and back to the truck.
“Fuck is up wit’ that greasy-ass nigga?” Silk asked when they were back in the whip and off 140th Street. She wore her Yankee fitted cap broken ace-deuce, with her dreads spilling freely from beneath it. The ends were so fine that no matter how much beeswax she treated them with, they kept curling up on her. Silk was a gorgeous young mix of Jamaican and Puerto Rican, giving her skin a color that resembled rich milk chocolate. Her bowed lips were slightly pouted, exposing the gold across her bottom row of teeth. For as hard as Silk tried to be, there was only so much you could do to hide natural beauty.
“You know that muthafucka, always about a dollar,” Tech said, pulling a Dutch from his pocket and splitting it down the middle with his pinky nail. “Got some niggaz that need to be relieved of their burdens and possibly relocated.”
“What we talking, chump change or a score?” Silk asked. Tech could tell by the look in her eyes that the girl’s wheels were already turning.
Tech leaned over and dumped the blunt guts out the window. “All depends on who you ask. Ol’ boy says they’ll be a few keys and maybe some cake, but I can’t say for sure. The mark is from Amsterdam projects, and I only know of a few cats coming outta there that even played remotely heavy. It should be a good lick either way, but I only give it a fifty-fifty shot at being a great one.”
Silk turned around to face the backseat. “We could rush them niggaz and end up only getting a few dollars, if anything. I don’t know, Tech, running up on these fuck-boys sounds like greed more than anything else. Sounds like a waste of time to me.”
“Then you’re still stuck on chapter one of the hustler’s handbook.” Tech flicked the brim of her hat playfully. “Too much is never enough, lil’ sis. You bleed a muthafucka till don’t nothing else come out, then you move on to the next vic. Besides, this is about monopoly, not so much the cash.”
“Whatever, yo.” Silk turned back around in her seat.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t mind a few extra dollars, but is this cat’s word worth anything?” This was China White, the minority of the group. With bleached blond hair and ocean-blue eyes, China looked every bit of a Nordic princess. Though she was just shy of twenty, she carried herself as if she’d been here far longer. China could best be described as a curvaceous white girl with a brilliant mind and the swag of a hood chick.
Tech pondered it for a minute. “Nah, the boy is scandalous, but I don’t think he’d be stupid enough to walk us into a setup. He lay one of us and the Animal is gonna come for his ass, everybody know that.”
“I’m sure Caesar said the same thing about Brutus,” China grumbled.
“Girl, quit being so damn paranoid, you always think a muthafucka is out to get you,” Silk teased.
“Yeah, and it’s my damn paranoid thinking that’s kept us alive when we were living on the streets,” China reminded her, stirring up old memories.
Physically, China White and Silk were polar opposites, but they shared similar passions, and hard-luck stories. Silk’s mother was an old-school dope fiend whose only break from the high in a ten-year span was when she was pregnant with her only child and so-called worst mistake. Silk had always been the bane of her mother’s existence, proverbial ball to her chain, even, and she made no attempt to hide this. It was never clear why her mother hated her, but Silk was always made to feel like the outsider in her house, and the fact that she was different didn’t help.
When dope gets hold of you, the grip is never a gentle one, and Silk’s mother was a testament to that. Sometimes she would get so high that young Silk would have to scour different dope to locate her. Silk became her mother’s unofficial guardian and a permanent fixture in all the shooting galleries. It got to a point where the blow had Silk’s mother so gone that she would even include her baby girl in her get-high schemes. Silk was pickpocketing and jacking since she was old enough to understand the hustle, all under her mother’s tutelage. To the little girl it didn’t seem wrong when her mother asked her to do something, because she was her mother. So, when she asked her to make love to a white woman for money, the girl complied.
Silk had always known she was different, but she had never actually had sex with a woman. She had an idea of what it would be like, but what her first time held was breathtaking. The woman was older and more experienced with the art. She brought life to places in Silk’s body that she would look up on the Internet after the experience. Silk never told her mother, but she continued to see the woman for a while after.
The life of hustling and doping came to a crashing halt when Silk found her mother overdosed in her bedroom. It seemed that she had finally found that rainbow she had been chasing. With no family to take th
e fourteen-year-old in, she became a ward of the state, and that’s where she met Sara Lucas, aka China White.
