Friend or Foe

by Imani Black

  Brice’s heart pounded almost out of his chest. He used the back of his arm to wipe sweat out of his eyes. He was a man possessed.

  Once Brice found out about the history of the man his sister had been seeing, he took to the media and the streets. He didn’t wait around for the NYPD missing person’s squad to do shit for him. Brice knew how they operated, especially when they figured a girl was just a sixteen-year-old runaway.

  “She’s my fucking sister!” Brice screamed, banging the desk in front of his former sergeant.

  “I don’t give a fuck! You don’t go to the media unless you have clearance from the Department!” Sergeant Carruthers barked, his pale face turning hot pink.

  “Sarg, I have investigated these fucking runaway cases for years, and I never went to the media. I mean, what makes this case so special? I understand she’s a cop’s sister, but they run away too,” another detective named D’Giulio interjected.

  Brice hated the guy and didn’t know why he’d even been included in the meeting about his sister.

  “What, motherfucker? She is not a fucking runaway! She is a missing fucking person! Somebody took her off the street!” Brice screamed. The vein in his neck pulsed fiercely up against his skin.

  “Simpson, there are ways to handle this. It’s a conflict for you to be involved. You are too emotional. Missing persons is handling it,” Sergeant Carruthers said.

  Brice bit down into his jaw. “Do you have an answer for me to give my mother? Huh? She wants to know why her fucking son is a hero cop but can’t find his own goddamn sister!” Brice exploded, rocking on his feet.

  Sergeant Carruthers did not have an answer. He exhaled.

  “I want the fucking commissioner himself to tell me I can’t help with the search for my sister. I want you bastards to put yourself in my shoes. If it was one of your precious daughters that were missing,” Brice barked, pointing an accusing finger in Sergeant Carruthers’ face. Brice didn’t plan on backing down.

  “I had enough of this sideshow bullshit. A runaway is a fucking runaway any way you slice it,” D’Giulio said with a slick smile on his face.

  Suddenly, Brice felt like the walls had closed in on him. The corners of his eyes went black, and he couldn’t see anything out of his peripheral vision. Without another word, Brice whirled around and punched D’Giulio in his nose. Blood spurted onto Brice’s clothes.

  “Ahhh!” D’Giulio screamed and fell to the floor.

  Brice jumped on top of him and hammered him in the head and face with his balled fists. Sergeant Carruthers scrambled from behind his desk and grabbed the back of Brice’s jacket in an attempt to pull Brice off of D’Giulio.

  Sergeant Carruthers was no match for Brice’s brute strength. Brice bucked like the Incredible Hulk, sending Sergeant Carruthers stumbling backward.

  “Help in here!” Sergeant Carruthers screamed out. The door to the sergeant’s office suddenly burst open, and several detectives swarmed in and descended on the heap of tangled arms and legs.

  They finally pulled Brice upright, but by then, D’Giulio was unconscious. Brice’s chest heaved in and out with fury. His knuckles were a scraped, bloody mess. His clothes were splashed with blood, and the back of his jacketwas ripped. With wild, wide eyes, Brice looked around at all of the faces staring back at him like he was a madman.

  “Get a bus right now!” Finally, one of the detectives got over his shock long enough to order an ambulance for D’Giulio.

  “Detective Simpson, you are suspended indefinitely. Hand over your gun and shield and get the fuck out of my precinct!” Sergeant Carruthers barked.

  * * *

  “Brice? Brice? Did you hear what I said?” his mother called out to him, breaking his trance.

  “Oh, um, yeah... um, no,” Brice stammered, shivering a tiny bit. “Wha . . . what’s the matter?” He shook his head to make sure he was present mentally to hear what his mother was saying.

  “We can’t let her run off to another country. You know she doesn’t make the best decisions. I’d be sick every day and night,” his mother told him. “Halfway across the world, you can’t get to her, no street smarts. It just won’t work.”

  “I’ll try my best to convince her again not to go, but she’s an adult. We are going to have to face it. Ciara is not a teenager anymore. She will do what she wants, no matter what we say. We may be out of luck this time,” Brice said ruefully.

