his gun trained on the boy. “Tell this nigga the number to dial,” he instructed the boy. The boy did as he was told, and Trail punched the numbers in on one of their many disposable track phones they used to communicate about their business and to speak to Scar, to avoid being traced.
Trail put the phone on speaker, and after three rings, the boy heard his mother’s melodic voice filter through the speaker.
“Hello?” she answered.
“Ma! Ma!” the boy cried out.
“Anthony? What’s the matter? Where are you?” his mother said, concern streaming through her words.
“Say bye, nigga,” Sticks whispered, placing the cold steel up against the boy’s temple.
“Bye, ma! I love you forever!!” the boy screamed.
“Anthony!” his mother screamed.
Trail disconnected the line.
Bang! One shot to the temple, and the boy’s body slumped from the chair and hit the floor with an ominous thud.
“One down, two more Frank Lucas snitch-ass niggas to go,” Sticks said. Temporarily put in charge by Scar, Sticks had vowed that the streets would be sorry for the day he was born. He remembered all the ill-treatment he’d suffered at Scar’s hands in the training phase of his come-up. Now he was prepared to take it out on anybody who got in his way, even members of the crew.
Sticks, Trail, Timber, and four new young members of the Dirty Money Crew loaded into two black Suburbans. Sticks drove slowly through the streets of Baltimore, blasting Drake and Lil Wayne. The bass and the lyrics had them all hyped. All except Sticks, who was silent and intently focused on his mission, while the other members were laughing and cracking jokes on each other.
“Yo! Y’all gotta shut the fuck up!” Sticks screamed. “We about to go handle some serious business. If Scar was here, y’all niggas would be like church mice up in this bitch, scared to fuckin’ make a peep!”
An immediate hush fell over the vehicle.
“Now, we gonna ride out slow and easy. This nigga Bam think shit is one hun’ed. I wanna scope out his spots first.” Sticks spoke calmly, as if he didn’t just scream on them. He was a perfectionist when it came to a mission. For him, failure wasn’t an option.
Sticks was a hungry dude from day one; he’d never had shit given to him. When Scar had met him, he could tell the boy would do almost anything to put food in his starving stomach. Which was why Scar had chosen him. Scar had groomed him much like a trainer would groom a prize fighter. So when Sticks collected his first couple of stacks, his loyalty to Scar was sealed. Scar figured he was the perfect one to run shit, allowing him to lay low.
They drove down a block and were careful to stay two or three buildings away from their destination.
“Look, there go that nigga right there,” Trail said in a low tone, pointing out a hustler named Bam that had been on the crew’s radar for some prime real estate he owned in the Baltimore drug trade.
Before anybody else could do or say anything, Sticks accelerated and rolled up on the rival dealer without warning. The truck tires screeched against the street, startling everyone on the block.
Before anyone could react, Sticks threw the truck in park and was out in a millisecond. He ran up to Bam, his gun drawn. “Yo, I thought I told you we staging a takeover of this set!” Sticks screamed as he rushed towards Bam.
Bam threw his hands up in surrender.
It was too late. He had been caught slippin’ and clearly not prepared for the huge .45-caliber gun sitting in his face. “Your choice was to get down or lay down, like that dude Beanie Sigel said. You chose to lay down, muthafucka,” Sticks growled.
Boom!
One shot to the dome, and Bam’s body crumpled to the ground, leaving the other members of Scar’s crew in shock. Screams erupted everywhere.
“Go in the mu’fucka and clean it out. Drugs and money!” Sticks barked, whirling around with his gun, swinging to ward off everybody.
The rest of the crew members raced into Bam’s trap house and looted as fast as they could.
Sticks had always instructed them that they had eight minutes from beginning to end to do a “jux.” He had timed the 9-1-1 response, the time it took the police to get up and out on a call.
He looked at his watch. They were almost on schedule but not quite. He could hear the distant wail of sirens. “Let’s go!” he ordered. “We ain’t got no witnesses.” He called out to the crowd of onlookers and to Bam’s little crew. “I saw all y’all faces?Anybody snitch, I will be back!”
Sticks and the rest of the Dirty Money Crew loaded back into their vehicles and rolled out.
Trail was fuming mad. He didn’t understand why Sticks didn’t give him any forewarning that he was going to murder Bam. He huffed, “Nigga, how you just gonna jump the fuck out and not say shit? No heads-up or nothing?”
“Hesitation leads to reservations. One ounce of doubt and you a fuckin’ dead man on these streets,” Sticks said calmly. He didn’t give a fuck about anyone’s feelings. This game and all its little quirks was all about a paper chase and power for him.
“You could’ve still said something,” Trail told him. “Let a nigga know what you was about to do and shit.”
“Damn, mu’fucka! Pull your skirt down. I can’t take no bitchy whining and complaining shit. If we gonna be on this new shit, taking down all the other niggas in Baltimore, we don’t have time to run our mouths like bitches. Now drop the fuckin’ subject and follow my lead, nigga. I mean, you either get down or lay down!”
Trail did as he was told and shut his mouth, but he didn’t like it. He twisted his lips to the side and bopped his head to the music in an effort to keep himself quiet. Shit was definitely different than when Scar was home. Trail noticed that since Scar had left, Sticks was more ruthless than ever. He was letting the young’uns run wild in the streets of Baltimore, killing any person—man, woman, or child—that got in their way. They were collecting money almost every hour. All of the street contracts and territorial agreements Scar had made with rival hustlers was out the window once he left. Sticks had single-handedly dismantled a commission of hustlers that Scar had put together years ago to divide up the drug territories and put an end to a war that was going on at the time. Although Scar had assigned himself the most lucrative spots and the biggest piece of the pie, the other hustlers got down with the commission because they were afraid of the consequences if they refused. Shit on the streets was all good after that. There were a little jealous spats here and there, but whenever niggas heard Scar wasn’t happy, those little sidebar fights quickly turned into truces.
Now, Trail was worried that Sticks, if he wasn’t careful, could start one of the biggest drug wars in Baltimore’s history, even bigger than the one Scar put an end to where seventy street dudes had been killed in a five-month span.
Finally, Sticks pulled the vehicle up on the other side of town. Trail bit down into his jaw. He knew that this entire south side belonged to Tango, another big hustler in Baltimore. Tango and Scar had finally settled their beef over streets years ago with the formulation of the commission, drawing imaginary lines in the Baltimore streets.
“Yo, Timber, you ready to earn your wings, nigga?” Sticks asked.
“I was born ready. Where they at?” Timber said with his thick country accent.
“That’s their main hub right there. I heard they collect like six hundred thousand stacks every eight hours. We about to take their day’s work.” Sticks laughed like he was a damn maniac.
“A’ight, let’s get it,” Timber said, pulling on the truck’s door handle with one hand, while he gripped a stolen AK-47 in the other.
Danielle rolled her eyes as her mother rambled on with