The Locke watched the abandoned house as the last of the men went inside. He was one street over looking through the vacant lot. The weeds had grown big, so he had to look over them to see, but there was no doubt that these were the men he wanted.
They had no idea what Detroit was about or they would have left town right after they’d robbed his store. Perhaps they were as crazy as he’d heard. His street sources told him that the three brothers were from out of town, from the South somewhere. When he was done today, they’d wish they had stayed there.
The Locke, as he was called, waited until the men had been inside the little dilapidated home for a few minutes; let them settle in. When he was sure it was time, he signaled his men to get ready.
In the back of the SUV, Dapp, a muscular black who sported a gold stud in the side of his flat nose, and Grease, a kid with a bald head and a Tigers cap pulled down tightly over his brow, took out their guns and checked them.
Desandias Locke was that rarest of criminals, the successful one. When he was just a kid, the Locke was double promoted in grade school, after his distraction in class was found not to be a learning disorder, but boredom. He had dazzled the teachers with his mastery of math and science and his remarkable memory. In junior high, he had skipped another grade as he exceeded his teachers’ already high expectations. He’d graduated from Northern High School at fifteen.
He should have gone on to college then some good job somewhere, escaping the nightmare of the ghetto. But the long arm of the hood was longer than anyone knew. The Locke’s parents were both alcoholics. Codependent and hopeless, they took little interest in their brilliant boy and so when the Locke started running numbers for a man named HiLo, all they cared about was how much money the boy was going to make.
The Locke took the job and excelled. He “kept book” as they called it, for HiLo, mentally marking all monies owed and owing. HiLo loved this because there were no written records to use against him if the cops caught on. But the Locke was more than just this one useful function. He thought up new ways to make money for his boss. The Locke invented a game that was tied to the sum of all the points scored by Detroit’s professional teams in one day, another was a card game that traveled in a small mobile camper. He was so good that when HiLo was killed by his girlfriend the Locke took over the game at the ripe old age of eighteen without so much as a ripple in the transition.
The numbers game got old after the lottery caught on big, so the Locke moved into drug trafficking. The money was great, and he’d set up middle men, mostly juveniles, to do the dirty work. He never got so much as arrested.
When the Union drug wars started, the Locke got out of narcotics. The organization of all the independent drug groups was a violent undertaking that closed off the avenues for profit. Either you joined, or they killed you. Locke saw this as a sign to move on. He got into all manner of nonviolent sin. If it was stolen, he had it, if you wanted sex, he could arrange it, and if you wanted to bet on anything, he was your man.
The Locke made peace with the drug dealers and hired enforcers to keep the random criminals away from his deals and businesses. He kept several small legitimate enterprises and paid taxes, so the IRS would look the other way. He greased the palms of the local community activists so they’d do the same.
The Locke loved “the life,” as they call it, so he always kept close to the action, financing a buy, setting up a pyramid scam or a robbery. Lately, he was doing a lot of auto arson. He’d torch a car for the insurance. With a burned-up car, you could inflate the value. He took 10 percent of the nut. Good money and no one ever resisted because everyone hated insurance companies. The Locke even sold information to the cops if it was safe to do so. He liked the ladies and ran a few girls, taking a modest cut of the earnings. They were a pain in the ass, but he got to sample the girls for free.
The Locke was a big man. He was only five nine or so, but he weighed in at almost three hundred pounds. He had a large, roundish head covered with thick hair that he never combed. His eyes were deep-set and seemed to be tiny circles of brown in the fleshy folds of his face.
So the Locke maintained a lifestyle devoid of criminal stench. To the public, he was a man with a small party store and a gas station. Things were good, that is, until someone robbed his store and killed two of his men. They had come into the store and robbed it, making sure to take the surveillance video. Only serious, hard-ass pros did that. But the video theft didn’t stop him from finding out who they were. The Locke had many street connections, and so he quickly discovered who the killers were. The three brothers were from out of town. They were young, ruthless, and were described as crazy more than once.
The Locke had withheld this information from the cops when they came to investigate the murders. He wanted these men. No one on the street could think that he would not avenge a thing like this. The clerk was a friend of the Locke and also one of the best forgers in the business, a valuable asset gone.
The Locke popped some M&M’s into his mouth as he checked on his hitters. “Y’all ready?” he asked.
“We up,” said Dapp.
“Hit ’em hard,” said the Locke. “If they got any of my money, get it back.”
Dapp and Grease opened the door to the SUV and rushed toward the house. The Locke turned on the engine and watched. He had faith in his men, but if there was any sign of trouble, he’d get his ass out of there in a hurry. He watched as Grease and Dapp disappeared. He was excited. Sometimes, he did miss the violence.
Muhammad Bady casually read a newspaper account of the hit on the party store. He was never a good reader and struggled with the long sentences. He also liked to read in front of his brothers because they never read and it made Muhammad feel like a father to them, the man who had all the answers.
