Chapter Twenty-Nine
“That’s ten more than last time.”
“Inflation,” I supplied, shrugging. “You taking it or what?”
There was no choice, and I knew it. I knew it because I had been around guys like him my entire life. When you were tweaking, you needed it, even if it cost ten more.
So he reached for the extra, slammed it into my hand, and I slipped him the baggie, and the deal was done.
I wasn’t strictly a drug dealer.
I dealt when I had a supply, which wasn’t as often as other dealers.
I also sold bootleg movies, fake designer bags, radios from cars that I personally hadn’t boosted, but I knew someone else had.
I guess you could say I was a bit of an entrepreneur.
Though the cops might have been more inclined to call my business a hustle. Which it was.
I did whatever the fuck I needed to do, though, to rake in some cash, to keep the lights on in our roach-infested apartment in our rough area.
My pops was an ever-changing number across his back in the pen.
My sis, Rainy, was too small to work; my grandmother was too old.
And my mom, well, when she wasn’t losing her battle with addiction, she was selling her body to pay for her supply.
So I had to step up.
I had to man up.
I had to do what I had to do to try to take care of my sister.
Being underage and in a bad area, there weren’t a whole fuckuva lot of opportunities open to me. I had a weekend job washing dishes, paid under the table a salary that made me angry every time I was handed it.
So I had to get inventive. There was no other choice.
I had spent my childhood too young to work, listening to my sister cry from hunger because there was nothing to eat in the fridge, barely able to comfort her because my stomach was a vice grip too.
I was old enough to make the difference, so I did.
Dealing was easy. The bigger guys always wanted some little nobody to hold the stash, to make the swap, to take all the risk.
Pawns and patsies, that was what Meek, the biggest big guy I knew in an organization that went a lot higher than I ever realized, called us.
I was the lowest man on the totem pole, though, and there wasn’t always product for me to push. That was when I got all the side hustles—the bags, the movies, the music, the car radios.
“Don’t be doing that shit around here,” a voice called, making me instantly recoil. Was there a part of me, maybe even a large part of me, that was enjoying feeling all grown, making my way, being a person others recognized? I was seventeen years old. Of fucking course.
That being said, there was also a part of me that knew dealers were scum. I hated my mother’s dealer with a fire I shouldn’t have been able to possess back when I was just a child. There was an ugliness attached to what I did that never sat right with me.
But when I turned and saw two kids around my own age standing there, not cops, not adults that I still had a begrudging respect for, just kids my own age? All that guilt slipped away and got replaced by pure adolescent bravado.
“Mind your own fucking business.”
The bigger one, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, massive kid raised a brow at that, looking over at his buddy, who was the light to his dark, being blond, light-eyed, and with an unmistakably pretty-boy look to him.
When the dark-haired one looked back at me, his tone was bored, but there was an undercurrent of steel. “You’re dealing out front of my place, so it is my fucking business.”
I looked behind him, seeing nothing but boarded-up storefronts that had been abandoned pretty much my entire life.
If that was his place, he was squatting.
If he was squatting, then he was a real street kid.
And real street kids had very little patience for kids like me who did have a warm place to call home.
“Yeah, we have no problem with the bags and films and shit, but keep the drugs over that way,” the lighter one said, waving a hand to the left where, as I knew from experience, a local Mexican gang ran shit.
“You trying to get me killed?”
“Trying not to have to stick my fingers down another junkie’s throat when you give them too much shit,” the darker one said, shrugging.
“And if I don’t take it elsewhere?” I asked, moving closer, perhaps too bold because most kids my age didn’t want to fuck with me given my size. But this guy almost rivaled me, and if the way he pushed off the wall and moved confidently toward me was anything to go by, he was sure of himself.
“Then we will have a problem.”
“And we don’t want a problem,” the lighter one agreed.
I might have been cocky, but I wasn’t stupid. I didn’t get into fights for no reason. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Rhodes,” the dark one supplied. “Xander. This is Gabe. And from here on out, this is our fucking turf, and you don’t step on it with drugs in your pocket. Understood?”
I understood.
And for the next year, I followed those rules.
