She looked at me and laughed. She put the hand down on the hood of her car to support herself from falling over. “You is mad corny, yo. Is that your best line?”

  “Naw. My best lines come in li’l baggies about this size.” I demonstrated with my fingers.

  “Yeah? Well, I’m good on that. What you tryin’-a holla for anyway? You all cute in the face and whatnot, I know you got wifey at home biting her nails down to the cuticle.”

  “Not even. I won’t front though. I do have a lot of friends.”

  “Friends, huh? So I guess you just want me to be one of your new friends? Homie, lover, friend, fuck buddy?”

  “Yo, that’s not even how I’m coming at you. Them other niggaz got your mind wrong. I just saw a pretty lady and took a chance. Besides, you never know when you may need a friend like me.”

  “Oh really? Let me ask you something? Do it look like I might be needing a friend’s help anytime soon?” Joi chuckled. “Oh, you thought because I’m from VA your New York accent was going to give you some sort of leeway into some drawers? I don’t have time for this. I’m out.” She opened her car door.

  I totally ignored the bullshit Joi was spitting. “You got a man, Joi?”

  “Something like that.”

  “A’ight. So let’s cut the small talk. Here goes a flyer and my card. Come on down and have a good time, baby. Promise, you won’t regret it.” I smiled.

  Joi looked at me over her shades for a second then reached down into the cup holder inside her car. She handed me her number. “You can call me after seven p.m. during the week. That’s when my minutes start.” She laughed.

  “I hear ya, baby. So that’s what’s up. I’m-a holla at you real soon.”

  She stepped inside her car, beeping as she pulled off toward the Cross Island Parkway. Getting inside the truck, I said to Anton, “Now that’s how you recruit, boy.”

  “Anybody could’ve done that. All you did was give the bitch a flyer. So what that mean? You keep talking about this pimping shit, but I ain’t seen shit yet. You be fucking the strippers for free and all, but you not pimping.”

  “You’ll see. Look at me, I am a gorgeous muthafucka, and women love that. Don’t ever let no bitch tell you that looks don’t matter. This is where it’s at.” I stroked my goatee. “This fly shit right here.” I smiled, looking in my rearview, and pushed back my bushy eyebrows. “Personality is for psychologists,” I said as I headed down Linden Boulevard.

  A white-and-blue Q4 bus stopped at a red light in front of us and released a cloud of smog. “Close the windows,” I said, turning on the vent. “This is why I hate coming down this block. I’m taking the back street.” I turned left on 227th.

  “So what you and Cocaine was talking about?”

  “I’ll let you know. Don’t be opening your mouth about it either when we get to his house. You know how that nigga be getting when dudes start asking about shit he didn’t bring up to them himself.”

  “I ain’t worried about his ass. He might’ve put OPT together, but I’m the cat that be putting in all the work.”

  Cocaine, founder of OPT, On Point Killers, had more schemes, scams, and smarts than any man I ever knew. OPT was a team of thorough wolves based solely in New York City, known for getting that paper, and stomping in a head or two, if it came down to it. Non-believers became victims of the human pool table effect, eight balls in the corner pockets of our younger shorties-in-training hugging the block as if it were a surrogate father.

  Cocaine was forty-six and straight out of an old school called “hard-knock life.” He was sentenced to ten years in prison when he was sixteen for killing Watty, his mother’s boyfriend. Watty was beating the shit out of his mother one night and knocked her through a glass coffee table. Cocaine shot him with a gun he was holding for a friend. According to Cocaine, his mother only respected Watty when he was applying that chokehold around her scrawny little neck. And she only seemed to follow orders when she got a slap across the lips.

  Even though it was some fucked-up shit to grow up seeing, it opened son’s eyes in understanding a bitch. They wanted a man to be in control, to tell them what to do, and even welcomed a beating, minor or major, if they consciously ever stepped out of line.

