Deadly Assets

[THREE]

Monmouth and Hancock Streets

Fairhill, Philadelphia

Saturday, December 15, 3:32 P.M.

“Is your momma gonna come down here and surprise us?” seventeen-year-old Carmelita Martinez teased Tyrone Hooks, who was sitting naked on the edge of his bed while watching her pull her shirt off over her head.

The cluttered basement bedroom, a crowded space of fifteen by twenty feet, also held a brown couch that faced a flat-screen television against one wall and, against the opposite wall, a wooden desk on top of which was a MacBook computer with a pair of high-end studio headphones and a chromed-mesh Shure professional musician’s microphone plugged into it. Also next to the computer was a ruby-red crushed velvet pouch with a string closure and a small, six-inch glass pipe. A wisp of smoke twisted upward from the pipe, the pungent aroma of marijuana hanging in the air.

Carmelita, a petite, dark-eyed, coffee-skinned Dominican with large breasts and full hips that had begun to spread, playfully tossed her top at Tyrone. Smiling widely, she ran her finger along the thin silver necklace that he had minutes earlier taken from the crushed velvet pouch and presented to her.

“She knows to stay in her room upstairs,” Hooks said, reaching out to unbutton Carmelita’s blue jeans. “Here, let me help you, baby girl.”

In the years that Tyrone’s grandparents had lived in the row house-his mother’s parents, who helped raise him; he never knew his father-the blue-collar neighborhood had begun to fall on hard times as its middle-class jobs slowly disappeared with the closure of the nearby factories.

By the time the grandparents had died, and his mother had inherited the home, a great deal had really changed in the area.

There now was widespread blight, for example, pockets of it severe. Calling the Hooks property a row house was something of a misnomer, as there were no other houses along its row. Twenty years earlier, when Tyrone had been five, a fire had ravaged all the others on that side of the street. Their blackened masonry shells had been demolished by the city, leaving the Hookses’ two-story structure standing alone near the corner, with only raw empty lots where the other row houses had once stood.

Over time the demographics of the neighborhood had dramatically changed, too.

Now the vast majority-eighty percent-of Fairhill’s residents were Hispanic. While these were mostly Puerto Ricans, there were also many who had emigrated from Cuba and Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. Family-owned businesses in what they called their El Centro de Oro-Center of Gold-catered to them, the markets painted in the same bright yellows and greens and blues as those in the islands. Remarkably, on all four corners at Lehigh and Fifth there were even palm trees-leaning ones made of metal installed to further create a tropical feel.

Carmelita-who had been born at Temple University Hospital’s Episcopal Campus, on the outer edge of Fairhill-wiggled her hips as Tyrone tugged down her skintight jeans.

Just as she jumped onto the bed, Tyrone’s cell phone-which he had tossed on the couch next to his black Ruger 9-millimeter semiauto pistol when he had undressed-began ringing.

Or, perhaps more correctly, it began rapping.

Hooks had recorded songs he had written on the computer, and from those digital files had created ring tones, then transferred the rings to his cell phone, where he had linked them to the telephone numbers of select members of his crew.

“Damn it!” he said, recognizing who was calling without needing to look at the phone screen.

“Anything wrong?” Carmelita said, watching the skinny Tyrone walk quickly to the couch and grab the phone off the seat cushion.

He ignored her, then snapped at the caller: “You better be calling to say it’s done.”

Carmelita could hear the male voice of the caller but could not make out what he was saying, only picking up on his tone. He sounded, she thought, excited in a nervous way-maybe even scared.

“Look, man,” Tyrone said angrily, his eyes darting at Carmelita then away, “we’ve been over this. You gotta just do it. You hearing me? ’Cause if you don’t, you know what happens.”

There was no reply for a moment, then Carmelita heard the caller mumble, “All right.”

“Don’t say it-do it! Let me know when it’s done. No surprises.”

Hooks ended the call, and was about to toss the phone back on the cushion when it made a Ping-Ping! sound.

He looked at the screen and read the text message: “Yo, King. Bags in AC safe. All good here. TV news keeps showing smash amp; grab. That dude really dead???”

Tyrone turned his back to Carmelita, then thumbed a reply: “News says 1 dead 1 shot. Stay there. No casinos!! Lay low til I say.”

