Now ten years old, after losing his father, life still seemed manageable for Freeze. Despite his resentment and hatred toward his father, Freeze realized he had inherited some of his father’s strength. He dealt with the loss of his father by acting out in school. He bullied everyone he came in contact with, young or old, and dared anyone to challenge him back. One particular day Freeze got suspended from school for fighting. He was relieved that no one was answering the phone when the principal called his mother. That gave him extra time to edit his version of the incident before he got home. He planned to put on his usual innocent face and blame everything on everybody but himself. He knew his mother usually fell for his version.
As soon as Freeze got home, he felt a cold chill enter his body and then exit. He shook the feeling off as he entered the living room. He inhaled the fresh but strong scent of overused Pine-Sol, Lemon Ajax, and Comet mixed. He knew his mother had been on one of her cleaning binges again. He also knew she was always in a good mood whenever she cleaned up.
The tiny apartment was spotless, recalled Freeze. The pressure he had placed on his bladder since he had left school reminded Freeze that he had to use the bathroom. He grabbed hold of his crotch and made his way down the hall to where the bathroom was located. Freeze was already unbuckling his belt as he pushed the bathroom door open. He was so preoccupied with his pants that he didn’t notice what was in front of him. His young eyes widened at the sight.
Freeze’s first reaction was to scream from the shock. Instead, he just stood there in the bathroom doorway, forcing himself to be emotionless, to no avail. The sight of his mother foaming from the mouth, slumped on the toilet seat, opened up a floodgate of tears. He noticed a metal box sitting on her lap and dried-up blood resting at the bottom of her upper lip. Her eyes were still open, looking straight in his direction, but through him, matching the cold chill that he felt in the hallway.
Freeze didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know where to turn or how to digest what he was witnessing. He couldn’t even process the hurt. So he stood tall, walked up closer to his mother, kissed her on her forehead, and looked down into the box. It contained a gun, drugs, and a wad of money. He removed the contents from the box and then backpedaled out of the bathroom. Freeze went back outside of the building and sat on the front steps until his sister’s bus arrived. When it did, he shook his head at her, stopped her from entering the building, took her by the hand, and led her away. He went to the only place he knew he could go and be embraced with open arms.
Frenchie didn’t know exactly what to do as his murdered best friend’s kids showed up at his door with nowhere else to go. One thing was for sure to him: turning them away wasn’t an option. Instead of a positive male role model for Freeze, he was like a ghetto tour guide. The streets became like a museum. Every scene had a story to be told and Frenchie seemed to know it all, from the beginning to the end. He taught Freeze everything he knew, mentally and intellectually preparing him. Freeze had no other choice but to end up in the streets.
He didn’t know what happened to his mother after he left her body in the bathroom that day. He didn’t even know if she had gotten a proper burial. Once again, life just went on. The police never even called the schools looking for her children. It was as if she was just one less person, deleted from existence. By the time Freeze was thirteen, once again the world that he had adapted and adjusted to took another drastic turn for the worse.
At 5:00 a.m., everything was calm and quiet. Five minutes after, the sound of a boom startled Freeze. Within seconds, the SWAT team units were in every room after knocking down the house door. Freeze was sound asleep with his father’s pistol under his pillow. It made him feel safe, with a sense of power. He was protecting himself as well as his sister. So when he saw their room door being breached, out of instinct and still half asleep Freeze reacted. He retrieved the pistol and let off the remaining three rounds that were left in the barrel, barely missing the officers who nearly returned fire.
“Whoa! Whoa! It’s a kid! It’s a kid!” the leading officer yelled as he jumped in front of the other two SWAT team members’ AR-15s with his hands up high.
Freeze dropped the smoking gun between his legs. It was as if he got high off of the gunpowder fumes he was inhaling. It gave him an instant rush. He sat in the bed, smiling. It was his first time actually discharging a gun. His aim was beyond terrible, but pulling the trigger was much easier than he thought.
