Ten

The clear day, with a warm sun pitched high in the sky, looked like a postcard moment. Tamar found herself engrossed in Melissa Chin’s new book as she sat butt-naked on her balcony. She became infuriated reading through the remaining pages of the latest novel. It was all there, their story, from beginning to end, but it was being told as fiction. It read like a Donald Goines novel, well written and detailed. Laced within the pages were the exploits of her former crew, once known as the Cristal Clique. Tandi and Olivia, two characters in the book, obviously represented herself and Cristal, the difference being the characters all grew up in Harlem, while Tamar and Cristal had grown up in Brooklyn. Tamar was reading the same events they went through with only the names and locations changed.

In Melissa Chin’s first book, it was all about boosting, sex, stealing, fighting, and growing up rough in the jaws of Harlem, trying not to be swallowed and forgotten. The writer was way too familiar with Tamar and her friends’ lives. In one chapter of the book, one secret was spilled that only Tamar, Cristal, and Mona knew about.

Tandi and I came up with the plan to rob the Chinese man late that evening, and Sarah had no choice but to go along with it. We were hungry like an African village, and with only three dollars between the three of us, we decided to commit our first wicked act. The deliveryman seemed like an easy mark. We would always see him delivering for Great Wall throughout our hood on his colorful moped with his own ghetto pass to come through untouched because niggas were always hungry. Tandi made the call. Sarah and I were nervous, but ready to go through with it. We were fifteen years old, bored, hungry, and broke, and we wanted to have some fun and feed our stomachs at the same time.

After placing the order, the only thing left to do was to wait. Forty minutes later, there was a knock at the apartment door. It wasn’t our place; we weren’t stupid enough to give him our real address. The apartment we occupied that evening was a former crack den that had been vacant for weeks. Police had raided it a few weeks back, arrested everybody, and didn’t secure it well enough. So, we took advantage of the place. We had sex and sucked dick there, smoked weed, drank, joked around, and loitered in the apartment, making it our own ghetto haven.

Tandi was always the wildest and most promiscuous one out of all of us. With the delivery man knocking, waiting to make his delivery, she looked at me and Sarah, and said, “Watch how I get this nigga’s attention.”

Unexpectedly, she stripped down to her panties and bra and went to answer the door raw like that. That was Tandi, unpredictable and crazy to do anything for attention. She opened the door, and once that China deliveryman caught a good look at the fifteen-year-old showing off her curves, ample breasts, and brown skin, he was utterly shocked.

“You got my food, right?” Tandi said, smiling at him.

He nodded. “Twen-tee fif-tee,” he said.

“Okay, let me get the money.” She pivoted and walked away, luring him deeper into the apartment.

Once he stepped foot inside, I hit him in the back of the head with a brick from outside. I didn’t think I had hit him that hard, but he tumbled over like a tree, falling face-first against the dusty floor. I saw blood and panicked. He wasn’t moving at all.

“Oh shit!” Sarah uttered, looking wide-eyed and scared.

“Yo, get the food!” Tandi said.

Sarah quickly snatched the plastic bag of food from the floor.

Tandi had another brainstorm. She was ready to knock out two birds with one stone. “Yo, go through his pockets. I know this nigga got money in them.”

I went through his pockets and removed ninety-five dollars. I was so nervous, I could feel my heart trying to beat through my chest. It sounded like the loudest thing in the room.

“He dead?” Sarah asked.

“Nah,” Tandi said, dressing quickly. “Olivia just fucked him up, but he ain’t dead.”

We rushed from that apartment like it was on fire and about to disintegrate. We had our food and some spending cash. As we were trying to ease all of our nerves and forget about what we’d done, we filled our stomachs with free food and got high from two blunts. The next day we went shopping on Pitkin Avenue.

Tamar clenched her fist, her blood boiling. After reading that chapter about her life from years ago, she wanted to tear the pages from the book and burn them, but there were plenty more books where that came from. She remembered that night so vividly in her head. The man wasn’t dead, but Cristal had really fucked him up. It was on the news that he had to be taken to the hospital and received seventeen stitches in the back of his head. Subsequently, he’d suffered some brain damage.

But they’d never told anyone about that incident. They had all gotten away with it. Detectives did a thorough investigation, but never came sniffing the girls’ way. The call was made from a public payphone, and the address was a vacant apartment commonly used by everyone living in the projects. So who was snitching suddenly? Both Cristal and Mona were dead . . . unless Mona told someone before her death.

