Queen of the City 3: The Life of a Female Rapper, page 12
“Ok, so you know that science just recently said it was no longer a planet. They were basically just like, ‘Aye Pluto, fuck yo’ lil’ retarded ass, you’re no longer one of us’.”
“Vinny, does this story have a fucking point?”
“Shaunie, shut up! I’m getting to it. Now look, you know we exist too, right? But what if one day somebody just says, ‘Yo, you no longer exist,' you know what I’m saying? Just because they say it, the shit doesn’t mean it’s right. Like, ‘Lyric, yo ass don’t exist no more,’ but um, you still sitting right the fuck here.”
Shaunie and I looked at each other trying to figure out where he was going with it. Suddenly, he spoke up, “Man, fuck y’all and fuck science, too! Science doesn't know shit!” I laughed to myself as Malley turned towards me, “What’s funny?” I smiled, “Nothing, just thinking about some shit from before, that’s all.” We waited on the porch for a few hours, hoping to attract Nas’s boys if they rode by. As the sun began to go down, I got a text from Garcia that said he was on his way. I let him know to park in the alley just in case they were here. Moments after that, the white Impala slowly turned down our block, and it was like as soon as they caught a glimpse of me on the porch, it sped up. I grabbed Malley, “They’re coming. You ready?” She stood up as if she was and the car stopped right in front of us and waited a few moments before they made a move. I put my hands in my pockets, glaring right back at them and suddenly, the passenger’s door opened and Loc stepped out. Three men stepped out the back of the car, smiling, “Ayyyye, Lyric! Man, you are hard to catch up with,” one of them said as they started walking closer to me.
“I’m here now.”
“We see.”
They walked up on the porch and glanced to my right, “Who is that?” Loc asked.
“This is my homegirl, Malley. Malley, you know Loc?”
“Nah, I’ve never met him.”
He peered at her as if he was analyzing her body language, then looked back at me. “Aight, Lyric. You should just come with us.” I folded my arms across my chest and said,
“I got Prince in there. Where is Nas at? He doesn't want him?”
“Nas ain’t here. Let me see Prince, though, if you don’t mind.”
“He’s in the back.”
I turned to go inside and Malley followed. “Nah, she can stay here,” Loc said, “she can stay out here with these niggas. If anything goes wrong in here, y’all kill her.” Malley turned towards me and just that quick, there was a wrench in the plan, but I had to play it off so they wouldn’t think something was up.
“If something goes wrong? Ain’t nothing goin’ wrong in here, Loc, but aight.”
“I’ve known you long enough to know that you plot. That’s what you do, and I respect it, but I know I have to stay on my toes with you.”
We walked inside the house, and Loc closed the door behind him as I walked to the back. I checked my phone; Garcia had texted me to say he was out back. I let him know the situation and then put my phone back in my pocket. “Lyric, stop bullshitting and come back out here. We both know that you don’t have Prince here,” Loc said, his deep voice traveling smoothly through the house. I grabbed the two desert eagles and came out to the front. Loc scowled at me, the pistol in his hand was still relaxed as I came out with the barrels pointed right at him. “So, here we are, Loc,” I said, creeping towards him, “this don’t have nothing to do with you, aight? I just need Nas.”
“Lyric, you know it doesn't work like that.”
“Fuck that, Loc. I don’t know what type of shit y’all got going on, but I need to get to him.”
“Lyric.”
“Loc, I’m telling you right now, I need to get to Nas. You need to bring him here, aight? I gotta protect Prince. I gotta protect myself, aight? Please.”
“Do you think it is that easy?”
“I don’t care how easy or hard it is, I need that nigga here, Loc!”
“Shhhh,” he said, “don’t raise your voice. Them niggas will come in here spraying, and I don’t want you hurt.”
“Oh, you don’t want me hurt, huh? Just like that day you were supposed to take me out of town? You were trying to see where I was headed so you could let Nas know.”
“Bullshit.”
“What?”