Reality was brought back to him by his ten-year-old sister waking out of her sleep, screaming for her mother and father, while hugging her teddy bear tight. Two of the officers immediately rushed over and restrained Freeze. The leading officer confiscated the pistol.
They escorted Freeze outside of the room. The first thing he saw was Frenchie being cuffed up, still in his boxers. He had apparently put up a fight also. He was banged up pretty good, Freeze noticed. Frenchie looked over at young Freeze and cracked a smile of approval. He knew the sound of that familiar gun anywhere. Freeze smiled back and watched them take Frenchie away. Ultimately Freeze found out that he had been charged with two homicides and three kidnappings. It would be the last time he would see him for quite some time.
Being that Freeze nearly killed two officers, he was taken to a juvenile detention center. If it weren’t for that, he would’ve been placed in foster care with his sister, who he lost contact with the entire time he was imprisoned.
Freeze had a rough time in the detention center. Most of the troubled teens there had lengthy sentences for serious crimes like murder and armed robbery. Many of the teens were huge compared to Freeze due to extensive workouts, and heavy eating. They had constantly picked on him and jumped on Freeze every chance they got. It seemed like every day he was being trapped in blind spaces from staff and was forced to defend himself. Freeze never backed down. He fought back and stood tall every time. Win or lose. He lost most of the time, but eventually he started getting his weight up just like his aggressors. Thereafter, Freeze stopped fighting fair. He kept two razors in his mouth at all times. Even in his sleep. He mastered the art of spitting, catching, and cutting, all in a single hand motion.
After a full year and a half, the Las Vegas, Nevada, detention center was his to claim. Freeze put together a team of young convicts who were going home around the same time as him, and made plans to take over the streets the same way he did in the juvenile facility.
Freeze was released when he was seventeen years old. By the time he was eighteen, he was known as Freeze, a cold-hearted problem child. He went back to claim the territory of his father’s old buildings, and started from there. Using everything Frenchie had taught him, he was unstoppable. Their plans were to move everyone out of their way. Brute force was their favorite method of persuasion.
* * *
Freeze cruised down Las Vegas Boulevard in his CLS 550, smoking a blunt of haze and thinking. A lot had transpired in the past week. He needed to be away from everybody to clear his thoughts. He cracked his tinted driver’s side window and plucked the ashes out into the warm midnight air as he made a left on Flamingo Road. He put the blunt back to his lips and took a deep pull, releasing the lung-cycled smoke from his nostrils. He zoned out to Kendrick Lamar as he pulled over to the side of the road, closed his eyes, laid his had back against the headrest, and reclined the electric seat all the way back, taking another hard hit of the drug that began sorting out his darkest thoughts.
The first thing he dwelled on was the incident that happened at Treasures the previous night. He realized that things could’ve gotten really ugly, had the head of the Double Gs not called him ordering him to defuse the situation immediately. How the fuck did she find out about that shit so quick? Freeze wondered. That nigga Prime must be another one of them bitches’ victims, he concluded. But what really kept going through his mind was the woman in the red dress Prime was with. And how stupid it was for her to risk her life the way she did. It was the stupidest thing he had ever seen anyone do. That was the
only truthful excuse he gave to his crew for backing down. There was no way he would have ever disclosed the entire reason and there was no way he could ever let any of them find out.
There was another major issue that stained Freeze’s stimulated mind: Frenchie, and the reason the two had fallen out after being so close. The letter he had gotten from Frenchie two years into his bid haunted him for the entire second half of his time in the detention center. He regretted ever keeping in contact after he’d received it. Freeze felt betrayed.
