Bonded by Blood

by Cash

  “Maybe . . . maybe not,” Khalil responded.

  They stood nose to nose, neither of them batting an eye. B-Man wanted to punch Khalil in the face; smash his nose in for the many times he felt Khalil had chosen Q’s side against him. But he felt sure that Khalil was strapped. He had seen a bulge under Khalil’s jacket.

  “Like I said, step aside, nigga!” demanded Khalil.

  B-Man blinked first. He stepped aside to allow Khalil to come inside.

  Khalil saw several glass crack pipes and straight shooters on the cocktail table. A large chunk of crack and a razor blade lay on a hand-sized mirror between the drug paraphernalia. Gwen watched over it all; seated on the couch, looking tore the fuck up. Khalil eyed her with contempt thick enough to choke a whale.

  He turned to B-Man. “Bonded by blood! If that still means anything to you, let’s get up out this bitch.”

  “I’m a tell you like I told Q . . . kick rocks, nigga!”

  “That’s how you want it?” asked Khalil.

  “That’s what I said, ain’t it?” B-Man snapped.

  “You know me, playboy—I ain’t gon’ baby you. You’s a grown ass man now. If you salty about some ole bitch shit, get over it. Men talk shit out, bitches deal with emotions and shit.”

  “You callin’ me a bitch?”

  “Naw, bruh—you’s a Jones boy, you could never be a bitch. We ain’t bitch-made. What I’m stressin’ is this: let bygones be bygones. It’s still love, fam.”

  “Miss me wit’ dat fam shit! Like I told dat nigga Q, I don’t fuck wit’ y’all two niggas no more. As far as I’m concerned, y’all niggas dead.”

  “That’s how you feel? You put it on Black Girl?”

  “I put it on Black Girl,” B-Man swore.

  Khalil looked him in the eye and told him he was sorry to hear him say that. Then he said, “In that case, me and Q wash our hands of you.” He opened his jacket and retrieved the bulge from within the oversized inside pockets. It was two kilos.

  “These are from Q.”

  Khalil let the two bricks plunk down on the table, right between two crack pipes.

  “You can let this shit bring you up, or you can let it take your weak ass all the way out. It’s on you.”

  Gwen was sweating the two kilos of cocaine, licking her dry, cracked lips and rocking her body back and forth.

  Khalil stabbed the bitch with his eyes. He reached inside his breast pocket and pulled out ten stacks in hundred dollar bills. He tossed the grip on top of the mirror where the razor blade and chunk of crack lay.

  “That’s from me and Rapheal. You on your own from here on out, stupid-ass nigga.”

  “Fuck you!” B-Man spat. “I don’t want shit from none of y’all. Rapheal ain’t shit to me. You ain’t shit, but a Rapheal wannabe! And Q, he always thought it was all about him. He pussy, though!”

  Khalil was surprised by the depth of his brother’s jealousy and envy.

  “Get out my crib, nigga. And take all this shit wit’ you! I don’t need nothin’ from y’all hos!” spewed B-Man.

  Gwen flung herself on top of the kilos and the money. “No, B-Man, don’t give it back to ‘em! They owe you more than this, baby.”

  Khalil leaned over her and hocked a glob of spit dead in the junkie bitch’s face. B-Man took a step toward him, but froze when Khalil whipped out a burner.

  “You feel like a frog?” growled Khalil. Then he backed out of the apartment, burner ready to set it off if B-Man had made a break toward him.

  When Khalil drove off, several gunshots could be heard coming from B-Man’s doorway, but they didn’t come close to penetrating Khalil’s Hummer.

  With Khalil’s and Q’s help Rapheal and Elisse had moved into a new luxury apartment near downtown. Sophie had entered a rehab program on her own. Rapheal had visited her at the clinic and found out that she’d checked herself in two days before he was robbed. It turned out that Sophie had been breaking into trick’s cars on her old ho stroll, while the tricks were off inside the whorehouses getting served. She had gotten lucky when she broke into a trick’s car and found five thousand dollars and nine ounces of crack. She admitted smoking some of the dope before deciding to surprise Rapheal by checking herself into rehab, and paying for it herself.

  “I’ma get myself back fine again, daddy,” she vowed, “and come back to you.”

  “You know I have Elisse,” Rapheal reminded her.

