Mirror Image

by Ice-T

  “Okay, baby, I’ll catch you later. I gotta put some work in,” Casey said as he leaned over and kissed her.

  “Okay, Daddy, baby will wait for you to come home,” Carla said, giggling. Casey chuckled at that. Carla always knew how to make him laugh—especially when he needed to.

  She hopped out of the Escalade, and Casey smiled as he watched her phat ass bounce while she walked to the front door of her apartment building. He always loved that view, as did the other passersby, with dudes up and down the street craning their necks to get a better look. Carla glanced back over her shoulder—she must have known he was looking—and gave him a saucy wink. He knew she loved him and wouldn’t let the shit at the cemetery spin her out.

  With that, Casey was off. His expression turned serious as he put his game face on. He was in business mode now and on a mission to take some people to church. His first call was to Shinzo Becker. Half black and half Korean, Shinzo was about fifteen years younger than Casey, and a straight street hustler always looking for a chance to prove himself. When the Rono beef had gone down, he proved himself in spades. He was smart, calm under pressure, and fiercely loyal to Casey. Case knew one day Shin would be the boss—and rightly so, he was a natural leader. Shin didn’t know it yet, but he was about to get himself some stripes.

  “What up, nigga, we got a pickup game in the Bronx,” Casey said on his Bluetooth earpiece, talking slightly louder over the city noise around him.

  “Yeah, so I heard. I’m already in motion—got this Korean kid who played college ball with me before, so the shit will get handled,” Shinzo replied.

  “No shit.” Casey grinned—as usual, Shinzo was already on the clock. “Okay, inna minute,” he said, then hung up.

  To anyone eavesdropping on their brief conversation—and Casey always assumed someone was—they’d be clueless that Shinzo was meeting the guys at a Korean mini mart in the Bronx for a strategy meeting with their lawyer. The word “kid” always meant specific locations—“Italian kid” meant Roberto’s Italian restaurant, “Thai kid” meant the Thai boxing ring in the Bronx, and so on, and “college ball” was short for “college baller,” their nickname for a lawyer.

  This kind of coded talk had been developed way back, starting when Casey and Champa were in juvie together. Early on, they’d realized if they were gonna thrive and not just survive, they’d need to be able to operate in plain sight. Within months, they had a flourishing black market business in full swing in the kiddie joint, offering everything from protection to cigarettes, pot to porno mags. Not bad for a couple of thirteen-year-olds, but then again, they were anything but your average kids.

  Champa did his first juvie bid for setting his alcoholic stepfather on fire. He’d doused the muthafucka with 151 when he was passed out on the couch, lit a match, and poof! He hadn’t killed him, but the sonofabitch was left so disfigured, he probably wished he were dead. Champa did it in retaliation for that chump beating his mother so bad, she’d been in the hospital for three days with her broken jaw wired up. That kind of shit stuck with a man—even today, Casey always noticed that whenever Champa saw cats drunk, it brought out something sinister in his childhood friend, and of course, everyone knew that you never cracked “yo mama” jokes around him. On more than one occasion, some dumb bastard had made that mistake and got a busted lip.

  Casey’s story was different, but just as fucked up. Both his parents were decent people who had caught bad breaks. His mother was a secretary for a law firm, worked hard, yet always had time and patience for her son. One night at dinner she complained of a severe headache, then started getting violently ill. She was rushed to Bronx-Lebanon Hospital, but died three hours later from a brain aneurysm. She was twenty-eight years old. Five-year-old Casey had watched in horror as his father frantically tried to bring her back to life. It was the only time he’d ever seen his father cry.

  His father had a rough year after that, but eventually pulled it together to survive. He remembered his dad saying to him, “When life pushes you around, son, you got to push back.” They were the only family each other had—no siblings, uncles or aunts, or grandparents. So there was no one to lean on or give a helping hand. His father worked for the transit authority; he was in middle management and was respected and well liked. One day when Casey’s father was coming home late from work and waiting on the train platform, two white teenagers demanded money, which his father refused to hand over. The kids attacked him, and a fight ensued. Casey’s father knocked one of the little bastards on his ass and was wrestling with the other one when they all accidentally fell on the live train tracks. One was electrocuted instantly. The surviving kid made up a story that his friend and he were pounced on by Casey’s father, the cops bought that bullshit, and that was that.

