by Kiki Swinson
Despite his towering six-foot-five height and muscular, broad frame, Eli had no trouble moving stealthily through the night.
Having cased the joint, he knew there were four Haitian niggas posted on the eastside.
Fifty feet out, the two enforcers screwed on their M4 upper can silencers to their lightweight weapons and took their targets out with two shots apiece.
They waited a full thirty seconds to see whether an army of niggas would rush to the fallen soldiers’ sides, but the coast remained clear and Eli and Omar went back into stealth mode.
Adrenaline pumping, they entered the warehouse by the back door and interrupted a product delivery by blasting every nigga in sight with their weapons on full auto. Most went down, roaring in agony before they ever got the chance to reach for their own weapons let alone take aim.
Eli recognized one man struggling to make it toward a door with his left side chewed up with bullets. Eli eased off the trigger and gave Omar a signal to do the same.
“Where are you headed off to, Dutch?” Eli’s deep baritone rumbled over the spacious warehouse.
Dutch dragged his tattered body across the concrete floor, leaving a wide swath of blood behind him.
Omar chuckled and then fired a few shots up at the ceiling.
Dutch’s arm wobbled and nearly collapsed.
“Nigga, I know that you hear my man talkin’ to you!” Omar followed up behind the injured man, sidestepping rivers of blood.
Eli detoured to the stacks of bricks and bundled cash on a large foldout table. He whipped out the rolled-up duffel bag that was tucked in the back of his jeans. In less than a minute, he had it all packed and was ready to roll.
When he looked up, Omar had Dutch’s ass jacked up against the wall.
“Everybody knows that the don’s reign is over. Finished. Finito.” Dutch laughed bravely, even though sweat poured down his face like Niagara Falls.
Omar swung his M16 back over his shoulder with a homemade strap, but then grabbed the Glock he had tucked in the back of his jeans and jammed it beneath Dutch’s chin. “You want to say that shit again, nigga?”
Fear polished Dutch’s eyes. “C’mon, man. I ain’t saying nothin’ that every nigga on the street don’t already know.”
Omar’s nose twitched at the alcoholic fumes rolling off the loose-lipped, begging-to-be-a-corpse paper gangster. As a small act of mercy, he rammed his knee straight into the nigga’s groin.
Dutch tried to straighten back up but then wobbled on his legs for so long that he had to reach out and try to support himself with Omar’s arm. “Aw, fuck, man. You done fuck my shit up.”
Eli rolled his eyes.
“Lookie here, Dutch.” Omar grabbed him by his soiled T-shirt and slammed him back against the wall, making sure that his head hit first. “You done hooked up with that dusty-headed immigrant Midnight. After all Mafia Don has done for you and your fam, nigga? Where’s your fucking loyalty?”
With his eyes still rolling around in his head, Dutch tried to shake the shit off and take his pleading to Omar’s boss behind him. “Eli, man. I ain’t got no beef with y’all. This shit is just business. My customers are geeked up on that Haitian’s product. Fo’ real. I’m a fucking capitalist. Supply and demand. You know? I haven’t been able to move the don’s product like I used to. I got to give the people what they want. You can understand that shit, can’t you?”
WHAP!
Dutch’s head snapped back with the swing of Omar’s Glock, and a tooth flew out of his mouth. When Dutch moved his head back into position, Omar rocked his shit in the opposite direction.
WHAP!
Dutch doubled over and threw up at least half a pint of blood and alcohol.
Omar jumped back, but the foul mixture splashed over his sneakers. “Nigga, do you know how much I dropped on these vintage Jordans?”
Dutch cowed. “Oh. I-I’m sorry. My bad.”
Omar sucked in a long breath. “Eli, please tell me I can put a cap in this nigga’s skull for disrespecting my shit. Please.”
Behind them, Eli chuckled as he reached into his jacket and pulled out a cigar. He took his time, biting off the back and whipping out his gold lighter. Once the end glowed amber, he took a few tokes and then blew out a long, thick stream of smoke.
