by Noire
Quick as shit, Pearl scurried over to the downed man. Once again Menace had galloped in right on time, but Pearl had started this shit by herself and she was determined to finish it by herself too. Fighting the pain lancing her back, she grabbed Kevvie by his chin and the top of his head. With one swift motion she twisted sharply, breaking his neck.
Long seconds passed in silence, and it wasn’t until they heard another room door open then quickly slam shut, did either one of them move.
“Owww …” Pearl moaned as she tried to stand up.
“Damn, girl,” Menace said as he ran over and cradled her in his arms. “You slumped him, baby. Straight slumped him! Yo! I told you to stay ya ass at my crib! You so damn hardheaded, Pearl!”
She frowned up at him for a moment, then smiled as he kissed her forehead, her nose, and then finally, her lips.
“Goddamn, your head is hard!”
Pearl winced as he helped her to her feet.
“Lemme carry you,” Menace said, and lifted her easily in his big, muscular arms. He held her like she was no more than baby weight as he hurried toward the front lobby where his whip waited at the curb. “Just relax. I’ma get you to the hospital, baby girl. I got you.”
But Pearl couldn’t relax. Precious minutes had passed since Kevvie had jumped her, and it wouldn’t be long before Mookie’s entire penthouse suite was up in flames.
Menace’s route out of the hotel took them in the opposite direction from where Pearl had been heading. He carried her past a restaurant and the indoor pool where families were lounging on deck chairs and children were splashing and playing in water that was so full of chlorine it stung her nose. A few passersby glanced curiously at Menace as he carried a full-grown woman in his arms, but after one look at his killer face, none dared stare too long.
Pearl lay weakly in his arms as he hurried past the indoor swimming pool. The sound of laughing children met her ears, a sound that she would never again hear without reliving the pain of her loss.
But nobody else should have to feel that pain.
Pearl knew it was already too late for Mookie. By the time they found him he’d be good and crunchy. Burnt to a crisp.
But every precious child on every floor in that hotel deserved to live a beautiful life.
“Hold up,” she demanded, squeezing Menace’s shoulder to make him stop. “Go that way, baby,” Pearl said, nodding toward a small corridor that was right near the pool.
“Yo, my car is in the front, Pearl. I gotta get you to a hospital, baby.”
But Pearl knew what she had to do, and it was no less important than everything else she had already done.
“Please! Go that way!” she insisted, struggling to get out of his arms.
Menace looked into her eyes and saw something that made him comply. He turned down the small corridor as she’d demanded, and he hadn’t gone very far when Pearl saw what she was looking for.
A small red plaque mounted on the wall read: IN CASE OF FIRE BREAK GLASS.
With thoughts of happy little girls on her mind, Pearl smiled as Menace lowered her gently to her feet and watched as she broke the glass.
And two seconds after the alarm was pulled, the man she loved gathered her up in his big strong arms again and they broke the hell out.
It was hard for Pearl to believe that a whole month had passed since she’d taken down Mookie’s crew, but the days had flown past before her eyes. She had chilled with Menace in Midtown for two weeks, resting and healing in his phat little crib, and thinking about what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. They’d gone to the morgue together and claimed Diamond’s remains, then had a small ceremony at a funeral home in Midtown, where they had her body cremated and her ashes placed in a beautiful, diamond-studded urn.
At Pearl’s request, Menace had accompanied her to the cemetery. They stood quietly before the small plot where the rest of her family was buried and Pearl talked to God and confessed her hopes that her people hadn’t suffered too badly, and offered her prayers that they were in a better place.
“Love doesn’t die, Pearl,” Menace told her gently as she cried. Pearl knew he was remembering his mother, who he’d lost so long ago and at a very tender and vulnerable age. “It never dies. They can still feel us, just like we can feel them,” he said as he kissed her forehead and wiped away her tears.
