Chapter 3

I woke up about fourteen hours later, feeling sick and in pain. This was partly from sleeping on the floor, among the rumpled blankets and dirty clothes of my empty apartment, and partly from the beating I’d taken from LaShawn when he tried to make me a better street fighter; mostly by beating the crap out of me. My mom had left I don’t even know how long ago and good riddance to that junkie cunt. Still, she was the only bio parent I had ever known. I had never known my dad; from what I understand he was just some dumb nigger trying to squirt his jizz into any twat that would let him. My mom wasn’t much better, she was one of LaShawn’s best customers and I was glad when she just one day disappeared. As you can imagine my life was much less stressful when I didn’t have to deal daily living with a mentally ill crack addict. Maybe you’re feeling sorry for me at this point but, if you are, I’ll tell you not to. Getting rid of my parents is one of the best things that ever happened to me and I had plenty of father figures in the gangbangers of the projects. They didn’t try to shake me down, I was just a kid who didn’t have anything worth being shaken down for. No, instead they took pretty good care of me; if for no other reason than they knew I could be an asset to them. Kids my age are widely used to do the high risk jobs that you find in the projects. No matter what you do, unless its murder, you’re going to juvie and not real jail. So my life really wasn’t that bad and I was on the cusp of finally making some real money, as I got up and tried to straighten the kinks out of my I spine, I vowed my first purchase would be a luxury bed.

Maybe I’ll christen that bed by fucking that juicy white mom cunt on it.

The thought now reinvigorated me and I shook off the rest of my coke hangover. Heading off into the kitchen I forced myself a to chug an entire glass of water

“Ruh! Rah!” I growled at myself and then smacked myself in the face several times, literally trying to knock the rest of the sleep right out of me.

“Eye of the tiger bitch!” Smack! “Eye of the fuckin’ tiger!” Smack! Smack!

After taking a piss, I walked to the front door, slipped on my canvas shoes, and headed back over to LaShawn’s. He was up when I returned and, like me, he looked like maybe he regretted partying so hard the night before. He wasn’t his usual playful self and, when I asked about breakfast, he turned me down for the first time.

“We goin’ to the diner or what?” I said after letting myself in with the key I had taken the night before. LaShawn looked at me with his bloodshot eyes and then just slowly shook his head.

“I feel like shit.” said LaShawn. “The smell of eggs gonna make me wanna barf. And, since my stomach’s empty, I’m not gonna be able to. Two Aleve and 32 ounces of water gonna be my breakfast, at least for an hour or two but I got the information you wanted. More than you ever could have hoped for. Made one last call before I dropped off to sleep last night. Dude dropped the information off and didn’t even wake me. Just sitting there on the table in front of me when I woke up. How’s that for some high class service shit.”

“Alright so now I owe you one” I said, not really liking the feeling of being in debt to someone like LaShawn.

“Where is it. What do I got?”

“It’s the fuckin’ stack of papers, sitting right there on coffee table between us.”

He must have really been feeling like shit because LaShawn now made only the slightest motion with his hand. It waved in the direction of the coffee table but this was enough to indicate that he meant the few sheafs of white paper that lay amongst the clutter of empty soda cans, burnt out cigarette butts and the ash tray on the table. I picked them up and started to examine them, the only thing tempering my excitement at my newfound information being the emptiness in my growling stomach.

“Come on man, let’s go to the diner. I’m fuckin’ starvin’”

“I go to the diner with you. I go to the diner with you and force myself to eat something just so right after I can vomit it back up right in yo’ face. That what you want little man?”

I didn’t answer, just made a face indicating that he had asked a stupid question.

“Go on, get the fuck out of here. Go to the diner yourself or suffer through and wait and when I feel like I can eat something again, I come get you.”

“Pussy,” I now said, “you got out-partied by a fourteen year old.”

“Man, if I wasn’t feelin’ so bad I’d kick your ass for that comment.”

I smiled. Some of the old moxie was coming back into the guy I considered as much of a surrogate father as anyone.

“Hey thanks LaShawn. I really do owe you for this one.”

“You wanna thank me. Go on get the fuck out of here. And go on and break that bitch. I wanna meet her when your good and done with her. Ain’t met too many of those rich, white, suburban soccer moms that been broken and turned into slaves. Bet she be a hot fuck once you done with her.”

“Yeah, don’t worry” I said, “once she’s learns her proper place in the world, she gonna spread her legs for you just like she gonna spread her legs for everybody else. She gonna be takin’ every black cock in the projects all up in her juicy white pussy once I get done with her. I just might need your help again before all this is over. Just giving you a heads up.”

He nodded slightly, his head slumping down back towards his chest again. Whatever motivation he had to get up and take care of business was now rapidly leaving his body once again.

