“Please, don’t kill me. Don’t kill me. Please. Please!”
He was sweating like a runaway slave and tears mixed with snot and saliva drooled from his mouth in long ropes. His eyes were bulging and fidgeting in their eye-sockets. I couldn’t have imagined a more pathetic site. He had lost his mind just like that. Scared stupid.
“Yo, man, shoot this nigga. He done bugged da fuck out!”
I shook my head, trying to get the image out of my mind before it could take root and form another unwanted memory. It was too much. This shit was getting to me. I was losing the plot. It wouldn’t be too long before I was a gibbering buffoon just like this fool. This shit had to stop. I had to get out.
“You shoot him. I’m out of bullets.”
I snatched the bag from his hand and stumbled over the bodies and out of the apartment, my Timberlands sloshing through the puddles of blood. I walked into a hallway crowded with spectators. I was mindless of their stares. It was a given that they would all lose their memories by the time the police rolled up. Scratch ran shit in the projects and I was his most feared enforcer and you didn’t drop dime on either one of us if you placed any value at all on your life.
The AK erupted seconds after I had left the room. Tank was right behind me as I took the stairs two at a time. The whole thing had taken less than fifteen minutes, about ten minutes longer than it should have, but I knew that we still had at least another five minutes before the cops arrived. Niggas killing niggas didn’t make for an emergency in North Philly. The cops down there didn’t like the idea of getting in gunfights inside the buildings. Everyone in the projects hated cops, almost all of them were armed, and police were their common enemies. Every door they passed on the way up to the crime scene held the potential for a hero’s funeral. All the police who patrolled these slums did was steal from the younger dealers and shake down the crack whores for pussy and head. Whenever anything serious went down they would wait until they were sure the gunmen had fled the scene before they went busting in. It was better to catch the perpetrators hours later when they were hiding under their grandmother’s bed than to step into some violent drama.
When Tank and I got back to G-town I was determined that I had done my last job for Scratch. I had said that before. But this time was different. We had never done anything this crazy before, walking into the middle of a drug den with no obvious means for a quick escape and blasting away like cowboys. We had done plenty of drive-bys and even close up and personal shit. But nothing this dangerous before. If I could have gotten a job sweeping floors and cleaning toilets right then I would have taken it without hesitation, but I knew that a day or two listening to the snickers of disrespect from my peers and I’d pick up the gun again. My pride would always make me choose gunshots and blood over humility. Even if it was the blood of people the same color as me.
Huey was right. I was a sell-out. I was working for a blue-eyed devil committing genocide against my own people.
If God truly loves Black folks I’ll die in my sleep. I thought as I laid down in my bed and tried to cry myself to sleep. It didn’t surprise me at all when neither sleep nor tears would come.
— | — | —
Chapter 11
“…Nothing undermines the Christian belief in God more than the existence of evil. If God is all-good and all-powerful, how can God allow evil to happen?”
—Roy F. Baumeiste, PH.D,
EVIL, Inside Human Violence and Cruelty
««—»»
Scratch was feeling desperate. Sweat bulleted down his pale face as his eyes darted from one side of the street to the other, probing every shadow for signs of life. His expression was no different than that of the drug addicts he passed. Each shambling corpse-like crack-fiend alerted his senses like a shark smelling blood in the water. His prey was somewhere close. He could almost smell her.
Trash blew down the street like tumbleweeds pushed by a gentle breeze. Packs of mongrel dogs hunted through the alleys for garbage, growling cautiously at the dope fiends who proliferated there as well. Most of the streetlights had long been broken and only one or two on each block remained lit. The night was concentrated into solid opaque curtains of black on either side of his headlights. He felt like an invading army as he accelerated through the dark, cutting a swath through the night, reveling in his alienness. Both his conspicuous affluence and his skin tone set him apart from his surroundings. He was out of place amid the honest working people who lived here as well as the welfare recipients and drug addicts. Even among the other criminals his lack of ethnicity set him apart. He liked it that way. Everything about the ghetto disgusted him. Even though it was the source of his wealth he was glad he’d never truly be a part of it. His relationship with the people who lived here was simply a predatory one. They were the nourishment he thrived on. They kept his pockets and his stomach filled.
Tonight Scratch was out alone. He had to find the whore and kill the baby without interruptions or long explanations to any of his underlings, not even Yellow Dog. Scratch was still hoping he could murder the bastard before it was born. He’d raped and killed nearly two dozen crack-whores in the last few years and still he could feel the baby’s presence. It was alive and it would be born soon.
The streets were desolate. The same five-dollar whores shambled along peering wide-eyed into the Beemer hoping for a drug-dealer who’s dick they could suck for a rock or two. The extravagantly dressed crack dealer waved them away like flies, his platinum custom Rolex reflecting starlight into their half-conscious faces. They were all too far gone. Their wombs were barren and dry from drug abuse and would probably never hold a seed again, least of all the one he was looking for.
Scratch drove the side streets deep in the heart of Germantown. He was far away from the Avenue now, but crackwhores could be found anywhere in G-town. He knew where every crack den and shooting gallery was for six miles in every direction. Rock cocaine’s influence here was nearly omnipotent. Mothers lit up after sending their kids off to school. Fathers hit the pipe after work before coming home to face their depressed and disappointed families. Kids smoked rocks behind the gym at school. And every one of them was just one or two hits away from sucking dicks in alleys for the next rock.
Even in the more residential areas nearly every alleyway flickered with the glow of heated glass and boiling cocaine. The corners on every major intersection were crowded with dealers, talking on cell phones and eyeing every passing car for a potential customer, rival, or cop. Most of them worked either directly or indirectly for Scratch. And wherever the dealers were, crackwhores circled like buzzards sniffing carrion. But none of them were who he was looking for.
Scratch turned onto Tulpehocken Street passing row after row of small rundown houses crammed together like dominoes waiting to fall. Their windows were darkened except for one or two on each block where the flickering blue light of television sets illuminated sleeping figures or where lights were left on in front rooms and on porches to discourage burglars who preferred to work under cover of night. A massive old church squatted on one corner looking dark and ominous like the structure itself was the embodiment of God, waiting to pass judgement on the sinners proliferating around it. Scratch shook his head in amusement as he peered through the front window of the church at the enormous statue of a crucified Jesus with skin as pale as his own. He wondered how it felt to worship a God rendered in the image of the race that had oppressed your kind for centuries. Perhaps the Black people who lived here took some comfort in seeing the most powerful white man on earth nailed to a cross and bleeding to death. Scratch laughed out loud when he saw the familiar glow of a crackpipe coming from behind the tall hedges surrounding the church. Crack had made church all but obsolete. Both heaven and hell were now just one hit away.