Pearl snuggled closer to him as she gazed over her shoulder at the grave that held the bodies of her family members. She knew then that Menace spoke the truth because she actually felt her father’s love in Menace’s protective embrace. There was no doubt that Irish had raised his young pup to be the kind of man that Pearl could trust with her love and with her life.
Just being in the presence of so much death drove home the reality of the tragedy, but Pearl managed to hold herself together much better than the last time she was there. The pain of her loss was still immeasurable, and the urge to be with her family still persisted, but she was getting stronger each day and better able to deal with her grief.
That didn’t mean she had gotten over the ache of their murders, though. Pearl still had some really bad episodes where the reality of how she had come so thoroughly unzipped and of what she had done to avenge their murders came down on her. Sometimes it hit her so hard she got sick.
During these dark moments Pearl reminded herself that it was Mookie Murdock, not her, who had brought destruction down on all of them. Mookie Murdock had started it. Pearl had only finished it. But it still hurt. She reminded herself that it was okay to miss her daughter and to grieve about not being there with her more while she was alive, but Pearl also acknowledged that even from a distance she had built a wonderful relationship with her baby girl. There had been nothing selfish about leaving Harlem to establish a better life for herself and her child. Her parents had wanted her to leave. They had encouraged her to go as far as she could in her career, and they were proud that one of their daughters had escaped the brutal streets and become progressive and accomplished in life.
And it wasn’t like she had abandoned Sasha or left her with just anybody, Pearl reminded herself. She had left her baby in the most capable hands in the world, hands that were far more capable than her own. Irish and Zeta had given Sasha and Chante all the love they could have ever wanted in their short lives, and Pearl knew that even if she had stayed put right there at home, she couldn’t have loved her daughter any better than that.
But she had loved her daughter. Loved her more than she loved her own life. Sasha had been happy, indulged, and surrounded with affection. There was no way Pearl was gonna let Mookie Murdock and the terror of what he’d done rob her of those beautiful memories. She was working toward putting the blame for her daughter’s death squarely where it belonged—on the treacherous crew who had killed her. Instead of bearing their burden, Pearl was slowly letting go of the guilt and pain that allowed Mookie and his boyz to continue wielding power over her from the grave. Instead of covering her ears from the phantom sound of her daughter’s cries, Pearl was learning to embrace the memories of her family’s special love. She was paying tribute to them by living a life that would make each of them proud.
And there was something else Pearl was doing that she knew would have made her parents proud. There had been a few things that she just couldn’t shake from her heart and mind, and Pearl had made quite a few trips back downtown to the Sunset Motel to see what she could do about that.
In the blighted area around Forty-second Street, Pearl had run across many young girls who were out there hustling on the track. Some of them were busy fucking like grown women all day and all night when they were barely twelve and thirteen!
For days Pearl sat on an abandoned stoop and watched as the young girls picked up tricks and rode off down the block with them. She knew the customers would pull over on a dark street or even lean up against the side of a building and get their trick on, using the young girls like they were nothing but disposable pieces of meat to be pinched, rubbed, and
fucked at any man’s whim.
There was one street chick in particular who caught Pearl’s attention because she stood out from all the rest. The girl had something about her that struck Pearl’s heart, and it wasn’t just because she was gorgeous and had a body that kept men rolling up and down the streets eager to buy what she was selling. The young ho looked like she was about fifteen, right about the age that Pearl and Diamond were when they gave birth to their daughters. She didn’t laugh and joke around with the other girls between customers the way normal teenagers did, and she didn’t crack a smile when a john pulled up and invited her to climb into his whip, neither.
In fact, the girl looked dead as hell to Pearl. Like she was there in body, but definitely not in spirit. Her street name was Cookie and she reminded Pearl of Diamond. She wore the same haunted look of hopelessness that Pearl had so often seen in her sister’s eyes, and her heart went out to the child who was busy selling the only thing she thought she had of value. The girl had just taken care of a john and was walking slowly back to her designated spot on the track when Pearl saw something that fucked her straight up.