  All throughout Cocaine’s entire life, he ain’t never saw any man love his mother. She never asked for respect. She was a poor excuse and a walking embarrassment in his eyes because, after it was really all said and done, it turned out his moms was a prostitute and a dope fiend. It was still etched in his head, the day he came home from school and his moms was fucking and doing dope right on his bed. Now if his own momma wasn’t shit and he never felt what it was like to know that kind of love, how in the fuck could anybody ever expect that man to love and respect another woman?

  Me and Cocaine met when I did two years of fed time for gun-running. We spent the last two years of his bid exchanging ideas. We got along so good that when I came home he had a spot for me in Queens Village and a lil’ Honda Civic at the time. When I was put down with OPT, everything changed.

  Cocaine had a stable of bitches working for him, regular bitches with jobs, others just trying to make a dollar. My job was to recruit for him. His clients consisted of average niggaz, white boys from Long Island and the Upper East Side of Manhattan, police, and some anonymous rappers. His biggest clientele was the husbands tired of the same ol’ sloppy, aged, wrinkled pussy they was getting after twenty years of marriage and who left their desperate housewives crying their eyes out at home.

  A lot of dudes was jealous because I didn’t have to go through the initiation process they did. I got in because he knew I could make that dough for him. And if one more of them faggots questioned why I didn’t get beat in, they’d be dead.

  Cocaine usually didn’t have to say anything twice. He had a short fuse. And an even shorter one when it came to his woman, Cakes, an ex-stripper from Michigan that he scooped at a party. She was on the books too. After he’d showed her what kind of bank he was dealing with, she was on the first Greyhound running. She was the epitome of what a dime should look like, 5-9, slender, bronze complexion. Her name was tatted across her chest and was followed by “Cocaine’s Property.”

  She was his main investment, but there was a problem. He beat on her so bad at times that she couldn’t always look presentable enough to work. He didn’t like no one in the family looking at her unless she was on duty. She was his woman.

  “Yo!” I knocked on Cocaine’s front door. I said to Anton as he got out my truck, “Leave that window cracked so that shit don’t be like no oven when we leave.” I rapped on the door again. “Yo!”

  “Who it is? What it be like?” he said, answering the door in a robe. “Pimping.” He smiled. “What’s happening, broth?” He widened the door so we could enter.

  “You know me. I just be doing what it do,” I responded, standing in the patio.

  “What’s up, Ton? You gonna come in, or you just gonna stand there like a fucking porch monkey?” Cocaine laughed. “Get your ass on in here.” He looked up and down the street before closing the door. He said to Anton, “You get my new strippers for the club yet?”

  “I’m still working on it. The girl ain’t been home. What you want me to do?” Anton shrugged his shoulders.

  “Yeah, you absolutely right. What the fuck he gonna do, Mack?” Cocaine shook his head as we walked into the living room. He walked over to the stereo. “Y’all niggaz want something to drink?”

  “You got some Grey Goose?” Anton asked.

  “Yeah.” Cocaine searched for the remote to his stereo. “What you want, Pimping?”

  Before I could answer, his phone rang.

  “Yeah,” he answered. “Look, Trish, you have your ass here before eight tonight. That’s it,” he said and disconnected the call.

  No sooner had he stuck it down in the pocket of his robe than it rang again. He looked down at the caller ID display and frowned. “Looky here, y’all, I gotta take this call upstairs. Make your own drinks. You know where they at.” He pressed power on the remote then jogged up the stairs.

  The front door unlocked, and in walked Cakes, her hands filled with shopping bags. She was absolutely fucking gorgeous, man. She closed the door with the heel of her foot. “What’s good, y’all?” She placed her bags in front of a blue reclining lounge chair next to a four-foot potted bella palm tree, where an automatic sterling silver mini-sprinkler connected to the hose of the bar’s sink hose sprayed a misty dew every ten minutes.

  Cakes’ long, sexy, lotioned ass shined and stretched outside of her poom-poom shorts as she strode across the green living room carpet and placed her bags at the bar. “What y’all doing here?” She looked specifically at me, while pouring herself a drink. “What’s up, boo? You looking kind of snazzy today. Where you off to, a job interview?” she sarcastically asked.

