“Who fucked with you kid?” Easy asked, his tone more serious. “You tell me if somebody is messing with you on these streets.”
Junior looked into Easy’s face and then over at the old dude, who was still standing a little ways away, acting like he wasn’t listening. Something about the old dude seemed familiar to Junior, but he just couldn’t place it.
“Nah, it’s my mom’s boyfriend. That dude be hittin’ on her and I was gon’ bust my piece in his ass just now, but she took up for his sorry ass, so I left,” Junior explained.
Easy could relate. After all, he was Junior’s age when he got fed up with an abusive male figure himself.
“What’s his name?” Easy asked calmly, looking off into the distance.
“Slick, but his real name is Broady too, like my li’l brother.”
“Where he be at?” Easy inquired, leaning back on the hood of his car, rubbing his hands together like a mad scientist concocting a diabolical plan.
“At that gambling spot behind Poppy’s store. He be in there all day gambling away my mother’s welfare check and his little piece of paycheck and any money we get in the house. That’s why you seen me stealing the food that day you bought me the stuff from the store.... We don’t have shit because of that nigga Slick. And my momz just keeps on taking him back in, like she dumb or sumthin’,” Junior whined, jerking his head and shoulders with feeling.
Easy’s gaze turned serious as he analyzed the situation.
“He’s a fuckin’ duck! I just wanna kill his ass!” Junior spat, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, itching for action.
“Calm down. Watch ya mouth! I’m still your elder. And stop letting all these jealous eyes out here on these streets see you upset and making threats. Niggas will turn state’s witness on you in a New York minute,” Easy warned. He nodded at the old dude, and the dude walked over.
“Seems like our little friend here got a problem he wanna take care of,” Easy said to the old dude.
“This is my friend Rock . . . Mr. Rock to you, young’un,” Easy introduced.
Junior remembered the man from the first day he met Easy, but he still didn’t feel comfortable with the weird old dude, who always seemed to stare at him too long.
“Let’s go pay your mom’s boyfriend a visit in a bit.” Easy assured.
Junior breathed a sigh of relief. Easy seemed to have all the answers to his problems. He felt powerful around Easy, and he wanted to be just like him when he grew up.
Easy found Slick playing deep at one of the back tables in the smoky, underground gambling hole. He effortlessly kicked the legs of the folding chair Slick occupied, sending him toppling to the ground.
“Say sorry to the kid,” Easy hissed, his dark boot pressed against Slick’s neck. Slick knew who Easy was, and he wasted no time bitching out to his fear.
“Junior, li’l man . . . you know I be messing up sometimes, but—” Slick had started to speak, but his words were short-lived when the butt of Easy’s gun landed on his skull, rendering him speechless.
“All I told you to say was sorry,” Easy spat.
Slick’s bladder involuntarily emptied on the floor of the basement gambling hole. The rest of the patrons of the illegal gambling spot had cleared out as soon as these intruders had arrived with their guns pointed and raised.
Junior felt powerful, like God right now. He was proud to be associated with Easy, and he loved seeing Slick humiliated.
“Now try it again,” Easy instructed, forcing Slick’s head up so he could look at Junior’s face.
“Junior . . . little man,” Slick said.
His words caused Mr. Rock to flinch.
“Don’t call me that,” Junior gritted. “I’m not none of your li’l man. You don’t be acting all nice when you tryin’a kick my mom’s ass, nigga!” Junior spat out.
“I—I’m sorry, man. I love Betty. You gotta believe me. I . . . can’t control it sometimes,” Slick pleaded.
Watching his grown ass start to cry like a bitch was a shameful sight to see.
“You a sorry-ass bitch. You always sayin’ sorry, but you go right back to doing it,” Junior accused. Mr. Rock whispered something to Easy.
“This is taking too long, Junior. It’s time for you to get your feet wet. You always face your enemies and let them see your eyes before you engage in warfare,” Easy told him.
Junior looked Slick in the eyes. He leveled his gun at his chest and pulled the trigger. Junior’s body stumbled backward from the powerful shot. He dropped the gun like it was a piece of hot coal.