“Fuck, Eli. It’s the fuckin’ general principle of the shit, Boss.” Omar slammed Dutch’s head back against the wall and then smirked when the muthafucka’s eyes rolled around in his head. “Ain’t nobody gonna miss this nigga.”
“Wait. Wait. I . . . I got six kids.”
“Yeah? When was the last time you fuckin’ seen them?”
Dutch stalled, thrown by the question.
“Just like I thought.” Omar slammed Dutch’s head again. “You tossing your seed in miscellaneous pussy don’t make you a father, nigga. I swear. You and my old man. I—”
“Omar,” Eli snapped, not wanting his boy to turn this shit into an episode of Dr. Phil. “Focus, nigga. Focus.”
“Oh, yeah. Right.” Omar looked contrite for half a second and then cleared his throat. “Sorry, Boss Man.” Omar slammed Dutch again. “Ain’t you gonna thank the man for sparing your life for a few more seconds?”
Dutch’s eyes had a hard time focusing, and now that his liquid courage was all over the concrete floor and Omar’s shoes, he realized how fucked his situation was. “Um. T-thanks, Eli. Y-you know I didn’t mean no harm. You know I ain’t shit. I got a serious drinking problem. I-I’ve been trying to beat it, but the shit got its hooks in me. I be saying shit and I don’t even know what the fuck I be saying sometimes.”
Disgust curdled in Eli’s gut, but he kept his cool while his tone remained ominous. “Nigga, this ain’t a goddamn intervention. I don’t give a fuck about your personal problems. I want to get at that nigga Midnight. Where he at?”
Dutch’s eyes widened. “I don’t know. Why the fuck would I know?” He laughed, but the shit sounded off.
Omar shook his head. “This Pinocchio muthafucka is lying.” He glanced over his shoulder at Eli. “Can you believe that shit? Right to our faces.”
“That is fuckin’ bold,” Eli agreed gravely.
Dutch held his breath while more sweat rolled down the side of his head.
Eli usually enjoyed prolonging these damn sentences, but tonight was an important night and they had someplace they needed to be. “Waste his punk ass.”
Omar’s fluorescent smile stretched across his oil-black face. “With pleasure.”
“Whoa. Whoa. Wait!” Dutch tried to squirm his way out of Omar’s grip. “C’mon, Eli. No nigga knows where that crazy muthafucka stay at. You gotta believe me. That muthafucka’s creep is so strong that you don’t know he’s on you until there’s a cap in your ass or a foot on your neck. Him and his boys are like ghosts. They are everywhere and nowhere at the same time.”
Eli remained unmoved.
Omar clicked off the safety.
“Please. Please. I’m telling you the truth. That Haitian muthafucka ain’t playing by the same rules as everybody else. I swear that nigga made a deal with the devil or something. He’s into some fucked-up shit. Everybody done heard about how he waged war with King Cobra and his boys on the west side last month. When niggas found their bodies, those muthafuckas had been gutted like fish. Real medieval shit. Now he done set his sights on Don Mafia’s shit, and no disrespect to your gangster, but ain’t nobody seeing how y’all gonna hold this nigga off.”
The blood in Eli’s veins heated as he finally strolled forward. “The devil is my muthafuckin’ bitch. Baltimore has been bought and paid for by Mafia Don with blood and bullets. You feel me?”
Dutch cowered while Eli’s brown eyes turned black. “I hear you, Eli. I swear. I told you—I . . . I don’t know what the fuck I be sayin’ sometimes. Forgive me, man. Please. Don’t kill me. I got some information that maybe . . . maybe you’d like.”
Eli puffed out a cloud of smoke in the drunkard’s face and dared his ass to cough t
hat shit back at him.
Dutch’s face turned green, but he held the shit in.
“What sort of information?”
“All right. All right. I’ll tell you and then you’ll let me go and we’ll just forget this night right here ever happened. I didn’t see you and you didn’t see me—all right?”
“That depends on the information.”
“All right. All right. See those niggas over there?”
Eli glanced back over his shoulder. “Those dead muthafuckas? What about them?”
“They . . . they were just telling me how they needed to hurry with the deal because they had a flight to catch.”
