Chapter Fifteen

Kings

 

Time to earn your pay.

—Tyrek

 

The day of the Trojan Horse ambush, two Crips soldiers selected for the mission—Flex Butler and Savant Sharpe—arrive early at the abandoned house in order to prepare. It’s a habit they picked up from Rock, who’s known to get to jobs three or four hours ahead of time to ensure “no one gets the drop” on him.

“In this game, if you want to be successful, you got to show up way ahead of time for your missions,” says Rock. “Because if the people you’re coming after show up first . . . if they better prepared than you? Shit, that’s going to be all she wrote for your late ass.”

Ice, still suspicious of Tyrek’s intentions, sends J-Roc to scout out the meeting spot. His sole job is to make sure the peace summit isn’t a trap, but having gotten high on his own weed supply beforehand, J-Roc fails to search the house occupied by Savant and Flex. Seeing nothing suspicious, he calls Ice and gives the all clear.

“We on,” Ice tells Steed and Super Curt, his newly promoted second lieutenant, as they pile into Steed’s Yukon and head for the summit. Each is armed and on alert for any sign of trouble. But having been assured by their advance man that nothing’s out of place, they’re feeling more relaxed.

“We going to be all good,” Ice assures them.

A few minutes later, Flex sees Steed’s Yukon approaching and calls Rock to alert him. Rock, who’s parked in a Beamer on the next block, starts for the house, too. The Crips gunmen perched at the window make one last check of their semiautomatic weapons. Finally, the Yukon comes to a stop halfway up the block.

“This the spot,” says Steed. The Beamer rolls up from the opposite direction a few seconds later. “Looks like everyone’s here,” Ice says, exiting the Yukon along with his lieutenants. “Let’s do this.”

The driver’s-side door of the Beamer swings open, the Crips watching closely to see who’ll step out. Ice thinks he can glimpse Rock behind the heavily tinted windshield. But as quickly as it opened, the door slams shut. It’s the signal Savant and Flex have been waiting for. They tear the window curtain away, raise their semiautos, and unleash a hail of gunfire at the three Bloods. The first shots strike the side of the Yukon, tearing holes in its doors and shattering its windows. The metallic clinks of lead slashing through metal echo through the neighborhood.

Then, the bullets begin to find their targets. Steed is the first one hit, struck in his lower back as he runs toward the Yukon’s passenger-side door. He collapses in the street as two more slugs tear into his legs. Super Curt is the next to fall. One round blows a piece of flesh off his arm and a second rips through his shoulder. He stumbles to the pavement and crawls around to the rear of the Yukon. There, a third bullet pierces his neck, and he goes still.

Ice, having hit the ground when the first shot rang out, manages to crawl around to the other side of the SUV, using it as a shield. He grabs Steed’s arm and drags him to cover. “At least two niggas shooting,” Ice says. “Let’s bang out, yo. Empty that clip.”

They both pull nine-millimeters from their waistbands and return fire toward the window, ducking out from behind the Yukon long enough to get off a few rounds, then returning to cover. They repeat this several times before the muzzle flashes in the window cease.

“They hit?” Steed asks.

“Don’t know,” says Ice.

They wait behind the Yukon, breathing hard, the street quiet now except for a distant car alarm. Then they hear it: the patter of sneakers on grass, then on pavement, followed by a screech of rubber. The Beamer pulls up in front of the house as Flex and Savant come sprinting out, guns raised and ready to fire should Ice or Steed peek their heads out again. The pair jump in the Beamer and Rock speeds off.

Ice runs out to the middle of the street and takes aim at the back of the getaway car, but it’s already too far gone. He slides the nine back into his waistband, runs over to Steed, and helps him to his feet.

“We got to move fast,” he says.

Steed’s jeans are soaked with blood, as is his lower back. He’s having trouble keeping his eyes open, and Ice knows he must get his lieutenant to a doctor quickly or risk him bleeding out. He slings Steed’s arm around his neck and half drags, half carries him toward an old, unlocked Camry parked nearby. Ice quickly hot-wires the car and peels out, Steed stretched across the backseat. He races back toward Hempstead, hauls his wounded friend out of the car, and drags him up Graham Avenue.

