Coca Kola - The Baddest Chick

by Nisa Santiago

  “What’s that?”

  “I want you to help me set up that bitch and Cross. I need for them to go, and ya gonna be the one to help me make it happen.”

  Moe looked up at Chico and nervously asked, “What you need me to do?” He began to breathe a little easier, knowing he was about to live. His nerves were still on edge, though.

  Chico smiled. He continued to talk to Moe, filling him in on when to set up a meeting with Kola. He was about to arrange her death, execution-style. Chico knew it would bring the heat on him and his crew, but bills had to get paid, and he and Apple needed to continue eating.

  Before Chico and Dante walked out of Moe’s office, Chico turned to Moe and told him, “Don’t you ever go behind my back like that again, Moe, or I swear next time it ain’t gonna be talk between us, but ya brains on the floor.” He shut the door behind him and followed behind Dante out of the tire shop, leaving Moe to ponder about what he’d just said.

  The chilly wind made the two men zip up their coats and lower their heads as they walked past the employees outside, hurrying to finish out the day’s work. The traffic on Amsterdam Avenue was thinning as the sun slipped behind the horizon.

  Dante pulled out a cigarette, lit it up, took a long drag, and walked toward the BMW. He was Chico’s chauffeur for the day. Chico needed to relax. Turning to face Chico, he said, “I’m hungry, cuzzo. Let’s stop by Applebee’s and get somethin’ to eat. I’m in the mood for one of their sandwiches and drinks.” Dante removed the alarm button from his coat pocket, pointed it at the 5 Series, and deactivated the alarm.

  Chico nodded. His mind was on business. It was about to be a busy week for him. He had fifteen ki’s to move, and they weren’t moving. He was hitting up all the locations he did business with and strong-arming them.

  Cross was starting to cut into Chico’s pockets heavily. He understood that he had the inferior product, but still, cocaine sold itself. And with Kola flaunting her sex appeal, manipulating his clientele with her slick talk, and Cross having the connect, he felt overmatched.

  And it wasn’t right that his girl had the disfigured face and was in pain at home, while Cross had the prettier twin sister. And now he had to play bottom feeder to the two people he hated the most.

  Chico raged inside. He didn’t care about any rules or think about the consequences. The gloves were off. He wanted Kola dead first, and then he would worry about Cross in due time. He wasn’t about to give up his hood so easily.

  Dante started to walk around to the driver’s seat. “Yo, cuzzo, tonight, let’s roll out to Sue’s Rendezvous and get it poppin’. I’m in the mood to see some strippers and get me some ass.”

  Chico chuckled.

  As Dante reached for the door handle to the car, he turned to see a dark, tinted Chevy Yukon heading his way on the two-way street. With his hand near his gun, he gawked at the car.

  Chico noticed the truck and became alert too.

  The Yukon stopped alongside Dante. As the front passenger window rolled down, he was ready to extract his weapon and fire, but the smiling face of a beautiful, brown-skinned Dominican woman made him relax somewhat. Still, he kept his hand close to his weapon.

  “What’s poppin’?” he asked.

  “Excuse me, we’re lost,” the lady with the full, beautiful lips and chinky eyes mentioned with a smile.

  The back passenger window to the truck slowly lowered, and the face of another pretty, brown-skinned honey appeared with a matching smile, like her friend. “Hey,” she greeted.

  Dante didn’t return their smiles. He had a straight face while staring back at the girls. “Where y’all tryin’ to go?” he asked, trying to look past the cheery girls and into the truck.

  “We trying to do something tonight, and we’re looking for this street . . . um . . . Riverside Drive and West One Fifty-Eighth Street. We’ve been driving all around this bitch for twenty minutes, and we can’t find it,” the female front passenger said.

  Chico told them, “You about ten blocks away. It’s on the West Side. Just take Amsterdam Avenue straight up, and when you get to One Fifty-Eighth Street, you make that right.”

  “Thank you, cutie.”

  Chico nodded, while Dante kept his eyes on the truck.

  The girls continued to laugh and flirt with the men for a short moment. Then the windows went back up, and the Yukon slowly drove away.