Omar twisted his face. “Nigga, we ain’t interested in some dead niggas’ traveling plans.”
“Where were they going?” Eli asked, not ready to dismiss where this was headed.
“California,” Dutch answered eagerly. “The tall nigga bragged that Midnight ordered a blackout on Mafia Don.”
Eli ground his jaw but failed to understand the California connection. “The don doesn’t have any people out on the West Coast.” Hell, he doesn’t have any on the East Coast either.
“According to them he does . . . a kid.”
Eli’s hardened gaze raked the tremblin’ nigga’s face for any trace of deception. Then, without saying a word, he strolled off.
Dutch’s scared gaze zoomed back to a grinning Omar. “Wait, Eli. We had a deal, man.”
Eli kept walking.
Omar smiled.
“Wait. Wait. Omar, wait,” Dutch begged as Omar gave Dutch one last hard shove up against the wall. When he released him, the cryin’ nigga slid down the wall and plopped into his own puke. “Don’t do this man. Please.”
Omar took one look at his fucked-up sneakers and shook his head. “You fucked up my sneaks, nigga.”
“Omar—”
POW!
Dutch’s head exploded open. At last, the begging stopped.
“Sloppy muthafucka,” Omar spat, and then rushed after his boy. It was party time.
2
On the eastside streets of B-more, Rick Ross’s latest track blasted out of Club Platinum. Security around the place ran extra deep for Don Mafia’s welcome-home party. After the don spent two years behind bars, his high-priced lawyers got the charges dropped, and everybody who ever thought they were somebody came to pay their respects.
Hoodrats and street hoes writhed around the joint with their tits and asses hanging out, thinking the shit was going to get them past the velvet rope faster. There was no point in trying to tell one from the other. They all wore the same uniform and wanted the same things: a good dick to ride, a nice buzz, and a couple of dollars—not necessarily in that order. Sprung and desperate niggas rode high on a few fat bumpers and flossed harder than what was necessary.
By the time Eli was sixteen, he had long stopped looking at such females as being anything more than a way to satisfy his primal urges. It didn’t stop them from trying to sink their claws into him, each one thinking they had what it took to go from ho to wifey.
There were all wrong.
Eli didn’t believe in getting tangled up in strings. Having a family was like Kryptonite to a real hustler. Once niggas knew what and who were your weaknesses, they could control you.
That much Eli learned from his father.
“Looks like we have a full house,” Omar commented, cutting the engine while Eli finished transferring the money from the duffel bag to a steel case. When he finished, he shoved the bricks into a compartment in the floorboard, locked it, and then handcuffed himself to the case.
“Yo, man. Do you believe that shit Dutch was spittin’ back there?” Omar asked.
“What? About the blackout?”
“Yeah.”
Eli shrugged. “It’s possible. But I don’t know shit about no kid in Cali. You?”
“Humph. Mafia Don is a man with many secrets,” Omar dismissed.
“That may be true, but I think in twenty years of him raising me like a son, I would’ve heard about him having his own flesh and blood.”
“Humph.” A smile twitched on Omar’s lips. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that you sound a little jealous, my man.”
“But you do know better,” Eli answered evenly, and met Omar’s gaze through the rearview mirror.
Omar’s hands shot up in surrender. “You’re right. You’re right.”
Eli sucked in a deep, calming breath and then opened the back door. “Let’s roll.”
“You got it, Boss.”
“Yo, Eli, man. What’s up?” a miscellaneous nigga hollered when Eli hopped out from the back of his whip and slid on his Luxuriator sunglasses.
All eyes zoomed toward Mafia Don’s infamous godson.
Stone-faced, Eli remained ready in case niggas wanted to try him and take that trip out to the morgue. As Mafia Don’s head enforcer, he was a one-man stimulus plan for the local funeral homes—and that shit hadn’t quit when Mafia Don got locked down. Eli stepped up and did what he’d been groomed to do: run shit. Under his hawkish eyes, money rained like manna from heaven and niggas feasted.
