by RM Johnson
“You done?”
“Not quite,” Trunk said, and before Rafe knew it, he had been drilled to the gut with two powerful punches, and then a fist tore across his face, sending him flying back into the trash and boxes lining the wall of the club. He thrashed around on his back, peering out of the debris, trying to make sure Trunk wasn’t still coming for him to finish him off. He wasn’t there anymore.
Rafe relaxed a little, feeling the pain in his stomach and against his jaw. Okay, he had been punished for butting in, but at least he had saved that man’s life, he thought, as he tried to clear away some of the boxes surrounding him. He pushed away most of them, then felt his hand being stopped by something warm and heavy, its surface feeling strangely like skin.
Rafe pushed away a large piece of cardboard and found himself staring into the wide, dead eyes of a man. Terror was frozen on his face, his mouth wide open, as if caught in mid-scream, just before a bullet burned through his forehead.
Rafe shot back from the dead man, swallowing his own scream that he felt trying to come out. His heart beat wildly, as he realized that this was the man from the bathroom, the man that Smoke was going to kill. And just like Trunk had just told him, “Business always gets done.”
ON THE WAY home, Rafe rode in the back while Smoke sat up front in the passenger seat. Not a word was said the entire trip to Rafe’s house, until Trunk pulled the car over to let Rafe out. Rafe pushed the door open, was about to get out, when he heard Smoke say, “It’s just how it is, Rafe, my man. Getting here is the easy part. Stayin’ is what’s rough, and you don’t stay by lettin’ people shit on you and get away with it.”
Rafe got out of the car without responding, but before he closed the door, Smoke said, “Take your usual couple of days off to get your head straight. I know you will. But don’t be disappearing on me, because you know, you still my man. See you at work.”
Rafe slammed the door and stalked off.
THIRTY-FIVE
THE NEXT time Rafe showed up at the library, he wasn’t late. He sat in the Jag, parked out in front with the top down. Let that other fool show up again and see what he gets, Rafe thought to himself.
He looked at the dash clock. It was a minute past nine, and he expected Henny to be walking out any minute.
She stepped out a moment later. She saw the car out the corner of her eye as she walked past it but dismissed it, not turning her head far enough to see the driver.
“So what, Henny?” Rafe used the windshield to pull himself up, yelling over it. “You don’t even see me no more, hunh!”
Henny spun around, startled. When she realized it was Rafe, she looked in disbelief at him, at the expensive, brand-new car he was standing up in.
“Just walk right past me, because you don’t need me no more, that it?”
“What are you talking about? You the one who stopped calling me! And whose car is that?” Henny demanded, walking toward it.
“Whose do you think it is? It’s mine.”
“What are you doing with it?”
“Seems if I wanted to keep dealing with you, I needed it.”
“What are you talking about?” Henny looked bewildered. “I been calling you like crazy, and you ain’t return none of my calls.”
“Who is he?”
“Who are you talking about?
“Don’t lie to me,” Rafe said, jumping over the door of the Jaguar, placing himself in front of Henny.
“Who the fuck is he!” he repeated, grabbing her forcefully.
“I don’t know who the hell you’re talking about!”
“The motherfucker who picked you up the other night. You fucking him?” Rafe felt a jealous anger burning inside him that he never thought he could feel toward this woman.
“What do you think?” Henny said with attitude, swatting Rafe’s hands off her.
“I don’t know. That’s why you need to be telling me.”
“If you don’t know, maybe you need to think about it more, and when you come up with the right answer, let me know.” She turned and started walking away but didn’t get more than a couple of steps before Rafe had his hands on her, whirling her around to question her.
“I said, tell me!” he yelled.
“Why! You take me to a restaurant I know you can’t afford, and because I care for you, tell you that you don’t have to do all that for me, you start trippin’. I haven’t spoken to you in a week. I thought we were over. Why should I tell you anything?”
“Because I need to know what’s going on in my camp. If you still down or not.”
