Array 50 Cent - Baby Brother

But by the time he ejected Lissa’s stank ass out on the curb near her apartment and skipped over to Queens to cross the bridge to Rikers Island, there was no fighting the dread he was feeling. He’d replayed Farad’s words in his mind over and over, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. Farad was right. They had to find Sari’s killer or shit was gonna spark off in a major way. Them Puerto Ricans loved their blood just like the Davis crew loved theirs. Tony Santos was gonna bring war down and send blood running in the gutters, and somebody was gonna get fuckin’ hurt.

Raheem gripped the steering wheel and stood up on the gas pedal. It wasn’t even a fuckin’ possibility that Baby Brother had killed nobody. Especially his girl, Sari. His brother was a hard-body mothafuckah. A solid little niggah. He could handle any niggah on the streets and even them slime-buckets on the tier if he had to. But he wasn’t a killer. Every ounce of the Davis hope was riding on Baby Brother’s shoulders. They were depending on him to create the kind of life for himself that the rest of them hadn’t been able to manage.

Raheem parked in the employee lot and ran toward the entrance. He nodded at a few C.O.s who were standing around talking, and headed over to the reception center. No matter how much he tried to fight off that rising feeling that signaled impending dread and doom, he just couldn’t shake it.

“Chill the fuck out, niggah,” he scolded himself. “B-Brother is tight. That niggah prolly chillin’ and maintaining his space right now.”

But Raheem was wrong.

Because as it turned out, it didn’t matter how much rubber he burned on the road, or how much he tried to fill his own head with positive hype. Yeah, Baby Brother was fearless, just like his brothers. He was a fighter who had come up in the streets and knew how to annihilate a mothafuckah with his bare hands. But none of that shit meant a damn thing by the time Raheem ran across the grounds and pushed through the door of the Otis Bantam Center. Because time hadn’t stood still waiting for him to come down from the Poconos. The clock had kept right on ticking while Raheem was out there chasing him a dick-licking, and by the time he found somebody to tell him where his baby brother was, it was already too late.

Life was moving fast for Baby Brother in the joint. Strip naked, bend over, spread your cheeks. He did all that and more. He went through the motions like a man made of stone. Not a hint of emotion flickered on his face. He was attuned to his surroundings, but cold and unfeeling inside.

He refused to think about Sari. He pushed the image of her bloody body deep into the recesses of his mind where it couldn’t hurt him. He wouldn’t let it weaken him neither. He’d come of age in an area of Brooklyn where the criminals crawled real low in the gutta. A project-trained niggah like him knew survival in the joint was a day-by-day thing. He’d seen what prison had done to Antwan. How his brother had been churned and burned by the acidic shit floating around in the belly of this same beast. Rikers might not have been as high-post as Comsackie or Greenhaven, but this is where them upstate niggahs got their start. Some of the most ruthless and despicable criminals in the city were behind these walls. Baby Brother put himself into a state of mind that was similar to a boxer’s zone. He was like a coiled snake. On guard and ready to strike.

Malik had shown up while he was still locked down in a bull pen at Central Booking. The judge had just denied Malik’s request to release him into his care. It had fucked Baby Brother up to hear Malik begging that white mothafuckah like that. Malik had poured out everything in his heart as he made his impassioned plea on Baby Brother’s behalf, telling the court all about Stanford and the prestigious full scholarship that Baby Brother had earned.

“Your Honor,” Malik had said. “My fellow officers have arrested the wrong man. My little brother is innocent. He’s going to college. To Stanford University in California!” He’d turned and looked into Baby Brother’s eyes. “He’s gonna be a surgeon. A baby surgeon. Everything he’s ever done in life was to help other people, and to make our dead mother proud.”

But the judge had given less than a fuck about Baby Brother’s accomplishments. That shriveled up mothafuckah had actually yawned while Malik damn near sank to his knees pleading for his understanding and mercy.

Baby Brother had gone even colder inside. He’d tried his best to make good decisions and do the right thing his whole life. Most of the shit other young heads in the hood indulged in, he had sworn he would avoid. There had been no rock-slanging, no wild fucking, no all-night drinking. Baby Brother had never jacked nobody for their car or knocked a bird on her ass. For the first time in his life he was on the opposite end of a good thing, and seeing Malik have to beg a motherfuckah like that infuriated him.

“Raise up…” Baby Brother had muttered under his breath from the bench he was chained to. Malik was bent with pain. “Don’t you beg that mothafuckah for me….”

After the hearing when Malik came back to the bull pen, they’d given up the dap, then his brother had pulled him close and held him briefly. Baby Brother picked up the scent of fear on his brother and he knew why. A cop’s brother was a target in the joint. Malik mighta been Mr. Personable, but he was still the po-po, and as such he still had enemies.

“Stay strong, Baby Brother. We’ll figure something out, yo. All of us are working on this, night and day.”

Baby Brother had nodded and backed away from his brother. He was the youngest of the crew, yeah. But he was just as hard as the rest of his brothers. He’d hang until they got him out. He’d fend, he’d fight, he’d do whatever the fuck he had to do. He’d survive.

But it wasn’t any of Malik’s enemies that shoulda concerned Baby Brother. The correctional facilities at Rikers were supposed to be less intense than the stonewalled prisons in upstate New York, but you couldn’t tell it by the grimy shit that went down on The Rock. Every new inmate in the place wanted to take a hard rep with them when they got transferred up north. If they were vicious enough on Rikers Island, then their name would precede them and their problems would be fewer when they got up there to the real doghouse.

As Baby Brother was led down the hall he passed between a row of cells where inmates grasped the bars and checked out the new meat. He walked like the niggah he was. Upright. Confident. He didn’t grill nobody, but he didn’t avoid nobody neither. Shit was talked on either side of him, but that was to be expected. He didn’t take it personally because these niggahs didn’t know him.

At least he didn’t think they did.

“Yo, Acqui!” a short, powerfully built dude named Rayz called out to his man on the other side. They were both down with the Brooklyn Borne click and had gotten knocked a couple of weeks earlier for kicking down the door of a state witness’s house and tying up the man and his whole family before pouring lighter fluid on them and setting the house on fire.

“I know that cat, son. He looks real familiar…. Look at them eyes. That’s that niggah Farad’s brother, yo! One of them Davis dudes.” His hand went to the spot where his right ear had once been. “Yo…what the fuck that niggah doing up in here?”

Across the way, Acqui frowned. The degradation Farad and Finesse had put him and his boy through had been so severe and humiliating it was like a living thing, never far from his mind. “Oh, he up in here about to get served, that’s what the fuck he doin’,” he said.