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THE GREY EXPEDITION swerved through the wooded county roads. The tree-covered trails were deserted as Feeq whipped the truck through the curving lanes. Tia, Feeq’s wife, was reclined in the passenger seat and exhausted from a long day at work. Feeq picked her up from work every day. She worked as a home aide out in the county. They, also, resided out in the county shrubs, a nice way from the hood.
Feeq catered to his wife like a real husband was supposed to. He knew he had to buy her some wheels soon because it was tedious picking her up every day after dropping her off in the mornings as well.
But Feeq was as tight as they got. He could squeeze a penny and make it holler, so imagine what he could do to Benjee.
He glanced over at his wifey and asked, “What’s up, baby cakes? You’re quiet tonight.”
“It was a long day. Mrs. Johnson ran me like a race horse today,” she complained. “I need a hot shower to relax.”
“Daddy will take care of you, baby cakes,” he said, rubbing her thighs.
“Ummm...I bet you will.” Tia licked her lips seductively. “Have you heard from Reem or Donnie lately?” she asked.
“Naw, I haven’t been down that way.”
“Good,” she mumbled. Feeq just glanced at her for the remark.
By them residing so far away from the hood, Feeq had limited time to be in the ghetto, getting caught up. But trouble followed Feeq wherever he went. It always stayed close by, even in the county where things were covered by trees and land. If Feeq was there, trouble sprouted there as well.
Blue twilight enveloped the sky as the sun crept past its setting. Feeq pushed the pedal to the floor, ignoring the dangers of the curvy roads. Without street lights, the area was a dark forest with roads.
Suddenly, the trees were lit up with red and blue flashing lights. The horn of a police car demanded they pull over.
“Ah, shit!” Feeq snapped.
Feeq pulled the SUV to the shoulder of the road. In what felt like twenty minutes, but was more like two, two uniforms finally got out the car, shining bright flashlights through the tinted windows as they inched closer.
“License, registration, and proof of insurance,” the officer said, rapping one hand on the window. He tucked his flashlight and held his pistol.
Feeq mumbled something unintelligible as he leaned over, reached in the glove box, and shuffled through papers. The cop pulled his flashlight back.
“What you say, boy?” the chubby redneck officer said with a dragged accent.
“I have registration and insurance, but I don’t have my license.”
The officer ripped the door open. “Step outta the car, son.” The police violated every constitutional right Feeq had. They
searched him, the car, and even violated procedure by frisking his wife, instead of calling a female officer to the scene.
“Yo! Don’t touch my wife!” Feeq snapped.
“Shut up, boy!”
The cop rammed Feeq’s chest into the truck. Before he knew it, the cuffs were on so tight his hands went numb. He was dragged to the back of the cop car.
Fortunately, they allowed Tia to get back in the truck. After verifying she had a valid driver’s license, they decided to let her drive the vehicle home.
They ran Feeq’s government through the system. “Looks like you have a bench warrant pending in Philly, son,” the cop said as he glared at Feeq.
Feeq tried to talk his way out the back of the car, but the rednecks weren’t trying to hear his slick talk. Defeat overcame him, and he sighed, dropping his head to the window.
His mind shut down to all but one thought.
I’m going back to jail.
The latest robbery proceeds tallied a little over $290,000. Ghost, Reem, and Schemes divided the money three ways, leaving each other with nearly a hundred a piece. They hadn’t expected to get that much money from the small branch, but, because the hit was right after the armored truck drop, the bank was loaded.
After the take, they hit King of Prussia mall and tightened up their wardrobes. Ghost really needed the upgrade after the skid bid.
Ghost promised to pick Kha up from school. He vowed to himself to never leave him and Kia out on the streets alone to fend for themselves again. A real man stayed on the bricks, taking care of his family, not in jail depending on them.
Ghost knew he was playing with fire by indulging in the bank robbery only a couple days out on the bricks. Even worse, now he was even contemplating flipping the paper in the drug game.
He wanted to take the legitimate route, but the streets were all he knew. Besides, getting into business wasn’t as easy as it sounded. A person from the streets with a record had barriers in front of him. Fuck the red tape, more like a red brick wall with graffiti on it saying, “No felons allowed.” That was what he believed anyway.
Besides Kha and Kia, Ghost knew he was alone out here. He had so-called homies, but they were just that—so-called. He had lost his mom a few years ago to a heart attack, and his pop was a loser. The only time he’d ever been close to his dad was during a bid where they were in the same facility. He found himself taking care of his pop when things were supposed to be the other way, but he understood his pop had lost the same game he was playing.
Ghost pulled up to the school and saw Kha talking to some little girl. Kha hopped in, smiling ear to ear.
“What’s up, little man?”
“Nothing. What’s up, Ghost?”
“Why you so happy?”
Kha just smiled and looked out the window. The light-skinned girl he was talking to was still standing there. She waved and blew Kha a kiss. He returned the gesture.
“Damn, little man. I see you got the chicks on you already, huh?” Ghost said, tapping Kha and snapping him out his daze.
