Hood (21 page)

It’s about to be a showdown

Whoaa now…

Got me paranoid lookin all around,

Say it ain’t nothing to it but to keep it moving,

Or some shit gonna have to go down…

ABOUT A WEEK
later Sackie sat on the toilet smoking a cigarette and taking a shit. The loud voices on the other side of the door were fuckin with him hard, and he inhaled deeply as he tried to get his temper under control and figure out his next move.

He was itching to crack Dreko’s grill.

It was Sunday morning and Dreko was in the spot wildin out on Zena, getting up in her face and scaring the shit out of their daughter. Sackie knew his sister was terrified shitless of Dreko. Plenty of gangstas on the street were scared of him too. But lately Sackie had been getting a vibe that all Dreko’s wildin out on Zena was really aimed at him instead of his sister. He bonked out on her almost every time Sackie was in range. Like he was daring Sackie to G up for his sister or something. And the more Sackie tried to stay cool on that shit, the harder Dreko rode Zena. He rode the hell outta his baby daughter too.

The lit cigarette made a quick whooshing sound as Sackie reached between his thighs and plucked it into the cold toilet water. He could hear baby Andreka screaming in the living room, and Zena was crying in her bedroom too.

“Shit.” Sackie stood up and looked in the mirror. Zena was stupid as fuck over Dreko and Sackie had sworn he was gonna stay out of their biz. No matter how bad Dreko shit on Zena and Egypt, he was their crack daddy and they submitted to him at all costs. Zena was long lost, and Egypt was just as bad. The guilt Sackie felt over Fat Daddy’s murder was the only thing keeping his tongue quiet about her. If it hadn’t been his gat that had smoked her father, Sackie would have put Hood down on his girl a long time ago.

Anger burned in his clear blue eyes as he stared at the reflection of his own scowl and listened to them going at it on the other side of the door. He was almost sure that half the shit Dreko was talking was meant for his ears and he wasn’t gonna be pushed but so hard. He was tired of Dreko and his shiesty stroll. He was tired of watching him shit on good people too.

It had taken Sackie some thought, but he’d finally figured out why Dreko hadn’t tried to take him or Lil Jay out yet, and why he had gone all out to make sure Hood beat his attempted murder charge and got back out on the streets.

The cat was an actor.

He liked to floss and he had to have an audience to impress. None of the shit he’d amassed was worth jack unless Dreko could flaunt it in the right faces. He gave a fuck about what the dun duns and the doljahs thought. They were real easy to impress. But they hadn’t walked the hard roads with him. None of them had been around to bear witness to the bottom rung he’d started out from, and then seen how high he had climbed. Sackie and Lil Jay had known him from kiddiehood and could testify to his upward travels.

And Hood? Shit. Dreko had been running a fever ever since the night all those years ago when Xan had put Hood in charge. By putting Dreko beneath Hood on the food chain Xan had practically sealed his own death warrant. Dreko had waited years for the right opportunity to come blasting out of that number two spot. He had burned every day with the need to show Xan and Hood who was really number one on the block, and he’d done it too. The streets were his. Fuck all the bodies he’d had to lay down just to prove a point. Xan was dead and Dreko was in charge. He’d done it.

Zena’s cries were louder. More like shrieks of alarm now. The baby’s cries had changed too. She was actually yelping like a puppy whose paw had been stomped on.

“Hell fuckin nah,” Sackie muttered, storming out of the bathroom. Zena was one thing. His niece was something else. He entered the living room to find Zena jumping on Dreko’s back as he gripped the screaming baby by her tiny wrist. Her naked little body twisted in the air as she dangled painfully by her father’s side.

“Yo, muhfucka!” Sackie ran across the room and stopped in front of Dreko. They stood toe to toe, eye to eye. Sackie reached for the baby as Dreko snatched her away. “Man what the fuck is you tryna do? Break her fuckin arm?”

Zena was still screaming and punching all over Dreko’s back. He didn’t even feel it as he shifted his weight and threw her off with almost no effort. Zena hit the floor and moaned, then rolled over with her teary face upturned toward her brother. Her eyes begged for help and Sackie found it hard to resist.

“Is this your fuckin baby?” Dreko spit, yanking Andreka painfully and thrusting the baby up higher in the air until his arm was above his head. The baby yelped then shrieked louder. Urine ran from her tiny body and trickled down her legs to the floor, splattering her father’s new boots.

“Gimme her,” Sackie demanded, reaching for his tiny niece. She wailed with her mouth wide open and her terrified eyes were full of tears. Damp tendrils of curly hair clung to her face.

“I said give her to me, you stupid muthafucka!”

Dreko laughed and turned away, pushing Sackie in the chest as he jerked Andreka out of reach again. Then lowering her slightly, he kissed his daughter on her wet, open mouth and chuckled at her frightened screams. He laughed again, and then without warning he tossed her. Hurled by one arm, the baby flew past Sackie and landed on the sofa where she had been sleeping peacefully before all the madness started.

