Hearing the gunfire finally made Chanel, Landy, and Mecca emerge from the bedroom. It was pandemonium inside the apartment. Trash and furniture were everywhere. Chanel saw her mother and sisters handcuffed and detained in the hallway where there was a nervous cop watching over them.
“Ohmygod, what’s going on?” Chanel asked.
“Get back inside!” Officer Fletcher shouted with his gun pointed at the teenage girls. They were wide-eyed with terror on their faces.
Fletcher was already on his radio calling for backup and he was too afraid to leave his position to see what happened. He knew an officer was involved in the shooting. Then it happened. He heard crackling through his two-way radio. “10-13, officer down! Officer down!”
Oh shit!
“Get the fuck back in the apartment!” Officer Fletcher screamed again at Chanel, Landy, and Mecca.
The girls complied. They were scared and shocked. Chanel’s home was turning into a war zone. Officer Duke finally emerged from the stairway looking torn down. He was angry. They all became angry and to feel like men, they began slamming and roughing up the handcuffed Bacardi, Charlie, and Claire. The girls were thrown to the floor, shouted at, and cursed. Question was, who shot a cop?
Chaos swept everywhere in less than an hour—from the Browns’ apartment, into the stairwell, and outside the project building. The SWAT team and dozens of police cars flooded the area, and homicide detectives and brass converged inside the building where it was confirmed. A cop was shot dead in the stairwell. The gloves were off, and the police shut down the Glenwood Houses—no foot traffic in or out of the place.
Butch was dragged out of his bed by several NYPD officers. He had slept through the commotion. Groggily, he stared up at a half-dozen cops glaring down at him—ready to beat him to a pulp simply because a cop was dead. Landy, Chanel, and Mecca were being treated like criminals, cursed out, and spoken to disparagingly. They too were placed in handcuffs and made to sit on the floor in the apartment while it was thoroughly searched. Unfortunately for the cops, they didn’t find anything except for two blunts—nothing to make a significant arrest. A few cops still wanted to arrest Butch, Landy, Chanel, and Mecca with a hard-on to thrust them into the system—maybe fuck ’em up. But an impartial captain overruled their racist desire.
The handcuffs were finally off, but Chanel couldn’t shake the feeling of being disrespected and treated like a criminal when she wasn’t. Landy decided she would stay far away from the Browns from here on out. They were too much drama, and murder was going too far. Even if it was a pig.
Mecca hugged her friend, but she too was in shock. She wanted to call her parents, but the police continued to treat them as if they were under arrest. Butch, now sober, was furious and he threatened to sue the NYPD. Everyone was upset. They all felt humiliated, and their wrists felt swollen because of the handcuffs being on for such a long time.
Camped outside the building were numerous reporters and news cameras. A cop being killed in the projects was big time news—if it bleeds then it leads. Locals were hounded by the reporters, and hovering above the projects were several police and media helicopters with a bird’s eye view of the commotion below.
When the house was finally cleared out and quiet, all Chanel thought was, Who shot the cop?
Chapter Five
Bacardi, Charlie, and Claire were attached to the chain gang and led into the Brooklyn precinct. They weren’t cursing out cops anymore, but they continued to seethe. They’d fucked up. They knew it, and it showed on their faces. New Year’s Day was going to be spent in jail, and due to the holiday, it was going to take a full forty-eight hours before they would go before a judge. They already had a strike against them with the NYPD—a cop was killed because of them. Each cop they came across at the precinct glared at them with hatred and disgust.
“Fuckin’ bitches!” one uniformed officer said. “If you ask me, the entire family needs to be put down.”
The girls heard the comment but kept quiet. It would behoove them to keep their cool, unlike a few hours ago when they were madwomen ranting obscenities at the police. They were now in enemy territory, and they truly did fear for their lives. Once a cop was killed, the gloves came off.
All three were placed in separate interrogation rooms, where the detectives questioned them about the shooting. The detectives started with Claire and they grilled her for hours, asking about guests at the party and details about what had taken place. She was a hot mess. She tried to speak with some intelligence, but nervousness overcame her and she ended up sounding like a bumbling idiot.
Charlie was next. She held her own and was adamant that she had nothing to do with the shooting and she wasn’t there. Bacardi frowned at the detectives and growled the same thing. She didn’t know who killed the cop. She and her daughters were cuffed when it went down.
The detectives wanted a shooter, but each of them separately said that they were nowhere near the crime scene. They were already under arrest and being detained in the hallway when it happened. Their statements angered the detectives, but there wasn’t anything they could do.
Inside Central Booking, they all had their mug shots taken, they were fingerprinted, and the guards conducted a full body search.
Once they were all together again in the holding cell, Bacardi immediately asked them, “What did y’all say to the police?”
“I ain’t say shit because I don’t know shit,” Charlie replied.
“I don’t know nothing either,” said Claire.
> Bacardi whispered, “So who you think killed that cop?” She looked at Charlie.
Charlie knew what she was hinting at. “God ain’t do it!”
“What about Fingers?” Claire asked.
“I don’t know. We don’t know shit!”
“You think God will get us out of here?” Bacardi asked Charlie.
“He will, believe me. My nigga is a man of his word. He ain’t gonna let me rot in here—y’all either. We just gotta keep cool and wait.”