Henny glared pathetically at Rafe for a moment, then said, “So I’m in your camp now. I see. Well if that’s what this is all about, then maybe it should be over. Goodbye, Raphiel.” She turned to go.
Rafe watched her, thought of just letting her carry her ass on out of his life, be done with her. But he couldn’t because he … because he … “I love you,” he mumbled, his head down. The words were barely audible, but Henny heard them, stopped and turned around, walked back toward him.
“What did you say?”
“I said, I love you,” he said, looking up at her. “That’s why I need to know.”
IT TURNED out the guy who picked Henny up was named Carlos. He was Henny’s mom’s ex-boyfriend. He was coming around, trying to do nice things—like picking Henny up from work, without her knowing—to try and squirm his way back into her mom’s life.
It was half an hour later, and Henny and Rafe were parked at Forty-Seventh Street, off Lake Shore Drive. They sat on the hood of the car, looking out at the water.
“So why didn’t you call me back?”
“I didn’t want to give you the chance to tell me that I wasn’t good enough for you, that I ain’t make enough money,” Rafe explained.
“I told you that wasn’t important.”
“Your mother seems to think it is.”
“My mother doesn’t make decisions for me. I decide who I want to be with, and that person is you.” Henny scooted a little closer, looping her hand through his arm. “And this car. You somehow got it to impress me?”
“Yeah.”
“But how?”
“The guy I work for, the one that I got in trouble with, bought it for me.”
“Is it—”
“It ain’t stolen. All the paperwork is in the glove box. I didn’t take it when he first tried to give it to me, but when I saw that man picking you up in his car, saw you hugging him, I thought I needed it. I ain’t want to lose you. I love you, Henny,” and he wrapped his arm around her, pulling her closer to him and kissing her on her forehead.
“I love you too. You know that, don’t you?” Henny looked up into his eyes.
“I didn’t know until this minute, but I was hoping you did,” he said, smiling a little.
“So you know you can’t keep the car. You said this guy was bad news, right?”
“Worse than you can imagine. I don’t know what happened. He changed from when we were kids. Or maybe he didn’t change at all. Maybe it was me. I just didn’t know how bad he was then. Every day that goes by, I get deeper and deeper in with him, with the bad things that he does.”
“Then just leave, baby,” Henny said, turning to Rafe, deep concern in her eyes.
“I told you, I can’t. He got stuff on me. If I stopped doing what he said, he could use that and have me back in jail. I don’t know what to do,” Rafe said, desperately.
“Come with me.”
“What do you mean, come with you?”
“Leave with me when I leave for school. Pack up your stuff and move down with me.”
“I don’t understand.” Rafe looked baffled.
“You have to get away. He’ll never find you down there. He’ll never think to look. Since he’s doing illegal stuff, he probably won’t go through the trouble of calling the police on you, taking the risk of their checking him out in the process.”
“But what would I do down there? You’d be busy going to s
chool, being with your friends,” and now Rafe started to think about what her mother said about her ex-boyfriend. A look of sadness appeared on his face.
“I’d be with you,” Henny said, taking his arm in hers, stroking it. “And you can get a job in an auto shop, and next semester you can start taking classes too.”
“Henny, I don’t know if I’m smart enough,” Rafe said, apprehension in his voice.
“You’re smart enough. I know you are. C’mon, baby. It’ll be you and me.”
Rafe shook his head, looking burdened with doubt.
“I’ll have my own place. And at night, I can cook for you, and in the morning you can cook for me. That is, if you know how to cook,” Henny joked.
“Hey. I make good eggs.”
“Then come with me, baby.”
“But Henny—”
“You said you loved me, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Then that’s all that matters,” she said, kissing him softly on the corner of his lips. “Please, baby. At least give us a chance.”
“Okay,” Rafe said, feeling that she was right. “Okay. I’ll go.”