It was a ghost from her past. A too-pretty niggah whose dieseled-up body was draped in fine rags from head to toe.
Scotch Allen hadn’t changed much over the years. He was still a gorgeous no-good hustler who used young girls any which way he could. Irish would never tell Pearl exactly what he had done to Scotch to keep him out of Harlem, and secretly, Pearl had hoped his gaming ass was dead and buried.
Pearl had gazed at Scotch for long moments as he barked in the face of the young girl Pearl had been watching. This muhfuckah had fathered and lost two daughters by her and Diamond, yet Pearl felt absolutely nothing except disgust toward him.
She started feeling way more than that when he pushed up on Cookie and snatched her by the arm and slung her down into a row of metal garbage cans that rattled loudly on the street. Pearl jumped to her feet, pumped. She felt herself going into fight mode and had to check herself. There was nothing to be gained by fucking Scotch up out on the streets. Even though she was more than capable of putting him on his ass, Pearl forced herself to stand down as she thought about how good it would feel to serve that muthafuckah up! But there was more than one way to kill a sewer rat, she thought, as she whipped out her cell phone and chose Carlita’s name from her list of favorite numbers.
“Slimy ass!” Pearl muttered as she waited for her call to be answered. Scotch would get his, Pearl vowed. All in due time.
In the safe haven of the bedroom they shared, Pearl and Menace had spent a lot of time just talking. They put their fears and their dreams out there, as well as their hopes for the future. They put their love out there too. The love they had always felt for each other.
“I never fucked with your sister,” Menace told her. Pearl believed him because she could see the integrity in his eyes. “You were wrong about what you thought you saw in the bathroom that day. Nothing ever happened between us. I never touched her.”
“But still,” Pearl countered, “even if nothing did happen, you kicked me outta your room that night, remember? I was real young, Menace. That shit really hurt.”
He nodded. “I know and I’m sorry. It hurt me too. I just didn’t have shit to offer you, Pearl. I had too much respect for your father to be messing with you like that. What we were doing felt real good, it just didn’t feel right.”
That young love was in the past, and both of them were fully grown now. Menace was man enough to put his shit out there first.
“I love you, Pearl. I been loving on you for years, girl. Probably since the first day I saw you. I was just a pup back then. A scared kid who was trying to find his way. But I’m ready now. I’m ready to love you the right way now. But I need to know what you got for me.”
Pearl had nothing but love for him and she told him that. The same love she’d always had, but only now it was stronger and much more mature.
Menace made it clear that even though his business was in Philly, his heart was in Harlem. He wanted to stay connected to the streets of his youth and to continue the work that Irish had started at No Limitz.
Pearl had found her heart in some unexpected places too. She couldn’t get those young streetwalkers out of her mind. She spent a lot of time downtown just chillin’ with them. Finding out what wound was causing them to sell their bodies to strangers and what she could offer them that would help them heal.
It was beginning to become a personal mission for Pearl. A mission of giving back some of what had been given to her. Talking to the young girls, she saw Diamond’s eyes, and sometimes even her own, in almost all of their faces. Their stories weren’t that different from Diamond’s or Pearl’s. They’d walked the same streets and breathed the same air. There but for the grace of God went Pearl, and she understood that the only real difference between her and these young girls was the guidance and influence that had been so unselfishly given to her. Harlem had never called out to Pearl before. But it was damn sure calling her now.
“I made my decision,” Menace had announced a week earlier. They were sprawled across his bed eating Chinese food and watching an episode of The First 48. A nineteen-year-old man had been gunned down while holding his infant daughter in his arms.
“I’ma go ’head and work here,” Menace said firmly. “Right here in New York. I’ma go back to Philly and shut everything down, then look around for some office space somewhere uptown. That way, I can run my biz and still run your father’s center too. You feel me?”
