THAT APRIL MORNING I HAD PLANNED TO SLEEP IN. There was work to be done later, but Hollywood had asked me if I could drop the girls off at school. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t say no. When Wood said ride, I rode.
I brushed my teeth, threw on my black T-shirt and short, black Dickies jeans. It’s safe to say all I wore was black. Besides the gold glitter coming from my nugget bracelet, I was draped all in black, the color of a gangster. I’d like to clear something up. Cops kept harassing kids they saw dressed in all black. Word on the street was that cops believed a kid donning that color signaled that he was on the hunt to go wet somebody, that he was commissioned to kill someone. That’s a pile of cattle shit. In my neighborhood folks would cap you whether they were dressed in pink, yellow, green, or aqua blue. Black is just a G thing.
I looked at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. The person staring back at me was lost. I had an oversize head resting between two pointy shoulders on top of a scrawny body. My appearance made me fodder for jokes. I wondered why I was born with such frailty in such a wild hood. If fate would have me born in the jungle, at least bless me with some size. I’m still only about 170 pounds sopping wet with bricks in my pocket. However, I made up for it. It made me bold.
Tater kept the engine running in Black Beauty, a ’91 SUV, hollering, “Come on!”
I bolted out the door barefoot.
“Damn, bruh . . . took long enough,” he fumed as I jumped in the passenger seat.
We called Dante, but he said he would catch up with us later after he met with his parole officer. The heat had been catching up to us for some time now. Dante had caught a charge.
“Relax, bruh . . . you got that boonk for me?”
There was no better breakfast than coke and weed.
“What you think?” replied Tater, unwrapping a plastic Ziploc bag with tiny packets of marijuana and cocaine. I unpeeled a Philly blunt and filled it with marijuana and coke before sealing it with saliva. With one light the blunt sparked. I reclined in my seat and turned the volume up. JT Money erupted from two Pioneer wood-grain speakers vibrating in the trunk. JT and the Poison Clan had some hot street records coming out of Uncle Luke’s camp.
As the SUV cruised down Northwest Fifteenth Avenue, the corners where crews were already setting up shop were waking up. The work began while most of the rest of Miami slept. Crews dressed in the same black T-shirts and short, black Dickie jeans as me held positions at virtually every intersection along the avenue.
The spotters were getting their orange juice and ham-and-cheese sandwiches outside the corner bodegas farther up the block. As the coke brought more and more money, it offered opportunities even for the smokers themselves. When they wanted to go fraternize with a schoolgirl at lunchtime, the spotters gave a couple of dollars and nickel rocks to Lu Lu and One Eye, two neighborhood homeless cats, to guard the stash.
It took a while for those two jokers to realize some of those cops were suppliers themselves though. False alarms were routine. Since my crew graduated to making drop-offs, the younger dudes on the corner got crafty. Their stash was left in holes carved out in palm trees. It’s ironic how everything in life evolves. The dope boy coming after you learns from your mistakes and becomes a bit craftier and more efficient. That’s how trades are passed down through the generations. Dope slinging was a birthright in Liberty City.
The lookouts nodded while we cruised past that April morning. They peered inside the jet-black tint, daydreaming of riding inside one day. The corners were quiet. Fiends usually flocked the corners by sunrise after passing out from a good trip, but that morning the usual rush-hour line was down to two or three.
“It’s dem boys from Lincoln Fields,” said Tater, responding to the frown on my face. We crossed Northwest Thirteen Avenue and there they were. Addicts huddled outside the Lincoln Fields blue-and-cream-colored low-rises just one block west of Fifteenth Avenue.
“This is ridiculous, bruh. I’m sick of these dudes, but I got the fire for them later. You just can’t let someone take your corner. Next thing you know they’re taking your house,” I said. “Might as well let them bone your wife while they’re at it.”
We had already left those corners. I really had no stake in beefing with those guys. I was just more preoccupied with the principle of it. I didn’t like them.
“Can y’all hurry up? We’re gonna be late,” whined Keba in the backseat. Her friend Chrystal was pouting alongside her.
Tater jumped out at the corner of Sixty-second Street to handle the work. I bolted onto the turnpike heading south toward Richmond Heights Middle. I sped through the neighborhood and crossed over to Seventeenth Avenue.
“Told y’all I’d make it on time,” I said, turning to the girls.
In my childhood, there really wasn’t much happiness. The playground scene in front of the school always offered me temporary respite from the bullshit. Flashing blue and red lights in the rearview forced me back into reality. I had whizzed pass the stop sign at the intersection.
“What’s happening?” Keba asked.
“Don’t worry, lil mama, we good,” I told her. But sweat poured from my forehead as a female officer approached the Blazer. As I mentioned earlier, police in Miami had been watching the Blazer for months. They knew the truck. They knew what went down inside.
“You’re in a hurry, young man?” the officer asked me.
“Kind of, Officer. I didn’t want my lil sister to be late,” I answered. The girls flashed a broad smile at the officer.
“Well, you sped past a stop sign in a school zone. That’s not safe,” the officer continued. “You girls go run along now. We wouldn’t want you guys to be late.”
She let the girls head to class and asked me to step out the vehicle. She patted me down. “No shoes . . . you were really in a rush, huh?” she joked.
I forced a smile. For some reason, Keba ran back to the car. She had forgotten her textbook on the backseat. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her freeze. She saw the nine-millimeter Walther PPK semiautomatic handgun tucked underneath her textbook where Tater had forgotten it. Her eyes locked with mine in the rearview mirror. She put the gun in a folder under her arm, then raced off. The officer gave me the usual lecture. She advised me to try to get my GED before writing a citation.
“Okay, looks like you’re good,” the officer told me. “Now go put some shoes on.” She chuckled.
I got in the truck and banked the corner. Suddenly, I heard officers shouting. Keba was facedown on the pavement with guns drawn to her head.