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

take a battering ram to get through after running a gauntlet of bullets. The OGs were virtually untouchable, so long as they stayed inside. But the kid Jerome recognized, Baby Toker, wasn’t an OG. He was just a foot soldier and drug dealer who sometimes pimped a few girls for extra cash. The best part was that he was a mommy’s boy who lived with her and his little brother. And Jerome knew where they lived.

Twenty minutes of navigating the dark corridors of innermost Chicago landed Jerome behind a row of track apartments that made war-torn Yemen look like the Hilton.

Jerome walked up the stairs, bypassing little clots of teenage thugs smoking in the hallways. Graffiti covered literally everything. Most of the lights were broken, lending a dim, shadowy cast to the walls and ceilings and floors that stretched and receded with no consistency. The smell of stale beer and fresh urine competed for his attention. A couple of junkies pushed away from a stairwell wall when they saw him approach and started toward him until they made out his size. They passed without making eye contact and left him be. Lucky for them.

Jerome couldn’t remember the exact apartment, but he managed to narrow it down to three. He knocked on the first and was rewarded with Baby Toker’s twelve-year-old little brother, James, answering the door with a six inch butcher knife.

“Whach yo wan…”

Jerome snatched the knife away and picked him up off the floor by his face with one hand. He flipped the boy’s thin body around in his arms and hugged him tight to his chest, his giant hand covering his mouth. Jerome kicked the door closed with a foot and walked the few short steps into the main room, past the closet-sized kitchen to the right. Baby Toker sat on a ratty couch in front of a seventy-inch, high-definition, surround-sound, TV that barely fit between the walls, playing a video game and puffing on a short joint. His grandmother sat next to him smoking a filtered cigarette, two inches of ash balanced amazingly at the end.

Baby Toker squinted up at Jerome and jumped up, reaching into the front of his pants. Jerome dropped the butcher knife and slipped out the S&W revolver. He shot Baby Toker in the left knee while the banger was still trying for the gun in his pants. Jerome kept his brother in front of him as a shield just in case. Baby Toker shrieked, forgetting all about untangling his own gun from his underwear, and fell back onto the couch, rolling back and forth.

Stepping forward, Jerome stuck the barrel of the revolver against Baby Toker’s forehead.

“Stay still,” said Jerome. Baby Toker got still. Moaning quietly.

Jerome set the twelve-year-old on the floor and told him to sit, which he promptly did, pure hatred beaming from his eyes. With his free hand, he removed the gun from Baby Toker’s waistband and stood up straight. G-Ma Toker never moved. She just stared up through her thick glasses and sucked on the filtered cigarette, a cloud of blue smoke obscuring her features.

“Who you working for?” asked Jerome.

“Fool, you know who I work for. I’m Pirue through and through.”

“But who hired you to take my little girl?”

“I ain’t telling you. You gonna kill me anyway. You got to ‘cause you know what’s coming down on you once the Blood know you in town.”

“That’s true,” said Jerome. “But if you tell me, and so long as none of your folks here know who I am, I ain’t got to kill them.”

The twelve-year-old stood up from the couch. “Don’t tell him nothin’, Bobby.”

“You shut up, James. Shut up and sit back down.” He looked up at Jerome, sweat running down his face and liquid crimson pooling around his fingers clutched over the leg wound. “You give me your Blood word you won’t hurt them?” The pain was getting to him and he breathed in and out fast to try and keep it in check.

Jerome looked at the old woman, still smoking as if the events transpiring in front of her meant absolutely nothing, then back at the boy. The boy was another matter. The boy was on the verge of attacking.

“He’s gonna make a play for me,” said Jerome. “He’s gonna try and save you.”

“No he’s not,” said Baby Toker. “He won’t.” A little spit and sweat flew as he said it. He thrust his bony chin toward the boy. “You don’t do nothin’, boy. You hear me? This is grown men matters. You ain’t there yet. One day you will be, but today ain’t that day. You got me?”

The boy looked at his brother, tears welling in his eyes and spilling down his cheeks. He looked back at Jerome.

“You do it and I’ll kill you. You do it and I’ll tell them what you look like and what you said. They’ll know who you be and they’ll find you. They will.”

Jerome pointed the gun at the boy’s forehead.

“No!” screamed Baby Toker. He tried to get up off the couch, but his leg wouldn’t hold him. He fell to the floor.

Jerome looked back at him and James charged, ducking under the gun and going for the butcher knife. The kid was brave, Jerome had to give him that. He swung down with the gun and smacked it against his skull. The kid went down and out.

“Don’t, please don’t, please, man,” blubbered Baby Toker.

“Because of you, I lost my little girl. So you tell me and I’ll let them live. You don’t and I kill him now.”

“Ok, ok, ok. Don’t know the man’s name, but he was big, real big, bigger than you maybe. Bald like you, only he was dressed in a suit and tie and had one of them ear piece things like in the movies that secret agents use. I seen him talking to the OGs over on 13th street. Then a few days later, they give us the go ahead to head up to Colorado and