Chronicles of Crooklyn, page 7
He cracked the kid on the back of both of his hands, making his fingers go numb. He beat the young’un all in his scrawny chest until the kid moaned and coughed. Then he swung the cane like a bat and hit a homerun with the kid’s head.
“AAARHHHHHGGHHH!!!” the little curly-haired runt shrieked in pain, unable to hold his cries in even though his homeys were watching.
Sly was on a roll. He popped the young thug all over his head until purple lumps jumped up on his yellow skin. When the boy tried to use his hands to shield his head from the blows, Sly damn near broke his lil fuckin fingers as he hammer-thumped his hands with the end of the cane.
“I bet the next time you’ll respect your elders and watch yo mutha…fuckin… MOUTH!” Sly raged as he cane-punted the kid in the face, bloodying his nose.
He raised the cane in the air again and bashed the kid in the mouth like he was cracking a whole rack of pool balls. The impact loosened both of the boy’s front teeth and he immediately shrieked and grabbed his bleeding mouth.
By now the cipher had ceased and all eyes were on the beat-down that was taking place. Sly McFly was in a rage brought on by the blatant disrespect that the kid had shown him. He continued to wail on his young ass, knowing the boy was broken and defeated, but the killer in him wanted to take the little nigga all the way out.
Knowing a bunch of impressionable young eyes were on him, Sly battled to regain his composure. He raised his cane again and stared down at the frightened little nigga who was now a bloody and petrified mess. He flicked his wrist and clicked a hidden button on the side of his cane, and a long, deadly-looking silver blade shot out of the tip.
“Listen up, you lil pussy-ass bitch!” Sly spit. He breathed fire as he jammed the glistening sharp tip of the knife into the frightened thug’s crotch and pierced the fabric of his saggy pants. “If I ever catch you disrespecting any of these OG’s who walk the streets out here I will slice your little fuckin nuts clean off, do you hear me?”
“Yeah!” the kid screamed in pain. “I hear you! I fuckin hear you!” Again Sly struggled with himself. He couldn’t believe this narrow-assed juvenile had put his goddamn feet on him! Back in the day dude woulda been found chopped up in a Dumpster for some shit like that. Sly thrust the cane’s blade even harder against the kid’s dick. All it took was one more good jab and everything in his worthless lil nut sack would spill out in his dirty drawers. The little shit-for-brains adolescent could forget about ever fucking a bitch or fathering a kid.
“Yo where the fuck is your daddy at lil nigga?” Sly demanded.
“He…he’s dead, sir,” the spineless boy responded. “He got killed.”
“Yeah? Well I’m probably the wolf who buried his ass! I’m Sly McFly, lil nigga! Mister McFly to you, and don’t you ever in ya lil bitch-ass life disrespect me again!”
Sly flipped his cane over and jabbed the kid hard in his nuts with the handle. “Say my name, muthafucka!”
“Mister McFly!” the teen squeaked and tried to cup his balls.
“Say it again, nigga!” Sly jabbed him in the nuts again.
“Mister McFly!” the boy screamed. “Mister McFly!”
“Good! Now get the fuck up and move around!”
Sly pushed a button and retracted the blade back into his cane, and the terrified young boy scrambled to his feet and took flight into the building.
All the other thugs on the porch just stood there staring at him in silence. They had all gasped when he revealed his name, and now they looked respectful and bewildered at the living legend who was standing before them in the flesh.
Sly McFly brushed off his suit and nodded at the crowd of young wannabe’s who were silently saluting him. The word would now fly through the projects that Sly McFly didn’t miss a fuckin step. The streets were always watching and today it had been his show.
Straightening his top hat, Sly had just turned around to head back to his car when he heard one of the thugs mumble.
“Man, that ain’t him! The real Sly McFly woulda killed that stupid nigga!”
Sly had to shake his head and chuckle at that one.
These lil niggas gonna think I’m soft now, he thought with a smile.
“Think again, youngbloods,” he muttered and went on about his day. “Think again!”