  At the time, Casey was eight years old and suddenly an orphan. A friend’s mom took him in for a couple days, but then Children’s Services stepped in and tried to place him, which was tough. Most people wanted babies, not an eight-year-old traumatized by the loss of both his parents. For years, he was bounced from place to place. Some foster parents took him in for the short-term cash from the state; others, because they wanted an extra pair of hands to help around the house. Over the ensuing years, Casey went from being a happy, extroverted kid to an introverted, angry young loner.

  At thirteen, he got transferred to his sixth family, which meant a new school and another nightmare. His new foster parents had seven other adopted kids, so clearly this was a business to them. Being the new kid in school, he was always getting pushed around and bullied by kids two and three years older than him. One day one of the kids, called Bulldog, and his two partners caught Casey off guard and beat the shit out of him by the school lockers. If that wasn’t enough, they held Casey’s legs open so Bulldog could kick him hard in the nuts, twice. It was painful and humiliating.

  Casey got little sympathy from his foster parents and pissed blood all day. He was out of school for the next three days, and when asked who did it, Casey held his water and didn’t snitch on any of his attackers. After being back at school for two weeks, Casey exacted his revenge on all three boys in one glorious day. The first boy, he stalked and caught in the bathroom during study hall. After throwing bleach in his eyes, he proceeded to stomp the living shit out of him. The sounds of the boy whimpering and begging him to stop were like a drug to Casey, and it felt fucking great. It was the first time in his life that he’d ever felt powerful, and he loved it. He fantasized that he was killing all the bastards who ever fucked with him as he jumped up and down on his head. He left the boy in a bloody heap out cold on the tile floor and bounced before anyone could catch him. In his mind, he’d killed him. The boy wasn’t dead, but he lost sight in his right eye. The other two fared far worse.

  From there, Casey went to the gym and found his next target. Grabbing a baseball bat, he walked up behind him and hit the second kid in the back of the head with all his might. Crack! The rest of the kids jumped the fuck back when they saw and heard the sickening blow. After the boy fell, Casey flipped him over and repeatedly swung at his face, breaking his nose and jaw and knocking out the whole front row of his teeth. He felt nothing but hate as the bat sent the kid’s teeth flying across the gym. A couple of nearby kids were so freaked out by the brutality of the assault that they started to vomit, with one girl peeing in her pants.

  By the time the coaches got hip to what was going on, Casey was already running out the door, dropping the bloody bat on the way out. He ran through the hallways until he was sure no one was doggin’ him, then slowed down, breathing hard, his pulse racing. He was in a zone unlike anything he’d ever experienced. He felt like he had been living in slow motion until that day. All those years of being fucked around with and being shit on were over, forever. He fantasized that he was The Punisher, exacting justice. Fuck the consequences—no one was gonna fuck with him without payin’ for it ever again. Fuck that!

  The young Casey rounded the hallway corner and saw Bulldog
talking to some girl, trying to be a little pimp. Perfect! Calm and cool, Casey reached into his back pocket and pulled out and opened his knife. Gritting his teeth, he walked up behind Bulldog and plunged the blade into the boy’s neck as hard as he could. He was so strung out, it was a wonder he didn’t miss.

  Bulldog let out a cry and fell to his knees and just started shaking as he collapsed to the ground. He looked up from the ground to see Casey standing above him, his face expressionless. Casey had thought the kid was dying as he convulsed on the floor, but he didn’t. He was paralyzed from the neck down for life.

  Casey was immediately tackled by a schoolteacher. And soon a swarm of cops and ambulances converged on the school and tended to the victims and took Casey into custody. The cops were shocked by how calm yet defiant he was at the same time. He heard one cop say he was a “little psychopath.”

