The BMW turned down Ambrose Street and Scratch smiled. This was where his most feared enforcer lived. He wondered if Snap was still awake. He thought maybe he should take the kid with him if he was going to start crashing crackhouses, but he knew that Snap and his partner Tank had just finished taking down a rival drug crew and were probably already drunk or high and trying to sleep it off. He cruised silently past Malik’s house chuckling over the irony of the man working.
“I should have that nigga, Snap, snuff the baby. I’ll see how down he really is. Even after all the fools he’s bodied, he still believes in some kind of redemption. I bet you puttin’ a bullet in a pregnant woman will kill all that noise.” He laughed again as he turned the corner.
His headlights slashed across the road illuminating a woman wearing tight jeans that had probably been baggy at one time, but were now so restrictive that she couldn’t button them or zip them up in front. Her swollen belly protruded through the open fly with her T-shirt riding high above her navel. She wore plastic flip-flops on her feet and Scratch could tell by the way she shuffled that she’d been hooked on drugs for a long time. Scratch pulled the car up next to her.
“Want to smoke with me?”
He held a glass pipe out the window with a rock of cocaine already loaded inside. He watched the pregnant woman’s eyes widen and seize on the crackpipe.
“Nuh, no. I can’t. I’ve got to stay clean for my baby.”
She was still staring at the pipe and almost drooling.
“When was the last time you had a hit, huh? A week ago? Two days ago? Quitting now ain’t goin’ to do a damn thing to help your baby. The damage is already done. So why don’t you get in here and suck on this dick. The glass one and this one.” Scratch unzipped his fly and pulled out his penis.
“I ain’t no fuckin’ whore! I got a job. You suck your own dick. Now get the fuck away from me!”
“Sorry, bitch, but I ain’t got no more time to play around with you.”
Scratch slid out of the BMW. The woman tried to run, but being in her third trimester slowed her down and Scratch seized her by her hair and dragged her to the floor.
“Helllllp! Raaape! Raaaape!”
Scratch smiled at her revealing two rows of gold plated teeth. Then he brought his fist down into her face sending several of the woman’s teeth tumbling down her throat. He struck her again and again until he realized that she wasn’t going to stop screaming until he killed her. It didn’t matter anyway. People tended to mind their business in this neighborhood.
Let the bitch scream. I’m still taking that ass.
He used his hands and his teeth to rip off her jeans and shirt. The woman’s breasts were enormous, bloated with milk. Scratch latched onto them with his fourteen karat canines greedily sucking them dry and biting into the massive glands until both blood and milk drooled down his face. He caressed her swollen stomach with a hand studded with platinum rings as he slid her jeans down to her ankles. He then took himself in hand and forced himself inside her tearing his own foreskin as much as her vaginal walls and caring equally little about either. Scratch sucked all the fluid from the woman’s breast as he drilled up inside her. His modest erection continued to grow in proportion to his excitement as if engorged by the same blood he was draining from her breast. When he finally grew tired of her screams he withdrew his cock, pulled out his knife, and cut open her belly. He reached up inside of her, pushing aside her intestines and stomach as he felt around in her womb. He then pulled out the fetus, covered in blood and amniotic fluid, sliced its head off and tossed it into the street. The woman’s screams redoubled.
“MY BABY! MY BABY!!!”
“Shut the fuck up!”
He stuck both of his hands up inside her and pulled out her uterus, intestines, and whatever organs he could get his hands on,
“Aaaaaarlllllggh! Noooooo!” she seized his wrists and tried to pull his hands out of her. Scratch grabbed hold of something inside of her and pulled hard, ripping it free. Her body shuddered from head to toe then lay still.
Scratch stuffed his limp penis back into his pants and climbed into his Beemer, leaving the woman’s vandalized corpse bleeding on the sidewalk. He cursed aloud as he slammed the car door and stomped down on the accelerator peeling off down the somber street. Once again he had killed the wrong whore. The baby was still alive somewhere. He could feel it.
— | — | —
Chapter 12
“The nature of man is not what he was born as, but what he is born for.”
—Aristotle
««—»»
I laid awake peeling the lead paint off the hundred-year-old window sill and watching the moon travel across the sky. The chittinous scurrying of hundreds, perhaps thousands of roaches click-clacked across the linoleum floor accompanied by the sound of large sewer rats scampering through the ceiling, bumping and thumping like they were carrying something heavy, stressing the already large cracks in the ceiling. It seemed ridiculous to me that after all the bodies I had made in pursuit of wealth I was still living like this.
I often sat with the window open on these stifling humid July nights listening to the activity out on the streets. Moans, and laughs, shouts, and laughter, off-beat rapping, bullshitting, and teasing, fighting, gunshots, and the wailing peel of the ambulance as they arrived to take away the wounded. It was all a part of my little ghetto world and it was the closest thing I’d ever gotten to a lullaby.
I would lie there trying to put faces and actions to all the noises and voices, to share in what they were experiencing. I would sit there in the dark wondering who was throwin’ down, who was poppin’ off rounds. And who was getting’ capped. Women’s sweet sighs and men’s passionate grunts would drift on the thick steaming air and I would wonder who was getting fucked and why I was alone. If it was someone’s wife or girlfriend. If she was enjoying herself or gagging beneath the smell of stale sweat and beer as some Neanderthal beast grunted and strained inside of her. This night however I knew that the woman who screamed out over and over again was not enjoying herself. Just as I knew the man who cursed her and struck her repeatedly wasn’t in it for his own enjoyment but for catharsis. Trying to transfer his own hopelessness and fear onto someone else thinking he could free himself of the pain. Just as I knew that it wouldn’t work. It never does.
A scream of mortal anguish pierced the still night air. I imagined I could hear the death rattle that followed. Whoever had been raping that woman had just graduated into murder. There was silence for a moment and I began to drift off to sleep. Then I heard it, a low chuckle that turned into cackling laugh, a familiar laugh. I could have sworn it was Scratch. But why would he need to rape a bitch when he had pussy being offered to him everyday from women desperate for his product or blinded by his cash and jewelry. It was absurd so I dismissed the notion and by the time I woke up I had forgotten all about it.
Mom was cooking breakfast and the smell of bacon and sausage pulled me up from my bed. I was wide awake by the time the aroma of buttermilk pancakes and syrup joined the chorus of delicious fragrances. Mom was humming to a George Benson tune on the stereo while she prepared breakfast. Her voice was as warm and wholesome as the smell of the pancakes and sausage.