  As Dante watched the truck, while Chico went to step inside his 5 Series, they didn’t notice the young, hooded boy looming from around the corner with his head down. The one who’d reached underneath his hoodie and pulled out a 9 mm, gripping it tightly. He was watching Chico and Dante as they looked at the Yukon. The young boy stretched his hand out, looming closer, his eyes focused on Chico.

  Chico turned and locked his attention on the hooded gangster.

  Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!

  The windows to the BMW shattered around Chico. Chico jumped back and hit the sidewalk fast.

  Dante reached for his weapon to shoot back, but a sudden force pushed him into the side of the car like a gust of wind. His back was on fire, and the only thing he heard was a second round of explosions. He managed to turn. The shot had come from the Yukon. The girl seated in the backseat was poised out the window with a pump-action shotgun in her hand.

  Dante’s eyes widened. Then he heard the third explosion. Boom! The bullet tore into his upper chest and plummeted him across the car. He was dead before he even hit the ground.

  Chico scurried for cover. Moving on his hands and knees, he ducked between two cars as the young boy continued firing, his eyes showing no mercy or any hint of fright; he was like a mindless zombie trained to do this.

  Chico clutched his pistol. What the fuck! he mouthed. He looked to his left and saw his cousin lying dead on the pavement. “Dante!” he screamed out.

  Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!

  As the shots continued to ring out, Chico felt like a sitting duck.

  The girl with the pump-action retreated back into the Yukon, and the second hit squad sped away, leaving the lone shooter to finish up. But he didn’t get a chance to.

  Click! Click! Click! He had emptied out his clip.

  When Chico slowly stood up and looked around the car cautiously, the shooter was long gone. He took off running and dropped the gun in a nearby sewer.

  The abrupt gunfire had sent people nearby running or hiding. The front of the tire shop was empty; the workers and customers had rushed inside when the shooting started, and the traffic on the street had stopped.

  Moe came running out, looking petrified. “Chico, what the fuck happened?” he shouted.

  Chico didn’t say a word. Seeing his cousin sprawled out on the cold street in thick, pooling blood made him unresponsive. The pistol was still in his hand at his side.

  Moe ran over to Chico. “Chico, you need to get the fuck outta here.” He pushed the keys to his Range Rover into Chico’s hand and pointed to his ride parked across the street. “Take my ride.”

  Chico turned to look at Moe. He grasped the keys and didn’t say a word. He stuffed the pistol into his waistband and ran over to the truck.

  Punk muthafucka! Moe smirked as he watched Chico speed away.

  Moe wasn’t as stupid as Chico thought. He knew Chico would drop by to pay him a visit after finding out about his dealings with Kola, so he had devised a plan.

  When Chico had arrived to meet with him, one of his trusted employees put the word out to Kola and Cross via text message, and then immediately a hit squad was sent out. He had only showed kindness to Chico after the failed hit because he didn’t want to look like he was involved with it.

  Chapter 16

  Kola was looking fabulous in her form-fitting, low-rise leather pants and black V-neck bodysuit that showed off her thick cleavage. She stepped into one of the private back rooms at one of her sex parties, where the muffled bass of Jim Jones’ “We Fly High’” could still be heard. The room was off-limits to everyone, except for her securit
y and the hands she trusted to count the money. She closed the door behind her and stared at the piles of money scattered across the large table. It looked like the Rocky Mountains, the way the bills were stacked on top of each other.

  She took a sip of Moët. “That’s the sexiest shit I’ve ever seen,” she said, referring to the large amount of money within her reach, profit from her parties and drug sales.

  Three men stood around the table separating the big bills from the small bills. There was a money machine on a separate table, two small cameras hovering above the room—one aimed at the cash and the second aimed at the door. A stocky armed man holding onto an Uzi stood near the entrance, and a black-and-white security monitor was perched catty-corner on a wooden shelf, allowing the occupants of the room to see who was right outside the thick door.

  At her events Kola sold coke, ecstasy, and heroin to willing customers who needed a pick-me-up to be with the girls, so she was making money hand over fist.

