Cigar Bar

by Dion Perkins

  “Let’s ride!” As the duo rode down the avenue, Sherry pulled out the money. “How much do you think we’ll need?”

  Amber said, “Sherry, give me that shit!” She snatched the money away from the girl. “How much is this, Sherry?”

  “I don’t know, maybe five thousand. Why?” Sherry replied.

  Amber picked up the money. There was a $10,000 band around it. She gasped. “Sherry! Where did you get ten thousand dollars?”

  “I took it out of the safe. My brother has a lot of them. Trust me, he won’t miss one.” She laughed.

  Amber spoke in a loud and clear voice so that Sherry could hear her. “Hey, Sherry, new fuckin’ rule: You don’t talk about, you don’t discuss, or you don’t pull out any money in front of anybody! You got it? Matter of fact, newer rule: I’m gonna hold on to the money for us, okay?”

  “Sure, go ahead. I don’t care as long as we can find Tony. You can have that shit.” She sat back in her seat. She demanded that Amber turn on the radio.

  “Girl!” Amber said, reaching over to flick the on switch. “Oh, that’s my shit!” Amber said, blasting the radio and waving her hands in the air. She danced to the beat while flying down the highway.

  Sherry wasn’t feeling as groovy. She couldn’t get that feeling off of her mind. She wanted to feel it again. She longed to feel the freedom, warmth, and ecstasy that she felt when Tony went down on her, and the drugs that enveloped her body.

  Then she looked at her friend’s lips. She bit her lip and moaned, “Mmmm.” She almost put her hand on her kitty; instead, she shook her head from side to side. Sherry said out loud, “What the fuck is on my mind? I’m not fuckin’ gay!”

  Amber turned the radio down and said, “What?”

  “Nothing. Are we almost there?” she asked.

  “As a matter of fact, we’re four blocks away,” she stated as she exited the highway,

  “Good, because I gotta pee!” replied Sherry.

  They turned a corner and pulled over. Before Sherry reached for the door, Amber grabbed her arm. “Listen, Sherry, this is a different area. This is like an area where the cops don’t usually come around. I implore you, Sherry, to please not fuckin’ trust anybody in this fuckin’ house we’re going in. They will lie to your face and have you believing you’re the President of the United fuckin’ States! Say nothing and don’t even introduce yourself to anyone. If I want you to meet someone, I’ll tell you who.”

  Even though Amber was Miss Goodie-Two-Shoes in college, she was also a street girl who got high off of pills and weed. Until today, however, she had never tried heroin. She had always been curious about it. Some friends used it and now knowing that pretty, little Sherry had used it, Amber felt it was time to take her turn.

  The girls walked from the car and crossed the street. The men hanging out on the stoops were like vultures. They began to yell out at Amber and Sherry. “Yo, ma! Come here and bring your friend!” said one guy.

  “Hey, shorty, what up?” said another.

  “Yo, I got that weed, ma! I’ll hook you up for free if you let me smack dat fat ass!” the final man said as they entered the building.

  Sherry couldn’t help but laugh. “He said he would give you free weed if you let him smack your ass!” They stepped into the hallway of the brownstone and began to laugh.

  Amber smiled and said, “Shut up, bitch! If the motherfucker would have come across the street, I was gonna pop his ass!” She showed Sherry a .22 semiauto that she had tucked into her bag.

  “Girl, what the fuck? Why you didn’t tell me you had that?” Sherry asked.

  “Because it was on a need-to-know basis. Come on,” she said as they climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. Amber was a little tired, whereas Sherry could have run up and down all six flights six times. “Fuck, I’m glad we here,” Amber said, out of breath. She knocked on the door.

  “Who is it?” asked a female voice on the other side of the door.

  “Amber, Ma, what up?”

  “Amber, girl! What are you doing here? I got company,” she said through the closed door.

  “Ma, it’s about bread.”

  The door unlocked. The woman told her to hold on for one minute as she hustled to the back room. After about 30 seconds, she yelled, “Okay, come on in, and lock the door behind you!”

