Free Baby Brother by 50 Cent, Noire Page B

monster-sized fury that was trying to take its place.
    He got a good look at them. At all of them. But especially at the tall dude they’d called “Qui.” This young niggah had bought and paid for whatever retribution ended up coming to him. He’d earned his wrath, cash and carry. Priest dropped his Sucrets to the ground and began walking away, his eyes recording their features like a video camera. That dude Acqui was in trouble.
    Storming back down the wet streets with deliberate purpose, Priest went into criminal-minded mode as Antwan “Monster” Davis, that brutal killer he had convinced himself was dead, emerged and took over the show, bigger and badder than ever. There was work to be done. Retribution to be exacted. Bodies to be buried. By the time he burst through his front door he was fully transformed, with nothing but crushing bone and spilling blood on his mind.
    “Whattup?” Farad asked as the front door flung open, then slammed violently shut. He whirled around in his chair and was shocked by what he saw. Damn. Whattup, stranger ? It had been a long time since this cat had menaced the streets of Brooklyn. For the longest time Farad had wondered if he would ever see him again.
    “Uh-oh,” he said as the familiar stranger moved toward their mother’s kitchen table. Deadly. Brutal. Swollen with fury.
    “Monster’s back.”

CHAPTER 8
     
    F inesse burnt up the phone lines.
    “Yo, Leek. Y’all at the crib yet? Oh, y’all swung by White Castle? Well snatch Rah outta the muh-fuckin line and y’all circle back to the crib, man! Hell yeah I’m serious. Nah, I ain’t got no new info! I got something better than that, baby. Yeah, my niggah. We got us a Monster breaking shit up in this joint again, man, and he’s calling for a meeting.”
    Two minutes later he had Kadir on the line. “Check it out, bruh. You on the Pike? The Garden State? Don’t matter, son. Dip at the next exit and turn that whip around. That’s right. Head back in, baby. We got some work to put in, homes. A Monster busted up in the crib tonight, man, and he’s hungry as hell.”
    An hour later they sat around their mother’s dining room table holding court. The Monster was wearing a red and white Phat Farm shirt and a pair of jeans.
    “Farad was right. It was Borne and his niggahs,” he told them quietly. His voice was calm, but each of his brothers could see the fury bubbling just under the surface of his skin. It ran up and down the side of his face, his veins throbbing. It was squeezed in his clenched fists and lurked madly just behind his eyes.
    “He had his boys out there playing them initiation games. His kid blasted Sari, then let Baby Brother take the fall.”
    The Monster looked around the table and saw identical rage in five pairs of eyes.
    “But Borne’s hand is on this shit even deeper than that. Those was his goonies on Rikers too. He cosigned that shit.” He glanced at Raheem, who sat there tense and pantherlike. “They back out on the streets now, but they killed Baby Brother for some get-back. I heard ’em say something about crawling on the floor and drinking out of a dog bowl.”
    Farad was on his feet. He looked at his twin and cursed. “I knew I shoulda popped that bitch niggah when I had him in my crosshairs! That fool don’t know fuckin’ get-back! I’ma kill him, man!” Tears of frustration were in his eyes as he battled his guilt. Baby Brother had had his throat cut by some come-up niggah. A coward who couldn’t even handle his on the street. “I swear, I’ma kill him!”
    The brothers stayed in a huddle for most of the night. They came up with a master plan, scratched it, argued, got mad, came up with something better, refined it, killed certain aspects and agreed on certain others. In the end, their shit was tight and they deferred final judgment to the biggest and the baddest amongst them.
    “Good,” the Monster growled. “Everybody on point?”
    All heads nodded.
    Then Farad spoke what