Brian took a deep breath as his heart jack-hammered beneath his chest. The moment he’d wanted to come and go so quickly had finally arrived, and he dreaded it.
He thought about Carla, who he’d promised to go back to later that night. She’d thrown up once and dry heaved in the time that he’d been with her after school. Her morning sickness occurred in the late afternoon, which was actually a good thing, because her mother wasn’t around. But soon she would be. And not only that, but soon Carla would begin to show. They had to break the news definitely much sooner than later. They talked about that when he’d been there. That and a few other things.
What they would do before the baby came.
Where they would live.
How they would support raising a child while going to school.
Lastly, when they would get married.
Married.
Brian was as unready for that as he was being a father, but just as Carla didn’t believe in having an abortion, she believed just as strongly about being married before the baby arrived.
Brian took another full breath as Tyrel waited for him and Will to answer.
Was he ready?
He exhaled at a snail’s pace, his heart thumping, almost making his upper body shake with each beat.
Was he ready?
He flared his nostrils. He wasn’t ready for shit.
“Let’s do this shit,” Will said, his tone jazzed.
Brian looked at him and thought about their last hit at the Laundromat. Will had been jazzed then, too. That dire feeling came over Brian. The feeling of impending disaster.
Back out, he thought. Goddammit, just back out.
Brian nodded and said, “Yeah.”
Tyrel gave a short nod, and then reached into a small black book bag and pulled out the three .45s they’d used before. He handed one to Will. “Don’t be usin’ any names, nigga,” he said.
Will nodded. “I’m good, son.”
“Yeah, you better be, nigga,” Tyrel said, his tone laced with warning. He turned to Brian and held out a .45 for him to take.
Brian looked at the gun and then shook his head. “I’m good.”
Tyrel squinted his eyes—the only thing that could be seen through his ski mask. “What? Nigga, you better take this shit.”
Brian looked at him, his gaze unflinching, and said again, “I’m good.” He’d had a hard enough time dealing with what they were about to do to Old Man Blackwell. The last thing he would do was carry a gun.
Tyrel glared at Brian, while Brian stared back. Tension was as thick between them as the wool ski masks they wore.
Seconds passed before Will said, “Yo, come on, fellas. Chill wit’ that shit. Ty, son, if he don’t wanna use it, he don’t wanna use it. You got yours. I got mine. We good.”
Tyrel’s eyes remained on Brian as he asked, “You sure you down for this, son? You sure you ain’t gonna bitch out?”
“I’m here,” Brian said, wanting to turn and run away. “I ain’t bitchin’ out on shit. But I’m not usin’ the piece.”
Tyrel looked at him.
Brian looked at Tyrel.
Seconds passed.
Then Tyrel nodded, slid Brian’s .45 back in his bag, and said, “Whatever, nigga. Just keep your fuckin’ eyes and ears open.”
Brian gave a nod. “I got it,” he said.
“You better, son.”
Brian took a breath again, then lowered his ski mask over his face.
Tyrel looked at his watch, then peeked from the alley across the street they’d been hiding in. “A’ight. That nigga, Rich, is pulling the shades down. Let’s do it.”
Without waiting, Tyrel moved and ran across the street. Will and Brian were on his heels seconds later.
Tyrel shouldered the entrance door open just as Rich made a move to lock it, causing the door to barrel into Rich, knocking him down. Before he could think to react, Tyrel pistol-whipped Rich two times in the face, knocking him unconscious, and then grabbed him by his shirt collar and began to drag him behind the counter. “Go and get Blackwell,” he said, looking at Will.
Without hesitation, Will ran behind the counter and disappeared into a back room.
Tyrel looked at Brian. “Hit the lights and watch the door, son!”
Brian took a momentary glance at Rich, who lay bleeding from his nose and mouth, and then did as instructed as Tyrel ran to the back, turned off the lights, and locked the door. From the back he heard Will yell out.
“Get your fuckin’ hands up!”
Brian hated this so much. He was glad everything was happening in the back where he couldn’t see.