Back then, China was your typical Kelly Bundy—a bleach-blond chick with a nice body and not a whole lot of sense about the way things worked—or so Silk initially thought. She had grown up in small town just outside Rochester, New York, with her parents and three siblings on a small patch of land that had been in their family for a spell. Though the modest farm house didn’t seem out of the ordinary, within the recesses of the property the Lucas family harbored a secret. China’s father operated a crystal-meth lab that supplied almost 33 percent of the dealers in the Tri-State area. He took everything he’d learned working for twenty-something years in pharmaceuticals and got rich off it. Unfortunately, little China was right there to soak it all up. By the time she was thirteen she was able to competently cook or cut most street drugs.
When the feds finally rushed old man Lucas’s barn, he was convicted before he even had a court date. He copped out to fifty years in exchange for his wife getting a reduced sentence. China’s siblings were rounded up and placed in the system, but she managed to elude capture and make her way to New York City. Unfortunately, she was arrested for trying to lift a chain off Canal Street. Being naïve about bootleg jewelry, she thought she had a come up, but ended up with a case instead. She was placed in the New York City juvenile-care system. China knew that as soon as her name was run through their runaway system they’d know she was a fugitive from the drug raid. It was her first and last night in the facility.
From the moment China stepped into the cramped dorm, with its rows of cast-iron beds, there was a bull’s-eye painted on her back. Being the only white girl there was no way she could blend in. Silk could’ve predicted how this was going to go down even if it hadn’t unfolded before her. Ariel, who had been the resident gooch at the facility, rolled on China with three of her flunkies, demanding that the white girl hand over her earrings. Silk hated Ariel because she was a bully, but this wasn’t her beef. She sat on her bunk and watched it play out.
Silk was a little too far from the action to hear clearly what was being said, but Ariel was waving her arms. She saw the white girl try to walk away, only to have her path blocked by one of Ariel’s people. Silk expected China to make a break for it or scream for one of the counselors, who wouldn’t have done anything anyhow, but to her and their surprise she lashed out and caught the girl with a solid right cross. They worked China’s ass something awful, but she just kept coming. It wasn’t until Ariel pulled a razor from her bra that Silk decided to intervene.
Ariel raised her arm to cut China, who was already down, but a left hook to the side of her head changed the plan. Wrapping her belt around her fist like a brass knuckle, Silk hit Ariel with a flurry of punches that backed her into a corner. She tried to bring the razor into play, but the strike was untrained and awkward. She waxed Ariel’s ass while China kept the other girls occupied. Eventually the staff was able to break it up, but Silk and China knew that wouldn’t be the end of it. Ariel’s authority had been challenged and she wasn’t going to let the ass whipping ride. Later that night, just after lights out, Silk and China fled the place and never looked back.
“Y’all are like an old married couple,” Tech joked, fishing in his pocket for a light.
“Bullshit. If we was married, I wouldn’t have to argue wit’ this bitch about everything,” Silk said, lighting the blunt for him.
China turned toward Silk, who grinned at her. “Look, you already know how I feel about that word, Silk; I ain’t one of these little girls that you got eating your pussy for Boost phones. Either we’re gonna respect each other, or I’m gonna pull this ride over and we’re gonna scrap.”
“My fault, Ma,” Silk said, trying to stifle the laughter that was building up. She loved the way China’s blue eyes turned to ice when she was in the heat of the moment.
Tech exhaled the smoke and handed the blunt to Silk. “Y’all can tear each other’s eyes out later. We still got business to handle before the sun goes down. C, you do that thing for me?” He leaned forward so she could hear him.
“I put the word out that you wanted to sit down, but he never got back,” China told him.
“I can’t believe them pussy niggaz down there is trying to stunt, wit’ they snitching asses,” Silk said venomously. “You want me to go put something hot to one of these whores, big bro?”
He considered it. “Nah, baby girl, I don’t think this shit is even gonna go that far. Sometimes a few words can be more effective than shells.”
CHAPTER 2
“What up, fellas?” Rock Head greeted the Senate after Tech had gone.
“Ain’t much, just catchin’ a breeze,” Sonny said, not bothering to look up from his cards.
“Let me hold something, moneybags.” Harley patted Rock Head’s pockets playfully.
“Shit, y’all the ones getting all the money.” Rock Head nodded toward the card table. “What’s in the pot?”
“And nothing but some change,” Rayfield answered, staring Rock Head directly in the eyes. “Why, you trying to lose something?” Rayfield shuffled the cards in his hand.
