Array 50 Cent - Baby Brother

“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.”

Finesse 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 was on all their minds. “Yo, I’m down with all this shit we talking about Borne and his crew. I’m on it, sons. But I’ma tell y’all this right now. One of us need to slump that niggah Acqui too. That bitch gotta get smoked.”

The twins were ready to get shit started. The first thing they did the next morning was roll down Linden Boulevard to sit down with Tony Santos.

“We takin’ a bitch?” Farad asked his brother.

Finesse shook his head. “Nah. No burners. No backup neither. Just me and you.”

Which could have been a big mistake.

“You steppin up in my crib to confess for your brother or to drop a dime?” Tony sneered. Sari’s death was eating at his bones and he’d sworn the worst kind of vengeance on her killer. He snorted in disgust at the sight of the two tall black men standing before him. Farad and Finesse were fools to roll up in East New York naked. His men were lined up and ready to blast these two niggahs all the way back to Africa. All they needed was the word.

“My brother was innocent,” Finesse told him. “And you know that shit. But this ain’t no muh’fuckin’ dry snitch. This a wet one, homey. Borne Reynolds had ya baby sis popped. He sent his sons out there with orders to take down some Puerto Ricans,” he said.

Tony played with his knife. His jaw twitched as his ire churned furiously. As much as he had fucked with Zabu, Tony knew the kid had really dug his sister. Besides, Borne had been encroaching on him in minor ways for a minute now, trying him on the low, annoying him like a gnat. The twins were speaking the truth and Tony knew it. “That fool will never learn,” he said finally. “The last time he tried to fuck with me I rearranged his bitch’s face. For that he comes after my sister?” He laughed bitterly. “I coulda crumbled his whole house…just like that. But I didn’t.”

“Them the same cats who been breaking into them houses over on Berriman Street too. That old Puerto Rican lady they found strangled a few months back? The one who’d lived in the hood feeding kids for sixty years?” Farad shook his head in disgust. “Who you think raped that old woman? Who choked her? That’s one of Borne’s too, man! He didn’t send nobody out on that shit, though. That’s one murder he committed himself.”

By the time the twins left East New York, Tony Santos and his Barrio crew had declared war on Borne and his click.

“We got ya back,” Finesse had told him as they walked out the door. “Matter fact, gimme twenty-four hours. We got some firepower for you too.”

Right about this time Kadir was standing in a warehouse watching two white boys pull an assortment of heat out of a stolen Mafia shipment. There were two crates filled with gats. Some were .45’s, some were Sigs, a few Glocks, and even a couple of 9mms.

“All of this fall off a damn truck?”

“Nah,” the short cat answered. “One was donated by a friend of mine named Seven. I did a favor for his Get-Money Crew down in Virginia a while back, and he tore me off a few pieces from his stash.”

“So are we cool?” the taller of the two asked. The last time Kadir had seen him he was red-faced and scared as fuck, pissing down his own leg.

“Yeah,” he told them, eyeing his new arsenal of firepower. “Almost. Y’all mothafuckas wasn’t on time tonight. Two minutes could make the difference between your life or your death. My little package needs a ride, son. A ride to Brooklyn. Handle that shit for me and we’ll be straight.”

Raheem drove into Queens and crossed the bridge to Rikers Island. His mood was pensive, and a hard Reem Raw cut with a gully beat blared from his speakers. Earlier in the day he’d gotten a heads-up from his boy Joppy that he was down on his team. He’d squeezed Dirtbag and found out which other cats had participated in Baby Brother’s murder, and he was ready to help however he could.

They’d met outside Jop’s moms’ crib, and drank a beer while they tossed info around.

“It was that red niggah Borne,” Joplin said, confirming what Raheem and his brothers already knew. “That fool lost control of his sons. He didn’t pull no triggers or swing no blades, but them cats belonged to him, so he’s responsible.”

Raheem nodded, his eyes cold. “What else, Jop? I know you got sumpthin’ else for me, man.”

“Yeah. I do.” He took a long pull from his cigarette and then flicked it into the bushes. “The cat who did Zabu? Him and his man already walked. Zab killed one, but I found out the names of the other two who are still on The Rock. Them fools riding it all the way, though. Dummied up. Don’t know shit. But we can get ’em.”