Nanowrimo - Part 4

"I've made choices and sacrifices that have dug trenches in my soul. And that was my choice." She downed he last of her tea without even blowing on it; it had lost so much of its heat by now. "My choice. But just like these men you run around with, these men you do work for ..." Mike shifted in his chair and opened his mouth to speak, but his grandmother just looked to the side and waved her hand in his direction. "Just like these men, I expect full value for my investment. I want what's coming to me. And I figure that my investment earns me the rights to your soul. I own it. And I'm going to see it saved even if it kills me."

Mike looked up at her face and started to say something, but then saw that she wasn't looking at him, at least, not at his face. She was staring at his arm. When he looked down at it, he could see what she was interested in - a short, oval line of blood shaped like the center of a cat's eye, seeping through the sleeve of his hoodie, darkening and glistening in the low lamp light that washed over him. He stared at it too, and for a moment he saw it the way she must have been seeing it, an ugly thing that was growing uglier moment by moment.

Without saying another word, she got up, took her mug from the table, and walked away from Mike into the kitchen. Mike heard her footsteps, heard the water running as she rinsed the mug, and heard her walk behind him down the hall towards her bedroom, but he didn't dare look up. He had been stabbed once with a short kitchen knife, by a woman he had betrayed. The look in her eyes when she stabbed him had been pure hate and rage. Once, when he was out on the street with one of Corleone's sons, Benzo, supposedly learning the art of the drop, he had seen the young man, himself just eighteen, a year older than Mike, put two bullets in another man's chest for skimming money and then turn the gun on Mike and warn him of the consequences of deceit. He had even spent two whole nights in county jail with a couple of thugs who had used every moment that the guards weren't looking to pound on him, ultimately breaking two ribs and fracturing a plate in his face before he was moved to a different cell. Still, there was no one, man or woman, that Mike Barnes feared more than his grandmother, because only he had seen first hand what happened when she decided to become the agent of justice.

After he was sure, she had closed the door other room, Mike crept into his own. He shut the door and immediately took off the hoodie, peeling the wet sleeve away from his bleeding arm. He kept a first aid kit under his bed for situations like this, and now he took it our and went to work. The would didn't seem to need stitches, despite how it looked, so he knew he didn't need a doctor. Instead, he cleaned it well with alcohol, rubbed some antibacterial cream into it, and bound it tightly with gauze and an Ace bandage. In the morning, he could always check it again and see if he needed to get it looked at, but for now, he just put the money under his bed, lay back in it, and closed his eyes, the dull throbbing of his arm putting him to sleep.

********************************

The next morning Mike woke up late, ducked his grandmother, and escaped the apartment without a lecture or even a look, as far as he could tell. He took the first aid kit with him and changed his dressing in the car. So far, the arm looked fine. It felt like it had been in a vice from the tightness of the bandages, and ached and itched as well, but it had stopped bleeding, looked clean, and was getting some color back into the surrounding area. He redressed it, a little looser this time, and then put the kit in the back seat. After one more inspection of his work, Mike wondered to himself if he could have done this for a living, if he hadn't quit school. He didn't think being a doctor was in the range of possibilities, but maybe a nurse. Other people from the neighborhood had gone that route, and eventually moved away. But then the idea of being a nurse made him chuckle a little to himself. It wasn't that he thought it was too feminine, even though he did, but rather that he though about what kind of money nurses make and laughed to himself about trying to get the things that he wanted on that kind of bank. How long would it take to get the BMW he wanted, or the house in a neighborhood nicer than Corleone's. Too, long, he thought, smiled once more, and then put the car in drive and pulled out onto the street, headed in Corleone's direction.

Corleone's house was a huge six-bedroom house in Opa Locka, the biggest on its block. He had bought two houses on the corner or the block, torn them both down, and built one big one on the two plots. The rumor was that at first the city had tried to stop him, because of he zoning or the property lines or whatever, but that after a couple of his boys made the trip to city hall, all of those petty nuisances went away, and Corleone did what he wanted, like he always did. Mike never was sure whether the motivation for the change was the carrot or the stick, the bag of cash or the bullet, but he was around when the house was being built, and he knew that the foundation was already being laid while the city people were coming out to stop it. Mike pulled up in front of the two story house, the only one that tall in the neighborhood, let alone the block, and waited for one of the boys to come out and walk him inside.

