Chapter 1
Mike Black
“Bullshit, Mikey. You tellin’ me that you whacked two DEA agents and you ain’t worried?” Angelo Collette asked me after his seventh single malt scotch.
“Right.”
“Get the fuck outta here. You’re drunk.”
“Right.” Actually I was fucked up, so I said it. “I’m fucked up, but I ain’t worried.” And I wasn’t.
Not really.
Near as I could tell the cops weren’t up on me. And if my luck held up, and it hasn’t been worth a shit lately, they wouldn’t.
Luck?
Fact was my luck with the DEA has been all bad. My wife Cassandra was brutally murdered; arranged by DEA agents, which is something else I don’t understand. I’ve been out of the drug game for years.
My attitude about a lotta things changed after a very good friend, Vickie Payne, died smoking cocaine in my apartment.
My cocaine.
I've never done cocaine in my life, but back in the day I would always keep some around ’cause some women would freak for it. That night, Andre gave me some pure; just chipped it off the block, bagged it and handed it to me. When I got home the next morning, instead of puttin’ a cut on it, I threw the bag on the coffee table and crashed on the couch.
I had been asleep a couple of hours I guess, when Vickie came in. We talked for a minute then I passed out again. When I woke up I decided to get in the bed, but the door to my room was locked. I knocked on the door, but Vickie didn’t answer. After a while I kicked the door in. I found her lying on the floor naked, with the pipe still in her hand. To me, cocaine is death and heroin is slow death. So I took steps to get out. Maybe it was time to get all the way out.
As Wanda has become very fond of tellin’ me, we make just as much money from our legitimate businesses as we do from our other operations. Gambling, number running, loan sharking, and prostitution.
I’ve got no interest in the dope game at all. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t give a fuck how a muthafucka makes his money.
That’s his business.
And as long as his business doesn’t cut into mine, it’s none of my business. It’s all about business to me.
But this shit with the DEA ain’t about business, its personal. If you believe Bobby’s version of it, it began years ago when I bitch slapped Diego Estabon. Back then, Diego was with just Gomez Estabon’s fresh off the boat, punk-ass kid, who was trying to make a name for himself in his daddy’s drug business.
It was years later that Diego came up with some wild-ass scheme to implicate me in the game. Part of his plan involved kidnapping my wife Cassandra, and he died for it. I thought it would end there, but it didn’t. That led to one of his partners, a DEA agent name Kenneth DeFrancisco, goin’ to jail, and he blamed me for being there.
Me?
Why me?
Why not blame your dumb-ass partner for coming up with the dumb-ass plan?
Drunk or sober, I still haven’t figured that out. But because he blamed me, DeFrancisco ordered Cassandra’s murder. I killed him and everybody else that was involved in it. The only one left was another DEA agent named Pete Vinnelli, and I would get to him in due time. But these other two I never saw coming.
“Look, Angee, all I know is that these two fucks were plannin’ to kill me. What the fuck was I supposed to do?” How the fuck was I supposed to know that they were DEA?