Cigar Bar (9 page)

The man awoke, ready to rumble. “What the fuck?” He then realized that he was tied to a chair. “Hey, what the fuck is your problem, man?” he asked as the knot on his head became visible to all. His head had swelled from the hit that Paulie delivered. “You better release me from this fuckin’ chair!” the man screamed at Paulie.

Paulie looked at the man with a half-smile, half-scowl. “Are you fuckin’ kidding me?” He then stepped to the side and showed the man the body of his newly departed cousin.

“What the fuck?” The man began to buck wildly, trying to break the chair.

Paulie walked up to him and hit him again in the same spot on his head. “Oh, we got a live one here,” Paulie said, taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves. “Hey, Johnny, go get me that duct tape.”

Paulie taped the man’s legs and torso to the chair. He doubled the tape around his wrists. He awakened the man, but this time, he did it with rubbing alcohol, pouring it over the guy’s wound.

The man jolted awake, screaming with pain. Paulie wrapped the duct tape around his mouth. He took a chair and sat right in front of the man. “Now, listen,” Paulie said. He pulled a pocket knife from his pocket. “I’m gonna make this painful. Very fuckin’ painful! Why, you ask? I’m not sure if you remember, but you were standing at my little sister’s door fuckin’ rubbing your damn dick.” Paulie giggled. “You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me!” Paulie poked the man’s legs with the knife several times.

The man wanted desperately to scream but it was useless. Paulie repeatedly poked the man in his legs with the five-inch blade. The pain was intense. The more he stabbed, the more his legs began to resemble ground steak. There were chunks of meat and flesh protruding from his body.

While all of this was going on in the basement, Sherry snuck out of her room. She walked on her tiptoes as if she was robbing the house. She peeked around the corner and saw that none of Paulie’s guards were around. Sherry snuck into the bedroom and opened the safe. She took a stack of hundred-dollar bills and silently crept out of the house. Her plan was to find Tony and give him everything he ever wanted, but she didn’t know where to go.

CHAPTER 5

Pretty Little Sherry

• • •

Breathing heavily, she ran up
the block at full speed. She had been on the track team in college, and she won state the year before. There was no way the goons could catch her, even if they were in a car.

This would be the first time that she ever went out on her own. Her brother always took care of her. No one else, except for Tony. She thought,
Wow!
The feeling drugs gave her was better than anything she had ever felt in her life. When Tony was between her legs eating, she couldn’t contain herself. She enjoyed the memory.
Damn,
I have to find that motherfucker!

She began to think and act like an addict. She asked herself,
Where would I go if I wanted to get high? To the ghetto!
As far as she knew, Tony was afraid to come home. She figured that if she found him and she talked to her brother to let him know that their love was mutual, everything would be okay.

Sherry vowed to find him, and, with Paulie’s money, she knew that it wouldn’t be a difficult task. At least that’s what she thought.

Sherry took the F train to Jamaica, Queens, and got off at the 179 Street station. Sherry believed that she could find someone there who could help. What was she thinking? Only God knew what was on her mind. As she walked up the street, she noticed how busy it was. There were people everywhere she looked. Sherry had to go deeper than she originally thought in order to find the drugs that she sought.

She remembered her friend Amber, who owned a car and lived fairly close to the area. Sherry pulled out her cell phone and called Amber.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s me, Sherry. I’m on the corner of One Hundred Seventy-ninth Street. Can you come pick me up?”

Amber laughed. “You’re funny. What’s up, girl?”

“No, I’m really up here, and I need you to come pick me up,” Sherry insisted.

“Yeah, okay. So, what’s really going on?”

Sherry was getting frustrated because the girl didn’t believe her. Everybody in the area knew Paulie and his sister. No one dared screw with her.

“Amber, listen to me!” Sherry yelled. “Hey, hold on,” she said and then walked to the corner. The driver of the Q43 bus had just parked, and Sherry asked if he could tell Amber their location.

The man took the cell phone. “No problem. Yes, ma’am. We’re down here on One Hundred Seventy-ninth and Jamaica Avenue. Yep, okay now. Right.”

“Thank you,” she said. Sherry tried to hand the kind bus driver some money. She pulled a big wad of cash from her pocket.

The man rushed her, pulling her onto the bus. She was startled. He said, “Girl, don’t you
ever
pull that much money out your pocket like that! These folks round here will knock you in your head, girl! Now you go on over there and sit down. Tell your friend you’re on this bus.”

“Okay, thanks!”

Amber screamed, “I heard him through the phone, and I just rushed out the door.”

Sherry had known Amber for a couple of years. They met during her first year of college. Amber quickly found out who her brother was and about his strict no-holds-barred-you-can’t-do-shit attitude. She was only able to go to the house to see Sherry. Now, to hear that she was here in Jamaica was quite unbelievable. She rounded the corner and pulled in front of the parked bus.

