by SLMN
No response.
He didn’t think anything of her silence. He knew her well. She was always wrapped up in these shows, properly losing herself to the false reality of it all, buying it hook, line and sinker. He went in the kitchen and came out with a bottled water and a cold drumstick straight out of the refrigerator.
Chewing, he asked again, “You handle that?”
Kandi just sucked her teeth and ignored him.
When he heard her suck her teeth, he got the message: I hear you, but fuck you, and grew instantly heated. He stayed calm. He finished his drumstick, threw the bone away, then stepped between her and the TV and said, “You heard what I said?”
“Move,” she hissed with attitude.
Mac smirked. It wasn’t a pretty look.
“Ain’t shit funny, boy. Move.”
Mac downed his bottle of water, sat the empty plastic bottle on the table, and with the quickness of a ninja snatched Kandi off the couch by her arm and hauled her to her feet.
“Bitch, come here!”
She didn’t go limp like a rag doll or fold like some timid bitch, she swung on his ass with a right cross that connected hard.
The impact barely fazed him.
“Get off me, Mac!” She huffed, realizing her protestations were futile.
Mac slammed her against the wall, hand around the throat, and snatched her skirt up around her waist with his free hand. She clawed at his wrist, but he had an iron grip on her, and wasn’t about to give, no matter how deep she dug her nails in.
He snatched skirt down and panties aside at the same time.
Nothing but ass and pussy fell out.
“Stop, damn you,” Kandi whined, her pussy heating up to the point of fiery passion.
“Shut the fuck up,” Mac roared, as he snatched her off her feet.
He pinned her to the wall.
She didn’t struggle. Not no more. It was different when she clawed in a sexual frenzy, not in defense.
Mac pushed deep inside with all the force of his fight, taking her breath away and punishing her with stroke after stroke of pure power.
“Oh fuck baby, fuuuuck,” Kandi moaned, protest broken. Her body banged up against the wall to his rhythm, her will totally subjugated.
Mac didn’t loosen his grip around her throat. His fingers tightened, choking her as he grudge-fucked the bitch until she came so hard, her pussy squirted.
“No more, please, no,” she begged, but she had started it and now he was damn sure going to finish it.
Mac spun her around and bent her over the couch.
Smack!
She cried out in pure pain.
He beat her again.
“I’m sorry!” She screamed, the pain cutting so deep.
There was no forgiveness in Mac. He grabbed her by the hair, yanked her head back until it touched the ridges of her spine, and plowed into her, beating her back out until tears of pain ran down her face.
“Bitch, when I speak you listen!” he roared. “You hear me?”
“Yes!”
He punched her this time, no open handed slap, a proper back of the skull punch.
Mac felt the rumble of the cumming train inside, like a locomotive about to run off the track. He released an explosion inside her as she collapsed over the arm of the couch, snot and tears streaming down her face.
“I needed that!” Mac sat on the floor, back to the couch, breathing hard.
They had been together for so long, he knew her inside and out, including the one where she needed that thug loving shit to get her head right.
Kandi slid down beside him.
“You want a sandwich, Daddy?” she asked, spirit broken.
“Yeah,” Mac replied.
He watched her get up and head for the kitchen.
He loved to watch her walk.
She knew how to move. It was like sex, made flesh. Her bow legs had a gap that he could see clean through, and her pussy lips, fat and juicy, pouted out like a monkey paw between her thick ass and shapely thighs.
She came back with a tuna melt on wheat bread. His favorite. It was a peace offering.
As he ate, she laid her head on his lap.
“So what happened?” Mac questioned, wiping tuna off his mouth, then licking it off his hand.
“What you think happened? I took that lame nigga for everything he had. I slipped that shit in his drink, and by the time I jive-flirted with him, did my little dance, I ain’t even get to my panties before he was out like a light. Jewelry, brand new Bentley and about twenty five hundred in cash. Not a bad night’s work.”