It was a letter unlike any other that he received from him weekly. It revealed that all of Frenchie’s appeals were denied, and him being sentenced to the death penalty was going to stick. According to the letter, he wanted to free his conscience of all mental burdens that had him trapped and make things right. He explained how he had known exactly what happened to Freeze’s father and why. Most importantly, who did it. Freeze remembered shaking his head in disgust as he read how his father was killed by one of his young jealous female lovers. Although she had known about his wife and kids, she was enraged to find out that Freeze’s father was expecting another baby by another young female from the housing projects across town. Freeze had never bothered to seek out his other sibling.
He had appreciated the clarity on his father’s death, but he couldn’t handle what Frenchie had written him about his mother. It was his heroin that his mother had overdosed on. He expressed how he felt he was responsible for his mother ODing on the drug. Freeze was crushed by the revelation. That day, he too placed blame on Frenchie. In his mind, he believed his mother would have still been alive had Frenchie not had the stash in the box. That letter marked the turning point of his bid and his life in general. That single letter, with nothing else to stand on, irreversibly transformed Anthony Frost into Freeze.
As if I don’t have enough stuff on my plate. He felt as if he was somehow losing his grip on things in the streets, in his life. He knew before he could let that happen he had to do something. With that being his only thought, Freeze took another hit of his blunt and pulled back into the ongoing traffic.
Chapter Nine
Monica woke up to the early morning sounds of birds chirping. The sun had just risen. The warm rays spread lightly across her beautiful naked body, which was tangled up in the linen sheets. A cool, refreshing breeze occasionally crept its way through the open balcony door, pampering her as she unintentionally overslept. She slowly opened her eyes and stared at the high, unfamiliar ceiling. She then sat up in a panic as reality hit her.
Oh my God! What did I do? I blew it! Oh shit! I blew it! Damn! She smacked her forehead with the palm of her hand and cursed herself.
She quickly scanned the lavish room for her clothes. They were across the room on the far end. She wrapped her body in the sheet and stood up. Her feet comfortably sank down into the plush carpet as she surveyed the room with surety that her mission was blown or at least compromised.
How much did I have to drink? she questioned herself as she felt her forehead while wobbling. She felt dizzy and could feel blood rushing to her brain. She looked around, trying to find anything that could salvage the mess that she had just gotten herself into. It would be all for nothing. Nothing at all.
Monica looked over at the balcony’s glass door. It was wide open. She walked past it and went straight for her clothes. They were neatly folded, sitting on top of a plush leather loveseat that sat in front of a huge sixty-inch plasma flat screen hanging on the wall over a virtual fireplace, with SportsCenter playing on the screen.
As she tiptoed over and reached for her red dress, she noticed the pair of slacks folded right next to it. She looked behind her with caution to make sure she was still alone before feeling the pockets and digging in them. After finding what she was looking for, she opened up the gator-skin wallet and studied the driver’s license. She looked at Prime’s face, his name, and the address. She assumed that was where she was, instead of a hotel suite, due to of all the personal items in the room. She could even smell the odor of the ocean drifting through the open balcony door. She thoroughly searched through his cell phone contacts until she heard a noise. It sounded as if it came from within the room. She quickly put his stuff back the way she found it and began to get dressed. She had never realized that there was another door in the back of the room. It slowly opened.
Prime reemerged from the master bathroom with a huge smile on his face. He stood in the doorway with nothing on but a thick Polo towel wrapped around the lower half of his damp muscular body. He stared at Monica as she slithered her thickness back into her dress.
Monica turned and stared at him. She almost lost her breath as it all came back to her in minor glimpses and flashbacks. The restaurant, the food, the wine, the dancing, the ride back to his house, the walk on the beach, the flirting, the resistance, the temptation, the seduction, the sex, the regret, the blackout. It all seemed to be like a movie. And she wished it were.
She was sure that everything she had worked for was gone. The reality of losing it all began to introduce itself. She had waited for years for this opportunity. The position. The timing. The trust. The execution. She had the easy part compared to the rest of the operation. She couldn’t fathom it all going to waste over something so meaningless.