“My pockets don’t run as deep as y’all’s.” Rock Head was speaking to Rayfield, but his eyes were on the minivan pulling up next to the fire hydrant, in front of the church. When you lived your life shitting on people, you never knew where or when you’d get your turn at the bowl.
“Who that is?” Sonny glanced at the SUV.
“Looks like Veronica’s van,” Rayfield said.
“Shiiit, Veronica ain’t looked like that in years!” Cords added, watching Gucci slide from the driver’s side and move to let Little Duhan and Duran out of the back. The two boys took off running down the block, leaving Tionna and Gucci to unload the black garbage bags that were stuffed in the back of the van.
“Damn, T, what you got in here?” Gucci asked, struggling with a large plastic bag.
“A few years’ worth of bullshit.” Tionna offered a tug and the bag popped free of the rear. She had traded her kimono for a sweat suit, but kept the scarf tied around her head. “Thanks again for helping me out, Gucci, even if you did come by early as hell.”
Gucci dropped the bag to the ground and snatched off her shades. “Tionna, you can’t be serious? You know just as well as I do that you ain’t got no sense of time. If I hadn’t come by, you probably would’ve laid up until it was too late to get anything done. Nah, T, you’ve been up in that joint long enough, I couldn’t stand it another day,” she said, as if she’d been the one living in the shelter.
“Me neither. It’s bad enough when you got bitches hating from a distance, but when you clump a bunch of us together, you know it’s gonna be some shit. Yo, I felt like I had to sit a ho on her ass the first and third week of every month,” Tionna said.
“What, you had ya fights scheduled or something?” Gucci slung a bag onto the curb.
“As if.” Tionna rolled her eyes. “Them broads would steer clear of me between checks, but when that little liquor-and-weed money rolled in it was like Battery City.”
“The price of being young and beautiful,” Gucci said, sighing.
“Tell me about it. Gucci, you’d be surprised at the gall of some of these girls when under the influence. Shorty, if you’re running around in knockoff Air Max and still buying loosies, what in the hell would make you think that I got designs on a nigga you’re dealing with? Get a fucking grip. I’m a made bitch and made bitches don’t do the help.”
“Talk that shit, T, but you know how it goes when you’re young and beautiful.”
“And I live with the curse every day, thank the Lord,” Tionna said with conviction. Her odd mix of Turkish and black set her in a class by herself when it came to physical beauty. She was tall, with skin that resembled unsweetened chocolate, and rich black hair that had never seen a perm. Tionna was thin like her father but had hips and ass like her mother, who was originally from Georgia. From the tim
e Tionna had slipped into her first training bra, her mother had made it clear to her that she was a bad bitch and must always carry herself as such. That jewel was the only thing her mother had ever given her that Tionna actually held on to.
Gucci wrestled one of the bags over her shoulder. “I don’t see how you did it, T. I would’ve killed somebody or went AWOL.”
Tionna reflected on the experience. “It was like hell, Gucci. I mean, I was thankful to have a roof over my head and all, but I ain’t used to them kinda conditions. One minute my boo had me living like a queen, and the next, I’m scraping together every bit of change I had to try and keep my black ass outta prison as an accessory and my kids outta the system.”
“The price of fame,” Gucci offered.
“Don’t I know it,” Tionna agreed, slinging a bag of clothes over her shoulder. She looked up at the building she thought she had finally escaped. “I can’t believe I went through hell and back just to find myself moving back on Fortieth.”
“Irony can be a muthafucka, T.” Gucci shook her head. “You waited all that time to get your certificate, just to have them pull this shit.”
When Duhan took his fall, things got real shaky for Tionna. She had managed to avoid becoming a part of his indictment, but still found herself in a bad way. Duhan had not only been her man, he’d been her provider. He was the one who brought it home and made sure the bills were paid. Now it was up to Tionna to get it while Duhan sat waiting for a date. There was no doubt about her willingness to get it, but the follow-through was something else altogether. Granted, she had finished high school, but the girl had no life skills to speak of.
Though it made her feel like less than the queen she knew she was, Tionna went and got on public assistance. Part of her lie that kept her from being charged was that Duhan beat her, so she was able to get into a battered-women’s shelter and be placed on a priority list for Section 8. She was supposed to be next on the list when she got the word that the program was being shut down again. Tionna now had two choices: move into the projects and participate in the WEP program or take a one-bedroom in one of the newly renovated buildings on the same block she’d vowed never to return to.