“You get pics?”
Whenever she ran game on a celebrity, she always got compromising photos. That was the money shot.
“Did I? Check this shit out!” She grabbed her phone off the coffee table, unlocking it with her thumb before she handed it to Mac. Looking at the pictures, he knew she’d hit a power move.
“Goddamn, this nigga gonna pay big for this shit!”
She had taken pictures of the dude with a long ass dildo sticking out of his ass, but the way she took the picture, you couldn’t tell if it was a dildo or a real dick. The thing was that lifelike. She’d taken the same type of picture with the dildo in his mouth and what looked like cum all over his face.
“You hit him up yet?”
“Naw. I’ma let him sweat for a minute.”
“I want the Bentley,” Mac chuckled.
She kissed him passionately. When they broke, she looked up at him, smiling, all those tears forgotten now, and told him, “Then it’s yours.”
Mac took the last bite of his sandwich.
“I had a dream,” Kandi told him after a minute.
“What about?”
Mac always paid attention to her dreams—it wasn’t like she had no sixth sense or any of that shit—but there was no getting away from the fact they had a tendency of coming true. Even when she was wrong, something in the dream would still play out. She’d joke that she was from New Orleans, the home of Voodoo, and that shit flowed through her veins. She was told she had been born with her eyes open, which, she reckoned was a sure sign of the gift of vision. So he paid attention.
“I dreamed you were trying to climb this like… pyramid of gold. The shit was ill. All shiny and shit. I was standin’ at the top, calling your name. That’s when all this blood started coming out of the pyramid, like gushing hard, and all these hands started reaching out too. You were climbing, kicking, punching, fighting your way to the top, and no matter how hard they tried to drag you down you kept on climbin’. Then once you got to the top, all the blood disappeared and the gold was shiny and pure again,” Kandi said, and looking at the shine in her eyes he was sure she was seeing it at that moment.
Mac saw the significance of the dream right away. “A pyramid?”
She nodded. “I’m tellin’ you bae, you gonna be the king of these streets! Watch!” she emphasized.
“Kings fall,” he dipped his head, like he was being humble.
“We all fall sooner or later, but not everybody rises, bae. That’s the magic. So when you get that chance, you take it, you don’t fuckin’ wait. For what? For who? You talk about loyalty and shit, but the first person you need to be loyal to is you,” Kandi told him, putting her hand on his heart for emphasis.
“When the time is right, if it happens, I’ll be ready,” Mac vowed.
“My dreams come true. You know that, bae. Don’t matter what you think, it will happen. It’s your destiny.”
Hearing her say the word destiny, sparked something deeper in Mac; a sense of purpose that he had never felt before.
The seed she had planted was beginning to take root.
His phone chimed with a text.
It was from Othello.
We got a problem.
“Yeah, we do,” Mac mumbled to himself.
Othello, Mac and Cash, Venus and Milk had their cars parked in a makeshift circle.
They all leaned on their respe
ctive hoods.
They were in a park, in the dead of night, the only light was the full Blood Moon above them.
“You sure about this, ma?” Cash pressed. He didn’t like it. He needed it dead set, locked in, pure 100% proof.
“Absolutely. I would never put that label on someone if I didn’t know, like for sure know, with my own two eyes. I live on the outskirts of the city, near the docks. There’s a diner there, an out of the way greasy spoon. Anyway, that’s where I saw him, several times, with this white guy. His whole being screamed Fed, you know?”
“You see a badge or a uniform? Anything more than you interpreting, ma? Gotta be sure.”
“I’m sure. Waitress kept callin’ him Officer when she refilled his coffee.”
“Fuck!” Mac cursed, then looked at Othello. “I thought you said this nigga was fuckin’ solid? Who the fuck you got us in bed wit?”
Othello, not used to being questioned, felt Mac’s frustration. He was burning up inside. It was a struggle to keep his calm. He squared up to Mac. “First of all, who the fuck you bassin at, Mac? Second, and this is real important to remember, shit happens. I’m in just as deep as you are. Deeper, because I’m the face he met with, you feel me?”