In Melissa Chin’s second novel, she wrote about when they were seventeen and a friend of theirs was murdered brutally:

I can remember standing on the Harlem corner with Tandi and Sarah one summer afternoon, when suddenly cop cars came flying by us with their lights blaring. They came to an abrupt stop in the vacant parking lot. A body had been found in the dumpster. The word had gotten out that it was a young girl our age, dead. She was naked, brutally beaten, raped and thrown out like she was yesterday’s trash.

We were all taken aback by the news, but we were even more taken aback when we found out the identity of the girl. Her name was Shakiyla Davis. We went to school together, and she lived around the corner from me. I couldn’t hold back my tears after hearing about what happened to her, Sarah too. But Tandi remained aloof and showed no empathy at all.

That day, I saw something in Tandi, something sinister, like she could be a serial killer in the making. What I saw in her didn’t scare me, but it intrigued me. Death didn’t seem to bother her; in fact, I think she was fascinated by it. Was I too? We were all subversive creatures from the ghetto, trying to find our way, trying to survive somehow, some way.

It didn’t take long for Shakiyla’s mother to hear about her daughter’s gruesome death, and she came running from her apartment in an undignified haste. The tears had already started brewing in her eyes, panic on her face; it was a look that I will never forget. When she reached the crime scene, her daughter’s body had already been removed from the foul-smelling dumpster and covered with a white sheet. She collapsed in the arms of her neighbor, falling to her knees in grief. She shrieked and cried so loud, her wail pierced all of Brooklyn that afternoon.

Tamar continued reading the second book. It was only the beginning of more secrets, lies, motives, and murders that were never to be told again being revealed through works of fiction. One chapter was particularly worrisome to Tamar. It delved into the details of the Commission, but was renamed the Syndicate in the trilogy.

The third book was the one E.P. had left on her bed. This one was the biscuits and gravy of the trilogy. The drama between Tandi, Olivia, and Sarah escalated. Supposedly, it was the last book, but at the end, it hinted at another book being written.

The area in Texas was a hamlet and census-designated place, almost on the tip of Texas in the town of Galveston. White people were everywhere, smiling, looking jolly like Santa Claus, and hurrying to their purpose of the day. We all felt like fish out of water, everything being strange and new to us.

The instructions given to me once we arrived in town were to go to a Baptist church located five miles from the railroad station. There wasn’t any pickup service for us. We had to find our own way to this church where our lives were supposedly going to change for the better.

We finally arrived at the white-steepled Baptist church on Johnson Avenue in the quiet suburban area with the picketed fences, tree-lined streets, and sprawling green lawns. We had to split the fare between the four of us, a worrisome feeling, since we were on our last dime. Shit, we’d never been outside of New York before, and now we were over a thousand miles away from home in some small Texas country town without a clue what to do next.

The cab driver gazed at me evenly. “Is there a problem here, ladies?”

“Nah, no problem,” I returned unworriedly, focusing on the driver.

“You sure there’s no problem here?” the driver reiterated evenly.

I told him, “Look, we pay you to drive us around, not to be in our fuckin’ business.”

Why I had the sudden irritation, I didn’t know. I was scared, but didn’t want to show it. I was told to come to Texas believing the words of a man I really liked.

The driver laughed out of the blue. He lit a cigarette and fixed his attention on me and my friends.

“You girls need help, I see,” the man said.

“We don’t need help,” I spat.

“You sure about that, Olivia?” he asked.

“How did you know my name?” I exclaimed.

He puffed on his cigarette and breathed out smoke. He looked into the eyes of all of us, a steady calm about him. He wasn’t in any rush to answer my question. I wasn’t important to him. Like L.T., he had a job to do. He was paid by the Syndicate to subtly observe our behavior upon our arrival in Texas and give a vital report on each and every one of us. Unbeknownst to us, the testing had already started. We were potential recruits, and once recruits arrived into the town, they were watched as if by a hawk. The people watching could be anybody: the cab driver, a sanitation worker, a cop, the conductor, a housewife, or a teenage girl. It didn’t matter. The Syndicate employed people of all ethnicities, creeds, and occupations.

I asked sternly again, “How did you know my name?”

“Because, I was paid to know about you,” the man replied with nonchalance.

It suddenly dawned on me that he was part of the Syndicate, or hired by them. My heart jumped, my fiery attitude changed suddenly, and I quickly apologized to him for my behavior.

