Hair of the Dog by Gordon Carroll (reading strategies book TXT) 📗

Hair of the Dog

Gordon Carroll

Copyright © 2019 by Gordon Carroll

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

For the three waiting for me in the arms of the Three…

Chimmey

Gabriel

Noah

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

1

June, two years ago.

Jerome’s ears blanked to a high pitched whine that hurt, and his head swam woozy from the smell of cordite and Sulphur. But at nineteen he was already an OG (Original Gangsta) at gunplay. Neither he, nor the two hitters with him, had expected the man to be there at all. Let alone for him to be armed and ready to come out shooting. But he was and he was and they might all have been gunned down except for Jerome’s quick reflexes and natural ability to point and click without missing. The forty-five semi-automatic looked childish in Jerome’s giant hand, but the sound of its big heavy grain bullets exploding from the barrel were anything but. The brother took the first round in the throat as he came off the bed, naked and scared and in a rage, his own gun pointed at Lil’ Grill, his finger jerking back on the trigger as Jerome’s chunk of lead threw off his balance causing him to miss his mark and saving Lil’ Grill from an eternal headache. Blood sprayed in a tight arc, splashing the walls and ceiling in what the CSI techs would later term high velocity spatter, as Jerome’s second and third shots ripped into the john’s right side, bi-laterally transecting his lungs and heart and dropping him instantly.

The woman, also naked, with the sheets pulled almost comically up to her nose and staring over them with wide terrified eyes, started a scream that never made it past her lips. Jerome shot her in the forehead… once… and that was that. The job was done.

Lil’ Grill and Bad Man were still trying to jerk their guns out of their pants while practically peeing on themselves.

Bad Man gaped at Jerome and slapped Lil’ Grill on the shoulder. “See man, didn’t I tell you Jerome was all that? Ain’t you glad I signed him up on this gig now? Ain’t you?”

Lil’ Grill was all grins and he nodded vigorously. “Yeah, yeah,” he stammered, his pot soaked brain still calibrating the fact that he had come a hair’s width from greeting God Himself. “Sorry I spoke against you, Jerome.” His gold-plated teeth sparked in the pale room’s light

Jerome just looked down at the two of them, his expression the same as always, calm, serene. Some people, upon first meeting him, thought him dumb, but he wasn’t, not exactly, just… slow.

Jerome’s mother, long since dead from an overdose, stayed high through most of her pregnancy with him. He came into the world addicted to heroin, his thick baby fingers clenched into convulsing fists, his feet and toes curled. He survived and grew up on the mean streets of Chicago. School didn’t work for him. He was bigger and stronger than kids twice his age, but numbers and letters made no sense to him. He’d miss an equation or stumble over a word and someone would laugh and Jerome would silently walk up and smash them in the face, and so by age eleven, the same year one of his mother’s ‘clients’ murdered his five year-old sister, Clair, his mother and him parted ways and neither tried very hard to reunite.

Baby Clair had been the best thing in Jerome’s life and he loved her more than the puppy he had for a while when he was six. He’d been breaking into an auto parts store with two teenagers when the man killed her. He’d finished with the mother, done another hit of crack and decided five-year-old Clair would do for seconds. Clair tried to run and he crushed her skull with a full beer bottle, leaving her lifeless body crumpled on the floor next to her passed out mother for Jerome to find when he came home with the stolen goods.

The police never found out who did it, his mother certainly didn’t know the man’s name. And what was one more dead little black girl killed by a black man in the most ghetto of ghettos? No, the police never found him, but Jerome did. And it only took him three days. Jerome was slow, but in some ways…in street ways…he was fast.

They were about the same height, but eleven-year-old Jerome was already stronger and faster and Jerome never touched a drug his entire life outside his mother’s womb. The man, Tyree Jefferson, felt the shakes from coming off his high as Jerome walked up to him outside the crack house he planned on scoring. Two in the morning and all the roaches were swarming the streets pimping, drinking, smoking, whoring. People were everywhere.

Jerome walked up to him and said, “You killed my Clair.”

Tyree, cranky from the loss of his high, slipped out a butterfly knife and tried to drive its tip into the eleven-year-old’s belly, but his wrist was caught in some kind of clamp and he felt the bones snap. Before he could yell, Jerome punched him in the jaw and he went to sleep.

A few onlookers oohed and aahed, but no one did a thing as the boy hoisted the fully grown man over his shoulder and tossed him in the trunk of a stolen car he’d obtained a few hours earlier.

Jerome took his time with Tyree Jefferson, not because the man’s suffering brought