“Keep your eyes open,” Ice says. “Take even breaths, yo.”

They make it to the porch of a bungalow-style home and Ice pounds on the door, holding Steed up with his other arm. There’s no answer for one minute, then two.

Finally, when Marsha Ricks can no longer ignore the banging, when she’s convinced herself the boy out there bleeding deserves to live no matter what he’s done or who he’s done it to, she opens up.

“Thank you, Mrs. Ricks,” Ice says. He has known her since he was a little kid, knows her reputation as a kind, patient woman. She’d once told him to come to her if he ever wanted to get out of gang life and needed help starting fresh. And as a friend of his aunt Cheryl’s, Ricks was just as fierce a proponent of him moving to Atlanta as she was.

“Can you help him?” Ice says. “I thought maybe your son could do something.”

“Get him inside,” Ricks says. “Lord have mercy.”

Right away she calls her son, William, a medical student doing his residency in New Jersey, and begs him to come help.

He refuses at first, telling her to call for an ambulance and get Steed to a hospital before it’s too late. She explains what Ice had told her: that a trip to the emergency room for multiple gunshot wounds would attract the attention of police. Since Steed had outstanding warrants for missing court in a handful of drug cases, he’d surely end up back behind bars after being treated.

William Ricks still declines to help, scolding his mother for “harboring two criminals.” Then she starts in about how William himself ran with gangsters when he was a kid in the neighborhood and only escaped their fate because of his parents’ tough love. After ten minutes of intense back-and-forth, with his mother playing every card she has, William relents.

“I’ll do this one time, Mom,” he says. “But you’ve got to stop acting like the ghetto Mother Teresa. And you’ve got to seriously think about moving out here, okay?”

“Okay, sweetheart,” Marsha Ricks says. “Just hurry.”

William arrives an hour later carrying two satchels full of medical supplies, which he uses to clean and dress Steed’s wounds after stemming the bleeding. Against all odds, the Crips lieutenant appears to stabilize.

“You ought to play the lotto,” William says. “A few inches one way or another on this back wound, we wouldn’t be talking right now.”

“So he’s going to be aight?” Ice says.

“I just mean he’s lucky he’s not dead,” says William. “But what we’re doing here is only going to buy him a little time. He needs to get to a hospital within the next day, or we’re looking at a serious possibility of infection and any number of other potential issues that could be life-threatening.”

“I can’t go to no hospital,” Steed says. “Police going to be looking in all the ERs after what went down.”

“So, you’d rather risk your life than go to jail?” asks William.

“Jail? Psshh. More like prison, yo. Judge suspended my sentence as long as I stayed out of trouble and made my court dates. But I missed some, so I’d probably be looking at the full sentence. Five years.”

“Listen to me closely,” William says. “You could die. Is that clear to you?”

“Yeah, I know,” Steed says. “But this how it’s got to play.”

“You could drive him to an ER somewhere in Jersey,” Ricks tells her son. “I’d imagine the police here wouldn’t be looking in hospitals out there.”

William looks at his mom, shakes his head.

“You’re unbelievable,” he says. But he can’t risk letting this kid die. William and Steed set off for a Jersey hospital. Ice stays behind to plot the Bloods’ retaliation and get with Super Curt’s family about planning his funeral.

“We got more heart than them Crips niggas any day,” Steed says before they part ways. “Don’t let them win, yo.”

“No doubt,” Ice says, hugging his last surviving lieutenant. “You let me know where you’re at, and I’ll be up when things quiet down.”

Then it’s just Ice and Marsha Ricks alone in her home, an old churchgoing woman raised in the segregated South and a young drug dealer who rules half the territory outside her door. They watch an episode of Judge Judy and she fixes him a plate of her best chicken and potatoes, while trying to talk him out of returning to the corners. After dinner he tells her he has to go; there’s business he must attend to.

“I know what business that is, Michael,” she says. “That business nearly got you and your friend killed. Why don’t you stay here until things calm down? I’ve got plenty of room. And you seem to like the cooking.”

“I appreciate it, Mrs. Ricks, but I’ve got responsibilities,” Ice says.