Slick’s body slumped to the floor.
Junior stood stock-still; his eyes were as wide as saucers, and his body trembling.
Easy grabbed him by the shoulders before he collapsed to the floor.
“Let’s go. You a man now,” Easy declared as he led Junior away from the murder scene. Easy stopped him for a minute and looked at him seriously. “You only ever kill people that are a threat to you or your family, and you never get back at a man through his woman or children,” Easy sternly lectured. Junior nodded his agreement. “I learned that from him,” Easy said, nodding toward Rock.
Word on the street the next day was that Slick was killed in a gambling spot over a bad debt.
Junior was now reminded of just how powerful he felt the day he took a man’s life. The thought compelled him into action. Junior picked up his cell phone and dialed a number.
“Hey, it’s Junior. I need a meeting. This is fucking life or death,” Junior spat. After hanging up the phone, he walked over and touched his mother’s cheek. She moved slightly but was still knocked out.
“I didn’t let anyone hurt you then, and I’m damn sure not going to let them do it now,” he promised before leaving the apartment.
Chapter 17
Sorting Out The Truth
Avon took the long way to Dana Carlisle’s house. As he pulled up, he could see Carlisle peeking through her front blinds. He smirked when she pulled the door back before he could even lift his fist to knock.
“Come in,” Carlisle greeted. Tucker walked inside just like he had for the past three weeks of crashing at Dana’s place.
“Look, Dana . . . about the way I acted . . .” he started to apologize. He had argued with her the day before. Tucker had grown frustrated when Carlisle insisted that she would help him find information on Candy and Easy Hardaway. Tucker had told her it was too risky, but she had insisted on helping him. She had never seen him so passionate about a case. He had also never seen her so hell-bent on getting involved in one.
“Shh. I understand. You were just trying to protect an old friend,” Carlisle joked, winking at him. She gave him a thorough once-over. She stared at him, starstruck by all his sexiness.
“I can’t stay long. I have a lot of things to get straight in my life,” Tucker explained, taking a seat on Carlisle’s futon, which had served as his bed when he stayed with her.
“I understand,” she whispered. “Are you finally going to try to go home? You know . . . work things out with her?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant. In reality, the green-eyed monster of jealousy was slowly crawling up her back.
“You said you had something important to show me, right?” Tucker got straight to the point. She had called him with an urgency to come by. He figured it would be something related to Candy.
“Yeah, I do.” Carlisle conceded his abrupt shift in subject, knowing that she had struck a nerve. She rushed into her home office, talking over her shoulder. “So you must be glad to be in one piece after all you went through,” Carlisle called out, her voice growing faint as she walked to the back of her house.
“Yeah. It’s all been really crazy. Look . . . let’s not . . .” Tucker replied evasively. He had already told her he couldn’t involve her.
Carlisle shuffled back into the living room, dragging a large box behind her. Tucker offered his assistance by casually brushing her hands away and lifting the box onto the pub-style
dinette set in her kitchen.
“Well, this is what I wanted to give you. Don’t say I’ve never given you any gifts,” Carlisle said flirtatiously.
“What exactly is all of this?” Tucker asked, surveying the large, dusty box.
“It’s all the shit you need to know, all packaged up. It’s also the thing that could get me fired from the DEA, and probably earn me the top spot on somebody’s fuckin’ hit list, so guard that stuff with your life. I don’t really understand everything, even after I read through most of this stuff. But it seems like after the Hardaway family was killed, the DEA tossed the house and found what’s in the box. I couldn’t really believe it myself. Never thought I’d ever see the day when a drug dealer would be writing down his life story,” Dana said, shaking her head.
Avon looked at her strangely.
“Yeah, that’s the same reaction I had when I saw what was in those boxes,” Dana told him. “I’m telling you, the shit reads just like a fiction novel, Tuck. Eric Hardaway was in deep. You have to read this shit for yourself,” Carlisle huffed, placing her hands on her hips.
“Where’d you find—” Avon started to say.
