Array 50 Cent - Baby Brother

“Z! What the hell you doing?” She jumped up, her eyes flashing with alarm. He liked it when she got all hyped. Her nature was a perfect indicator of her ethnic mix. Black and Hispanic. She was a down chick and had a temper on her too. “Don’t open that damn door! You gotta go out the window!” She snatched the sheet off the bed and tried to wrap it around her nakedness. “Man, Tony’s home! You can’t let him see you leaving outta my room!”

Baby Brother grinned and walked out, closing the door on her high-pitched protests. Fuck all that window action. He was leaving out the door today.

His light brown eyes danced and his skin looked chocolaty smooth against the red-and-white Rocawear shirt he wore. He hiked up his jeans until they settled over his Air Force Ones just the right way, then headed down the short hall toward the front door.

Passing the kitchen, he stuck his head inside then slammed his hand against the side of the refrigerator as hard as he could. A cracking sound exploded in the air, startling the handsome Puerto Rican killer sitting at the table. Out of nowhere, a small silver gat appeared in the man’s hand.

“Damn, Tony! What? You gone shoot me or something?”

Tony stared at him with a snarl and set the gun down on the chair between his thighs. Even in the heat his voice came out feeling like ice.

“Yo, muthafucka. What the fuck is you doin’ in my crib?”

Baby Brother checked out Sari’s half brother. Her father had been black, and while she was brown and curly-haired, Tony was a pale Hispanic with dark, piercing eyes. He’d been sitting alone in the kitchen smoking a dutchey and counting a large stack of chips. His jet-black hair was shower-wet, his bare chest stained with tattoos and bulging with jailhouse muscle. A large bag half-filled with white powder sat on the table in front of him, and another much smaller bag rested on a triple-beam scale.

“Damn. Whatever happened to ‘good morning,’ son?”

Tony pushed the stack of money aside and reached into his back pocket. The glint of his knife caught Baby Brother’s eye.

“Yo. You been up in my joint all night?” His voice was deadly. “Back there witcha dick up in my little sister?” He twirled his knife. The tip of his blunt glared red, and his cold eyes never left Baby Brother’s face. “You must be a bad motherfucker then, huh?”

Baby Brother laughed and held up his hands. “Chill, amigo. I ain’t the enemy, son. Shit, after three years I’m just about family. Plus, I’m about to be outtie in a minute. No disrespect to your crib or nothing. I just wanted to spend some time with Sari. You know, treat her right before I leave, man.”

Tony stopped twirling the knife. Baby Brother knew how sharp that blade was. Tony was almost as legendary as the Monster had been on the knife tip. Both of them had plenty of carved-up victims walking the streets of Brooklyn.

“That’s right, I forgot. You graduated. Now you runnin’ off to college to be some kinda fuckin’ professor or something.” He laughed coldly. “That’s real stupid, yo. You need to claim you some territory and be a real man now, homey. You can fuck my little sister in my crib, then come stand in my kitchen where I can smell your nuts? Yeah, you a fuckin’ man. But real men pay dues, amigo! Leave that college business for the herbs out in Canarsie and get yourself a grind. Business is good on this side of the bridge. Tell ya pretty-ass brothers you coming to work for me now.”

“Fool, what I look like? You can kill all that shit. I got plans. I ain’t slinging rock for nobody. Not for you, not for that stupid niggah Borne, and not for my brothers neither.”

Tony laughed. “Okay, okay, I tell you what! I’m a nice mothafucker. Those fuckin’ twins can come work for me too, cool? You can be my runner and your brothers can be my capos. You can hold my balls, while they take turns suckin’ my dick!” He laughed louder this time, sweeping half the bills off the table and to the floor as he gripped his knife in his fist and glared.

Baby Brother watched him for a moment, then walked toward the door shaking his head. Tony had been tryna get at him for years, but it was cool. He was the oldest boy in the Santos’s family, and Sari was the youngest and only girl. It was only right that he would look out for his little sister the same way the six older Davis brothers came to the table for him.

Baby Brother and Sari had been rolling together since he was in the tenth grade and she was in the ninth. They were on opposite sides of a family rivalry. The Davis twins, Farad and Finesse, controlled the rock and the powder flowing in and out of Brownsville and were well-known for their savage brutality. The Santos clan ran the streets of East New York, with Tony at the helm. He was ruthless and crazy. A cutter. Like the Monster. A loose missile just itching to launch. There was no love lost between the two families, but they tolerated each other. Mainly on account of business, and partly because of Baby Brother and Sari.

Baby Brother walked down the hall and went through the stairwell door. The hot smell of stale urine and beer rushed out at him. He maneuvered around a couple of winos and crackheads who were sitting on the stairs trying to come down off their all-night highs.

“Whassup, Felix. Big Porter. How you doin’ this morning, Mrs. Woodson?”

The woman he addressed beamed at him. She was Jelly’s moms, a dude he knew from way back in the day. They’d boxed together at the BBC gym, but Jelly had gone into the Marine Corps two years ago, and it wasn’t long after that that the streets had claimed his mother.

“Baby Brother!” the woman exclaimed. She pulled her bra strap up on her shoulder and tried to smooth her hair. “You almost ready to leave us, huh?” She nudged the crackhead sitting next to her. “This boy right here is something else. He used to be Jelly’s best friend, you know. He was the only kid who ever whupped my Jelly in the ring too. Now he’s going off to college to learn how to be an astronaut! Ain’t that right, Baby Brother?”

He smiled down at her. Her hair was raggedy and her teeth looked like rotten little worms, but Baby Brother showed her much respect.

“Nah, Mrs. Woodson. I’m gonna be a surgeon. I’m majoring in premed.” The odors assaulting him were excruciatingly foul, but he withstood them. He stood there and carried on a conversation with Mrs. Woodson the same way he used to when his boy Jelly had still been around. He talked to her the way he used to talk to her back when she was still a loudmouthed, heavyset, dark-skinned woman holding her family down in a cool apartment off of New Lots Avenue and pushing a decent whip. As cracked-out as Mrs. Woodson was now, and as dreadful as she smelled, Baby Brother treated her the same way he would’ve wanted somebody to treat his own mother if he’d had one.

“Boy, you got a future ahead of you,” Jelly’s moms told him. “A real future. Wherever you goin’ to school, hurr’up and get there. This place ain’t for boys like you. Don’t let it crush you like it done crushed me.”

Baby Brother stepped out of the building and into the hazy sunshine. He inhaled the morning air and gazed at the candy-red 2007 drop-top Mercedes parked at the curb. The whip was just like he’d left it and he wasn’t surprised. Everybody in Central Brooklyn knew Farad’s wheels when they saw them, and only a fool with a death wish would have laid a finger on the paint.

“Baby Brother!”

His name rang out from a doorway across the street.

“You tell that niggah Farad his g-ride ain’t as tight as mine!”

Baby Brother grinned and lifted his chin at the skinny brother standing on the stoop. It was Bip, one of Farad’s ex-partners. A guy who had grown up with the Davis brothers in Brownsville, but who slummed around in East New York now. Bip had been banned from Brownsville on the direct word of Farad. He’d been allowed to keep his life because they’d been dawgs damn near from the cradle. But even that wouldn’t stop Farad from having him murked if he got caught crossing over into The Ville.