  The three men glanced at Kola and continued working. They were college kids—nineteen- and twenty-year-old accounting and business majors—undergraduates working on their bachelor’s degrees who’d agreed to work for her for some extra cash for books and tuition.

  Her new location was at a loft near the Brooklyn Bridge, a waterfront property with a view of the bridge and the river, in an industrial area, surrounded by warehouses, shipping companies, and a lumber yard. The building was close to the Brooklyn/Queens Expressway and the Navy shipyard.. The venue was huge, three floors and many rooms, and was one of her better spots.

  The three young men would take subtle glances at Kola, admiring her beauty and figure. And even though she was the youngest person in the room, the college students knew she was way out of their league.

  Kola walked over to the corner of the room where two large, empty black duffel bags sat. She said, “I want a hundred and fifty stacks in both bags.”

  Everyone nodded.

  At the sound of a buzz at the door, Kola and everyone else looked up at the security monitor and saw a beautiful, young woman clad in tight blue jeans and a boob-revealing top with long, chic braids standing right outside the door. Kola immediately recognized Candace.

  “Y’all finish up in here, a’ight?” she said to her workers.

  They nodded.

  Kola turned and approached the door. She glanced at her one-man security team dressed in black fatigues and nodded, and Rondo returned the head nod.

  Rondo, a friend of Cross, was as serious as they came. He was an ex-marine who’d done two tours in Iraq but was fresh home from Attica, where he’d done time for second-degree murder. He’d killed two men armed with guns with his bare hands and claimed it was self-defense. They were trying to rob him, but the DA said it was overkill. One man had his neck snapped like a twig, and the second was stabbed repeatedly in his chest and throat.

  Kola opened the thick door and stepped outside to greet Candace, who was from Panama, spoke three languages—Spanish, English, and French—and had a body like Jennifer Lopez.

  “Kola, hey,” Candace greeted.

  Kola knew why Candace wanted to see her. The two walked away from the money room and down the hallway, where they could talk in private.

  After glancing around, Kola said to Candace, “Talk to me. What happened?”

  “My bitches got one, but Chico, I think he escaped,” Candace said in her thick accent.

  “What you mean? Y’all missed?”

  “We did our job. Tina worked his cousin wit’ the shotgun. She put that puta down. He don’t get back up, but the young boy didn’t finish it.”

  Kola sighed. “Well, at least one is fuckin’ down.”

  “If you want, we finish lookin’,” Candace suggested.

  “Nah, y’all did good.”

  Kola passed Candace a thick bulging envelope filled with cash, payment for the hit, and Candace reached out and took it.

  “That’s the rest of it, twenty-five thousand,” Kola said. “Make sure you pay them bitches, Candace. I don’t want any problems.”

  Candace nodded. “We good, Kola. I told you, my girls, we put in work. Niggas see pussy, and they smile. So that puta didn’t even see us coming.”

  Kola liked what she heard. She respected Candace. Many niggas and bitches were fooled by the stunning hazel-eyed beauty with the sweet Panamanian accent, but underneath all the glamour and beauty was a hellcat—a woman as deadly as a venomous snake.

  Candace had come to the country when she was seven years old and grew up in Edenwald Projects, one of the most notorious housing projects in the Bronx. She learned to fight because she was always bullied for being different and an immigrant. However, by the time she was sixteen, she had a reputation in the neighborhood that made even grown men stay away from her. Candace only fucked with gangsters and killers, and she learned her illicit and deadly ways through them. By the time she was seventeen years old, she was already stripping, trafficking guns for her boyfriend, and had numerous assault and drug charges on her record.

  When Kola first met Candace six months ago, she had just gotten out of Rikers after doing a year-long bid for possession and assault. The two met in the strip club, and Candace liked what Kola was saying to her. It didn’t take long for Candace to link up with Kola, and at the age of twenty-two, she was a force to be reckoned with.

  After her conversation with Candace, Kola walked into the primary room where everything was taking place. The huge area with the high concrete ceiling and towering concrete columns was filled with people. Kola stood above them on a slightly raised platform. She peered down at the crowd and watched to see what was going on.