“Don’t ask me any questions. You didn’t want me to ask you any, and I don’t want you to ask me any. Just take it and make good use of it,” she said, smiling wanly.
Tucker had no idea just how desperate she had been to help him get the information he sought. Or the depraved acts she had performed to gather these documents. She owed more than a few people in the classified archives a bunch of favors.
“Thanks for this and for everything else. I’m sorry I can’t . . . I never intended to . . .” Tucker was stumbling, truly tongue-tied. He never meant to drag her into the mix. All he’d wanted to do in the first place was go undercover, make a big bust and then redeem himself.
Dana shifted her weight from one foot to the other and shoved her restless hands into the back pockets of her jeans. Avon was clearly having a difficult time saying the words that were in his mind, but not on his tongue: I’m sorry I kind of used you, although I know I could never be attracted to you, because I am in love with someone else.
Things between them had happened so fast. The revelations that Brubaker was trying to set him up to look like a rogue agent; watching Rock Barton shoot himself in the femoral artery. Watching Candy suffer as she learned that her own brother, under the government’s direction, had killed her father. It was enough to make anyone go crazy.
Carlisle had been there at the end. Her smiling, loyal face was the only comfort in the face of death, destruction and betrayal. Dana had opened up her arms and her home to Avon, listening to him pour out his heart over his wife, over Candy and over his time on the street.
In the end her porcelain skin and the lemony smell of her shampoo had made him feel clean and whole. She’d rubbed his bald head and massaged the tension out of his neck. Her long, spindly fingers kneaded him, probing him.
Their first kiss was electric. It was hot, fast and furious. Animalistic.
He’d devoured her tongue like a starving refugee. She nearly ripped his shirt from his muscular chest. Her mouth moved over him so fast—he felt like she’d set his chest ablaze.
Carlisle had made the first move by removing her jeans and then her panties to expose her woman’s core. Tuck felt flush; his body betrayed him. His emotions were on overload and he mindlessly took her: forcefully, brutally, clenching his ass cheeks with every release of his hurt, frustrated loneliness.
She had screamed out more than once—mostly from pleasure, not pain—but she certainly could not have enjoyed their coupling very much.
He had been brutal and selfish and completely insensitive to her wants and needs. After ejaculating, he had collapsed on the futon, spent.
The next day, neither spoke about the events that had transpired in the dark. Instead, the focus had switched back to Avon’s impending task—finding Candy.
Shaking away the memory—the mistake—Avon finally decided he would just let the heavy silence that stood between them remain intact, like the Great Wall of China.
“You okay?” Carlisle asked, noticing his glassy, blank stare.
“Oh . . . yeah. I’m—I’m just gonna go,” he said, stumbling, his palms sweaty. He leaned toward her awkwardly, giving her a clumsy hug.
Carlisle felt light-headed and unsteady on her feet. She lifted her arms uncomfortably and pat his back—a friendly pat like what men would exchange. She fought the urge to kiss him on the neck. She inhaled his scent and closed her eyes. She was glad that she could help him unravel the Hardaway case. In the meantime, she planned to keep a close eye on him—whether he liked it or not.
Avon got into his car and stared over at the box he had placed on the passenger seat. His first thought was to drive to a safe place and look inside, but the anxious feeling in the pit of his stomach prevented him from moving. The dark-tinted windows on the car gave him a sense of security that no one would be able to see inside. He finally gave in to his curiosity and pulled back the thick gray duct tape sealing the box.
The first notebook on the pile was an old-school black-and-white marble composition book. Tucker picked it up and read the cover: MY LIFE, BY ERIC HARDAWAY. Pressed for answers that might lead him to learn more about the young girl he’d become so obsessed with, Avon placed the old dusty notebook against the steering wheel and began to read. Just like Carlisle had said, it was like reading a book.
Avon immediately escaped into the life of Easy Hardaway.
Brooklyn, New York, 1983
“You little bastard! Get ya ass over here!” Doobey screamed, his pale face turning crimson.
