Zero Degrees Part 1 (18 page)

Two of the boys had already introduced themselves –a skinny, light-skinned teenaged boy said his name was Young D, and a similar-looking young thug had introduced himself as Lil Mike—but Alexus had only nodded solemnly and turned her head, setting her pretty green eyes on a passing city bus.

A short and chubby, handsome faced boy who had been the recipient of brief, clandestine stares from Alexus as he lifted the heaviest boxes with ease, walked up to her and said, “You missing some teeth or something?”

“Hell no!” Alexus felt insulted. She looked the fat fool up and down, searching for something to degrade him about. But his black-and-gray Coogi sweater, his baggy black Coogi jeans, and his jet black Timberland boots were flawless.

“I’m Blake,” he said, smiling. “Didn’t mean nothing by that teeth comment. I just couldn’t understand why you weren’t talking.” He turned to glance at his three comrades, who were standing just inside the front door of the house, taking orders from Rita. Then his eyes moved back to Alexus, and for a moment he gazed at her wet lips. “You know who you look like?” he asked finally.

Alexus crossed her arms. “Who?” She looked at him as if her eyes were daggers and she was ready to stab him directly in the heart.

Raising his hands in surrender, Blake said, “Hold up, baby, I apologize. You’re the last person on Earth I want upset with me. I’m just tryna be nice, welcome you to the neighborhood, get to know you.”

“I’d like to meet the person who taught you how to start a conversation,” Alexus said snidely.

“Can I get your name?” asked Blake.

“Bad Bitch. Any more questions, officer?”

“Aw yeah?” Blake’s thick eyebrows rose, and an ingratiating smile grew on his face. “I like you already.”

“I’m sure you do,” replied Alexus. She took a thick ponytail holder from her left wrist and pulling her long and curly black hair back, said, “I need some weed, and not just any weed. I’d prefer Kush or Haze.”

“Ain’t none of that out here. My bruh Streets got some dro, that blueberry shit. I know a nigga in Chicago who sell Kush, though. But that’s a forty-five minute drive from here.”

“Can you get a few pounds?” Asked Alexus.

Blake’s eyes went wide, A few pounds of Kush? He wondered if she was joking.

“Prob’ly,” he said.

“What do you mean ‘probably’? Call and find out!” Alexus nasty attitude was out of habit, but her prudent mind was swarming with monetary thoughts, and she knew that she would need a thug’s sucker to survive in the drug game without her father. Especially in a new area. Hustling was in her blood, and she had a family reputation to uphold and protect.

While Blake was on his cell phone talking, and staring at the crotch of Alexus’s tight jeans, Alexus inhaled deeply, loving the scent of his cologne. She looked him up and down and concluded that she liked him, although he was in serious need of a haircut. She figured he was a small time drug-dealer, judging from the rust-laden Caprice he and his crew had been crowded around.

Blake ended the call and slipped his Blackberry to the waistline of the jeans. “Forty-five hundred for a pound,” he said. “My nigga got seven left.”

Nodding thoughtfully, Alexus said, “Okay, I need you to take me to him sometime today.” Then, out of the blue, she palmed and squeezed the crotch of Blake’s jeans.

He froze in complete shock…

“Hmm.” Alexus smiled. “Impressive. I might need a taste of that, too.” Her hand dropped. “Leave your number in the mailbox. I’ll call you in a bit.”

She sashayed away from Blake, shaking her thick, round ass harder than usual. She was certain it would hold his attention. No man could resist her biracial features, her unblemished, perfect face, and her perfectly shaped, too-large-to-be-true “ghetto booty,” that’s what her schoolmates had called it.

As Alexus started up her front stairs and she took a peek over her shoulder and saw that Blake had his phone aimed at her round backside.

Grinning, Blake recorded video of Alexus’ ass until she disappeared inside the yellow house.

CHAPTER 2

Rita Mae Bishop was a pleasant, and polite Southern woman with deep brown skin and an intransigent sense of morality. Born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, she had encountered evils of all shapes and sizes and managed somehow to remain a fairly decent human being. For Rita, all who knew her would do anything, because she was the ideal woman. A trustworthy, honest, God-fearing lady who listened to their problems without judgment, and who held a conversation without being a gossip. She graciously shared with man and woman alike and expected nothing in return.

