by Ws Greer
Maybe I’d feel a little bit better if I had heard from Reina recently, but it’s been three weeks since the day she left my house, and I haven’t spoken to her one single time. I’ve texted more times than I can count, and I’ve gotten nothing back. I even built up the nerve to drive to Center City to look for her. I managed to make it into the city and was halfway to her suburb before I realized the people driving next to me where staring into the car. My mother’s car must’ve stuck out like a sore thumb, because I swear everybody I passed was giving me a second look, but I didn’t let that stop me. They could look all the wanted, because I was determined to find Reina. I drove onto her street and parked Whitney’s car three houses down from the house Reina and I had gone into on prom night. I waited there for four hours, watching the house, avoiding eye contact from nose people passing by, and I never saw Reina come out, nor did I see anyone go in. After the fourth hour, the owner of the house I was parked in front of came home in a shiny black Jaguar, and as he pulled into his driveway, he noticed me sitting there. The last thing I wanted to do was get the cops called on me or make more trouble for Reina if it got back to her, so before the guy could approach my car, I put it in gear and drove away. I haven’t been back since, and now it feels like she’s really gone.
It’s like Reina has fallen off the face of the planet, and with Whitney being put into the ground today, I’ve never felt more alone. How could Reina just leave me without saying a word? Who does that to someone? Who the hell makes someone like me love them, only to leave me more broken than ever before? I need her more than ever right now, and she’s gone. How could she do this to me? Not a single text!
Every day I feel my heart growing darker. The money in the footlocker, the clothes in my mother’s closet and dresser drawers isn’t enough to make me happy now. I’m empty. I have no love in my life, and every day the desire to do something horrible grows within me. I knew I wasn’t normal before Whitney died and before I ever saw Reina in that alley. It’s all coming full circle now, though. The rage in me is growing, and it’s going to come out. It’s going to rush out like water from a fire hose, and someone is going to drown. Maybe it’ll be me. Maybe it’ll be someone else. Either way, someone is going to suffer.
The preacher stops talking and the rain quits at the same time. The six people next to Nix and I start to slowly walk away without giving me their condolences, and as Nix places a hand on my shoulder to lead me back to his new Honda Civic, his touch snaps my train of thought and startles me.
“You alright?” I hear him ask. Nix seems to have stopped caring about hiding the money he’s made, because his new car is a beauty and the long, gray trench coat he’s wearing makes him look like a character from a mob movie.
“Just peachy,” I reply with a smile. Nix frowns at the response, then turns on his heel and heads for the car parked on the road.
“For what it’s worth, I’m really sorry, Solomon,” Nix says. “Things have taken a bad turn, and I know it’s tough on you. I’m here if you need me.”
“I do need you, Nix,” I snip back. “I need you to help me rob another place.”
Nix stops walking to look around, making sure nobody heard me. “What?”
“I know you heard me, Nix. Now that Whitney is gone and I don’t have to hide, I want more.”
“You think you’re ready for that right now? After all that’s happened?”
“Of course I’m ready!” I hear myself bark. The sound of my voice travels and echoes around us, but so few people showed up to my mother’s funeral, there’s no one around to hear me anyway. “You think because Whitney died and Reina left that I want to sit around Strawberry Mansion waiting to die? It’s not over, Nix. I still live in the house I grew up in with Whitney. We’re still stuck in hell! There’s still liquor stores on every other block. There’s still crack houses on every damn corner. There’s still drug dealers living at the end of my street, and . . .”
A thought makes me cut the sentence in half. Suddenly, all I can think about is something my mother said a couple of weeks before she overdosed.
“What’s up, man? Are you okay? I think all of this has you losing it a little more than usual,” I hear Nix say, but I ignore his words and focus on the words I heard two weeks ago.
