Chapter 0 - Prelude

Stone was bored, but bored was good. Bored was simple. Bored meant, generally speaking, that no one was dead, dying, or screaming—and who likes a screamer? Stone could certainly handle dead, and dying meant that dead was on the way. Dead was good. Dead was quiet. Screaming was quite the opposite.

Though happily counting the blessings of boredom, Stone was getting sick of waiting for Hero to call him and give him his orders. If there was one thing Hero was good at, it was making people wait. Stone dreamily watched the light from the buzzing fluorescent lantern slide up and down his arm as he tapped the corner of his worn down, khaki green cell phone. Eagerly, he waited for the plastic gadget to deliver him with a boredom-vanquishing ring.

“Man,” sighed Wildcard, leaning his lazy head against the tattered wall. “I really hate killing people.”

Tei’wa, the scrawny 20-something shop clerk with blood tricking down his eye tied to the chair, didn’t want to hear that.

Stone continued to play with his phone, freeing a sigh of fatigue into the musty air. Wildcard’s round, babyish face and blood colored hair were well illuminated by the cheap Home Depot light source, as was the paint chipping off the decaying wall behind him. Ace, a third gunman, faced the prisoner from the opposite side of the room, standing with his long legs crossed, the rim of his navy fedora covering his eyes. Mixer, a lanky pretty boy who habitually chewed the inside of his mouth, sat unsteadily at Stone’s table, and, naturally, chewed the inside of his mouth. A moldy but empty smell saturated the classroom, making the air inside feel indistinguishable from the air outside. The high school was long since abandoned; no one had been taught lessons here for well over a decade. At least not in the state-sanctioned sense.

“Why?” Mixer questioned Wildcard’s cynical remark, his long body perking upward as his feet wiggled around the legs of his desperately unbalanced stool. His chocolate hair was sticking out all over the place from the several minutes he’d spent tugging on it—another nervous habit. “Because, like, you feel all bad?” The uneven legs of his chair tapped erratically against the concrete floor.

“No,” Wildcard sneered with a smug scoff. “’Cause it’s a pain in the ass!” He shifted his body upright, his lip still twisted. “We gotta burn the clothes we was wearing, we gotta pay off the cops…” He tilted his chin toward Tei’wa. “We gotta dump a damn body.” He slumped his shoulder. “Then I gotta gut my gun, and I like this gun.” He clutched his Glock tightly. “I don’t wanna gut my gun.”

“If we end up plugging this dude, you ain’t gonna shoot.” Stone’s words were far from his mind.

Ace’s eyes, accented by frustration, lifted from under the canopy of his stylish cap. “Yeah, didn’t we just talk about this, Wildcard?”

“Talk about what!?” Wildcard asked, looking to both Ace and Stone for relief from his puzzlement. “If I ain’t shootin’ nobody then what’s the point of having a damn gun!?”

“In case things get out of hand,” said Stone. “In case Tei’wa’s got friends or Dragons that can find us here, you dumb fuck. Standard business procedure.”

Wildcard’s frown put a dark crease between his brows. “Well if we gotta shoot ‘im, who’s gonna shoot ‘im?”

“I’m gonna shoot him,” said Stone, his fingers now toying with the grip of his pistol.

“Besides, I was just explaining this to you in the car on the way down here,” said Ace. He swaggered across the room, following the downward tilting tip of his hat, picked up Wildcard’s gun, and tapped an index finger on the end of the barrel. “The Glock’s got octagonal rifling, see? So it marks the bullet differently and those CSI fuckers catch on to that shit. It’s real easy to get busted plugging people with this gun, I keep telling you to get a different piece, but you just don’t listen.” He handed Wildcard the gun back with a lazy arm.

“I listen to you, I just don’t understand nothin’ you just said.”

“That’s why you shoot with a Glock,” Ace winked. “Less moving parts to confuse an idiot.”

Wildcard rolled his eyes. “Oh, ha ha.”

