A crackhouse had burned to the ground the previous night and everyone inside had been immolated. Those who had not died in the fire were gunned down as they tried to escape. Every piper around the way was now on alert for the arsonist. I was pretty sure I knew who it was. I just didn’t understand why. It made no sense to me why Scratch was killing his own customers.
The crackwhore we were after was somewhere down in the mildew and filth below and these steps were the only exit. She was trapped. I had no idea how many pipers and hypers were down there nodding and scratching among the rats and roaches, but I had a fifteen shot clip in the Berretta and anyone who tried to interfere with business was gonna catch a bad one.
My senses were screaming. I could smell the sweat, the foul breath, the burning cocaine, heroin, speed, the dried blood and urine, the jungle funk of recent sex and something altogether foreign yet unnervingly familiar. Scratch pressed up against me breathing excitedly. He could sense it too. We were nearing the kill. I still couldn’t figure out why Scratch wanted to come along on this one. Why he hadn’t just given me the location and the bitch’s description and sent me to do the dirty-work myself. Killing a crackwhore in a shooting gallery wasn’t a very glamorous assignment.
“You hear that, Snap?” Scratch whispered nervously. His white skin seemed to glow in the near pitch darkness making his head look like a glow-in-the-dark Halloween skull.
“I don’t hear shit. Now shut the fuck up.”
I was still trying to place that strange smell and wondering about a new scent…burning wax, as if someone had just blown out a candle.
“Yeah, these muthafuckas know we’re here,” I thought to myself, and then I heard what Scratch was trippin’ on. It sounded like someone trying to smother a baby’s cries. That’s when I placed the smell. It was used diapers. Somebody had a baby down here. I guess she wasn’t pregnant anymore. The thought of an infant crawling around in that house among crack vials, hypodermic needles, and broken liquor bottles sickened me.
When we reached the bottom of the stairs, Scratch turned on the big halogen flashlight he had brought with him and waved it around the room. There were over a dozen people huddled there in various corners of the room. They shied away from the light as if they truly were the lifeless ghouls they appeared to be. There was an amalgam of young, old, male, female, White, Black, Puerto Rican, and even Korean crowded together on the dusty floor. Addiction did not discriminate.
They were the living dead. Skin drawn tight to muscles atrophied to the point of near uselessness, animated only by their addiction. Bones showing through the thin layer of flesh, brittle from malnourishment to the point where each step drew pain, their souls suppurating with infected wounds that even the hardest narcotics could not remedy. They gathered around the dim flicker of lighters heating crackpipes and heroine spoons like settlers around a campfire fervently engrossed in their quotidian ritual of self-destruction. It looked like some modern day leper colony, a mirthless carnival of woe where society quarantined its diseased misfits.
We had intended to just smoke anyone we found down here, but there were too many. Spillage from the crackhouses Scratch had already raided. This many bodies would attract too much attention after the damage Scratch had done last night. One or two crackheads dead wasn’t going to make anyone’s priority list, but a massacre like this would start tongues wagging about conspiracies and bring the heat down hard.
I spotted the girl we were after way in the back clutching a bundle of rags to her face, trying to hide.
“Is that the bitch right there?”
Scratch aimed the big light at her and smiled even as he took an involuntary step backwards as if he were suddenly afraid.
“I want all ya’ll crackheads and hypes to raise up out of here unless you’re lookin’ for a quick end to your misery,” I yelled, pointing the gun for emphasis.
The walking dead started to scramble, shuffle, and drag their tired asses out into the street. The girl with the rags pressed to her face didn’t even bother to move. She knew that we were there for her and that she was as good as dead. Death would be no great divergence from her current condition.
“Here, take my baby,” she said to a man who was busy gathering up his works and trying to get out of the line of fire.
“Bitch, we ain’t gonna hurt that little bastard!” Scratch roared “Fool get your shit and get the fuck out!”
The old man promptly complied, kicking up a trail of dust as he scurried up the basement steps.
The woman’s eyes were full of fear and almost looked innocent despite her addiction. But starring out from a face hardened by drug use, chapped and burnt lips, disheveled hair, sunken cheeks, reminded me that she was just another treacherous ho strung out on that shit. Still, in order to get burned by a crackwhore, you had to first be stupid enough to trust one and I couldn’t imagine Scratch being that stupid.
“This the bitch you said played you for your shit?” I asked, staring at the notorious drug kingpin like he was the world’s biggest fool.
“Yeah, bro, this the bitch.”
“You must’a been slippin’ majorly for some nasty-ass hooker like this to clown you.”
“Nigga, ain’t nobody clown shit here! The bitch slipped some shit out my ride while I was handlin’ some business with Yellow Dog.”
“Fool, you call me nigga again and they’s gonna find two bodies down here in the dirt. I don’t play no peckerwood usin’ that word around me no matter how down you supposed to be. Ain’t no cracker ever that down. Stupid ass shouldn’t have been holdin’ in your car no how. You supposed to be a playa you should know better.”
“You gettin’ a little too free with your tongue yourself, Snap. You forgettin’ who works for who.” Scratch walked up to me and stood with his chest swelled out against mine and his foul carrion breath steaming in my face. I put my hand out and softly but firmly shoved him back. He swatted at my hand but kept his distance.
“I ain’t forgot shit. You just watch who you callin’ nigga and it’s all good.”
Scratch glared at me like I was some poisonous insect that he was trying to decide whether or not to swat at the risk of being stung. My skin crawled and tendrils of ice slithered up my spine.
“You ain’t invincible, Snap, and you damn sure ain’t bulletproof. So you better watch how you speak to my white ass. I can have you bodied as easily as anyone else.”
“Now we both know that ain’t true and ain’t neither of us invincible so you watch yourself too, nigga!”
This time it was I who walked up to stand chest to chest with Scratch, bumping him backwards and rotating my face inches from his as I purposely spit out my words, spraying him with minuscule droplets of saliva. I had my hand on the trigger of my nine and I would have hollowed out his chest right then if he hadn’t plead to a lesser and backed down like a little bitch. His punk ass couldn’t draw down on somebody who was set to fire back. Either that or he just didn’t consider me worth the effort.
“See, Snap, that’s the difference between you and I. To me, you callin’ me nigga, that’s a compliment. I guess I’m just ignorant like that. Now cap this bitch and lets get the fuck up out of here!”
She looked like the ghost of Christmas past with her skeletal frame wrapped in designer clothes that were five or six years out of date. Her faded black, pinstriped, skintight, Gloria Vanderbilts gave testament to just how long she’d been tweakin’.
“I ain’t steal shit from this white boy! He just don’t want me to have this baby. He wants to kill my little boy!”