by London Starr
“Well, you’re here now, motherfucker,” a man responds—Chang, “and you’ve started a war. Do you want a closed casket next week or a memorial in about seven years when they declare your ass legally dead because they cannot find your body?”
As much as I want to enter the building and finish this shit since Lea and Chang are doing too much talking, dragging this hit out, and probably waiting for me to enter the building, I stay where I am, and decide to make them shut up and let me inside. I point my gun inside the doorway towards the table to do what I usually do not—pull the trigger in rapid succession and hope I hit one of their asses through the tabletop.
The long muzzle of a large caliber weapon appears over the edge of it, and starts to bust steadily on my ass. I stop shooting and press my back harder into the wall, waiting for the gun to run out of bullets. When the shots stop, I run inside then to the left, hoping there is something to hide behind. If there is not, I am up a shit creek and will worry about that when I have to.
Luckily, I find another table sitting in the opposite corner of the room with bricks of coke on top of its wooden surface, then run behind it before turning it over and taking cover on my knees.
“Fuck, he’s in here, Lea!” Chang shouts. “Where the fuck is the other one?”
“I don’t fucking know, Chang! I’m back here with you and you emptied the clip fool!”
“Fuck that! I got another clip and these motherfuckers gon’ learn today about coming up in Chang’s house and acting a fool! You ready to die, King?”
I release the empty clip from my gun onto the floor, then extract a fully loaded one from my pocket and shove it into place in the butt of my weapon, planning to retrieve the empty magazine later.
Bullets start pelting the tabletop. A white dust storm kicks up. I slide down to my front before I breathe it in, and look around the bottom edge of the table. All I need is one shot, and have it when I see Chang, who looks like the milk chocolate, male version of Lea, stupidly exposing his head from behind the table while shooting at me.
A shadow falls on the floor in front of the backdoor, then the business end of a gun appears in it and takes aim.
Chang suddenly changes the path of his bullets, aiming at the backdoor, and then the side of his head explodes, splattering his brains against the wall behind him. His dead body collapses on top of Lea. She screams.
“Raw!” I holler.
“Yeah!”
“You good?”
“Yep, and feeling better than ever, but I’ll feel fucking fantastic when I’ve ghosted that bitch behind the table! She has to come out sometime.”
“I’m coming out right now, motherfucker! That was my fucking brother you killed, Raw! I just fucking found him after we got out of the state’s care ten years ago, and put him on to the game! We was about to get this motherfucking paper and take over Mecca,” she yells hysterically, before more bullets start to strike the wooden table and all the walls of the building like she has a fully automatic and illegal weapon, and is trying to kill everything, inanimate objects and all.
Everybody is losing their damn minds and wants to take over Mecca.
I duck behind the table, realizing I am literally trapped with a piece shooter no match for an AK-47 that Chang probably brought from Shad. I hope Raw is not stupid enough to take a chance of getting a kill shot while she is busting a gun that shoots bullets thirty times faster than any one of us can blink.
“Raw, stay where the fuck you are,” I order and cover my head, waiting for Lea to run out of bullets, and praying that she does not know how to reload or dead my ass before the clip is empty.
“You can bet that, King! This bitch has gone crazy!” His voice seems to be traveling low, like he is crouching on the ground outside.
“You’ll pay for this, King! You should’ve just gave me the money,” Lea joins in the conversation again over the gunfire before the rounds suddenly stop going off over my head and near it, then the gun clicks in her hand. Now that she has finally run out of bullets, I almost shout ‘Hallelujah!’ Then a single shot discharges inside the building.
Something crashes into another object that skids across the floor on the other side of the room. I assume it is Lea’s dead body getting intimately acquainted with the concrete floor or table, positive that Raw has gotten the kill shot after her clip ran out finally, but I have to get up to see.
I grab my empty clip off the floor, stash it in my coat pocket, stand up, and see a small figure under a black skull cap standing in the front doorway with their back to me. I recognize the rear profile as Ajoni’s instantly, with her gun down by her side and looking at Lea’s body folded and bleeding over the top of the table.
Ajoni cocks her head to the side as if she is contemplating a sculpture in a museum. “I have to tell your daughter to stop playing with her food all the time, King. If you’re going to eat somebody’s ass up, eat it up and move on.” Then she turns around and walks out of the building without looking back.
Raw laughs out while walking inside the back door.
“Damn, King. She colder than you is.”
I turn to him, angry as hell. “What the fuck just happened?”
He shrugs. “You wanted a Queen that would ride or die. Well, she has dead her first body for you, so I guess you can’t keep thinking that she’s not loyal anymore, now can you?”
No, I cannot, but I never needed Ajoni to take a life for me, just create it, and stay in the damn car.
“She’s still going to kill my child, Raw, is hardheaded as hell, and I never wanted a Queenpin, just a queen. I can run my own dope game and lay my own bodies down.”
“Nobody ever gets exactly what they want in a person… do they, Calen?” he asks flippantly.
I get exactly what he is trying to put down, while he stuffs his gun in his back—Ajoni has to deal with the sides of me that she would rather not, and I do too when it comes to her.
