Passion for the Heist, page 5
“I ain’t been fucking off with nobody. Junior is my boyfriend!” Birdie argued, not realizing that she was digging the hole deeper for herself.
“See, since she’s already broke in you ain’t got to worry about me hurting her none,” Ted said. “What do you say, darling? You wanna make yourself a little money to buy your fella something nice?”
Birdie looked uncertain, so Uncle Joe decided to give her a not-so-subtle push in the right direction. “Birdie, when your mama went to prison for killing that John and you found yourself sleeping in stairwells and on park benches, trying to keep from freezing to death, who took you in?”
“You did, Uncle Joe,” Birdie answered.
“And when your grandma was taking the SSD checks that were coming from your dead daddy, and letting you and your siblings go hungry, who fed you?”
“You did, Uncle Joe,” she repeated.
“And when you asked me why I did all those things for you without you even having to ask, what was my answer?”
“You said because we were family. What makes a strong family is doing what one of its members needs before they even have to ask,” Birdie said, reciting from memory. She knew where Uncle Joe was about to go with this.
Uncle Joe leaned forward and took one of Birdie’s frail hands in his larger one. “Now, if this ain’t something you’re up for, I understand. I won’t lie and say I won’t be disappointed. You know how much your Uncle Joe hates to be disappointed.” He gave her hand a small squeeze. “It makes me start to second-guess some folks, and their appreciation of my generosities.”
Birdie glanced at Passion, who looked like she was on the verge of exploding. Passion slowly shook her head no, letting Birdie know that she didn’t have to. If Birdie decided to buck against this, Passion would stand with her on her decision. She was hopeful that for once Birdie would stand up for herself, but knew it wasn’t to be when she kept her eyes locked to the ground and said, “Passion, I’ll catch up with you in school.”
“Birdie…” Passion began, but was cut off by Uncle Joe.
“You better get going so you won’t be late,” Uncle Joe told her. His tone was even, but his facial expression said that the subject was no longer up for debate without someone in the room getting hurt.
Passion felt her eyes well, but the tears never fell. She turned to Bo, who was trying to keep her game face, but she could tell that the older woman felt just as powerless as she was. She was the one ally Passion felt like she had in the whole room, and Bo had folded, same as Birdie. Passion’s hands were tied. She couldn’t fight for someone who wasn’t willing to fight for themselves. That was a lesson she had learned a few years back. Taking a deep breath, and thrusting her chin up, Passion left them to their devices.
* * *
By the time Passion reached the elevator in the hallway, she was on fire. Her finger jabbed the button angrily and she tried to will the car to hurry up. She was livid about what had just taken place.
Passion was no dummy. She had learned a long time ago what kinds of games her Uncle Joe played with the women he provided shelter to. Outside of Passion, there wasn’t a piece of pussy that passed under that roof that Joe didn’t sample at some point. Uncle Joe was Passion’s mother’s brother, but she had to admit that there had been times when he looked at her like he was oblivious to their genetic bond. Occasional hungry looks aside, Uncle Joe had never disrespected Passion like he did the others girls and she guessed that’s what made it so easy for her to tolerate what went on under that roof. Still, it didn’t make her feel any less the coward for turning a blind eye.
She was in her second round of angrily jabbing the elevator button when the apartment door opened. Her breath caught in her throat as she anticipated seeing Ted and Birdie on their way to their romp, or worse, Uncle Joe. Passion needed to put some distance between herself and the toxic-ass environment she resided in before she snapped. For as much as she hated school, that morning she would be thankful for the seven-hour distraction. Who stepped from the apartment was neither Joe nor Ted, but Zeta. She was once again wearing her fur jacket, but she had traded the heels she was wearing when she walked in that morning for a pair of worn brown Uggs. She ambled up to Passion, and glared at her over folded arms.