Pearl was feeling him all right. Feeling him hard. Menace had taken her under his wing and provided the same kind of love, protection, and high hopes for her future that her father once had. It was so easy for her to see why out of the thousands of young thugs that had flowed through No Limitz over the years, Irish had chosen only one to bring into his home and into their lives. He had chosen Malik “Menace” Brown for all the right reasons.
“You sure?” Pearl had asked. She knew he wasn’t the type of man to just say shit off the cuff, but she had to ask anyway.
“Yeah,” he’d answered. “I’m sure.”
Pearl had lain beside him quietly. It didn’t really matter if he was in Philly or in Harlem. She lived and worked in D.C., and there was no way they could be together every day. And that was what Pearl wanted. To be with this man every single goddamn day.
The last few weeks had been a period of joy and healing for Pearl. She’d done a whole lot of crying, but she’d done a lot of laughing too. No longer was she afraid to close her eyes at night. The nightmares had vanished, and even though the grief and sorrow would always be with her, Pearl had discovered that love and happiness could actually cure a broken heart.
Sex helped too. Lots of good, hot, tender sex with a dark-skinned cutie who had a monster dick and knew how to stroke it with love. Even though they slept in the same bed, during the first two weeks she was there Menace had refused to touch her. It had taken twelve stitches to close the knife wound that Krazy Kevvie had left in her back. The doctors had assured them that no vital organs or nerves had been damaged, but Menace was scared he’d hurt her and he fought like hell trying to make Pearl keep her hands to herself.
Of course she snuck him.
Shit, Pearl liked to get her gushy on and it had been almost ten long years since she’d had the dick of her dreams. She’d woken up real early one morning while Menace was still sleeping, and she’d sucked his soft dick into her mouth while he was weak and defenseless. By the time he opened his eyes his package was hard and wet, and Pearl was giving him the juiciest dome he had ever had.
They flowed naturally in bed after that, and it wasn’t hard to pick up right where they’d left off all those years ago. Of course, Pearl was more experienced now and her sex game was nothing to sleep on.
They’d had their quiet moments too. Times when they talked in soft tones about their families and what their losses meant to them, and about how they wanted to live the rest of the
ir lives in a way that would always make their parents proud.
“I gotta tell you something,” Pearl said the next Monday night as they were eating dinner. Menace had already found a prime spot for office space and had met with his attorney, a realtor, and the building management and signed the contract that would make the space his. He’d been running around handling his biz all day long, and Pearl had been up in his apartment by herself.
“Whassup?” he’d asked, getting down on some chicken wings Pearl had baked. She couldn’t cook shit else, so if Menace wanted to be with her he was gonna have to either take her out all the time, or get used to eating a whole lot of chicken.
“Remember when we talked about finding a zone of purpose and doing big things in our own little sector of that zone?”
Menace licked his fingers and nodded.
“Well, I think I found mine. I’ve been making calls all day, and there’s a position open in a field office on the Lower East Side. My lead instructor from the Academy is running things down there, and he said the job is mine if I want it.”
The room went quiet, then Menace said, “Do you?”
Pearl shrugged. She had been expecting him to jump up and down at the idea of her taking a job in New York, but he was playing it cool.
“It’s a decent job.” Pearl shrugged again. “So I might.” She had never shown much interest in her father’s outreach center in the past, but a whole lot of things had changed in her life and she wanted Menace to know she was sincere. “I’ve been thinking a lot about No Limitz.”
Menace didn’t say anything, but looking into his eyes Pearl could see she had his full attention.
“I know my father felt it was important to save young boys from the trappings of the street, but I’d like to do a little expanding to the programming. Open it up to young girls. You know, girls like Diamond who have a better chance of getting swallowed up by the streets than of graduating from high school. I can relate to girls like that,” Pearl said, her words coming out eagerly. “I’ve been out on these streets, Menace. I came up in Harlem and ran around with thugs and got pregnant when I was fourteen. If it wasn’t for my parents I wouldn’t have made it. These girls out here need them an Irish and a Zeta. Between you and me, if we work hard enough, I think we could be that.”