“What the hell?” Old Man Blackwell said.
“Shut the fuck up, nigga!” Will yelled. “Or I will pull this fuckin’ trigger.”
“The money, old man!” Tyrel yelled. “Get that shit now!”
Brian heard Blackwell grunt out. He had no doubt he’d been hit. He gritted his teeth and kept watch outside. His heart galloped. His skin was hot and itching beneath the wool.
It was supposed to be as easy as one, two, three.
“The . . . the money’s up front,” Blackwell said. “I . . . I haven’t removed it yet.”
“Get that shit, nigga!” Tyrel yelled.
Brian looked up and down the street as he hid behind the curtained window. Seconds later, Old Man Blackwell stumbled forward from the back with Tyrel and Will in tow.
Brian looked at Blackwell, at the fear in his eyes. God, he hated this.
“My God,” Blackwell said, looking down at Rich. “Is he . . .”
Tyrel said, “No. But you will be if you don’t do what the fuck you’re supposed to do. Now, get that fuckin’ money.”
He shoved Blackwell in the back, sending him crashing against the counter with the registers.
“Please,” Blackwell pleaded. “Please don’t do this.”
“Shut the fuck up!” Tyrel yelled, hitting him in his back. “Now open that shit!”
Will, who’d been standing to the side, laughed.
Brian took a look outside. Blackwell’s spot was where a gas station once stood. Luckily for them, no one was close enough to notice anything.
Brian took a look over his shoulder at Old Man Blackwell. Please, he thought. Just do what they say and do it fast. In that instant, the store’s owner locked eyes with him, and, although he had a mask covering his face, Brian was almost positive that Blackwell knew who he was. Brian looked away quickly.
“Hurry up, old man!” Tyrel ordered.
Brian heard Blackwell at the register, hitting buttons. He prayed for everything to be over soon.
Buttons were hit.
The register dinged as the cash drawer opened.
“Shove the money in here, nigga!” Tyrel demanded. A few seconds later, he said, “Now the other one!”
Just as before, buttons were hit and the second register dinged open.
Soon, Brian thought. It would be over soon.
He looked up and down the block.
Then looked over his shoulder and saw something that made him yell, “No!”
From somewhere beneath the counter, Old Man Blackwell had removed a concealed pistol.
Within a span of seconds, Brian watched in slow motion as Blackwell pointed the weapon at Tyrel’s head and pulled the trigger. No sound escaped from Tyrel as he fell back to the ground.
Will screamed out, pointed his .45 at Blackwell, and fired.
Blackwell gasped, fell back against the counter, and as he was falling, managed to raise his arm and fire off one shot at Will.
Brian, yelled “No!” again as Will fell back against the wall, blood pouring from his neck, while his .45 dropped from his hand.
Brian ran around the counter and stopped just short of the blood pooling from his boys and from Old Man Blackwell. “No!” he screamed again.
Will, slumped against the wall, looked up at him with his hand clamped over his neck, doing little to stop the blood flow. Brian shook his head
as Will looked at him with terror and fear in his eyes. “B . . . B . . .” he stuttered, trying to speak, but unable to.
Brian shook his head again.
Will tried in vain to utter something else again, and then his hand fell from his neck as his last breath floated away.
“Will! No!” Brian yelled.
He looked over to Tyrel, who lay flat on his back, blood pooling from beneath his head. He looked to Blackwell. He was bleeding from his chest, coughing and spitting blood.
Brian put his hand behind his neck and squeezed as the room spun around him. Tyrel said this was supposed to be easy, simple. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Yet, as Brian stood still, staring at blood and death, he’d known all along that this would happen.
His boys were dead. His niggas, his brothers.
He shook his head again, then removed the mask, exposing his face to Blackwell. “I . . . I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Shit, I’m s . . . sorry.”
Brian wiped tears away with his gloved hands as he heard sirens in the distance.
Blackwell coughed, spit blood, coughed again, and in a faint whisper said, “G . . . go.”
