“Mhmm,” Elroy hums in agreement beside me.
We ain’t supposed to respond to anything Melo says, but motherfuckas like Elroy are still star-struck no matter how many ways Melo shows us we’re like the old shit stains sitting at the bottom of his boxers.
“Mayor Julian and Chief Hernandez said, ‘Five hundred thousand, and it’s yours…’” Melo looks back over his shoulder at me. “Allof it is yours. The building, Lucky, his folks, and even the fighters. They said I could own it all under one condition.”
He tosses his finger up, spinning around in a slow twirl before stopping in front of me. “They said I had to keep you fuckin monkeys in line and keep this place quiet because it was getting loud again, and Mayor Julian said he had bigger fish to fry around the city.”
I stare into his pale-green eyes.
“District C’s got a homicide rate out the ass, and District H has a whole goddamn red-light district they’ve been trying to contain for the past thirty years. Mayor Julian put in his bid for re-election and if I could just take this one lil’ shitty problem off of his hands, he could focus on the big stuff and I could prove to him I deserve that seat in District D next month.”
Growing up, folks said if you were ever blessed to meet Melo Barnes in the flesh, you weren’t supposed to look him in his eyes. The problem is that I ain’t know how to look anywhere else but in a man’s eyes because Senior says it’s how you measure the size of a man’s nuts.
“I know most of you Neanderthals don’t understand what any of this means, so let me break it down to you in a way you Bottoms niggas can understand. It means ain’t none of you motherfuckas bigger than the program! And what is theprogram, you might ask? It’s me. I am the Alpha and Omega. The beginning and end. I control this lovely ship that is Bayou Crest, and I want my ship to be the biggest and brightest in this city. That means I sit my black ass on my ship’s bridge where I watch and control everything that happens on it and around it. I want homicide and crime rates down by ten percent. I want surveillance cameras from 45 all the way to Crestwood Bayou. I want more tourist money being spent…”
He rattles off the rest of the bullshit I hear him yelling about in his election commercials I catch playing on TV sometimes, then takes a step toward me. “But I’ve got a problem on my hands.”
His green pupils dilate as he curls his lip. “And my Big Mama used to say, ‘If you ever wanna get rid of a problem, you got to cut it at the root where it’s rotten to keep it from spreading.’”
Elroy lets out a ragged breath from beside me like he’s the one getting his temperature checked.
Melo narrows his eyes at my fat lip, then waves his hand out. “Y’all get the fuck out! I need to debrief with my staff.”
The door lets out a shrill screech as Lucky pushes it open with his body. One by one, the guys shuffle past Lucky and outside to stand with everybody else. As soon as I try to step around Melo to follow them, he pushes his hand against my chest.
“Oh no. Not you. It’s come to my attention that you and I need to have a lil’ pow-wow,” he murmurs, turning around and crooking his finger at Chubbie.
Chubbie waddles toward us with a slew-footed gait and drops his heavy hand on my shoulder. He digs his fat fingers into my skin. The loud stench of sweat and Creed makes my nostrils flare.
Melo cocks his head to the side and rakes his eyes across my face like he’s trying to confirm whatever story Wendell cameup with to explain what happened between us in Beatrice’s backyard last night.
He steps back, swiping the side of his nose. “You got anything you wanna tell me, Pup?”
There’s a lot I wanna tell him—like how I fuck Rasheeda in her home office while they have phone conferences sometimes, how his nuts are probably the same size as his pea brain, how I stomped his big brother out in Beatrice’s backyard for what he did to Tamryn, and how Kenny and Faye Fairchild’s niece stuck her tongue down my throat after she saw what I did.
I bite down on my lip, nodding.
“Oh, he wants to talk, Chubbie.” Melo’s face lights up, and he glances at Chubbie out the corner of his eye, then glances back at me. “Well, talk, nigga”
I let out a quiet snort. “Man…fuck you,andyour ship, nigga.”
He jerks his head back, looking from me to Chubbie in disbelief. “What the fuck did you just say to me?”
“Fuck—”
“You know, I’m tired of you. I amsomotherfuckin sick of you, you degenerate motherfucka.”
“Then kill me.”
The words came out in a steady rhythm like they always did when I threw them at men that tried to test me, but this time there’s a little blip afterward—a fuse that lights and leads to a spark in my brain that makes me remember how Slim couldn’t even fix her mouth to utter the word “kill.” And here I am throwing that shit around as if it’s nothing. I couldn’t even tell her how well I knew that word or that toreallybreak a fighter; you had to beat that word into him. Senior always said a fighter “had to taste it to understand it wasn’t nothing to fear.”
I swallow the phantom vomit that still lingers on my tongue from the times him and Smitty would stomp it into me anddangle me over life’s edge until I’d see that nothingness they always said was on the other side of life for men like us.
“Kill you?” Melo asks. “That’s what you want? You want me to put you out of your misery after what you did? You want me to kill you when you owe me money?”
He looks over at Chubbie. “This nigga out here putting his hands on my brother and fucking with my business operations and he wants me to do himanotherfavor? Ain’t that some shit, Chubbie?”
“I ain’t ask you for no favor. I never asked nobody for nothing,” I spit out.
