“Useful how?” Honey was confused.
“Lisa Montgomery.” El-Jihad shook his head at the name. “They let anybody foster kids these days, even the ones hooked on dope. She still got that old ’99 Grand Am with the one white door, I see.” He chuckled to himself, but Honey knew there was nothing funny. “Are you familiar with Lamont Ferguson?”
“Yes,” Honey answered, not understanding what her foster mother and her boyfriend had to do with anything. “I didn’t know his last name was Ferguson, but we have to be talking about the same one.”
“Sometime last night, one of my young runners got a call from someone asking for $400 worth of product. An hour later, one of my spots got robbed of $5,000 or $10,000 and another ten in product and guns. Now, imagine my surprise when I played back the security cameras and saw the niggas that robbed me hop into the same green Grand Am with the white door.”
El-Jihad’s words sent electricity through Honey’s whole body. Not only had Lisa lied to her about what she did with the $400—she still had it. Honey wouldn’t even be seated at the table with El-Jihad if Lisa would have just given her $100.
“I already had some niggas sweep through her house and—”
“They weren’t there,” Honey interrupted absentmindedly. Her anger had made her lips purse and her brow wrinkle. “This morning, I heard them talking about going to Lamont’s house. Nobody knows about it, but Lisa drove me by there before. Why are you telling me all of this? What do you want?”
“Isn’t it obvious, my dear Honey? I want their souls. Tonight. I was going to give you five hours to get the job done, but now you have exactly three hours to fulfill the job. I want them dead and the stolen items in the house Lanai so graciously took you to—or else I will kill both of you. Succeed, and you will live.”
Honey said the only thing that she could think of without getting a bullet to her head right then and there.
“OK.”
Chapter 4
“Come on, bitch! Give me some pussy before we hit the road!”
Honey sat outside of Lamont’s one-story brick house. The neighborhood that the home was in was shabby, and many of the houses on his block were condemned. His looked like it wasn’t too far from being declared that as well. The bottom looked like it was sinking into the ground, and on the left side of the house, mold was building up. El-Jihad had given her a car to use so she could get to where she was going. It was a silver Audi A8, and she’d never ridden in anything that drove so smooth like this before. Honey thought that maybe she should have parked a little farther away when she arrived at her destination, but it was too late now.
“Safety off,” she told herself holding the gun tightly in her hand.
She got out of the car with her hood over her head and checked her surroundings. She didn’t see anything but a few stray cats roaming the streets. Other than that, the night was quiet. The only thing she could hear was Lamont begging for some pussy plain as day. She advanced on the white front door and pressed her ear against it.
“Man, nigga, if you don’t drag that ho in the back and get some pussy, you ain’t gotta ask a whore for shit!”
The second male voice speaking to Lamont threw Honey completely off. She didn’t recognize it from anywhere and decided to go with a different approach. She removed her hood and tucked her gun before knocking three times on the door. She heard footsteps coming closer to her, and then they stopped. She figured that whoever it was, they were looking through the peephole to see who was knocking on the door that late at night.
“Who is it, Monty?”
“Just this bitch’s foster kid,” Lamont said over his shoulder as he opened the door. “What the fuck you want, bitch?”
“I was . . .” Honey put on her most innocent face and tried to peer inside the house. So far, she could make out three other people, including Lisa, in the small living room. There was a coffee table on top of an old ragged rug that had a stack of cash and an open kilo of cocaine on it. “I was looking for Lisa. I went home, and she wasn’t there. Is she here?”
Honey didn’t wait for him to tell her what she already knew before she stepped in the house. She cleared her throat at Lisa to get her attention right before she snorted a line of the white powder. Lisa looked up and squinted her eyes at Honey until she figured out who she was.
“What you want, girl?”
“You said you didn’t have the money I needed earlier,” Honey said pointing at all the money on the table. “What’s that, then?”
Lisa looked at the money Honey was pointing to and started laughing. She leaned into the skinny man sitting next to her. “Butch, this little bitch is still mad at a hundred dollars.”
“That’s your foster daughter, sis?” Butch asked her and looked Honey up and down with a small smile. “She looks mighty fine. How old is she?”
“She’s seventeen. She turns eighteen in a little bit, though.” Lisa stopped laughing to look seriously at Honey. “You know what that means, bitch? No. More. Money. So I ain’t got no more use for ya!”
“I might have some use for her.” Butch licked his lips at her.
Honey was trying to understand how a bunch of crackheads robbed the most notorious kingpin around, but she knew to never underestimate her enemy.
Slap!
“Damn, your ass is fat!” Lamont had come up behind her and palmed one of her ass cheeks. “I’ve been wanting to dive in that since I first saw it. I wanted some of Lisa’s pussy tonight, but I think I’ma take yours instead. Y’all can do her with me. Lisa, make sure you don’t sniff all the coke. We gotta sell some of it!” Lamont said, and then put his mouth to the back of Honey’s ear. He reached his hand to the front of her and tried to palm her pussy too. “I’m about to make you fuck me and suck me the way I like.”
When he licked her neck, Honey lost it. She pulled the gun from her waist and whipped around to face Lamont before he could react.
