A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (The Midnight Series Book 3) (4 page)

There are men who deserve to be murdered. To kill ’em would be too compassionate.

Ninety-seven aggressive degrees outside same day, in the same place, my old Brooklyn block, except now it’s 9 p.m. The sweltering orange sun refused to settle. The three-thousand-strong block party was officially over an hour ago. The fire department captain and the DJ were in an intense standoff. The captain had the authority, but the DJ had crowd control. Long as he was spinning the cuts, ain’t nobody leaving the jam.

The Brooklyn crowd shouted and roared with a rapping rhythm, “Don’t stop the music!” A suited public official over a megaphone kept reminding everyone of his name and status and crediting
himself. He thanked everyone for coming to his “community event,” and repeatedly asked the crowd to break up peacefully so the cleaning crew could do its job.

Police posed up their power, stepping out of their parked cruisers where they had been slacking and snacking in the air-conditioning. One po-po pulled the plug and the speaker system went dead after a screech. But they had interrupted Eric B for President while Rakim was rhyming and hundreds of ’hood heads performed Ra’s rhyme in perfect sync, while others beat-boxed the beats.

From the wall where I was low-leaning, I peeped one cop who reached into his car to trigger the siren. He let the high-pitched sound leak a little, and then deaded it, but kept the red lights spinning. And now cops in other cruisers did the same, a chain reaction of lights and sound. Now there was movement. Now, even I was milling. My eyes speeding over grills and grimaces, T-shirts and kicks, jewels and scars, and watching all hands, all pockets, and all men moving—knowing, at least one of ’em was gonna get mercked, and die before midnight. The ’hood was all hip-hop. But, there was only one joint playing in my head, “In The Air Tonight,” by Phil Collins. The truth of the track, the lyrics and the music, accelerated my anger, as it mixed with my usual calmness and precision. Anger overtook me and then turned to pure fury. My state of mind was explosive. It was burning hot outside. I’m hotheaded, but now my heart is ice cold.

Nigga, not ninja. ’Cause ninjas manage their emotions, eliminate rage, and deliver with ease the takedown of the target at the opportune time, and without leaving a trace.

But this was too personal to organize, calculate calmly or put off for a wiser plan or perfect opportunity, and definitely not for another day. No matter what, in these moments, I could not separate myself from my fury.

Suddenly the moon eclipsed the sun and darkness dropped down disguised as a subtle gray, then drifted into deep black. I
didn’t have my silencer on me, but my nine was tucked with one in the chamber. So heated out of my usual posture, I didn’t give a fuck about the boom of my burner, only about the execution.

Shoulder to shoulder with many men moving like a stampede on the Sahara, a pack of ’hood-hyenas cut across the flow of the movement diagonally in front of me. Girls grouped up like desert foxes, wearing bleached-out jeans and fresh kicks, tight tees and hair gelled, followed close behind. A young mother held one baby in her left arm while walking a four-year-old with her right hand, who dropped a pacifier. Instinctively, I squatted to scoop it, handed it to her young son, and saw one lion moving behind her turn left and another lion turn right. And over the kid’s shoulder, the approach of my target was revealed.

Sideways, he was the sidewinder type, a poisonous viper that usually sneaks around rapidly sliding sideways across the desert effortlessly. Closer now, he saw me squatted there with my milli in my grip. He froze. His own frightened feet were fucking him over. Shook, he was empty-handed and solo. The nasty shit he did, he had to do alone. He did it. He knew it. I knew it. He knew that I knew. In his eyes was fear. His left eye was bandaged where Chiasa’s razor thin and lethally sharp blade had already cut him. I leaped. Punched him hard in his injury. He raised his fist in the aftershock. I punched him in his stomach. Big, slow, and stupid, he had left it unguarded. All those jail push-ups and that bench-pressing gave him the look but not the technique. His body buckled from the blow. His jaw dropped open. Speeding, I shoved my barrel in his mouth. Made him deep-throat it. He pushed back but couldn’t move me. As he reached for me, he choked on my black steel. I squeezed off six in him to make sure only he swallowed the bullets and no one else in the crowd. I never want innocent blood on my hands.