Kha just blushed and sunk his small frame into the folds of the seat. Ghost reminisced over his days as a youngin'. He had gone wrong somewhere down the line by getting into the streets. He dreaded that decision and was determined to make sure Kha didn’t follow in his footsteps.
“Where we going?” Kha asked, noticing they were headed in a different direction than home.
“Chill. We gon’ take a little ride.”
Ghost did not want to reveal the secret and ruin the surprise. Ghost and Kia agreed to meet at Jillian’s up Franklin Mills. With the arcades, pool tables and bowling alley, they would have a ball. It was family night out.
Schemes and Reem wasted no time investing their money in the game. They had Boyer and Locust rocking. They went half on three bricks. After coming up on two robberies, they both were sitting on well over a hundred a piece.
After fucking up a lot of the money from the first robbery, they decided that they needed to go hard. They had their own block, youngins, and guns, so with the additional money they came up with, they felt untouchable. They asked Ghost if he wanted to chip in, because he was conservative, he said he had to think about it. It was nothing to think about for them—money came first.
“So, how do you want to do this?” Reem asked Schemes, who was standing over a hot stove, watching a pot of water rise to a boil.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you want to give Frog and them some weight or nine-packs?”
“Come on, man! They’ve been out there with us for a minute, so it’s only right we break them off right,” Donnie said, a little irritated by the question. “We’re going to serve them weight, so they can get all the way on their feet.”
The question irritated Schemes because Reem was on some tight shit, and he wasn’t feeling that. Frog was Schemes’s little cousin, so he wanted to make sure he ate.
“We’ll serve Frog and Snook weight, and let them break it down how they wanna do it. We’ll break them off equally, and everyone else is separate,” Schemes said.
Reem just nodded. He was watching Schemes whip the work in a transparent pot. “Schemes, we should have the old head Pops cook that shit up ‘cause it look like you about to fuck that money up.”
“Chill! I got it, nigga,” Schemes responded, whipping the work like he was pro.
Reem’s phone slid across the kitchen table from the vibration of it ringing.
“Yo! Who this?” he answered since he didn’t recognize the number.
“You have a pre-paid call ...” the automated machine said “Feeq.” Feeq’s voice chimed in.
“Oh, shit! Feeq is booked, Schemes,” Reem whispered.
His heart was in his ass. The first thought that came to his head was that Feeq somehow got locked up for the first robbery they did. He took the phone away from his ear and looked at it like Feeq could see him.
Reem, hesitating to accept the call, looked at Schemes with an uncertain look.
“Accept the fucking call, dickhead!” Schemes snapped, snatching the phone out of Reem’s hand.
He accepted the call. “Yo, unc! What’s good?”
“Damn, neph. I’ve been blowing your jack up like crazy! What’s up with you?” Feeq shot, sounding agitated.
“You didn’t call my phone.”
“Yes, I did. Check your missed calls.”
Schemes patted his pockets, but couldn’t find his phone.
“Where the fuck is my phone at?” he mumbled to himself.
“What happened? What? You booked?”
Reem stared attentively at Schemes, wanting to know why Feeq was locked up. His nerves started to become jumpy because all he could think about was Feeq being booked for robbery.
“Yo! What he say?” Reem asked in a whisper, a bit jittery. Schemes put up his index finger, indicating for him to hold up. “Holler at Reem for a second. I got some grits on the stove right now,” he said in coded language, referring to the coke.
Reem halfheartedly took the phone, fumbling with it before saying,
“Yo, cuz. What’s good?”
“Ain’t shit. They booked me for a warrant I had on an old drug case yesterday.”
“What’s your bail?” Reem was relaxed now, knowing Feeq wasn’t down for robbery.
“I can’t make bail because they dropped a dipsy on me before I could see the warrant unit. They had me in the receiving room all night, but I got Smitty to get me up to the block ASAP.”
“Smitty? Who that?”
“You know the CO that mess with my little cousin Taniesha.” “Right. I know who you are talking about. You need something?”
“Yeah. I just need you to get with D when he calls, all right?” Reem knew that Feeq was referring to Smitty by his street name. Smitty was his nickname at CFCF because his last name was Smith.
“Yeah, give him my number, and I’ll lace you something nice, cousin.”
It was understood that Smitty was a horse, and Feeq wanted them to give him a package to smuggle into the prison. It would contain a phone, drugs, and some cigarettes.
Smitty was from the hood, but they didn’t deal with him like that because he was a correctional officer. He was a square who tried to act like a gangster.
After making some more arrangements and small talk, they hung up with Feeq. The coke Schemes was whipping was dry and rock hard. They took half of brick out of the one they cooked and broke it down into two nine-ounce batches. Reem called Frog, and told him to meet him at the McDonald’s up Stenton Avenue.
After hopping in the Marauder, Schemes found his phone on the side of the driver’s seat.
“Damn! Here goes my shit right here,” he mumbled, stuffing the phone in his pocket.
“Tighten up,” Reem joked.