But success bred jealousy—and jealousy bred enemies. Case in point, this Midnight muthafucka. Years ago, the nigga worked for Mafia Don, but not too many muthafuckas talked about the shit. Eventually niggas did talk, and Eli now had his suspicions about the Haitian gangsta being the one who ordered the blackout on Killa E. Every time Elijah thought about that night, he remembered the man dressed in all white who was mysteriously missing when all the bodies were counted.
The nigga dropped out of sight for a long time. Now his name was becoming legendary, and the product his ass pushed was crushing the competition. For Mafia Don’s crew, what had been a feast was turning into a famine.
Plus the Haitian nigga rolled into town with enough soldiers and machinery to start yet another war in the Middle East. Though Eli and his crew held the line, the streets still ran red with blood.
Omar slammed the door behind Eli and then turned with his hand on his piece tucked inside his waist. He was as black as oil, and niggas usually joked that the only way to see him at night was when he smiled—but since he didn’t do that shit too often, people never saw his ass coming.
“Chill out,” Eli said, placing a hand on his boy’s shoulders. “We’re here to have a good time.”
Grunting, Omar eased off his piece, but he looked far from relaxed. Every nigga, white and black, knew they were at war—and despite the party mode everyone was in tonight, they remained tense and ready for shit to jump off at any moment.
Eli strolled past the long line, and the mountain-sized bouncers at the door parted as if his name were Moses. Inside, the place was packed to capacity. Easing through the crowd, Eli clocked the hooker and hoes ratio at warp speed. Once business was handled, he wouldn’t mind releasing some stress, preferably with a thick redbone.
“Heeey, Eli,” women cooed with big, greedy smiles.
Nodding, he tossed out winks to the beauties and the chicken heads as he made his way to VIP.
“Well, well, well.” Mafia Don pulled his head out from between Shemeka’s new pair of double-F breasts to flash a toothy smile. “Look who decided to finally show up at my party.”
To his left, Teardrop eased on a matching smile.
Mafia Don slapped Shemeka on the ass. “Leave us so that the men can talk some business.”
Shemeka pouted but popped out of his lap like a toasted Pop-Tart.
Before strolling off, Shemeka’s big chocolaty eyes performed a slow drag down Eli. When her lips twitched in silent invitation, Eli ignored it.
“Sit on down here, my boy.” The don reached out for the bottle of Hennessy XO sitting in the center of the table as the waitress arrived and set down two more glasses.
“Make it just the one,” Mafia Don said.
Omar took the hint and melted away from the table.
Eli took a seat.
“All is well?”
“Of course.” Eli removed a silver key from his pocket, unlocked the handcuffs from his wrist, and slid the case under the table.
“Body count?”
“A few.”
“Three?”
“A few more than that.”
The Don waited him out.
“About twenty or so.”
“Ho. Ho, my boy. Just you and Omar?”
Teardrop shook his head, impressed. “We need to start calling your ass the Terminator.”
Eli shrugged. “All in a day’s work.”
“You could’ve taken a few more guys with you,” Mafia Don said, but his smile remained stretched wide.
“It was more important that they remained here with you.”
“Still don’t think that the party was such a good idea?” He smirked.
“It’s a bit risky.”
“These days breathing is considered a high-risk game.” He huffed out a breath and poured Eli a drink. “We work hard and we have to play hard—you know what I’m saying?”
“I hear you.” He just didn’t agree.
Mafia Don pressed his point. “A king is always safest in his castle—and the east side is my throne. I’m not about to let some crazy nigga chase me off it. If Midnight wants to roll over here and blast, we blast. But in the meantime, I’m going to celebrate with my people. You feel me?”
Eli bobbed his head and kept his real thoughts to himself. For his trouble he received another dismissive wave.
“You worry too much.”
“No. It’s just that a lot of things have changed since you’ve been gone.”
“The street game has been the same since they invented asphalt: only the strongest survive. It’s going to take a lot more than some nigga with breast milk on his breath to get me out of the game.”
“That’s what King Cobra said before Midnight relieved him of his head,” Eli said, easing off his shades and meeting his godfather’s gaze with sincerity.
The don’s face hardened. “Don’t tell me that you’ve traded your dick in for a pussy while I was gone too.”