Loving a Midwest Menace

Prologue

“Hey, hey… you put back!” The old Chinese man shouted to the two little brown-skinned girls that raced into his corner store that chilling, winter day.

Minka Ward and her sister Michaela—who everyone knew as Mickey—sprinted down the hill toward home as soon as school let out.

Stomping through their hood was nothing new.

From the school their house was up the street and around a couple of corners, so they walked every day.

Everyone knew them because of who their parents were.

Maximiliano and Mila Ward were damn near hood royalty.

Max and his crew were known for shaking things up and policing their own town.

A little girl goes missing, Max and his crew were out there looking for her before police could even get the Amber Alert out.

Somebody robbed or beat up an old lady, they had the perp hog tied and ready to put down within twenty-four hours.

Women, elderly, and children were off limits.

Those were the rules. It wasn’t for he weary and if you weren’t raised off it, you didn’t understand. His crew was raised by it, lived by it.

Nothing moved in town without going through Max and the Notorious crew.

When shit went wrong in the neighborhood, fuck the police, they called them.

His streets were supposed to be safe enough for his daughters to walk home from school as if they were in the suburbs somewhere, and for years, it had been.

Minx and Mickey thought everyone lived like they did.

Raised by the village, they said hello to damn near everyone on their sprint to the store.

Neither had any money, and they knew if they ran into Mr. Choo’s store and grabbed some snacks, he would get on them, but they would just laugh and run out with their winnings in their little arms. Max always came back and tossed Mr. Choo a few extra bills for his daughters being so damn rambunctious.

The man got mad, but he always got over it.

“I said put back and go now!” Choo yelled from behind the counter, waving his arm angrily.

Minx threw her head back, roaring with laughter while her and Mickey scooped chips, candy, and cupcakes into their arms. Near the back at the coolers, the two listened as the door burst open, letting the icy December wind with it.

“Open the fucking register, chow mein!” A muffled voice barked through the ski mask covering his face.

The crackhead ass nigga named Javon came into the small convenience store on some bullshit.

Kansas City, Kansas had its share of crime, and as crack continued to destroy families, more violent criminals like Javon emerged.

It was worse than when the epidemic first hit.

Mr. Choo stood tall, staring him blankly back in his wide eyes.

“Thieves don’t live long around here. You sure you want to do this?” His calm demeanor pissed Javon off.

“Open the fucking register, or I’ll blow your brains all over the fucking shit back there!” Javon instructed, so antsy he couldn’t stop pacing in a circle.

Mr. Choo could see Minx and Mickey knelt behind the chips at the end of the aisle.

He didn’t want harm to come to them. He saw them both, and he knew that they knew he was looking at them.

Holding each other and trembling with fear, the girls tried to stifle their whimpers.

No sooner than him getting the register open, Javon’s finger squeezed the trigger. The loud blast shook both girls.

The sickening splat of his brain matter hitting the wall left Javon unbothered.

He was high, and the only thing that mattered to him was getting the cash for when he came down.

He watched the man drop to the floor and crept around the counter to snatch the money out from the slots.

After he cleaned all the cash out and stuck it in his pocket, he paused.

Someone else was inside the store. The sniffling nearby pulled him from behind the counter.

Peering around the small store, he didn’t even think when he ran up in here.

It wasn’t the smartest thing, considering the time of day, but he was desperate.

Glancing at the mirror in the far corner, he spotted two girls hunched over , blocked by a few shelves at the end of the aisle.

“Shit!” Javon hissed, his hands flying to his head in panic, still gripping the gun.

With the barrel of his nine millimeter aimed at them, his eyes ballooned.

Javon was only twenty-five, and his story was one of many.

He was selling crack at the age of twelve, and by the time he was twenty-four he was on the other side, smoking it through a pipe like the base heads he used to serve.

The little niggas that came up under him were now the ones getting paid off the monkey on his back.

Mickey and Minka were huddled together, each of their chests rising and falling with rapid breaths.

Tears streamed down Mickey’s face. She was the oldest of the two, but they were two peas in a pod.