He nodded as he glanced at the crushed velvet pouch and thought: Lucky they got to the Shore quick. Five-Oh really got to be looking hard for them, especially since he killed that guy. Damn good news that loot’s locked up.

Right after he hit SEND, the phone made another Ping-Ping!

“Damn,” he said in a hiss, then flipped the switch to silence the phone.

He suddenly felt the warmth of Carmelita’s skin against his back, then her arms wrapping around him, her gentle fingers finding his curly black chest hairs. She rested her chin on his shoulder. He could feel her moist breath on his ear.

“You ever shoot anyone, King?” she said.

Hooks jerked his head.

“Why the hell you say that?”

“You rap about it,” she said, her tone playful but serious. “You got the nine. Just wonder sometimes if you’ve done it.”

She buried her face in his neck as her right hand slipped down to his belly and then to his groin.

Hooks inhaled deeply.

“Well, baby, I rap about some super-hot sex, too, so what do you think?”

He exhaled as he glanced at the phone screen and saw that the text massage read “Call me QUICK!”

“What’s that text about?” Carmelita said.

“You oughta not ask so many questions,” Hooks said sharply, turning from the phone toward her.

She stuck out her lower lip in a pout-just as her hand grasped him in a way that left no question she wasn’t really pouting.

After a very brief moment he grinned, tossed the phone back beside the pistol on the couch, and said, “But that one’s about nothing that ain’t gonna wait!”

He then roughly pulled a giggling Carmelita back across the room to the bed.

–

A half hour later, Hooks hit a speed-dial key on his cellular phone as he watched Carmelita, sitting up in bed beside him, take a fat pinch of crushed marijuana from a clear plastic zip-top bag and refill the bowl of the glass pipe that had been on the desk.

“Don’t forget I need you to call your brother after that bowl’s burned,” Tyrone told her. “I got a job for him.”

“What you want with Ruben?” she said, picking up a matchbook from the bedsheet.

“Baby girl, what’d I tell you about asking so many questions?” Tyrone said, then barked into the phone, “Yo!”

“You call that calling me quick?” DiAndre Pringle answered.

“I had something I had to do first.”

Carmelita giggled.

“Whatever, Ty,” Pringle said.

Hooks guessed that Pringle had overheard Carmelita, and grinned at her.

“Listen,” Pringle went on, “I wanted you to call quick ’cause I’d just got an idea for you.”

“This about me performing at that Turkey Day gig?”

“No.”

“What? I’m still doing the gig, right?”

“Yeah, Ty. But you want to work another gig?”

Hooks looked at Carmelita, grinned, then said, “Depends. I don’t know. Might be busy. When?”

“This afternoon.”

“Today? You messing with me?”

“No. You heard that the Rev is putting on a rally, right?”

“Rally? About what?”

“About all the killing that’s going on. About stopping Killadelphia.”

Hooks felt the hair on his neck stand up.

He can’t mean what happened this morning.

How’d he know about my boys?

Unless somebody else went and talked. .

“Going to be lots of people at the ministry here, Ty. And I figured you’d be really good at really amping up the crowd.”

Yeah, he does mean my raps.

“How much?” Hooks said.

“How many people?”

“No. How much I get paid?”

“Are you serious? Ain’t nobody getting paid. I mean, c’mon, it’s for our people!”

Hooks was quiet a moment.

Guess I’m about to get me a good grip for that loot-plenty of benjamins for a while.

And it’d look good if I played that rally.

Might even be news covering it. Get me on TV.

“TV news coming?” he said.

“Yeah. I left messages with ’em all. That Philly News Now and Channel 10 called back and said they were sending reporters. Sure there’ll be more.”

Hooks’s eyebrows went up.

“Yeah, man,” he said, nodding, “I could seriously amp that crowd up.”

“Don’t need you to do a whole set or nothing. Just rap one or two songs. Rev Cross doesn’t like folks taking over his stage.”

Carmelita lit a match, then put the flame to the pot in the pipe bowl. She took a deep puff on the glass pipe and held it in, before holding out the pipe to Hooks.

“So,” Pringle said, “whatcha say, King?”

Tyrone Hooks looked at his gold Rolex watch.

“I say what time you want me there?” he said, winked at Carmelita, then took a puff on the pipe.