Tabu, page 10
The suddenly searing heat had driven the people of Patterson projects out of their stifling concrete and brick dwellings. This reborn section of the South Bronx, a spit away from Harlem, had been home to many of the best athletes in the country as well as a breeding ground for some of the city’s most vicious drug dealers.
Most of the normal folk who had a little dough got out when the crack epidemic made project living its worst in the late ʹ80s. Bernie Mann was going to try to keep his family there, the rent was cheap and he knew most of the hoods, but got his family out the day after Tanya was mugged in the lobby of their building.
Already sitting high on the bench was Pip, Chuck’s main man. Pip was a six‐footer with a dark complexion and was very slender. He wasn’t a native to Patterson; he was imported in like the drugs and just as lethal as Chuck’s right hand.
Pip stood when he saw C-Mann. He gave C-Mann a nod as a greeting. Back in the day, about a dozen years ago, those two, C-Mann and Pip, were sharing women like Biggie and Puffy.
Chuck wasn’t surprised to see him. He met C-Mann and they embraced.
“What’s up?” C-Mann said.
“I can’t call it.”
“These are for you.” He offered the bag but knew better than to hand it to Chuck.
“Thanks, good looking out. Some motherfuckers don’t understand respect, come empty handed and shit.”
Pip perked up. That was the notice for where the bag should go. Pip flipped open his phone, said something in a whisper, and seconds before C‐Mann got close to him a youngster rode up on a dirt bike.
“Give it to him,” Pip said, pointing at the pre‐teen on the shiny bicycle.
The kid took it, put the bag in his backpack and stood on the bike pumping back up the hill.
“Thanks for see me.” C-Mann said.
“Yo, whenever. We still fam.”
“I am glad to hear that.”
“You not going to be glad about all I have to say.” C-Mann let the words go without response.
Chuck moved to a bench that faced the street and Pip. Pip got back into the sports section as if he had put money on yesterday’s games.
C-Mann sat an arm’s length from Chuck.
The benches always reminded C-Mann of Iris Taveras, a Puerto Rican chick who lived in Chuck’s building. What seemed like a million years ago, she sat across from C-Mann in a short, short miniskirt and opened her legs. When someone would sit with C-Mann she’d close her legs until they were alone. The bad thing about that memory was that she never gave him any of that pussy she was showing off.
C-Mann said, “Man, shit, I remember we used to sit on these benches and break night, drinking Old E, smoking fat-ass joints. Talking shit about the future.”
Chuck nodded but he didn’t feel the same nostalgia. He was still there everyday.
“The future is here. It ain’t like we thought.”
“Nope,” Chuck said. “Ain’t nobody living on easy street. Shit is still a struggle.”
C-Mann swallowed a knot. His voice failed him as he said, “They killed my uncle Myers, my cousin Fingers, my sister Tanya and now they got my girl and my father. My father is probably dead. You already knew about my mother.”
“Tanya. They killed her?” Chuck looked away as if he knew the answer wouldn’t clear his mind. “Why would they kill her?”
“Why would they start it with my mother?” C-Mann sighed. He faced Chuck and bellowed, “It’s bananas. Out of control.”
“I have a truce with Miami,” Chuck said without looking in his friend’s direction.
“Well, that’s sweet. But check this, it’s not Miami.”
The words rang true. Chuck knew that Miami would have just tortured Bernie or C-Mann until he got what he wanted. It wasn’t Miami’s style to kill civilians.
The quick movements of his dog chasing a squirrel took Chuck’s attention easily.
Chuck said, “I hear there is a price on your head, a nice fat knot of hundreds that would make a crackhead want to drop his pipe and cut your throat with the broken glass.”
“I am telling you the real. It ain’t Miami. It’s family shit gone bad. It’s some southerners who want money they feel they’re owed.”
“I got to pass.”
C-Mann looked Chuck over. He saw that his old hangout partner didn’t want any part of Miami. C-Mann couldn’t figure out why. He knew Chuck feared no man.
