begging-ass boy was amusing, and they were particularly anxious to see him get his punishment, even if it meant murder. In Scar’s absence the crew all looked to Sticks for their orders, and he knew he definitely had something to prove.
“Yo, now a nigga wanna cop a plea,” Timber said. He was one of the new members of the crew. “Let me kill him, slow and painful like. I will cut off his eyelids so the nigga can’t blink. I will remove that nigga’s fingernails and toenails one by one while he watch.” Timber got menacingly close to the boy’s face.
Timber was a wild boy, and he was helping the Dirty Money Crew wreak havoc on the streets of Baltimore. He had relocated from Alabama to Baltimore with his mother, and it wasn’t long before he got knee-deep into the streets. He had told Sticks and Trail that he got his nickname Timber because one night when he was eleven, he went out into his backyard, sawed off a tree branch and beat his stepfather to death with it for hitting on his mother. When the word spread about him to all the gangs in Alabama, they started calling him Little Timber after that, and the name stuck. (Tim-ber!” was what the tree cutters in Alabama called out when they cut trees down.) After Timber felt the power surge from his first murder, it became nothing for him. He was ruthless and was into torture. In fact, he craved the sensational rush he got from committing heinous acts.
“Nah, I’ma do this shit Scar-style?short and sweet, no need for a bunch of blood and guts and shit,” Sticks said. He really just wanted to assert his power and show off his bravado in front of the younger dudes in the crew. Murder and mayhem was what he wanted on his tombstone.
“Yo, Scar always gives a nigga his chance to have last rites. “So what is it gonna be?” Sticks said to the boy. You got a choice, nigga—call a bitch, call your moms, or you wanna chance to pray to God? Don’t think too long, nigga. I ain’t got all day.”
Staring death in the eyes, the boy thought to himself, This can’t be real. Crying like a baby and trembling like a leaf, he agreed to a call to his mother to say good-bye. He figured at least she would know he was thinking of her before he died. He couldn’t imagine how she would react if he had gone missing for weeks, or when the police finally came to the door to tell her they had found his body. He wanted to tell her good-bye himself. In his mind, he was saying, Fuck God, because if there was a God, He would save him right now.
“I’ma call my moms,” the boy whined through the tsunami of tears that covered his face.
Sticks kept his gun trained on the boy. “Tell this nigga the number to dial,” he instructed the boy. The boy did as he was told, and Trail punched the numbers in on one of their many disposable track phones they used to communicate about their business and to speak to Scar, to avoid being traced.
Trail put the phone on speaker, and after three rings, the boy heard his mother’s melodic voice filter through the speaker.
“Hello?” she answered.
“Ma! Ma!” the boy cried out.
“Anthony? What’s the matter? Where are you?” his mother said, concern streaming through her words.
“Say bye, nigga,” Sticks whispered, placing the cold steel up against the boy’s temple.
“Bye, ma! I love you forever!!” the boy screamed.
“Anthony!” his mother screamed.
Trail disconnected the line.
Bang! One shot to the temple, and the boy’s body slumped from the chair and hit the floor with an ominous thud.
“One down, two more Frank Lucas snitch-ass niggas to go,” Sticks said. Temporarily put in charge by Scar, Sticks had vowed that the streets would be sorry for the day he was born. He remembered all the ill-treatment he’d suffered at Scar’s hands in the training phase of his come-up. Now he was prepared to take it out on anybody who got in his way, even members of the crew.
Sticks, Trail, Timber, and four new young members of the Dirty Money Crew loaded into two black Suburbans. Sticks drove slowly through the streets of Baltimore, blasting Drake and Lil Wayne. The bass and the lyrics had them all hyped. All except Sticks, who was silent and intently focused on his mission, while the other members were laughing and cracking jokes on each other.
“Yo! Y’all gotta shut the fuck up!” Sticks screamed. “We about to go handle some serious business. If Scar was here, y’all niggas would be like church mice up in this bitch, scared to fuckin’ make a peep!”
An immediate hush fell over the vehicle.
“Now, we gonna ride out slow and easy. This nigga Bam think shit is one hun’ed. I wanna scope out his spots first.” Sticks spoke calmly, as if he didn’t just scream on them. He was a perfectionist when it came to a mission. For him, failure wasn’t an option.
Sticks was a hungry dude from day one; he’d never had shit given to him. When Scar had met him, he could tell the boy would do almost anything to put food in his starving stomach. Which was why Scar had chosen him. Scar had groomed him much like a trainer would groom a prize fighter. So when Sticks collected his first couple of stacks, his loyalty to Scar was sealed. Scar figured he was the perfect one to run shit, allowing him to lay low.
They drove down a block and were careful to stay two or three buildings away from their destination.
“Look, there go that nigga right there,” Trail said in a low tone, pointing out a hustler named Bam that had been on the crew’s radar for some prime real estate he owned in the Baltimore drug trade.
Before anybody else could do or say anything, Sticks accelerated and rolled up on the rival dealer without warning. The truck tires screeched against the street, startling everyone on the block.
Before anyone could react, Sticks threw the truck in park and was out in a millisecond. He ran up to Bam, his gun drawn. “Yo, I thought I told you we staging a takeover of this set!” Sticks screamed as he rushed towards Bam.
Bam threw his hands up in surrender.
It was too late. He had been caught slippin’ and clearly not prepared for the huge .45-caliber gun sitting in his face. “Your choice was to get down or lay down, like that dude Beanie Sigel said. You chose to lay down, muthafucka,” Sticks growled.
Boom!
One shot to the dome, and Bam’s body crumpled to the ground, leaving the other members of Scar’s crew in shock. Screams erupted everywhere.
“Go in the mu’fucka and clean it out. Drugs and money!” Sticks barked, whirling around with his gun, swinging to ward off everybody.
The rest of the crew members raced into Bam’s trap house and looted as fast as they could.
Sticks had always instructed them that they had eight minutes from beginning to end to do a “jux.” He had timed the 9-1-1 response, the time it took the police to get up and out on a call.
He looked at his watch. They were almost on schedule but not quite. He could hear the distant wail of sirens. “Let’s go!” he ordered. “We ain’t got no witnesses.” He called out to the crowd of onlookers and to Bam’s little crew. “I saw all y’all faces?Anybody snitch, I will be back!”
Sticks and the rest of the Dirty Money Crew loaded back into their vehicles and rolled out.
Trail
