Baltimore Chronicles (3 page)

“Yo, he said to kill this nigga,” Trail said, no emotion behind his words as he hung up the phone.

“No. Please, Trail, help me, man. Sticks, please,” the boy pleaded as he sat on a small chair in the middle of the floor, surrounded by members of the Dirty Money Crew.

The boy's begging and pleading for mercy amused the crew, who were laughing and making light of his impending doom, but he saw it as a last-ditch effort to save himself. Only fifteen, he felt he was too young to die. The day he took Scar's offer to join the crew, he'd made the worst mistake of his life, and he knew it now more than ever.

“Nigga, your trap was short seven fuckin' times in a row. Then you show up in the hood with a fuckin' brand-new-ass Escalade, paid out in cash! You can't afford that shit, nigga. You ain't move up in this game yet. Ain't nobody gonna surpass Scar's status. When you stole from that nigga and tried to floss like you was larger than him, you sealed your fate. You thought a nigga like Scar was gone, vamoose, and that you was gonna get away with having larceny in yo' heart. Well, nigga, I just got word from the king of these streets. The order has been given?you're a dead man.” Sticks' face curled into a hard scowl, stiff and emotionless like stone.

“Yo, I can pay it back. It wasn't that much, I swear. I just been saving for a minute,” the boy begged, shaking his legs back and forth.

All of the Dirty Money Crew members began laughing uproariously. They thought this little begging-ass boy was amusing, and they were particularly anxious to see him get his punishment, even if it meant murder. In Scar's absence the crew all looked to Sticks for their orders, and he knew he definitely had something to prove.

“Yo, now a nigga wanna cop a plea,” Timber said. He was one of the new members of the crew. “Let me kill him, slow and painful like. I will cut off his eyelids so the nigga can't blink. I will remove that nigga's fingernails and toenails one by one while he watch.” Timber got menacingly close to the boy's face.

Timber was a wild boy, and he was helping the Dirty Money Crew wreak havoc on the streets of Baltimore. He had relocated from Alabama to Baltimore with his mother, and it wasn't long before he got knee-deep into the streets. He had told Sticks and Trail that he got his nickname Timber because one night when he was eleven, he went out into his backyard, sawed off a tree branch and beat his stepfather to death with it for hitting on his mother. When the word spread about him to all the gangs in Alabama, they started calling him Little Timber after that, and the name stuck. (
Tim-ber
!” was what the tree cutters in Alabama called out when they cut trees down.) After Timber felt the power surge from his first murder, it became nothing for him. He was ruthless and was into torture. In fact, he craved the sensational rush he got from committing heinous acts.

“Nah, I'ma do this shit Scar-style?short and sweet, no need for a bunch of blood and guts and shit,” Sticks said. He really just wanted to assert his power and show off his bravado in front of the younger dudes in the crew. Murder and mayhem was what he wanted on his tombstone.

“Yo, Scar always gives a nigga his chance to have last rites. “So what is it gonna be?” Sticks said to the boy. You got a choice, nigga—call a bitch, call your moms, or you wanna chance to pray to God? Don't think too long, nigga. I ain't got all day.”

Staring death in the eyes, the boy thought to himself,
This can't be real.
Crying like a baby and trembling like a leaf, he agreed to a call to his mother to say good-bye. He figured at least she would know he was thinking of her before he died. He couldn't imagine how she would react if he had gone missing for weeks, or when the police finally came to the door to tell her they had found his body. He wanted to tell her good-bye himself. In his mind, he was saying,
Fuck God
, because if there was a God, He would save him right now.

“I'ma call my moms,” the boy whined through the tsunami of tears that covered his face.

Sticks kept his gun trained on the boy. “Tell this nigga the number to dial,” he instructed the boy. The boy did as he was told, and Trail punched the numbers in on one of their many disposable track phones they used to communicate about their business and to speak to Scar, to avoid being traced.

Trail put the phone on speaker, and after three rings, the boy heard his mother's melodic voice filter through the speaker.

“Hello?” she answered.

“Ma! Ma!” the boy cried out.

“Anthony? What's the matter? Where are you?” his mother said, concern streaming through her words.

“Say bye, nigga,” Sticks whispered, placing the cold steel up against the boy's temple.