CHAPTER 5
Pebble Beach
There was no place Slick dug more than the rooftop of the fourteen-story project building that he had grown up in. It was usually quiet and deserted up there, but tonight the sight that greeted him as he stepped through the doorway was all ashy ass and swinging balls.
Two crackheads were stretched out on the pebbly tar fucking up a storm. The female was on her back with her thick yellow legs spread wide open. The heels of her crusty feet were pointing straight up at the sky as she moaned out loud and shivered and shook and totally got her fuck on.
Slick could hear her juices sloshing as the old-head who was jammed between her thighs went to town on that pussy. His narrow black ass pumped like a piston as he pounded his meat deep inside her wetness and went all out for his nut.
Slick slammed the rooftop door as hard as shit to announce himself, but the old dude had no fucks to give. He kept right on pumping and grinding as he looked over his shoulder and held one finger up like he was in church. He bit down on his bottom lip for a quick second, then he got right back to work and tried to drill a hole in the chick’s back.
Seconds later, the gray-haired nigga gasped and grunted. He moaned out loud and called for Jesus a couple of times, and then he scrambled to his feet and yanked up his silky drawers.
Slick watched quietly as the thick, banana-colored female took her sweet-ass time rolling over on her knees. Naked from the waist down, she stood up and shook her meaty butt around like a dog shaking off water. Her flowery sundress fell down over her bare hips and stopped right above her knees.
“Sorry ’bout that,” the old school dope-head said as he bopped proudly past Slick and headed toward the door. “Thanks for waiting, my nigga.”
“Fuck outta here,” Slick said quietly.
The female grinned as she sashayed past him holding her head up high like Slick didn’t just see her fat, naked ass. Her dirt-buster house shoes made scraping sounds on the tar and a stream of cum ran down her ashy leg. The smell of funky sex radiated off her in waves as she walked by.
Slick shook his head and glanced around after they were gone. The pebbly rooftops of project buildings were valuable pieces of real estate in the hood. They served as lookouts, meeting spots, fuck pads, and drug dens, and there would always be crackheads, winos, and hoes competing for their piece of the rock.
But the rooftop of building 430 in Van Dyke projects was Slick’s territory. He guarded that shit like the king of the castle. It was the headquarters of the Zip ’em up Crew, and home to a fleet of homing pigeons that were Slick’s most trusted collaborators.
Most of his birds were what New Yorkers called, “flying rats.” They were ordinary pigeons that he had trained to go out to specific locations during the day and then return home to the rooftop at night.
But there were about a dozen birds in particular, his most prized and intelligent messengers, who were the heart of Slick’s business operation. These special birds looked just like all the regular clucking and shitting pests, but they were the key to Slick’s success with the BBU. They also kept the Feds and the local police from following his trail and fuckin him up the ass.
The BBU, or Body Bags Unlimited, was known on paper as the security firm of Banfield and Baines Unincorporated, but hired guns in the game knew all that fancy shit was just a front. The BBU was actually a conglomerate consisting of high-level officials who held day jobs in law enforcement, politics, and state and federal government. They fronted like public servants, but their real mission was the contracted elimination of targeted human beings in the five boroughs of New York City. Slick and his posse were professional gunslingers who filled up as many body bags for them as possible.
It had taken a lot of careful planning for Slick to select and assemble his highly efficient team of shooters. They were a five-member crew and each of them was responsible for a particular borough in the city of New York. Every gunslinger in his squad had major history with Slick and they operated under a strict set of rules and bylaws.
Slick was tossing a few handfuls of grain to his pigeon when his cell phone vibrated on his waist. He glanced down and saw it was a text message from his right-hand manz, Noodles.
I’m in the elevator coming up, the text message read. Don’t fuck around and spray me when I come through the door a’ight?
Minutes later the door swung outward and his homeys Noodles and Wild Man stepped out on the roof. While Slick was still dressed in the rags of his alter ego Sometimey, Noodles and Wild Man were draped in their regular gear. Noodles’s style was cool and casual, but as usual Wild Man was wearing the white boy tags with the black boy swag. His shit was set from top to bottom in trendy fly gear like Polo, Hollister, and Levi.