  As the girls walked in, they noticed eight people in the living room sitting on the couch. They wore wrinkled clothing. The men were shirtless and it wasn’t hard to tell what was going on. There was drug paraphernalia and assorted drugs everywhere they looked, and dense smoke filled the room,

  Sherry tried not to look, but she couldn’t help it. Lying on the couch between two old white women was a young black man. He had to be about 18, and he was hung like a horse. White powder residue coated his nostrils.

  The man saw the young, pretty girl, wiped the stuff away, and said, “Hello.”

  Sherry looked down at his manhood and couldn’t really say anything. She was rendered speechless. Before she could get a word out of her mouth, Amber snatched her by the arm and dragged her into another room.

  “Close your damn mouth! You look stupid, Sherry,” Amber told her.

  Sherry closed her gaping mouth and said, “What the fuck?”

  Lorraine was sitting on the bed, wearing a beautiful red-satin robe. The bed looked to be the size of a double-king mattress. It was enormous.

  “What can Mama do you for?” she asked as she lit a Virginia Slim cigarette and blew out the smoke in their direction. Sherry waved the smoke away.

  “Well, Mom, this is my girl Sherry. Sherry, Lorraine…everybody calls her Mom.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Sherry said, trying not to stare the old lady in her face. Her robe hung slightly open in front, and Sherry could see her wrinkled tits hanging out.

  Mom grabbed her hand. “Where in the hell have you been? I know every pretty motherfucker around here, and I ain’t never seen you, girl.” Sherry was shocked when she heard how the old lady talked. She sounded black! What the hell? Lorraine asked again, “Well, what can I do for you, Amber?” Then she pulled out her bag of pills.

  “No, we’re not here for pills, Mom,” Amber said. “Then again, keep those out. But we need some boy.”

  The old white lady dropped the bag on the bed, stood up, and walked over to the girls. She looked Sherry up and down, then walked over to Amber and said, “Amber, all the times you been coming over my house, you ain’t never fuck with this shit here! What makes you wanna start now? Remember all those days you would come over here and tell me about your career and all that you planned on being?” She grabbed the girl by the face and spoke loudly. “Well, if you start this shit here, you will have no future!”

  Amber snatched away from the lady. She could still feel the woman’s fingers digging into her cheeks as she tried to stretch her mouth. “Ouch!” she moaned.

  “You see all this?” Lorraine started pointing to the girls’ nice clothes and bodies. “All this pretty shit that you two bitches have is going to disappear. Take your last look in the mirror and say good-bye to all this shit because Satan is coming, and once he gets a hold of ya, you might as well back the fuck up!” The old woman said the words with conviction.

  Sherry looked at the woman and couldn’t help but snicker. While the woman was talking and gesturing, her tits were flailing all over the place. “Listen, Mom, we appreciate your concern, but we’re on a mission,” Sherry said, giggling a little. “And it appears that you’re on your own kind of mission,” she said, tilting her head toward the door.

  “Oh, yes,” Mom said. She looked at Amber. “Are you sure you wanna do this, hon?”

  Amber looked at her and nodded. “Mom, I’m good.” She pulled out $400.

  Mom shook her head. “Baby, having a lot of money doesn’t make it all right. It makes it even worse. But who am I to
turn down four hundred?” The old lady pulled out her scale, opened a plastic bag, and measured out the powder. “That’s a lot of shit. Are you girls gonna be okay?”

  Once again, Amber flashed her gun. “I believe so, Ma.”

  “Oy, oy, oy!” Lorraine said. “Another bad fuckin’ move, girl! I’m telling you now: If you get into any shit tonight, please don’t come back around here!”

  “What are you talking about, Mom?” Amber inquired.

  The older woman just shook her head. “Listen, I would ask you to stay, but as you see, Mama trying to do her thing. Please, if you don’t mind…” she said as she opened the bedroom door and escorted the girls to the front entrance. “Listen, thanks for coming by and be careful. Y’all are two beautiful girls. Don’t lose that!”

  The two younger women exited, and the boy with the large cock screamed out, “Ma, get her number for me!”

  “Boy, are you stupid?” the old lady asked, closing the door. “You just make sure that dick of yours stays hard while we see who can ride it the longest.” Amber and Sherry heard music and laughter coming from the apartment as they headed down the hall.