But the year of my eighteenth birthday, the life I had that, while not great, wasn’t horribly depressive, quickly changed.
My grams died, being old and sick of the world she had been living in. My mom followed two months later, a needle in her arm and her dealer beside her, cock still out from his payment.
Then, on her seventeenth birthday, my little sister was held down by her gang-banging boyfriend, who let every member of his gang rape her until she was choked to death by one of those fuckers.
I got to be the one to identify her body.
And let’s just say that while I might have tried to be a good man who, on the sly, broke the law, I was not so good that I didn’t feel rage boil through my veins.
I wasn’t so good that I didn’t know that every single one of those sons of bitches needed to pay for what they did to her, the only light I had in my entire fucking life, the one person I wanted to make a better life for, and give better opportunities to.
Over the next three years, as I eked my way up in the organization I worked for, no longer giving a fuck about letting anyone down since there was no one to do that to, I slowly but surely took out every single one of the fucks that was still around, minus one who was sent upstate.
Then, deadbeat though he was, when I got word to my pops that one of those bastards was in the pen with him, serving a nickel for an assault charge, he took care of the last.
Once word got around to the big guy that I was good at taking lives, well, I was recruited to handle that for him from then on.
It meant nothing to me.
The death.
The dying.
The fact that it was at my hands.
There was very little left of the person I had once been, the kid trying to take care of his sister, the guy who made the best way he could in a shit situation.
“So, what, you’re a lowlife fucking murderer now?” a voice said from behind me as I walked down an alley where I knew my target was.
I didn’t hear that voice often, and it had changed with age, but I knew it when I heard it again.
I turned back to see Xander Rhodes, older, as I was as well. The years had hardened his body, scarred his hands and parts of his face. He looked a helluva lot more dangerous than he had when we were seventeen. But, then again, so did I.
I had no idea what he was up to these days.
The same, obviously, could not be said about him.
“Rhodes, no offense, but fuck off. You gotta do what you gotta do in this place.”
“Oh, come the fuck on. A coupla years ago you were some good kid with a strange hustle. No one got hurt. You were just making some extra dough to take care of your family.”
“Grams and Mom died. Sister was killed, but not before some bastards tortured her first. You wanna tell me they didn’t deserve what came to them?”
“No,” he said, reaching up and running a hand down his face.
Shocked? No. He, like me, had seen too much shit at too young an age to be truly thrown off by anything, not even the brutal rape and murder of an innocent girl.
In our world, that happened more than anyone cared to admit.
“I’m not saying that. I’m saying it should have ended there.
I’m saying you walking down that alley and putting a plug between the eyes of my client isn’t gonna bring your sister back.
It isn’t going to purge your anger about that whole situation.
And it damn sure isn’t going to prove any kind of point except that you’re some cliched fucking statistic. ”
“Says the homeless kid on the streets who got into legendary fights all the time. Don’t think I didn’t know about that.”
“Difference there being I decided to grow the fuck up and move past that, try to make some life other than the shitstorm I grew up in. That kid,” he said, waving a hand toward the alley where there was someone who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, high off his ass, sitting in a puddle of water or piss or both, staring up at the crack of sky between the two buildings like it was the most mesmerizing thing in the entire world, “isn’t guilty of shit but getting hooked on the drugs you and your bosses supplied him.
And you’re gonna kill him to prove a point?
Not on my fucking watch. You’ll have to go through me. ”
There was enough misplaced anger left, and I went ahead and tried to go through him. Tried. Xander’s benefit in a fight was going in cold. He never got angry, and therefore he always won.
That had me face up in a filthy alley, staring up into the muzzle of my own goddamn gun.
“If I told you I was going to pull this trigger right now…”
“The fuck could it matter?”
That, apparently, was the answer he was looking for because he put the safety back on, and tucked it into his waistband, bending forward and extending a hand toward me, pulling me back onto my feet.
“Rock bottom is a good place to be,” he said oddly as he led me back onto the street, leaving his supposed client in that alley, still tripping his balls off, and going toward the building he had stood in front of years before, the one he had been squatting in.