“Bye, ma! I love you forever!!” the boy screamed.

“Anthony!” his mother screamed.

Trail disconnected the line.

Bang!
One shot to the temple, and the boy's body slumped from the chair and hit the floor with an ominous thud.

“One down, two more Frank Lucas snitch-ass niggas to go,” Sticks said. Temporarily put in charge by Scar, Sticks had vowed that the streets would be sorry for the day he was born. He remembered all the ill-treatment he'd suffered at Scar's hands in the training phase of his come-up. Now he was prepared to take it out on anybody who got in his way, even members of the crew.

Sticks, Trail, Timber, and four new young members of the Dirty Money Crew loaded into two black Suburbans. Sticks drove slowly through the streets of Baltimore, blasting Drake and Lil Wayne. The bass and the lyrics had them all hyped. All except Sticks, who was silent and intently focused on his mission, while the other members were laughing and cracking jokes on each other.

“Yo! Y'all gotta shut the fuck up!” Sticks screamed. “We about to go handle some serious business. If Scar was here, y'all niggas would be like church mice up in this bitch, scared to fuckin' make a peep!”

An immediate hush fell over the vehicle.

“Now, we gonna ride out slow and easy. This nigga Bam think shit is one hun'ed. I wanna scope out his spots first.” Sticks spoke calmly, as if he didn't just scream on them. He was a perfectionist when it came to a mission. For him, failure wasn't an option.

Sticks was a hungry dude from day one; he'd never had shit given to him. When Scar had met him, he could tell the boy would do almost anything to put food in his starving stomach. Which was why Scar had chosen him. Scar had groomed him much like a trainer would groom a prize fighter. So when Sticks collected his first couple of stacks, his loyalty to Scar was sealed. Scar figured he was the perfect one to run shit, allowing him to lay low.

They drove down a block and were careful to stay two or three buildings away from their destination.

“Look, there go that nigga right there,” Trail said in a low tone, pointing out a hustler named Bam that had been on the crew's radar for some prime real estate he owned in the Baltimore drug trade.

Before anybody else could do or say anything, Sticks accelerated and rolled up on the rival dealer without warning. The truck tires screeched against the street, startling everyone on the block.

Before anyone could react, Sticks threw the truck in park and was out in a millisecond. He ran up to Bam, his gun drawn. “Yo, I thought I told you we staging a takeover of this set!” Sticks screamed as he rushed towards Bam.

Bam threw his hands up in surrender.

It was too late. He had been caught slippin' and clearly not prepared for the huge .45-caliber gun sitting in his face. “Your choice was to get down or lay down, like that dude Beanie Sigel said. You chose to lay down, muthafucka,” Sticks growled.

Boom!

One shot to the dome, and Bam's body crumpled to the ground, leaving the other members of Scar's crew in shock. Screams erupted everywhere.

“Go in the mu'fucka and clean it out. Drugs and money!” Sticks barked, whirling around with his gun, swinging to ward off everybody.

The rest of the crew members raced into Bam's trap house and looted as fast as they could.

Sticks had always instructed them that they had eight minutes from beginning to end to do a “jux.” He had timed the 9-1-1 response, the time it took the police to get up and out on a call.

He looked at his watch. They were almost on schedule but not quite. He could hear the distant wail of sirens. “Let's go!” he ordered. “We ain't got no witnesses.” He called out to the crowd of onlookers and to Bam's little crew. “I saw all y'all faces?Anybody snitch, I will be back!”

Sticks and the rest of the Dirty Money Crew loaded back into their vehicles and rolled out.

Trail was fuming mad. He didn't understand why Sticks didn't give him any forewarning that he was going to murder Bam. He huffed, “Nigga, how you just gonna jump the fuck out and not say shit? No heads-up or nothing?”

“Hesitation leads to reservations. One ounce of doubt and you a fuckin' dead man on these streets,” Sticks said calmly. He didn't give a fuck about anyone's feelings. This game and all its little quirks was all about a paper chase and power for him.

“You could've still said something,” Trail told him. “Let a nigga know what you was about to do and shit.”