“Pass?” C-Mann said. “Why, ʹcause I ain’t come around here and hang out with you and your drug dealers? Because I don’t call you?”
“No, none of that. This business.”
“Bullshit. What I owe you? What I got to do to get you to back me on this? Man, dog, we got history.”
“You taking this personal. You ain’t hearing me; I got a truce with Miami.”
“How the fuck am I supposed to take it. Motherfuckers are counting the seconds until my father and I are killed and our club is taken from us. None of you motherfuckers want to help us. Tell me how I am supposed to feel?”
Chuck paused for effect. That pissed C-Mann off.
“Did you and your father ever make me feel comfortable in that fucking club y’all got? No.”
“Fuck was we supposed to do? Blow you in a booth and leave a bottle of Cristal?”
Chuck was set to explain his feelings. He thought Bernie Mann never liked him and that C-Mann had changed once he took charge of the club, forsaking their friendship, but C‐Mann cut him off.
“You know what? Fuck it. I don’t need shit from you. Thanks for nothing.”
Chuck had never allowed anyone to speak to him in such a manner and walk away. Never had anybody cursed so much at him. But this was a former friend who would be dead in less than a week, so he let the man vent.
Chuck did get tense, though. He said, “Chill, kill that attitude.”
“Fuck that, yes or no?”
“No.”
“Then fuck it then, you know?”
“Come on, nigga. Dogs get mad, you ain’t seeing it clear.”
“Stop telling me to see shit. Fuck that. You my last hope, for real. So fuck seeing shit clear. It’s all muddle, muddy, whatever. I ain’t trying to hear it.”
Pip looked up over his paper. He wasn’t alarmed, though. He understood the tension between two old friends when one needed the other to do something he couldn’t.
Chuck watched a crowded city bus go by. He then spoke in a singsong, Bronx niggerish verse that silenced C-Mann.
“You still ain’t feeling me, son.” Chuck was shaking his head. “Yeah, I miss our friendship. I miss hanging with someone I could trust with my life or my wife. I miss hanging with someone from back in the days that seen me grow up. Someone that knows my blood family. I miss all that shit.
“But I am a businessman like you and your father. I got lives depending on the shit I do. I can’t fuck around in this shit. I can’t come riding in and save you. Too many other motherfuckers will get killed.”
This was the most Pip had heard Chuck speak to someone.
“Shit.” C-Mann rubbed his forehead. “You...nigga, you not hearing me. Miami ain’t got shit to do with this. Believe me.”
“Let me tell you something; C-Mann, I love you from here,” he patted his chest with a fist. “I don’t want to see you get hurt or worse.”
Chuck bit his words in a grimace of anger and frustration.
He said, “Whoever, okay? Whoever this is. Your pops and your girl? They dead, son. The club? They got that shit. And there’s nothing you can do about it. I don’t want to see anything happened to you. I can’t do anything about it. This, this I gotta pass on. Giving you firepower is the best I can do.”
“Firepower?” C-Mann let out a deep breath. His mind was working fast. “You know what? I need a fucking bomb.”
Chuck knew what he meant. He shuffled his feet on the hard tar covering the concrete.
C-Mann wanted Chale, a Puerto Rican who they had grown up with them in Patterson projects. Chale was as good a terrorist as any foreigner. He lived and studied explosives and prided himself in killing without a gun.
“Nobody is getting that club. Nobody.”
Chuck nodded. “I’ll send him to you.”
They hugged in a tight embrace, Chuck patting his
back.
“Stay alive, man. That is your only goal in this.” C-Mann nodded and let out a long sigh. Then he said, “You know what? Fuck that. You right, Chuck. This is not personal. Naw, not for you.”
Chuck spat into the grass.
C-Mann turned to walk away. He looked back and said, “But I’ll tell you what though, yeah I am gonna stay the fuck alive. Survive this shit. Fuck that.”
CHAPTER 24
Penny wasn’t afraid for her life.