“Go on get out of here little man. I’m going back to sleep. Wish I wasn’t. Got business to take care of but I ain’t go no energy. Go on, get out of here and let me sleep.”

I did so without a further word and a few minutes later I was down in the diner, sipping coffee and eating oatmeal, all courtesy of the open tab that the owner had for LaShawn. It was one of the great benefits of working for LaShawn and, seeing as how he ran a cash only business, it made sense for him to offer it. As for the business owner, he always got paid in full at the end of the month; the people who ate on LaShawn’s tab probably being the only thing that kept the restaurant in business. As I ate, I examined the papers LaShawn had procured for me. She hadn’t lied; her name was Ms. Beverly Ann Moore, and she was forty and she and Donnie actually weren’t living in Manhattan. No, they were about a half hour away in a place called Alpine New Jersey. Her house was a full brick number with a whopping 7 bedrooms that sat on 3 prime acres in Bergen County. As to what a divorced woman and her fourteen year old son would need such a big house for I couldn’t guess but, I guess, when you are as rich as Beverly obviously was you just buy whatever the fuck you feel like and need never comes into the equation. Whatever the reason the divorce decree indicated that Beverly had gotten the home but, as to why they split up in the first case, it simply stated nothing but the frustratingly vague irreconcilable differences. Child custody was primarily Beverly’s with dad only getting visitation every other weekend. Child support was non-existent and page three of the custody arrangement made it clear why. While Beverly was CFO and CEO of Moore Accounting and Investments LLC, Jesse’s father wasn’t in charge of jack shit. His employment was listed as Central Heating and Air Conditioning with his job title listed as HVAC Technician. How Mrs. High Achieving Smarty Pants ended up with blue collar Joe was a mystery to me until I made it to the next page of the divorce decree. Under listed assets, all Mr. Todd Ferguson has listed was one vintage 1994 Harley Davidson Fat Boy motorcycle. I imagined little Miss Smarty Pants at the age of 18, clutching her handful of school books tightly to her chest, her little 18 year old pussy getting all kinds of wet for the tough looking guy on the motor cycle wearing sunglasses, jeans and a leather jacket. Ah, the stupid things we do when we’re young. All the dumb shit people who haven’t lived a life on the street still believe when they’re teenagers. Miss High IQ was probably so stupid as to actually believe she and motorcycle boy a.k.a Todd Ferguson could live happily ever after. Hell, I was only fourteen and hadn’t been in school for months and I could have told her that shit was destined to fail. Oh well, all the better because getting married and then getting fucked, and somehow I couldn’t imagine Miss Beverly letting those two things happen in any other order than that, had produced one Mr. Jesse Ferguson, a.k.a Beverly’s son. A kid that Beverly would be getting to know much better in the coming days and weeks if I had anything to say about it. The last page of the bundle was the best and my heart skipped a beat when I saw just how thorough LaShawn had managed to be. Every country has its own free market and that market is known as the black market. It’s probably something I, as a black kid, should be offended about but instead I wear it as a badge of pride. I see me and my niggas as the true entrepreneurs of society, providing products and services that people want and are willing to pay for, without letting the man tell us what we can and can’t do with our own bodies. People would be surprised just how much information is for sale for the right price and often cheaper than what they might assume. And there that information was, staring back at me, and I had to keep looking at it for a minute before I could believe it. Every last detail, straight from the national alarm company itself, of little Mrs. Beverly’s private home security system. Alarm Disable codes, door unlock codes, frequency and data to control all sorts of things in her home. Lights, garage door, even shades and thermostat. Oh, I was betting that her home alarm system gave that moronically succulent MILF a false sense of security and that was something I would enjoy exploiting to the fullest. Now it was just a matter of having one more meeting and then suffering through waiting until I got word that my plan had been put into action. I wolfed down the rest of my oatmeal and then headed back towards the housing project. I needed to talk to Cheeba and Street, my two best buds and a couple of guys who were dying to get in on what LaShawn was selling. By that I don’t mean the drugs he was selling but the opportunity to make bank by going to work for him. I knew they would do anything I asked them to if I promised to put in a good word and today was the day that they were going to show me whether they could handle a hustle as well as I thought they could. They were chilling in their crib when I got there. Like me, they didn’t bother going to school anymore and, like me, their dad had just been passing through and he had bugged out probably two minutes after he squirted the two of them deep inside their mom. Lord only knew where she was; she was in and out every couple of days at best and her two twin boys, only told apart by the dreadlocks Street wore in his hair, took it upon themselves to survive using her EBT card. The TV was on to snow when I got there, the Maury show barely visible among the static, while the two brothers were slumped on the only piece of furniture and placing bets on whether the next male would indeed be that baby’s daddy.