by London Starr
“Yeah, I can eat.”
“That’s what’s up. If you can do normal things after putting a bullet between a bitch’s eyes, you’re good.”
I get angry.
“She ordered a fucking hit on me and was going to kill King for a few dollars without a second thought for what our deaths would’ve done to Anjuwan. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“I don’t blame you. I would’ve busted on her ass too. Well, I did, and she hadn’t did shit to me but gave me some damn good head. At least, you had a life or death reason to kill her. I was doing it for the fun of it.”
I throw up a little in my mouth.
“First off, Raw, never mention what she did to you. That is TMI; too much information… and I guess her head game is why King kept her around.” I look out the side window, not wanting to hear anything else about Lea period. The bitch is dead and gone, and never to be remembered as far as I am concerned.
“Sorry, but she served a purpose. What do you want to eat?”
“What does King like besides Chinese food?”
“That’s about it, to tell you truth. He’s a picky motherfucker.”
I scoff. “He is that, but we can’t afford to go inside anywhere looking like we just buried a bunch of bodies and cleaned up a crack house. Find an all-night drive-thru, or we starve.”
“Ajoni, King is loyal if he is nothing else. Sometimes too loyal or he would’ve left you in D.C., and fucked both Lea and Nina when he got out of The Pen. There’s a Mickey D’s up this road. If he doesn’t want that, his ass can wait until a Chinese restaurant opens up tomorrow.”
“I’m learning that King can be too loyal, Raw. He’s already planning to raise a baby that doesn’t exist yet.” And there is no way in hell that he is just going to walk away from Anjuwan.
“How many women would be lucky to have a man like that, A?” he asks nonchalantly.
“All of them,” I whisper, but I have already ruined my chances for having a relationship with him, and there is nothing I can do about it.
I just wish I could get over that, but I am stuck in my feelings just like King is.
Raw falls silent. Ten minutes pass before he finds the restaurant, the only one still open after twelve on a lonely strip of highway. We have ten minutes left before we have to pick up King at the entrance of the subdivision. Driving back through the area again will look suspicious to anyone still awake and playing neighborhood watchman, or just be plain damn nosy.
***
King
Slipping through the backyards with no pets into Hankin’s in the dark is easy as baking a pie. I glance in all the windows around the house, making sure there are no alarm decals on them before striding silently back to the bare sliding-glass doors in his kitchen. I get a bird’s eye view of a head laying to the side of an easy chair in front of an outdated thirty-two inch television in the living room. I am thoroughly shocked that a correctional officer does not protect his home better from criminals. Being confident that he can protect his home himself or sure that no one would dare enter his home uninvited just worked against him.
I lift the crowbar in my hands, intending to jimmy the lock on the doors, but something tells me to try opening them first. I grip the handle of one and push. It slides right open. I smile and walk inside the kitchen, quiet as death arriving. This will be the easiest burglary that I have ever committed before I discovered that I could sell drugs and make even faster money, if I was coming to steal material things.
I stand in the shadows by the sink next to the doors, looking for motion sensors and cameras on the wall. Hankins moves in his chair restlessly, as if he senses that he is not alone. I start to wonder if an overweight correctional officer is worth the effort it will take to kill him for a measly three grand. Ajoni wouldn’t do this, and he really is no threat to me. I sure as hell will not miss the money, and Hankin had eight years to try me for what he really wanted from me. He must have known that one of us would have died if he did, but is he raping other prisoners too afraid to kill him or that cannot protect themselves?
I cannot find it in me to believe that he is not.
Anger starts to boil inside me. I never liked a motherfucker that picked on people weaker than they are for the hell of it, and I will bet my next child’s life that Hankin is especially good at doing that.
He shifts in his chair. His right hand falls over the side before his fingers lose their grip on a piece of paper in them. It flutters to the floor, landing beside the chair. I step forward, dodging the four-chair dining room table filled with beer bottles and takeout containers, while pulling my gun out of the waistband of my jeans. My fingers adjust around the frame of it, hovering over the trigger as I move into the dim lamplight illuminating half of the kitchen and coming from an end table on the right side of the small living room beside a faded floral couch.
A wall between the two rooms blocks my view of the left side of the living room, and will make me have to shoot first and ask no questions later if anyone walks around it before I do.
I step over the threshold into the room with Hankin, and look down a tiny hall that must lead to the bedrooms on my left. I hear no sounds of anyone moving around or see any lights coming from under closed doors or out of opened rooms. When I am sure it is just me and him in the house, I look down at the paper on the floor. It is not just paper though, but a black and white photo of a man in a bright yellow prisoner’s uniform bent over a table, with his pants down around his ankles and his hands cuffed to the iron loop in the middle of the table.
Even in the still frame, I can see the prisoner’s struggle to get free before his manhood is taken, and he cannot be any more than eighteen. If he wanted to do this with Hankin, it would be another matter, and none of my business. This is not the case, and Hankin raping prisoners is my business—I could have been the man in the picture very easily if all the guards are helping Hankin do this.