Not yet. Not even while the down South folks kept her tied while they talked out their plans. She wasn’t even fearful she was about to die after she was taken into a bare room and shown Bernie Mann’s cold, dead‐ass body in a trunk.
No, she considered herself a thousand‐dollar poker chip in a high stakes game. Penny figured she was bait; and of course, her lover was going to come for her. He was mean when he felt somebody was fucking with her. He had gotten one of them, she thought, he can come get these two.
Tippy was looking at Penny as if she was a pink and green alien with puss coming out of her disgusting face. She was mumbling angrily.
Penny cut her eyes away. She wasn’t afraid to die, but she sure was frightened of what Tippy might do to hurt her. She knew for sure Tippy was crazy and the man with her was set to explode after watching his boy get gunned down. Penny kept her mind on being rescued and her eyes off them two motherfuckers. She didn’t listen to the arguing between the thug and the crazy sister.
Fred was mourning the death of his boy and questioning the plan Tippy had going.
Tippy was trying to nip his dissension in the butt.
“Look, you gonna sulk or you gonna help me get this motherfucker. Shit, come on. Focus those murderous thoughts. You are going to get your chance.”
Fred quietly rose and seemingly in one motion was out the door with a slam.
Tippy shook her head. He was going to get high. She wasn’t sure if that was going to be a good thing or disastrous.
Three hours later, Fred returned with a slam of the apartment’s door. Tippy had succumbed to a numbing tiredness. She pushed herself off the bed and came out to find that Fred had dragged Penny to the middle of the living‐room floor and was untying her.
“Fred, wait?”
“Shut the fuck up. We left my boy dead in the street. I’m taking my payback out her ass.”
Tippy shut up. She stood there and watched, thinking through the bitter screaming that the only way to stop him would be to kill him, and she couldn’t do that. She needed him to have her back for at least one more day.
CHAPTER 25
C-Mann rode into Harlem across the bumpy Third Avenue Bridge. He turned onto Lexington Avenue and saw the pretty young white cop on her motor scooter before she saw him.
He tried not to pass her and kept his eyes on her. Shit, if he could have backed up or turned he would have, but they were in the middle of a block and she was sitting still.
He got caught at the light in a crowd of cars at 125th Street. He looked for her in his mirror and she was looking at the car. She came to him.
C-Mann took his piece off the passenger’s seat and dropped it under his seat as he slowed, the reflex so automatic he did not even register the action.
The cop maneuvered to the driver’s side of the Caddy. She stood off the scooter and grim faced said, “License and registration, please.”
“Sure.”
She ran the information on the shouldered mic extension of her walkie‐talkie. Nothing came up negative.
“Somebody doesn’t like you, sir?”
“A lot of people don’t.”
“What happened? The bullet holes?”
“I don’t know. I was just visiting friends in the projects in the Bronx and came out like this. I ain’t even hear no shots.”
“The Bronx is rough.”
“No doubt.”
The female cop looked into C-Mann’s eyes while she handed him his ID. She was looking for a reason to take him down. She was late for a booty call, but if this guy in front of her was a felon, she could use the collar.
“You have to get those holes fixed,” she sighed. “Yeah, I gotta.”
“Be safe, Mr. Mann.”
“I am trying to be. You are going to make sergeant.”
“And you are going to get taken down if you ain’t right.”
Lanier had his hands full. Only two bouncers showed up for work. Tabu was crowding nicely for business but neither father nor son was there, and only two bouncers showed up for work.
Lanier had the guys at high alert, searching everyone, male or female, at the door thoroughly. And that night, for some reason, there were so many sexy females coming through the door.
Lanier tried to stay focused, but there were too many distractions. He was seriously thinking about robbing the place. Just taking a bag full of money and dipping out. He was plotting it out in his mind when one of his younger bouncers, a big oaf from uptown, came over.
“Yo kid, there’s more breasts, legs and thighs in here than in a bucket of the Colonel’s finest.”
Lanier ignored him but could see he was right. He couldn’t let the youngin’ see him slipping or all would be lost.
