Trickery (5 page)

After a while we gave up our seats to two old black women who had come in, and we walked down the hall to get something from the vending machines. I got a cup of hot chocolate and Trey got a cold bottle of water.

“You know, Harlem is my shit, Juicy,” he said as we took our time walking back to the waiting room. I love this hospital ’cause I was born here, but I hate this place too because it symbolizes sickness and death, nah’m sayin?”

I looked at him and nodded. Harlem Hospital was a big part of the community. Me and Grandmother had sat up in this place with my brother Jimmy on many, many days. That boy had stayed getting hurt. If he wasn’t busting his head open or damn-near cutting off one of his fingers, then he was being mentally evaluated because of that crazy bug that lived in his head and kept him acting off the wall. I used to beg Jimmy to stop talking idiotic shit and act right because I was scared the doctors would cart his ass off to the psych ward at Bellevue where our father was locked up at.

“You had a lot of sick family come through here or something?” I asked Trey as we walked back inside the crowded waiting room. The intensive care unit was on jam, and people were steady coming and going.

“Yeah,” he nodded as he held the door open and let me go in first. “Family and friends too. Actually,” he said offhandedly, “I got knocked from here. Matter fact, they slapped the cuffs on me right here in this room.”

I sucked that scalding hot chocolate in my mouth so fast it burnt my tongue.

“You got arrested up
in here
?” I gave him a crazy look as we leaned against a back wall. “Oh, you’s a gangsta in disguise, huh, Mr. Messiah? What did you get busted in the hospital for? What in the world did you do?”

“I killed a man, Juicy,” Trey said quietly, and I could tell by the look in his eyes that he wasn’t bragging about that shit neither. “Matter fact,” he added, “I killed two.”

$$$$$

All I could do was sit there and listen as Trey put me up on what had happened the night his manz Mayhem died. I had heard so many rumors about it that it was impossible to know what was really real, but now I was getting the bullet straight out of the shooter’s mouth.

I sat there mesmerized by Trey’s story. In a crazy way it was sorta like mine. Tragic. Both of us had been through a lot in life, and both of us were out here in the world practically by ourselves. Trey’s mother was dead just like mine was, and his sister Charlene and brother Cooter had lost their lives fuckin’ around with G, just like my brother Jimmy had. Trey felt like he shoulda done more to save his boy Mayhem, and Lord knows if I coulda just left G alone, then my girl Dicey woulda never got her tongue cut out her mouth and my brother Jimmy woulda never blown his own brains out of his own head. 

“By the time I went looking for Mayhem that night,” Trey continued, “my dude had already made his decision, and them two niggahs had made them one too. They were gonna do him.”

“So what happened then?” I whispered. “What did you do?”

Trey pushed off the wall and stood up straight and frowned. He looked down at me and stared dead into my eyes and said quietly, “I killed them mothafuckas, Juicy. I blasted them niggahs with they own gats. I emptied the clips and made sure they was both dead.”

A cold look entered his eyes and I felt so sad inside. Shyly, I reached over and touched the back of his hand. Spreading my fingers, I slid them down between his, and then I curled my hand into a tight fist.

“Chiney told me how close you be playing Maleek,” I said softly as we squeezed each other’s hands. “Is that why you try to look out for him so hard? Because he’s Mayhem’s little brother?”

Trey nodded a little bit and shrugged, but he didn’t look at me when he spoke. “Yeah. Prolly. But Mayhem was way more than Leek’s brother. He was that boy’s daddy too. When their moms passed all they had was each other. And when Mayhem got killed, Maleek went bonkers. I mean that cat got straight-up reckless with his shit. Even the hardest nigs on the streets got enough sense to have a fear of dying, but not Maleek. When Mayhem got shot it was like that young boy caught a fear of living or something.”

Trey shook his head. “I started wondering if he had some kinda death wish, nah’mean? Word, I started thinking the boy might jump off a roof or run out in front of a truck or some ill shit like that. So I stayed real close to him and kept him in pocket. I tried to look out for him the same way Mayhem woulda looked out for me and minez.”

Trey’s hand had swallowed my fist and he was holding onto me real tight as he spoke. There were eight million stories in the naked city of New York, and Trey had trusted me enough to tell me his. But I was a New Yorker with a story to tell too. So standing against a hard wall in that crowded hospital waiting room next to a dude that I was feeling all down in my bones, I opened up my heart just a little bit, and even though I told Trey about some of the dirt that life had thrown down on me, I damn sure didn’t tell him everything.