“Bullshit. I left that day because I weighed my options. I could have taken you out of town and risked being tracked there and get both of us killed or I could leave and let you figure shit out on your own. I didn’t want you hurt, Lyric. The truth is, I care about you. I know Nas is on some fuck shit right now, but that is the homie, and I’m not in a position to cross him.” He sat his gun on the table as mine were still aimed right at him. That was the one thing about him that I admired, even in the face of death, he was never scared. I wished that I could have that mentality but the truth was, death scared the shit out of me and if I could, I would avoid it all together. The thought of leaving this life and going somewhere that nobody alive has ever seen with their own eyes was enough to make me want to stay here forever. I hated the unknown.
“Damn, Loc.Look, I just need to get to him, aight? I need to. This ain’t got shit to do with you.”
“Lyric, are you ready to die?”
Just then, there was a knock on the front door. “I’ll be out in a minute,” Loc said, yelling towards the door. He turned back to me, and that is when a bullet pierced through the window and hit him on his side. He grabbed his rib cage and leaned down to pick up his pistol but before he could grab it, four more shots went off and knocked him completely to the ground. I slowly shook my head as my guns shook in the palm of my hands. Suddenly, Garcia and Malley walked through the door. He fired three more shots into Loc and looked at me, “Aye, Lyric, let’s go! Rapid Lament, Ma!”
It wasn’t until Malley ran over and grabbed my arm that I snapped out of my daze and ran to the front door. Everybody that was with Loc was laid out on the ground and the porch. They didn’t have gunshot wounds or anything on them. Malley grabbed my arm again, “Come on, girl! We gotta go!” She pulled me to the back where Garcia and a couple guys were waiting in their cars. We got in and left the scene as the thoughts of Loc replayed in my mind. He just wanted to help,I said to myself as we sped away from Big Mama’s house. “Why did y’all kill him?!” I yelled to Garcia.
“Mama, chill out, all right? We have to send a message. That nigga didn’t show up, and he wasn’t going to show up. Now he knows it’s real and there is a better chance that he is going to come out of hiding.”
“Fuck! He didn’t do shit to deserve that!”
“Deserve?” he said disgustedly, “deserve has nothing to do with it. This is the drug game, and they know that once they get involved, they are not guaranteed to make it out alive. This is a part of the game, Lyric.”
We sped through the neighborhoods until we got to the south side. I knew the police would be contacting me soon. This would have been the second murder at Big Mama’s house in less than a month, and there was no way that they would buy it being a coincidence. This hadn’t gone the way I thought it would, and it was time to improvise. I looked at Malley as she sat by the window without uttering a word. I knew what had to be done, “Garcia, I know where this nigga is at. I think we need to get over there now though because shit is probably a little crazy right now with them knowing that a few of his men were killed. It is the perfect time to catch the nigga off guard.”
They drove us to his spot on the south side as darkness blanketed the sky above. I nodded in Malley’s direction, and she picked up on what I was saying. As long as we had been together, we were able to develop some flawless nonverbal communication. It was like we were one in the same and I didn’t have to say a word for her to understand fully what I was trying to say. Garcia walked a few steps ahead of me and just then, I pulled out my gun and aimed it at the back of his head. He stopped, “Mama, what are you doing?” he said as I reached my hand around his waist and snatched his pistol off his hip. “You’re not running this shit right now. Your plan was fucked from the jump, aight? I got business I need to handle, and yo’ ass is slowin’ me down.” Malley slit the driver’s throat and slid into his seat. “Come on, let’s go!” she yelled. I kept my gun aimed at him as I backed into the passenger’s seat. We pulled off from his spot, his homie dead on the street while we drove further away. “We are going to Nas, right?” she asked. “Yeah. We are going straight to him.”
Chapter 18
We parked at the end of the alley as streetlights flickered on and off above us like they were signaling our path to Nas’s crib. Everything looked the same, and if that was the case, I knew exactly where to go to get inside the house. “Follow me,” I whispered to Malley as we crept down the alley to the back of the house. The backyard was empty, and I waited to hear the dogs, knowing that they usually came rushing out as soon as the smallest noise was made. I tapped my gun against the fence to lure them out, and suddenly, two of them charged out of the garage and headed straight to the fence. When they got close, they stopped growling and began wagging their tails. “Thank God they remember me,” I said to Malley as I unlatched the lock on the fence. They jumped on me until I gave them the sign to calm down. They both sat, wagging their tails and waiting for the next order, but I didn’t give them any. We went to the back of the house, and I glanced up at the window to Nas’s room. The light was off as was the kitchen lights. There is no way that nobody is here, I thought to myself, no fuckin’ way.
