“Where’s the fuckin’ money?” Bobby yelled right along with Bodie and then he shot him in the other leg.
“Shit!” Bodie screamed, but he wouldn’t tell us where the money was. I think that he really thought that he was going to walk out of there alive to spend some of that money.
“This ain’t getting us anywhere,” I said, and Bobby started laughing. “What?”
“Maybe we shoulda cut off his dick instead of a piece of his ear,” Bobby said, and held up his knife.
“All right, all right, shit. The money is in a briefcase cemented in the wall at the hoe house.”
“Now was that so hard?” I said, put the clip back in my gun and shot Bodie twice in the head.
“If we had started with his dick, I’d be fuckin’ Jillian by now.”
“Yeah, but where is the fun in that?”
“I would have had plenty of fun fuckin’ Jillian,” Bobby said on our way out the door.
Chapter Nineteen
Canard Henderson is dead. Montel Lamont is dead. Roscoe Simeon is dead. Bodie Ringling is dead. Even Jerome Ennis and Butler Griffin aka Silky, they were all dead and guys like Emmet Grey and Dayton Armstrong were seeing the world through a completely new set of eyes. That allowed me to keep my word to André and more than tripled the money he was making.
I had built an organization inside of what André called an organization. It was over and we had come out on top. The streets belonged to us now. And even though I wouldn’t admit it to what was now The Family, I was King in those streets.
And you know what? It felt good.
I was in the office in his private club with André and Ricky when Benny and Dupree walked in with the money. André looked at me and then he spit his usual line.
“I don’t want to hear no excuses, just tell me who came up short and who ain’t paid this time,” André said the second they walked in the room.
“Everybody was ready with the money when we got there, Boss,” Benny said.
Dupree laughed. “Shit, Emmet and Dayton even told us we were late when we got there.”
“Then why were you late?” Ricky asked, and then he laughed, but when André didn’t, both he and Dupree stopped laughing.
The reason they were on time and eager to pay was because Nick and Jamaica had paid Emmet a visit earlier that day and Freeze was standing next to Dayton when he handed them the money.
“When we got to Sherman and Howard, they said that it wasn’t going to be necessary for us to go around to the rest of them niggas, because t
hey had gotten the money from them,” Benny said, and handed André a briefcase.
He nodded his head and then he looked at me. “Y’all go on and get the fuck outta here now.” André opened the briefcase, smiled and started counting the money. “You too, Ricky. I need to talk to Black alone,” he said without looking up from the case.
“Yes, Boss,” Benny said, and Dupree followed him out.
Ricky got up slowly and looked at me like he didn’t appreciate being asked to leave. I didn’t give a fuck, so I stared back at him with a smile on my face.
“I got some shit I need to go check out about that other thing anyway,” Ricky was saying on his way out of the office.
“You do that. Let me know when it gets here,” André said, and then he looked at me.
Once Ricky closed the door, I got up and made us both a drink and then I sat quietly until André finished counting the money. Then he put all of the money in the briefcase, got up and locked it in the safe.
“You wanna go ahead now and tell me about what I already been hearing about?”
“I changed the way we do business,” I said and then I took my time explaining to André exactly what I did and how I had things set up now.
André didn’t say a word while I talked. After a while, he got up, got the bottle and refilled our glasses. I even told him how I cut myself in on the gambling businesses of the operators I’d killed. That one raised an eyebrow until I told him that all of that was his too.