I take the business end of my nine, and nudge him in the back of the head with the silencer. He snorts and rolls to his side in the chair away from me—that is no easy feat when he has a lot of body to maneuver. His bare feet almost knock over the coffee table loaded down with everything from pill bottles to old newspapers. I nudge the back of his head again until he turns it to look behind him.
His eyes widen in terror, just like the prisoner’s in the photo, before he turns his body to the position that will allow him to get up. “What the fuck!” he yells out before gripping both arms of the chair, preparing to get to his feet.
I put the barrel of the gun to the side of his head. “Uh huh, Hankin, no running.” He freezes in place. “I told you that you would see me again, but this situation probably is not what you had in mind, is it?”
He shakes his head.
“How many, Hankin?”
“Wh—what?” he stutters.
“How many men have you raped? I can see your little trophy
on the floor, so I’m figuring there’s at least one, which is too many. I’m sure there are more. So how many? If you lie, I’ll know it, so speak the truth if you want to live.”
He swallows and licks his lips. “One hundred and one.”
My stomach flips over. “I don’t have one hundred and one bullets, but fourteen will do for every man that didn’t want you like that, don’t you think?”
It suddenly hits me that I was no better than Hankin—Ajoni did not want me like that either, until I made her want me, and I am surprised she does not hate me for it like I detest Hankin.
He raises his left hand in the air. “Just wait, Calen,” he begs.
“Did all 101 men ask you to wait?”
He nods. I grit my teeth, wanting to blow his ass away before he has learned his lesson.
“Did you wait, Hankin?”
He shakes his head.
“Then I’m not going to either.” I press the gun harder against his temple.
He grabs for his chest with one hand, and reaches for something in front of
him with the other. I glance down at the pill bottles on the table. Nitroglycerin is written plainly on several empty ones lying on their sides on the grimy surface of the table.
“Having a heart attack, huh?” I ask glibly with a small smile.
He nods. I do not have to pull the trigger after all, instead letting nature take its course, like I should have done with Ajoni—I rushed things and fucked up just about everybody’s life around me, including Anjuwan’s.
I switch plans from killing him outright to waiting for Hankin to die naturally. I will leave the picture right where it is for someone to find when they find his body. Hopefully, they will inform the cops of Hankin’s tendencies with prisoners, and someone will investigate the corruption that seems to be extending even further through the right side of the law than I ever thought possible.
I wait ten minutes longer than I am supposed to and his lips start to turn blue, making sure he cannot be resuscitated and able to return to work anywhere. Only then do I start searching the room for a phone. A landline with a phone connected to the base by a long cord sits on the end table with the lamp. I knock the receiver off its base then punch in 911 with the barrel of the gun, before leaving the way I came. I slip easily through the backyards going toward the front of the neighborhood, passing a few sleeping dogs that barely whimper when I jog by. By all rights, they should have sensed me coming before I ever left Hankin’s house, and tried to chew through me, but they didn’t, probably suspected Hankin for what he was, a lowlife bastard that needed to die.
I have never felt a sense of justice since I was old enough to be aware that my mother chose the pipe over me, and forced me into learning how to take, and sometimes kill, to survive, but I feel it tonight. Finally, someone got what they deserved in the end without me having to put a bullet in them to make it happen. Maybe if I had let Ajoni come into her love for me on her own, I would not have gotten what I deserved in the end eight years ago either, but it is too late to get out of my own way with Ajoni after the way I treated her today. I wouldn’t want me either after that, and will learn to live with it somehow—I should have a whole lot of years of being alone after tonight to find a way..
***
Ajoni
King finally steps off the curb into the street as we pass by. If I had not been looking backwards, I would have not seen him. I barely resist jumping out the damn car and running to him to make sure he is okay—he is ten minutes late.
Raw turns the headlights off and stops in the middle of the road so we blend into the night while we sit idle. King jogs to the passenger side as I opened the door to get in the backseat, gripping the Mickey D’s bag with the food that we think he will eat, or I would have thrown my arms around his neck and held on for dear life.
“Where the fuck were you, King?” Raw asks angrily before we drive off at a high rate of speed, then he turns the lights back on.
“Waiting for Hankins to die,” he says simply.
“Waiting!” Raw bellows. “You were supposed to ghost his ass yourself. In and out, King, remember?”
“Nature decided to give him a heart attack first. I saved my bullets and dialed 911 after he died.”
Raw bangs his hands on the steering wheel. “Why the hell did you dial 911?”
King looks at him with a small smile playing on his face. “Raw, you know I’ve been taking shit from people for so long that didn’t deserve it just to feed myself, and it felt good to watch a motherfucker that did deserve it to get what was coming to him. I needed to make sure that he got it, and for somebody to find the photo of one of the prisoners that Hankin raped.”
I gasp in the backseat. Raw does a double take.
King nods. “That motherfucker wanted to do the same shit to me, and hoped that I got locked down again so he would have his chance to get at me in prison, but karma did her job for once. I made sure it couldn’t be undone.”
“So he wouldn’t hurt anybody else,” I add quietly.
King looks back at me. “Yes.” He turns around. “Let’s get back to our warehouse and burn these clothes and get rid of the evidence from Chang’s. I hope y’all didn’t bring me nothing from Mickey D’s.”