  “It’s not like I’m not used to sharing you, daddy,” She smiled, showing some of the vitality she had before life and drug abuse choked it out of her.

  Rapheal returned her smile, then said easily, “I doubt if Elisse would go for that,”

  “Aw, c’mon, daddy,” she said, dismissing his remark with a flick of her hand. “Can’t no young thing tell you how to handle your business. Once a mack, always a mack—ain’t that what you used to tell us, daddy? You just think I’m old and broke down. But wait until I come home from here, I’ma be back thick and fine just like I was when I was one of the baddest hos on Auburn Avenue. Just wait, daddy, you’ll see.”

  “Just concentrate on getting yourself together. You hear me?”

  “I will, daddy,” promised Sophie.

  B-Man and Gwen had been smoking like two chimneys for the past month. B-Man was selling small weight out of one of the two bricks they had, while he and Gwen was doing their best to bloop every last gram of the second brick. Bed-Stuy came through and got high with them frequently, but he didn’t fuck with the glass dick; he snorted.

  Today they were at B-Man’s crib getting high, as usual. B-Man had his big lips wrapped around one end of the glass dick, sucking on it like a ho sucks her man’s dick. Bed-Stuy, was chiefing on a blunt, silently appalled by B-Man’s quick addiction to the pipe. He had lost love for B-Man over the time they’d been cliqued up. He was especially salty about the way B-Man had played him with the money they got for slumpin’ Lamar.

  Though Bed-Stuy had shitted on B-Man, too, cuffing money sometimes when they pulled licks, he didn’t consider that to be the same as what B-Man had done to him. Cuffing money during a lick was just part of the game. There would always be opportunities to get some “get back” on other licks. But slumpin’ a nigga was a whole ‘nother story.

  He hadn’t risked that for the chump money he’d been paid. He hadn’t even stepped to Q about it because he knew that it was B-Man who had put shit in the game. So now he didn’t give a fuck if his man smoked so much crack it busted his muthafuckin’ heart! As long as B-Man was on point when they picked up that steel and pulled on those ski masks, Bed-Stuy ain’t have shit to say to him about his glass dick addiction.

  “Yo, money. That kid, Shawn, who we jacked for that dro and shit running his mouth like he wanna see us,” Bed-Stuy said, after finishing off the blunt of cush.

  “Shawdy, don’t want no drama,” B-Man sat the pipe down long enough to remark.

  “He must do, he in the streets barking and shit.”

  “What you wanna do, go see him again?”

  “I’m sayin’, yo. I ain’t waiting on him to come see me.”

  “I’ll handle dat lil’ pussy nigga, I know where he be hangin’ out at.”

  “I’ma roll with you, son.”

  Bed-Stuy got up and went to the bathroom to take a piss. From the hallway he could see into the bedroom, where Gwen was asleep across the bed in nothing, but a bra and panties. The panties were up the crack of her ass. Ma done fell way off, he observed, shaking his head as he closed the bathroom door.

  Gwen was in a deep slumber. Before finally laying down and going to sleep yesterday, she had been up seventy-two hours without sleep. Much of that time had been spent getting high. She and B-Man hadn’t bathed in three days. Nor had they eaten anything. Finally, Gwen’s sleep and food deprived body had shut down. She’d been out like a light now for more than twenty-four hours with no sign of waking up anytime soon.

  “Yo, B, you back fuckin’ with your fam yet?” Bed-Stuy asked B-Man, havin
g returned from the bathroom.

  “Hell, naw, I told you I ain’t got no holla for them niggas no more.”

  “Shid, Q doing big things, that nigga’s name is hot in the streets.”

  “Fuck that nigga, shawdy,” B-Man replied with distaste. “Q be on some mo’ shit. Dat nigga can eat a dick for all I care!”

  “He gettin’ at the money, though, son. You might need to make the peace and reap some of those blessings. Everywhere I go niggas screamin’ his name. Son, dropping work all around this muthafucka,” Bed-Stuy went on.

  He could sense that B-Man didn’t like being reminded of his brother’s success. Which is exactly the reaction Bed-Stuy was hoping for.

  “But I feel you, dawg. Q is on some other shit. When Khalil was on lock, Q needed you to hold him down, ‘cause niggas would’ve been looking to touch him without a killa on his team. Now since Khalil is home, Q switched up on you. Yeah, that’s some fool shit, after all the work you put in.”

