by Erica Hilton
The elevator door opened and Kym stepped into the narrow, graffiti-covered hallway that reeked of weed and an unfamiliar ghetto smell. She made her way to the end of the hallway and nervously knocked on apartment 6H.
Shortly after her knock, she heard someone say, “Yo, who is it?”
“I’m here to see my uncle—Uncle Pete,” she announced.
The door opened right away and a tall, thuggish looking man with a gleaming bald head and a muscular upper body swathed with tattoos came into view. He had a cigarette dangling from his mouth as he smiled at his niece.
“Oh shit, niecy! Why you ain’t tell me you were coming?” he said.
“It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, Uncle Pete.”
“Yo, come inside.”
Kym entered the ultimate ghetto bachelor pad and drug spot. A shifty looking guy was on the couch puffing on a blunt and talking on the phone.
“Yo, CK, this my niece right here, Kym,” Uncle Pete introduced her.
CK simply nodded to her and continued with his business.
“Anyway, what brings you by, niecy?” he asked.
“I got a problem, Uncle Pete.”
“Fo’ real? Yo, just talk to me. You know I got you.”
Uncle Pete was her dad’s younger brother, and he was just a few years older than her. He was a street dude and was considered the black sheep of the family. But he was proud of his niece. She was a beautiful young girl with goals in her life, and he didn’t want to see her struggling or messed with.
“You heard what happened to me?” she said.
“Yo, when I heard that shit, I knew you ain’t caught no body. That ain’t you, niecy. I know if you needed someone got, then you woulda been came to me to do that shit, cuz you know I got you,” he said.
“Well, that’s why I’m coming to you.”
“Talk to me.”
Just thinking about it started to make her emotional. “I was set up.”
“No doubt . . . by who?”
“This bitch named Charlie Brown—redhead bitch with freckles. She ruined my life, Uncle Pete, and I want her dead,” she declared.
“Oh word?” he grumbled, agitated by what he was hearing. “Just tell me everything you know about this bitch.”
There was no way he could refuse his niece’s request. Murder wasn’t anything new to him. He had several open homicide investigations on him, and he wasn’t afraid to commit another one—especially for his niece.
“She needs to pay.”
“And she will fo’ fuckin’ wit’ my niece,” he said with a clenched jaw. “But I’m on it. Don’t even fret ’bout it, a’ight?”
She nodded. Hearing those words gave her some comfort. The look in her uncle’s eyes said he wasn’t going to rest until the bitch was got.
“Yo, go home and get some rest. I got this.”
She exhaled and replied, “Thank you, Uncle Pete.”
“They fuck wit’ family, then they fuck wit’ me.”
***
It didn’t take long for Pete to get a beat on Charlie Brown AKA Red Charlie. The more he investigated her, the more shocked he was by her notorious reputation. She was the real deal. She had allegedly done dirt that most niggas wouldn’t do. She was well-known on the streets, and she was a pretty bitch, with her reddish hair and attractive features. He was impressed, and he would have gotten with her—had she not done his niece dirty.
He called Kym and told her to leave town for a while, maybe go see some friends out of state. He wanted her to have a solid alibi. He was ready to make his move and take out the infamous Red Charlie.
Chapter Forty-Five
Pyro was sleeping like a baby. He looked so peaceful, like he didn’t have a care in the world. But Mecca couldn’t sleep. She had been up most of the night thinking. No matter how much she tried to brush it off, the same question kept popping back up into her head.
Why the sudden tension between Pyro and Chanel? At the ceremony, they barely said anything to each other. Bizarre. And why did Pyro ask her to marry him after keeping his distance for so long? His proposal came right after Mateo’s release from the rehabilitation center.
Mecca didn’t want to think the unthinkable.
Would Chanel, sweet Chanel, fuck her man and Mateo’s best friend? Did she and Pyro have something going on? And did it happen right under her nose? Mecca wrestled with the disturbing thought. Lying next to Pyro, she propped herself against the headboard and looked down at the huge rock on her finger and exhaled most of her doubts.
This man loves me, she said to herself. He had to. She was pretty and would soon become a Colombia University graduate. She was ambitious and smart, and she was going places.
Mecca mentally compared herself to Chanel. Chanel was her friend, but she came with issues. She was very pretty, but her life had been stalled. Mecca felt that Chanel couldn’t hold a candle to her and her accomplishments. She wasn’t in college. Her family was dysfunctional, and to Mecca, Chanel’s DNA was tainted. Charlie was a sociopath, Claire was crazy and committed suicide, Bacardi was uncouth and ghetto, and Butch was a drunk.
Mecca felt she was clearly the better of the two. She had her shit together, and there was no way Pyro would be with someone like Chanel.
But there were signs. They lived together for a few months. Chanel knew a lot of things about him, and at one point, the two of them seemed inseparable.