“If he sent you to make sure I’m actually going to school and not planning on doubling back to plead Birdie’s case, I can save you the trouble. I’m cool on all that bullshit y’all got going on,” Passion said in an easy tone. In her mind she was genuinely working to convince herself that she was done coming between the girls in the house and whatever dangers faced them in the world. It was a thin line, but a starting point for her to convince herself to stick to it.
“Spoken like a true princess in this kingdom of shit!” Zeta chuckled. “Ain’t nobody stunting you, Passion. Joe needed a pack of smokes, so he sent me to get them from the store.”
The elevator finally came and the girls stepped on.
“Don’t you mean, Uncle Joe?” Passion continued the conversation as they descended. Her tone was heavy with sarcasm. All the girls, with the exception of Bo, called him Uncle Joe, even the ones he shared no blood with.
Zeta let out a hearty chuckle. “Uncle? Girl, that Uncle shit went out the window first time him and tree-trunk dick crawled into my bed. You and Birdie’s dizzy ass are probably the only ones in the house still jacking that middle school shit, but you’re gonna get with the program eventually.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Passion asked defensively.
“What it means is, the only reason your precious little pussy ain’t been played with is because you ain’t eighteen yet, and Joe ain’t got no taste for the penitentiary. However, the way I hear it, you have a birthday coming up. You’ll be eighteen in a few weeks, right?”
“Yeah, and? The arrangement between you chicks and my uncle don’t apply to me. I’m his sister’s kid.”
Zeta laughed as she stepped off the elevator out into the lobby. “Girl, you too smart to be so stupid. Normally, I’d stick around, burst your bubble, but Uncle Joe needs his smokes. See you soon, birthday girl.” She sashayed out of the lobby.
CHAPTER 4
The train ride back uptown proved to be equally as bumpy for Pain as the nightmare-filled bus ride from upstate had been. The first hiccup he’d run into was when he tried to pay his fare for the train. The city had long ago done away with subway tokens and switched to MetroCards. Pain hadn’t been gone long enough not to be familiar. Where he ran into trouble was purchasing a card. Usually he’d just approach the token clerk in the booth to buy a card, but the city had done away with a large number of the clerks and replaced them with kiosks. The machine kept rejecting the crumpled bills he was trying to insert and he didn’t have a credit card. Pain had to wait until he came across a Good Samaritan who was willing to swipe him through the turnstile with her MetroCard. He tried to pay the older white woman, but she refused, claiming that she was happy to help those less fortunate whenever she could. She had basically mistaken Pain for a beggar. Looking at his reflection in one of the store windows he passed, he couldn’t say that he blamed her.
Since being sent to prison Pain had gained about twenty pounds, which meant that the clothes he had gotten locked up in no longer fit. He dressed out in an off-brand gray sweat suit, a green army jacket that had seen better days, and an Afro that looked like it hadn’t seen a comb in ages. He was also sporting the beginnings of a beard that could use a trim. The only sign of the man who Pain had once been were the Top-Five Air Jordans on his feet. He looked a mess, and hoped that he didn’t run into anyone he knew when he hit the block.
When Pain got on the northbound subway he noticed that almost everyone was wearing masks. It was the new mandate. Pain had seen the horror stories on the news, same as everyone else, about how the deadly virus was washing over the planet. He knew of a few cats in the prison who had contracted Covid, but this was his first time being dropped in the thick of it as a free man. Watching the news and listening to misinformed stories about the virus in prison could not have prepared him for the world he had come back to. Everyone on the subway seemed to be on edge. Pain had made the mistake of sneezing and damn near everyone at that end of the subway car put distance between themselves and him.
It had been years since Pain had been on the subway, but the same rules applied. His head was on swivel the whole time. He knew too well the number of cuckoo birds and people up to no good who frequented the New York City subways. The crime rate underground in New York was almost as bad as it was aboveground. There weren’t many empty seats, just the little double numbers near the door and an empty space between two people on the benches. Pain opted for the middle seat on the bench. The double seats near the door were a setup. In his day, Pain had caught plenty of people sleeping who took the seats near the door. He would wait until just before the doors closed before booking his unsuspecting victim and escaping before they even knew what was happening. At that point there was never much they could do about it, because the train would be back in motion. He chuckled thinking back on some of his less-than-civilized days and the things he would do for a dollar.