As gratitude, Rita gave the boys who had helped unload the U-Haul a hundred dollars each before sending them on their way. Afterward she searched through the house and found Alexus in an upstairs bedroom. Looking through a box marked “A.C.”, which looked to be full of expensive designer bags that Juan Costilla had purchased for his only child.

“I thought you lost that,” said Rita, referring to the large leather Louis Vuitton shoulder bag that Alexus was lifting from the box. “We looked everywhere for that bag.”

“It was at Aunt Jenny’s house.” Alexus set the bag on the fresh tan carpet and instinctively contemplated calling her aunt Jennifer Costilla. ”Papi had left it there by accident. I went over and got it after he and Uncle Flako were arrested. After those punk ass FBI tore our house up.”

“Watch your mouth.” Rita crossed the room to the window. As she looked out at the neighboring house, images of the raid on the Spanish-style mini-mansion that she had shared with her ex-husband flashed through her mind.

They had seized nearly everything. Juan’s silver Bentley coupe. Rita’s pearly white Porsche Cayenne. The brand-new Mercedes-Benz E350 that Juan had purchased as Alexus’s birthday gift six months ago. Most of their clothes, all of their paintings, jewelry and furniture were gone. A kind-hearted DEA agent named Dewitt Larkson had allowed Rita and Alexus to pack an assortment of clothes and shoes into boxes shortly after the raid. “You’re an educated, and strong Black woman,” the agent had said. “I don’t know how you ended up in a relationship with Costilla, and honestly I don’t care to know. Just get away from here and stay away.” Larkson had went on to say that Rita’s bank account had not been frozen, which meant that Rita Mae Bishop had just under ninety thousand dollars to restart her life with. Eighteen grand had already been spent on the twenty percent down-payment for her new home.

“Why couldn’t we stay in Texas?” Alexus inquired. “It’s too cold here.”

The sound of her daughter’s voice shook Rita from her thoughts. She turned and sat on the window sill.

“Your cousins Bookie and Kenya live here,” said Rita. “I haven’t spent any time with your uncle Dennis since eighty-nine. He’s the only brother I have…. I miss him.”

Alexus knew that her mother was still profoundly saddened by the Hurricane Katrina disaster. It had claimed the lives of both Rita’s parents and her younger sister.

“Is Uncle Dennis coming over?” Alexus asked. She was seated Indian-style on the carpet, poring over the newspaper article that declared her father the “Costilla Cartel leader.”

“He’ll be here in” Rita pushed the sleeve of her New Orleans Saints sweatshirt and checked her rose gold Cartier watch “about three hours. He gets off work at three o’clock.”

Planting her hands in the carpet behind her, Alexus leaned back and stared up at Rita

“The newspaper says federal agents seized over two hundred kilograms of cocaine and seven million dollars in cash from Papi’s condo in Houston,” Alexus said.

“I know.”

“That’s a whole lot of money.”

“Yes, it is. Papi’s been rich for a long time. A very long time. When I met him at the Mardi gras back in ’91, I had just received my master’s degree from Harvard. The girls and I were out celebrating on the strip, looking awkward and out-of-place among all those half-naked girls, when your uncle Flake stumbled up to us, in a drunken stupor—“

“A what?”

“He was pissy drunk,” Rita said.

“Oh.” Alexus giggled.

“And he began feeling on my butt, making nasty little comments, with his breath smelling like sour salami.”

Alexus fell over in a fit of laughter

Struggling to suppress her own laughter, Rita continued: “I showed him how a real Baton Rouge girl can kick some tail. Didn’t even need my girls. I had him on the ground, kickin’ his head when your father pushed through the crowd with about ten big Mexican’s behind him. Once I explained to Papi what had happened, he had his goons help Flake to a silver Rolls-Royce that was parked up the street. Then he asked me to follow him and his ‘familia’ to the Marriott Hotel.”

“Well, did you?” Alexus raised her eyebrows, intrigued.”

“Of course I did! I mean, here I was, twenty-eight years old, single and fresh out of college, and I meet this well-dressed forty-year-old Mexican man with a three-car fleet of Rolls Royces—your grandmamma didn’t raise any fools.” Rita smiled at the memories. “He asked me to move in with him about a week later. Bought me an LS400 Lexus and a six-carat engagement ring shortly after that. We married on his parents’ ranch in Matamoras, Mexico, a year later, right after I had you.”

“Is that why you named me Alexus? Because of the car?”

Rita showed a conspiratorial grin as she started toward the bedroom door. “Come on,” she said. “We need to find a furniture store. I want to get as much done today as possible.”