CHAPTER 4

Flex mighta been moaning like he was in heaven as he got his top done by a chick who favored Juicy, but even though his nut was rising, his mind was way on the other side of town.

He gazed down at the chick who was slobbering on his balls and frowned. She looked good in the face and she had a nice ass on her, but she damn sure wasn’t no substitute for the girl he really wanted. The girl he planned to wife and own someday.

Flex moaned as the hoe he’d picked up off the track gripped his fat dick in both her hands. She had looked real surprised when he pulled his bone out and she saw how big it was. Like she had expected him to have a kid-sized lil pee-pee or something. His shit was man-sized, just like his gangsta. Matter fact, this bitch could barely throat his shit. Every time she dove down and tried to swallow his meat, the sheer length of it stopped her and she fell back, acknowledging his superior structure.

Flex let his head loll back as the young girl gave up trying to deep throat him and went into her hoe bag for a couple of new tricks. She pulled up her shirt and clapped his dick between her swollen bubble-breasts, then squeezed them babies together and swirled her tongue around the head while titty-jacking his shit to a perfect rhythm. He closed his eyes and imagined it was Juicy squeezing his wood, Juicy’s tongue licking all over his dick, and Juicy’s hands gently gripping his swollen nuts.

In due time
, Flex told himself as he snatched the girl by the head and pumped deeply up into her mouth. He’d get Juicy in his bed in due time. Sex and power went hand and hand for Flex, and just thinking about how he was gonna reign large as fuck one day turned him on.

Yeah,
he admitted, his shit mighta got twisted a lil bit to the left when he got mad and pushed Juicy down on them train tracks, but hell, she could forgive him and his basic plans could still stay set. He was
still
gonna be running Harlem one day, he thought as he thrust his meat halfway down the hoe’s throat. He was
still
gonna take over the G-Spot. And no matter what nobody said, he was
still
gonna get Juicy.

Juicy.
Juicy.
Juicy . . . he moaned her name and an avalanche of cum raced up outta Flex’s nuts and spewed outta the tip of his dick. He shuddered as his muscle jerked and his seed scalded the back of the girl’s throat.
Juicy.
Juicy
.
Juicy
.

Flex kept his eyes closed as he pulled his wet dick outta the skank’s mouth and stuffed it back inside his drawers. He waved the bitch off, dismissing her from his presence as he tried to hold on to the remnants of his pleasure and his thoughts of Juicy. Flex well understood that wifing Juicy would be the greatest sign of his evolution as a G. Because in the street world it was all about progress and gain. Gain and progress. If you wasn’t growing then that meant your black ass was dying, and even though he lived in a funeral parlor underneath the cold and the dead, Flex wasn’t planning on dying anytime soon. 

Instead, he was plotting on multiple avenues of expanding his business sector, and there was one shifty bitch who was throwing up roadblocks on one of his key paths.

Salida McKay.

That chick had a mind for business, and it burned Flex up to know that for months now she had been out-thinking him three steps to one. He had figured the old bird was harmless when she first came to him looking to cop some low-priced ingredients to cook up her own club drugs, but outta nowhere her shit had blew the fuck up into a booming money-pit.

Her Strawberry Snake meth was severely undercutting the Divine Nine crack sales, and people were flocking to Harlem in droves for that shit. At the rate Salida was selling there were gonna be more meth heads than crack heads left on the streets pretty soon, and Flex wanted him a piece of that icy action.

Actually, it was only right that he should get a piece of it. He had helped Salida tap into a virtually underexposed market, and since he was the one who provided her with the raw materials she needed, damn straight he should be getting him a lil cut on each vial of shit she sold.

But just like Juicy, Salida was a hardheaded bitch who didn’t wanna cooperate. When Flex sent a couple of his boys to tell her about his new shakedown rules where she was either gonna have to dig real damn deep in her pockets to keep purchasing his shit, or slide him a cut off the top of her profit, that bitch sent him back a note with only two words written on it.

Fuck you.

Oh, I’ll fuck you, you old-ass bitch,
Flex fumed. He didn’t know what the world was coming to when some elderly come-up bitch thought she could cross him and get away with that shit.