The memory of the last time I saw Reina flashes in my mind, and I suddenly feel like I’m right back in that day. Nix and I had gone shopping at King of Prussia Mall. I bought a royal blue shirt, and I was so focused on Reina not answering my calls or texts that I forgot to go through the outside door with my shopping bag when I got back to the house. I came in the front door and Whitney was on the couch. She immediately honed in on the bag and started asking questions about money. I responded with some smart-ass comment about her sucking dick to get more drug money, and as I walked down the stairs to my room, she shouted something to me that I ignored in the moment.
“Don’t disrespect me, Solomon. I’m still your mother. And if Nix got a job, I need you to ask him for some money. He’s a nice kid, I’m sure he’ll give it to you if you just ask nicely. Davon says I have to pay with real money now, and I need my medicine, Solomon! You hear me?”
The words meant nothing then, but they mean everything now.
“Davon says I have to pay with real money now, and I need my medicine, Solomon!”
I don’t know how I didn’t catch it when she said it, but from the goddamn grave my mother has told me what my next move needs to be. She’d asked if I heard her, and the answer is yes. Yes, I heard you, Whitney.
“Solomon, talk to me, man. You good?” Nix asks, leaning over to try to look me in the eye.
“I’ve got something I need to take care of, Nix,” I reply, staring over at my mother’s brown and black coffin, remembering her words. “I’ve got to pay a special someone a visit.”
THE AIR IS crisp, the stars are bright, and the night is young. My heart beats calmly under the thickness of my black sweater and black leather jacket, and my hand is steady. There are no nerves, there are no feelings. There is only what needs to be done. There is only what I’m dying to do—what I’ve been dying to do for a long time now, and in this moment, standing outside of the projects on the outer edge of Strawberry Mansion, I’m filled with the thrill of the hunt. Is this what makes hunters want to keep killing things? Is it the thrill of the chase, or the excitement of the act of violence? Time will tell!
The complex looks like I expected it would when I looked through my mom’s things and found the address. I figured it’d be a tall building surrounded by bare land, with a crappy little playground on the corner for the poor kids born into this horrible excuse for existence by their horrible excuse for parents. In the light from the streetlights, I can tell the building is pink, with lots of the color giving way to the gray concrete underneath as the paint peels off more and more over time. There are tons of windows missing, replaced by cardboard or trash bags, and given the time of night it is, there is almost nobody walking around outside. There are, however, a few guys who are tucked away in dark recesses of the building. These men are the exact type of scum I’ve grown to loathe—drug dealers. They add nothing of value to the world, they only destroy people who aren’t strong enough to fend for themselves. They’re basically murderers when the product they sell people ends up bringing them nothing but death. They themselves deserve death. Tonight, I’m going to team up with the grim reaper himself!
I close the door to Whitney’s car and make my way across the field, past the playground that’s nothing more than a jungle gym and a seesaw embedded in hard sand. As I approach the dying building, I feel nothing at all. My breathing doesn’t pick up, and my nerves don’t stand on end. This isn’t me being forced into the violent life I’ve always wanted to stay away from. No, this is me embracing what I am. This is what my life has done to me since the second I was born. This is what Whitney made me. This is what Reina did to me.
There’s a dealer wearing a red hoodie standing in front of the door, an
d he looks me up and down as I approach him. He looks like he wants to say something, and I hope for it. I would love nothing more than a confrontation right now. I want everyone in this building, everyone in this neighborhood, everyone in this city to know who I am. Whitney’s death didn’t diminish that—it emboldened it.
“What up, blood?” the man in the hoodie says as he stands up straight, now locking eyes with me. I smile at him as I step directly in front of him and push my black hair to the back with both hands.
“Blood? You want to see blood?” I chirp, to which the dealer frowns. “I’ll show you blood. Whose would you like to see, mine or yours?”
The hooded asshole furrows his brow as he thinks about his options, and I see it in him when he decides he doesn’t want to play with me. Still frowning and looking as confused as ever, he doesn’t vocalize a response. Instead, the guy just steps aside, granting me access to the complex.
I let out a sad sigh as I reach for the door. “Too bad,” I whisper as I enter the building and leave him to wonder all by himself.
