That’s just shit in your head. Jus’ the chocolate you been smokin’.” Messiah said, staying firm.
The whole time they were talking, the rest of the crew were oblivious to their conversation.
Lil’ Earl shook his head.
Messiah gazed down at his little cousin, his mother’s sister’s son; his little nigga that peed the bed whenever he stayed with him. He loved him, but he loved himself and Knowledge more. There was no question Lil’ Earl would tell. The only question was when.
He reached his hand down to help Lil’ Earl up.
“Don’t worry about it, cuz. We’ll take care of it,” Messiah assured him.
Looking into his eyes, Lil’ Earl saw it, but at that point, he was too gone to care. “O-okay,” Lil’ Earl replied, as he reached up and took his cousin’s hand. Messiah pulled him to his feet and then without missing a beat, he shoved Lil’ Earl’s head and sent him toppling over the side of the roof.
Power caught the moment out of the corner of his eye. “What the fuck?!”
In that last instant before he fell, Messiah and Lil’ Earl’s eyes met.
On Lil’ Earl’s face was an expression of relief. He knew what his cousin was going to do, but deep down he thanked him because he knew he didn’t have the heart to do it himself. His arms flailed around as he felt the pull of gravity, making his heart pound - but then he looked down and saw Tyrone smiling up at him, no longer rotting, but whole and glowing.
Then his arms went from flailing to embracing as his body sped downward, faster and faster, until he hit the pavement. The crash taking out all the lights on the building, bridge, in the city from his head, and last of all the light in Lil’ Earl’s eyes went out.
Messiah looked over the edge at the broken bird of his cuz, spread on the ground, arms and legs doing impossible things. In seconds there was screaming and running footsteps. A woman fell to her knees by the body, her hands useless. There was nothing she could do. She looked up at Messiah.
Messiah shook his head moved back from the edge to face his crew.
All conversation on the roof had stopped. They all knew what happened, but none of them knew why. Messiah looked at them - at their questioning eyes and simply said, “He fell.”
And that became what happened.
Three Years Later
“He fell?” O’Brien echoed with a disbelieving smirk on his face. It was the smirk you’d paint on if you’d just been told a stupid joke or read a lame meme on Facebook. It wasn’t the face you made when you heard some nigga had become pizza on a project pavement. Or, looking at Spagoli and O’Brien, perhaps it was.
“He fell,” he repeated with a shrug, then lit a cigarette.
“Bullshit,” O’Brien spat. “You killed your own cousin because he knew about the murder in Goldsboro. Admit it!” The detective banged the table to hammer home his point, but it didn’t startle him. All O’Brien got out of him was a shrug. “Yo, if you believed that, I’d be under arrest. Like I said earlier, my fuckin’ ribs is killin’ me. I need a fuckin’ doctor!”
“You think you’re hot shit, don’t you?! Running all over the world with that nigger rap shit. Well let me tell you, I’m not fooled! You’re not a rap group, you’re a fuckin’ drug-dealing hit squad!” Spagoli bellowed in his face as he pulled out a stack of glossies, slapping each photo on the table one by one. “Cincinnati! Houston! Miami! Hawaii!”
Each picture showed a different dead body, headless or grotesquely disfigured. Spagoli and O’Brien had thrown out the nice and nasty cop interrogation handbook. This was all nasty. They paced the room in front of him, like tigers in a too small cage at the zoo.
“You better hope – no, you better PRAY that none of these murders can be traced back to those stolen guns, because if they are, I’m going to squeeze you until you squeal like a bitch,” Spagoli threatened.
He just laughed at Spagoli’s see-through tactics. “The last time you heard a bitch scream was when she caught you trying on her underwear.”
Spagoli seethed. “You’re just a piece of shit. We’re gonna take you down so hard we’ll be able to roll you up, put you in a tube and post you to Riker’s Island.”
Present Day
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