The back door was locked, but Malley was a pro with opening shit that didn’t need to be opened. She plucked two bobby pins out of her hair and went to work. Moments later, the door popped open as she winked at me. We both took out our pistols and crept into the house like assassins. The back door opened into a living room that was stripped clean with nothing inside of it except a table and a few chairs. The wooden floor boards creaked whenever you stepped in certain spots, and I remembered that minute detail as I directed Malley across the room. We went into the dining area, the place where there was usually the most men around but oddly that room was just as empty. The old drug rooms were clean, and there wasn’t a clue that this house had been a heavy drug spot in the past. “Something ain’t right,” I whispered to Malley as we stood, looking around the room, feeling the eerie emptiness that accompanied it.
We crept up the stairs, still curious as to why there was nobody or nothing here. We got to Nas’s room, and the door was unlocked. I took a deep breath and pushed it open just to see that his room was swept clean. “Fuck!” I said out loud, realizing that this was no longer Nas’s spot. He moved, and I didn’t know how long ago he left. I realized I had made a wrong move as I looked around. The emptiness made me feel as if I was inside of a warehouse. “What now?” Malley said as she went to the window. “I don’t know. I don’t fuckin’ know.”
Just then, my phone rang. It was a number that wasn’t saved in my contacts, but I answered anyway,
“Hello?”
“Lyric Sutton?”
“Yes.”
“This is Detective Spencer. Where are you right now?”
“I’m out. Why?”
“We need you to come down to the station.”
“What is this about?”
“We will explain everything once you arrive. Can you come now?”
I paused for a moment, knowing exactly what this was about and dreading every minute, “Aight. I’ll be there.”
“Lyric,” he said sternly, “Please don’t make us come look for you because if you do, we will do it with a warrant for your arrest.”
“I said I’ll be there.”
With that, I hung up the phone and let Malley know what was going on. “Now what?” she asked, nervously. I was pissed that Garcia came to the crib and killed everyone, but that was my fault. I agreed to the shit, but I didn’t have to. I could’ve left that night and did my own thing, and now, I wished I did. We drove down to the police station and Malley parked in the lot.
“I don’t know how long I’ma be in here,” I said to her, “so I don’t know if you wanna chill here or what.”
“Lyric, I don’t have nowhere else to go. I’ma just chill here.”
I walked into a building flooding with police officers. They all glared at me as soon I stepped in as if they knew what I was coming in for. One of the officers stepped to me as I stood at the front entrance. She was short and round with blonde hair flowing from under her cap. “Can I help you?” she asked pleasantly. “Yeah, I’m here to see Detective Spencer.” She led me through the police station, past the holding cells that kept people with somber faces behind bars. They looked as if they were begging for someone to let them out and I could only hope that I wouldn’t be locked up anywhere in here after I spoke with the detective.
She set me down inside of a small room with a flickering light above me. The chair I sat in was uneven and rocked whichever way my body weight shifted to. It was annoying, and the chair itself was uncomfortable, and I knew why it was that way. This was not a room to get comfortable in; this was a room to intimidate and hopefully prod something out of whoever sat in this seat. Moments later, Detective Spencer walked in and flopped a Manilla folder on the table in front of me. He huffed as he sat down in the seat and intensely looked me in the eyes for a few seconds. “Are you going to tell me why I am here or are you just going to stare at me the whole time?” He reached over to the folder and pulled out snapshots. Four men, one dead on the porch, two dead on the lawn and one dead inside the house. When I saw Loc laying in Big Mama’s front room, I cringed inside, but I didn’t show any emotions. I couldn’t because if I did, the string would begin to unravel and nobody likes a snitch. Snitches don’t last long at all here in Milwaukee, and that wasn’t even in my blood. I hoped Garcia knew that himself.
“Four men, all dead at your place of residence, Lyric. Four. Well, five if you include the young man who was stabbed there a couple weeks back and died at the hospital. That was your friend, wasn’t it? Vinny?”
“Yeah.”
