“I’ll be with you in a minute, Carter,” Rain said, and then Carter left the office. “Now that you’ve heard all the details from Monika, are you comfortable thinking that the situation has been dealt with?” she asked.
“For the time being, I’m comfortable thinking that the situation has been dealt with. For the time being,” Wanda said, and Rain stood up.
“Just checking,” Rain said as she made her way to the door with Wanda following behind her. When they exited the office, Carter stood up and looked at Yarissa.
“You have the conn,” Carter said.
“Aye, Captain,” Yarissa saluted as Carter followed Rain and Wanda out.
Chapter Thirty-three
When Jackie got in the car with Baby Chris, she was feeling good. For the first time since Mike Black made her a Captain, she felt that she had the respect of her peers. Jackie had just left a meeting with some of the people she respected.
She had deep admiration and respect for Rain, her actions when she was a soldier and the way that she had conducted herself as boss of The Family made her worthy of it. Jackie had been hangin out at Doc’s for years and looked up to him. And Ed Weather, his reputation had always proceeded him, and when he lost that, Ed did what was necessary to restore it. And then there was Carter Garrison. Everybody she respected in this family held him in high regard. And now that she had met him and had a chance to work with him, she saw why.
“The killing Captain,” Jackie said aloud, as Baby Chris drove.
“Say what?”
“The killing Captain, that’s what they’re calling me now,” Jackie said and laughed, but she was proud of her new title.
“Like Howard. Yeah, I can see that.” Baby Chris nodded his head. “Difference is you do your own killing. Carter used to do Howard’s killing for him.”
“What you know about that, youngling?”
Baby Chris laughed. “I grew up in Cynt’s crew.”
Christopher Aloysius Arcus Jr. was the son of Chris ‘Babyface’ Arcus, he was one of Cynt’s soldiers. He was quite the ladies’ man until the day that he first saw Paula Shorter, aka Peaches, a new dancer at Cynt’s. Babyface walked up to her while she was dancing, took all the money he had out of his pocket and looked at her.
“You gonna be my wife,” he said, and laid the money at her feet. True to his word, Babyface Arcus married Peaches four months after that day and two years later, Peaches was pregnant. If the ambulance got there ten minutes later, Baby Chris would have been born at Cynt’s.
“You serious?”
“Yeah. I mean it ain’t like she was dancing or nothing that night, she just used to hang out up there. My father was there, all her friends were there.”
“They were family.”
“Right. So, after I was born, my mother went back to work dancing and a lot of those nights, she’d bring me with her. Since they both worked there, I pretty much grew up at Cynt’s.”
Jackie laughed. “So, you grew up in a hoe house.”
“Sure did.”
Like R.J. and Judah, Baby Chris grew up in The Family, only his father wasn’t a boss or a Captain, his father was a soldier, a hijacker and a stick-up man. He was a decent earner that was shot by the police coming out of a bank when Chris was eleven. “Lookin’ just like my daddy is how I got the name Baby Chris,” he said as he pulled up in front of Conversations and Travis got in the back seat.
As Baby Chris drove on, Jackie explained to Travis where they were going and what they were going to do.
“Kill all of Coleman’s men and burn the place to the ground,” Jackie said.
“Okay,” Travis said. “How you gonna do it?”
“Run the civilians out like we gonna rob the place, kill his men and torch the joint,” Jackie said.
Travis shook his head. “The hard way.”
“You got a better idea, now’s the time.”
“I say we toss in a couple of flash bangs, and a couple of smoke grenades, everybody runs out,” Travis suggested. “In the confusion, we go in with gas masks and night vision goggles. We pop the guys with the guns.”