  B-Man said, “It’s all good,” but his expression said something quite different.

  Bed-Stuy decided not to press on. There was plenty of time to subtly influence B-Man into jacking his own brother. Bed-Stuy knew that it wouldn’t take much.

  Later in the week, B-Man just so happened to run into Shawn outside Stroker’s, a strip club frequented by many hustlers. Shawn was sitting on the hood of his whip, kickin’ it with two other niggas B-Man recognized. The three men were sharing a blunt while discussing a new stripper that had only been working at the club for a few weeks. B-Man crept up on them from behind, and before anyone knew what was going down, he had a Desert Eagle pointed in Shawn’s face.

  “You looking fo me, bitch nigga?” B-Man asked, with menace.

  “Nah, pimp. I ain’t got no beef with you.” Shawn quickly copped deuces, raising his hands in the air.

  “Put your hands down, nigga!”

  “Ah’ight, pimp. You got that lil’ bit.”

  He lowered his hands to his side.

  “What’s the business, homie?” asked one of the dudes Shawn had been burning the blunt with.

  “This ain’t got shit to do wit’ you, Nut,” stated B-Man. Then he returned his attention to Shawn. “Nigga, you don’t look for me, I look for you!”

  He cracked Shawn across the head with the steel, drawing blood.

  Shawn crumpled to the ground, moaning like the bitch nigga B-Man knew him to be. He had been barking in the streets, acting like it was gon’ be do-or-die the next time he locked eyes with either B-Man or Bed-Stuy. But like many niggas, his bark was bigger than his bite.

  Shawn tried to curl up to ward off some of the punishment being inflicted on him.

  “You got that, pimp,” he kept crying as B-Man repeatedly cracked his head.

  When B-Man grew tired of pistol-whipping him, he snatched the platinum chain off Shawn’s neck and took the watch off his wrist. Then he went in the nigga’s pockets and removed his money.

  “I ain’t hard to find!”

  He kicked Shawn in the face.

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Corlette had undergone the last of three surgical procedures a few weeks ago, including the orthodontal work to insert permanent partials in her mouth. Now she was inside her plastic surgeon’s private room anxiously waiting for him to remove the bandages from her face.

  “You ready to have a look?” Doctor Weinbaugh asked

  “Yes,” Corlette said nervously. She could hardly control her breathing.

  Doctor Weinbaugh handed her a long-handled mirror.

  Corlette closed her eyes. Then she held the mirror in front of her face, keeping her eyes shut. She took a deep breath, slowly exhaled, then just as slowly opened her eyes.

  When she saw the reflection looking back at her, a tear trickled from her eye, and a smile instantly enveloped her, now flawless face.

  “Oh my god! Thank you so much,” she cried.

  “You approve?” the plastic surgeon asked.

  “Oh yes, doctor. I love it!” she could hardly believe that the person in the mirror was her.

  The surgeries to repair her face hadn’t changed her appearance much from how she used to look before getting shot, and that was just perfect in Corlette’s book. She was pleased that she looked like her old self again. Maybe a bit more symmetrically perfect, about the face, but definitely the same as before.

  Q was waiting for her at the airport when she arrived back in Atlanta from the plastic surgeon’s clinic.

  “Dayum! I almost didn’t recognize you,” he kidded her.

  The smile on his face was as wide as Corlette’s.

  “Now I’ma have to keep niggas out your face.”

  “Neva dat. You’re the only nigga for me,” Corlette declared.

  Everyone was impressed with the wonderful job the surgeon had done to restore Corlette’s original look. They were amazed that no scars or disfigurement remained. When they commented on it, Corlette did not hesitate to show her thirty-two pearly whites. Only the skilled eye of an orthodontist could detect that she had partials. Corlette thanked Q over and over again for paying for everything, and for loving and desiring her while she went through it all.

  “There ain’t nothing I wouldn’t do for you, shawdy,” Q said.

  Now that his shawdy was back looking like Keyshia Cole, Q knew that she would be much happier. The tragedy they’d gone through together had bonded them much closer than what had been between him and Persia. He knew that he would never love again the way he had loved Persia. Q was cool with that; he never wanted to love blindly again anyway. What made this love better, though, was that he knew Corlette loved him back.