“And time waits for no man, King, so let’s get this shit over with before someone drives over here with their nose wide open and gets their shit split down the middle by Ajoni. I’ll go get the shovels right quick. You can start hauling the bodies to the Escalade, or wait for me to get back to help you.”
I absorb Raw’s order, cram my gun in the back of my jeans, pull my leather jacket off while Raw jogs out the front door behind Ajoni, and drape it over the edge of the table that I was taking cover behind. I cannot help but feel proud of her while I am angry with her too for doing what needed to be done, and wishing she did not have a body on her conscience now.
Sometimes, my sleep is interrupted with the faces of people that I have had to kill just to survive in Mecca—I did not want that for her either. I make up my mind to stick close to her while keeping my distance, to make sure she has no lasting effects from this night, but something tells me that she won’t—she stared at Lea’s body like it was an inanimate object that had never been full of life.
Shit! That chick is colder than I am when she needs to be. I’ll never make the mistake of telling her to shoot me and take me out of my misery again. She just might do it.
I haul Lea’s body over my shoulder, and carry it out to the truck, trying not to get blood dripping from the wound in her forehead on my clothes. Raw emerges from the darkness less than a minute later with the shovels in both hands. He drops them and runs to the back of the Escalade to open the back doors for me. I would ask him if Ajoni is okay, but that will give him the opening to talk about the situation between her and me. I am still in a foul mood about her getting out of the car when I told her ass not to, and do not want to discuss it.
It takes quite a few minutes for me and Raw to dump all the bodies in the back of the truck on top of each other with their weapons without getting too much of their blood on us. I wipe my prints off the back door with the tail of my shirt. We get in and drive around the back of the warehouse with Raw’s hands balled in the sleeve of his coat on the steering wheel.
The neon-gre
en digital clock in the dashboard informs me that it is five minutes after ten. He is still oddly quiet while we look for paths big enough to get the truck through to go farther in the woods, looking for a spot wide enough to bury everyone deep so the animals will not smell the rotting flesh and bones beneath the dirt and dig them right back up. Just as Raw parks between two oak trees, intending to break ground in front of the truck, a shadow moves up my side of it, continuing towards the front end, and scares the living shit out of both of us.
“What the fuck,” we holler together.
Ajoni steps into the headlights with shovels in both hands that we both forgot to grab, and giggles quietly before dropping both tools on the ground. “I was walking behind the truck the whole time. You were driving so damn slow Raw, I could’ve passed you on foot.”
He snickers and shakes his head. “Excuse me for not knowing where the hell I was going. I know the Kings’ woods better, thank you.”
She stops laughing. “If you have any bodies behind the Kings’ warehouse, you two should probably move those too. You never know who is snitching, do you, King?”
Raw and I look at each other and consider her advice. I take it to heart. Cleaning up the Kings’ movements before I become completely Calen Kingsley is a damn good idea. And if she does not ask where we are going to rebury the bodies, she is probably not going to be the one snitching on us, again. I grow a little bit more secure in her loyalty to me, but do not tell her that though, and cannot—when I looked back at where Ajoni is standing, I discovered that she is gone.
I turn around in my seat, and look through the tinted glass in the rear doors. She’s walking back towards the warehouse several yards away. I can barely see the halogen light that is mounted in the ceiling shining out of the back door. “Damn, she’s like a fucking cat, Raw.”
“While we were riding to the store, she told me about sneaking out of her house for years to watch her father do dirt in the streets for whoever he was working for at the time. She never got caught by her mother either, or everyone on Teamon block would’ve known about it. That damn Seeri was nothing to play with even as a junkie. You chose well for a queen, bruh. I give you that much.”
“I did, but I can’t get her respect and trust for shit.”
“She had your kid, King, made Larkin take her deal instead of letting our asses rot in prison, just killed a motherfucker for you so you can meet your daughter in the morning, is helping you bury bodies, and told you to get rid of the others in case somebody decides to sing like a bird for a get out jail free pass. Where exactly does she not respect and trust you at?”
“She’s still getting rid of my kid, Raw.”
“You sure about that?”
His question sparks my doubts into overdrive. Suddenly, I am not so sure of anything concerning Ajoni anymore, not after she just killed a woman in cold blood, and then giggled because she scared the hell out of two grown men. If she really wanted to prevent a pregnancy, she is completely capable of not giving a damn if I was watching her do it or not.
“No, I’m not sure, Raw.”
“Good, now let’s dig. I ain’t gon’ be out here all night talking to your ass.”
I laugh out loud as one of the canyons in my chest starts to shrink. “Something will be wrong if you didn’t talk all night, Raw.”
“Yeah, you right,” he says casually before getting out of the car, and picking up one of the shovels.
He jabs the dirt with the tip of it, and begins talking his ass off. I grunt from time to time during the twenty minutes it takes to dig the mass grave before we can throw the first body in it. Another twenty pass before we have them covered up good enough. Georgia’s red clay is all over us, caking up in the blood spots on our clothes from Chang’s, Lea’s, and his crew bleeding bodies.
We shake most of the dirt off during our walk out of the woods with our shovels in hand, and see Ajoni moving around the warehouse through the backdoor. She has a white scarf tied around her face—probably Chang’s colors—and is using a regular broom that she must have found in this warehouse to sweep the spilled cocaine out the back door.