“I’m not here for you to fuck me. I already told you that would never happen,” she said and was pleased at his shock at the gun pointed in his face. “I’m here because you robbed a very powerful man, and you gotta pay the price.”
“You ain’ no gangsta!” Lamont puffed his chest out and hit it with his own fist. “You ain’t shit but a stray that nobody wanted!”
“Exactly. I don’t have shit to lose.”
Bang! Bang!
She pulled the trigger twice and held on to the gun the way Willie had showed her so she would have control of the weapon. Lamont fell to the ground with half of his face missing, and the wall behind him was sprayed crimson. Lisa’s scream sounded far away, although she was right there, and Honey felt an adrenaline kick that she never knew existed. When Lisa came charging at her like a wild beast, Honey fired again, catching her foster mother in her throat. Lisa gripped her neck and gurgled on her blood as she dropped to her knees.
Butch and the other shaggy man in the room jumped into action. They each pulled out a pistol, and Honey dove for cover as soon as she heard them start shooting. Her body was behind a love seat, and she could hear the bullets ripping holes through it. Suddenly, she had an idea. It was risky, but she had to try it. She forced her body to collapse all the way on the floor so she was lying on her stomach. She stretched her legs out so that her feet showed at one end of the love seat and she lay lifelessly on the ground.
“Aye, man! We got her!” she heard Butch yell over the gunfire. “Grab the money and the coke and let’s get out of here!”
The moment their guns stopped shooting was the moment that Honey used to her advantage. She jumped up while they were bending down and stuffing the cocaine and cash into duffle bags and pulled her trigger nonstop. Their bodies hit the floor and their blood mixed in with the other two dead bodies’. She didn’t have time to sit and stare at her handiwork. She grabbed up the duffle bags and ran through every room of the house to make sure she wasn’t forgetting anything. When she realized that she had everything she’d come for, she stepped o
ver the bodies and ran for the door. Although the neighborhood was one that law enforcement would take their time getting to if someone called them, she didn’t want to be anywhere near it when the pigs came sniffing around.
Honey’s heart was still pumping as she turned the car on and sped away from the crime scene. She thought that she would feel differently about what she’d just done. On her way to the hit, she had asked herself if she could really take a soul. Now she knew how easy it was. She felt no remorse. If anything, she felt reborn. She felt . . . powerful.
When she got to the trap house, Dank and El-Jihad were already there waiting for her. Dank was surprised to see her since she was an hour early, and he was even more surprised to see that she had everything El-Jihad had asked for. There were a few dried blood spots on her hoodie, but instead of saying anything, he just looked her in the eyes and nodded his approval.
“Nicely done,” El-Jihad said after he counted the money. Then he did something that surprised Honey. He handed her the duffle bag containing the money. “I don’t give none of my soldiers shit that they don’t work for. This is your payment for the job. You need a new place to stay, right? And a way to buy a car? Dank will teach you how to flip work, and you can re-up from there.”
“Thank you,” Honey said, taking the bag back from him. “I won’t let you down.”
“That’s what I always hope,” El-Jihad hissed. “But sometimes, hope isn’t enough. I’m going to tell you what I tell all of my employees: two strikes and you’re out. But I like your spunk, so for you? I’ll add on one more. If you fuck up three times . . . Well, I don’t think I need to explain. I’ll show you. Bring him in here!”
He called behind him although his eyes were still on Honey. She shifted her gaze from him to a man that Snow and Ron Ron were bringing from the upper level. He had a pillowcase over his head, and his hands were bound behind his back. They half-walked and half-dragged him down the stairs. He looked like he was trying to yank away from them, but his body had been beaten so badly it was a wonder that he even had any strength left. They brought him in front of El-Jihad and Honey and forced him to kneel.
“This is Malone.” El-Jihad yanked the pillowcase from the man’s head and removed his gag. El-Jihad’s voice reminded Honey of an infomercial, and it made his words more menacing. “Malone is the one who let his entire trap house get robbed by four crackheads. Malone has hit his second strike . . . and now, Malone must die.”
Malone’s hair was matted with blood, and his face was so cruelly beaten that Honey couldn’t even make out his features. Both of his eyes were swollen, and his lips were puffed up and bloody. His mouth couldn’t shut all the way because his jaw had been cracked, and his eyes went to the only familiar face in the room. He began crying and begging for Honey to save him.
“The way he dies is up to you.” El-Jihad stepped closer to Honey so that he could speak directly in her ear.
“What if I don’t want him to die?” Honey subconsciously knelt so that she was eye to eye with Malone. “He hasn’t done anything to me.” She recognized him from Lisa’s neighborhood.
“One thing I don’t need from anybody who is on call for me is a conscience.”
There was nothing Honey could do to save Malone, no matter how much he begged her, and suddenly, she wondered why she even wanted to. She didn’t know how. All she saw before her was a sorry man in need. However, she knew nothing about his inner demons. She’d sold her soul not even an hour before, and it wasn’t to save a two-bit hustler; it was to save herself.
