Invincible: A Novel (5 page)

Jake had met Mary-beth one day while he was trying to do some shopping for Kim. He did a lot of things that day that were totally out of his character. For starters he took five gees out of his stash and decided to go to Mitch’s gambling spot. He wasn’t a real risk taker usually but ended up leaving with twenty-two gees. He took his seventeen gees profit to Neiman Marcus and walked straight to the women’s section—he was having one of his soft moments. Being that he had on his hood uniform—Carhartt hoody, hard blue denim jeans, and his Chukkas—none of the salespeople were fucking with him. They probably thought he was coming to steal or just window-shop. Not really knowing what he wanted, Jake starting surveying the room. He looked to his left: nothing, then to his right: still nothing, then he turned and looked behind him and spotted what he was looking for—a dime piece with a freshly did hairdo. She had a pretty brown complexion, not short but not
too tall, fully dipped in the flyest gear: nice bag, nice shoes, and if he had to bet she was probably driving a pretty little coupe like a C-Class or 3 Series Beamer or something.

Jake decided to approach her and get straight to the point. “Um, excuse me, miss, are you with someone?”

“Why?” she asked.

Jake liked her spunk. “Because I would like to ask for some help if you’re not,” he told her.

“Is that always how you come on to women? With the you-need-help line?”

Jake laughed. “Nah, I usually just say ‘What up, ma? You look good—what’s your math?’”

“Does that work?” she asked.

“Eighty percent of the time,” he admitted before adding, “Besides, I didn’t say I needed your help, I said I was going to ask for it.” When she asked him his name he said: “J.B., what’s yours?”

When she answered “M.B.,” they both shared a small laugh. M.B. interrupted the jovial moment with, “What do you need help with?”

“Well,” he said, “being that you so stylish and well put together I was going to ask your advice on the latest women’s shoes and bags. You know, put a brotha up on what’s popping! I need to know what the women want these days.”

“Stick with Chanel or Lou V.; you can’t lose with those.” Then she smiled and said, “I’ll show you a pair of shoes and a bag practically every woman would nearly die over.” She showed him a nice Lou bag that cost twenty-five hundred and some Chanel shoes that ran twelve hundred.

Jake liked the two pieces that she’d showed him and knew that Kim would, too. He was holding the bag in his hand when he said, “One more thing, ma.”

“You want my number,” she said with a straight face.

“Well, actually I was going to ask you to show me a good bottle of perfume.” She suggested a bottle of CREED. He walked over to the perfume counter, got the big gold bottle of CREED that ran about five hundred and some change, then gave it to Mary-beth after he purchased it.

Mary-beth said it was sweet of him to buy the perfume but he didn’t have to—he was cool and it was her pleasure to help him. “And I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful.” She could feel a connection to this guy; he made her feel comfortable—comfortable enough to ask if he knew where she could get some good weed from.

Jake gave a light chuckle. “What, are you police?”

She paused for a second. The look on her face had Jake believing she was keeping it one hundred with him.

“Let me find out somebody like you smokes.”

“You’d be surprised what a girl like me does.”

He liked that. “Yeah, well, I can take care of that for you, how much you need? I got a few bags in the car.” She said “Cool,” and after Jake bought the bag and shoes, they both headed toward the parking lot.

Both of them chose to stay quiet as they walked toward the car. It was silent but it wasn’t uncomfortable—both of them thinking how interesting the other was. Jake stopped at a brand-new Cadillac truck. It was nice; nothing special about it. He opened the passenger’s-side back door and hopped in. The
driver said, “Damn, that was quick,” and raised the back of the driver’s seat out of its reclining position. “I barely shut my eyes,” he added.

“Sleep when you’re dead, homie, we got moves to make,” Jake told his friend Nine-One. Nine-One was Jake’s favorite driver. He always held him down and put him before all his other customers. Jake reached into a bag in the back, grabbed two dubs, and handed them to Mary-beth. Then he wrote his number on a piece of paper and told her to hit him up if she want some more—that’s all he had on him right now.

She thanked him and said it was a pleasure to meet him and she definitely would give him a call.

———

Just as Jake was reminiscing, something told him to be alert. When he looked, two dudes were approaching him. He guessed they could read his body language because one of them said, “Nah, gee, it ain’t like that, we T.M.B.” One said his name was Clips and the other said his name was Frankie. “Regg is our peoples,” the one called Clips said. “He told us to hold you down, fam.”

“That’s good looking,” Jake told the two men, “but I told Regg I was a’ight.”

Frankie said, “I hear you, fam, and I seen you scrap so I know you can hold it down, but this is a nasty house and them boys you fucked up don’t play fair. There’re going to be a lot more niggaz coming for you, we just here to make sure it’s an even fight, you know.”

Clips added, “Regg said you was a stand-up thoroughbred kinda nigga, but even a thoroughbred can get on the wrong
track. We just here to make sure if you need a banga you get a banga. Before lights out let a nigga know if you need something to eat or whatever, homie. We respect that work you put in and the way you carried yourself in the yard. It’s been a long time since I seen a nigga man up to that many niggaz and be ready to get it in.”

Frankie nodded his head. “Yeah, that was some real brave-heart shit, my nigga.” And he gave Jake a dap.

Jake was thinking that the smart thing to do was to be humble and ask one of them to watch his back for a few while he caught some z’s. But what if they were the ones who wanted to kill him? He would be finished real quick. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t; what was he to do? And before he could come up with any kind of answer, he felt something hot going into his back.