“Man, you is crazy!” Sackie said in disbelief. He rushed over to the baby and picked her up. “Straight fuckin crazy. This is your little girl you throwing around, Dreko!”

“Yo,” Dreko warned, “you gone wanna stay the fuck outta my business, Sackie,” Dreko said, his voice deadly. He touched the spot on his waistband where Sackie knew he kept his burner. “You run ya mouth too fuckin much.”

Sackie’s hand went to his side as well. He had his strap on too.

“Oh?” Dreko said, eyebrows raised. He stepped up closer. “You wanna get with me, muhfucka? Come on wit’ it. I’ll open up ya fuckin forehead right now. Bloody this whole muhfuckin crib up! Let’s go!”

Sackie backed off. He wasn’t scared of Dreko. He just didn’t want no gunfire and bloodshed going down in front of his sister and his niece. He’d be patient and save that shit for another time and another place.

Noting his hesitation, Dreko nodded. “That’s what the fuck I thought. If you wanna do something to me, you better do it. Otherwise, go sit your stupid ass down at that computer and stay outta my biz. I do whatever the fuck I wanna do around here, homey. With Zena and with Dreka, because both of them ugly bitches belong to me.”

I hope you lil cats got ya game perfected…

Don’t come around here and get ya gangsta tested!

“SEE YOU NEXT
week, Mrs. Ono,” Sackie said a couple of days later as he left the Asian dry cleaners through a back door. It was his last stop for the day, and his whip was parked in an alley in back of the store where a couple of corner doljahs waited inside.

The thin old woman smiled and waved real cheery like, as if Sackie wasn’t forcing her and her sick husband to wash Dreko’s drug money through her busy little shop each week. There were more than thirty small business owners like her in the hood whose laundered funds were funneled to Sackie’s uncle Pete, who in turn set up phony accounts and invested in high-yield stocks. But it was Sackie who studied the market and anticipated the trends. He decided when it was time to buy and when they should sell, and over the past few years he had made so much legal money for D.W.I.T. that he was far more valuable than any trap boy or sector capo.

With the day’s work done Sackie dropped the doljahs off and drove off as his mind wandered back to the two problems he had at hand: Hood and Dreko.

Every bit of loyalty he had in his heart went to Hood. There was no doubt about that. Yeah, he had smoked Fat Daddy and if Hood ever found out he was the trigger-man it might bring some awkward shit between them, but these were the streets. Cats did what they had to do to survive, and he hoped if that news ever reached Hood’s ears his boy would understand that. Killing a muhfucka was a common thing out here. There was no shame in pulling out a tool and puttin in work. Every one of them had done it at one time or another. But it was that second problem that fucked with Sackie’s head the most. The shit with Dreko, and the small matter that had gotten Hood knocked and sent out on the Rock in the first place.

Sackie walked down Pitken Avenue, deep in thought. There was no other way to look at it. Dreko was worse than psycho. He was a fuckin snitch. Sackie had practically heard it from the horse’s mouth. In fact, he’d gotten it from the very detective who had cuffed Hood and administered him an ass-whipping on the morning of his arrest. The fat, redheaded cop was dirty, and worked out of the 73rd. Before joining the force he had run hard with Sackie’s Uncle Pete, and whenever he got a little extra change from street busts and cash bribes he called on Sackie to help guide his market investments. The DT had told Sackie that the call had come from somebody inside the abandoned house where they busted Hood. And since the only other person who had been there ended up getting away with the entire proceeds of a drug hit, come on. It didn’t take a fuckin stock whiz kid to figure out how to add that shit up.

But dropping that kinda bomb in Hood’s lap was gonna create some severe consequences, Sackie knew. Hood loved Dreko, for real. They had history, and Hood would never forget how Dreko had run to the hospital with Moo cradled in his arms. That act alone had earned Dreko Hood’s loyalty for life, but Sackie had to admit that Dreko had been hard-body and loyal too, dead on point for Hood for a lot of years. No doubt he had some kinda twisted love for his man. But Dreko also had a lot of jealousy and hate for Hood too.

Hood was street smart as fuck, though. Sooner or later he’d be forced to face up to who Dreko really was, and that shit wasn’t gonna be nothing nice. Sackie knew his boy was a beast, and he’d come out clawing and biting savagely like one too. Yeah, there’d be some casualties but that was a risk Sackie was willing to take. And hell yeah he had his own reasons for wanting Dreko deaded. If Hood didn’t do it then Sackie might have to.

And why not? The cat made a mockery of the G-code and he wasn’t fit to live. He brutalized women. He terrorized babies. He was a snitch bitch who had risen to the top the grimy way, and for that alone the penalty he paid had to be most severe.

