by Carl Weber
I raised my wrist to look at my watch. The bodyguards glanced at their boss for an answer. El Gato waited patiently for me to reply, but all I did was smile, because I knew something they didn’t. When I passed the bodyguards earlier, I had placed a tiny sticker on each of their necks, just the way I’d been taught.
“Why the fuck are you smiling?” El Gato shouted at me.
“Because the poison should be kicking in right about now,” I informed him just as his men began to crumble to the ground. Suddenly, it was just the two of us, face to face.
“What have you done to them?” he screamed as he looked around at all of his men squirming for their lives.
“Poison dart frog toxin. Real lethal, fast-acting shit,” I told him. “I had to take a pill before coming in here just to handle the stuff.”
“You think you can kill me?” He lunged for the gun of the bodyguard closest to him, but I wasn’t about to let that happen. I kicked it out of his reach.
As I went to reach for El Gato, his arm caught me in the chin. He almost kneed me in the nut sack, but I twisted my body just enough for the blow to land on my leg. I grabbed his leg in the air and pushed hard so that he fell backward. Just as I went to jump on him, he flipped up and landed on his feet. He was pretty spry for an old guy.
“If one of us is going, it won’t be me!” I promised, and I meant it. A roundhouse, a couple of karate chops later, and I was on top of him, with a gun pointed at his head. “My girl Bridget sends her love.”
“Fuck you and that bitch. I am El Gato,” he bragged, but I already saw that without his swarm of men, he was almost helpless. “You can’t kill me. I have nine lives.” That was the last thing he said as I pumped two bullets into him.
“Yeah, well, I guess you should have counted, ’cause that was your ninth life.”
Stepping away from the bloody scene, I grabbed the case full of money, shoved the gun in my waist, and hurried through the house toward the front door.
“Everything okay? I thought I heard gunfire?” Dominique stood blocking my exit.
“You might need a new employer, but other than that, things are just fine,” I told her, and that’s when I heard a gun being prepared. She came flying at me, arms and fists flailing, but I was in no mood. I hated fighting women, but I knew she was going to try to avenge her boss. It was her job.
We went at it, and I had to admit this girl was a real bad-ass. With every hit, she met me. Finally, I’d had enough, and I grabbed her in a chokehold and twisted, stopping just before the point of snapping her neck.
“Please. Didn’t we have a great time last night?” She begged for her life, and I could feel myself softening. “I can show you an even better time today.” She started stroking her breasts in a gesture meant to be sexual, but it was just grotesque.
“Please don’t flatter yourself. That was business. I’ve got something much better waiting for me at home.” I slammed the butt of the gun against her head, knocking her out. Yeah, I was ready to get home.
Willie
60
“What’s up, boss? How’d it go?” I asked Niles when I answered my phone. I was thankful that he was alive, but hoping this would be a quick call and I could get back to business. With him being on the West Coast, I had at least six hours to get my groove on.
“Will you stop calling me boss?” Niles asked for the millionth time, but when someone gives you a job that changes your life and upgrades your lifestyle, what else would you call them to show respect? I have to admit, though, half the time I called him that just to fuck with him.
“What you want me to call you, pipsqueak? Like I did when you were a kid? That’s what you want?” I joked.
“Where are you?” he asked.
I wasn’t about to tell him the truth, not when I was puffing on one of his fine cigars. “Uh . . . I’m in the city.” I admitted half the truth, not wanting to tell a bald-faced lie. He wasn’t stupid enough to believe me.
“Are you in my suite?” he asked, full of suspicion.
I decided it was best to stay silent. For all I knew, he had some kind of hidden camera in the place and was watching my every move as we spoke.
“Got nothing to say, huh? Mm-hmm. Just like I thought. Wearing my robe too?” he added, which I was. “Drinking my two-hundred-dollar-a-bottle spring water?”
That one might have been a lucky guess, I thought. After all, he knew I was committed to staying sober so I wouldn’t be drinking his fancy champagne.