Now his face was mangled and soaking in the blood of his brains. His whole body was jumping, shaking, in a jerking motion like a worm with its head cut off. His intestines were blown out of his sides. His blood was mixing with his pee and his shit, which
splattered, and stained, and stunk. He wanted to be ’hood-famous. Now he was beyond recognition. Now, he would only be known for the last six seconds of his life. For peeing and shitting out of fear in his Guess jean shorts, and for getting hunted and slaughtered on the block like a beast.

More shots were fired. Not from me, but they sounded not too far away. Familiar, I figured young cubs was shooting into the air, just to fuck with the cops for shutting down the sound system. A bottle got thrown from the roof, smashed open, and caused a ripple in a crowd.

“Here come the jake!” someone hollered from the window ledge.

It was as though everybody out here had shot him dead ’cause some started running and bumping into others who already had been running since the split seconds that the six fatal shots got fired. Mamas were hanging out of opened project windows like curious monkeys.

Some ’hood-heads stayed still, chilling like they was huge elephants who owned the block, the building and the people, blocking the path of police on purpose while acting like they wasn’t doing what they was doing. Another mother covered her young daughter’s eyes with the palm of her hand so she wouldn’t see what she would probably see many times more if they stayed living on my street. A small crowd surrounded the dead body like circling vultures. Talking, laughing, some shocked but nobody crying. Now the switched-on sirens were screaming, so no one in the crowd could hear themselves thinking or speaking or being spoken to. The stage crowd, politicians and performers, had scattered like rodents, nearly knocking one another over to escape the audience.

The police cruisers were deadlocked in the chaos of the party, and street exits and entrances were blocked off by them. So they charged like heavy-hooved wild pigs where they must’ve believed the body was stewing.

Searching for the shooter must’ve been crazy. Staring into a sea of faces that all “fit the description.” Young, black—real black, armed and dangerous. For them, that’s every man moving.

I lowered the hood of my black Champion sweatshirt.

Don’t react. You move the action. Make your enemy react to you
, I heard my father’s voice in my head. I eased my right hand into my right pocket to remove my glove.

“Brownsville, never ran, never will,” so I walked. My milli tucked till I could toss it, the burning-hot barrel feeling like it was branding my black skin blacker. I was walking casually, unloading my adrenaline, dismissing my doubts, regrets, and disappointment that I should have made his murder more brutal and even more painful for him. Maybe I should’ve stayed and skinned him alive, then hung his dead body from the streetlight to let regular niggas on the block know to stop letting foul men live—men who fuck with little girls who don’t agree, don’t have titties or periods, or even desires to be talked to, followed, chased, cornered, or touched.

Persecution is worse than slaughter
, a line from a
sura
in the Holy Quran moved through my mind.
Maybe I should’ve tortured him.

Now the police were surrounding the body, pushing the crowd back, and pulling out the chalk and yellow tape. A few of them dashed into the crowd in different directions.

Last look: the cluttered crowd was thinning. I wouldn’t be looking back no more. Just facing forward, keeping an even pace as most scrambled. Now I was politely passing by the parked in the middle of the street police bus. The doors were flung open. Soon they would sweep and pile randomly cuffed-up, roughed-up prisoners in there and haul them off. I had already put distance between me and them.

Dropped down between two parallel parked cars two blocks over, I tossed my nine in the iron-slotted gutter after wiping it down with the white washcloth that I normally rocked in my back pocket. The cops would want the murder weapon. I wouldn’t make
it easy on them. I’d forced them to get low, crawl into the gutter with the fist-size water bugs and their rat rivals. The men in blue were already dirty. I’d make them get filthy, wade in the water, and inhale the stench of the project toilet shit.

“Police, stop!” I heard as I raised up. I didn’t stop, didn’t turn. Just walked swiftly to the nearest subway station. Shook ones turn when they hear those two words, afraid they’ll get shot in the back by the Glock. I have zero fear; I believe that when it is my turn to return to Allah, I will. Fear was trained out of me from when I was young enough to walk on this earth.
Fear only Allah.

Terror, not fear, had gripped me though, when I was out checking the whole length and width of my ’hood. Looking in the front, sides, and back of the buildings, searching down shortcuts and alleyways. Peering through car windows and parking lots, and even climbing up “the dumps” where trash is heaped up high.

