Partnerz in Crime

by Kareem

  She called and let him know things with that hillbilly cat went smooth. Then she led me into a walk-in closet where, behind a rack of very expensive-looking casual dress suits, was a little four-foot door. She opened it, and there was a safe. She opened the safe after a few spins of the combination lock.

  “There it all is,” she said, stepping back so I could view it for myself. Stacks upon stacks upon stacks of cash was all I saw.

  “Dump those two suitcases over there and put every dime in ’em.”

  “Nothing’s in those suitcases,” she said, retrieving them. “They’re brand new.”

  “Load ’em up right got’dayum now.”

  She got busy.

  “How much you think all that is in that safe?” I asked her while she was sweating, dumping it in.

  “I don’t know. Three or four million, I reckon. He has more, but it’s in off-shore accounts. My husband is filthy rich. I swear to God he is.”

  “Your husband is a filthy snitch is what he is.”

  “There’s jewelry in here, too.”

  “Fuck the jewelry. Cash only.” I looked and saw something chrome and shiny. It was a .357 Magnum. “Don’t touch that gun. Let me get that.” I grabbed it. The muthafucka was fully loaded. Dayum, I said silently. If I had turned my head, the bitch would have had the ups on me! I unloaded it, wiped my prints from it, and tossed it to the floor.

  “The money, it’s all there,” she said. Both suitcases were full to capacity and heavy as hell. I made her carry one while I carried the other with the hand I wasn’t holding my burner on her ass with. We took the suitcases to the car and got back inside the house. “He’s got lots of guns, too,” she squealed once back inside. This bitch was just like her husband. She’d tell everything just to save her life.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “In that room over there.” She pointed, walking me to it. She opened the closet door and hanging all over the wall of this walk-in closet was big weaponry. AKs, M16s, Uzis, you name it. This muthafucka was ready for war.

  “Ham,” I called, “peep this.”

  He came inside. “Got’dayum!” he exclaimed. He was as shocked as I was to see such high-powered weaponry.

  “This nigga ready. We ain’t fuckin’ with none of this, K. Fuck it. That’s too much heat to ride with. Besides, we got our own burners,” he said, walking back inside the living room. We followed.

  “Can I please smoke me a cigarette, guys? I need one badly.”

  “Then smoke one, bitch,” Hammer told her. He fired up a blunt he rolled from a pound of reefer he grabbed for himself while upstairs. “This some good-ass shit here!” he exclaimed, holding in the smoke, then seconds later releasing it from his lungs. “You smoke this here shit, Blondie.” Hammer handed it to her.

  Without saying yea or nay, she took it and hit it hard, with her hand shaking like she had Parkinson’s disease.

  “I knew this day would come, when someone would come looking for my husband for what he did,” she said, hitting the blunt again before nervously passing it back to Hammer. “He just told on too many people,” she added.

  “My father-in-law received a life sentence on account of your husband being the government’s star witness. From my understanding, your husband spent three days on the stand with diarrhea of that mouth of his. Rat muthafucka told it all.”

  “He told me the Feds told him that if he held anything back, they would forfeit the agreement.”

  “The Feds. Humph!” Hammer muttered with a crooked smile and put the blunt out with his fingertips. He hated the Feds. We both did. “The Feds think they’re God. Got all these soft, weak, so-called gangsta-ass niggas bowing at their stinking feet! Not my father-in-law, though. Oh, no. That man . . .” Hammer said, shaking his head and crossing his body like he was in a Catholic church. “God bless the dead. That man was one of the last of a dying breed, a real solid OG.” When Hammer said that, her phone went off.

  “Y’all want me to answer this? It’s him.”

  “Answer the muthafucka,” Hammer told her.

  She answered, spoke with him briefly, responded with some yes’s and no’s, then disconnected.

  “What’s up? What he want?” I ask, beating Hammer to it.

  “He’s on his way.”

  “Good,” Hammer said, retrieving his burner from inside his pants. “That’s real fucking good!”