She sat upright in the bed and stared at Pyro again. If only she could read his thoughts or know what he was dreaming about. But she was too afraid to ask him. Her stomach started to churn with emotions just thinking about her man fucking her best friend—and if so, was it a one-night stand, or was it an ongoing thing with them?
Mecca wanted to wake him up and ask him, but what if he told her he did fuck Chanel, and it happened on more than one occasion? Even worse, what if Pyro confessed his love for Chanel? The thought was sickening. Would she be able to walk away from him? Mecca knew she would have to gather her strength and move on from him and end their engagement. The truth would tear her apart, and she knew that she would never forgive Pyro or Chanel if her worst nightmare came true. She continued to wrestle with the upsetting thoughts and heaved a deep sigh. The mere thought of it made a few tears trickle from her eyes.
They say don’t ask questions that you don’t want to know the answers to, so Mecca decided to remain quiet and keep her suspicion to herself.
Chapter Forty-Six
Pete sat behind the wheel of a Chevy dressed in dark clothing and smoking his cigarette. His attention was fixed on Red Charlie climbing out of her red convertible Benz. He was parked across the street, his dark blue Malibu blending in with the other vehicles on the Brooklyn street. It was dark and her quaint Brooklyn neighborhood was quiet. He had been watching Charlie for two weeks now—her comings and goings. He was ready to make his move.
He extinguished his cigarette and donned a pair of black latex gloves. He secured his 9mm Beretta with a suppressor in his hoodie pocket. He wasn’t nervous. What he was about to do was nothing new to him. He was relaxed and sure of himself.
Seeing Charlie enter her building, Pete quickly removed himself from the car and hurriedly walked across the street, trying to remain discreet. He glided toward her building and slipped inside. He followed her up the stairwell and onto her floor.
She traveled down the hallway and approached her apartment. Pete, with his gun in his hand, eagerly crept behind her just as she was placing her key in the lock. The plan was to push her inside the apartment and kill her there. He also planned on robbing the bitch to make some extra cash off the hit.
Unfortunately for Pete, he was a few seconds too eager to pounce on Charlie from behind. She spied the threat from her peripheral view and quickly reacted. She immediately pivoted as Pete was inches away and she braced herself for the assault. He was too close f
or her to reach for her gun at that moment, so she went pound for pound with him. A brawl ensued inside the hallway, and while Pete desperately tried to take her down with brute force, Charlie was urgently reaching for her pistol in her purse. It was life or death for them both—someone was going to die tonight, and they were both determined it wouldn’t be them.
Pete continued to try and overpower her and drag her into her apartment, but Charlie knew that meant certain death. She screamed and she fought.
“Help me! Help! Someone help me!” she hollered frantically.
Pete smashed his fist into her face repeatedly, immediately silencing Charlie by knocking her out. With the fight and her screaming, his plans of killing her inside the apartment changed. Cops were possibly on their way, and he was finishing what he’d started. He picked Charlie up from the floor, tossed her over his shoulder, and hurried for the exit.
Epilogue
July
Once again, familiar, hard banging on her front door made Bacardi ready to implode. When was she ever going to find peace?
She was in the kitchen seasoning meat for their 4th of July barbeque downstairs in the park. Her renters were helping load pans of macaroni salad and potato salad into the coolers, along with lemonade, bottled water, sodas, and ice.
Bacardi opened the door to a new set of detectives. Both were white males who looked to be in their mid-forties.
“What now?” she barked at them.
A Detective Henry asked, “Have you heard from your oldest daughter lately? Charlie Brown?”
“What has she done now?” asked Bacardi.
“She’s missing.”
“Missing?” She was taken aback by that information.
“Yes, and we have reason to believe she was met with foul play,” said the partner, Detective Mathews. “A neighbor called it in and said that there was some kind of struggle outside her apartment. There was some blood found on the walls and her door was left open.”
Hearing this, Bacardi reached for her cell phone and dialed Charlie’s phone, but it went straight to her voicemail.
“When did this happen?” she asked the detectives.
“Two days ago, ma’am. It took us some time to investigate and locate her parents.”
Butch came out of the bedroom, and upon seeing the detectives, he asked, “Bernice, what is going on now?”
Bacardi sadly gazed his way. Although Charlie was bad news, the thought of having to bury another child was disheartening.
“Charlie is missing,” she said.
***
Chanel sat alone in her doctor’s office and couldn’t help but to be nervous. She fiddled with her thumbs and fingers and tried to chase away the butterflies in her stomach. The reason she was hard pressed to quickly marry Mateo was because two days before he was released from the center, she and Pyro had sex. For the first time, he came inside of her instead of pulling out like he usually did.
Chanel didn’t know if Pyro did it on purpose or if he was caught up in the moment. Nor did she know at the time if she was pregnant. But eight weeks after her wedding, she was told that she was ten weeks pregnant. History was repeating itself. She knew that the baby was Pyro’s and it was also, as her mother had advised her, a secret she was prepared to take to her grave.