Passion for the Heist, page 38
“There’s my little bitch.” Goodie rounded the corner, gun drawn and aimed at Case.
“Jay, you crossed me?” Case asked in disbelief.
Jay shrugged. “It ain’t personal. I told you all I cared about was my bottom line. The dumb shit you did could have some adverse effects on that.”
“Don’t blame Jay. I could’ve laid my hands on you any time I wanted. I was just giving you enough rope to hang yourself, and from what I’m hearing you did just that,” Goodie said with a smirk.
“Goodie, man, we can fix this. I’ve put a lot of money in your pocket and done everything you asked of me, whether I wanted to or not.”
“Yeah, you did everything except the one thing that would convince me to let you keep breathing.” Goodie pointed his gun at Case’s face. “You promised me a bird, yet my cage is still empty. Where is Pain?”
SEVERAL DAYS LATER:
The 32nd Precinct in Harlem had been abuzz all morning. Everyone was talking about the suits who were currently in one of the conference rooms with Lieutenant Wolf and Captain Connors. From their drab clothing, silent stares, and near-mechanical movements, you could tell off the back that they were from the government. The question had been which branch. Even the desk sergeant had been kept in the dark and given instructions to provide their guests with anything they might need without question. Whatever was going on in that room had to be major.
Inside the room the blinds were closed so that no one on the outside could see who or what was going on. This meeting and what was discussed during it would be on a need-to-know basis. A large whiteboard had been erected on one side of the room. Pinned to it were pictures of several men and women, with notes scribbled on stickies. At the top of the pyramid was a face that most in the room were familiar with.
Lieutenant James Wolf sat quietly in a chair with his hands folded on the table. He stood out amongst the clean-cut men and women, with his cornrows and baggy sweat suit, but it had been his day off when he got the call. He hadn’t expected to be called in, especially for something of that magnitude. He had been listening for twenty minutes and still wasn’t sure why he was there. The only other person of color in the room was an older Black woman. She was wearing an olive green business suit and glasses. She would look up every so often from the legal pad she had been taking notes on, but outside of that she hadn’t said a word. She looked just as out of place in the room as Wolf.
“So, really quickly, let’s just go over what we already know,” Captain Connors was saying. “At ten hundred hours Thursday night, vice detective Joe Brown was found murdered in his apartment. In addition to being a fifteen-year veteran of the department, he had also been working as a confidential informant in an ongoing investigation involving police corruption.”
“The irony of that,” Wolf said under his breath. He knew Uncle Joe. The man was a piece of trash who used his badge to do all kinds of crooked shit, but Wolf had been no choirboy in his days as a young detective. The brass looked the other way on Uncle Joe, so he did, too. Now he understood why.
“When Joe started out, we had been looking into what we thought were some local cops running drugs. But thanks to Joe we figured out that it went way higher up the food chain than just some locals making a few extra bucks. This is why our friends from the federal government have so graciously volunteered to give us an assist on this one. The man we are after is one of theirs.” He pointed to the top picture. It was of a light-skinned man with a sharp chin. “Marshall Gooden, a rogue US Marshal who’s been running his own little pharmacy from New York, to some say as far as Indianapolis. He’s been using his position to pinch drugs from state and local seizures and redistribute them in the streets. Joe had given us almost everything we needed to bring him and his organization down until his untimely death.”
“You think he’s the one who clipped Uncle Joe?” Wolf asked. The wheels in his brain had already began whirling and examining the case from several different angles.
“Not his style. Gooden isn’t one who likes to get his hands dirty. His thing is manipulating other people to get what he needs,” a redheaded man in a gray suit answered. From his tone it was clear that he didn’t care for Gooden. Wolf would learn later that this was Agent Fredericks. He was a big shot at the FBI.
“Which brings us to yet another plot twist in this already crazy story,” Captain Connors continued. “During the autopsy the medical examiner was able to lift a second DNA sample from Joe’s mouth. Apparently, he bit whoever was behind his murder. I had the lab put a rush on it. We came up with a hit, and it pointed us to this man,” he indicated at another photo in the pyramid. This one sat lower that most of the others. “Percy Wells, known as Pain or the Blackbird. He was recently released from prison after doing time on a drug charge. Before his little vacation he was the right hand and sometimes enforcer to the Queen of Thieves, Cassandra Savage.”
“How does he connect to Joe?” Wolf asked.
“He doesn’t, at least not directly. As it turns out, Wells and Gooden are from the same neighborhood. From what I’m told, Gooden also had a relationship of some sort with Wells’s mother years ago.”
“So, it stands to reason that Gooden got this Wells kid to kill Joe, doesn’t it?” the Black woman who had been taking notes asked.
“All signs point to it, which is why this matter has been escalated to urgent status.” Captain Connors looked to Fredericks to pick up.
“Gooden is a lot of things, but sloppy isn’t one of them,” Fredericks continued. “If he did use Wells to kill Joe, that means he knows we’re on to him. Gooden is going to track this Wells kid down and kill him and then get ghost. We figure if we can get to Wells before Gooden does we may be able to flip him. All we need is Wells to admit that a US Marshal contracted him to kill a cop, and we don’t even need the drug charges anymore to fry him. Wells has now become the key to this investigation and the top priority of this precinct.”
“And the girl?” the woman with the notepad asked. On the board, between Blackbird and Uncle Joe, was a picture of a young girl with a question mark under it.