At the next stop, more people got on and filled out the remaining seats, including the ones by the door. The unlucky occupant was a young female. She had shoulder-length hair, which she wore in neat dreadlocks. She was wearing a mask, so Pain couldn’t see her face outside of her beautiful brown eyes, but he could see the rest of her just fine. She had a Coke-bottle shape: thin waist with a round ass that seemed to dance under jeans when she moved to take the seat. She flipped her hair back and Pain caught a glimpse of the necklace with two lockets hanging from her neck. It wasn’t anything spectacular, a simple chain with two white gold hearts hanging from it. The only reason Pain even gave it a second look was because his mother and grandmother had owned similar pieces. His grandfather had passed after a nasty fight with brain cancer. Between the chemo and the disease eating away at him, there wasn’t a lot left of the man they remembered, so they decided to cremate him. After the funeral the family was able to order jewelry pieces that held the ashes of their loved ones. His mother and grandmother were the only two who opted to have the pieces made. The rest of the family was more concerned about how much money would come back from the life insurance policy than carrying about a piece of their patriarch with them.
The girl must’ve felt Pain watching her because she looked across the train at him. It was an awkward moment for him, so he tried to flash her a friendly smile. In response she rolled her eyes at him and shifted her body. If Pain’s luck with women continued like this during his homecoming, the only way he was going to get any pussy was if he paid for it. He was definitely out of the loop and it would take some work to get him back in.
From her knapsack she pulled out a book and busied herself with it. From the tattered cover and dog-eared pages, he knew this wasn’t her first time reading the book. If he had to judge by the condition it was in he’d say it was one of her favorites. His eyes went to the title on the jacket: Road Dawgz. Pain was familiar with the book. He had read it while he was locked up. His cellmate had been trying to get him to read it for months, but Pain refused. The dudes on the cover looked soft and the synopsis didn’t sound that interesting. The only reason he had relented and picked the book up was because he had run through just about everything they had in the prison library and didn’t have anything to read at the time. When he was done, he was glad that he picked the book up. It was one of the best novels that he’d ever read. After Road Dawgz, Pain tracked down more titles by the author, as well as others on the publishing roster. Pain had so many Triple Crown books that they started overrunning his cell and he had to start mailing some of them home.
Pain tried to busy himself with anything but the reading girl. His eyes traveled up and down the subway car over the faces of people, wondering what their stories were. It was a game he and his mom used to play, called “people watching.” They would ride the subway or buses and study the passengers, and try to guess what the real stories of their lives might’ve read like. At the far end of the car there was a man leaning against the door with a brown pizza box under one arm. It wasn’t the first time Pain had seen someone with food on the subway, but there was the lack of grease stains on the bottom and the care with which he held the box that made Pain guess that there was something more valuable than his breakfast in the box.
On the opposite side of the car there was a young girl who couldn’t have been a day over twenty, if even that old. Sitting on the seat beside her was a boy of maybe two or three, and she had a newborn strapped to her chest. She was scrolling through her phone, likely on social media catching glimpses of the life she could’ve been living had she not let a man make a promise that he couldn’t keep not once, but twice. She loved her kids, that was apparent in how she was so on point with them; from the toddler randomly jumping from his seat, to the bottle expertly balanced in the mouth of the infant on her chest. Life had dealt her a lot, and she was handling it, but her eyes spoke of how tired she was.
At the next stop a cluster of young men spilled into the car. They were about high school age, but from the bottle they were not so discreetly passing amongst each other it was doubtful that they were on their way to anyone’s educational institution. The fact that it wasn’t even 9 AM and they were drinking told Pain all that he needed to know about them: Whatever they had been seeking the night before they still hadn’t found, and the fact that they were still on bullshit the next morning said that whatever it was had been important to them. Pain knew his kind when he saw them. They spread themselves throughout the car, which let Pain know they were on bullshit. He’d done the same thing with his crew back in the day, spread out through a car and make your moves all at once. Pain didn’t have a weapon on him at the time, but he had the foresight to know what they were up to, so it gave him one up.