“You got to go back to selling drugs, you mean.”

“Ma’am, with all due respect, staying here ain’t going to help me deal with what’s waiting out there. That world’s going to be there tomorrow, be there a week from now, and a year from now. The longer I wait to go back, the harder it gets for me to keep doing what I do.”

“I just don’t want you to get shot. Neither does your aunt,” Ricks says. “I know what’s going on out there. I hear it outside my windows every night. You and your friend got lucky, that’s all. Ain’t that you survived because you’re tougher—it’s just dumb luck. You want to keep relying on luck to keep you alive?”

“You right, there’s some luck in the game. But you got to have more than that.”

He points to his head, then to his heart.

Ricks waves a hand in dismissal. “You can’t outthink a bullet, because it don’t have nobody’s name on it,” she says. “You can’t out-tough a bullet, neither. We just want you to make it out of here alive.”

“Bye, Mrs. Ricks.”

In a moment, he’s limping down the street, his practiced roughneck front switched back on. He retrieves one of his cars, a Lexus, and drives to a Bloods safe house in Riverhead, sixty miles east of Hempstead.

Still got a chance to beat these niggas, he thinks.

Later, when Tyrek hears Ice and Steed survived the ambush, he’s livid.

“How’d those niggas miss?” Tyrek asks. “Got-damn.”

“Flex and Savant carried that shit,” Rock says. “Those two bitches just got lucky.”

“Aight, but it’s a fucking mess we got here.”

“I’ll clean it up.”

“You best,” says Tyrek. “Time to earn your pay.”

Rock patrols Hempstead all night in search of Ice and Steed. He stops at every store in town to ask if anyone’s seen them, checks in with every Crips informant. But there’s no sign of the Bloods leaders.

“I’m thinking maybe they left town,” Rock says when Tyrek calls him for an update. “Ain’t nobody spotted them.”

Tyrek’s yelling into the phone, cursing the Bloods, when Rock interrupts him.

“Got-damn, there go that mothafucka’s whip right there!”

Rock hangs up and chases after a passing Lexus like the one Ice drives. It stops at a red light, giving him time to catch up. He reaches into the glove box for his Luger, steps out of his car, and walks up to the Lexus’s half-opened driver’s-side window.

“No!” a woman screams.

Rock sees it’s not Ice in the car, but only a large, scared-looking lady in a nurse’s uniform and her two little girls seated in the back, neither older than four or five. The children begin to cry when they see the gun pointed at their mother.

“My bad,” Rock says.

“Please don’t kill me.”

“Get up outta here,” he says, lowering the Luger and walking back to his car.

The woman speeds off and calls the cops, but Rock’s long gone by the time they arrive.

“Wasn’t them,” he tells Tyrek back at the clubhouse.

“Nigga, you on my last nerve,” Tyrek says. “I feel like we playing Where’s Waldo and shit. Where them bitch niggas at?”

Ice spends several days hiding out at his Riverhead safe house, maintaining regular contact with the remainder of his crew, telling them to stay off their corners and out of sight. They must keep low profiles, he says, because cops are out in force following the shoot-out that killed Super Curt. Rock’s almost certainly hunting for them, too.

Ice is far from the action, but he keeps in touch. A day after the shoot-out, the wounded Steed called to say he was in a hospital and feeling much better. They’d performed surgery to remove a bullet and were keeping him loaded up on painkillers.

“This stuff better than weed, yo,” said Steed. “This the shit we should be selling.”

Ice laughed at his lieutenant, told him to heal up and wait for his word.

“We’ll be back up in no time,” Ice said.

But the truth is, he’s worried. Every day his crew is off the corners, they’re losing money as well as respect. Their crack and weed supplies sit untouched in various stash houses throughout the neighborhood, all drug deliveries and sales suspended, all orders put on hold. It’s a lull like this all dealers fear, because ceasing operations in one’s territory—even for a few days—tends to embolden other crews looking to claim vacant corners. Empty streets on a gang’s turf are a sign of weakness—and often precede defeat.

“Maybe Tyrek decides to put his people down there, claim MLK as his own. Claim victory and shit.”