The news account of the robbery was the usual shit, “unknown robbers,” “no witnesses,” and the like. But the thing that bothered him was that the owner of the store’s name was not used and he wasn’t quoted as saying anything. They’d done more than their share of robberies, and if there was a story, the owner always said something, usually how the world was going to hell in a handbasket. But this owner was silent, almost as if he didn’t want anybody to know he owned the joint. That bothered him a little, though he didn’t know why.
The house they were in had been recently occupied by a crew of drug dealers who’d been taken down by the cops. They’d boarded up the place, but that was easily remedied. Muhammad also knew the utilities would be easy to turn back on.
Detroit was a wonderful place for them to end up. There were many abandoned houses in forgotten neighborhoods that could be easily lived in with little work. And the people in the hood were nice and stayed out of your business. The brothers took advantage of this as they always needed cheap living space, and free was as cheap as you could get.
The place was still very cluttered, but that didn’t bother the brothers. They didn’t plan to be there very long. Muhammad had tips on where to find their missing father.
Rimba was still nursing his cold and was sprawled out on an old sofa in a corner. He had his headphones on and he muttered a rap by Nelly.
Muhammad made sure his brother took it easy. Rimba was an energetic person who’d only make the sickness worse by his natural tendency to run around. And if he wasn’t careful, Rimba would give the cold to Akema, then they’d both be sick. They did need looking after, he thought.
Suddenly, there was a loud pounding sound from above them. Akema bounded down the stairs, jumping down the last two.
“Men comin’,” said Akema. “One in the front, one sneaking round the back way. They got guns.”
Muhammad cursed then pulled out a gun and yelled to Rimba, who ripped himself from his slumber and grabbed his coat off the floor. Out of the inside pocket, he took a big knife.
“Go to the back,” said Muhammad. Akema and Rimba rushed to the rear of the house. Akema pulled out a small pistol and waited by the door.
Dapp kicked in the flimsy front door and raised his gun. He saw no one in the room. He entered slowly, waiting for any sound or movement. He moved out of the living room toward the small den to the right of the front door. Quickly, Dapp approached a closet whose door was ajar, flinging it open, pointing the gun inside. He fired a shot inside the darkness, but soon saw that the closet was empty.
From across the room, Muhammad rose from behind the old sofa and fired a shot at the man facing the empty closet. The shot caught him in the back of the head. Dapp flew forward, disappearing into the closet. Muhammad kept firing into the closet as he walked across the room.
In the rear of the house, Grease heard the shots and kicked open the back door. It was sturdier than the one in front and he had to kick it twice before it flew open. He started firing as soon as the door was open. He saw the two people in front of him for only a second before the big knife hit him in the throat. He jerked from the impact and fired off a round. He was shocked at the speed of the attack. His mouth popped open as he tried to make a sound, but none came out.
Akema’s shot flew right into Grease’s open mouth and out of the back of his head. Grease’s errant shot just missed Akema’s left arm. Both attacks had come right on the heels of one another. Grease faintly heard his gun fire, and saw the blurry images of his killers as he fell on the dirty floor, dead.
A moment later, Muhammad walked in holding his gun and the one he’d taken off Dapp’s dead body. He moved over to a window and looked out. A street over, through a lot, he saw a white Cadillac Escalade parked on the street. Exhaust came out of the tailpipe, signaling that the engine was running. The vehicle was much too nice to be in a place like this, thought Muhammad. The windows were darkly tinted and he could not see who was in the driver’s seat.
Muhammad went out of the back door so the driver could see him and know that his men had failed. The Cadillac quickly sped away, burning rubber. Muhammad frowned as the SUV rolled off. He walked back inside.
“We got us an enemy,” said Muhammad.
“Who?” asked Rimba.
“Probably the man whose store that was,” said Muhammad. He now knew why the owner hadn’t wanted his name used and made no comment. He was a player, a criminal, and he wanted revenge. “Akema, put your hat back on,” he said with a little anger.
Akema’s hat had fallen off, and with it gone you could see what the hat was designed to hide. Akema was a girl. The baby face she tried so hard to make look tough was now clearly the face of an adolescent girl. Akema stuffed her hair back under the hat, feeling embarrassed. Her brothers didn’t like to think of her as a girl. Years of abuse in the foster care system had turned Akema away from her God-given sexuality and into the one she felt gave her the most security. She was neither female or male. She was tough and that was what it took to be left alone.
“Get all your shit,” said Muhammad. “We got to go.”
The Badys gathered their meager belongings and started to vacate the house. They would leave their car and steal another. Muhammad was too smart to keep using the same car now that they had a formidable enemy. This was not good, he thought. They had business and this enemy would be a distraction. But all it meant to Muhammad was that they had to get down to business of finding their father that much quicker.
Muhammad instructed his brothers to pull the bodies together in one room. They did, dragging them into the center of the floor. Then Muhammad picked up their belongings, started a fire, and left as the house burned to the ground.