“So, you’re going to tell me that he died, and now these four men have died all in the same house, and you don’t know anything about it? Is that what you’re going to tell me, Ms. Sutton?”
“No, I’m not going to tell you anything because I wasn’t there. I don’t know how these people are getting murdered at my Grandmother’s house. I—”
He cut me off, “Bullshit, Lyric. Bullshit. Now, Vinny? I can understand that, okay. You were out in, what, Rockwall? That’s what you told me last time, and Vinny had gotten stabbed much earlier that day, so, call me a dumb ass, but I believed you then. Now, we have four, count them, FOUR dead bodies at the SAME SPOT and you want me to believe that you don’t know shit about it? You expect me to believe that you don’t have anything to do with it?”
“I don’t want you to believe anything, but I want you to understand that I didn’t kill anybody.”
“Well, Lyric, here’s the thing. I can put you in that house. I have witnesses that said they saw you there earlier today when they were killed. What are you going to say to that?”
I folded my arms over my chest, “I’m going to say that whoever said that is full of shit.”
He could have been right, but if this was a game, I wasn’t going to tip my hand. I would rather call his bluff and make him prove himself than to admit to something, even if I knew it was true. I had been around this business too long just to get played by some pissed off detective. “You know who did this, and if I had to guess, I would say you did.” I laughed, “Well, you don’t have to guess because I’m telling you I didn’t do it.” He reached into the folder and pulled out another sheet of paper and asked, “What is this?” I glanced down at it,
“It’s a chopper.”
“A chopper. Okay. AK-47, right?”
“If you know it, why are you asking?”
“Because, we found this in your room. Now, you tell me that if you weren’t there and Vinny was murdered weeks ago, whose weapon is this?”
“I don’t know. As far as I knew, Vinny wasn’t doing no shit with guns, but he did tell me people were chilling at the house with him from time to time, so maybe they know. Shit, maybe it is theirs.”
“Who’s?”
I lowered my eyes at him, “You want me to do your fucking job for you? Am I getting your paycheck too, or nah?”
He stood up and walked out of the room with a head full of steam. I shook my head and leaned over to look at the pictures again. I moved them out the way until I got to Loc. It was fucked up that he had to get killed especially since I knew he always had my back as much as he could in his position. I couldn’t show any signs of emotion or anything because I knew they were watching me through the camera in the room. I had to keep it cool and play it off. Moments later, Detective Spencer walked in,
“Alright, come with me.”
“Come with you? For what?”
“We are going to hold you overnight for this warrant.”
“Warrant? What warrant?”
“Speeding ticket you never paid.”
I laughed, “I can’t believe this. For real?”
He cuffed me, “Yeah, for real. I know you know more than what you are telling me, and if we can keep you around a little longer to figure shit out, that’s what I’m going to do.”
He took me and placed me in the holding cell that I passed when I came in. I knew Malley was still waiting outside, so I used my phone call to let her know what was going on. As covertly as she could, she mentioned Quandra and said that she was able to get some information about Nas. She ended up finessing one of his homies earlier tonight, and when she heard what happened, she said she just wanted to pass the information. I could only hope that they didn’t find anything else to use against me and keep me locked up. Once Nas was dead, I really wouldn’t care what they did to me. I could rest easy knowing that Prince and everyone connected to me was safe.
They let me out the next morning, and Malley was still in the same spot she was when she brought me last night. “You stayed here all night?” I said as I got in the car. “Nah, I went to see what Quandra was talking about. She showed me where that nigga is right now. We rode past some spot on the north side. Here,” she handed me the piece of paper with the address on it. I knew exactly where he was at. It was near a playground right in the heart of the inner city, and I used to go there to watch Junie and Vinny play basketball after school. “Yo, you think—” She cut me off, “She said she would help if we needed her to.” I was thankful for that because even though I knew the area, I still didn’t know as much as I needed to know in order to slide in there. It was 1 pm when we headed back to Big Mama’s house. The yellow tape had been removed from the house, and the front room was stained with Loc’s blood. I shook my head when we walked through the door as the same stench of blood stained my nostrils as it did when I saw Vinny. “Damn, you just cleaned shit up, and now it’s here again.”