  “Naw. I’m off to see the ‘wizard’ about some muthafucking brains, bitch.” I grabbed my crotch like Michael Jackson after his acquittal.

  Cakes chuckled. “That was actually funny. Anton, you all sitting up there like you don’t acknowledge perfection in your presence, nigga. Hail a prominent ho when you see one, nigga.” She bounced her ass off his leg.

  “Hail the ho, hail the ho.” Anton bent over laughing.

  “That’s right. My shit is magic on the johnson.” She winked at me.

  “So what you got over there?” Anton joked. “A bag of tricks?”

  “Shit you can’t afford on the salary you making.”

  Anton pulled out a roll of hundreds. “My pockets is fine.”

  “Pennies, nigga. You ain’t getting it like Mack. Ain’t that right?” Cakes smiled and looked at me.

  “I’m not even in this. Y’all two always going at it. Shit, if I didn’t know y’all wasn’t stupid, I’d think you two was fucking.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Cocaine said, stepping down the last stair and into the end of the conversation. “But I know that ain’t the case, right, y’all? Because there’s a rule about fucking the help.” He snatched Cakes’ bags off the floor and threw them on the couch.

  “Hi, daddy. I missed you.” Cakes kissed his lips.

  Cocaine turned his head and pushed her away. “You must be out of your mind, girl. What, you planning on going out on a date somewhere? What the fuck is all this bullshit, Cakes?” Then he started tossing shit out the bags onto the floor.

  “I told you I was going shopping earlier. I can’t be wearing repeat outfits when the work come in. I’m not like them other raggedy bitches you got munching and punching the clock, daddy. You know my style—Gots to look good for the customers.”

  As Cakes bent over to collect the fallen luxury items, Cocaine kicked her square in the ass. I could’ve sworn I saw a pound of that lotion on her shiny legs jump off her skin. She fell onto the pile of clothing in front of her and quickly turned over. Cocaine never liked anyone talking slick, especially no high-priced, hooker-ass ho. Especially when he was feeding and clothing them.

  A tear rushed down her eye. “What the hell is you doing?”

  “Get this damn shit off my living room floor, Cakes. You spent all of your allowance money on this bullshit. Get the fuck up to your room. NOW!”

  Cakes quickly scrambled to her feet and stuffed all the clothing back into the bags. Then she slowly walked up the stairs, rubbing her ass.

  Anton and me looked at each other then looked at him.

  “What?” Cocaine asked in a tone similar to Raphael Saadiq. “When the day comes I let one of my hoes talk to me like that, it’ll be a rainy day in Southern California, you hear that? You give ’em one inch and they’ll have you living in your own yard under the fucking gas meter.” He sipped his drink. “Y’all muthafuckas know what I’m saying to you? Mack, you the next nigga up. I hope you paying attention. I’m trying to train your ass. You got potential, boy. Don’t go letting me down.”

  Cocaine poured two shots of tequila, one for Anton, one for me. “Y’all niggas have a drink with me.” He held up his glass.

  Anton told him, “You hard on these hoes, man.”

  “What, nigga? You need to be following in this man’s footsteps.” Cocaine pointed to me. “This fool is a pussy magnet. He bring the bitches into work.”

  Anton was upset. “And I don’t?”

  “You couldn’t bring in the New Year without tripping over last month.” Cocaine laughed. “You used to be on point. You slipping.”

  “What you mean, man? How much money and bitches I brought in last year?”

  “That’s not the point. It’s all about chutes and ladders, baby.”

  Every now and again, when Cocaine had a little drink in his system, he’d just start making up some mind-boggling-ass phrase then build on it. Sometimes it’d make perfect sense; other times it sounded just as crazy as Gnarls Barkley singing the movie soundtrack for One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  Anton asked, “What you mean, chutes and ladders?”

