“Great, give me a few minutes and you can send him in,” Father Michael told her. “We're done here, Ms. Chandler.”
Persia happily got up and started for the door. Her hand touched the knob, and she had an afterthought. “Father Michael, can I ask you a question?”
“Certainly, Ms. Chandler.”
She looked from the tattoo on his forearm, which was a tombstone with small tally marks through it, to his dark eyes. “What did you do before you were a priest?”
Father Michael smiled and absently rubbed the tattoo. “Things that I had no business doing. Now get to class, Ms. Chandler.”
Persia was so busy rushing to get out of Father's Michael's office that she wasn't watching where she was going and bumped into someone. Strong hands grabbed her arms to keep her from stumbling. The hands were attached to a tall man with chocolate-colored skin; and he wore his hair neatly tapered. He wore a gray V-neck sweater with a white shirt beneath it. He didn't look to be much older than Persia, but he carried himself with an air of a man wise beyond his years. When he flashed his pearly white smile at her, Persia felt her knees threaten to buckle.
“You a'ight, ma?” he asked in a deep voice.
“Yeah, I'm sorry. Should've been watching where I was going,” Persia apologized.
“Jesus, kid, I can't take you anywhere without women throwing themselves into your arms,” the older man with him joked. His long nose reminded Persia of the old comedian W.C. Fields. He looked to be in his late sixties, with snow white hair and wearing a Mr. Rog-ersâstyle sweater. His baby blue eyes twinkled, admiring Persia.
“Cut it out, Sol,” the young man said bashfully.
“I'm just giving you shit, Shai.” Sol elbowed him good naturedly. “Come on, we don't wanna keep Father Michael waiting.” He turned to Persia and dipped his head. “Enjoy the rest of your day, young lady.” He walked into Father Michael's office.
“Later, shorty.” The young man called Shai winked and followed Sol into the office.
Persia stood there for a few minutes, watching as Father Michael got to his feet and came around the desk to properly receive his visitors. “Mr. Lansky, Mr. Clark,” Persia heard Father Michael greet them, before closing the door.
CHAPTER 6
“Yo, you gonna get the door or keep acting like you don't hear a muthafucka knocking, Maggie?” Chucky asked with an attitude. He was sitting on the couch, shirtless, sucking the life out of a cigarette. On the table in front of him, was a half-f Heineken. It had lost its chill an hour earlier, but it didn't stop him from taking the occasional sip from it, just to complain about how warm the beer was. Chucky was clearly in a sour mood.
After a few seconds, Maggie finally stirred on the loveseat, where she had been curled up, half asleep. At some point during her nod, the blond wig she wore had shifted and now sat askew on her head. Her arm hung over the edge of the couch, lit cigarette pinched between her fingers, and the ash had grown incredibly long. When she moved to sit up, the ash came loose and dropped on the carpet. “Shit,” she cursed, but didn't move to clean it up. Maggie was an older woman, with a gorgeous face and a figure to match, but the years of partying were starting to show.
In her day, Maggie had been one of the baddest chicks in West Philadelphia. All the hustlers wanted her and all the women hated her, and with good reason. Maggie had come up rough, with no father and a mother who didn't want to be bothered. At an early age she found herself on the streets getting it how she lived to take care of her little sister. When she was younger, she would boost clothes to sell or steal food from the supermarket to make sure they ate at night, but as she got older and discovered the power of her natural gifts, she stepped her game up.
Maggie was a renegade, selling sex to whoever could afford to feed her for the night until she hooked up with a pimp who taught her what the game was really about. He gave Maggie a crash course in Lost 101, forcing her to read dozens of books on the subject and watching countless porno movies. Every night before he put Maggie on the streets he would quiz her on what she had learned for the day. Sometimes he would even make her perform on him, and if she couldn't make him cum with her mouth or pussy in five minutes or less, he would beat her. The art of making a man blow his load quickly would come in very handy for Maggie in the streets. It would not only ensure that she could turn more tricks than the other girls in the course of a night, but her skills became so notorious that men started seeking her out. Everybody wanted a taste of Maggie's world-famous sex, and she made loads of money for her pimp.
Maggie's run with her pimp came to an end when he was arrested on a parole violation. He had only been given sixty days in county jail, but it was enough time for Maggie to rob him of everything he had, taking her show on the road. Maggie roamed from place to place, keeping time with unsavory men and numbing herself with drugs. Before she knew it, her looks were slipping and she had developed a drug habit. The young girls with less mileage on them began catching all the big-money tricks, and Maggie had to get in where she fit in, finding her sponsors where she could. She had been cursed to a miserable existence and would've probably taken her own life years ago if it hadn't been for the fact that she needed to be there for her sister. They were all each other had left, until Chucky came into the picture.