Noodles came over to the bird coop and dapped Slick out.
“Yo whattup,” Slick said, showing his ace some love.
He turned to Wild Man. “Sup, my nigga!”
Wild Man nodded. He didn’t fuck with pigeons like that so he said whattup from a distance.
Slick eyed his boy Noodles. He was the linebacker type. A down-ass cat from the Bronx. Noodles was big and muscular with long dreadlocks, and as usual he wore a high-necked shirt to cover the metal trach tube in his throat. The two men had met in the Army as members of an elite special ops combat team. Slick had been a platoon sergeant and Noodles had been the most loyal and dedicated soldier on his squad.
They had clicked up on the New York City tip and got real tight, and when Noodles got knocked for slumping a fellow soldier, Slick turned himself in and took the rap.
Not a lotta niggas woulda done no wild shit like that, but for Slick it had been an easy decision. He had already come to a crossroad in his life. Everybody that he loved was already dead, and sometimes he had a death wish himself. He had thought that the military training regiment would quiet that reckless urge that his family’s murders had opened up in him, but he was wrong. Because on the inside, in his heart where it really mattered, Slick was just as dead as his family members. He was just waiting to get buried.
The cracker that Noodles had murdered was one of them racist skinheads, and him and his KKK friends had ambushed Noodles while he was out on a remote field site. Them redneck soldiers had jumped Noodles and tied a rope around his neck, then dragged him through a muddy swamp until he blacked out.
Noodles had almost died and he’d been scarred for life, but he had survived. He had told the investigators who the cats were, but not one of those cowards had been brought to justice. Not one.
A couple of months later the ringleader of the skinheads was found hanging upside down from a rafter with an American flag stuffed down his throat. Fourteen bones in his body were broken and his throat was sliced open from ear to ear.
It took six hours for the military investigators to arrest Noodles and charge him with murder. The brief trial was a joke, and the moment the conviction came in they snatched Noodles and tossed his ass as deep into the shitty bowels of the brig as they could throw him.
But Noodles had an insane fear of being locked down in small spaces, and when Slick went to visit him his boy was a fuckin wreck. Noodles had been refusing to eat or drink ever since he got there. He was huddled in a corner hearing voices and fighting off invisible enemies, and he had lost a crazy amount of weight off of his six-five frame.
It was obvious that he wasn’t gonna make it in the bing. So despite what it was gonna cost him Slick had gone to his military superiors and ‘fessed up to the murder. Noodles was let go and Slick became a convict. He ended up serving nine months on a murder bid before his sentence was overturned on appeal and the killing was deemed a justifiable homicide.
It had been a real risky maneuver that could’ve cost Slick his freedom for the rest of his life, but he had no regrets. His right-hand manz Noodles had spent every day since then showing Slick the utmost loyalty and allegiance. Noodles knew exactly what kind of sacrifice that Slick had made for him, and he woulda laid down his life for him. All he had to do was ask.
But Slick decided he didn’t want Noodles’s life. He wanted his stealthy surveillance techniques and his eagle-eye sniping skills. So Slick had invited his ace to get down with the Zip ’em up Crew, and promised him he could rake in way more cheese from one job than he had made in six months with the military.
Noodles was wit’ it off the rip. His moms was real sick in Guatemala and she needed money for her heart medicine, so he was all the way game. Free to do his thing, Noodles took to the murder game like a fish takes to water, and right off the bat he became one of the most dedicated and proficient members of the team.
“Yo, that was some quality work y’all put in at that Chinese Restaurant last night,” Slick said as he eyed Noodles and Wild Man. “But another mission just came down the pipes that we need to talk about. It’s coming up quick so I need both of y’all to be ready.”
“I was born fuckin ready,” Wild Man rocked back on his heels and sneered. Slick knew his cocky Asian brother spoke the truth because he lived up to his street name on a daily fuckin basis.