  The press covered the story for weeks, calling Casey a monster and the product of a shitty foster care system. Politicans used the incident as currency to get elected. The court of public opinion wanted him tried as an adult, but the judge overruled that and sentenced him to four years in juvie. After sentencing, he was soon forgotten by the outside world as a new headline dominated the press and the public’s mind.

  All that publicity did a lot for his rep in juvie, however. The young Casey had walked in with a lot of respect—something he’d never felt before and quickly became addicted to. From then on, he never walked away from trouble, but toward it. After his four-year stint, Casey came out ready for the big leagues.

  * * *

  Casey drove through the Bronx. It used to be home; now it was just another piece of his territory. The projects and the playgrounds were all a battlefield he’d both waged war and done business on at some point or another. Crime statistics still rated the Bronx as the most dangerous borough in NY, but like everything else in life, that seemed exaggerated.

  Rolling down the familiar streets brought back more memories—meeting Antonio’s mother at the National Puerto Rican Day Parade, taking Antonio to the Bronx Zoo. Man, too many memories, his expression turned hard as he thought of his lost boy yet again.

  Pulling up to Kimchi’s Mini Mart and Deli, Casey scoped out the area from his car and spotted both Champa’s and Shin’s rides. He took a magnet from the center divider and placed it below the steering column, opening a secret compartment that held a SIG 226 and a baby Glock 9 millimeter. He grabbed the baby 9 and from its weight knew it was fully loaded. The tiny but deadly pistol was compact enough to fit into his front pocket. Casey opened the Escalade’s door and felt thick humidity envelop him as he got out and crossed the street; it was a hot day in more ways than one.

  He walked into Kimchi’s, enjoying the cool breeze from the air conditioner. Casey nodded to Mr. Kim, a skinny older Korean man who was always behind the register. No words were spoken as he headed to the back room. The storage room was filled with shelves full of boxes, foodstuffs, and everything else a person would expect in a Korean corner store—except for the two master criminals and their crooked attorney sitting at a card table, that was.

  Shinzo, Champa, and Alejandro Hernandez all looked up and greeted Casey. After the what’sups had been exchanged, Casey hooked the fourth chair, sat down, and looked at Champa. “Okay, what the fuck happened?”

  “Rodrigo and Ernesto were at that strip joint, the Crazy Horse Cabaret, getting loaded on I don’t know what and got into a beef with some guys that were there for a bachelor party. After some shouting and a scuffle, Rodrigo and Ernesto got thrown out on their asses,” said Champa.

  “Are these niggas never not in some bullshit?” asked Casey rhetorically.

  “Hold on, it gets better. They decide to wait for the guys to leave the club, right? When they come out, they jolly stomp these niggas, right then and there. Of course, the parking lot has closed-circuit—”

  “Of course,” said Casey.

  “—the club owner calls the cops, they show up on time for once, Rodrigo and Ernesto resist arrest ’cause they’re higher than kites, cops pat ’em down and find some rock on Ernesto, and then they go downtown.”

  Alejandro looked at Casey. “Bottom line, Crush, is that bail was set at seventy-five K for each of them. I’m sure I can get ’em something light for the assult and resisting arrest, but the possession, given that they both have priors, means they could be facing ten years, and that’s with me using some grease.”

  “Shee-it! Okay, let’s get their dumb asses out.” Casey then turned to Shin. “You bring that bread?”

  Shin nodded and tossed four stacks of money on the table. “Yeah, fifteen K for the bail bondsman plus five K retainer for the counselor here.”

  Casey watched Alejandro as he spied the money, but their mouthpiece waited for Casey to give him the nod, then took the dough. Casey respected Alejandro’s intelligence, but at the end of the day, he knew the man was a criminal, too, and would sell him and anyone else out in a heartbeat to save his own ass. Alejandro had heard and seen too many stories about being in the joint to even think twice about doing a stretch. But Casey also knew Alejandro enjoyed his role as the VK’s legal counsel and the perks it got him—plenty of power, boatloads of undeclared cash, and all the women he could handle. The shifty lawyer had always been straight up with them, and as long as he wasn’t compromised, he would never be a problem.