Mac snorted like a thwarted bull, all steaming head ready to charge, but was smart enough not to say anything.
“We gotta do something,” Cash stated.
Othello looked at him. “Well, what do you suggest? We can’t turn back, that’s for sure. We in too deep. Blood been shed and lines have been drawn,” Othello pointed out. “So I'm all fuckin’ ears, Cash.”
“Sam got us where he wants us,” Mac remarked snidely.
Mac and Othello glared at one another.
There was gonna be a moment, real soon, when this got ugly.
“Ay yo Mac, you got a lot to say tonight. You think you can handle this thing better than me?” Othello spat.
“Better? I thought we was handling it together, remember? Team? Or is it all about you now, O?” Mac fired back.
Othello smirked, but his eyes remained cold.
“By all means, the floor is yours, brah.”
“Like you said, you been the one he met with, so like, I don’t know all the ins and outs of this shit. I’m simply asking you to keep us all in the loop, brah,” Mac replied, fronting him.
Milk, seeing the tension growing out of the mutual frustration, sighed and moved to put it right, “Bottom line, we know something nobody else does. That’s got to be worth something, right?”
It was a different perspective.
Othello nodded.
“Exactly. So like I was sayin’ before Mac hot-headed on his bullshit, we still got the ace we ain’t played yet. We sitting on a flush, so there’s nothing to worry about. Milk, you sit in your goddamn window night and day. You see them meet, you get in that diner and record everything, you got me? I want it all. Go online and get some of that spyware shit off the Dark Internet. We need proof. Hard proof, got me?”
“I got you,” Milk assured him.
Othello scratched at his jaw, thinking for a moment, then said, “The game has changed. So we have to change with it. Lay low, everybody. Time to play these niggas against one another.”
Venus and Milk left. When it was just the men, Othello turned to Mac and put his hand out. “Yo brah, I apologize. I know we a team. No question. We tight. It’s just, I formulated the plan, so I guess I got little caught up in being the one to execute. We go back too far to beef over petty shit.”
“I agree,” Mac said.
“On the real, you always kept it a hunnid wit me, no matter what. I can always depend on my man Mac to keep it real.”
They shook hands.
“You still my nigga, you ugly Yaphet Kotto lookin’ muhfucka,” Mac cracked.
They all laughed, tension broken.
“Oh, you got jokes huh? You shitty midget eatin’ ass nigga! Breath smell like you shit out your mouth!” Othello hollered back, smile wider than the Holland Tunnel. The three of them laughed like the old friends they were, releasing the tension of the situation. “But yo, on some real shit. I got somebody I want y’all to meet,” Othello announced.
“Who?” Cash asked.
“You’ll know soon enough. Little shortie I met and, keepin’ it one hunnid, I’m really feelin’ her, yo,” Othello admitted.
“Aw man, not you, too. First Mac got pussy-whipped, now you gonna join the club?” Cash groaned in mock despair.
Othello grinned at him. “Ay, Black Love is a beautiful thing.”
“Man, fuck that. The only time I love ’em is when my dick hard,” Cash cackled, grabbing his crouch.
“So when we gonna meet her?” Mac asked.
“Friday, yo. Bring Kandi. Cash, you just bring any bitch you can dig up,” Othello chuckled.
“I’ll be there. Gonna be good to meet the chick who locked that ass down,” Cash said.
Be careful what you wish for…
Milk did as she was told.
She knew there was a lot riding on catching Black Sam with the federal agent, and putting solid proof on the table that went beyond a word, so she stayed in her window damn near 24 hours a day, watching.
She went online and bought these long-range listening devices the size of a dime, as well as recorders to keep the information on.
She felt like a fuckin’ spy herself.
Maybe today she’d strike gold?