The terror of hurting my Umma’s heart, our mother. The terror of losing my little sister, oh Allah. The terror of her becoming ruined and raped and unprotected like too many fatherless American girls. The terror of her losing her honor, of me failing my father, my culture, and my faith.

Terror had soaked through my pores and seized me, when I had seen a body laid out and white-sheeted and being carried to the ambulance, only to overhear people saying, “It was some old lady from the building who caught a heatstroke and died.”

As I looked everywhere and walked and searched in every direction from my Brooklyn building, my terror made my head get even hotter, and it felt like my own blood was boiling up my body organs. Yet, I have no fear of any man living and zero fear of my own death.

Frightened boys turn when they hear “Police, stop!” Ruled by their fears for their entire lives, both their bodies and their thoughts freeze up. If you stop when you hear those two words, you are revealing that you are the one they’re looking for and that you know
it. Especially when you’re in the same street packed with plenty of people. The cops could be talking to anybody. Probably by now they were following four or five or fifty different niggas who “fit the description.” I had already breezed by tens of youth snatched and lined up against the building with their hands in the air, the ones with the wildest reactions laid out on the pavement cuffed. I saw some soft-boiled boys, the type that would break and crack open like eggshells within minutes. Soon as they got in some private space they’d start snitching on their friends and even on family and would even tell on people the cops ain’t even asked them about. Giving up information believing that it would somehow save them, and saving themselves would be all that mattered, because cowards can only think of saving themselves.

I reversed it on the cops, by acting and not reacting. Made the cops doubt their suspicion of me by never looking back or over my shoulders, and by remaining calm, detached, looking straight forward and keeping it moving.

As my feet moved down the subway stairs, I felt a second set of feet were stepping in my same rhythm directly behind me. On the subway platform I moved in and out of the outgoing crowd until the train stormed in. I stepped into the second-to-last car, with a group of random riders. Doors closed. Train pulled out. I was heading to the dirty door that connects one train car to the next, thinking that either way, I had achieved my objective: to move the action away from my Brooklyn block where I had lived for seven years. My ’hood, where I was often seen but never known. Where I had fought but never mixed or mingled. Investigate me! No one there had ever known my name. “Midnight” was the only name some could use or tell. My Umi, my sister, and both my wives lived safely elsewhere outside of the borough of Brooklyn, forwarding address unknown by even my closest, truest friends.
Insha’Allah.

Looking through a backwards reflection cast on a dirty train door window, my eyes were scanning movements and faces. They
paused on someone lovely, exotic, and familiar. My heart skipped half a beat before fast-forwarding. It was not time for love or longing, only for carrying out the plan to its completion. In this plan there are no comrades on purpose. I’m strictly solo.

“Hibernate the heart,” my sensei had taught me. In extreme situations or in captivity, isolation or torture, only the hibernated heart will allow the fighter to prevail.

Again my eyes paused, then doubled back to confirm what I sensed. D-tec, undercover detectives, were only undercover to themselves. The street-trained eye could see them clearly. On my side of Brooklyn, they were usually black like us. But they were different from everyday street cats. They didn’t have the swagger or the rhythm of the full-blown bold and ignorant niggas. They lacked style, wore the wrong fitteds and bogus jewels, which could only be wrong. Worn-too-long kicks is always dead wrong, because we either clean ’em or trash ’em when they get marks or specks on them. That’s why we walk like we stepping on air when we sport ’em. Even our laces had to be flawless. The D’s lacked ease. They were uncomfortable with themselves, uncomfortable with their jobs, and uncomfortable in our ’hoods, even if they came from ’em.

Train stopped, doors opened. I saw the D was still sitting, staring in my direction at the back of my head. Would he get off? He didn’t. Seemed like he was waiting to see if I would. I didn’t. He sat fingering his pager, looking into the slim screen. He stood up, one hand grabbing hold of the overhead strap while the train shook slightly as it moved forward while still pulling left to right. He was facing my direction. Took one step towards me, and then . . .
pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop
 . . . seven shots. Sounded like a 22-caliber. Nah, not a 22, it was firecrackers with the fuses connected to make them fire off rapidly and sound lethal. Then a stink bomb was let off. The smell and the smoke fogged the air and the train car lights went black for a half a second, as they often do. Fire flared up in the opposite corner from me.