  “She’s still my baby. Please, Brice. I know you get busy at work, but I need you to make sure she doesn’t run off. Please,” his mother pleaded. “You remember how it was back then. The hospital. The memory loss. The nightmares. The close call with her life,” his mother recounted.

  Brice did remember. He pictured himself back when he’d almost singlehandedly saved Ciara. He’d been a suspended cop totally unhinged by the need to rescue her.

  * * *

  Brice paced and ran his fingers over the cold steel of the shiny silver .45 caliber Desert Eagle special. Pop had come through big time and gotten it for him. The gun made Brice feel powerful.

  The girl who helped him told Brice that chances were his sister’s captor was still right there in New York, hiding in plain sight with Ciara. She let Brice know that the bastard’s first method of making money was putting young girls on the streets. Next, the porn industry. Brice cringed, thinking about his sister doing either. He vowed to kill that son of a bitch with his own hands when he found him.

  Brice hadn’t gotten much sleep, nor had he eaten a decent meal during that time. He had lost everything that meant something to him—his job, his sister.

  Brice let the girl helping him take him to the place his sister was being held.

  “You get me inside, and then you get the fuck out of dodge. You hear me?” Brice whispered to the girl who’d told him where to find his sister.

  “It’s me, Dave. Casey,” the girl called into the intercom system to the guy who held down the place Ciara had been held captive.

  Brice stood off to the side. His police training told him that he was being stupid. He had walked into possible danger like a fool with no kind of backup—a one-man army, which could be deadly for everyone. It was too late once he thought rationally.

  When the guy pulled back the doors, the girl smiled and stepped aside. Brice rounded the corner and pounced on the man so fast there was no turning back.

  “Where the fuck is he?” Brice growled, his hot breath blowing on the guy’s face.

  “H—who ya looking for?” the surprised man croaked out.

  “Jordan, motherfucker. You know who!” Brice said in a low, harsh whisper, his gun at the man’s chin.

  “You have to ask Mikey. I don’t know,” the guy said weakly.

  Brice released him with a shove and stepped over him. He stormed down a long hallway toward the sounds at the back of the suite.

  Brice used his raid boots to kick the door open and was startled by a high-pitched scream of a woman. Then he spotted a fat white man, hovering over a bed with a camera. The man’s eyes stretched so wide he looked almost like a cartoon.

  “Where the fuck is that coward, Jordan Bleu?” Brice yelled out, rushing toward the director.

  “He left, man. I swear. He ain’t here. Said something about leaving town. That he was going to see the man he gets the girls from. The one that’s a cop. I don’t know, man,” Mikey stuttered. He had already dropped the camera and put his hands up in front of him as if they could shield him from the big-ass gun Brice had aimed at his fat titties.

  “What? A cop?” Brice asked.

  “Yeah, man. Jordan got girls on the street, and he gets girls for underground movies from this white guy. I think he said the guy is a cop,” Mikey blabbed, his words rolling off his tongue so fast he couldn’t even get them out right.

  “Where does he go to get the girls from? This white guy. Where is he?” Brice asked as his chest swelled.

  “Man, I don’t know. I swear,” Mikey pleaded.

  Brice walked over
to him and hit him on the back of the neck with the butt of the gun.

  “Agh!” Mikey screamed out.

  “Now. Where does he go to get the girls?” Brice asked again.

  “All I got is the cell phone number. I swear, man. That’s all I got,” Mikey moaned, his fat girth spilling over the floor like a beached whale.

  He directed Brice to his desk. There was a piece of paper there with a number and no name. “Jordan had written that down and forgot it there. That’s the new number the man gave him,” Mikey explained, almost crying.

  Brice folded the paper into his pocket. He looked around. Three girls sat naked, cowering in a corner. “How old are these fucking girls?” Brice asked, going back to stand over Mikey with the gun aimed at Mikey’s head.

  “They told me they were eighteen,” Mikey whined, sounding like a straight bitch.

  “Everybody get dressed and get out of here!” Brice yelled to the girls. Their faces were filled with horror. At his command, they scrambled around like hens running from the slaughterhouse.

  “If you contact Jordan and tell him I was here, I will kill you myself,” Brice threatened.