That’s the scenario Ice is hoping to avoid when, following a fifth straight day off the corners in mid-November, he orders J-Roc, Big Boy Owens, and a few junior Bloods to return to MLK with a small package of crack. They’re all the soldiers he has left aside from D-Bo, his top corner supervisor, who isn’t answering his calls.

“Smart kid,” Ice says of Devon. “He wants to live. Boy was always too smart for this here game.”

Ice, resigned to working with this depleted crew, lays out some basic instructions to J-Roc and Big Boy: Move their g-pack while gathering intelligence on any new competitors, police presence, and Crips patrols. Then, call him with an update.

“We on it,” J-Roc says.

At first, all appears to be just as the Bloods had left it. Old customers who had ventured to the Triangle for the past week and been disappointed begin returning to the MLK market as word spreads of its reopening.

By late afternoon, the g-pack is nearly sold out. J-Roc calls Ice to ask if they should re-up.

“What you seeing out there?” Ice asks.

“All good so far,” says J-Roc. “Police be staring us down and shit when they roll past but ain’t none jumped out. Ain’t no detectives come down asking about no shootings, either. Crips is steady slinging in the Triangle, but they ain’t been down here but to patrol like regular.”

“They ain’t made a play for our corners?”

“Not from what I’m hearing,” J-Roc says. “I asked around, and everyone say MLK been a ghost town. No other crews been down here. Crips was just letting our customers come to them, seems like.”

“Aight, keep it going,” Ice says. “But you best not be wrong about this the way you was with that meeting.”

J-Roc quickly orders the re-up from a nearby stash apartment. In the same project building, Flex Butler, disguised in what he calls his “hood rat costume”—consisting of a blonde wig and Gucci women’s sunglasses—pretends to talk on his cell phone. He watches Big Boy walk out of the stash apartment carrying a backpack filled with crack vials. A few minutes later, the backpack’s in the hands of J-Roc and the rest of his corner crew, its contents already being traded to pipeheads for bills.

Flex, watching all this from an upstairs window, dials Rock’s burner.

“They just moved the re-up,” Flex says. “Nobody even guarding the stash spot.”

“Good job, yo,” says Rock.

Two minutes later, he pulls up behind the projects, his car full of heavily armed Crips, including Bolo. Flex hurries downstairs and opens the rear emergency door for Rock and his men. He loses the wig and glasses and joins the crew of soldiers as they race up to the third floor, gathering outside the Bloods’ stash apartment. Rock gives them a countdown and they burst in through the unlocked door. The three kids inside—twelve- and thirteen-year-old Bloods associates—look stunned.

“Don’t even think about it, nigga,” Rock says when one kid makes a move toward his waist.

Bolo tosses three empty duffel bags onto the floor and orders the kids to pack them up with their stash. They do as they’re told, retrieving all the coke in the closet, about $20,000 worth, and stuffing it inside the bags.

“Tell Ice his stashes going to keep getting took until he shows his face like a man,” says Rock. “Tell him Tyrek says he a punk-ass bitch, and he ain’t got the heart for this here war. He either crawl out from wherever he hiding his bitch ass, or we take down his packages, his money, and his crew till he do. Tell him they only one king around here, and he ain’t it.”

Rock and his men leave with the stolen crack and bring it down to the Triangle, where it’s sold alongside their own product. Customers who’d been returning to MLK now hurry to the Triangle for their rush-hour fix. Meanwhile, the surviving Bloods soldiers pace their empty corners, furious and ashamed.

“We looking like dummies right now, for real,” J-Roc says.

He calls Ice to report the robbery, relaying Rock’s message verbatim.

“Tyrek called you out, straight up, yo. Called you a bitch.”

Ice retrieves a bulletproof vest from his closet, steels himself with a swig of Hennessy, and grabs his car keys.

But on his way out the door, something gives him pause. He goes back inside and calls his aunt, tells her he loves her, asks her to pray for his soul should he fall. He might not see her again, he says.

“I love you, Auntie.”

She begs him not to return to Hempstead, tells him that whatever static he’s involved in isn’t worth his life.

“They called me out,” Ice says. “I’ve got to answer.”