We entered the Baptist church and saw about thirty other people inside, black, white, and Hispanic, mostly young and eager-looking, supposedly new recruits from all over vying to work for the Syndicate. Everyone in the room stood around looking lost and out of place, until they were told to find a seat in the pews.

An hour after entering the church, conversations going on, and strangers trying to become familiar with each other, a well-dressed but hard-looking white man with a faded teardrop tattoo under his right eye that looked like it was in the process of being removed by laser and a strong German accent came out to greet us.

“Willkommen jeder!” the man said loudly to the crowd in German, which meant “Welcome, everyone.”

He had everyone’s undivided attention.

He continued, “Sie haben einen langen Weg von zu hause gereist…für diese grobe chance.” The man gazed heavily into the small gathering of people before him. He stood on the church platform, his strong presence speaking volumes.

Not a soul in the room understood what he had just said. I didn’t either. Some didn’t even know he had just spoken in German.

With further reading, the new novel, Killer Dolls, ventured farther into forbidden territory. Tamar’s eyes went wide when she started reading about Pike’s character, who in the book was renamed Traven.

One particular part of the book read:

Traven would probably be our easiest target, but yet, our hardest too. It was close to home. He was our friend. I had no idea why he was on the Syndicate’s hit list, but for some reason, they wanted him dead. We thought about the aftermath following his death, especially with Sarah. How was she going to take it? She had fallen in love with Traven, and they had a special bond building. She was our close friend, but we couldn’t dwell on outcomes. This was business, and we were broke and needed to prove ourselves.

Tandi and I sat parked in a stolen maroon Chevy on the quiet, narrow Brooklyn block and observed Traven exiting his building. He zipped up his jacket in the cool fall air and started to walk down the street alone.

We each wore large black hoodies, dark, baggy jeans, latex gloves, Timberlands, and ski hats, trying to give off the impression we were two black males seated in the car.

I was behind the wheel, the .9mm loaded and cocked back on my lap. Tandi gripped the same caliber of gun. We both were ready to get it over with. Our forty-eight hours to do the hit were winding down. We had devised a plan to make it look gang-related. It was no secret that Traven was a drug dealer and womanizer, so his death could have come from anybody from rival dealers or a jealous boyfriend.

“When you wanna do this?” Tandi asked.

“When he comes back,” I said.

“That could be hours.”

“He won’t be gone long,” I returned.

“How you know?”

“I just know.”

I knew it wasn’t going to be a long wait by what he had on: some sweat pants, sneakers, and a gray hoodie underneath his fall jacket. It looked like he was making a quick run to the corner store.

“Remember, make it look gang-related. We in and we out,” I said.

Tandi nodded.

Tamar stood from her chair and tossed the book in a different direction. Filled with frustration and anger, she wanted to scream. There was no reason to read on, since she already knew how it was going to end. How could this be? How could this author have so much information about her and her friends’ lives?

The majority of the story was told in detailed first person, though some particulars had been changed slightly. The Dinkins brothers had been fictionalized as the Johnson brothers. One of their earlier assignments, the killing of the groom at his wedding via poison, was written as a baby shower assassination. And the Cristal Clique had been fictionalized as Murder Inc.

Fucking Murder Inc.? It doesn’t get any more transparent than that.

Tamar was ready to tear Melissa Chin apart with her bare fucking hands. But, first, she wanted to torture her and find out where she got her information from. What source was feeding her the material? It was killing Tamar to know how the fuck that bitch knew so many intimate details about their operation.

With everyone from the original crew who knew about the Farm dead, she suspected Mona, while residing in the Bronx, had probably run off her mouth to someone. Maybe it had been to a journalist, in confession to a priest, or to an average Joe crafty enough to jot down all her tales and profit from it.

Now Mona was dead, and so was Cristal, and E.P. had confirmed that Lisa had been killed at the Farm. So who?

It hadn’t been until the latest novel, Killer Dolls, that Tamar finally had a face to go with the name. She studied the bitch’s photo intently, scrutinizing every feature, hoping for something to jog her memory. Where did she know this girl from? Did she even know this girl at all? Was she someone from their old neighborhood? A friend of a friend? Maybe, an enemy? Was the bitch somehow overlooked while she was growing up?

Tamar thought hard. She had never seen the girl before. Melissa Chin was young, pretty, and a dead bitch walking. She just didn’t know it yet. Whoever said the game should be sold not told needed a foot shoved up their ass.