Brian closed his eyes a bit, and looked with confusion in his eyes at the man he’d always respected. “What?”
Blackwell coughed again. “Go get . . . tape at de . . . desk.”
Brian shook his head as the wailing from the sirens grew louder. “I can’t go,” he said. “I can’t.”
Blackwell coughed. “Get out n . . . now!”
Brian shook his head. Gritted his teeth. Tears fell hard, fast. He looked over at Will, then at Tyrel. His boys were gone. It didn’t seem real.
Blackwell coughed once more. “B . . . Brian, go now!”
The sirens wail grew louder.
Brian looked at Blackwell. “I’m sorry,” he said. Then, making sure to avoid the blood, he stepped past his boys and Blackwell, and ran through the back room to the exit heading out to the back. But before he did, he made sure to follow Blackwell’s instructions, and grabbed the security tape from the VCR in the back.
32
Brian ran, his feet taking him where only they knew the destination. Will and Tyrel were dead. Old Man Blackwell, he was on his way.
Brian ran, blinded by tears, fear, and disbelief, down the block, away from the red and blue spiraling lights. Away from his boys.
He didn’t want to believe it. Not his boys. They couldn’t be dead. He struggled to stifle a scream as he ran. His boys, his brothas, his niggas.
Brian ran. He saw nothing but the sight of his lifelong friends on the ground lying in a pool of their own blood. He heard nothing but the crack of gunfire and the shrill of his own scream. He felt nothing but . . . emptiness.
He ran.
And ran.
Until his lungs demanded that he stop and take in air.
He stopped, leaned against the brick wall of a building, and took in several deep breaths of air. He was four blocks away now from the disaster that had taken place, but he was as on edge, as though he were still inside. His heartbeat refused to slow down, refused to try to stop beating its way through his chest. He felt like rubber, his hands shook. He breathed in and out. Deep, deep breaths as tears fell from the corners of his eyes.
“Damn,” he whispered, slamming his head back against the wall. “Damn.”
He looked up to the starless nighttime sky and prayed for the nightmare he was living to be over. Be a dream, he thought. A horrible fucking dream. He closed his eyes, and prayed that when he opened them, he’d be back at Will’s sitting on his couch with Will on his right and Tyrel on his left, playing Xbox 360. Of course he knew that wouldn’t be the case, and so when he opened them, he could only let out a breath.
A police siren wailed suddenly and his heart leapt into his throat. He flattened himself against the wall, unable to move.
They found me. They found me.
He couldn’t breathe as one of New York’s finest sped by in an unmarked car on the street in front of him, its single light flashing red, its siren wailing, and headed in the direction he’d just come from. Only when the car was out of sight did Brian allow himself to breathe and to move.
He needed to get off of the street. But where could he go? Not home. He’d held his emotions down before, but put now in front of his mother he would surely break down. So where? He needed a safe place to think, to breathe, to break down, and then pull himself back together.
Brian looked up at the sky, prayed that Will and Tyrel were somewhere up there amid the darkness, and then pushed away from the wall and ran to the safest place he could think of.
Two and a half hours later, he lay in Carla’s arms, staring up at her ceiling while she slept. He’d spent a little over an hour telling her all about the three-man cartel he’d been a part of, and then telling about what had gone down hours earlier.
Carla, who hadn’t known about any of the activities he’d done with Will and Tyrel, laid into him. How could he do this? What had he been thinking? He was an idiot. An asshole. On and on she went, and then in Spanish, sounding far more pissed off. Brian took it all without a word because she’d been right with everything she’d said. He was an immature, irresponsible, disrespectful idiot. He was pitiful, weak. After Carla finished ripping him a new one and telling him how disappointed she was in him, she helped him come up with an alibi for when the cops came knocking on his door, which he knew they would.
Brian stared up at the ceiling, reliving moments he knew he would never forget. He closed his fists. If he could only go back, he thought. But of course he couldn’t. The cards had been dealt and turned over. There was no giving back to the dealer the hand he’d been given. He unclenched his fists.