  That bitch will never outdo or outshine me, Kola thought to herself, thinking about Apple.

  ***

  Kola had the black duffel bag gripped in her hand and walked by the doorman without any problems this time. She strutted toward the elevators wearing a pair of suede pants and a stretch silk shirt underneath her hazelnut Mongolian fur-trimmed sweater coat. She had become a known face to him. He nodded at Kola when she walked by and immediately got on the phone to call upstairs. He said to his employer, “Kola’s coming up.”

  Kola stepped into the elevator and placed the duffel bag on the floor by her feet. She pushed for the top floor and waited. When she stepped off the elevator, she was encountered by the same three goons like always.

  She smiled and greeted them with a teasing, “Hey, boys.”

  The men perked up but didn’t smile. They always knew what she was there for. They had gotten used to seeing her and even liked it when she came by. She was their eye candy.

  Kola walked up to them, dropped her bag, and readied herself for the usual search. She looked over at her friend, the only one who took pride in his job and whose hands lingered on her the most. She had gotten used to his deep fondling during his search for weapons.

  “Y’all ready to frisk me?”

  This time, her friend’s hand rested between her legs a little longer, his fingers rubbing against her pussy. Kola released a teasing moan and stared down at Anton. He was a dumb goon, but she thought he was cute.

  She was allowed into the room and was ready to meet with Tony. She dropped the duffel bag of cash in the middle of the room and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows to take in the picturesque view. Being twenty-one floors up gave her an eyeful of the New Jersey shores, the Hudson River, and the Manhattan skyline. She even saw the George Washington Bridge.

  It was a clear, sunny day, and the weather was in the lower forties. Kola wanted spring to hurry up so she could wear her tight skirts and eye-catching clothing. She liked being a tease, and she loved being the center of attention even more.

  As Kola stood by the windows gazing at New York City, she thought about business. She was always thinking about ways to expand herself. The parties were profitable, but she couldn’t be everywhere at once. Taking over with the connect and networking her business in the streets—going back and forth with her
parties and moving so many ki’s a week—was taking its toll on her. She thought about who to trust to run her events when she was away on business.

  She thought about Candace, but she was too hotheaded and only good for problems, not handling money. Kola missed Bunny Rabbit, her one true bitch who knew how to get money and was a down-ass bitch. It disturbed her that Bunny Rabbit was killed at her eighteenth birthday party in an incident that her sister had provoked.

  “I see you like the view.”

  Kola turned around to see Eduardo approaching her in his long cotton bathrobe, which was open, exposing his chiseled chest. He had on swimming trunks underneath and held a glass of wine in his hand.

  “Eduardo, you’re back.” Kola was surprised to see him.

  He smiled. “You miss me?”

  “Where’s Tony?”

  “Back in my country. I needed him to fix something for me.”

  Kola didn’t pry. She understood Eduardo kept his affairs silent.

  Eduardo saw the duffel bag sitting in the middle of the room. “It’s good to see that business is still good.”

  “You keep producing that good white, the money ain’t going anywhere.”

  Eduardo nodded. “You look nice.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Come, have a drink with me. Relax. I’ve been gone for weeks.”

  Kola wasn’t sure, but Eduardo walked over to the bar and prepared two glasses. He mixed a scotch on the rocks with a twist and walked over to Kola as she remained standing by the window. He passed her the glass. She took a few simple sips, while Eduardo downed half his drink.

  There was a moment of silence between them. Kola glanced out the window; it was hard to take her eyes away from the Manhattan skyline.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Eduardo said.

  “It is.”

  “The city of dreams.”

  “Well, my dreams are coming true.”

  “Cheers to that, beautiful.” Eduardo raised his glass in a toast.

  Kola raised her too, and their glasses clinked together. “Cheers.”

  They locked eyes for a moment. Kola felt her heart racing and her panties were on fire. She took a few more sips and tried to control her hormones, while Eduardo stood in front of her with his robe still open. She noticed the bulge protruding from his swimming trunks.