  Chapter 23

  Tipsy

  Keisha

  “Are you okay, sis?” Kolanda asked me, seeing that, shortly after Josh left, I went to her bedroom bar and poured myself some gin and grapefruit juice. She sat beside me and poured her one too.

  “I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re lying,” she shot back, knowing me better than anyone. She placed her arm around me. “You been drinking away since Josh came over. Wanna talk about it?”

  “I hate that bastard! And he got the nerve to come over to our house, talking about he still love me!”

  “Maybe he does, Keisha.”

  “What is there to love, Kolanda, when you have shattered your woman’s heart? C’mon now, riddle me that.”

  “The broken pieces, the memories, I guess. People do come to their senses after a while. Sometimes it just takes them being with someone worse before they realize they had someone better. Men are notorious for that shit.”

  “That bastard definitely had the best when he had me, Kolanda.” I took a sip.

  “Of course he did. I think he finally realizes that now, too.”

  “So, tell me,” I said, taking another drink and looking into my sister’s sweet face and eyes. She’d always been there for me. And although I was born three minutes and seven seconds before her, she always took up the role of big sis. “Tell me, do you think I made a mistake by not giving that bastard opportunity enough to express himself to me tonight? Or should I have slammed the fuckin’ door in his face at first glance?”

  “Regardless of what he wanted to say to you, he blew his chance to have you and love you unconditionally. That’s all that matters. He blew that by cheating. It’s okay to forgive him, Ke. Nothing wrong with that. But you don’t have to take him back. As far as I’m concerned, if a man will cheat once, he’ll cheat twice, and a third.”

  “And a fourth, and fifth,” I added while continuing to sip away.

  “Precisely. Best thing is to move on and don’t look back, no matter how bad it hurts. You hear me, sis?” Kolanda kissed me on my forehead and squeezed me tight for comfort.

  “You know I’ll toast to fuckin’ that!” We touched glasses and turned up our drinks. By now, I was pretty damn tipsy. “Okay, now, forget about Josh,” I said. “Tell me this, Kolanda. What do you think about Killa Korey? You think he’s right for me, like Ham’s right for you?”

  “Korey’s a sweet guy. I like him. I think he really, really likes and respects you—”

  “But do you think he loves me?” I cut in.

  “I think that’s a question only he can answer, Ke. I do feel that he believes in you and deeply enjoys your company and friendship. He tells my husband all the time that you’re like an angel to him, real special. He thinks a lot of you, Ke. I like Korey.”

  “He thinks Keisha is special,” I repeated to my sister, slurring my speech, thinking of the nightie Korey bought me. The gin was taking its course. “But he has a baby mother who he thinks is special also.”

  “So what? She was before you, Keisha. You can’t change that. Most importantly, she’s not Keisha! You’re Korey’s angel. His baby’s mother is his baby’s mother.”

  “Do you think I would make a good mother?” I asked, rubbing my stomach.

  “Not drinking as you do whenever you’re feeling emotional about something, no.”

  “No, really, Kolanda. Do you?”

  “You’ll make a good whatever you set your mind to become. But not drinking so much!” she said, helping me off the barstool and taking my drink from me. “You need to lay it down. I think you�
��ve had one too many drinks.” She helped me to my bedroom where I laid my tipsy ass down.

  “I love you, Kolanda,” was the last thing I remembered saying before I was snoozing.

  Chapter 24

  You Crossed My Father-in-law

  Korey

  “Bae, I’m home,” Fat Rah yelled as he stepped inside his house alone, carrying a small leather bag. “Whose car is that out in the driveway? Do you have company?”

  “Donald, is that you, honey?” she yelled from the bathroom downstairs after flushing the toilet like her ass was really using the muthafucka. She was there with me as Hammer and I planned.

  He walked toward the base of the staircase to go up. Unbeknownst to him, that’s where Hammer was in a blind spot.

  “What up, bitch!” Hammer stepped out of hiding, burner out, and aimed at Fat Rah’s face, startling him.

  “Hey, what’s going on here?” He lifted his hands and backed up a little.

  “I got a message for you, muthafucka!” Hammer barked with venom.