Black Sam pulled up and looked around. The same cautious triple check. Maybe he figured the 5am truckers would conceal him in the traffic?
Milk was onto him.
She watched him get out of the car, cross the hardstand and enter the diner.
She watched him take a seat at a booth. Watched him order. It was a well-rehearsed routine.
She waited.
Several minutes later, the federal agent pulled up and parked side by side with his vehicle.
She watched him talk into his cellphone before hanging up. Watched him pocket it. Watched him clamber out of the car, lock up and go inside to join Black Sam.
Milk took picture after picture of both of them, then the two of them together in the booth. She knew beforehand that she couldn’t just go down and enter the diner. Black Sam knew her now, and knew who she was with. But money had a way of getting around shit like that. She’d paid one of the waitresses a thousand dollars to plant the listening device in the base of a salt shaker. It wasn’t her fault these fuckers were creatures of habit, always the same time, always the same place. She hadn’t told the girl exactly who she was after, so she picked up her cell and called the waitress on the spot.
“Hello?” She answered.
“That’s them, The white guy in the blue suit and the older black guy in the trench coat. You see them, table by the window?”
“Table 5. Yeah, I got them.”
“Handle your business.”
Click.
A few moments later, she watched the waitress approach the table and take the Fed's order.
When she returned with the food, the salt shaker was on the tray.
They never noticed a thing. Milk turned on the recorder, and heard Black Sam’s voice “…to get the rest of them?”
The other man said, “All of them.”
“That’s going to take some time,” Black Sam objected. “Joe Hamlet is a very powerful man. He won’t just talk about this type of shit on the phone.”
“Far be it from me to tell you your business, but you’re his right hand man, right? Make him talk.”
“I’m tellin’ you, it’s not that simple. Look, I can deliver Malik Muhammad, Tony Malone and Jerome Peters. That’s some serious hitters. Ain’t that enough?”
“We want Hamlet. The rest are fucking gnats, irritating but barely worth slapping down. It’s all about Hamlet.”
The conversation went on like that for another twenty minutes with Black Sam trying to convince the Fed it was going to be just about impossible to get hard evidence on Joe H
amlet and his political manipulations and kickbacks. The harder he blustered the more insistent the Fed became. The message was obvious: either get Joe or we send you away for a long time.
Milk smiled to herself. Maybe he wasn’t a cop after all, but this was better.
“O is going to love this.”
Othello held the get together in his apartment.
Mona arrived first.
When he opened the door and saw her come striding in dressed in a pink cat suit, cleavage popping, her hair done up with shocking pink highlights, he could barely control himself. She was a mighty fine sight. He grinned from ear to ear.
“Damn ma, you making that suit look good,” he complimented, as he pulled her into his arms and tongued her down.
“Don’t start something you know we don’t have time to finish,” she told him, walking in and dropping her clutch on the table.
“I see you cleaned up.”
“Some,” he chuckled.
He couldn’t believe how nervous she made him feel. He wasn’t used to it. She got under his skin. He was a man who prided himself on handling any situation, and not just handling it, handling it well. But not around her. She left him feeling like a little schoolboy.
“Patron?” he offered.
“But of course,” she replied, giving him a wink.
He poured her the drink, clinking the bottle on the rim of the glass.
His doorbell rang again.
“Get that for me ma,” he told Mona.
She opened the door to Kandi and Mac.
Kandi and Mona assessed one another. Eyes up, eyes down, judgment passed. Mona was looking good, but Kandi was no slouch. Her dress hugged her curves, showing off that bow legged stance that drove men crazy.
“You must be the woman that has our Othello wrapped around her little finger, huh?” Kandi smirked.
Mona smiled.
“I wouldn’t say all that, but… Hi, I’m Mona.”
They shook hands.
Othello approached, wrapping his arms protectively around Mona from the back.
“Mo, this is Kandi, and my man Mac Bethel. The Bethels, Mona,” Othello playfully introduced with mock flourish.