So me and Enzo, we grabbed knives and guns and we headed out.
See the thing is, we knew the important members of our crew. We knew the men who kept an eye on things, who handled our big clients, who enforced the rules. But we didn't know the names or reputations of every punk on the streets handing out bags of smack. So when we showed up at D'angelo's house, we had no idea he was just a kid. Meaning, no more than sixteen. He was big and heavy, having the body of a grown man, making it easy for him to overpower one of the girls, but in the face... just a boy.
Enzo pounced.
Because age didn't matter. You were old enough to live through a beat-in and possibly offer up a nice chunk of your life to jail for the gang, then you were old enough to take your punishment when you earned it.
I froze.
I froze because I saw for the first time what I was doing. Not necessarily in that moment, because even free of the gang and older, I don't regret that shithead getting his face bashed in. Rape was rape, didn't matter if you were of legal age for a beat down or not. But, all the arrogance and power fell away as I stood there and watched the boy I had grown up with, the one with fucking potential, with the grades and skills to get out of our shit upbringing in a straight-up way, bash into the face of a street kid I had employed to sell drugs, a position that ultimately gave him access to our women.
And it wasn't just the two in front of me. It was the dozens of men, and the smattering of women, that I employed. Yes, I gave them a way out of poverty like Terrell and Darius offered me when I needed it. But in exchange for that, how many men died at my hands? Rival gang members, sure, but my own too. Ones I had ordered to be taken out, ones who had caught a spray of bullets during a drive by, ones that went away to jail and got shivved and left out the back door in a casket.
In that moment, slumped back against the wall in a house that obviously didn't belong to the kid getting his jaw busted, I was done.
It was over for me.
The problem being, it didn't work that way.
If you wanted out, you got out by death and death only.
Leaders especially didn't get the luxury of walking away.
Maybe they would have let me run. I could have rounded up my family and went to the West coast. But it wasn't just about my family at that point. I liked Navesink Bank. It was all I ever knew. I'd made friends outside of the gang that I didn't want to lose. I wanted out, but I wanted to stay in the area.
And, well, that meant my options were limited.
And the options I did have, yeah, they were bloody.
"Enough, Enzo," I snapped, dragging him backward by his shirt as the kid rolled to his side and spit out blood on his mother's carpet. Enzo shook me off and stormed outside, needing a minute to calm down. "You're out obviously," I told the kid. "We see you anywhere near our operation and especially our women again, your mom will be picking out funeral flowers. Got it?"
It took me three weeks to build up the nerve and steel my stomach to do what needed to be done.
Half of the men in Third Street ended up with knife wounds or bullets.
This included Enzo who spent two nights in a hospital bed recovering from a shot to his shoulder.
It was all bravado and it only worked for about a week before some of the men I attacked came at me in my new life in the industrial part of town. But I had been expecting them.
I spent two years fighting before they got tired of losing and left me alone.
Enzo never came after me, but I also lost my brother the second I put a bullet in him.
By the time I was thirty-four, I was fully free. No one messed with me and I got a following of ink lovers who kept me in business. I still had my nest egg that I earned illegally that allowed me to have the nice things I liked, the car I liked, the spending money I liked.
Enzo had a bloody fight to get to the top. A couple of the other guys who had been around longer kept him down and called shots until either he, or someone else, took them out. Things had been crazy since I left them, but had finally started to shape up once Enzo got in power. His men still needed some reining in, but he was doing better. Things were more controlled, less paranoid. People respected him, maybe partly because he reminded them of me in my younger days, but also because nothing about Enzo invited questioning or disrespect.