Array 50 Cent - Baby Brother

That was all Raheem needed to hear. He drove with extreme purpose, going over his plan in his head. He arrived on The Rock and reported for his shift as usual. A couple of his fellow officers had heard about Baby Brother, and they gave their condolences and promised to keep their ears open and let him know what they heard. All inmate deaths were thoroughly investigated, and one of Raheem’s boys who worked prison investigations was also down on his team.

“Rah. Don’t worry ’bout it, baby. We gonna find out who did that shit. Two inmates got bodied on our watch that day, and we know for a fact there were at least ten inmates in the kitchen who knew what was going down. All them niggahs either went blind or got amnesia, and they swearing to God they don’t remember seeing a goddamn thing. But trust. We gonna work it out of ’em.”

Raheem had dapped his boy hard and all, but he had no intentions of waiting around for some internal correctional system to exact justice for his brother’s life. He was out to get street justice for his. That was truth.

Two hours later Raheem and Joplin were in position and ready to orchestrate their plan. Inmates were constantly being called down to the medical screening room. Sometimes blood tests needed to be run, other times they were asked to update their medical histories. Jop was banging one of the reception center nurses and knew she made a daily run to the other side of the complex for a meeting each Thursday.

He used her computer to send up a request for the two prisoners to report to the nurse’s office, then waved Raheem inside and left, closing the door behind him as he walked off whistling down the hall.

Fifteen minutes passed before Raheem heard a knock. He stood behind it with every muscle in his body tensed and ready to spring. It didn’t matter who was on the other side of that door, he thought. Whichever one of them niggahs got here first, he was gonna die.

Instead of calling out an answer, he twisted the knob and opened the door, careful to stay hidden behind it. A leg swung forward as the man entered the office, and the moment Raheem saw the fresh sneaker and the telltale prison pants, he swung his right arm in a low roundhouse, catching the inmate by surprise as his prison-made shank sank deeply into the man’s belly. His hand moved in a flurry. Once, twice, three times.

“Umph!” was all the niggah said as he clutched his stomach in surprise. Raheem moved swiftly. He grabbed the cat’s neck with his left hand and kicked the door shut at the same time. Swinging him around in a yoke, Raheem crushed the inmate’s windpipe with his forearm, bending him backward and lifting him off his feet.

“Bitch.” He breathed his menace into the struggling man’s ear. “That niggah y’all hit in the freezer?” He tightened his grip as the inmate clawed at his arm with one hand and clutched his gutted stomach with the other. “That was a Davis boy, mothafuckah. That was my baby brother.”

Raheem pressed the shank into the inmate’s temple and pushed hard. The guy would have screamed if he could, but instead his body shuddered for several long moments, and then went still. Raheem’s arm trembled as he continued to squeeze the inmate’s neck until he was sure there was no life left in him.

A minute later he slung the bloody body to the floor and tossed the shank down beside it. He stood above it looking down in disgust.

One to go.

By the time he heard the next knock at the door he was back in position.

Raheem pulled the door open once again, but this time when the inmate walked in he chilled until the cat was fully in the room. Kicking the door closed, Raheem grabbed the kid from behind. He spun him right, flung him down on top of his dead partner, then landed heavily on top of them both, knocking the air outta the inmate’s lungs.

“Yo!” The dude gave a short yell, but Raheem was all over him. He grabbed the inmate’s hand and closed it over the shank, crushing his fingers in a vise grip until they closed around the handle. The inmate screamed, both from the pain running up his arm and exploding in his shoulder, and from the sight of his man, dead beneath him on the floor.

Sandwiched between a corpse and a killer, he squirmed and fought, pushing against the warm bloody body as he tried to free his hand from Raheem’s deadly grasp.

Raheem grabbed the back of the man’s head and smashed his face into the floor, trying to shatter it like an egg. The inmate slumped on top of his friend, down but not out.

“What the fuck are you doing, man?” he whimpered, stretched out helplessly between a rock and a dead man.

“Killing you,” Raheem whispered.

Seconds later the door opened and Joppy rushed in.

“Officer down!” he screamed into his walkie-talkie, then jumped on top of the heap as the inmate wiggled weakly beneath them both. “Easy,” Joppy cautioned his friend. “Don’t go too far, now. We need this motherfucker alive, man. Ease up now, bruh.”

The first three officers responding to the call saw exactly what they were supposed to see: a dangerous, bloody scene. A shanked inmate. And two of their most trusted fellow officers on the ground struggling to restrain an armed killer.

“We got him, fellas.” A veteran white officer got on his knees to help. Raheem continued to squeeze the inmate’s fist inside his own.

“No! No! No! NO!” the inmate whispered, unable to even move his fingers, let alone escape Raheem’s killer clutch.

“Watch the shank!” Raheem shouted. He flailed their arms up and down, back and forth in a mock struggle. “He’s still got a shank!”

Minutes later the inmate was restrained and led away and the three officers were standing on their feet, breathing hard and covered in blood.

“We got him,” Joplin sighed, clapping Raheem on the back as they waited for the prison investigators to report to the scene. “He won’t be hurting nobody no more.”

The older white officer wiped his bloody hands on his pants legs and agreed.

“He sure won’t. That guy’s been through here a few times. He’s a three-time felon, you know. That’s automatic life.”

New York City’s drug problem had long been out of hand. Most of the cops who worked narcotics were on the streets undercover, blending into the fabric of the community. Their mission was to infiltrate the various cells that claimed territorial rights all over Brooklyn, and since turnover and burnout were high, much of their success could be attributed to anonymous tips and street informants.

Malik was a down cat on the job. A true brother in blue. A cop’s cop. But he also had twin brothers who were deep in the drug game, and he’d come up on the streets with that kind of criminal element.

So when he approached his man Taylor, a brand-new narcotics officer who was bucking hard for a promotion, he knew he’d have very little trouble being persuasive.

“’Sup, Taylor,” Malik said, offering the cat some dap. Taylor looked like a damn kid, Malik noticed. He knew Taylor came from one of those rich-niggah families from upstate New York, but the cat had mad street credibility and his swagger and shine came off as truly official.

“Is your boss in, man?” Malik asked the question but he already knew the answer. The head man was at a training conference and wouldn’t be back for three days.

Taylor shook his head. “Nah, son. He’s outta the office. You can catch him in a couple of days, though.”

Malik dapped him like he was ready to walk out, but then shook his head. “That’s all right. Shit’ll be done jumped off and over with by then, man.”

That got him. Taylor was the opportunistic type. Always looking for a leg up the blue ladder. “What’s cookin’, baby?” he asked, his interest piqued.