  He looked past Hammer momentarily and saw me with my burner at the back of his wife’s head. She was crying. “Do whatever they tell you, please, D.”

  “What’s going on here, fellas? Is this a robbery?” He looked at me, then back at Hammer, who couldn’t wait to address him the thug way.

  “Nah, nigga,” Hammer said, screwing his face up and holding his burner sideways at Rah’s forehead. “This a reality check!”

  “Reality check?” he repeated Hammer, confused.

  From his pocket, Hammer retrieved the picture of his father-in-law. He held it up in Rah’s face. “You know this man, muthafucka? You don’t have to answer that. I know you do. You crossed him!”

  “Look here, guys. Shit happens. I didn’t have a choice in the matter.”

  “The main code in the game and in the streets is that if you get jammed up, you don’t under any circumstances cooperate with the authorities to the extent you cross your friends and associates!” Hammer exclaimed with a hard stomp of his foot to the floor to stamp his seriousness.

  I’d known my ace for many, many years. We grew up together, hustled together, went to prison together, and were still together, and I’d never seen him this serious, backed by the deadly emotion of uncompromising anger.

  “Thing is, bitch, you took the easy way out,” he carried on. “You crossed my father-in-law, who sent me to give you a message from his grave.”

  “Wait, wait, please wait. Maybe we can work this out. Maybe I can make this right. Would y’all like to have a lot of money? I got plenty. I swear I do. I’ll take you to it right now. I got drugs galore, coke by the kilo, marijuana by the pound. Guys, y’all can have it all. Just let my wife and me be,” his fat ass pleaded just like he did with the government, looking for the easy way out.

  “My father-in-law had mad love for you,” Hammer said, nose flared, shaking his head. A tear fell from his eye. “But you crossed him like Judas did the Lord Jesus. This ain’t business. This one personal!”

  Hammer quickly squeezed three shots off like his trigger finger was in a squeezeathon! One bullet penetrated his forehead, knocking his big body back. The other two went into his face, causing him to drop to the floor, dead as a doorknob. I knew exactly why Hammer shot him only three times. The three bullets represented the three days Rah sat on the witness stand telling the courtroom of the underworld activity he and Hammer’s father-in-law were involved in.

  Rah’s wife wept hard with her hands at her face at seeing his body slumped over on the floor, blood pouring from his face and the back of his head, leaving a red puddle on their white shiny marble floor. Hammer rushed over to her, grabbed her by her collar, and pushed her so hard in the direction of where her husband was lying dead that she stumbled over him on the floor.

  “Please, don’t kill me. I cooperated with you guys to the fullest.”

  “That dead rat there,” Hammer said, pointing at Rah with his gun, “that’s your husband. A wife must ride and die with her man, bitch.” He squeezed one off into her forehead, killing her instantly.

  Before leaving, I ran upstairs, cut open a kilo of coke, and brought it back downstairs, leaving a trail of powder coke on the way down. I sprinkled it all over both Rah and his wife’s bodies to make the scene look like a drug-related homicide. Then we set everything that looked flammable on fire and got the hell up out of Monroe.

  * * *

  When Hammer and I got back to the Queen City, it was a little after midnight. We grabbed the suitcases full of money and headed inside, him carrying one and me carrying the other. We went straight into the den, placed the suitcases on the sofa, and unzipped them. Hammer couldn’t believe the money we now had in our possession. “How much bacon you think this is here, K?”

  “I asked Fat Rah’s bitch the same thing while she stuffed it all in these suitcases. She said anywhere from three to four mil. Yo, this it. We ain’t got to hustle drugs no more, Ham. We set for real!”

  Hammer went and grabbed his money counting machine, which was on a table to the left of us. He set it up to count our riches, then gave me some pound and a hug. “You dead right. We straight for real now, my nigga.”

  “Tell me ’bout it.” I smiled, nodding.

  Hammer grabbed a few stacks of cash out of the suitcases and put them in the money machine. Each stack was fifty grand.

  “Yo, did you see the fear in that fat muthafucka’s eyes when I put my burner in his face, K?”