  Brice’s hands trembled as he dialed another detective’s number. He exhaled all of the air in his lungs when Page finally picked up.

  “I need you to do a reverse phone lookup on a number,” Brice huffed into the phone, his voice shaky. His counterpart agreed and told Brice he would call him back.

  It didn’t take him long to get back to Brice. When the phone rang, Brice fumbled with it, his nerves on edge.

  “Yeah,” Brice answered. “Fuck!!” he screamed in response to what the detective told him. The number had returned no information on the public internet. Brice had to call in a favor to the Feds.

  In a panic, Brice scrolled through his cell phone contact list. He would need a favor from an old friend, an FBI agent he had met while standing patrol on a dignitary homicide. Special Agent Lisa Striker had taken a liking to Brice. They’d dated, but it didn’t work out. Brice hadn’t heard from her after the breakup, until Agent Striker called when she heard about his sister. Agent Striker told Brice she would love to get in on the search for Ciara, but the Bureau had prevented her from getting involved because Ciara had been classified as a runaway by the NYPD.

  When Agent Striker picked up the line, Brice didn’t waste his time with pleasantries and fake inquiries about her well-being. He got right to the point of his call and gave her the phone number in question. She told him she would go into the Bureau’s databases and get right back to him.

  “I hope you’re sitting down,” she told Brice when she called back. “The name associated with this number is listed as unknown, but the billing address came up. When I ran the billing address, it came back to Anthony and Carmelita D’Giulio. When I ran Anthony D’Giulio to match the address, he came up as an NYPD detective!” Agent Striker announced.

  Brice thought his heart would thunder out of his chest. “Motherfucker!” Brice screamed so loud his throat itched.

  “Brice, what is it?” Agent Striker asked, shocked by his outburst.

  “I want you to meet me. I may have stumbled onto a human trafficking ring, and they have my sister,” Brice announced. Renegade, suspended cop, or not, he knew he was going into danger.

  * * *

  Brice’s feet were moving the speed of light, and then the shots vibrated in his ears. He stood in shock, his hands shaking uncontrollably and sweat dripping from every pore on his body.

  Brice watched as Detective D’Giulio’s body lurched forward, falling just inches from Ciara. He wasn’t sure where the shots had come from at first, but his sister was his first priority.

  “Ah!” Ciara cried out, covering her face

  “Be careful. The other one has a gun too!” Special Agent Striker screamed out, her gun still smoking at the tip. She came through for Brice and Ciara that day.

  “Stay there, Ciara! Drop your fucking weapon!” Brice screamed as his sister’s captor leveled a weapon at him. They both pointed at each other, looking like two cowboys at a showdown.

  “I’m not going out like this, son. Not over no bitch,” the captor said, holding his position.

  Brice heard his own breath in his ears.

  “We just both going to have to die.” The captor continued talking shit.

  “Well, let’s get ready to die then, cowboy,” Brice said calmly.

  “Fuck you!” the man screamed out, cocking his gun to the side.

  Bang! Brice seized his moment. The captor fell backward, his gun flying from his hand.

  “Ahh!” he screamed out. Brice had gotten him right in the shoulder of his shooting hand. Brice hadn’t wanted him dead. Not yet.

  Before Brice could reach him, he heard the thunder of feet. When Brice turned around, there was a swarm of law enforcement, some NYPD and some FBI.

  Agent Striker had Ciara, trying to console her.

  “Simp, you all right?” a fellow detective asked, racing over to Brice while the backup stormed the man who’d held Brice’s sister captive like he had a bomb strapped to him.

  “I’m fine,” Brice replied, dropping his illegal gun on the floor. He knew it would disappear. He ran over to his sister and hugged her so tight he thought she would stop breathing.

  “I’m sorry I failed you,” Brice cried into her hair.

  “We got an ambulance waiting for her,” another detective said.

  Brice sat vigil at his sister’s hospital bedside, not even leaving to change his clothes. The hospital kept her for observation and to run a battery of tests. Ciara couldn’t remember much of what had been done to her, for which Brice was grateful. He was also grateful as he watched his mother lay next to his baby sister, rubbing her hair and acting as if she never wanted to let her child go.