Mickey was ten, and Minka would be eight soon, but they were bonded none the same regardless of the small age gap.

Mickey was shy and so pretty. The minute her mother pushed her out of her pussy, everyone doted on her.

Minka was just as beautiful. She was a shade darker than her sister and the same big coffee-bean-colored eyes.

Minka stared on at Javon in that moment with those same eyes, the emptiness behind her gaze spooking him.

Her transparent gaze rattled the man in front of her.

“The fuck y’all doing in here?” he demanded, his gun growing shaky in his hands.

He knew who they were. He’d seen them both around the way all the time. Mickey shut her eyes tight, squeezing a few more tears down her honey-glazed cheeks. Her heart wentwild in her chest and she felt the pulse in her ears.

“Please, don’t kill us.” Mickey pleaded, and Javon’s heart sped up in his chest.

He didn’t have a choice if he wanted to escape with no witnesses. He had come in for a robbery, nothing more. These two complicated things.

“J-Just let my sister go.” Mickey closed her eyes tight and let the tears slip from them.

“Fuck!” he yelled, raising his head to the ceiling.

One last glance down at the two girls, and his decision had been made.

He fired at them twice, catching Mickey right in the chest. Her stunned eyes stared back at him as she reached for the bloody hole in her flesh and gasped for air.

The other bullet hit Minka in the side of the head, leaving her slumped over in the store resting against a stand that housed all the small bags of potato chips.

Javon sprinted to the nearest door, and like a crackhead, he ran for his life away from the scene.

“The fuck… is that, that nigga Javon?” Finn Adkins rolled up to the curb outside the store and caught the local smoker bolting down the street like he was escaping something.

“Look like him.” Beside him, ten-year-old Ambrose Westbrook counted a lap full of balled up money.

He briefly glanced up and spotted what looked like the back of Javon’s peanut ass head as he took off down the pavement.

Rose and Finn were thick as thieves. With a four year age gap between them, Finn would tell anyone that he never met anyone more thorough than motherfucking Ambrose.

When he was six, niggas started teasing him and calling him Rose for short.

At first, it was funny, and even the little girls used to make fun of him for it.

The older he got, the more lethal he became, and the name didn’t even bother him.

Motherfuckers called him Rose with respect, and that shit couldn’t be stripped away.

“Go in there and grab us some sodas, a pack of wraps, and some of them cups of ice to mix this drank in,” Finn advised, watching his little nigga stuff his pockets with his money before he slid out of the car.

Rose didn’t drink or smoke. He was still a kid in that aspect of life, and Finn never tried to peer pressure him on the shit.

The door slammed shut, and Rose strolled up to the store entrance to go inside.

When he stepped in and looked around, shit was off.

He’d been to the store many times, and the Korean behind the counter always talked shit to him as soon as he entered.

Today, shit felt vacant. Rose walked up to the counter, but there was no one there.

He was pretty tall for a ten-year old, so he placed his hands on the counter and used his arm strength to lift himself up and peer behind it.

The Korean was on the floor staring back at him with lifeless eyes.

“Shit!” Rose hissed, immediately putting his feet back on the floor.

The sound of something hitting the floor near the back grabbed his attention, and he spun around only to see a little hand slip down to the floor and into the side aisle near the door.

He pressed his back against the row of candy bars behind him and craned his neck, taking baby steps closer.

When Rose reached the end of the aisle, his heart dropped.

He wasn’t new to violence; he was raised up in that shit, but the sight in front of him made his stomach flip.

He knew Mickey from being in the same class as her, and everybody knew Minka was her baby sister.

Both hands falling on his head, Rose’s eyes darted around.

In that moment, he was just a kid, not the little hustler everybody knew from around the way.

He ran as fast as his little feet would carry him, back outside to Finn’s whip still running.

“The fuck is wrong with you?” Finn’s brows pinched as he peeped how shaken up his little homie seemed to be.

Sirens wailed in the distance and Finn now knew that the popping sounds he heard coming down the street weren’t just somebody’s ride backfiring.

“That nigga killed the Korean, and it’s two little girls in there shot too,” Rose explained, panting wildly.