“We got five niggas,” Rodney continued. “We go in there, get the money, and we’re out. If he come around askin’ questions, we let that nigga know who he’s dealin’ with.”
Sean argued back that it was easier said than done, that as far as you all knew the house might not even belong to the alleged “D”. Butchie coulda been a snitch for the cops or somebody’s cousin you jumped a few weeks back at some party you can’t even remember.
You rebutted that the cops didn’t have a reason to be after y’all. Shit, you’d never been caught, never even been arrested, never even had to talk to a cop outside of the Officer Friendlys that blew through your elementary schools all those years ago. You’d dealt with a whole lot worse for a whole lot less. So why not give it a shot?
Dante looked nervous. Baba looked like he was already through D’s door. Sean looked like you were all about to make the biggest mistake of your young lives. And Rodney, having finished his sandwich, actually looked full. Nobody wanted to put an answer on the table. So you did it for them. You were gonna tell Butchie that you were in, but stake the place out for a few hours before you made a move.
You paged Butchie that afternoon and he gave you a green light. It was around 3:00 when you the made the call so you all decided to waiting until after 10:00 when the block would be night and settled in. While you were waiting, Sean took the wheel of your Accord hatchback and headed over to the local arsenal, where he happened to have a running tab. He came out five minutes after he went in with a Glock 9, two snub .38s, and a .380, enough for all of you except Rodney, who “didn’t do heat.”
As it turned out, D’s crib was the last house on the right at the bottom of Adrian, a little bungalow with a front and back yard. No basement and no alarm system, which appeared to mean that there were no problems. Texas Avenue was at the corner and Dupont Park was a block east.
Still, you decided to go with caution. Everybody took turns for three hours. The neighbors filed in car by car. By midnight all the lights in their cribs had gone dark.
Nobody went in or out of D’s place either. It seemed deserted, just like Butchie said it’d be. All you had to do was go in and get rich.
Dante decided to stay in the car. Sean told him to honk the horn twice if somebody was comin’. Baba went around the back to make sure nobody was gonna sneak in from the rear. Sean was gonna stay at the front gate. You and Rodney were gonna go up the steps, turn the key, and stuff the Jansport you used for your books with more cash than you’d held in your seventeen years on the planet.
Each step brought you closer to the prize. You were thinking of Catalina and Claiborne, of having her lips wrapped around you in the privacy of your own bedroom. You slipped Butchie’s key into the lock and it turned, putting a bigger smile on your face than Isaac from The Love Boat You turned to Rodney for some sign of approval. You looked just in time to see the buckshot take half his head off.
It was only God that kept you from going out with him. The blast was deafening. You tripped over the porch railing and did a double-back into the bushes underneath. From what you could tell, Sean returned fire, trading blasts with your fat homeboy’s killer. Babatunde picked you up and dragged you toward the car. Next thing you knew, Dante had parked at the river. The night sky didn’t have a star in it, but you had a full clip and one in the chamber, one you wanted to use on yourself.
Sean didn’t have a problem reminding you that he’d told you so. Dante’s hands were trembling. Baba wanted blood. You wanted a time-traveling DeLorean so you could go back and stop your boy from a closed-casket funeral. But once the shock wore off, you wanted answers.
Who the fuck were the niggas in there and why’d they open up on you so quick? If you’d been set up, what was the reason? If it was your bad luck, then why’d Rodney have to go out? The magnitude of it made your head hurt. But you couldn’t go home. You didn’t even want to make a phone call until the source of the problem was six feet deep.
Baba and Dante seconded the motion. Dante knew he should have covered the front with you. He was sitting in the car with a gun that could’ve saved his boy’s life. Sean felt the same way too. He just wanted you all to be careful. This was a bigger game than any of you had ever played. So you had to be smart, or you’d be as dead as Rodney.
After debating until dawn, you all decided the only move was to reach out to Butchie, to act like shit had gone as planned and then see what move he might make. Sure there were better ways to play it, but not with a bunch of young niggas working on fear, regret, and not a minute’s worth of sleep. You paged your betrayer just after 9:00 from a pay phone on Benning Road.
He called right back and you told him you had everything. You even mocked Scarface by saying you had “the money and the yayo.” He laughed and told you to meet him at his crib, the white house at the corner of Chaplin and Ridge. He even gave you the street number. You gave people street numbers.
Still, you pulled up to the given spot at the designated time, your lips greasy from the bag of sausage biscuits and hash browns you’d recently devoured. Why did you have to be so fucking greedy? Now you were leading a crew of five down to four, running on nothing but revenge.
You literally saw red when he opened the door in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and some boxer shorts. He said that you were early. You said that he was a dead motherfucker. Baba and Sean came in through an open window at the rear and you all let him have it.
Babo and Sean took the crib. They broke the glass-framed pictures and knocked over the credenza with all of his mom’s good dishes. Then they went to work on him, while you asked the questions.
It turned out that Butchie had been doing a little double-dealing. Just to make sure he got paid, he pitched the same offer to some dude named Rico who lived over by the fish place on Burns Street. Apparently they’d gotten there long before you did. Maybe they’d come through the back or on the side you couldn’t see so good. So they were on their way out with the goods as y’all were headed in.
However, Butchie hadn’t heard from them, which told you maybe they’d gotten caught by the cops, probably with the money and the weight in hand after the shoot-out. Did Rodney’s mom even know yet? Was there enough of his face left for a positive ID?
The bloody boy was talking so fast that he could’ve been speaking in tongues. He gave you Rico’s first and last name and told you where the place was. Sean and Baba found about $1,000, a half a brick, and a pump-action sawed-off with a bunch of shells. Had you actually been thinking, you would’ve pressed him for all the money he had, cake you knew had to be stashed somewhere. But now all you wanted was Rico. Rico would close the circle so y’all could get the shirts and suits ready.
3
This was no longer about what you wanted. It was about what had to be done. That’s what you told yourself in the mirror as you changed into that hot-ass hoodie, that this was the way things worked in the streets, that it was an eye for an eye and all that other shit.
But then, for a moment, you thought about your mama, about the two jobs she worked to keep a roof over your head, about all the efforts she made to get you out of that fucked-up neighborhood school and into that pre-engineering program. You thought about all those dreams you had of getting out of Southeast someday, of being a better dad than the one you never knew. You thought about all of those things and then shook them off when you closed the door behind you.
Dante brought his car so you could work in teams. Baba bought the walkie-talkies from the corner store on his block. You were in business. All you had to do was go to the designated crib and designate Rico’s ass — that is, if he happened to be home. Still, you hesitated when you turned your key in the ignition. It was as if you knew you’d made the wrong choice.