Inside the complex, the lights in the hall are flickering in and out, and there’s graffiti all along the walls that lead right up to people’s homes. It doesn’t look like the kind of place you’d want to live in as an adult, so I find myself thoroughly annoyed by the fact that the playground outside has kids that play on it regularly. A child should not be living in a hellhole like this. Then again, I shouldn’t have lived in the hellhole I’ve lived in my whole life either, yet here I am. No one feels sorry for me!
I walk past the doors with no regard to what I hear behind them. I’m on a mission that will require being focused. So I find my way to the elevator that looks like its next trip up will be its last, and press the number seven. When I make it up, I step off of the elevator into another hall that looks identical to the one on the ground floor. I step down the hall at a quick pace, thinking only about my destination. It only takes one turn down a dimly lit corridor to get there—room seven-sixteen; the home of my mother’s drug dealer who should’ve learned his lesson when I stabbed him in the cheek with my box cutter—Davon.
As I stand in the dim hallway staring at the outside of the door of the man whose drugs killed my mother, I hear a tiny voice in the back of my head telling me to stop and think about what I’m about to do. I hate that voice. It’s never done me any good up to this point, and I never really was good at listening to it. Why change that now? After Whitney. After Reina. I ignore that voice and tell myself that I will never allow myself to even hear it again, let alone listen to it.
Knock. Knock.
I bang my fist on the door twice, before listening for movement inside. I hear some light shuffling but no voices. Then there are footsteps as someone heavy approaches the door and stops short of opening it.
“Who the fuck is it?” a baritone voice says, and I know it’s him.
“Solomon,” I answer without the slightest hesitation. I don’t have a need to hide my identity. I want him to know. If he runs, I’ll catch him. Either way, he’s going to know Solomon King is coming for him.
“What are you doing here?” he asks, still not opening the door.
“It’s not polite to talk to someone through a closed door, Davon. Open up,” I tell him, smiling into the peephole I’m sure he’s looking through.
“Look, man, I already told Whitney, if she wants something, she gotta pay just like everybody else. I’m done with the charity cases.”
He doesn’t even know she’s dead!
My blood immediately goes into a full boil under my skin, but I suppress the anger before it can spill over. Just because I’m livid on the inside and ready to explode, he doesn’t need to know that—not until I want him to know it, at which point it’ll be too late to escape my rage.
“Relax, Davon,” I reply after a deep breath to steady myself. “I have money.”
There’s silence for a moment as Davon thinks about my response. I assume he’s thinking about the last time he and I were in a room together and it’s giving him second thoughts. However, he’s a drug dealer, and nothing is more important than making money. So, as I expected, the next sound I hear is the locks on the door being undone. The door slowly creeps open and there stands my mother’s killer, dressed in a wife beater and gray basketball shorts. He has one gigantic diamond stud earring in each ear that really stand out against his dark skin, and his braids are free and hanging behind his head. There’s a thin scar on his face where the blade of my box cutter entered his cheek, but after all this time, it’s nice and healed up, and Davon carries a look on his face now that says he’s not going to allow himself to be intimidated by an eighteen-year-old. That day in my living room was over six months ago, and he wants me to know it.
“Show me the money,” Davon says as he keeps one hand on the door and puts on his toughest expression. I oblige him by reaching into my pocket and pulling out a wad of cash. Davon’s eyes widen at the sight of it. “How’d Whitney get cash like that?”
“Does it matter?” I snip. “I assume we’re not doing this in the hallway, so maybe you should let me in.”
“You know I don’t trust you,” Davon replies. “So if you try anything in here, I’m gonna end you real quick. Without hesitation, you feel me?” Davon slowly reaches behind him and pulls a small black handgun from the back of his shorts. He shows it to me, and I can feel the confidence emanating off of him. That’s the way guns work. If you’re a little bitch like Davon, having a gun can make you feel like the toughest guy in the world. There’s nothing more empowering to a coward than knowing they can hurt something or someone from a distance without having to actually face them.
