Maurice Broaddus - King Maker

"Say I let you in on part of my package," Dred said. "You let my people ease into some of the Breton Court territory. Off my package and with what you pull in from Li'l Nam, you'll be doubling your profits."

"What's in it for you?"

"Spread in territory. Another revenue stream from distribution through you. And peace. No business gets done if bodies keep dropping and the police come in to grind things to a halt."

"True dat."

This was a temporary measure at best. Once he got a feel for the new set-up, at his first opportunity, Night would slit his throat and leave his body for all to see as he took over the entire operation. Dred understood that. He also understood that soldiers were trained for combat. So every now and then, there had to be a war.

Fountain Square Mortuary was no stranger to burying the far-too-young. Just the other day, the old man who managed the mortuary had to watch a family grieving over an eight year-old. Those were the hardest on him. Funerals for teenagers, though often just as tragic, caused his blood pressure to rise for other reasons. Jowly with a graying mustache, his body with the contours of a cruller donut, he mopped his beaded brow with a handkerchief. Wisps of his good hair, combed over to cover his thinning pate, clung to his forehead.

The funeral of Alaina Walker was well attended with the requisite friends, family, police, media, and publicity seekers. The mayor gave a brief address decrying the rising tide of violence in what was proving to be the most bloody year in the city's history. The concerned clergy took turns denouncing gangs, hip hop, and Republicans. The newspapers ran columns on the story, but the incident would be forgotten in the next day or so once some famous-for-no-reason would-be actress did something equally vacuous in public.

Everyone would return to their steady state of benign neglect, the numbing consistency of the violence silencing them. With eyes both friendly and frightened, the old man did his best to greet each mourner neutrally, but the ways of this generation eluded him. The mourners came in, most not much older than the girl. Sagging pants. Underwear showing. Untied shoes. Basketball jerseys. Tattoos on any exposed flesh. Piercings in their ears, noses, lips, tongues, and chins (and those were the ones he could see). Gentlemen not removing their hats. Ladies revealing their bras and wearing pants with words written across their bottoms. The art of decorum lost on the lot of them.

Towards the rear, studying each face, the police weren't too hard to spot. The girl must've been caught up in something fierce, though no one could tell from today. Dressed in her Sunday best, she was the spitting image of a lady of occasion. The woman she could have been juxtaposed against the trappings of the woman she was, judging from the flower arrangements made into gang symbols and guns.

King arrived at the funeral escorting Lady G, not that he felt obligated or anything. She wished to attend the funeral and he thought it prudent to accompany her. He recognized few of the people, but all of the faces — set hard with no tears, impassive and inscrutable — were masks of barely checked rage. He stepped closer and put his arm around her. Lady G didn't object to his proximity. It was a non-threatening intimacy.

Regret was a powerful emotion. It gave weight, if not words, to ideas and feelings unable to be expressed in life. Things like mourning the waste of her life. The futility of their constant fighting. The lost opportunity to have been friends. No, these things were sealed behind another layer of armor as she stared, hard-faced. She knew her presence might upset a few folks, but Alaina was… she didn't know what Alaina was, only that they had been connected somehow. She knew that she owed Alaina some measure of respect in death that she never had the chance to give in life.

The graveside service was at Bethel Cemetery. The casket lowered into the ground, another seed planted though what fruit would come of it King didn't venture to guess. He eyed the crowd warily. Car doors slammed shut as most of the mourners departed. An air of unchecked resentment lingered. Word had it that no one knew who fired the shot. Just the same, blood was in the air and demanded more to be appeased. He knew where the trouble would come from as a few boys tarried, pointing to King and Lady G, and laughed.

"He do one of us, he's got to fall," one of them called out, daring King.

King had his fill of violence for one week. For one lifetime, really. One of them caught his disaffected sigh.

"What 'chu lookin' at nigga?"

"I'm tired is all. Not everything is about how you carry it."

"Might be time for you to tip on out," the young one said.

"We will when we're ready. We've come to pay our respect. When we through, we're gone." King had to stand tall or else those chump-ass busters would think he was shook.

The boy, tall and good-sized — barely out his teens, if that mattered at all — stepped forward, inches from King's face, nearly bowling him down with his butt funk. He had some flex in him, but having no fear was easy when you had little to live for. No dreams of tomorrow. For next year.

Lady G let go of his slowly balling fists.

King met his eyes without fear. He could feel the flare of his heated blood. The boy said something to him, but King didn't answer, just hard-eyed him with a hint of disdain. By the code, the boy couldn't back down. The eyes of his boys were on him.

The boy put his weight on his back foot, preparing to throw a punch. When it came, King sidestepped and countered, planting his fist solidly in the boy's kidney, turning him, then shoving him into the wall of a memorial. The anxious squawks of the crowd had suddenly been reduced to mumbles. From the corner of his eye, King spied a light-skinned girl with fine braids, observing the proceedings from behind a nearby tree, then, like a will o' wisp, she was gone.

To Night's mind, wizards were white men with long beards, robes, and pointy hats. For that matter, African witch doctors conjured images of men in large masks dancing around pyres of fire. Neither picture came close to what he practiced. He slumped within his great wicker chair, exhausted from manipulating the dragon's breath. At his beckoning, it poured from the vents of the Phoenix Apartments penthouse and pooled at his feet, a faithful dog awaiting his master's command. So he thought.

"What we gonna do about Miss Jane?" Green stood in the corner of the room, a discreet distance from the enveloping tendrils of mist, and watched as they entered Night's nostrils and open mouth. The distortion added to the ghoulishness of his face.

Night's eye's fluttered, his upturned pupils returning to normal and focusing on Green. "What do you mean?"

"Her time's about up. She's bound to become a… liability before too long."

"You mean give me up? She don't know nothing."

"She knows more than you think. Plus, she thinks she has a trump card to play."

"Percy?"

"Yeah."

"Leave her be," Night said. "He's still my blood and she's still the boy's mother."

"Not much of one. No disrespect."

"No, you right. But the bug or the blast will catch up with her before much longer." Night struggled to upright himself, but his arm muscles gave out. Sweat scattered like buckshot across his face and chest.

"Are you OK?"

"Just off my game is all." Night wouldn't have suffered any interruptions or taken any visitors during the ritual — definitely would not have risked appearing weak — except in front of Green. Night's T-shirt draped over him, his gaunt face betraying his emaciated body. His dark flesh withered. If Green had seen this before, his thoughts were his own.

"You're using it too much."

Night threw a bloodshot glare at Green. The undersides of his eyelids itched with the scrape of ants crawling alongside his eyes into his skull. The rasp of his breathing choked into a cough. He rolled his tongue across his dry, cracked lips. The ashy pallor to his skin obscured by the waning mist, Night's head was already caught up in the heady throes of the dragon's breath.