  Alejandro scooped the money up and placed it into his alligator-skin briefcase. Standing, he said, “They’ll be out by dinnertime. As far as the other details, I’ll let you know what the ticket is for leniency. By the way, I heard you got Lomax as a PO?”

  “Yeah, what of it?” Casey looked at him sideways.

  “I remember when he was a cop, rumor was that he was dirty, but they never could pin anything on him, so they bumped him to corrections.”

  “Yeah, that’s a story I heard before. Do me a favor—dig on that for me on the DL and let me know what you find,” Casey said.

  “Yeah, all right. I think his old partner is still active. I’ll see what I can get, no charge,” Alejandro said with a half-joking smile on his face.

  Casey looked at him and said sardonically, “You’re a funny guy, Alejandro.”

  Casey and Alejandro bumped fists, and with that, the lawyer left out the back door.

  Casey stared at Champa and Shinzo, took a deep breath, and exhaled. “If those guys think they gonna pull a dime, will they hold their water?”

  “Yeah, they’re tight with their families and each have kids. They know they’d lose that if they said shit,” said Champa.

  Shinzo nodded. “They’re also both in their early twenties—with good behavior, all they’re looking at is seven years max.”

  “Besides, they don’t really know shit about shit,” added Champa.

  “Well, let’s assume they’re still set on stupid, and remind them of the consequences of spilling shit to anyone. Shin, I’ma leave that to you,” Casey said. He didn’t need to spell it out—everyone in the VKs knew the penalty for turning rat—snitches always ended up facedown in the gutter, no matter where they were.

  Satisfied, Casey rose to his feet. “Okay, let’s get all the major players at the Urban Victory office tonight at nine. These niggas all need to have a tighter rein on the baby OGs they got reportin’ to them. Also, I’m guessin’ Ern and Rodrigo were probably slanging shit on the side, so that’s gonna have to be dealt with as well.”

  Champa and Shinzo both nodded. Casey looked at Champa. “It’s past time we got our house in order. Our organization needs more organization, and I’m putting you in charge of making sure everything runs smooth from here on out. Make sure the sets don’t get out of line and stay in check. You hear of anything that might rock the boat, you let me know quick fast.”

  Casey made sure both his captains felt his gaze. “Now that we got everyone consolidated, it’s important that it sticks. A lotta these cats ain’t used to really reporting to anyone. Not only do we have that to deal with, but we’re a
lso demanding they do business in a different way.” Casey said, “Shinzo, you gonna be my eyes and ears on the street. I want you always movin’ among your connects, going from hood to hood and making sure shit’s adhered to, squashing any beefs before they get outta control, and reporting back to me on who the liabilities are and who’s got skills. Got it?”

  Shinzo nodded soberly. “I’m yer dawg.”

  With that business handled, they all split, Shinzo and Champa through the back door and Casey back through the deli.

  On his way out, Casey grabbed an OJ from the refrigerator, walked to the counter, and handed Mr. Kim two bucks.

  “That’s not necessary, Mr. Casey,” Kim humbly said.

  “But it’s appropriate, my man. Thanks for the use of your back room,” said Casey.

  “Anytime, Mr. Casey. As you Americans say, ‘That’s what friends are for.’”

  “And as you Koreans say, ‘A close neighbor is better than a far-off relative,’” Casey replied.

  “Indeed, you are correct, sir, your friendship is always appreciated,” said Mr. Kim as he bowed. Casey bowed back, took the money and his OJ, and left.

  As he walked back to his Caddy, Casey remembered when Mr. Kim had come to him long ago with a problem. Casey owned the apartment above Kimchi’s Deli, using it as a crash spot on regular occasion. Mr. Kim was smart enough to see what kind of man Casey was, and came to him one day when his only daughter had gotten involved with one of Casey’s enforcers. Casey made the girl off-limits to everyone, not because he liked Kim or gave a shit, but because he wanted the insurance of knowing the store owner would never speak about what he saw or overheard.