Tears began to stream as she sat down on the edge of the sofa. She rested her elbows on her knees and her forehead into her hands. Her actions caught Prime totally off guard. His cocky smile turned into a look of warm compassion and concern. He rushed over and dropped to his knees directly in front of Monica. He was a sucker for a damsel in distress. Especially one he’d enjoyed as much as he had her. He put her head on his shoulder. She tried to push him away at first, but eventually embraced him as he begged her to let him know what was wrong.
Monica knew she couldn’t reveal what really had her in tears and disturbed. You jeopardized everything, she beat herself up. She could feel Prime’s eyes on her. She knew she had to tell him something. A thought quickly jumped in her head. “I’m so sorry. I’m stupid. You’re going to kill me,” she rambled.
“Whoa, slow up.” Prime rubbed the side of her shoulders.
Monica lifted her head. When she did, she could see the genuine concern in Prime’s eyes. At that moment she felt like shit. Despite his apparent occupation, Monica could see that he was a decent guy. Still, she had to remind herself of the bigger picture. Prime was just a small fish in a big pond. And small fish were often sacrificed for the bigger ones, Monica concluded. She took a deep breath before she continued. “I was only supposed to be using you. I’m so sorry,” she blurted out.
Prime cocked his head back to look Monica in her eyes. Her words caught him by surprise. “Using me?” he repeated. He could already feel his temperature rising. He had felt that something was strange last night but she had put him at ease. He prided himself on being a man always on point and he couldn’t believe he had almost gotten caught slipping.
“What?” he asked with a lot more aggression in his tone. He ended his physical support and now had her gripped by the side of the arms.
“Yeah. It’s true. I was supposed to get close to you—” she confessed.
“For what? Like a . . . hit? You was put on me?” he jumped in before she could finish.
“Nooo!” She shook her head rapidly.
“But I supposed to be dead? You was setting me up for some niggas?” he boomed, already drawing his conclusion as to who had put Monica on him.
“No, I told you, and not exactly,” she replied.
Prime scowled. “So, what the fuck is it?” he wanted to know. He was already searching around for his nearest pistol to help speed up the process.
Monica peeped it. “It’s the Double Gs!” she exclaimed. “They wanted me to get close to you and tell you that Freeze was pillow talking about you so that it would cause tension or beef between the two of you,” Monica confessed.
Prime’s menacing look softened. His scowl was replaced with a smirk as he let out
a light chuckle. “Did they choose me as a target? Or did you?” His demeanor was calm but stern.
“They did,” she confirmed, still sobbing.
“I heard some shit about them bitches,” he admitted. The name Double G had crossed his path on several occasions throughout the years. He had mainly heard it through the crooked cops and politicians he sometimes rubbed elbows with. At some point they all had asked him if he had any information on the organization, as if he had more clout and pull than the government or law enforcement. No one ever went into detail as to why they were inquiring, but somehow the Double Gs had tracked him down and he wanted to know more.
“Where are they? What do they want from me?” he asked all at once.
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I wouldn’t have known until I got in. But now it’s over. No one who had ever had sex with their intended target is allowed in.”
“Well, how would they know?” he shot back. He had already begun to devise a plan.
“Trust me. They know almost everything else. This wouldn’t be hard for them to find out,” she proclaimed, lightening up on the tears while wiping her eyes. Prime’s hands quickly joined hers with pure gentleness. Monica’s eyes widened as she looked up with disbelief. He should be smacking me up or trying to choke me to death by now.
Prime was an opportunist and smart. He knew last night the sexy female in the red dress was too good to be true and he kept a watchful eye on her. He planned ahead like an expert chess player. He pretended not to see her texting someone while he was outside his car. His first thought was to drive off into the desert and leave her with a bullet in the back of her skull, but he instead decided to take full advantage of the situation. He thought Freeze had put her on to him, but he shook that notion off. That would be giving him too much credit, he knew. Now he was getting closer to the truth. He put his softest tone on as he forced her head right back onto his shoulder.
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