  “Looked like he saw a ghost, yo!”

  “I dropped that snitch for that man right there,” Ham said, pointing over at a big, blown-up, framed picture of his father-in-law on the wall. “That dear man is the reason we all are able to eat good right now. You, me, my wife, and Keisha. All of us are indebted to that dear man. Tonight, though, K, I paid my debt with the undying loyalty and help of the only brother I have ever known and have mad love for: you.”

  We shook hands this time, Partnerz in Crime style, locking our trigger fingers together. I was about a year and a half out of the joint, and I had said I wasn’t going to get tangled back up in the game of criminal activity. But, here I was, with blood on my hands from backing my brother’s play. I guess undying loyalty should not be underestimated.

  “Baby, I didn’t know you and Korey was back. Why didn’t you come upstairs to give me a holler?” Kolanda said, walking in on us embracing and running money through the machine.

  “My bad, sweetheart,” Hammer said, giving her a kiss. “I thought you were asleep. I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Well, I was upstairs resting. Then I heard this machine and figured you and Korey were back. I see business is good,” she said, looking at all the money we had out all over the sofa.

  “Baby,” Hammer said, stopping what he was doing, which was putting more money into the machine. He looked his wife in the eyes. “You see all this bacon? Korey and I took it all from the muthafucka who ratted on Pops.”

  “Fat Rah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You caught up with him?”

  “Sweetheart, he and his wife got murdered tonight. I stretched his ass out like a Cadillac coupe!”

  “Yeah.” Kolanda made a fist and smashed it into her palm. “The fat snake got what he deserved!” she said, excited.

  “He damn sho’nuff got it. Hammer didn’t play no games delivering the nigga and his wife the murda mail, special delivery,” I chimed in.

  “Good. That’s damn good. Like I said, the snake got what he deserved!”

  “One thing, though, babe,” Hammer said, putting his hand up with a serious look suddenly blanketing his face.

  “What’s that, Ham?” she shot back, catching on to the sudden change of face.

  “And Keisha should know this too: never, ever, under any circumstance, mention to anyone what I just told you.”

  “I know, babe. You know I don’t have loose lips. Neither does Ke.”

  “You take it to the grave with you. I got back
at that nigga, Rah, because he crossed the man who loved me enough to introduce me to you, the woman I love more than any woman in this world. You hear me, baby girl?”

  “Of course I hear you. I know the game. Keisha and I both do. Never talk!”

  “There you go, baby,” Hammer said, giving her a kiss. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  I nodded, knowing from being in the game long enough that loose lips sink ships.

  “Partnerz in Crime, baby girl,” Hammer said, locking trigger fingers with Kolanda like he and I had been doing for many years as an embrace of inseparable union and loyalty.

  “I will back my man’s play, come what may.” She uttered those nine words Hammer taught her that she must never go back on ever as long as they were alive and together.

  “Oh, and by the way, Korey, Keisha’s in her bedroom. Josh came over, trying to talk her into taking him back.”

  “Word?”

  “Hell, yeah. She dismissed him. But, Korey, him coming over only opened up wounds that Keisha hasn’t completely healed from.”

  “I feel you.”

  “She went and took in one too many drinks. But she’s up there in her bedroom sleeping. You might wanna talk to her in the morning. She could use your presence.”

  “I’ma go up right now and check on her.”

  “Yeah,” Hammer said, waving me forward. “Go ’head, K. We’ll get back to counting all this money tomorrow.”

  “A’ight. Bet that.”

  * * *

  I walked upstairs to check on Keisha. Sure enough, she was in her bed in her bra and panties. I covered her with her bedspread that was partially covering her buttocks. I came out of my clothes, leaving my briefs on. I lay beside her on my side, with my arm wrapped around her. She moved and opened her eyes enough for her to see it was me.

  “Korey,” she said softly, with a drunken slur. “Josh came over here, talkin’ about he love me. I told him to leave and never come back.”

  “You did, baby.” I gently rubbed her back up and down through her bedspread.

  “I don’t love him anymore. I love you.”