“With your woman on my silk sheets in my bed?”
I glanced over at the bed, where Tanya was lying half-naked, giving me a look that told me she had something for me that I wanted.
“Niles, where’s the trust, brother? Would Batman accuse Robin of sneaking a woman into the Batcave?”
He laughed. “He would if he had a horny-ass partner like you.”
“Hey, at least I keep it one hundred,” I told him. Niles knew exactly who I was at all times.
“Look, I’m sorry, but I’m gonna need you to put the party on pause for a few minutes. I’ve got something important I need you to handle for me.”
I looked over at Tanya, and damn if I didn’t want to hang up and get busy, but I couldn’t let him down. “No problem. What you need, boss?” I gave Tanya an apologetic look, but I already knew she wouldn’t complain. That’s one thing I really appreciated about her. She understood my priorities.
“I’ve been trying to get a hold of Bridget just to check in, but she’s not answering any of her phones. You think you could check in on her, maybe call Winston so it doesn’t look like I’m sweating her?”
“Sure, I got you. Don’t wanna look like you’re pussy whipped, even though you are.” I laughed, but he didn’t.
“Not funny,” Niles replied seriously.
“It was a joke. Shit, I’ll call him right now.” I didn’t like it when my nephew was like this. It meant something deep was going down—possibly something dangerous—and that always made me nervous. I might like to fuck with him time and again, but I didn’t want anything to happen to Niles.
“Great. Thanks, Unc. I’m about to get on this plane. I’ll see you at the usual spot in about six hours.”
As soon as Niles hung up, I dialed Winston.
“Winnie the Pooh,” I teased as soon as he picked up. “This your boy Willie. What’s up?”
“Hello, Willie. Nothing much. Just watching the game. How are you?” Despite his stuck-up demeanor when he was at work, Winston was actually a cool cat who had given me pointers about how to deal with this sidekick driving shit. We’d actually gone to a couple of Mets games together.
“So you’re not with Bridget?” That actually concerned me a little.
“No, I haven’t spoken to her since this morning. She gave me the day off. Why do you ask?” I could almost hear him get up out of his seat. He had obviously picked up on my unease.
“Niles thinks something may be wrong with her. He called her cell and she didn’t answer.”
“Let me call you right back,” he said. “Maybe she’ll answer me.”
I held tight and waited for Winston to call me back, hoping this was a false alarm and I could get back to my business with Tanya. A few seconds later, my phone rang.
“She didn’t answer me neither,” Winston said. “I’m going to her place in Chelsea. That’s where I left her this morning.”
“I’m not that far. I’ll meet you at her place.”
I said a quick good-bye to Tanya then hit the elevator and shot down to get the BMW out of the parking garage. I drove to Bridget’s place, pulling up right behind Winston, who was getting out of the Rolls.
“I got a key,” he said as we went to the entrance. “I’ll talk to the doorman to see if he saw her leave anytime today.”
It turned out that conversation was not going to be possible. The door to the building was ajar, and the doorman was nowhere to be seen. Something did not feel right. One look around and we spotted the doorman on
the floor behind his station, blood seeping out of his forehead.
“Shit! Winston, man, we’re on tape,” I said, pointing to the security camera I spotted in the corner.
“Not a problem.” He pulled out his cell phone and made a call.
“Yeah, it’s Winston,” he spoke into the phone. “I need you to crash the server on the Chelsea apartment building.”
He ended the call and said to me, “Let’s go.”
I double-checked to make sure my piece was easy to grab before I went any farther. Winston did the same. Instead of taking the elevator, we headed up the stairs, which made me glad for all the training I’d gotten and the booze I’d gotten rid of in my life.
When we arrived at Bridget’s floor and got to the apartment, we saw that her door was ajar. He reached for his gun; I did the same, and we entered quietly. The place had been ransacked, furniture overturned, stuffing pulled out of the cushions in the couch. Things were in complete disarray. Now our real concern had become finding Bridget alive.