I decide to play along with Davon’s little game and nod my head. “I got it.”
Davon, enjoying seeing what he believes is fear in my eyes, moves aside for me to walk past him. I hear the door shut and lock behind me as I step into the dark room and look around for signs of life. There’s a messy kitchen to my right, with bottles of liquor sprawled across the counter, and a small living room with modest furniture, but I don’t see anyone else in the apartment. I’m actually surprised that a dealer like Davon is living so modestly, considering his income. He must be trying to make sure he’s inconspicuous. You can’t showcase wealth in a place like this. It’ll get you robbed and killed.
I stand at the entrance to the living room as Davon brushes past me, still holding his little gun. I feel the urge to chuckle rush to the surface, but I suppress it as Davon sits on his brown leather couch and reaches under it. He pulls out a double-locked black suitcase and sets on his black coffee table before stopping and looking up at me.
“Alright, Solomon, explain something to me,” he says, glaring up at me from the couch. “Whitney always calls me before she comes over, and actually prefers that I go to her. So I find it very interesting that you’re here right now. She didn’t call and say she was getting low or anything. Usually she’s blowing up my phone, begging me to hook her up. Now, all of a sudden, she sends you to make a purchase for her. Not to mention the fact that she bought, like, two grand worth of product the last time I saw her. There’s no way she used all that up in just over a week. Sounds like some bullshit to me.” Davon makes a show of placing the gun on his knee and sitting back on the couch.
“Aww, do I make you nervous?” I reply with a smile.
“Hey, don’t start that smiling crap,” he barks. “The shit that went down last time won’t happen again, you feel me? Don’t get any bright ideas.”
“Why don’t you stop being so scared and open up your little toy box so we can get this over with? I’m not interested in talking. I never said I was buying for Whitney.”
Davon nods his head as if realizing something. “So you’re on it now too, huh? Figures. Like mother, like son.”
Still nodding with a smug smile on his face, accepting the idea that I’ve turned into a junkie like my mother, Davon leans forward to put in the combos for the suitcase. As he leans, turnin
g the golden dials on one of the locks, he forgets all about his gun. I watch in anticipation as it slowly starts to slide to the edge of his leg. Davon gets one lock open and shifts his body to put in the combo for the other, but when he moves, the gun on his knee falls, and I immediately spring into action.
Before the gun can hit the floor, my body is already in the air, hurling towards Davon. He tries to react to the gun and reaches down for it, but I collide with him before he can grab it, knocking him backwards. The two of us struggle on the couch, throwing wild punches at each other while trying to get up at the same time, and I manage to get one foot on the floor and kick the gun away before being hit in the jaw by an elbow. I stumble off of Davon, who tries to make a run for the door, but I manage to grab onto his ankle before he can get too far. I hold him in place with my right hand, while I reach into my pocket with my left and pull out my box cutter. As Davon kicks at me to get free, I expose the blade and slide it across his Achilles tendon, slicing completely through it. He lets out a blood curdling scream and falls to the floor, but I jump onto his back and wrap my hand around his mouth to muffle the sound, placing the blade on his throat at the same time.
“Sshhh,” I whisper in his ear as I squeeze his face with my hand. “How could you be so smart and so stupid at the same time? You knew something was off with me showing up here, yet you were so consumed by making the money, you didn’t even realize the gun was sliding off your stupid knee.”
Davon struggles to get free, trying to bounce me off of him by jolting himself up and down, and it pisses me right off. I press the knife into his throat enough to draw a line of blood, and he finally settles down.
“There, that’s better. Let me ask you something, Davon,” I say to him in his ear, still holding his mouth. “Does it matter to you that you killed my mother?” I can feel the confusion shooting through his veins as he furiously shakes his head. “You didn’t do it? Oh, that’s where you’re wrong. You did do it, you just don’t know you did it. It’s all the same though, Davon. She overdosed on the heroin you sold her. She died in her bed last week, and you didn’t even know about it. I buried her this morning. But don’t worry, your burial is coming!”