Sherry thanked the driver and attempted to hand him money again. “I’m okay, sweetheart, but you make sure you don’t be pulling all that money out like that. Be careful!”

As she walked over to her friend’s car, she gave one final wave to the nice man. She greeted Amber with a hug.

“What the
fuck
is going on, Sherry?” Amber asked her friend. “I mean, I have never seen you outside of school, and then when I did see you, you had a bodyguard, and shit, as if you were the President’s daughter! Is everything okay, girl?” Sherry looked at Amber and a small tear ran down her cheek. “What’s wrong?” Amber asked again, holding her friend real tight.

“I need to find Tony.”

“Tony? Who the fuck is Tony?”

Sherry explained. “Do you remember when I told you about my neighbor?”

“Oh, yeah right, Mr. Blue Eyes,” she said, a look of disgust on her face.

Amber was also a beautiful girl. She had blond hair and light-brown eyes. Her body resembled that of a black girl’s: thick thighs, tiny waistline, and a decent bra size. From behind, many men assumed that she was a light-skin black girl. But she was a proud Irish girl with a tattoo of a sexy leprechaun displayed on her lower back. She knew that men would look at her ass, so she wanted them to know that she was Irish. She drove around in a blue Mustang. Her family also had money. She could have gone away to college but decided to stay close to home to attend the local school and become a psychologist.

Amber asked, “What happened with Tony?” She wiped away her friend’s tears.

Sherry went back to the beginning, back to the day when Tony met her coming home from school. She told Amber about the drugs, the sex, getting caught, everything!.

Amber sat there with her mouth wide open. She had a bewildered look on her face that begged her to ask, “What the fuck did you just say?”

Sherry said, “Amber, stop it! I need your help!”

“Okay. First off, let me go back a minute. You just told me that you liked it when you got high, so you want me to help you find some more, as well as hang out with you so we can find Tony together? Is that right?” She looked at Sherry, shrugged her shoulders, and said, “Well, fuck it! I have nothing else to do this weekend. Why the fuck not?” Then she started the engine of her car and pulled off.

“Okay, what will be our first move?” Sherry asked as she slapped and rubbed her hands together.

Amber replied, “Well, first, let’s get the shit. I know this lady named Loraine. Everybody calls her Mom. She knows everybody! If Tony looks as good as you’re telling me, Mom definitely knows him. She is one of those rich, ugly women who pays young, pretty boys to service her. She also does dope.”

“Let’s ride!” As the duo rode down the avenue, Sherry pulled out the money. “How much do you think we’ll need?”

Amber said, “Sherry, give me that shit!” She snatched the money away from the girl. “How much is this, Sherry?”

“I don’t know, maybe five thousand. Why?” Sherry replied.

Amber picked up the money. There was a $10,000 band around it. She gasped. “Sherry! Where did you get ten thousand dollars?”

“I took it out of the safe. My brother has a lot of them. Trust me, he won’t miss one.” She laughed.

Amber spoke in a loud and clear voice so that Sherry could hear her. “Hey, Sherry, new fuckin’ rule: You don’t talk about, you don’t discuss, or you don’t pull out any money in front of anybody! You got it? Matter of fact, newer rule: I’m gonna hold on to the money for us, okay?”

“Sure, go ahead. I don’t care as long as we can find Tony. You can have that shit.” She sat back in her seat. She demanded that Amber turn on the radio.

“Girl!” Amber said, reaching over to flick the on switch. “Oh, that’s my shit!” Amber said, blasting the radio and waving her hands in the air. She danced to the beat while flying down the highway.

Sherry wasn’t feeling as groovy. She couldn’t get that feeling off of her mind. She wanted to feel it again. She longed to feel the freedom, warmth, and ecstasy that she felt when Tony went down on her, and the drugs that enveloped her body.

Then she looked at her friend’s lips. She bit her lip and moaned, “Mmmm.” She almost put her hand on her kitty; instead, she shook her head from side to side. Sherry said out loud, “What the fuck is on my mind? I’m not fuckin’ gay!”

Amber turned the radio down and said, “What?”

“Nothing. Are we almost there?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact, we’re four blocks away,” she stated as she exited the highway,

“Good, because I gotta pee!” replied Sherry.

They turned a corner and pulled over. Before Sherry reached for the door, Amber grabbed her arm. “Listen, Sherry, this is a different area. This is like an area where the cops don’t usually come around. I implore you, Sherry, to please not fuckin’ trust anybody in this fuckin’ house we’re going in. They will lie to your face and have you believing you’re the President of the United fuckin’ States! Say nothing and don’t even introduce yourself to anyone. If I want you to meet someone, I’ll tell you who.”

Even though Amber was Miss Goodie-Two-Shoes in college, she was also a street girl who got high off of pills and weed. Until today, however, she had never tried heroin. She had always been curious about it. Some friends used it and now knowing that pretty, little Sherry had used it, Amber felt it was time to take her turn.

