A Kingpin's Obsession: Ajoni's Story (19 page)

The man in the door way goes down, his spine slamming into the ground with a dull thud. The two left standing raise their guns. I take out the right soldier then haul ass forward, running diagonally toward the front door so the third man is shooting at where I was, and then I take him out too.

The body laying in the center of warehouse’s doorway suddenly disappears inside the building, then the door slams shut to it as I cover the distance between me and the backs of the cars parked in front of it.

I expected the door of the warehouse to shut suddenly, and needed it to happen so when I checked to make sure all three soldiers are dead, nobody lets loose on me from the inside of the warehouse.

I crouch down and move between the cars, giving the sorry excuse for patrol time to give me any sign that there is still life in them. No one has moved by the time I have inched my way to the front of the warehouse. I do not expect to have to shoot them again since my aim is always true, but some men are hard to kill. I ease between the bodies and bend down. The two men, who were left outside to die if they were not already dead, did so with their eyes open.

I stand up just in time to hear the sound of Raw’s foot breaking down the back door, shaking the whole damn tin can on its foundation. I do not hesitate to put my foot to the front door. As it falls inwards, I jump to the side and put my back against the wall, while the door crashes to the floor inside. Going in right after putting foot to a door is a quick way to get a hole in the head. I did not come here for that.

Bullets begin exiting the building, whizzing over my left shoulder, and striking the cars while I scope out what I can see from my position. That is not much since what I can see is mostly empty space, except for the flash of a gun discharging in the corner of my eye from the right side of the building. When someone screams and the gunshots stop, I stick my head in the door quickly, then put my back right back against the wall. The scream came from behind an aluminum table turned on its side with plenty of white packages filled with white powder spilling onto the floor in front of it—cocaine.

Chang is not as small-time as I thought he was. Lea has been financing his dope deals with the cash I’ve been sending to her. I guess that makes the cocaine mine then.

“King,” she screams from behind the table, “I know that’s you out there! You should’ve kept your ass at home!”

“And wait for you to try and kill Ajoni again?” I yell back. “I don’t think so, and you should’ve known I’d come to you after trying that shit!”

“Well, you’re here now, motherfucker,” a man responds—Chang, “and you’ve started a war. Do you want a closed casket next week or a memorial in about seven years when they declare your ass legally dead because they cannot find your body?”

As much as I want to enter the building and finish this shit since Lea and Chang are doing too much talking, dragging this hit out, and probably waiting for me to enter the building, I stay where I am, and decide to make them shut up and let me inside. I point my gun inside the doorway towards the table to do what I usually do not—pull the trigger in rapid succession and
hope
I hit one of their asses through the tabletop.

The long muzzle of a large caliber weapon appears over the edge of it, and starts to bust steadily on my ass. I stop shooting and press my back harder into the wall, waiting for the gun to run out of bullets. When the shots stop, I run inside then to the left, hoping there is something to hide behind. If there is not, I am up a shit creek and will worry about that when I have to.

Luckily, I find another table sitting in the opposite corner of the room with bricks of coke on top of its wooden surface, then run behind it before turning it over and taking cover on my knees.

“Fuck, he’s in here, Lea!” Chang shouts. “Where the fuck is the other one?”

“I don’t fucking know, Chang! I’m back here with you and you emptied the clip fool!”

“Fuck that! I got another clip and these motherfuckers gon’ learn today about coming up in Chang’s house and acting a fool! You ready to die, King?”

I release the empty clip from my gun onto the floor, then extract a fully loaded one from my pocket and shove it into place in the butt of my weapon, planning to retrieve the empty magazine later.

Bullets start pelting the tabletop. A white dust storm kicks up. I slide down to my front before I breathe it in, and look around the bottom edge of the table. All I need is one shot, and have it when I see Chang, who looks like the milk chocolate, male version of Lea, stupidly exposing his head from behind the table while shooting at me.

A shadow falls on the floor in front of the backdoor, then the business end of a gun appears in it and takes aim.

Chang suddenly changes the path of his bullets, aiming at the backdoor, and then the side of his head explodes, splattering his brains against the wall behind him. His dead body collapses on top of Lea. She screams.

“Raw!” I holler.

“Yeah!”

“You good?”

“Yep, and feeling better than ever, but I’ll feel fucking fantastic when I’ve ghosted that bitch behind the table! She has to come out sometime.”

“I’m coming out right now, motherfucker! That was my fucking brother you killed, Raw! I just fucking found him after we got out of the state’s care ten years ago, and put him on to the game! We was about to get this motherfucking paper and take over Mecca,” she yells hysterically, before more bullets start to strike the wooden table and all the walls of the building like she has a fully automatic and illegal weapon, and is trying to kill everything, inanimate objects and all.

Everybody is losing their damn minds and wants to take over Mecca.

I duck behind the table, realizing I am literally trapped with a piece shooter no match for an AK-47 that Chang probably brought from Shad. I hope Raw is not stupid enough to take a chance of getting a kill shot while she is busting a gun that shoots bullets thirty times faster than any one of us can blink.

“Raw, stay where the fuck you are,” I order and cover my head, waiting for Lea to run out of bullets, and praying that she does not know how to reload or dead my ass before the clip is empty.

“You can bet that, King! This bitch has gone crazy!” His voice seems to be traveling low, like he is crouching on the ground outside.

“You’ll pay for this, King! You should’ve just gave me the money,” Lea joins in the conversation again over the gunfire before the rounds suddenly stop going off over my head and near it, then the gun clicks in her hand. Now that she has finally run out of bullets, I almost shout ‘Hallelujah!’ Then a single shot discharges inside the building.