CHAPTER 2

With their immaturity, Blake King and two members of his trigger happy clique,—the Dub Life Goons—were all staring attentively at the screen of his cell phone, ogling the new girl’s incredible body. They were standing in the trash-littered living room of Blake’s crack house, a sparsely furnished dungeon of dilapidation that catered to a smorgasbord of addicts.

On average, Blake’s crack house raked in about $1,500-a-day in sales, which meant that he needed at least an ounce of crack-cocaine on hand every day to supply the demand. Currently there was a pocket-flattening cocaine drought all throughout the Midwest and many hustlers found themselves paying upwards of a grand for a single ounce. Blake was one of them, and he hated it. He had four thousand dollars stowed away in a shoe box in the hallway closet of his girlfriend Ashley Joy’s apartment, and every dollar of it had come from selling crack-rocks.

Blake thought about tricking off every dollar of his savings on the new girl up the block form his crack house. For the umpteenth time Blake restarted the video on his cell phone.
I could watch this all day
, he thought.

“That lil sexy bitch look like Nicki Minaj, don’t she?” Young-D asked, as he lit the end of a blunt.

“Bitch grabbed my dick and said she wanna taste it,” Blake said. He whistled through his teeth, shook his head in disbelief, and kept his eyes on the girl. “She fresh-to-deaf, too. J’s on her feet. Apple Bottom jeans. And that’s a Fendi jacket she got on—pro’bly cost ‘bout three racks.”

“And she got a fat-nigga fetish.’’ Young-D chuckled and took a few puffs from the blunt.

Jokes made at Blake’s expense—particularly when pertaining to his weight—had always had a way of angering him, usually to the point of violence.

This time was no different.

Blake straightened his left hand and chopped it across Young-D’s throat; Young-D’s blunt plummeted to the multi-stained carpet, and he doubled over, clutching at his neck with both hands, gagging and choking and gasping.

“Stop fuckin’ playin’ with me so much,” Blake scolded. He did his cell phone into its clip-on carrying case on his waist.

Lil Mike picked up the smoldering blunt and smiled. He took his fair share of inhalations before passing it off to Blake. Then Lil Mike was at the back door, ushering a pair of crackheads—an older white couple—into the kitchen.

“One twenty-five,” Lil Mike shouted a moment later, indicating that the addicts had $125 to spend.

Blake went to the small gray card table that was in the center of the tiny dining room and seated himself in one of the four matching fold-out chairs that surrounded it. Atop the card table was a circular gray digital scale, thinly veiled with a film of crack-crumbs; a box of sandwich bags; a scattered pile of cash and coins; a bag of crack-cocaine, filled with about twenty grams of the hard yellowish-white substance, and a glass ashtray brimming with cigarillo tobacco, cigarette butts, and blunt roaches.

As Blake King weighed up then bagged 1.8-grams of hard, he observed Young-D—Dante Roscoe-hoist himself up onto the raggedy old sofa with one hand, his other hand still massaging his slender neck. Young-D shot Blake a look full of contempt, but held his tongue. Maybe because it would have pained him to speak, but more likely due to his first-hand knowledge of Blake’s angry capability.

Thirty minutes and five drug deals later, things returned to normal. Blake and Lil Mike were sitting on the couch with Young-D, their thumbs hammering away at PlayStation 3 controllers, their eyes stuck to the fifty-inch screen television that Lil Mike and Young-D had stolen from a stripper’s house. They were playing “NBA Live 2010,” Blake had the Lakers and Lil Mike –born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee—had chosen the Grizzlies, who were now busy being victimized by Kobe Bryant’s effortless jump shots and indubitably superior ball-handling skills.

In the kitchen, the back door issued a slight, barely audible creak as it was pushed open.

The creak sounded just as the halftime horns of the poignant basketball game blared. So deeply focused on the television screen, Blake and Michael “Lil Mike” Lane failed to hear the opening door.

Young-D thought he heard something—like the squeak of a shoe on the linoleum kitchen floor—but figured it was probably Alonzo “Blubby” Jones, the Ugly-Duckling of their crew, returning with their Taco Bell orders.

Neither Blake King nor his comrades could have guessed that a team of three doped-up masked men had just entered their trap.

“Face-down, nigga!” Bookie shouted aggressively, as he rushed into the living room carrying a twelve-gauge Mossberg pump-action shotgun in his gloved hands. “Play if you wanna, homie!”