THIRTY-SIX
ANOTHER NIGHT came, and another hit had to be made, so the girls ended up at a huge club in the western suburbs. Lisa had found a couple of guys who seemed suitable, but Ally didn’t trust something about them. They were laughing, joking, flashing money, throwing it at the bartender, as if their cash was nothing but useless scraps of paper. Something about their behavior made Ally restless. They seemed too volatile. Something about them gave Ally a bad feeling.
“They have to be better than the guys you all picked last time,” Lisa told the other girls when Ally pulled them all into the ladies’ room to discuss their plans.
“It’s just the two of them. They ain’t got no boys here that’s gonna follow them, or none waiting back at the room?” Ally asked, concerned.
“Naw, I told them we only gonna do the two,” Lisa said.
“I still don’t like ’em.”
“Don’t nobody want you to marry them, girl,” JJ said. “They got money, and that’s what we want.”
Everyone else agreed, leaving Ally no choice but to go along as well.
AT THE motel room, Ally felt that she may have misjudged these guys. Things were chill. They weren’t grabbing or pawing at any of them. JJ and Sasha didn’t even have to put on the show. The men—Black and Tan, they said to call them, “Just like the scotch,” because one was a light-skinned brother, the other dark—were comfortably drinking, listening to music, and allowing the girls to do the same thing as they walked around half-naked, occasionally sitting in the men’s laps, rubbing their hands over their heads, treating them adoringly.
Ally was sitting in Black’s lap, her tongue in his ear, when his cell phone started ringing. He dug into his pocket, pulled the phone out, flipped it open, and smiling, placed it to his other ear.
This had been the third or fourth call that he had received since they had gotten to the room. He laughed on this call, like he had on the others.
“Aw, yeah, yeah, that’s cool. That’ll work,” he said. Ally could hear the sound of a man’s voice squawking loudly out of the tiny flip phone but could not make out what he was saying.
“Whatever, just chillin’ … Right, just like we planned … Okay. Yeah, yeah, do that. Bet … Peace,” he said, flipping the phone closed and stuffing it back into his pocket.
“Who was that?” Ally whispered in Black’s ear. She was unsettled by what she had just heard.
“Wasn’t nobody, baby,” Black responded, a smile still on his face, straight white teeth showing. “Just business,” he said. “Just business. Now give me a drink of that.”
Ally held the cup of Jack and Coke, the cup that JJ had just given her, laced with drugs, up to Black’s lips. He took three swallows, then eyed Ally slyly, seductively. Ally glared at him suspiciously, then quickly smiled back, hoping that she didn’t have anything to worry about. Black placed his hand over the hand Ally was holding the cup with, moved the cup back to his mouth and drank some more.
Fifteen minutes later, the girls had just about finished redressing. The music was turned off, and they were now all about business. Both men were passed out, one across the bed, the other slumped across the arm of the recliner in the corner of the room.
Lisa smacked Tan lightly on the cheek a few times to make sure that he was definitely out cold. When he didn’t respond, she said, “What did I tell you, Ally. Can I pick these fools or what?”
“Whatever. Just grab they shit and let’s go.” Ally pulled on her left boot and zipped it up to her calf.
“Sasha, you got him covered over there, baby?” JJ asked, watching Sasha go through Black’s pockets.
“I’m fine, baby. It’s like searching for buried treasure,” she said, raising up one of his pants legs, reaching into his sock, pulling out another wad of money, and then holding it up, gleefully. “See what I mean.”
“We almost out of here?” Ally asked JJ, still feeling uneasy.
“Yeah. We getting there. But these fools are loaded, and I got to go to the bathroom, so just chill, all right?” JJ grabbed her bag and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind her.
Ally watched as both Lisa and Sasha continued to strip both men of whatever they had of value and set it down beside them. Both piles were beginning to add up to a nice amount, Ally thought. They would dump it all into a plastic bag—money, jewelry, credit cards, everything—tie it in a knot, and when they got back to JJ’s, they would divide it four ways. They’d pawn off what wasn’t cash, then divide that too.
