by Brick
Shawn’s booming voice echoed in the silence of the room. His eyes now coal black, the demons in him were alive. “No! Fuck the tried. You sat here, you fucking sat here, and never told me, us, the truth. You have no motherfucking idea what I went through, Tía. Nah, that ain’t even it huh? When Mom would lock herself away, it would be days we didn’t eat. I fucking had to run the streets and get us food. Had to change Drew’s dirty diapers that he used to be sitting in for hours. You don’t fucking know! Naw, no, you fucking knew and you kept us there.”
My hands cupped my aching face. Hot tears fell and my body began to shake. “I had to keep you away from him. I wish I had known earlier. We had no one to go to. Our grandparents were dead, my mom and pops had ended up dying two years before Drew’s birth. We had nothing but our minds and plans to keep you secret and I’d do that shit again if I had to, but I’d do it better where he couldn’t find you.”
“You fucking telling me all this shit that the African Queen got now, you didn’t have then to get help huh? Naw.”
“Shawn! We were empire building then. Kids in college trying to figure out that the games our parents play will fall onto the children. It happened to me, and now it’s happening to you and Drew. This is why I always told you parts of my story, in hopes that one day you all would understand me. I’m so sorry.”
“You kept us from you. You are our fucking mom and you kept that from us. That shit is wrong. Fuck the rest. Fuck that nigga Dame, that nigga Dante, and they fucking daddy. I don’t want shit to do with them. Never did, never will. Fuck those bitch-ass niggas! That shit in this, your part, is wrong as fuck,” Shawn spat out.
I watch him walked out, slamming doors on the way. I glanced at Drew. He was hurt and angry. The way his hands fisted and his eyes darkened let me know, but it was the quiet way he just stood there then walked out on me that hurt me hard. I sat in my karma, sat in my pain, and I lay down trying to find the snatches of love I had only momentarily had only hours ago.
Something I remembered Zora Neale Hurston saying ran deep in my soul: “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
This is my truth and the truth hurts, but there it was for me. All I could do was pray on it, pray on my sons, and have faith.
E.N.G.A. Which makes this a new chapter, in a new game for us all.
Epilogue
Micah
Three weeks later
“Don’t you think you’re getting in too deep, Micah?”
I looked up into the eyes of the woman who had become more than a friend to me on many occasions. She had been the one woman I could go to no matter how fucked up of a situation I’d gotten myself into. I’d been undercover in this operation so long that sometimes I did lose myself. I’d forgotten what was real and what wasn’t a long time ago.
I came into the FBI an eager kid ready to take on whatever task was handed to me so I could rise in the ranks and I did. But it all came with a price. The first member of DOA I put in prison cost my partner her life. She had gone in so deep that by the time she realized her time was near, it was too late. After she put Lu Orlando in prison, we’d thought we were well on our way to shutting down one of the major underworld bosses in the South. We were wrong.
The history of DOA went all the way back to the Harlem Renaissance days. Lu’s pops and grandpops were legends back in New York until a woman came between Moses Ekejindu and Caltrone Orlando. Since then, the two families had made the United States and abroad their playground. The blood feud between the two families left bodies from border to border in their wake.
“I ain’t fucking in deep enough. If I was I’d have Dame and Dante Orlando behind bars instead of in the fucking ground,” I barked out at the woman.
“How many more bodies do you need behind bars? You’ve locked up countless people,” she argued.
“And I still don’t have the ones I want.”
“Who else is there? The main two you want are dead.”
“DOA goes a long way, Candace. Not to mention, I’m still looking for Moses Ekejindu’s great grandson. Every time I think I know who he is, his face changes,” I told the woman who didn’t know how close she was to the case herself.
Candace stood and stripped the latex gloves she had on off. My bloody clothes lay scattered over her front room. Dr. Candace Lewis had been in my pockets since I’d first laid eyes on her. When two of Dame’s girls had tried to run away from him, it was me who had to walk into her doctor’s office to ensure that there wouldn’t be any problems for us afterward.
“That doesn’t explain why you’re after this Shawn Banks kid so tough.”
“It’s best if I get to him before he realizes who he is,” I said as I struggled to slowly get up from the sofa she had stitched me up on. It had been three weeks and my wounds still needed tending to like they had just happened.
Her chocolate face turned to me. “What does that mean?” The woman before me was shaped like she was made for the gods, but because I knew all of her dirty little secrets, she would never be more than a woman I used until I was tired of her. Any woman who would put their own flesh and blood out on the street was scum to me. But the pussy was good and she was resourceful. She kept the Bounce Girls treated monthly with Pap smears and such, at least the ones who handled my extra business on the side.
From the outside looking in, no one would know that I worked for the Feds. I’d taken my undercover moniker to the extreme and had no plans to turn the heat down anytime soon.
“That means that I want him to make a mistake so he can end up behind bars like his father. I never want a boy as ruthless as Enzo to know his full potential. Never. I’d kill the son of a bitch first. It took the Feds years to clean the street of Lu Orlando’s rule and thanks to some ragtag misfits from the hood, his two sons are dead now too. But that means nothing. You hear me? Nothing compared to how far the DOA organization really goes. If that boy ever found out who he was”—I shook my head, or at least tried to—“or if the big players in that organization figured out that Lu still had a son out there, we’d be back at square one. We can’t afford that,” I rambled on.