“Damn, mu'fucka! Pull your skirt down. I can't take no bitchy whining and complaining shit. If we gonna be on this new shit, taking down all the other niggas in Baltimore, we don't have time to run our mouths like bitches. Now drop the fuckin' subject and follow my lead, nigga. I mean, you either get down or lay down!”

Trail did as he was told and shut his mouth, but he didn't like it. He twisted his lips to the side and bopped his head to the music in an effort to keep himself quiet. Shit was definitely different than when Scar was home. Trail noticed that since Scar had left, Sticks was more ruthless than ever. He was letting the young'uns run wild in the streets of Baltimore, killing any person—man, woman, or child—that got in their way. They were collecting money almost every hour. All of the street contracts and territorial agreements Scar had made with rival hustlers was out the window once he left. Sticks had single-handedly dismantled a commission of hustlers that Scar had put together years ago to divide up the drug territories and put an end to a war that was going on at the time. Although Scar had assigned himself the most lucrative spots and the biggest piece of the pie, the other hustlers got down with the commission because they were afraid of the consequences if they refused. Shit on the streets was all good after that. There were a little jealous spats here and there, but whenever niggas heard Scar wasn't happy, those little sidebar fights quickly turned into truces.

Now, Trail was worried that Sticks, if he wasn't careful, could start one of the biggest drug wars in Baltimore's history, even bigger than the one Scar put an end to where seventy street dudes had been killed in a five-month span.

 

Finally, Sticks pulled the vehicle up on the other side of town. Trail bit down into his jaw. He knew that this entire south side belonged to Tango, another big hustler in Baltimore. Tango and Scar had finally settled their beef over streets years ago with the formulation of the commission, drawing imaginary lines in the Baltimore streets.

“Yo, Timber, you ready to earn your wings, nigga?” Sticks asked.

“I was born ready. Where they at?” Timber said with his thick country accent.

“That's their main hub right there. I heard they collect like six hundred thousand stacks every eight hours. We about to take their day's work.” Sticks laughed like he was a damn maniac.

“A'ight, let's get it,” Timber said, pulling on the truck's door handle with one hand, while he gripped a stolen AK-47 in the other.

 

Danielle rolled her eyes as her mother rambled on with another lecture. She was thinking, her mother just didn't get it. The more Dana told her to stay away from boys, sex, and drugs, the more Danielle was drawn to them. Today though, it was a different lecture. Her mother was trying to convince her to go and spend more time with her older sister. Ever since she had turned sixteen, Danielle had begun to smell herself, thinking she was grown.

“Why should I go spend the weekends at her house, Ma? She's a cop, and I hate the police!” Danielle said. “Plus, she's boring. Ain't nobody trying to sit up in her face all day talking about nothing at all.” She folded her arms across her ample breasts and shifted her weight from one foot to another.

Dana was determined to get her to focus on something other than the streets and she wasn't trying to hear it. “First of all, your sister has a very good job. She helps pay most of the bills in here and keeps you in all of that expensive stuff you like to wear. You can show her you appreciate her. She loves you, and besides, you used to like to spend time with her.”

Danielle rolled her eyes as she applied a full face of make-up. At sixteen, she resembled a grown-ass woman. Thirty-six D cup breasts, a small waist, plump round hips, and an ass you could set a glass on made her a hot commodity in the hood. She got a million attempts at getting with her a day, and knew just how to play the game. Danielle wasn't interested in traditional school. She was from the “use-what-you-got-to-get-what-you-want” school, having learned from the best—her mother. And she damn sure didn't have time to spend with her lame-ass sister.

“Look, you're becoming too spoiled, Dani. One day your sister is going to cut you off, and then what you gon' do? Huh?” Her mother took a long drag off her cigarette.

Danielle sucked her teeth. She always felt unloved because she never knew her father. And ever since she could remember, Maria had been like a second parent.

“Fine. I'll go with her for the weekend, if you let me go to a party with Veronica and my friends first.”

“She will be here on Saturday morning to get you, so have your ass back up in here. You act like spending time with her is going to kill you. You should try to appease her, as much as she does for us. When she cuts us off, your lips gonna be poked out. If that happens, your hot ass ain't gonna get those little stripper-ass outfits you like to wear.” Dana blew a ring of smoke toward her daughter.