Chapter Seven

Extreme Tactics

 

What that man said they did to her just ain’t right.

—Darren

 

Leticia “Black Widow” Lewis is walking home after a long runner shift, her eyes cast downward, her mind on weekend plans. She doesn’t notice the Ford SUV following her, even when it speeds up and pulls alongside her as she turns onto Laurel Avenue. She doesn’t look up, even when a masked Bloods soldier steps out of the Ford and, quietly as he can, moves toward her. Leticia is one of the few Crips employees who doesn’t carry a gun these days, believing she won’t be targeted because she’s a woman. But such rules don’t apply in a gang war this intense. In such a climate, the Hempstead Bloods have decided that if Tyrek, Tony, and Flex want to “hide out like bitches” after what they did to Lamar, then it’s only fair the females they run with pay the price.

Leticia doesn’t hear her abductor’s footsteps until he’s just behind her, and by then it’s too late. He spins her around and clobbers her face with a pistol, grabs her by her hair, and throws her over his shoulder. People in their homes must surely hear her crying out. Around here, though, screams are too common to cause real alarm. Like gunfire and police sirens, they’re a kind of white noise in the Triangle, the sounds people in any war zone learn to ignore after a while.

Leticia is tossed into the SUV’s backseat as it speeds off. Inside, her captors blindfold and hog-tie her, punching and burning her with lit cigarettes. By the time the SUV arrives at its destination, she’s bleeding from her nose and mouth, her skin covered in circular burn marks.

They carry her inside a building and up to a room barren but for a soiled mattress on the floor. There, they undress her at gunpoint. For the next twenty-four hours, she’s raped repeatedly, sometimes by groups of men, sometimes by one at a time. She resists at first, screaming, biting, and squirming in an effort to break free of the plastic zip ties binding her arms and feet. But the men beat her for resisting and she’s soon too exhausted, in too much pain, to keep fighting.

The first men to rape her are those whose voices she’d heard in the car. Then more arrive and take their turns. Still blindfolded, she’s allowed small meals—cold-cut sandwiches and Coca-Cola—every few hours. Her captors force her to swallow uppers so that she doesn’t fall asleep. One rapist, who’s particularly rough with her, grabs her hand and sucks on her fingers as he penetrates her. She feels a scar running across his chin and makes a mental note of it, hoping it will help her identify him later.

When there are no more men left to serve, when Leticia’s face is so bruised and covered in dried blood that she’s no longer recognizable, they let her go. She’s driven to the same corner she’d been kidnapped from twenty-four hours earlier. There, she is tossed, half-naked and blindfolded, onto the cold pavement. Her abductors speed away. It begins to rain as she lies there, trembling in the road. And it’s a long time before she can gather the energy to stand up and walk home.

At first, Leticia doesn’t speak of the attack to anyone. She calls Tyrek and says she needs a few weeks off to attend to some family business. But she’s really holed up in her apartment day after day, nursing her injuries and trying to get her mind right. She knows that if the Crips find out what happened, they’ll hunt down and probably kill the men who did this to her—men she assumes are Bloods and their associates. But she also knows the stigma she’ll carry should her crew learn of the attack. She’ll be known in the neighborhood as the girl who got “gangbanged” by the Bloods. She won’t be able to walk anywhere without wondering if the men staring at her on the street were among those who raped her. And the Crips would eventually cast her out of their circle, she believes, unable to look at her without being reminded of the defeat she represented.

Leticia’s secret is kept until a month or so later, when one of her rapists brags about the attack to an acquaintance of his, a building maintenance man named Darren, who happens to go back a ways with Leticia. Upset by the story he’d heard, Darren asks around for her, wanting to see if she’s all right. He knows she runs with the Crips, so he drops by their clubhouse in the Triangle to ask about her whereabouts. The Big Homies aren’t around when Darren shows, so a Crips foot soldier calls Tyrek to tell him there’s a man looking for Leticia.

“I’ll be right there,” Tyrek says. “Tell him not to go nowhere.”

Tyrek suspected from the start that something was wrong with Leticia, whom he hasn’t seen on the street in weeks. He has called her several times since she asked for time off, and though she insisted everything was fine, Tyrek sensed she was hiding something. Thinking Darren may know what’s behind her withdrawal, Tyrek has Rock pick him up and drive him to the clubhouse. There, Darren tells them the story he’d heard from his Bloods acquaintance.

“What that man said they did to her,” Darren says, “just ain’t right.”

Tyrek thanks him, slips him $100 for his troubles, and sends him on his way with instructions to keep relaying any intelligence of interest to the Crips.

“Drive me down to Leticia’s crib,” Tyrek tells Rock.

At Leticia’s house, the men bang on the door for fifteen minutes before she finally gets out of bed and opens up. She is rail-thin and pale, so different from the girl they remember running their packages.

“You need to talk to me, Tish,” Tyrek says. “Tell me what happened.”

She’s hesitant at first, but once she sees the men have no intention of leaving, Leticia relents. Through tears, she tells them all the details, relating what the attackers said to her, what they fed her, what the place smelled like. She tells them about the man with the scar on his chin, the way it made her sick when she touched it.

“Steed, that mothafucka,” Tyrek says.

She chain-smokes Marlboro Lights as she tells her story, crying hysterically at times but always gathering herself and continuing. By the time she finishes, Tyrek and Rock have worked themselves into states of rage unprecedented even for them. Soon they’re out the door and in Rock’s car, speeding toward MLK. They park near the projects, boost an unlocked Camry, and roll through Bloods territory in search of Steed.

“Nigga’s going to wish he stayed in LA,” Tyrek says.