“How do you even know that this boy is who you think he is? Do you have any proof that he is the son of this man?” she asked.
“Candace, I know what I’m talking about and that is all you need to know. When you’ve been infiltrating a faction as long as we have in DOA, you know shit. This boy is dangerous and needs to be off the street and if I could get that little one, his brother, off the street too, that would be all worth it. I want to wash the fucking world of any Orlando still on US soil.”
I was talking more so to myself than I was to her. I thought back to five days I’d been left in the basement after Enzo had tortured me. There was no doubt in my mind that he would have killed me had I not found a way to untie myself. I’d seen a lot of shit that Dame had done to people in the basement when it came to torture, but none took the cake like when I’d seen Enzo torture people. I never thought I’d find myself on the receiving end of that shit. The look in that boy’s eyes said that he was his father’s son in that moment. With as evil as Dame and Dante were, I was willing to bet money and my life that Enzo would be worse.
I hobbled over to look in the mirror at the side of my face. The place on my face where he had peeled the skin from my eyelids all the way down to the right side of my neck was decorated in white gauzes. My vision was blurry in my right eye from the injuries to it. The burns to my back would take months to heal. It hurt like hell for me to piss because of the burned hanger that had been inserted into my dick. As I looked in the mirror, I barely recognized myself.
“You still in contact with your daughter?” I asked Candace.
She sighed and looked at me like I’d annoyed her with the question. “I made contact that one time and that was only because I’d happened to see her when she was out.”
“Contact her again.”
“Why?”
�
�Because I know for a fact that Enzo is close with Jackson Hawks. If we get to Hawks, we can get to Shawn, and the only way to get to Hawks is through your daughter. So can you do that for me?”
I had already made contact with Dominique. As long as I had her on the inside, everything was good, but I needed shit to be great. I needed more than one ace in the hole for me to be satisfied. Dom had been in Dame’s pocket for a long time. At first I had wanted to tell the young girl to run as far away from that nigga as I could, but Dom had her own agenda. Once it was revealed, I knew her days would be numbered. So the next best thing for me was Candace.
Candace folded her arms across her chest and cut her eyes at me. “What’s in this for me?” She confused me at times. For as beautiful as she was, there was an evil interior that would trade her own daughter to death for her own selfish reasons.
I had to ask, “Don’t you even want to see her?”
She didn’t answer. “Why?”
“She’s your daughter.”
“Your point? What’s in this for me?”
I inwardly shook my head and hobbled back over to the bloodstained sofa. I picked up two Vicodin, popped them, and then chased them with bourbon whiskey. I knew what I was about to do was foul, but fuck it if I cared.
“I’ll give you what you want,” I lied to her.
Candace placed her hands on her hips and casted a skeptical look at me.
I held my hands up. “I’m serious. When this is all said and done, it’ll just be me and you. I’ll be done with this whole thing and I’ll give you the life you want.”
“And all I have to do is get Gina to talk to you?”
I shook my head. “No, I need for her to do more than talk. I need for her to get Jackson Hawks somewhere so I can get to him.”
“I hope you come prepared. That’s a big nigga.”
I nodded once. “I know how big he is. I worked in Dame’s world for years. Remember when he brought all of those misfits in. Get Gina to talk to you and get her to bring Hawks with her.”
“She won’t be hurt?” she asked.
That had me tilting my head to the side. “Thought you didn’t care one way or the other.”
“Answer me,” she demanded.
I shook my head with a lie in my heart. I’d kill anybody to further my agenda. Every last person I had in on this shit was expendable, including Candace. “Look, I just want to talk to them. I ain’t trying to kill either one of them.”
“And once you get this Shawn kid, you’ll be done?”
“Yes, I promise.”
Candace smiled and walked over to sit next to me. She ran a delicate hand over the disheveled waves and scars in my head. “Then lets finish getting you all healed up so you can get on your job,” she crooned.
The pills mixed with the bourbon were beginning to make my head light and the fact that I knew what was on her mind made my mood even better. The higher I stayed off the meds, the less pain I felt. I needed to sit back and regroup. That nigga damn near killed me. I was closer to death than I’d ever been. In fact my body felt as if I’d been embalmed. I really felt like a zombie walking. That was until I felt Candace wrap her plush lips around the head of my dick. I’d had a hot metal coat hanger stuck up my dick hole, so the fact that there was a little pain as it hardened didn’t surprise me. However, Candace’s mouth felt so good wrapped around my head, I could ignore the pain for the moment.
My head fell back and I exhaled loudly. She would never know I used to fuck her daughter, just like she would never see her death was imminent. She knew too much and for that reason, killing her would be easy . . . after she helped me with my agenda.
Urban Books, LLC
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Hood Misfits Volume 3: Carl Weber Presents
Copyright © 2015 Brick & Storm
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