We at fucking war, he reminded himself.
Lanier had been in a drug war before and was happy to have survived it. He and his boys had a nice little thing going in their projects out in Brooklyn, and some Jamaicans fresh off the boat brought them down in one bloody night.
He looked at the smiling bouncer and spewed, “You trying to get laid or you making money tonight?” Lanier barked. “Get your ass back to your fucking post and stay alert.”
The dude lost his smile, cursed, but went back to his spot near the DJ’s booth without a word.
Burke came into the club just as unsure about his future as he had been leaving Juanita’s bed.
“You’re late,” Lanier barked. “Where’s Bernie?”
“I don’t know where he is; what you asking me for? And don’t sweat what time I get here, like it matters. We’ll be closed soon anyway.”
He saw beyond Lanier, looking for Juanita. She was at the bar and he wanted to catch her before she ran her big mouth.
“I can’t wait until you are running this motherfucker. I can’t get a drink. I gotta wait while these dumb hoes ignore customers and do whatever.”
“Fuck that, just make sure you keep your mouth shut about that.”
“About what?”
He eyed her strongly.
“Like, who I’ma tell. Just make sure you take care of me when you running this place.”
“Shut your fucking mouth. You done had enough
to drink.”
“Give me some money?”
“Later. I need what I got.”
That meant he was going to gamble, and usually Burke wins so she saw dollar signs and shopping the next day in the village.
Lanier was eyeing Burke, and when he moved he saw Juanita’s big legs in a short skirt. Lanier was sent off dreaming again. He looked up her body to find Juanita smiling at him. Damn, he smirked to himself; sometimes she is so fine for the bitch that she is.
He thought about C-Mann telling him how well she did head and that when you hit it from behind she could move her hips and turn you into a minuteman. Rumor had it that she fucked the boss, Bernie Mann, for a grand.
Fuck it, he thought and went over there.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Where everybody at, you in charge?”
“Your man is in the back. He’s in charge until C-Mann gets here.”
She scoffed, “Damn that, you the man.” “What do you want, Juanita?”
“A bottle of champagne, for starters.”
“Why don’t you ask Burke?”
“I want you to do it.”
“I don’t have time to fuck with you.” “Make time.”
“And what I get out of it.”
“Some good head.”
It didn’t take much for her to talk him into fucking her in Bernie’s office.
Lanier was laying pipe well, getting her good.
“I want you to take a nut in your mouth.”
She grinned, “You better not stop.”
“It’s coming.”
“Uh uh, go head and put that nut in me. This shit is too damn good. I’ll suck another one out.”
“Burke don’t be hitting it like this?”
It was nice to be with a young stud again, she thought.
She told him, “Shut up and fuck me harder.”
He did. He slammed her on the desk and hammered her until he shot off hard across her tight stomach.
After he got that nut she promised and they were getting dressed, she told him about Burke.
“He is trying to be the last Mann standing,” she said, giggling at her pun.
Lanier wasn’t surprised, just disappointed that Burke was slipping like that to tell a big‐mouth ho. Lanier had been offered a job by the Domini‐cans a month ago and hadn’t told a soul. He knew he was set no matter which way the war ended.
But Burke’s big mouth had him thinking, though. C-Mann didn’t deserve this.
CHAPTER 26
Lanier was talking to Michelle at the bar when C-Mann arrived. C-Mann gave them nods as he went by. Lanier caught C-Mann before he got to the office. “Man, where you been? Shit is hectic.”
C-Mann sucked in his anger; don’t this motherfucker know the shit I’m in?
C-Mann said evenly, “You did your job, you held it down, now shut the fuck up.”
Lanier bit back his words. He was contemplating putting an annoyance tax on the Manns. The last time they left him alone he took a grand from the bar and no one ever knew, he thought, and it brought a relaxed smile to his face.
“We need to talk.”
“Yeah,” C-Mann kept moving. “Get ready to close. We out of here in no more than two hours.”