  * * *

  “I remember even when I don’t want to. I’ll try my best to convince her not to do this, but I can’t promise anything,” Brice replied in a low whisper. “But I will damn sure try.”

  Brice left his mother’s house with what felt like the weight of the world on his shoulders. Reliving his sister’s close call was harrowing enough, but also thinking back on his suspension and the fight he’d endured to get his job reinstated was not something Brice liked to have on his mind. He also hated to remember Ciara in the hospital, suffering through the healing from her experience. Brice had hurried to find a therapist after coming close to losing everything back then.

  Back at his desk, Brice was back into the murder of Desiree Turner. He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed loudly as he pored over Kevin “Big K” Turner’s criminal record one more time. He wanted to know everything about Big K, other than his street legend, before he brought him in for questioning. Brice had spoken to Big K briefly in the days since his wife had been found shot to death in the parking lot at her job, but he felt Big K wasn’t telling it all. Brice thought he could see the deception in his eyes, but he couldn’t place it. Would he murder her, or did he know why she’d gotten murdered? Big K hadn’t admitted to trying to get back into the drug game, but Brice knew his type. They didn’t see their life worth anything if they couldn’t reclaim what had been theirs when they’d been taken off the streets.

  Brice flipped through more of the old reports on Big K. Although he was a mere kid back then, he knew that Big K had been the man on the street in Coney Island back in the day. According to the reports, Big K had been taken down after an informant blew the lid on his well-run operation. His kids were young when he got pinched, and now his son tried to fill his illegal business shoes.

  “If he was as big in the streets as I remember and as these reports say he was, I know a few street dudes that can tell me some more about him,” Brice mumbled to himself. “Yup, I know just the person to see,” Brice said, pushing up from his desk chair and grabbing his gun and badge in a flurry. He had to do what was familiar to him—hit the streets.

  Brice sat nursing a drink inside the crowded restaurant /cl
ub Sugar Hill on Dekalb Avenue, waiting for his old friend to show up again. It was their spot every time Brice needed to put his cop side on the back burner and step into his street side. Back when his sister’s life was in danger, this was where he’d come to get what he needed to save her. Brice had sat in the same spot back then, looking at naked photos that a sex trafficker had taken of his sister. Back then, and even now, the thought of Ciara being touched by a man made Brice deaf, dumb, and blind with rage. As he waited, he remembered how he’d studied the address where his sister was held. He had mapped out a few routes in and out—side streets, determined whether there was high traffic, what the nightlife was like. Brice even played out the scenarios of when he met his sister’s captor face to face back then. Brice saw himself adding one more bullet to the bastard’s dome.

  Before his work in therapy, Brice had always wanted his revenge to be served ice cold.

  He had tried to be patient with the search for his sister, but the legal way hadn’t been fast enough. He’d taken things into his own hands, and to this day, Brice believed if he hadn’t saved Ciara, he might have never seen her again. They NYPD surely hadn’t been doing a good job on her case.

  “If it ain’t the hood’s detective. I’ll be damned.”

  Brice heard the familiar voice from behind and felt a pat on his shoulder. He turned around slowly, smiling at the new moniker he’d earned in the streets.

  “My nigga, you ain’t never fail me yet. What’s good, man?” Brice said, standing up and exchanging a hand slap and shoulder bump with his long-time friend. Avery “Pop” Michaels was one of the street dudes Brice and Earl had grown up with. While Pop and Brice were not as close as he and Earl were, Pop was around enough when they were younger to get into several mischievous capers with them. Unlike Earl, Pop was always a smooth dude. Even as a kid, he did his dirt on the low, making all the parents in the neighborhood refer to him as the “good one.” Pop wasn’t into the fifteen minutes of fame thing. He didn’t commit blatant and brash crimes like Earl did. Pop was more of a behind-the-scenes, kingpin type of dude.

  Pop had made his living on the streets but had turned his dirty money into legitimate investments, and he had dudes all over Brooklyn working for him. As smooth as he was, people knew not to sleep on Pop. He was still a well-known, notorious force to be reckoned with.