Just like Slick, Wild Man was a product of the grimy streets of Brooklyn. His family had owned the Wing Luck Chinese restaurant near the train station on Rockaway Avenue since way back in the day. But as a skinny Asian kid living in a crime-ridden all-black hood, Wild Man had grown up in the trenches fighting to prove his manhood almost every single day. He used to get the shit kicked outta him walking back and forth to school until he developed some heavy hand skills and started earning his brutal rep.
Slick used to grub on mad egg rolls at the Wing Luck all the time when he was a juvenile. Him and Wild Man had gotten into their first dust-up when they were both thirteen, and by that time Wild Man was already well on his way to becoming a criminal beast. He was scrambling on the streets with a reckless posse, and they were pulling brutal kick-doors and drug-related kidnappings left and right.
Slick’s grandmother was still alive back then and she had him running errands for all the old people in the building. When Wild Man called himself squeezing Slick for the money he was carrying for old lady Johnson’s blood pressure pills, Slick had twisted him up on the concrete and jammed a snub-nose deep up under his nuts.
Slick had won that round, but by the time Wild Man turned seventeen he had packed on twenty pounds of muscle and was terrorizing grown men on the streets of Brooklyn. He had fallen in love with martial arts and he carried a razor blade in his mouth and kept something sharp shit in every pocket.
While the majority of trigger-happy hittas preferred to kill niggas from a distance, Wild Man was a junkie for that toe-to-toe up-close combat shit. He was lethal with his bare hands and highly proficient with anything that had a sharp edge on it.
The respect Wild Man earned in the hood was rapid and widespread. Them same cats who used to stomp him like a rat back in the day would scamper to the other side of street if they saw him coming now. They didn’t even know how to fuck with a dieseled-up Hulk-lookin Chinese hitta who carried a blade under his tongue and walked outta his house every single day looking for trouble.
But Wild Man’s attraction to trouble had put him in a trick bag more than a few times. He had fucked around and caught a charge that coulda put him ass-down in a cell for a good long minute, but the judge was an old Asian cat who took mercy on him. He gave Wild Man the option of either going to jail or joining the Marine Corps, and Wild Man had jumped at the chance to get his hands on a government burner and shoot shit up.
The military regime of the Corps had tried to instill discipline and a code of honor in Wild Man. But as a product of Brownsville he was from a place that had no discipline and he walked amongst beasts who obeyed no code of conduct. After five years in uniform Wild Man had returned home to The Ville, and the only thing he had to show for his service were the skills he got from his combat training: how to hunt, how to survive, and most importantly, how to kill.
Slick had tapped Wild Man for his squad right after he was ejected from the service and it was one of the best decisions he had ever made. Despite their lil bang ups back when they were young’uns, the two of them had become true brothers. Even though Wild Man could be reckless and had a quick temper, Slick knew that when it came time to yank that trigger his Asian-persuasion brother was the Zip ’em up Crew’s Most Valuable Player.
Slick got another buzz on his cell phone alerting him that Whitey and Jewelz were on their way up to the rooftop too. He pulled his shit together and got ready to put an appeal out there. He was about to hit his team with a request that was real crucial to him, but had the potential to cause some static at the same time.
So what’s poppin with the next job? Noodles typed on his text-to-speech device as soon as all five of them were onsite and their circle was complete. Noodles’s vocal cords had been fucked up by his near-lynching, and ever since the night of his assault he had been mute and unable to speak a single word.
Slick reached up under his cap and retrieved a scrap of paper that he had taken off his bird and tucked away. He unfolded it and looked out at his click. “We got a message that says there’s a jeweler down on Fulton Street who needs to be pushed off the edge of the fuckin planet. We ain’t got a lotta info on this one, though. Matter fact, besides the time and the place, they didn’t give up any other details. All I know is we’re supposed to hit a monkey holding a red briefcase.”
Mad snide comments broke out amongst his crew.
“Hit a monkey? That’s all you got?” Wild Man’s slanted eyes flashed dangerously under the moonlight. “Them suckers gonna toss out some bogus lil cookie crumbs and they just expect us to walk up on a job with our eyes closed?”