Frankie slid a six-and-a-half-inch blade into him. He had been hit real decent from the back and Jake knew it. How could he let this happen? Clips tried to catch him in the face, but unlike the first blow, Jake saw this one coming and put his hand up just in time to get it in his palm instead of his face. Jake was pulsing with adrenaline, enabling him to kick Clips in the ribs and nuts. But despite his efforts, he got hit twice more in the back by Frankie. Jake felt his legs go out from under him, and he fell to the floor. That didn’t stop the two killers from getting their thing off. They started stomping him out, leaving Jake broken and bloody. Then Frankie put on the finishing touch: stabbing Jake in the top of his head with one of the razor-sharp blades.

That was all Jake’s body could take. He saw a blinding white light all around, then nothing.

GANGSTAS RIDE

Reggie flipped out when the news about the attack on his friend reached his dorm. Word had spread through the jail that the hit was brutal even for jail standards, and Reggie felt even worse after hearing that the niggaz that did it used his name to get close enough to make Jake relax his guard. Reggie knew both Frankie and Clips, and neither one of them was down with the Northside Boys. He couldn’t figure out why they did what they did to Jake or how they had the balls to use his name, but he sure was going to find out on the way to nighttime rec.

Reggie had no idea what he was in store for at rec call, nor were any of the COs prepared for what was about to go down. The Northside Boys had decided to fold their hands, bowing down to the mysterious 300 Crew. Some people said there
were only ten members in the jail, others thought there had to be three hundred of them running all the worldly goods in and out of the facility. Whoever they were, the 300 Crew supplied sneakers, knives, cellphones, porn mags, whatever you needed. Nobody ever fucked them over because instead of hurting you, they would use their outside connects to get to a family member or a significant other. It was said that each member was capable of killing a man with his bare hands and over the past ten years they averaged three hundred bodies a year, which led to them being named the 300 Crew. No one knew who they where. They had allegedly each gotten a life sentence for murder, extortion, or kidnapping and not one of them snitched. Some say they are stronger now that they are locked down and are making more than a hundred thousand dollars a week. The shit sounded far-fetched and unbelievable.

As soon as Reggie got to the yard he was approached by Lil Red and Dollar. Red started off the convo. “Yeah, nigga, look like ya man headed to heaven or hell. Heard they had to bring him outta there on a stretcher.”

“So y’all niggaz is hiring mu’fuckaz to put your work in for you now? And y’all had them niggaz get close off the strength of my name,” Reggie accused. “I guess y’all niggaz is pussy after all. Both y’all cowards can suck my dick, and I would gladly see any of you two faggots in the bathroom—hands, knife fight, whatever—but one of y’all niggaz got to see me.”

Lil Red got real hype. “You and I can play the bathroom right now, Regg. I’ll murder yo bitch ass. You ain’t hard motherfucka.”

Dollar hopped in, told his brother to chill, then said to Regg, “It’s like this, homie, that shit that happened today
wasn’t personal, it was business. I know that’s your homeboy but he fucked up a lot of money that belonged to us.” Dollar went on to explain, “If he hadn’t pulled that stunt earlier in the house, Ike and Cory wouldn’t have said shit to him. There wouldn’t of been no fight, none of that tough-guy shit in the yard earlier. My boys would have been on point and we wouldn’t have lost all that money when the turtles flipped the house. Besides that he had it coming to him for trying to be the hardest nigga in the world! And that’s not the only reason I’m approaching you. I came to give you a heads-up.” After being sure he had Reggie’s attention, Dollar continued, “The Northside Boys and the Spanish Crowns are both going to attack T.M.B. Both gangs are putting a lot of work in for the 300 Crew and getting paid well for it. You guys are in the way all the time so either you get down or lay down. It’s a lot of cash to be made so I suggest you think about it very carefully.”

“Ain’t nothing to think about,” Reggie said. “Hell no, T.M.B is T.M.B. and we ain’t getting down with nobody. If you and the Crowns decide to set it, be my guest. Matter of fact,” he added, “let’s get it in right now.” Reggie punctuated his statement by running straight at Lil Red and Dollar, but what Regg didn’t know was that the 300 had got at more than half of his crew and paid them off to fall back. That left Reggie left to set it with only about ten or twelve soldiers to scrap with him. They didn’t have a chance, but all of T.M.B. that didn’t take the pay went out like the warriors they were. Regg never made it to Lil Red or Dollar. Instead he was swarmed by a bunch of Northside and Spanish Crown soldiers. None of the members of T.M.B. got done like they did Jake but they all received official beat-downs. They had to take solace in the fact that at least there weren’t any
murders; they would all live to fight another day. The turtle squad came and shut the mini riot down, but the word was spread all over the jail that the takeover was official: The 300 Crew was running everything. As the turtles were bringing out all of the participants in plastic wire cuffs en route to the hole, all Regg could think about was how pussy the Northside, the Crowns, and T.M.B. members that sold out were. What kind of crew would work for another crew? He wondered how much money the 300 offered them, and why.

Reggie would get his answers soon enough, and he swore to get revenge on all T.M.B. niggaz who sold him out, which was most of them. But the last thing he thought about before falling to sleep in his cell was,
I wonder how J.B. doing
.

AWAKE

“Hey good-lookin’, what’s cooking?” Nurse Brenda Knight said in a tone that sounded as if she was about to sing. She wasn’t looking at him when she said it; it was just what she always said to him when she entered his room for the first time that day. She had a special little thing she would say to all her patients. The lady who shared the room with Jake would have gotten a “Heeey, Boo-Boo, how are you?” if Jake hadn’t scared the life out of her when he replied.