His boys.
Old Man Blackwell.
He took a slow breath. Old Man Blackwell. He’d told him to take the tape, told him to leave. Why? It was a question he’d never have an answer for.
Brian took another slow, deep breath. He’d had no gun in his hand, and he hadn’t pulled any triggers, but Old Man Blackwell’s blood was on his hands just as surely as if he’d been holding the piece of steel with his finger curled around the trigger. That fact hurt his heart almost as though he’d taken a bullet point blank. He closed his eyes while tears welled once more and leaked from the corners.
33
Deahnna rolled over onto her side and looked at her alarm clock. It was nine o’clock in the morning. She should have been up since six, cleaning and dusting. Her Saturday morning ritual. But she didn’t feel like cleaning or dusting. She didn’t feel like doing much of anything.
Three days had now passed since she’d last seen Jawan. More, if you consider the fact that their last time together had been one she wanted to forget.
Three days.
Seventy-two hours of loneliness.
She stared at the time displayed. Watched one, then two minutes click by. Minutes that seemed like hours. She looked from the clock to her cell phone sitting beside it. It hadn’t rung in the middle of the night. It hadn’t chimed, letting her know that a message was waiting for her to listen to. That meant Jawan hadn’t called. She frowned. She wanted to pick it up and call him again, but what was the use?
She opened her mouth, took a deep breath, and blew it out as her eyes threatened to well. She shook her head and pressed her palms against her eyes. No, she thought. No more. She wasn’t going to cry anymore. She’d made the bed and she would have to lie in it. Even if she wasn’t completely in the wrong.
She didn’t want to, but she swung her feet off of the bed, slid into her slippers, and stood up. Three days had passed and he hadn’t called. Surely he’d gotten her messages. She didn’t want to, but she had no choice: she had to move on. Move on and continue to survive, knowing and accepting that love and happiness just wasn’t in the deck she’d been given when she was born.
She took a final glance at her phone, and then slid on her robe and went into the bathroom to brush her teeth. As she did, there was
a knock on the front door. Her heartbeat quickened. Jawan? Could it be? Her toothbrush in her mouth, she called out to her son. “Brian, can you get the door?”
She finished brushing, then washed out her mouth, and quickly ran water over her face and through her hair. She didn’t have time to shower, but at least she could look presentable.
Knocking came from the door again. Harder. More insistent.
She dried her face, did the best she could to spruce up her hair, and then went to Brian’s bedroom door and pushed it open as the knocking continued. “Brian.” She paused. His room was empty. His bed still made up from the day before. “Dammit,” she whispered.
She shook her head, promised to have a very serious, no-nonsense heart–to-heart with her son about being under her roof and having to follow her rules, and then rushed to the front door.
“Coming!” she yelled out, tightening the sash on her robe.
She took a look through the peephole and her heart fell to the pit of her stomach. On the other side of the door, dressed in blue uniforms, with their hats on their heads, were two police officers. Deahnna felt a shiver come over her. Brian wasn’t in his room and hadn’t been all night. Now the police were at her door at nine o’clock in the morning. “Oh, God,” she whispered.
She opened the door slightly “Yes, can I help you?”
One of the officers, the taller of the two, with dark brown skin, a clean-shaven face, and deep-set dark brown eyes smiled and said, “Hello. Are you Brian Moore’s mother?”
Deahnna nodded. “I am.”
“I’m Officer Cribbs. This is my partner, Officer Lomax.”
Deahnna looked at Officer Lomax, a shorter, stockier man with a whisper of a goatee and a scowl on his face, and then looked back to Officer Cribbs. “Can I help you?”
“We’re looking for your son, Brian.”
“Brian? Is he in some sort of trouble?”
Officer Cribbs shook his head. “We just have some questions that we’d like to ask him.”
“Questions about what?”
“We’d really rather talk with Brian before we discuss the nature of our visit.”
Deahnna looked at them skeptically. “Well, I’m sorry, officer, but my son is—”
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