There were at least a half dozen stories that Pain had been able to pull from his people watching. They were all interesting in an imaginary way, but he couldn’t help but find his attention turned back to the reading girl. From the speed with which she was flipping through the pages of her book, he knew that she was just skimming through the best parts and not digesting the story. That was a clear sign of a busy mind. Her eyes were on the pages of the book, but her mind was elsewhere. He tried to get a read on her … to piece together a story of what her life was like outside the steel and concrete confines of the subway car. What was her personal heaven or hell? Hell showed up ten seconds after he’d had the thought.
The train pulled into the station and the doors slid open. People were coming on as well as getting off, including the boys Pain had spied. Just as the doors were about to close, one of them made their move and grabbed for the reading girl’s knapsack. To her credit, she put up one hell of a fight, socking one of them in the chin while still holding onto her knapsack. Deciding that the bag was too much trouble, one of the boys snatched her necklace and slid from the train just as the doors snapped closed. She pounded the doors futilely as the train pulled out of the station. When she turned back to Pain and he saw the broken look in her eyes, it did something to him. The young dude who had snatched her jewelry had looked at the necklace as something that would put enough money in his pocket to eat for the night, but to the girl it represented something that was irreplaceable. And he felt that.
A few people who had seen what had happened used the time between that stop and the next to fake concern and question the girl about the experience. A few less than tasteful characters had even pulled out their phones to record her reaction to the robbery. The whole display was disgusting to Pain. Not just because people were more interested in posting this girl’s pain to their social media pages than helping her, but because in a past life Pain had been the one snatching jewelry in subway cars. The reading girl got off at the next stop. She pretended to be okay, but Pain saw the truth in her eyes. She hadn’t just been robbed. She had been violated. She cast a glance back at Pain, and if he lived to be one hundred he’d never forget the look in her eyes. For as much as he wished he could’ve assuaged her hurt, realistically there was nothing he could do. He was fresh home from prison and barely in a position to help himself, let alone anyone else. Having to eat that tasted like shit in his mouth, and it wasn’t a flavor he planned on getting used to.
* * *
It was still early when Pain came up out of the subway station on 103rd and Central Park West. He expected to be greeted by the mix of addicts and corner boys coming out to start their morning shift, but instead found himself confronted with a bunch of unfamiliar faces. Most were European white kids who were likely staying at the hostel on the corner. They milled back and forth with the ease and carefree natures of people who lived off Riverside Drive. They obviously had no clue what kind of shithole block they had chosen as their temporary residence while in the states. The neighborhood had clearly changed, but so had Pain.
He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and began walking up the block, toward his building. He kept his head down, but his eyes up. Pain knew that at some point he would have to make his rounds, but he didn’t want to see anyone just yet. All that would come once he had gotten himself settled. Right then, all he wanted to do was get home, hug his granny, and take a shower.
Seeing the girl get robbed on the subway was renting space in his head for free. He didn’t know her from a can of paint, and couldn’t figure out why he cared so much. Maybe because he had a grandma and had once had a mother who could’ve easily fallen victim to the young punks. Pain was all for getting it how you lived, because that’s how he had come up, but what happened to the rule? He and his crew ran the streets like a pack of wild dogs, but there were certain lines that even they wouldn’t cross. Anybody could find themselves food if Pain was hungry enough, but women, elders, and children were never on his dinner menu. He had even physically disciplined members of his crew who violated that unspoken rule. He was a thief, but an honorable one, if that made sense. While he was away, he had heard more than a few stories about how the next generations of crooks were built differently than he had come up, but these lil niggas had no morals that he could tell. Fitting into this new world was definitely going to be an adjustment.