  “Wow, that old lady be gettin’ it in!” said Sherry.

  “Yeah, Moms don’t play,” replied Amber. As the girls got into the car, Amber turned to Sherry and said, “Okay, this is what I think we should do.”

  “Wait!” Sherry screamed.

  “What, girl?”

  “We forgot to ask her about Tony.”

  “Oh shit! Fuck! You’re right, shit! I’m so sorry, girl! There was so much shit going on that it completely slipped my mind.”

  “Fuck that! I’m going back up there and ask her,” Sherry said.

  “No the fuck you’re not! Didn’t you see how she hustled us out the fuckin’ door? Obviously, we are not welcomed. How ’bout we go get a hotel room, chill out for a while, and get a little high? But before we do all dat, we should take some of this money and go buy some outfits for tonight. Shit, because after we get high and chill, we’re gonna go to a fuckin’ club I know. It’s the perfect one, over in Manhattan. I figure we might as well get a room at, like, let’s say the Ritz Carlton or something. I mean, come on, Sherry. We got all this money and all this shit.” She paused and tapped her pocket. “If we go to any other hotel, we wouldn’t be able to leave this shit. We are definitely not riding around with this all fuckin’ night.”

  “Okay, you got it,” Sherry said.

  “Let’s have some fuckin’ fun!” The girl started the car, and they were off into the night.

  Meanwhile, it had been over three hours since Sherry took off. Paulie still had no clue. He had been in the basement the entire time, torturing the man. He had sent one of his men upstairs to keep an eye on his sister, but the man had simply looked at the closed door, incorrectly assuming that Sherry was in there.

  Paulie came upstairs, blood dripping from the towel that he was wiping his hands on. The front of his shirt was stained with what appeared to be blood and chunks of meat. “How’s my sister?” he asked the man.

  “Not a peep. She must be asleep.”

  “Sherry, come out here. What do you wanna eat?” he asked, as if nothing had just happened in the basement. He had two dead bodies down there, and here he was, taking his shirt off and just changing it as if nothing was wrong.

  After he changed his clothes, he went back to Sherry’s door and opened it while knocking. “Sherry?” Paulie walked into the room. No Sherry. He checked her bathroom. No Sherry. “Hey, dumbass!” he called out to the man in the hallway.

  The man ran to the bedroom. “Yeah, Paulie?”

  “Do you see anybody in this fuckin’ room?”

  The man said, “Huh?”

  Paulie walked by his man and warned, “If anything happens to my sister, I’m gonna fuckin’ kill you! How fucking long ago did I send you up here, you motherfucker? You didn’t even check to see if she was still in her room, fuckin’ prick!”

  Paulie pulled out his gun and began to beat the man in the face. Once. Twice. Bam, bam! Three times. Four. Bam, bam! Paulie’s hits landed so hard on the man that it sounded like he was shooting a gun as he beat him. More and more blood stained his clothes. He threw the man to the floor and wiped his bloody gun off on the man’s hair. Paulie was enraged. None dared to walk near him. He felt that his life was falling apart, and he didn’t know how to stop it. As he was walking into the living room, his doorbell rang. One of his men answered it and quickly moved out of the way.

  “Hey, Paulie.” Veto was walking in with Sal.

  They were almost like family. Veto wished Paulie truly had been in the family, but he had chosen his own path. His choice had worked out well until now.

  As they walked into the kitchen, they saw Paulie standing there, drinking a glass of milk. They also saw his bloody shirt and the gun in his waistband.

  “Hey. Oh, what the fuck is going on in here?” Veto asked Paulie.

  “I have a bunch of crazy motherfuckers working for me, so I had to show them who was crazier,” he said, pouring another glass of milk.

  “Where’s Sherry at?” Veto inquired.

  “Fuck if I know,” Paulie said as he tilted his cup to his mouth.

  Sal walked up and down the hallway, laughing as he looked around at all the blood. He saw the bodies on the floor in the basement and was glad that he wasn’t on Paulie’s bad side. “You really outdid yourself with this new art you have,” Sal said. He stepped over the bloodied man in the hallway, then asked, “So, what do you call this?”