Something crashes into another object that skids across the floor on the other side of the room. I assume it is Lea’s dead body getting intimately acquainted with the concrete floor or table, positive that Raw has gotten the kill shot after her clip ran out finally, but I have to get up to see.

I grab my empty clip off the floor, stash it in my coat pocket, stand up, and see a small figure under a black skull cap standing in the front doorway with their back to me. I recognize the rear profile as Ajoni’s instantly, with her gun down by her side and looking at Lea’s body folded and bleeding over the top of the table.

Ajoni cocks her head to the side as if she is contemplating a sculpture in a museum. “I have to tell your daughter to stop playing with her food all the time, King. If you’re going to eat somebody’s ass up, eat it up and move on.” Then she turns around and walks out of the building without looking back.

Raw laughs out while walking inside the back door.

“Damn, King. She colder than you is.”

I turn to him, angry as hell. “What the
fuck
just happened?”

He shrugs. “You wanted a Queen that would ride or die. Well, she has dead her first body for you, so I guess you can’t keep thinking that she’s not loyal anymore, now can you?”

No, I cannot, but I never needed Ajoni to take a life for me, just create it, and stay in the damn car.

“She’s still going to kill my child, Raw, is hardheaded as hell, and I never wanted a Queen
pin
, just a queen. I can run my own dope game and lay my own bodies down.”

“Nobody ever gets exactly what they want in a person... do they,
Calen
?” he asks flippantly.

I get exactly what he is trying to put down, while he stuffs his gun in his back—Ajoni has to deal with the sides of me that she would rather not, and I do too when it comes to her.

“And time waits for no man, King, so let’s get this shit over with before someone drives over here with their nose wide open and gets their shit split down the middle by Ajoni. I’ll go get the shovels right quick. You can start hauling the bodies to the Escalade, or wait for me to get back to help you.”

I absorb Raw’s order, cram my gun in the back of my jeans, pull my leather jacket off while Raw jogs out the front door behind Ajoni, and drape it over the edge of the table that I was taking cover behind. I cannot help but feel proud of her while I am angry with her too for doing what needed to be done, and wishing she did not have a body on her conscience now.

Sometimes, my sleep is interrupted with the faces of people that I have had to kill just to survive in Mecca—I did not want that for her either. I make up my mind to stick close to her while keeping my distance, to make sure she has no lasting effects from this night, but something tells me that she won’t—she stared at Lea’s body like
it
was an inanimate object that had never been full of life.

Shit! That chick
is
colder than I am when she needs to be. I’ll never make the mistake of telling her to shoot me and take me out of my misery again. She just might do it.

I haul Lea’s body over my shoulder, and carry it out to the truck, trying not to get blood dripping from the wound in her forehead on my clothes. Raw emerges from the darkness less than a minute later with the shovels in both hands. He drops them and runs to the back of the Escalade to open the back doors for me. I would ask him if Ajoni is okay, but that will give him the opening to talk about the situation between her and me. I am still in a foul mood about her getting out of the car when I told her ass not to, and do not want to discuss it.

It takes quite a few minutes for me and Raw to dump all the bodies in the back of the truck on top of each other with their weapons without getting too much of their blood on us. I wipe my prints off the back door with the tail of my shirt. We get in and drive around the back of the warehouse with Raw’s hands balled in the sleeve of his coat on the steering wheel.

The neon-green digital clock in the dashboard informs me that it is five minutes after ten. He is still oddly quiet while we look for paths big enough to get the truck through to go farther in the woods, looking for a spot wide enough to bury everyone deep so the animals will not smell the rotting flesh and bones beneath the dirt and dig them right back up. Just as Raw parks between two oak trees, intending to break ground in front of the truck, a shadow moves up my side of it, continuing towards the front end, and scares the living shit out of both of us.

“
What the fuck
,” we holler together.

Ajoni steps into the headlights with shovels in both hands that we both forgot to grab, and giggles quietly before dropping both tools on the ground. “I was walking behind the truck the whole time. You were driving so damn slow Raw, I could’ve passed you on foot.”

He snickers and shakes his head. “Excuse me for not knowing where the hell I was going. I know the Kings’ woods better, thank you.”

She stops laughing. “If you have any bodies behind the Kings’ warehouse, you two should probably move those too. You never know who is snitching, do you, King?”

Raw and I look at each other and consider her advice. I take it to heart. Cleaning up the Kings’ movements before I become completely Calen Kingsley is a damn good idea. And if she does not ask where we are going to rebury the bodies, she is probably not going to be the one snitching on us, again. I grow a little bit more secure in her loyalty to me, but do not tell her that though, and cannot—when I looked back at where Ajoni is standing, I discovered that she is gone.

I turn around in my seat, and look through the tinted glass in the rear doors. She’s walking back towards the warehouse several yards away. I can barely see the halogen light that is mounted in the ceiling shining out of the back door. “Damn, she’s like a fucking cat, Raw.”

“While we were riding to the store, she told me about sneaking out of her house for years to watch her father do dirt in the streets for whoever he was working for at the time. She never got caught by her mother either, or everyone on Teamon block would’ve known about it. That damn Seeri was nothing to play with even as a junkie. You chose well for a queen, bruh. I give you that much.”

“I did, but I can’t get her respect and trust for shit.”

“She had your kid, King, made Larkin take her deal instead of letting our asses rot in prison, just killed a motherfucker for you so you can meet your daughter in the morning, is helping you bury bodies, and told you to get rid of the others in case somebody decides to sing like a bird for a get out jail free pass. Where exactly does she not respect and trust you at?”