“Besides,” frowned Stone, “didn’t you just say you hate killing people?”

Mixer grinned, showing off his full set of sparkly white, mouth-chewing teeth. “Yeah, he doesn’t want to kill nobody until you tell him he don’t get to kill nobody.” His half giggle stopped as soon as his eyes drifted across the prisoner. “…sorry.”

“What the fuck, Mixer?” snapped Wildcard with a quick glance at Tei’wa. “What you apologizing to him for?”

“Come on, hy’ung,” Mixer’s face hid behind a heavy pout. “The dude’s staring death right up in the face and we’re talking about it like it’s nothing. Just seems a little disrespectful, don’t it?”

“You really need to stop empathizing with these guys,” said Stone. “You’re gonna go all soft and drive yourself crazy. It’s a lot easier if you act like they don’t matter.”

Tei’wa’s already withered stance collapsed further as he started to weep, his lips sputtering, snot and tears rolling down his face.

“Look!” cried Mixer. “Look, Stone, you made him cry!”

Stone retreated. “I didn’t make him cry!”

“Yes you did!” Mixer said. “Look, he’s crying!”

To Stone’s delighted surprise, his phone began to light up, buzz, and sing its Flo Rida ringer. “Finally.” He picked it up and fastened the thing it to his ear, scurrying out the room to receive his orders in private.

Mixer, his lips tightened to the side of his face, glanced over at the captive. “I’m sorry we made you cry.”

Tei’wa sniffled. He lifted his face upward, his moist cheeks and bruised eye catching a bit more of the unflattering fluorescent light. “Are you guys… going to k-kill me?”

“Jesus Christ!” Wildcard threw his hands in the air, one of which waving his precious Glock. “I am so fucking sick of fuckers asking that question!” He looked at Tei’wa. “You dumb motherfucker—if we knew if we was gonna kill you, wouldn’t you be dead by now?”

“Maybe he thinks we gonna interrogate him or something,” suggested Mixer. “Like maybe we keeping him alive to get some information out of him. And then we plug him afterwards.”

Wildcard pondered this for a moment. “You mean, like, pretend we gonna keep him alive to get information and then shoot him afterwards anyway?”

Mixer nodded.

Wildcard couldn’t contain his disgust. “That’s fucked up!” He looked at Tei’wa. “That would be a fucked up thing to do! Who do you think we, are, huh? Animals? What, you think we don’t got morals!?”

Ace gave the captive a warm glance. “I mean, don’t get your hopes up, we still might kill you.”

Stone made his way back in, closed the stiff, rotting door behind him, and put his phone back on the table. “Alright, I just got off the phone with Hero. He discussed the issue with A’pa Sei and the Dragons–”

“All of them?” gasped Mixer.

“No, not all of them, dumbass, that would be like a hundred people,” sighed Stone, dragging his chair over to Tei’wa, swinging it backward, and straddling his seat in front of his captive. “Just Om’bai and a couple of his boys.” Stone held his gun against his knee and focused his attention on the prisoner. “You scared, buddy?” He pat the broken boy on the shoulder. “Ya scared?”

The boy nodded.

“Good,” said Stone. “You should be.”

Tei’wa’s bottom lip quavered some more.

“You know why you’re here, don’t you?” asked Stone.

Tei’wa nodded slowly.

“Tell me why you’re here.”

Tei’wa’s head pulled upward slowly as if hanging from a string. “’Cause I fucked up.”

“That’s right, you fucked up, didn’t you?” said Stone. “You fucked up bad. You see, I would draw you out a map of the Grove, but I don’t want to insult your intelligence. That said, you certainly insulted ours when you started moving money for the Dragons thinking we wouldn’t find out about it – I mean come on, man.” He snickered. “This shit is my full time job, you think I don’t pay attention?” He shook his head disapprovingly. “People think we wanna fight – people think we actually want to fight the Dragons, but we don’t, that’s why we keep our business separate from their business. So let’s focus, now, south of 15th belongs to?”