The boss was busy, fortunately. While he was happy to see all of his money accounted for, he wasn't interested in the details of the drop, and since Mike didn't plan on doing any more of them, he didn't bother to mention them. Mainly, he was glad to get out of there with the five thousand dollars in his pocket in a big round roll, and no mention of what his next assignment might be. Give him some time to think about where he was headed.

When he was done with business, he decided to head over to the mall to spend some of the money. Nothing much, and nothing flashy, just maybe a new pair of sneakers, no more than a couple of hundred dollars. Mike generally saved as much money as he could, and made a point of keeping his life simple when it came to possessions. Besides trying to keep his grandmother at peace, he had a couple of other reasons. First, he had seen too many guys get caught be doing what he called "advertising the hustle." He despised the guys who drove sixty thousand dollar cars and wore at least three thousand dollars worth of jewelry at all times, and with no verifiable source of income. As far as Mike was concerned, they made themselves targets for the cops. But second, he liked having the money far more than he liked having the things. He like knowing that it was in the house nearby, being able to get at it when he wanted to. He liked keeping track of it, even had a ledger notebook that he got from Office Depot that he used to document how much he had. There were some things that he wanted to buy, but every time he did, he always found it had to part with the money, even if he really wanted the prize.

The mall was one of those places that had gone through a lot of changes since Mike had been going there. Like a lot of places it had lost whatever had made it safe and special, and had become just another part of the decay. According to his grandmother, the mall on 163rd Street used to be the one everyone went to, not just the regular shoppers, but the rich folks, and the tourists who came to Miami just for the shopping. First it was just a really nice plaza, with a central hall down the middle of two long rows of stores and restaurants. Just before Mike was born, his grandmother had told him, the owners had covered the central walkway with a beautiful domed roof that still let the sunlight filter through in the daytime, and how everybody came out to see it when it reopened. In fact, it was so classy that it attracted anchor stores like Burdines and Macy's, as well as a number of important chains and specialty boutiques and the best movie theater around at he time. But since Mike was born, the crime rate had gone up and up, and the more lucrative business owners had pulled out. The tourists didn't dare go there any more, choosing instead to shop at the newer mall in what was now the richer, and therefore better, neighborhood. Now it was little more than a flea market with a food court, and a moat of trouble surrounding it.
When Mike parked the car and approached the mall entrance, there were five teenaged boys standing around outside and listening to music through an iPad attached to some portable speakers. Most of them were just knuckleheads skipping school, just like Mike would have been about five years ago, but two of them were guys Mike recognized, ones that he knew Corleone had noticed and was getting ready to groom for the business. As he got nearer, he could hear a couple of them rapping over the instrumental coming out of the speakers, obviously battling, by the tone of their lyrics.

Often Mike had thought about rap as a way of making money. Guys like Jay Z and Diddy had it all, the money, the power, major corporations that got them whatever they wanted, and hey didn't have to get shot at to get it. He considered himself a good rapper; after all it didn't really take much, it seemed to him. When he was in school, he and a couple of friends, back when he had friends, had played around with the idea of a group, even giving themselves names and recording some stuff on a computer. But it never went anywhere, not because it wasn't good, Mike had always told himself, but because he had started making money working for Corleone, and the rap thing seemed so irrelevant. Now, however, seeing those young guys doing it, he had an urge to show them up, to see if he still had some of it left in him.

He walked up to one of the ones he had met before, a seventeen-year-old kid from North Miami Beach named Antwan. He was one of the ones that Corleone was looking at for working inside the school. He had always seemed down enough, and didn't stand out much. He was only about average height, lighter skin, and blended in well, but still seemed smart enough to handle numbers and wise enough to stay on the right side of things. Mike nodded to him and gave him and the other boy from his same school that had showed some promise, Kevin, a pound, but didn't say anything more, so he could listen to the tail end of the verse one of the other guys was just finishing up. Not bad, but not great, certainly not as good as some of the stuff Mike and his boys used to write.