Raw and I walk around to the front, and find no traces of blood or evidence that a crime occurred in the tin can. The tables are upright again with the unopened dope stacked neatly on them, the busted bags and bullet casings from Chang and his men’s guns gone. The bottom drops out of my stomach—Ajoni fingerprints could be on all of it. I will burn this tin can down before I let her go to prison for murder.
“Ajoni, did you touch—”
“With my sweater, King,” she cuts me off calmly, still sweeping. “I’m not stupid. The empty dope bags and bullet casings are in my bag in the car waiting to be thrown away somewhere else. Use the dope bags to keep the dirt on the shovels from getting on the interior of Camaro. Everything seems to have its own DNA these days. Now go get the other brooms out the trunk. We’ll spread the coke across the yard until it mixes in with the dirt and contaminates the blood in it, while someone sweeps away our footprints in the yard and woods.
I hope you didn’t wipe down the truck too much. The cops need to find everyone’s prints in it that normally used it since Lea never washed the damn thing. I cleaned the warehouse, because burning it down will only make the cops look for a reason that it burned, and probably find something that we missed. A forensics team will certainly find it, and no crime is perfect. We don’t want a forensic team being called out here.”
“So we’re doing a Roanoke Island, where the first real colony that settled America just disappeared without a trace huh?” Raw asks with a smile.
Ajoni nods. “Yes, but we’re going to pray that the cops think Chang and his crew are just a bunch of gangsters that Mecca would’ve been better off without and don’t want to look for them though.”
Raw’s head swivels to me. “King, we could’ve taken over the world with this chick.”
I think he is right, and know it is my fault that we did not and won’t because I could not keep my hands off of her. I do not regret that I couldn’t though, because Anjuwan wouldn’t be here. I guess I have to accept now that the domino effect of the King’s downfall started with me making Ajoni mine. It ended when I pushed her to choose between the crew that she only knew from the streets and her blood. I would have chosen any one of the Blue Kings over some random gangsters that Mecca would have been better off without too.
Some of my resentment fades as I stare at her working to keep our asses free and clear of Larkin again and protect what is hers; Anjuwan, Seeri, me, and Raw. I know instantly she isn’t going to prevent the pregnancy. Ajoni gives life a chance when she can.
Even Lea would be alive if I hadn’t made it my business to take her out, and forced Ajoni to choose again—making sure I made it to D.C. in the morning to meet my baby girl or risk me dying in a shootout that had not gone down like I thought it would. I did not expect Lea to try and take my ass out with a AK-47, and she did not because of Ajoni.
CHAPTER Sixteen
Ajoni
I am dog-ass tired by the time we leave Chang’s warehouse, and arrive in Union City, going to Hankin’s house, whoever the hell that is. I do not even ask. I have just taken a life, covered it up, and am extremely concerned about why I do not feel bad about it. Even a little information about the next stop on this killing spree will have my mind spinning out, so I ride quietly in the backseat down Highway 41.
King looks back at me from time to time on the thirty-minute drive, but none of the usual anger towards me is showing in his face. I start to wonder where the hell it has gone and what that means for me. Is he taking me somewhere to lay my body down next since I know of his bad acts tonight and he cannot trust me to not snitch on him again?
I have given him no reason to think I will not do it again. Right now, I do not have the energy to fight or beg for my life, but I can pull the trigger if I need to and if it gets me back to my daughter—I hope he does not make me need to. I would rather take him home with
me to live with his daughter, but Anjuwan comes before all others.
For now, I will trust him, and watch the scenery turn to an isolated residential district that is not anything to brag about. Raw rides by several mailboxes that have seen better days, then slows down just a little when we see one with Hankin stenciled on it. I guess King was telling the truth when he said he was going to dead someone named Hankin tonight. Some of my worry eases up—I am not the one minutes away from taking my last breath after all.
“Raw, find a part of the street where there are no lights and no one can see me get out of the car,” King says suddenly, making me become alert.
Raw drives a little further down the street that intercepts with another and yields at a stop sign before turning right into an undeveloped and pitch black cul-de-sac.
King releases his seatbelt. “Slow down, but don’t stop. Ajoni climb over the seat when I get out and sit up straight so when y’all drive out of here, no one suspects that a rider is missing from the car.”
I sit up, preparing to dive head first over the seat when we are circling around the dead end and the passenger door is facing the wooded acres of land. King opens the door, and steps out of the car with a crowbar in his hand then vanishes into the dark. I am in the passenger’s seat and softly closing the door back before Raw has completed the turn out of the dead end and arrives back at the stop sign. I suspect King is running through the backyards of the houses, and get anxious when Raw rides out of the subdivision. I do not know what animal is waiting to take a chunk out of King’s ass, or if the owner is waiting to blow him away for trespassing.
“Raw—”
“He’s got this, Ajoni, and this is the last time he’ll have to do something like this. I promise.”
“I’m holding you to that.”
He smiles. “Hungry?”
Could I eat at a time like this? I have not eaten anything in hours and my stomach feels empty, so I guess I could.