As they pulled up in the McDonald’s parking lot, Reem and Schemes were both startled by the presence of a marked police car parked in front of the adjoining gas station entrance. Frog’s car was, also, parked beside one of the gas tanks. Both cars were empty, so they must have been inside the gas station or restaurant.
They kept it moving, driving straight out the parking lot and parking on one of the back blocks. They called Frog and told him to meet them on Beverly Road. There, they would do the pass off.
A few minutes later, Frog parked his Buick Lesabre behind them and jumped in the car with them. Reem handed him the work.
“That’s a half of joint in there. It’s broke down into two fifties. One for you and one for Snook. They’re already fried. Y’all need to learn how to cook, or get Pops to do it for y’all next time ‘cause we ain’t going to keep doing it for y’all,” Schemes said. “All right. I got it. Stop bitching,” Frog said in a throaty voice.
He started scratching the back of his throat—his signature.
“Stop that irritating shit with your throat!” Reem snapped. “And like he said, learn how to cook, or you’re assed out.”
Frog was Schemes’s little cousin. The relationship they shared was tight. Schemes only had Frog by two years, so they had been pretty close coming up.
Frog had a raspy voice, and he always scratched the back of his throat, which irritated the shit out of Reem. His voice and scratch sounds resembled those of a frog, so that was where he got his nickname from.
“Y’all need to stop playing and put me on some real paper!” Frog threw his opinion out there to see what their responses would be. It wasn’t that he was ungrateful for the work that they had just fronted him, but, in the last week, he’d watched both of them upgrade cars and clothes, and now they were passing off work. He knew they had come up on a sting, but he wasn’t sure who or what they had taken down.
“Goak, goak, goak..."
“Man, we’ll rap!” Reem said, wanting to get him out the car. Frog bounced, feeling good. Nine ounces wasn’t much, but
shit, it was more than he had when he got into the car.
Ghost was sitting on the bed, trying to quickly count the money he wanted to put aside for his plans tomorrow. After the family night at Jillian’s, he had stopped down Gratz Street to get some sour diesel. The exotic haze had him and Kia on cloud nine. She was in the shower freshening up.
Ghost was in a hurry to count out $35,000 of the money, so he could hoard it away in a safe tucked under the bed. Copping the exotic smoke had given him an idea. Gratz Street was one of the only blocks that always had the good smoke on a consistent basis. Hustlers from all over the city traveled to Gratz Street to cop off that block because it was so tough to find it anywhere else.
Ghost figured, if he set up a shop uptown, he could take a lot of the clientele from down there and, also, gain his own. He called a Jamaican named Smoke, who always had various loads of weed on deck. Smoke gave him a deal he couldn’t refuse: ten pounds of weed for thirty-five thousand. Ghost was hesitant at first to purchase that many pounds because he was starting from the ground, but the offer was too good, and he knew, if things didn’t take off right away, he could always get the pounds off wholesale.
Just as he was tucking the safe under the bed, Kia entered, her succulent body cloaked in a towel. Ghost jumped up from the bed suspiciously, drawing the blanket over the stacks of bills on the bed that he’d yet to put in the bag.
Kia squinted her eyes, looking at him suspiciously. Apprehensively, she asked, “What you hiding, boy?”
“Nothing,” Ghost said with a guilty smile.
Now Kia wondered about his sneakiness, so she became persistent.
“What you mean ‘nothing’? What you pull the covers over?” She snatched the covers off the money before he could
squeeze another lie between his teeth.
“What the—”
Kia threw her hand over her mouth, alarmed at the sight of money scattered on the mattress. “Where the fuck you get all of that money from?”
“Listen, babe. I can explain,” he said in a soft voice.
“You fucking right you can explain! You got a lot of explaining to do!”
Tears filled her eyes as she glared at him. Kia didn’t care about money. Keeping Ghost with her was all that mattered. She despised the game he was in—the same one that had taken her baby’s father.
Ghost started explaining things to her down to the T. Initially, he had planned to hide the money from her and keep her in the dark about his recent endeavors, but now he was compelled to reveal things to her. Either that or lie to her, and that wasn’t an option. He always kept it real with her.
Kha was sound asleep in the other room, so Ghost immediately defused the situation, so they wouldn’t awaken him. Kia was stuck in an ambivalent state. She had mixed feelings about what he was sharing with her. A part of her was happy he got away, and they had a hundred thousand. But the caring side of her was more concerned about his bad decision, and the risk he took on almost leaving her again. She couldn’t believe that he was fresh out of jail and already headfirst back in the game.
“Please, Ghost. Don’t do this tomorrow. Please don’t leave again,” she begged softly.
He took her into his embrace and warmly whispered in her ear that he would never leave them again, trying to soothe her. The relaxing words subdued her. Before they knew it, they were kissing and gyrating against one another. Longing passion overcame them, and they made intense love on top of the big-face money.
Following the sexual episode, Ghost put the money up in a bag and laid there with his queen’s head buried in his chest.
Men never listened to their women when they knew they should. His decision was made. The game was calling his name, and, when it called, he had to go.