The knocking on the door continued. “You gonna get that or what?” Chucky repeated his initial question.
“What were you doing that's so important to where you couldn't get it?” Maggie asked with an attitude.
“I'm thinking, that's what I'm doing. Somebody has gotta be the brains of this operation and you sure ain't in no condition to play the role, with as high as you be all the time,” Chucky snapped.
“You got some nerve coming for me, like you ain't got a never-ending oil burner. You do enough to get you and three other muthafuckas high at one time.” Maggie rolled her neck.
Chucky threw his lighter at her, narrowly missing Maggie's head. “Bitch, don't worry about what I'm doing. Worry about getting the fucking door!”
Maggie spared him one last roll of her eyes, before uncoiling her long chocolate legs from the couch, and oozing to her feet. The tight green skirt she wore was hiked up, exposing her bare black ass. On her left ass cheek was a tattoo of a weed leaf. Maggie took slow steps toward the door, making sure to throw some extra bounce in her walk, sending a ripple across her ass. She knew Chucky liked to see it move. Maggie had been a dime piece back in her day, and still held together well, but after a few months of running with Chucky, she was starting to slip. Still, Maggie was a looker and a stone-cold freak. She did things to Chucky that he'd be ashamed to admit out loud and that was part of the reason he fucked with her, that and she was blindly loyal to him.
Chucky took a brief hiatus from watching Maggie's ass, and addressed the small pile of cocaine on the table in front of him. He took a club flyer and gently scraped what was left of the coke into a line. It wasn't much, barely enough to get his wheels spinning properly, but it would have to do for the moment. Chucky didn't bother looking for a straw or rolling up a dollar, he just dragged his nose across the coffee table, snorting up coke, ashes, and whatever else littered the table. When the coke bobsledded through his nasal cavity, Chucky felt the urge to sneeze, but pinched his nostrils closed to hold it in. He needed everything to go straight to the head. Chucky released his nose and waited in anticipation of the medicine-like drip in the back of his throat, but it never came. It wasn't enough coke to do much more than boost his craving.
Frustrated, Chucky ran his hand over his head and began looking over the table to see if maybe there was some powder residue that might've gone overlooked. When his eyes caught his reflection in the glass tabletop, it gave him pause. His eyes were wide and webbed with red veins from lack of sleep, and if you looked close enough you could see the faint scabs around his nose from constant abuse. The boyish glow that had once been his calling card was now gone, and his skin was beginning to darken, making him look older. Looking at the monster staring back at him, Chucky couldn't help but to wonder how he could've let himself slip so far.
At one time, the streets had great expectations for Chucky. He was a young hustler on the fast track, and a respected lieutenant in one of the most notorious drug crews in the city. He had money, a fly car, and more women than he knew what to do with. In addition to the material things, he had status. Chucky was the right hand to Pharaoh's most trusted captain, Ramses. He was young, sharp, and on his way to being the next big thing in the game, until his ambitions and his demons proved to be his undoing. Ramses had been slow walking Chucky up the food chain, constantly dangling the carrot but never letting him taste it and Chucky got impatient. Though it was Pharaoh and Ramses who were the bosses of their organization, it was Chucky and his soldiers who solidified their positions. The old regime was on their way out, but not moving fast enough for Chucky so he set a plan in motion to speed things along.
Being the manipulative bastard he was, Chucky began gradually spreading the seeds of corruption throughout the soldiers who held the streets, swaying those who were loyal to his cause and making plans to get rid of those who weren't. To stage his coup, he enlisted his partner, Benny, who was another one of Ramses's trusted lieutenants and Chucky's best friend. Collectively, they ran the neighborhood for Ramses with Chucky being the enforcer and Benny was the money man. With their positions it was easy for Chucky to orchestrate a series of bogus robberies, hitting their drug spots. They would chip away a little at a time until they had enough to make the big play. For as long as they kept their capers random and focused on the smaller drug spots, they would be able to fly under the radar and neither Ramses or Pharaoh would wake up to it until it was too late. Things were going smooth, but two things happened: Benny got sloppy and Chucky got knocked.