Tei’wa pouted. “The Dragons.”

“15th to the Interstate?”

Tei’wa pouted harder. “The Blades.”

“That’s right,” said Stone with a smile. “And where’s your shop at?”

Tei’wa trembled. “13th and Oregon.”

“And that’s…?”

“…Blades turf?”

“That’s right,” said Stone. “So you should have known better. We put these boundaries down for a reason – to keep the peace. Then we got pricks like you who start tangling shit up. And it’s really insulting—and frustrating.”

Tei’wa said nothing. He sat there, cold and still, awaiting his fate.

“So do you understand?”

Tei’wa’s eyes lifted. Stone bothering to ask this question was pretty promising.

“I said, do you understand?”

Tei’wa’s dry, cracked lips formed a small, surprised O. “Yeah…” He lifted his eyes further. “Yeah, I understand.”

Stone smiled. “Well, okay then.”

Tei’wa looked at Stone. Then Ace. Then Wildcard. Then Mixer. “So… you’re not going to kill me?”

The boys laughed. They laughed and laughed and laughed some more.

“Fuck, no, we ain’t gonna kill you!” chortled Stone, now nearly doubling over, catching spurts of breath between chuckles. “For double-dipping? Kill you!? Fuck no, that ain’t an offense worth killing you for, fuck no. Murder, rape, and otherwise hurting women, that’s what we kill for, we don’t kill for this shit. Get up, man.”

Mixer began to untie Tei’wa, and Tei’wa was relieved. He let a warm stream of reprieve wash through his veins with such vigor the room seemed to spin as he lifted his weary body to his feet. The four sinister faces before him didn’t seem so bad now, and for a brief moment, he felt a splatter of guilt slap him for all the shit he’d been talking about the Blades over the past few weeks and their unfair, brutish rule over the northern half of Sequoia Grove. Maybe they weren’t so bad after all.

Stone put his arm around Tei’wa. “See? You ain’t gonna die, man.”

Tei’wa was relieved, indeed. Until he saw Mixer squint his eyes tight and press his fingers into his ears.

Pow. The crack of Stone’s gunshot made the building seem to shudder just before the blood exploded from Tei’wa’s kneecap. The bloodcurdling scream, which ripped out of the shop clerk’s throat like cannon fire, was diluted to a sputtering organic buzz after the deafening blast.

“No, you ain’t gonna die,” said Stone. “You just gonna walk with a limp for the rest of your life.” He held up Tei’wa’s body at his side, tightly pressing the boy upright between his palm and his torso to keep the boy from collapsing. “Don’t feel good, does it? No?”

“No—nuh…” Tei’wa was crying in furious spurts. The next sounds to come out of his mouth may have been words, but they were far from intelligible.

“I’m real sorry about this,” said Stone, his arm gripped tightly around Tei’wa’s scrawny bicep. “I don’t like doing this – I swear to God, I don’t like doing this – but we gotta send a message. We gotta set a… what the fuck is it that Hero always says…”

“A precedent,” said Ace. “We gotta set a precedent.”

“That’s right,” said Stone with a distant, warm smirk. “We gotta set a precedent, Tei’wa. So dumb, arrogant, naïve little cuntsuckers like you—” He squeezed Tei’wa’s broken knee with his free hand for dramatic effect, forcing the boy to collapse back into the blood-splattered chair. “—know not to fuck around when we put rules in place.”

He wiped some blood off his hands onto the bottom of his shirt. “We’re gonna do what it takes to control these streets, whether dumbshits like you like it or not." He turned toward Ace. “Hey, call Hero back for me and ask him where he wants us to dump this fool.” He moved his disapproving eyes back to the pile of whining flesh on the red-stained chair, wiping away the last bit of the kid’s blood onto his shirt with a disgusted sneer. “I don’t want to get any blood on my phone.”



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