She laughed. “Thanks for letting me know you’re coming, so if you don’t bang on my door, I won’t have to shove my gun in your face.” Once we arrived at her apartment, I explained what I wanted her to do and she basically had the same set of questions as Bobby and Wanda.
“You want me to hit Johnny Boy too.”
“No, just Nicky’s crazy ass. But, I want you to work up a profile on Johnny Boy and his crew. I want to have as much information as I can on both his and Nicky’s crew; their operations, the people they do business with, everything. In case this blows back on us, I need to know how they’re gonna come at us and be ready for it. We’re about to make an unsanctioned hit on a made-man, so we need to know as much as we can.”
“I’m on it, Black,” Monika promised and since I knew she was, and she will get it done for me and do it right, I left her apartment with the intention of going home to relax and enjoy my family.
“Somebody’s following us,” Chuck said. “You want me to lose them?”
“No. Pull over up ahead somewhere. At a bar, coffee shop, restaurant, doesn’t matter.”
Chuck spotted a small coffee shop up ahead on our right and he pulled over. “You stay out here, see how many there are, then call me and let me know,” I said, and I thought about Cassandra’s recent insistence that I start wearing a vest.
“If Rain has enough sense to wear one, I think you should too,” she said, and she was probably right. I mean, she usually is about most things. “We’re about to have another child, Michael, one that I do not plan on raising alone.”
“You won’t be alone; you’ll have Michelle and Easy.”
“You know what I mean,” Cassandra said with her I’m serious Michael look on her pretty face.
And I did.
I’ve been rolling the dice with my life for years, so I agreed with her before she got around to reminding me that I am not a young man anymore and honestly, I wasn’t trying to hear it.
The old Vicious Black days are gone and so is that Mike Black, she’s grown fond of saying.
I get that, I really do, so maybe, just maybe, for the sake of peace in my house, I’ll start rocking a vest.
I got out and went into the coffee shop and waited for Chuck to call and let me know what’s up. There was a line at the counter, as it is with all these places, so I got in line and waited like everybody else. When Chuck called, he said that there were three of them and they were coming in.
“You want me to follow them in?”
My first thought was to say, hell no, I got this.
After all, there were just three of them, right?
No problem, but then I thought about my wife and my children and said, “Come on.”
When I looked up and saw the three of them come in, my next thought was to call Chuck and say, never mind. I got these three piss-ant little young niggas. But instead, I just shook my head and got out of line and headed toward the back of the shop where the bathrooms were located. I looked over my shoulder to make sure they were following me. When I got back there, I pushed open the bathroom door but kept going out the back door.
Once I got out there, I waited. Waited for a good five minutes before they came outside. I guess they spent the time trying to figure out how I vanished into thin air, before one of them said, let’s check out back.
When they came out, I was leaning against a truck with both guns pointed at them. One of them froze right away, another froze when Chuck put his gun to the back of his head. But the last one, he decided that the thing to do was to raise his weapon. When he did, I shot him. You know the routine, one to the chest, one to the dome … make sure he’s gone.
At that point, the other two decided that they wanted to die too, I don’t know why, but they raised their weapons too. That’s when Chuck put one in the back of his head and I lit up the other.
“These kids,” Chuck said as we walked back to the car. “Somebody needs to teach them just a little something before they hand them a gun and say go kill somebody,” he said, as we got in.
“Thug school,” I laughed. “What a concept.”
Chapter Two
Carter Garrison had not been himself the last couple of days, and the reason for that was Mileena. When she took Carter back into her life, it was with the understanding that things would be different this time. Now that he was a captain, she thought that he would delegate all of the stuff that he used to do for Howard when he was a soldier. That way, he would be free to spend time with her. That didn’t happen.
She had grown tired of being the last on his list, and then there was Fantasy. To Mileena, it seemed like every time she turned around, that bitch was all up in his face and he was all up in hers. And on top of that, he spent entirely too much time with Rain, and knowing how much Rain loved
to fuck and knowing how she liked to get fucked because they’d talked about it, she wondered about that too. It was all too much for her, so when Carter returned to the condo that night after rolling out first thing in the morning to be with Rain, Mileena wasn’t there when he got back, and she’d been avoiding speaking to him ever since. And when she did have to speak to him, it was short and straight to the point.
“I don’t want to see you anymore.”