  Corlette’s love comforted him, and it allowed him to handle his business in the streets without having to worry about shit being raggedy at home when he was away. Now that he was plugged in with a new connect, and po-po had backed up off of him some, he was back on the grind. He had toned down his shine a lot lately. He was just trying to stack chips. Khalil was constantly reminding him to keep his mind on his money and his money on his mind.

  Fazio was pressing Q to fuck with him again, but Q wasn’t thinking about doing business with his old connect no more. When the heat was on, Fazio had cut him off, without a second thought. He hadn’t showed Q any loyalty. So, fuck Fazio! That’s how Q felt. If Fazio kept pressing him, he’d get the same thing Q was about to serve to DeWayne.

  Q, Khalil and Rapheal were strapped and ready. Q just got the call he’d been waiting for.

  “He just went up in his grandmother’s crib,” the caller had whispered into the phone. “Hurry up. I’ma stay here and watch the place. I’ll call you if he leaves,” the boy said, and Q knew that he could count on shorty to do just that.

  As they were entering Thomasville Heights, Q hit lil’ shorty on the cell phone he had given him. Vashon answered the first ring. “Yeah?”

  “What’s the business?”

  “He still there.”

  “Aight, shorty, go on home. I’ll get at you in a few days.”

  “You need me to roll witchu?”

  “Naw, lil’ nigga. Take yo’ butt in the house.”

  Q checked his watch and saw that it was almost midnight. The street was quiet and still at that hour. Q drove past the apartment then parked around the corner. One by one they exited the car, at two-minute intervals. Q, who had gone first, was posted on the side of Mrs. Freeman’s building. He was slouched down on the cold ground, leaning against the building like a bum. The only thing that would’ve betrayed his disguise was the thick jacket he wore, and his sneaks. They were too new to belong to a bum. Q didn’t plan on letting anyone get up close enough to him to peep that.

  Khalil posted up across the street, near where Corlette used to stay. Rapheal walked up and down the block, portraying the actions of a crackhead, late-night-shuffling, a role he played well from personal experience. An hour passed before luck broke their way.

  From the side of the apartment building Q heard a door open
and close. He jumped up when he saw Khalil moving with swiftness from his post across the street.

  Q had his TEC-9 locked and loaded as he ran from around the side of the building. DeWayne had his back to Q, so he didn’t see him coming but he heard the hurried footsteps. Then he noticed the figure coming toward him from across the street. It was dark out, but the streetlight revealed the burner aimed at him right before it went off. Blocka! Blocka!

  Khalil squeezed two shots, but both missed. DeWayne jumped two feet in the air. When his feet touched concrete he dodged to the right, half running, half reaching for his own strap. The glock slipped out of his hands, smacked pavement, and he accidentally kicked it further away from him. When he bent to pick it up he felt a hot explosion in his ass. He yelped and grabbed where he’d been shot, before snatching his burner off the ground.

  Q was letting the TEC-9 spit. He knew that he had hit the nigga at least once; he’d heard the nigga yelp like a bitch. Now the nigga was tryna run, with a limp, occasionally bustin’ back over his shoulder. Q and Khalil were side by side now, tryna run DeWayne down, but not carelessly because they had to respect his wild shooting. Anyway, the fool was running right toward Rapheal and his choppa.

  DeWayne tried to stop in his tracks when he ran into the choppa that was leveled at his chest. Rapheal didn’t hesitate to avenge his granddaughter. The choppa coughed angry, loud, and repeatedly.

  DeWayne was blown backwards from the inpact of the choppas deadly ammunition. He smacked the pavement and died in a puddle of his own blood.

  Q pulled up in his Ford Explorer. When Vashon saw him pull up to the curb, he hopped off the hood of the broke down hooptie, and walked up to the driver’s door of Q’s whip.

  “What it do, lil’ pimp?” Q smiled down at him from inside the SUV.

  “Slow motion,” replied Vashon.

  “Hop in, let’s ride, lil’ nigga.”

  As they drove out of the projects, Q said to Vashon, “Good lookin’ out lil’ man. But you know you can’t mention nothing to nobody about that.”

  “Man, I ain’t slow, and I damn sho ain’t no snitch I’ma take dat to the grave wit’ me,” replied Vashon, with a realness beyond his years.