“You’ve beat him up bad enough,” Honey said and saw a flicker of hope creeped into Malone’s eyes. She stood up tall next to El-Jihad again and turned her nose up at Malone. “He was trying to run when they brought him down the stairs, now I wanna know how fast he can go. Put him in a room with some hungry pit bulls and see what he does.”
The smile that formed on El-Jihad’s face was a slow and thoughtful one. He chuckled to himself and wondered why he, the king of torture, had never thought of doing that.
“I like how you think,” he said and motioned for Snow and Ron Ron to take him back to wherever they had him. “I like it a lot.”
Chapter 5
Present Day . . .
Honey sat quietly in the backseat of the car beside a tattered Tari. Neither woman spoke, but both were trying to catch the vibe of the other. The last time Tari had used her voice was when they first stopped outside a raggedy-looking motel, and she was confused.
“This is where y’all were staying?”
“Low profile,” Honey answered. “DeAngelo has been so good at playing ghost because he knew exactly who El-Jihad would send to collect. The last thing I needed was for him to be tipped off that I was in town. Now, pray that my shit don’t have no roaches in it when I bring it back to the car.”
At the time Tari had almost laughed. Now, there they were again riding in silence, and she didn’t know what to do. Tari sat up and turned around to look out the back window, and sure enough, a black Audi A8 was following close behind. She’d given the driver the address to her house and wondered how she was going to explain three house guests to her mother.
“Do you have a mirror?” Tari’s voice seemed to startle Honey.
“For?”
“So I can see exactly how much like shit I look before I walk in my house.”
“You don’t need a mirror for what I can tell you. You look like old man shit, the green kind.”
The laugh almost got stuck in Tari’s throat, and when it came out, it sounded like she was choking.
“The green kind?” Tari exclaimed and touched her face with her fingers. The makeup smeared right off, and she groaned. “My mom is going to flip shits. I don’t want her to call the police.”
“Here.” Honey reached into the makeup bag by her feet. It was the only thing that she removed from the duffle bag she’d placed in the trunk. “There should be some makeup wipes inside. I think there’s a comb and some bobby pins too. I don’t think I have anything for them edges—whoo!” Honey looked at Tari’s hair and shook her head. “You better say you sweated them bitches out.”
“I guess that won’t be too much of a lie,” Tari smiled to herself.
Sure enough, in the MAC makeup bag, she found some MAC makeup wipes, a small comb, and three bobby pins. Tari combed through her short hair and pinned it back as neatly as she could. She then cleaned her face, removing the fake eyelashes that she was wearing, and threw all of her trash out the window of the moving car.
“That’s it?” Honey asked, nodding at the pink house Tari had described earlier.
“Yeah,” Tari said. “Pull into the driveway. We don’t have a car, and Mama should be asleep.”
The house wasn’t much, and Tari was almost embarrassed to bring them there. Little did she know, Honey was admiring her home. Her eyes brushed the little lit-up flower garden in the front yard and noticed how neatly the grass was trimmed around it. The house looked like it was older than the owners, but Tari and her mother had kept it up.
“Pretty,” Honey said.
“Yeah, right,” Tari replied, looking around in the backseat to make sure she had everything she came with. “You probably live in some big-ass mansion or some shit.”
Although she didn’t live in a mansion, Honey couldn’t lie and say that her three-story suburban home wasn’t the bee’s knees. When she didn’t say anything, Tari shook her head and scoffed before getting out of the car.
“You probably don’t know shit about living in the hood. You look like you’ve been spoon-fed all your life.”
“Ha!” Honey laughed at the fact that Tari had tried her. “You’d be surprised at what I’ve been through. Money used to be a foreign language to me. Just because I speak it fluently now doesn’t mean I’ve always known how to.”
Honey grabbed her duffle bag from the very back of the truck and told the driver to go to the other motel where the others were. The plan was to all go home that night, but s
ince the transaction wouldn’t clear for a few days, Honey, Dank, and Breezy would hang back. Dank pulled in the driveway as the truck was backing out, and surprisingly, he got out of the car by himself.
“Where’s Breezy?”
“He said his baby mama is tripping on him, and he needed to get home to handle family business.” Dank shrugged his shoulders. “He figured we got this since all we doing is waiting on the transaction to process. And shit, I’m not about to come between no man and his family.”
“Whatever,” Honey shook her head. “He still gon’ touch down and go fuck on all of his little hoes before he makes it home.”
“Come on,” Tari waved for them to follow her to the sidewalk that led to the front door. “My neighbors are nosy. If they see us, they’re probably going to think we’re about to have a threesome.”
“You into that shit, ma?” Dank asked jokingly but caught a quick jab to the arm from Honey.
“Stupid ass,” Honey mugged him and wanted to hit him again because he was laughing so hard.
“Chill, ma,” Dank said when Tari unlocked the front door.
The moment they were all through the threshold, the smell of clean linen hit their nostrils. To their right was a living room that had a baby blue couch and love seat. On the glass coffee table were two burning candles that gave enough light to see where they were going. Directly in front of them was a long hallway that would take them to the back of the house, and to their right was the dining room and kitchen.
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