Raw chuckles under his breath. “You gone starve then because Ajoni is against stopping at a store.”
“I’ll starve.”
The ride back to Mecca gets quieter than a cemetery, everyone lost in their own thoughts. Surprisingly, I have only one; all we have done tonight is take lives. Somebody needed to give at least one back. I guess that falls on me since I am the only one in the car that can do it, and I am positive that if I do not swallow the morning-after pill in the next two days, giving back a life is exactly what I will be doing in nine months. Everything that makes up King seems to stick with me long after he’s gone, including his seed.
Yeah, I will be stuck with another shitload of responsibility,
but I brought this shit on myself, and I will deal with it happily when the time comes. Since my decision of what to do about the baby incoming is made, I just need to go home now and figure out what to do when King comes to visit Anjuwan tomorrow. I haven’t figured out how to be around him without wanting him, yet.
Thirty minutes pass again before we are back in Mecca at King’s warehouse. No one speaks as we empty the trunk of everything, from the damning evidence of our crime to the clothes we were wearing earlier today. I go inside the pitch black tin can alone, feeling my way to the table where I light a candle before getting undressed then redressed slowly while letting the old memories wash over me. When I go back outside, I still have not made my peace about me and King never being as a real couple, and he and Raw have already started a fire in a barrel, burning everything from the shovels to our clothes bought from Shad.
I want to call home just to hear my family voices even though it is one o’clock in the morning, but I know better than to turn my phone back on before we get to the hotel. Hopefully, Seeri has not called me every hour on the hour like she promised, but I am confident that she has and that I need talk to her before she calls MPD, and starts a manhunt. This would not be a wasted trip if I had actually checked in with my father and gotten King to understand my side of our story.
“Raw, can I use your phone to check in with my mother, and have you seen Jonny?”
He turns away from the flames. We exchange my clothes in the sack for his phone.
“Yeah, I’ve seen him a couple times. He stays in the projects with a crack head.”
“Do you know which apartment?” I ask while dialing Seeri’s cell. Mecca Heights has sixty apartments. I am not interested in going door to door, looking for him.
“No, I don’t know which one, but he’s usually standing just outside the gates or in front his building slanging dope. I swear he doesn’t sleep.”
“No change there or anywhere else in Mecca,” I mumble and put the phone to my ear, just as Seeri’s line stops ringing.
“Hello! This had better be Ajoni,” she says angrily into the line.
“It is, Mama. How are you and my baby?”
“She’s asleep and we’re both worried as hell about you! Why haven’t you been answering your phone? I’ll have called your number a hundred times and got your voicemail! I was just about to buy plane tickets for me and Anjuwan and fly out on the first thing smoking to Mecca!”
“No need. I’m fine, and standing here with King and Raw now. We’ve been talking about Anjuwan, and my phone’s battery is useless. I’ll be home in the morning as soon as I can. I want to check on Jonny before I fly back.”
“Ajoni—”
“Everything is okay, Mama. I promise. King knows about Anjuwan. He’s dealing with it the best he knows how and does not want anything from me but to know his daughter.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. He told me that, and I believe him. You should too. Now, go to sleep. I’ll call you before I get on the plane in the morning.”
“Okay, but if anything—”
&n
bsp; “Mama, I’m good! Go to sleep and kiss my baby goodnight for me. I love you both. Bye.” I disconnect the call before she can say another word, or we will be on the phone all night until she catches me in half of the lies and all of the half-truths that I just told her.
I am not alright, and I still want to look for Jonny before I go home. Instead of going straight to the hotel after we leave here, I would rather make a side trip to the projects first. I give Raw his phone back, while avoiding King’s eyes trained on me.
“Raw, before we go back to the Hilton, can you—”
“You’re not going to the Heights this late at night or staying here to look for your pops, Ajoni,” King interrupts.
I catch an immediate attitude. “I didn’t ask you for your two cents.”
He grins. “Well, you have them. Go home to Anjuwan. I’ll deal with your father.”
“And how exactly are you going to do that? You can’t even deal with the fact that you have a daughter.”
He smirks. “Oh, I’m dealing, just not the way you want me to, and I hear the projects are even more dangerous than they were eight years ago with Lex running the drug traffic. He doesn’t take care of his territory. If you stay here, you’ll just sneak your ass in it, looking for Jonny anyway and find trouble. You’re going home.”
This bastard knows I want him more than my next breath, but is making me live without him anyway.
I plant both of my hands on my hips, tilt my lips upward, and nod in true black-girl-about-to-go-off fashion.
“I get it now. You’re getting payback for how I hurt you, and the faster I get back home, the faster your idea of making me suffer can begin. Well, King, you’re about eight years late on making me suffer without you… and I’ll continue to. If you want to deal with Jonny and the projects on my behalf, have at it, but I just need you to not get yourself killed for Anjuwan’s sake. Raw, take me straight to the airport after we finish up here please.”
Before he can agree, I turn on the spiked heels of my boots and walk away, planning to get in the backseat of the Camaro and wait to get home and breakdown behind my bedroom’s closed door.