Eric stood rooted to the floor. His fists were balled at his side. His chest was rising and falling rapidly. He wasn’t going that easily this time.
“Did you hear me?” Doobey barked, stepping closer to his nephew.
Eric squinted his eyes into little dashes and folded his face into a scowl.
“Oh, you gon’ stand there like you that fuckin’ man! You s’pose to scare me? I’ma show you who the man is in this muthafucka!” Doobey spat out. Small sprinkles of his Colt 45–scented spittle landed on Eric’s face.
Still, Eric refused to move while his drunken uncle struggled to get his cowhide belt off his pants.
This type of commotion was commonplace in his Aunt Deena’s house; so much so, that his cousins didn’t even bother to intervene. They simply exited the room as soon as the altercation took place. Deena never intervened when her husband beat the shit out of her nephew; in fact, in Eric’s assessment, his aunt encouraged it.
Deena was his mother’s sister. She had seven children of her own—all cramped into a two-bedroom apartment—so she resented the fact that she had to care for her sister’s orphaned child.
Easy’s mother, Cynthia, was one of the first female drug dealers in Brooklyn. His father, Erv, had turned Cynthia on to the game. They were an unstoppable duo, until jealous rival dealers executed them both.
Immediately after their deaths, Easy went to live with his grandmother, who died of a broken heart, he believed, shortly after his mother’s murder.
Then he moved in with his maternal aunt, where he was reminded daily that he was unwanted and unloved.
“Now! I said get the fuck over here, boy!” Doobey growled, finally getting his belt free.
Eric looked at him evilly. “Fuck you! You ain’t my father!” Eric hissed, clenching his fists so tightly that his nails dug half-moon–shaped craters into his palms.
“After this ass whupping you gon’ wish I was ya daddy!” Doobey slurred, raising the belt over his shoulder.
Eric felt a hot rush of adrenaline come over his body. Moved by some unknown force, he lifted his left fist. When Doobey went to plow into him, Eric punched his uncle in the balls with all of the strength he could muster.
Eric growled as his unsuspecting uncle doubled over in pain. It was a bold move; but like an animal trapped in a corner, Eric felt his on
ly choice was to attack. He started swinging wildly, landing punches at will on Doobey’s head, face and chest.
With his equilibrium off from drinking, Doobey tried to stop Eric’s wild blows, but he couldn’t see straight enough to grab the ferocious fists flying at him.
“I hate you!” Eric screamed, throwing more punches and kicks. He finally tackled his uncle to the floor; he sat on his chest and lit into him.
“Get him off me!” Doobey gasped, the combination of alcohol and head injuries making him feel nauseated and dizzy.
Eric was like a machine that could not be turned off. He thought about all of the nights his uncle had come home, stinking drunk, and beat him out of his sleep just because he could. All of the times his uncle took his dinner plate, forcing him to go to bed with his insides churning from hunger. He thought about all of the times his grandmother allowed his cousins to tease him about his raggedy sneakers and clothes.
As if possessed by the devil himself, Eric felt spit fly out of his mouth, and tears ran down his cheeks. For the first time in his life, he felt an overwhelming sense of power over his life. He felt invincible, strong enough to kill his uncle with his bare hands.
Blood leaked out of his uncle’s nose by the time Deena shuffled her obese body into the cramped living room and tried to pull her lunatic nephew off her drunken husband.
“Boy! You ain’t gon’ be hittin’ on my man! You need to get the hell out of my house!” Deena hollered as she tried in vain to pull Eric off Doobey. A crowd of cousins surrounded the two tangled bodies and moved in like vultures over a dead carcass.
“Get the fuck off me! I hate y’all! I hate all of y’all!” Eric screamed, kicking and flailing, as his eldest cousin, Poopie, finally pulled his arms behind his back. “I hate this house!” Eric screeched.
Turning to Deena, he eyed his aunt with all of the hate he’d augmented over the years. “This is all your fault! You evil bitch! You just jealous because my mother had everything and you ain’t got shit!” he growled, pushing his aunt in the chest.
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