We separated and moved stealthily through the apartment when we heard a sound coming from the back of the apartment. Winston picked up a large piece of broken glass off the floor then raised his fingers, silently counting. On the count of three, Winston tossed the glass against the wall as I ducked behind the couch and he ducked behind a wall. If Bridget was safe and she’d heard the glass, she’d come out or at least say something to alert us that she was all right. Instead, we heard a male voice.
“What was that?” Two thug-looking dudes came running from the back of the apartment, guns drawn, looking around for the source of the noise.
I slid around from the side of the couch, unnoticed by the intruders. Just as I was getting ready to make a move, Winston motioned for me to hold still. He had a clear shot from where he was. I watched as the bullet pierced his chest and one guy fell to the floor.
“Fuck!” the other guy shouted as he turned around to try to figure out what had happened. He saw me, then his dead boy slumped on the floor, and then his eyes went to the gun in my hand. He and the dead guy must have been real close, because I saw the fury in his eyes as he aimed his gun at my face.
As I braced myself for a gunfight, Winston tried to sneak up behind the guy to disarm him before he got off any shots. The guy must have seen Winston out of the corner of his eye, because he quickly turned in Winston’s direction and fired two shots. Then he started running toward the front door. I raised my gun and let off a shot. He dropped like a sack of potatoes.
“Winston, where the fuck are you, man?” I looked around the living room, and when I finally spotted him through all that mess, I realized he’d been hit.
“Winston. Ah, shit. Man, please don’t be dead. Please!” I shouted as I leaned over him.
“It’s just my shoulder. I’ll be all right,” he said, trying to reassure me. “Willie, you got to find her.”
“I gotta get you to a hospital, man.”
“No, I’ll be all right. I’ve been her driver for years. No one will question me being here. But they’ll just hold you up, and you have to get Niles and find her.”
“I can’t leave you here, man,” I insisted.
“Yes, you can. You have to get out of here quick.”
I reluctantly stood up to go.
“Here. Take my phone. I put a tracker on all her cars. She’s probably in the Porsche. It’s her favorite. Once you activate it, you’ll know where she is.”
He took the phone out of his pocket and handed it to me.
“Now go before the police come. Get out of here,” he ordered me. “Go. Please find my girl.”
I raced out of the apartment and down the stairs. By this time, a crowd had gathered around the doorman’s body, but I slipped past and kept moving to the car.
Inside the BMW, I took out Winston’s phone and activated the tracker. It felt like forever waiting for the location to come up, but as soon as I saw the address pop up on the GPS, I headed out, hoping it was not too late.
* * *
As luck would have it, I hit every light from Columbus Circle to SoHo, and as a black man driving a BMW, I couldn’t risk getting pulled over and wasting more time, so I had to stay within ten miles of the speed limit. Folks were out in the streets en masse, so the traffic was bumper to bumper when I finally got downtown. What should have been a fifteen-minute ride took me thirty-five.
I had tried calling Bridget multiple times, but she still wasn’t answering her phone, which confirmed for me that something was very wrong.
“Where are you?” I said out loud as I raced around the parking lot looking for Bridget’s car. I finally spotted it, but she was nowhere in sight. I got out of my car, my gun close at hand.
“Bridget!” I called out to her only to be met with silence.
As I got closer, I found her phone, purse, and packages sprawled on the ground between two cars.
“Shit.” This was really bad. I grabbed her things and took them with me as I got back in the BMW.
For a split second, I thought of calling Niles on the plane, but I knew this wasn’t the kind of information he’d want to receive over the phone, especially thousands of feet in the air where he really couldn’t do anything. The only thing I could do was head back through Manhattan traffic to make sure I would be at the airport when his plane landed, so I could break the bad news to him.