“Joe Brown’s ward, Passion,” Connor said. “She was last seen going into their building not long before Joe’s murder. Since then, nobody has been able to find her. Not even the other women she lives with know where she is, and her cell phone was found in the elevator shaft of the apartment building. We think she may be Wells’s hostage.”
“Or an accomplice,” Wolf thought out loud.
“How about we get the facts before we condemn this girl,” the woman with the notepad challenged.
“Detective Wolf, this is Special Agent Lauren Higgins,” Captain Connors made the introduction. “She’s been working undercover on this since the beginning. She’s been posing as a professor at the community college that Passion attends. The two of them have gotten very close during the course of this investigation. She knows this girl better than anybody.”
“Which is why none of this is sitting right with me,” Agent Higgins spoke up. “Look, Passion has got some very deep issues, but she’s no cold-blooded killer. Even if the victim is a flesh-peddling demon. I knew Joe before the badge, and what I think is that something happened in that apartment that got out of hand, and this Wells kid just happened to be in the middle of it.”
“Well, we can figure out whose theory was right and whose was wrong when the two of you bring them in.” Fredericks looked from Higgins to Wolf.
“Say again?” Wolf wanted to make sure he’d heard correctly.
“A joint effort between the NYPD and the FBI to bring down a multimillion-dollar drug operation and put a dirty government agent down as a sweetener,” Captain Connors said. He looked at Wolf. “I told Agent Fredericks that you’re the best tracker in this department. There’s nobody I’d be more confident in to catch these kids.”
“That’s a high compliment coming from you, Captain,” Wolf said.
“And Detective Wolf, so you don’t run into any red tape over jurisdiction while you’re on this case, I am authorized to deputize you as a federal agent for the duration of this manhunt,” Fredericks announced. “I don’t care how far you and Agent Higgins have to go or what you have to do, but we want these kids.”
Wolf looked to Agent Higgins, who was staring at him coldly. She was not looking forward to this undertaking. He then turned back to Agent Fredericks and nodded, letting him know that he was in. “Any ideas on where we should start looking?”
EPILOGUE
Ted was having himself a grand old time. Since someone had punched Uncle Joe’s ticket to the hereafter, Ted figured the money he had been holding on to became his by default. With Joe gone, Bo was the only other person who could contest his claim, and she was clueless about the nest egg Joe had been building. Ted wished that he could see the sour old bitch’s face when Joe sprang it on her that he was running off with Passion. Joe was like a fool over that young girl, and from what the streets were saying she had something to do with ending him. Ted could see the vicious little harpy, waving that sweet young pussy under Joe’s nose until she got him to let his guard down. Ted was glad that he hadn’t gotten a chance to sample her pussy that morning, because he might’ve found himself half crazy and dead like Uncle Joe. Thankfully, he was very much alive and enjoying the fruits of Joe’s labor.
To celebrate his windfall, he had hit the club and popped a few bottles. Ted never really cared for champagne. He was more of a whiskey man, but the expensive bubbles were a magnet for thirsty young girls. As proof of that, he managed to leave the club that night with two of them, and for the last hour or so, they had been in the private room he kept at the back of his dealership getting real freaky. He was on his knees with his face buried in the pussy of one of the girls while the other one was running her tongue through his ass. Ted was a freak like that. Her tongue was getting good to him when she suddenly stopped.
“Damn girl, why’d you quit? You were hitting my spot,” Ted said over his shoulder. When she didn’t answer, he looked back to see what was going on.
There were two more people in the room with them. They were cloaked in the shadows so he couldn’t get a good look, but he could see very clearly that the taller of the two was pointing a gun at him. Foolishly, Ted lunged for something on the floor. He heard the shot and pain exploded in one of his ass cheeks. “Damn, I was only reaching for my pants!”
“Can never be too careful,” the taller of the two said.
They stepped into view so that Ted could get a better look at them. They were both wearing all black and had bandannas covering their faces, one black and one pink. The eyes of the person behind the pink bandanna rang familiar to Ted. “What is this?” he asked.
Passion thought back to her conversation with Birdie, and how they would run up in the spot. She slipped her mask down so that Ted could see exactly who was doing this to him before responding, “A muthafuckin stickup.”
ALSO BY K’WAN
Hood Rat
Street Dreams
Hoodlum
Eve
Still Hood
Gutter
Section 8
Flirt
Welfare Wifeys
Eviction Notice
Diamonds and Pearl
The Diamond Empire
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
K’WAN is the No. 1 Essence bestselling author of Welfare Wifeys, Section 8, Gutter, Still Hood, Hood Rat, and others. He wrote his first novel, Gangsta, as a therapeutic release, and it went on to become an Essence bestseller and a part of urban-lit history. In 2008, K’wan received the Black Author of the Year Award from Black Press Radio. He has been featured in Time, KING, New York Press, and on MTV and BET. Besides an author, K’wan is also a motivational speaker, a mentor to at-risk children, and the CEO of Black Dawn, Inc. and Write 2 Eat Concepts, LLC. He lives in New Jersey. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Prologue
Part I. Twilight
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part II. Dawn
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part III. Dusk
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part IV. Sunset
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
Also by K’Wan
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
PASSION FOR THE HEIST
Copyright © 2024 by K’wan Foye
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Troy Stoelma and Adobe Stock
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates / Tor Publishing Group
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New York, NY 10271
www.torpublishinggroup.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-83489-8 (trade paperback)
ISBN 978-1-250-83490-4 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250834904
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First Edition: 2024
K'wan, Passion for the Heist