The corner of Bristol and Pitken was crowded. Sackie found a parking spot and ducked into a pizza shop, bought a slice, then walked down the street eating it. When he got back to Hopkinson Avenue where his whip was parked, he climbed behind the wheel, hit Hood on the chirp and told him to meet him at the crib.

By the time Hood arrived Sackie was on the computer browsing the NASDAQ website and studying Standard & Poor’s figures from the
New York Times.

“Whattup,” Hood greeted his man. He dapped him and stepped into the small apartment.

“What it do?”

Hood shrugged, taking off his jacket. He pulled up a chair from the dining table and sat down beside Sackie so he could see the computer screen. “Same shit. Me and Dreko been out there runnin the business. Keeping shit tight. What we looking like in the bank?”

Sackie leaned back in his chair, and put his arms behind his head. He frowned at the computer screen, then turned to Hood. “I don’t know what the fuck
we
lookin like, man. But I know how you lookin. Blinded.”

Hood cocked his head. “Man what the fuck is you talkin about?”

“Dig,” Sackie said quietly. He swiveled his long legs around and turned to face his boy. “You my man, Hood. That’s truth. A whole lotta cats out here couldn’t even see me as a G until you and Xan embraced me and shot down all that bullshit they was talking. You know I’ll pump a round in a cat’s throat over you, and there’s never been a time when you had to question my loyalty or my heart.”

“Man,” Hood laughed. “What the fuck is up with you?”

“Ain’t shit wrong with me,” Sackie barked. “But what the fuck is wrong with your eyes, muhfucka? What happened? You got locked up and went blind? All that fuckin time you sat up on that Rock and you ain’t spend none of it wondering how the fuck you got there? How did them jakes know where to find you, Hood? Just how the fuck did they sniff you out and follow your trail straight back to that empty house?”

“I know how they peeped me. It was one of Chaos’s boys. One of the niggas his mule was making a delivery to. We had ’em all tied up on the floor and one of them bitches snitched. Dreko got him, though. That cat got handled a long time ago.”

Sackie shook his head. “Or it coulda been the muhfucka who got away with the coke too. You ever stop to think of that?”

Hood shook his head too, like he didn’t wanna believe it, but of course he had considered everything about his case left and right and from bottom to top. Six months alone is enough time to think. Even longer when you might be facing twenty years more years. In this game every fuckin body was a suspect. But he wasn’t about to show his hand to Sackie. Not yet anyway.

“Man what was Dre supposed to do with all that powder? Give that shit back? By the time he got to Xan that grimy bastard had already smoked Fat Daddy! There was nothing else to do but keep it!”

Sackie swallowed hard at the mention of Fat Daddy’s name.

He shook his head, praying Hood would see the truth and he wouldn’t have to tell it all.

“That’s a lie, man. Fat Daddy was alive and well and counting on you to come through. Xan was on time waiting for his package, and if he had gotten it shit woulda been all the way straight. Dreko is lying. Fat Daddy didn’t get capped until
after
that dope disappeared.”

“How the fuck you know all this, Sack? Was you there? Dreko been like a brother to me. We jumped into this game together side by side, and when that fuckin prosecutor wanted me to face the music in that courtroom, it was Dreko who made sure the tune got changed. I walked outta there a free man, Sackie. If Dreko was dirty, why the fuck would he do that?”

“Because he just had to
show
you man. Letting you sit in jail and hear about it wouldn’t have done it for him. He needs you out on the streets so he can show you every single day, man. That’s what get his juice going on a daily, man. Pushing it up in you face that it was him who took the top kingpin down, and that makes him bigger and better than you.”

Hood shook his head.

Sackie tried harder. “Come on, man! You might
think
that dude got love for you! But who else knew where y’all was that morning besides Dreko and Xan? Which one of them muthafucka benefitted from getting you off the streets?”

Sackie scooted his chair close and spoke fast.

“Dig. From way back in the day Xanbar set up our ranking order. You was always number one and Dreko was always number two. You didn’t smell nothin shitty when you came home and seen Dre had a number one plastered on his grill? What? You going to jail automatically meant when you got out he became the boss and you became his bitch?”

Hood stood up and dapped Sackie without another word. He was no fool, and he knew Sackie wasn’t no hater and he wasn’t no emotional muthafucka neither. Sackie was a loyal soldier and a trusted G. Hood had been weighing his own suspicions ever since the morning he got knocked, and even though he kept them on the low, they had always been there. He just hadn’t been willing to bring no charge to the table unless he knew certain things for sure. Everybody’s loyalty was liable to be tested in this game. He would make his own moves in his own way. In his own time.

Hood walked out of Sackie’s crib spittin what would end up becoming one of his most famous rhymes.

A million dollars in ya hands—

what’s power to you?

But if he tellin’ on his man—

what’s a coward to you?

You on ya muthafuckin grind!

what’s a shower to you?

Don’t let the money change you

It do what you allow it to do!