  “Chutes and ladders, nigga.” Cocaine coughed after inhaling deeply. “Rewards and consequences. You always start out on a good path, collecting points, respect, street cred and shit like that—That be the ladders that help you climb to the top of this game. Then you got them chutes—bitch-ass niggas, snitches, and informants, haters. Shit of that nature is the chutes that’ll land your ass in a world of consequences. The chutes is the shit that’ll make you fall, and it won’t have shit to do with autumn. The whole idea of this pimp shit is to keep climbing the ladder until all the muthafuckas under you look like ants. This pimp shit be about the constant climb. The trick is to never look down, especially if you afraid of heights, muthafucka, because it’s just not about pimping these hoes, it’s about pimping the system. You ever lose focus of that, and you’ll just be part of some bitch’s photographic memory.” He released a cloud of London fog.

  “So what you saying, man?”

  “I’m saying I see your true colors shining through, Ton.”

  “Yo, y’all is bugging,” I said. “I got shit to do, Coke. You straight with that paper.” I stood up.

  Lately Cocaine had been stressing Anton about his inability to make things happen as he used to. He’d been that way ever since Anton had popped these two auxiliary police officers in Flushing Meadows, Queens a couple of months back. I felt in my gut that Cocaine wanted Ton dead, because his mouth would leak if he ever was caught by the pigs for that murder.

  “Yeah, youngblood. We be done. Y’all seen my brother around? I ain’t heard from him in a couple of days.”

  “Naw, man, not me,” I said. “I just got out.”

  He said to Ton, “You, nigga?”

  “I ain’t seen him in a couple of days.”

  “All right, whatever. Hit my phone later, Mack,” Cocaine said as we walked out the door. “We need to talk.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MACK

  As Sade packed her suitcase for the next day’s trip down to VA, I said to her, “Baby, I’m-a miss your ass. You know that.”

  “I’m going to miss you too, but I’ll be back soon as I can. I just need to see my mother.”

  “That’s what’s up, boo. I know I keep asking, but you sure you don’t need me to troop there with you?”

  “It’s all good, daddy. I got this.” She kissed my lips.

  “Let’s go out tonight.”

  “Baby, I got the meat sitting in the sink already.”

  “Fuck it. Throw that shit in the fridge. Wherever you want to go.”

  “Well, I could go for some O.G.’s.”

  “Ma, I mean a real restaurant, with forks and knives at the table, folded napkins and shit. Hello, may-I-take-your-order type shit.”

  “You asked me where I wanted to eat. That’s what I want.”

  “A’ight, mon. We get the bloodclaat Jamaican food,” I said, doing my best Jamaican accent.

  She laughed. “Something wrong with you.”

  We walked into the restaurant and sat. The dreads were in full view seated upon the river of seats rapidly running across the enormous dining room. Ceiling fans spun to combat the outpouring of aromatic heat coming from the kitchen.

  “Can I talk to you about something, babe?” Sade said.

  “What’s up?”

  “What do you see in me?”

  “Ma, what you want me to say?” I said irritated with a conversation that popped up at least once a week. “You gotta get that esteem up. We been together for a minute now. That should say a lot.”

  “It does. It really does, but there are these times when I get insecure.”

  “Like when?”

  “Like when you don’t come home at night.”

  “Come on, that’s business. We talked about this already, Sade.”

  “You talked about it.”

  “No. We talked about it. I told you that when I’m out, it’s because I’m making money. You said you understood that. That’s the shit that kills me about y’all females. When a man don’t work he a bum, when he work too much he’s being neglectful. I mean, where does it end?”

  “It’s not about you staying out to make your money. I’d never stop that. It’s about you playing me like I’m one of them dumb bitches at Phenomenon. Then you wanna smile all up in my face without a single regret.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about? You tripping.” I turned my head to sneeze.

  Sade stared at me. “Mack, you can look me directly in my eyes and tell me you not cheating.”

  I accepted the challenge, staring back with more truth in my eyes than Wonder Woman’s lasso. “I’m not fucking around on you, Sade.”

  “I hope not, Mack. I’ve been real good to you. I’d do anything you ask me to. I do anything you tell me already. So don’t let me find out you doing me dirty or I’ll kill you. Word to me.” She kissed her fingers.

  Did I forget to mention that Sade was a jealous girl, like that bitch New Edition was talking about back in the Eighties?