Maybe Ally was just being paranoid about tonight. She was glad that her girls had outvoted her and gone ahead with this hit, because they would’ve lost out on a basketful of cash if they had listened to her.
“We just about done, ya’ll?” Ally asked the girls.
“Yeah,” Lisa said, “and we hit the mother lode tonight.”
Ally smiled, telling herself that after tonight, she should have enough to get her own place and even lay down a couple of months in advance. Everything might just be all right from now on.
She glanced toward the motel room door. Had she seen a flash of red on the door handle? That couldn’t have been, Ally thought, as she focused intently on the two little darkened squares beneath the handle, one red, one green, informing the key card holder if the key was working or not.
No, Ally thought. She hadn’t seen a flash of red, because if she had, that would’ve meant that somebody was trying to get in, and … another flash of light. This time, it was green, and now she knew for sure someone was trying to come in. Ally saw the door handle turning, and she pulled herself off the chair, telling herself to run to the door. She didn’t know what she would do once she got there, but she knew she had to go. But before she could even stand all the way to her feet, the door opened and a man burst in, a bottle of liquor in his hand, a huge grin on his face.
Sasha and Lisa spun around, shocked to see this smiling man in the doorway, yelling, “Let’s get the party started!”
It took him only a second to realize what was happening. His eyes took everything in: his boys out cold, their valuables pulled out and resting beside what looked like their dead bodies, and the three woman, dressed like prostitutes, standing over them.
“What the fuck?” The man dropped the bottle, where it exploded on the cement patio walkway just outside the door. “What the fuck did you do to my boys?” he yelled, racing into the room. Ally put it together then. The last person Black spoke to on the phone must’ve been this fool. He must’ve told him to come by and get in on the party.
The big man rushed over to Tan, who was on the bed. He swept Sasha aside, sending her falling to the floor and crashing into a nearby wall. He grabbed Tan by his shirt, shook him frantically, Tan’s head wobbling and spinning about on his neck, but he would not wake up. He let the drugged man fall back to the bed, then rushed over to Blac
k, grabbing him the same way. Black’s body was limp, and lifeless looking as well, and when he released Black, he turned to Lisa, a crazed look on his face. “You kill my boys, just to take they money?”
Lisa stood trembling, frightened before him, trying to open her mouth, but unable to form words.
“I said, did you fuckin’ kill my boys!” The man, this time yelling, reached behind him, grabbing something from the waist of his jeans.
Ally didn’t have to see what it was to know. She ran at the man and was only two steps from him when she saw the gun emerge from behind him. He tried to level the weapon on Lisa, but Ally swatted at his arm, hitting him on the wrist, knocking the gun away from him, where it slid across the room, stopping against the wall.
The man whipped around, swung out at Ally, and caught her hard across the face with the back of his hand. She spun on her feet, spiraling clumsily down to the floor.
He then grabbed Lisa by the arm, yanked her into him, and was rearing back with his fist to hit her when Sasha ran at him from behind, leaped on his back, and began to scratch wildly at his face. She dug into his skin, opening up narrow, bloody slices from his cheeks to his temples.
The man yelled out in pain, forced his body backward, slamming himself and Sasha into a wall, smashing her against it. When he pulled himself away, she fell to the floor, where he threw himself on top of her, straddled her, and started pummeling her with hard blows to her face.
In the bathroom, JJ was on the toilet thinking about just what she would do with all the money they took in tonight, how exactly she would spend it, and just how her and Sasha would celebrate. Maybe a bath for two in Kristall champagne, or a trip to the islands. It really didn’t matter, JJ thought, smiling. Whatever she wanted. Whatever it took to make her happy, JJ would do. Poor girl had been through so much, all JJ wanted to do was see her smile and hear her laugh.
JJ finished peeing, raised herself from the seat, and was about to wipe, when she heard a loud thud in the bedroom. She quickly wiped herself, yanked up her pants, and called, “What the fuck was that?”
Then she heard a man’s voice. “You kill my boys just to take they money?”