One of the dudes Chucky had been selling coke to on the side turned out to be an undercover detective they called Lone Wolf. He had bought enough cocaine from Chucky over the course of a few weeks to hang a lifetime sentence on him, but instead of arresting Chucky, Wolf started extorting him. In exchange for Wolf letting him continue to do business, Chucky had to feed Wolf information. Chucky never told on anyone in his crew, but he did feed Wolf a few low-level cats around town. It wasn't until Wolf tried to get Chucky to set Pharaoh up that Chucky put his foot down. He was a lot of things, but he was no fool. If he pointed the finger at Pharaoh there would be no rock he could hide under where Pharoah's people couldn't find him. Chucky might as well have blown his own brains out instead of waiting around for someone else to do it. There was no way Chucky was going to give up Pharaoh, but he had to do something to get Wolf off his back and out of his life, so he played on his larcenous side. Wolf was a cop, but he was also a gambler and Chucky had heard through the grapevine that he had some serious debts. Chucky offered Wolf $100,000 to get out of his life. Just as he'd hoped, Wolf agreed to take a pay off but he wanted a quarter of million dollars. That was the price for Chucky to purchase his life back. Wolf also made it very clear that if he didn't come up with the money that he was going to drop a bug in Pharaoh's ear about what Chucky had been doing in his spare time.
It was a lose-lose situation for Chucky. There was no way he could come up with the amount of money Wolf was demanding and he sure as hell wasn't going to give Pharaoh up, so he was fucked either way he played it. He thought about going to Ramses and laying out everything that had happened with the dirty cop, hoping his relationship with Ramses would at least get him the benefit of the doubt, but decided against it. He might be able to sway Ramses, but there was no way it would go over well with Pharoah. Even though Chucky had never given up any information on their organization, Pharaoh would have him killed just in case. He wasn't the type of man to take chances. Chucky figured his best bet was to just take whatever money they had made from looting Pharaoh's spots and blow town. He could take what he had and make a fresh start somewhere else, but Benny would make this easier said than done.
For as careful as Chucky had been in laying the plan, Benny was equally careless in ruining it. Benny got lazy and deviated from Chucky's original plan to keep their robberies random, and he hit same spot twice. Doubling back sent up a red flag and put Ramses on alert, but it was Ramses's new recruits Omega and Li'l Monk who picked up on the trail of breadcrumbs that left a trail leading straight back to Benny.
From the time Chucky had first met the dirty little street rat who called himself Li'l Monk, he knew he was going to be trouble. He had already hated him for the role his father, Monk, was said to have played in the death of his oldest brother Sonny, but that hate increased tenfold the day Ramses decided to offer him a job opportunity. The day it happened they came across Li'l Monk beating the blood out of one of Chucky's young workers over some offense. Chucky wanted to kill for personal reasons, but he tried to convince Ramses that Li'l Monk should die for putting his hands on one of their workers. Instead of Ramses feeding into what Chucky was saying, he ended up taking a liking to Li'l Monk. So much so that he offered him a job. Li'l Monk was paired with a young up-and-comer who had been a part of Chucky's crew and they were hired as muscle to hold the block down. The two kids were sharp and about their business, and fiercely loyal to Ramses. When Benny sent his people to rob the spot for the second time, Li'l Monk and Omega sent them back in bags. Omega had recognized one of the dead men from seeing him with Benny, and told this to Ramses. That was all it took to unravel Chucky's whole little scheme.
Chucky hadn't even realized that Pharaoh and Ramses were hip to their bullshit until the morning he walked into a recording studio and found Benny tied to a chair and being tortured. The moment Chucky laid eyes on Benny he knew that he was dead. Benny was a mess of bruises, blood, and fresh cuts. From the looks of things they had been putting him through it for hours and there was no telling what information they had pried out of Benny. There was no doubt in Chucky's mind that he would never leave that apartment. Shockingly, Benny had held it down and never confessed to Chucky's involvement, but Ramses was still suspicious. He knew Chucky and Benny were close, and the whole scheme had Chucky's stink on it, but he needed proof of Chucky's guilt or innocence in the plot, so he put Chucky to the ultimate test of loyalty.
The feeling of utter nausea that hit Chucky when Ramses ordered him to kill his best friend was one that would stick with Chucky until the end of his days on earth. It was feeling like you had to vomit, shit, and pee all at once. Chucky was left with a hard decision: murder Benny and walk away or die with him. He looked into Benny's tearful eyes and thought about days when they had to eat at each other's houses when their families didn't have enough food. Benny was his partner, his brother, but he was also careless and had put both of their lives at risk. Chucky pointed the gun, which was trembling in his hand, at Benny, and for a split second he considered it, but couldn't bring himself to do it. Chucky was a snake, but he wasn't a coward, so he turned the gun on Ramses's men and pulled the trigger.
To the surprise of everyone in the room besides Ramses and Huck, it clicked empty. The gun wasn't even loaded. It had all been a setup by Ramses. If Chucky had been willing to kill his best friend it would've proved that he was trying to bury a secret and hide his involvement, but the fact that he was willing to ride out for his friend showed Ramses that his heart was still in the right place. It was indeed Ramses's ultimate test of loyalty, and Chucky had almost failed. Chucky was allowed to keep his life, but he still received a beat down from Ramses's friend Boo for pulling a gun on them. He got off light considering what fate awaited Benny.