  Paulie looked up, knocked off the rest of his milk, and wiped his hands on his shirt. “I call it three shirts in one day,” he said, removing his shirt. He walked into his room to change it again.

  Veto chimed in. “Paulie, look at me when I’m fuckin’ talking! Dammit, do you hear me?” He grabbed Paulie’s arm before he reached his room to change his shirt.

  “Yeah, Veto!” Paulie said with arrogance and a look that made Veto flinch.

  Veto pulled back and said, “If you ever do that shit to me again, you’re a fuckin’ wet spot on the floor that somebody is gonna have to wipe up! You got it?”

  He said it with such conviction that the men in the room looked at Paulie, shook their heads from side to side, and tried to get him to relax. Nobody ever did that to Don Veto Santoro and lived to tell about it. However, Paulie was sort of a family member, and Sherry was like his niece.

  Paulie realized that he might have fucked up. He tried to play another angle. “Listen, Uncle V, the niggers are trying to kill me. Your fuckin’ nephew gets my sister hooked on heroin and rapes her, and, to top it off, all my businesses were robbed and burned. They hit my taxi stand out in Queens and all the bars I own in Manhattan. So, please, Veto, forgive me. My head is not where it should be right now. I meant no disrespect.”

  What Paulie didn’t see when all that transpired between him and Veto was that Sal was already standing behind him, shotgun ready. Veto nodded to Sal to let him know that it was okay. It was then that Paulie realized that he was a dead man. “Well, listen, first off, we find your sister.”

  When Paulie heard that, he ran over to the man on the floor and stomped him a few more times in the face. “Hey!” Veto screamed out, demanding the man to stop.

  Sal laughed and Paulie’s men couldn’t take it anymore. They had watched him kill and maim people for hours. Some of them just put their guns down and walked out of the room for fear that they might be next. Paulie said nothing as the men departed.

  Sal turned and said, “Smart men! I would get the fuck away from your crazy ass too. You’re on a fuckin’ rampage over heeeere!” he said. He dragged out the last word while flicking his chin. “But I gotta say, I like you. You’re my kind of fuckin’ man! Hey, Veto, can we keep him?”

  Veto looked around the house. “We can’t leave him here.” He then p
ointed to Paulie’s remaining three bodyguards and said, “Listen, you three, go clean this fuckin’ house up from top to bottom. I don’t wanna see a trace of anything! I don’t have to tell you what will happen, do I?” They knew what the whole state of New York knew. The men nodded their heads to let him know that they were loyal to his cause. They immediately jumped to the task at hand.

  Veto stuck his hand in his pocket, pulled out $6000, and handed it to the men. “Now, listen, when this thing here is done, I want you to find those fuckers that left. Take care of that little problem, capisce? Then come down by the club later and sit down with Vinnie.”

  The men were elated but they didn’t want to show it. They knew that if they accomplished this mission, their futures were set.

  Veto demanded, “Paulie, now you go get your shit and get in the fuckin’ truck!”

  The walk to the truck made Paulie feel like he was walking with the President. Veto’s men were lined up and down the walkway on both sides, each man facing a different direction, while one held the door open.

  “Now, where the hell would Sherry go?” Veto asked.

  “I really couldn’t tell you,” Paulie shook his head. “I watched her go to school. I would leave and just wait for her to return.” Then it clicked in his head. “Amber!” he screamed. “Sherry hung out with a short, blonde babe named Amber. She’s out in, in uh… Fuck! I can’t recall her fuckin’ address! Shit, I only went over there one time.”

  “Give me her number,” he said as they drove down the highway. Veto then gave her number to one of his men. “I want you to reach that number, and don’t stop calling until you reach a live person.” The phone rang and rang, but no one would answer. It was set on silent, and it was sitting on the girl’s dresser at home.

  CHAPTER 6

  • • •

  Mr. Y and Dawn sat in his big mansion.

  Mr. Y asked, “Dawn, please, is there some movie you want to watch? Are you hungry? Please, whatever you want, just tell my man. He will get whatever you want. Now, please, you relax and be comfortable. I regret you have to stay here, but, hey, look at what you get,” Mr. Y said with a heavy Ukrainian accent.