Hostile Takeover

I slammed his face in the bar again.

“You better have my money tomorrow.”

Then I slammed his face in the bar again.

“And to make sure that you understand me.” I slammed his face on the bar again.

I pushed him toward security. “Get him out of here.”

They grabbed him, and Bobby and them walked his crew to the door at gunpoint.

Like I said, this was our mutha fuckin’ house. Wasn't shit going down in here that we couldn’t handle.

Chapter Fourteen

After we threw Bodie out, I spent most of the rest of the night in the office with Bobby, Nick and Jamaica making plans, because my slamming his face into the bar repeatedly was a declaration of war. I know that I said that I didn’t want to go to war, but he shouldn’t have brought his ass up in my joint trying to front.

“This is just me playing devil’s advocate,” Bobby began. “But if you hadn’t gotten happy slamming his face into the bar, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“I know. But fuck that.” I laughed a little. “I hate to sound like a fuckin’ little kid, but he started it, so yeah, Bobby, we’re going to the mattresses.”

“I ain’t sayin your wrong. Shit, if it was me, I would have just put a bullet in his brain and we’d be talking to Wes now,” Bobby said, and everybody laughed. Wesley Talin was Bodie’s right hand man.

The laughter stopped when the door open and Wanda came in with that look on her face. That look told me that she had already heard what went down with Bodie. One of these days, I’ll find out who her sources are.

“We’d be talking to Wes about what, Bobby?”

“I was just sayin’ I woulda shot Bodie—”

“Instead of slamming his face into the bar.” Wanda looked at me. “Really, Mike. You said you didn’t want to go to war with Bodie.”

“Then he shouldn’t have brought his ass up in here, five deep and heavy.”

Nick and Jamaica got up and tried to ease out quietly.

“You don’t have to leave because I’m here,” Wanda said.

“Yes we do, Wanda,” Jamaica said, and Nick closed the door behind them.

“He came up in here talkin’ shit. What was I supposed to do?”

“You could have tried talking.”

“He didn’t come here to talk,” Bobby said. “We did what we had to do.”

For the next half hour, we went back and forth with Wanda about what we could and should have done. Until she finally said, “What’s done is done. Let’s talk about how we can end this. War is bad for business.”

“That’s what we were doing before you walked in with this shoulda-coulda-woulda shit,” I said.

“I say we go find Bodie now and kill him,” Bobby said. “And then we can talk to Wes about how we can end this.”

After a while, I told them to go home and that I would close the club. But I told Nick and Jamaica that their mission for the next day was to go get my money from Bodie and that they should take Jap and Kenny with them. It was around seven in the morning when the crowd started thinning out. That was when Arlene, one of the waitresses noticed that I was still there.

“You closing this morning, Mike?”

“That is why I’m still here.”

Arlene liked doing it on the pool table, and that was enough of an excuse for her to hang around until the club closed. After I fucked her, I walked home.