Flex had read the note and then stared at the kid she had sent to deliver it with cold contempt in his eyes. “So this how them G-Spot niggahs wanna do me, huh, Bilal?” he barked on him. “I gave them pussy niggahs the scope on Juicy, and this is how they let this trifling bitch Salida do me? A’ight,” he had nodded his head and balled up the piece of paper and hurled it across the room. “You go tell that bitch Salida we gone see who’s got the biggest dick in this town.”

Flex had immediately called a meeting with three of his most trusted members of the Divine Nine. The four of them had sat in his basement battle-den plotting and scheming on that bitch Salida, as Flex tried to figure out how he could fuck her shit up and teach her a lesson at the same time.

He gave less than a fuck about the broad being old enough to be his mama, or about her being G’s ex-tramp neither. She was just another trifling money-hungry bitch in his book, and somebody shoulda taught that dried-up slice of pussy how to stay in a pussy’s place a long time ago. All he had to do was figure out what was in Salida’s shit that kept feens flocking to it, and he’d be ready to make his move.

Luckily, every last member of Flex’s inner circle was a thinker and a schemer, and by the time their meeting was over Flex and his small crew had figured out how to drive Salida McKay outta business and launch a highly profitable new branch of their own business at the same time.
Shiiit
, Flex laughed to himself. Salida wasn’t the only one who could feed club drugs to the rich white kids who were all of a sudden so fuckin’ in love with Harlem. Yeah. Flex was about to get his hands on that jawn’s secret formula, cook up his own batch of chemicals, and bone in on all Salida’s action and her fuckin’ customers too.

And if them G-Spot niggahs had a problem with that shit, then let them chump ass niggahs just try to jump. Flex hoped the fuck they would! He was already planning to twist Ace and Pluto’s shit up by stiffing them on the joint-connect deal he had told them to work out with Moonie. He didn’t have the slightest fuckin’ intentions on sharing a common supply line with Ace or Pluto, and if either one of them bear-lookin’ fags got fancy he would send his lil hooligan Maleek out to bust a cap in their asses.

Regardless of what them niggahs did, Flex was still aimed and charging toward his original agenda. All of his dreams were gonna come true in due time, but in the meantime, Flex knew he had to keep his cool and let his plans unfold naturally.
All things in time
, he calmed himself as he wiped off a dirty Smith and Wesson that had about ten bodies on it. Once he got his hands on that clean stash of burners that he’d ordered from that Italian boy, he’d be ready to storm the G-Spot and press a tool to that bitch Salida’s forehead and squeeze the trigger as many times as he wanted to. But until then he just had to wait.

Flex’s grandmother had come to New York City outta the deep South, and the churchified old lady had always told him that the best way to kill a snake was to cut off the head. Flex grinned. Salida McKay’s head was about to get chop-chopped.

CHAPTER 5

A’ight, this shit here looks a whole lot better, Mizz Salida.”

Freeze Dodson held out a bright pink sample of the crystallized mixture of meth that him and his crew had just spent the last few days mixing, cutting, and cooking upstairs in the G-Spot’s cut room. He was Salida’s number one street pharmacist and he was damn good at churning out batches of crystal and powder for her left and right, but just a couple of weeks earlier he had almost got himself fired for pissing Salida off.

It wasn’t his fault though, Freeze thought. Salida was bent in about twenty different directions, and she had gone off on him when she dumped some special chemicals into his mix and he complained that it made the batch come out too strong.

“This shit ain’t even smokable,” Freeze had told her. “We put this out on the streets and it’s gone fuck around and give them fools a heart attack. I think we need to cut it again.”

Salida had narrowed her eyes and shaken her head. “Hell no. We ain’t cutting shit! Put it out there just like that. We’ll get these fools hooked on it first, and then when they’re jonesing so hard till they start banging down our doors, that’s when we’ll cut the mixture back.”

 Freeze didn’t have no choice but to cook the overload of toxic chemicals in the mix like she had ordered him to. But Salida had been right ’cause that shit had worked. The corners they manned had turned into Meth-Head Central, and they couldn’t produce the shit fast enough to meet their growing demand. The nice-sized batch of strawberry-scented crystals they were about to package today would bring in a quick hundred grand on the streets, which Salida would promptly pocket and make disappear.