Majestic
61
“That shit is funny as hell,” I said, laughing at the ridiculousness up on the screen. A beat later, the three half-naked ladies draped around me in the screening room all followed my lead. It made me laugh again at just how anxious these hoes were to make me happy. Who could blame them? I was real generous to the people in my life, especially when they were as fine and accommodating as these lovelies, ass and tits out, sucking and fucking the way they had for the last twelve hours.
“Majestic, we still going out tonight?” China, my newest friend, asked as she stroked my arm like she wanted another round. Before I could answer, Bruce stepped into the room with a massive scowl on his face.
“We got problems.”
His words hit me hard, because with the shit we were into, it could have been anything. Raising my right hand, I snapped my fingers, and as if I had performed a magic trick, all three ladies swiftly disappeared to give us privacy. I clicked off the screen, tied up my robe, and sat up straight to hear what had my partner so concerned.
“What is it?”
“Those two guys we sent over to that address El Gato gave us. They’re both dead.”
“Get the fuck outta here. Those were two first-class killers. This bitch is as good as El Gato said,” I replied, concerned. “Thank God we sent outside talent to get her instead of our own people. They’ll never trace it back to us.”
“Well, maybe, but it gets worse. I just got a call from Cali. Literally right after we left and headed back to New York, someone hit El Gato.” He delivered the news and then sank down in the chair next to mine from the weight of this revelation.
“You’re shitting me. In that fortress he’s got?” I sputtered, my thoughts darting all over the place. Hell, he had ten times the security that I did.
“I know, right. It was definitely professional. Dude killed everyone but that chick Dominique.”
We exchanged a look. “You think it was her?” It wouldn’t be the first time someone in this business got taken out by his own people.
Bruce shook his head, “Nah. She was really hurt, but I guess the person took pity on her or some shit and let her live.”
“This is not good for business.” My mind went to all of the work we had been planning to do together. “Who the hell did this? This shit’s gonna cost us millions, and who knows if we’ll ever recover,” I explained to him, although I was sure he had already done the math. There were a lot of people that took that kind of hit and never came back.
Bruce pulled out his cell phone and fiddled with it a minute, then he handed it to me. “Dominiqu
e sent me this.”
It was a picture of a guy sleeping like a fucking baby, not a care in the world.
“This the guy that got El Gato?” He looked like a lightweight to me.
Bruce seemed ready to blow. “Yep, he’s the hitter. Dominique took this while he was sleeping. Apparently El Gato didn’t trust the dude, so he made her spend the night to keep an eye on him. Notice anything familiar about him?”
“Nah, can’t say I do. Why?”
“That’s the guy I had beef with outside the club.”
“Damn, this is fucked up, man. If we had only stayed in town a little longer, we could have dealt with him. Now we’re royally screwed.”
“We gonna have to start all over, or damn near,” Bruce fumed, pounding his fist into the thick leather armrest. “We may have to go to the Duncans, hat in hand.”
My phone rang, and I raised my hand for Bruce to put his rant on pause. I checked the caller ID and picked up the call. “Yo, Pooh, what’s up?” I’d put him on a sensitive assignment.
“You see those pictures I sent you last night?” he asked, no doubt to make sure I knew he was doing his job. I had sent him over to Keisha’s to keep an eye on her and to document anything suspicious. Something hadn’t seemed quite right with her ever since I got home from camp.
“Man, I was a little indisposed last night. I had three of the best side-pieces over here try’na out-fuck each other. Bitches wore me out.” I laughed just thinking about how crazy things had gotten. One went to suck my dick, and it was like the other two had to prove just how valid their dick-sucking skills were, and on and on. Some regular-season chicks vying to win the title of MVP.
“Yeah, well, you should take a look at those flicks,” Pooh said, not interested in stories about last night’s marathon sex. Usually he was the first one to ask for details, so I knew this was something important.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I told you Keisha’s trying to play you. I found some pictures of her and some dude hidden in her dresser.”