The girls walked from the car and crossed the street. The men hanging out on the stoops were like vultures. They began to yell out at Amber and Sherry. “Yo, ma! Come here and bring your friend!” said one guy.

“Hey, shorty, what up?” said another.

“Yo, I got that weed, ma! I’ll hook you up for free if you let me smack dat fat ass!” the final man said as they entered the building.

Sherry couldn’t help but laugh. “He said he would give you free weed if you let him smack your ass!” They stepped into the hallway of the brownstone and began to laugh.

Amber smiled and said, “Shut up, bitch! If the motherfucker would have come across the street, I was gonna pop his ass!” She showed Sherry a .22 semiauto that she had tucked into her bag.

“Girl, what the fuck? Why you didn’t tell me you had that?” Sherry asked.

“Because it was on a need-to-know basis. Come on,” she said as they climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. Amber was a little tired, whereas Sherry could have run up and down all six flights six times. “Fuck, I’m glad we here,” Amber said, out of breath. She knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” asked a female voice on the other side of the door.

“Amber, Ma, what up?”

“Amber, girl! What are you doing here? I got company,” she said through the closed door.

“Ma, it’s about bread.”

The door unlocked. The woman told her to hold on for one minute as she hustled to the back room. After about 30 seconds, she yelled, “Okay, come on in, and lock the door behind you!”

As the girls walked in, they noticed eight people in the living room sitting on the couch. They wore wrinkled clothing. The men were shirtless and it wasn’t hard to tell what was going on. There was drug paraphernalia and assorted drugs everywhere they looked, and dense smoke filled the room,

Sherry tried not to look, but she couldn’t help it. Lying on the couch between two old white women was a young black man. He had to be about 18, and he was hung like a horse. White powder residue coated his nostrils.

The man saw the young, pretty girl, wiped the stuff away, and said, “Hello.”

Sherry looked down at his manhood and couldn’t really say anything. She was rendered speechless. Before she could get a word out of her mouth, Amber snatched her by the arm and dragged her into another room.

“Close your damn mouth! You look stupid, Sherry,” Amber told her.

Sherry closed her gaping mouth and said, “What the fuck?”

Lorraine was sitting on the bed, wearing a beautiful red-satin robe. The bed looked to be the size of a double-king mattress. It was enormous.

“What can Mama do you for?” she asked as she lit a Virginia Slim cigarette and blew out the smoke in their direction. Sherry waved the smoke away.

“Well, Mom, this is my girl Sherry. Sherry, Lorraine…everybody calls her Mom.”

“Nice to meet you,” Sherry said, trying not to stare the old lady in her face. Her robe hung slightly open in front, and Sherry could see her wrinkled tits hanging out.

Mom grabbed her hand. “Where in the hell have you been? I know every pretty motherfucker around here, and I ain’t never seen you, girl.” Sherry was shocked when she heard how the old lady talked. She sounded black!
What the hell?
Lorraine asked again, “Well, what can I do for you, Amber?” Then she pulled out her bag of pills.

“No, we’re not here for pills, Mom,” Amber said. “Then again, keep those out. But we need some boy.”

The old white lady dropped the bag on the bed, stood up, and walked over to the girls. She looked Sherry up and down, then walked over to Amber and said, “Amber, all the times you been coming over my house, you ain’t never fuck with this shit here! What makes you wanna start now? Remember all those days you would come over here and tell me about your career and all that you planned on being?” She grabbed the girl by the face and spoke loudly. “Well, if you start this shit here, you will have no future!”

Amber snatched away from the lady. She could still feel the woman’s fingers digging into her cheeks as she tried to stretch her mouth. “Ouch!” she moaned.

“You see all this?” Lorraine started pointing to the girls’ nice clothes and bodies. “All this pretty shit that you two bitches have is going to disappear. Take your last look in the mirror and say good-bye to all this shit because Satan is coming, and once he gets a hold of ya, you might as well back the fuck up!” The old woman said the words with conviction.

Sherry looked at the woman and couldn’t help but snicker. While the woman was talking and gesturing, her tits were flailing all over the place. “Listen, Mom, we appreciate your concern, but we’re on a mission,” Sherry said, giggling a little. “And it appears that you’re on your own kind of mission,” she said, tilting her head toward the door.

“Oh, yes,” Mom said. She looked at Amber. “Are you sure you wanna do this, hon?”

Amber looked at her and nodded. “Mom, I’m good.” She pulled out $400.

Mom shook her head. “Baby, having a lot of money doesn’t make it all right. It makes it even worse. But who am I to turn down four hundred?” The old lady pulled out her scale, opened a plastic bag, and measured out the powder. “That’s a lot of shit. Are you girls gonna be okay?”

Once again, Amber flashed her gun. “I believe so, Ma.”

“Oy, oy, oy!” Lorraine said. “Another bad fuckin’ move, girl! I’m telling you now: If you get into any shit tonight, please don’t come back around here!”