“Don’t go, Michael,” she says.

“I love you,” Ice repeats, hanging up before she can say it back.

Ice covers the sixty miles to Hempstead in less than forty minutes, weaving his Lexus in and out of traffic at speeds rarely reached on Long Island’s congested highways. If a cop were to stop Ice, he’d find a .40 caliber pistol and Glock-9 under the passenger seat, as well as some coke and weed in the center console. It would be enough to get his probation violated and likely send him back to prison for a few years. It might also save him from whatever fate awaits him tonight. But there’s no traffic stop or arrest. Not a single cop car in sight.

Ice is going so fast—his mind running through all his possible moves in response to the stash robbery—that he overshoots the Hempstead exit, ending up in Queens. He gets off the highway and stops at a bodega to buy Newports, chain-smoking them while pacing up and down the sidewalk outside the store. He mentally ticks off his options, none of which are good: He could gather up what remains of his set and wage an all-out assault on the Crips clubhouse; stake out Tyrek’s apartment and assassinate him when he shows up; relocate his crew to new corners far from Crips territory; or walk away like his aunt had begged him to. Just keep driving to Manhattan, pick up I-95, and be in Atlanta the next day.

“Might be nice down there,” he says.

It might also be the smartest choice. An assault on the Crips clubhouse or hit on Tyrek would be a boon to the Bloods, Ice knows, but their triumph would likely be short-lived. The Crips chain of command remains intact, meaning Tyrek’s death would simply thrust Tony into the role of set leader, with Rock as his second-in-command. Those two, he knows, would never quit fighting. Continuing to go head-to-head with the Crips, Ice thinks, will likely lead to his death, as well as those of his remaining soldiers.

On the other hand, keeping the war going would salvage the Bloods’ reputation. Ice knows what people in the neighborhood are saying about him and his set: They’re punks and cowards; their leader ran off and hid when things got too hot. If legacies matter—and part of Ice thinks they do—he must keep blazing at his rival gang until all of his men, or all of theirs, are dead. That’s the gangster in him talking, the man who took a broke-down Bloods set and, with the help and coke connections of his friend Steed, turned them into one of the strongest gangs in the region.

Ice had made them rich, street-famous, and dangerous. But as things stood now, they’d be remembered as cowards who backed down from a fight when the war’s momentum turned against them. That’s the legacy that awaits Ice, too, should he choose to relocate his operation to another neighborhood or escape to Atlanta. He wonders if he can live with that kind of reputation in the neighborhood.

He lights another Newport and thinks of Atlanta: the sun, the pretty young sisters, a thriving black business community that would probably welcome him with open arms, despite his record. It’s a chance to do the right thing with his life, a chance to stay out of prison and reconnect with Cheryl, the only person left who still loves him. With the money he’d saved up from drug proceeds, he wouldn’t even need the start-up capital she’d promised him. He could probably obtain the needed business licenses through her husband’s connections and be up and running with his accounting firm in a few months.

Maybe he’d even stop by a few youth centers to talk to at-risk kids about gang life; how he’d lived it, escaped it, and found success. While he’s at it, he might even find himself a fine-looking wife, get treatment for his PTSD, go get that master’s in finance.

“Might be real nice,” he says.

Yes, starting over was the smart thing to do, a chance to resume the path he should have stayed on all along. Honest work over quick riches. The embrace of real family over gang family. The pursuit of happiness over desire for revenge, money, and reputation as the hardest gangster in town.

He’s weighing the pros and cons of this plan—oblivious to what’s happening in the bodega behind him—when the clerk leaves his post at the register. Ice doesn’t see him walk into the rear stock room and make a phone call, doesn’t know he’s one of a handful of Queens informants the Crips pay to supply them information. When a white SUV turns onto the block and parks near the bodega, Ice doesn’t notice that, either. He’s too lost in thought, imagining all the possibilities for his future. Only the sound of high heels clicking on the sidewalk behind him stirs Ice from his revelry.

“This for sticking your boys on me, you sick mothafucka,” Leticia says, firing a single shot into the back of Ice’s head.

Once again, there’s only one king in town.