lady friend there in the nice suit. Most of them had mouths full of gold teeth and they wore baggy pants with their boxers showing.” Martin stopped for breath. “We stumbled on them gang raping this teenaged white girl before we negotiated a deal with them.”
“Negotiate—“Chris though that he’d chosen an interesting choice of word to use.
“After we killed a couple of his friends, my friends and I negotiated the unconditional release of the girl for the life of those of his brood still breathing. The accepted, although I never heard the leader speak, his Deacon—yet that’s what he called him—did all the yapping for him. The lot of them headed east.”
Chris stifled a laugh. Blue wasn’t sure what to make of the story. Grace didn’t look comfortable at all. She looked as if she were working something uncomfortable in her mind under her own braids.
“Tell me…Mr. Martin, did you hear any of these young men chanting anything?” And when the man didn’t answer immediately, “Mr. Martin, did you hear them chanting anything in particular?”
“I don’t remember saying that you could speak young lady—“
“I need an answer…please. It could be very important.”
Martin scrubbed at his heavy beard.
“Maybe I did…yea, I think that I do. It came out all jumbled as they took turns with the girl, but at first I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.”
And so Grace Edwards said it for him.
“Yea,” Martin’s beard seemed to take a life all its own. “Yea, that’s it exactly.” And then he altered his aim from Chris to Grace. “I told you that I had no reason to trust you. Might be that you’re one of them?”
“They were Choir Boys?” Chris said to Grace. “And it sounds as if the Bishop and his Deacon were out leading the troops tonight.”
Grace nodded a yes.
“We need to know how far this altercation happened from this location, Mr. Martin.” Grace Edwards asked. Chris could see genuine fear in Grace’s eyes for the first time this evening, but it had little to do with being the target of Martin’s rifle. “How long ago did this happen?”
“I don’t remember—“
“I need you to think, Mr. Marin,” Grace visibly worked to calm herself. “It’s very important that you remember these details.”
Martin conferred with an associate to his near left.
“I think it was an hour ago. Maybe, just maybe, it was 90 minutes at the top end.”
“We’ve got to go, now, Agent Prince.” Grace’s braids rattled as her head went on a swivel. “They’ll be here soon and probably with what’s left of the Choir Boys that survived the Peacekeeper incursion at Carver Housing Apartments.”
Chris suddenly became alarmed.
“She’s right, Tabitha.” Chris said. “Remember the intel that we received on from the agents in the field house. Remember that we were told that the Choir Boys concentrated numbers were in Carver, we knew that they had other smaller cells all over the city. One of those larger cells hung around here.”
“That’s why they are wearing the FBI garb.” Grace added the information, probably from her own information files. “I would bet that they are conducting assaults while they feel they have a perceived advantage. If Mr. Martin’s group got the drop on them they are not going to stop until they find you when they feel you are the most vulnerable and avenge those you’ve killed.”
“Do you hear me, Tabitha?” Chris said. “We have to go—now.”
“I never agreed to any of this, Chris.”
“Tabitha, please,”
“Alright,” Blue said. “But I need you to put your gun down first.”
“I always thought that a lady was supposed to go first.”
And so both FBI Special Agents began to lower their guns—
He then the earth moved underneath them—
And Chris could feel his gun fire off a round…
After an unknown number of minutes, Chris picked himself up off the ground and he could see Grace Edwards and Marin and his people around him slowly doing the same.
Everyone but Tabitha Blue was on their feet again.
“Oh no,” Chris muttered. And then a louder voice he said: “Oh, no—“
He sprinted over to where she was lying flat on her back with a clear head wound. He got on the ground and in an instant he had his partner wrapped into his arms. At first glance, he couldn’t tell how deep the bullet had penetrated or how severe her injuries really were. She was bleeding. She was breathing though and he was taking every positive that he could and storing it away.
Grace Edwards pointed through her cuffs in the general direction to where the nearest hospital was.
And then…
And then—
“So what do we have here?” A new voice added his to the mix. “Ain’t this a bitch?”
Chris recognized the Deacon who was speaking—as usual—for his and the other Choir Boys leader that carried a Bible around, wore a minister’s robe and called himself the Bishop.
Your Peacekeepers let the big fish get away, little brother. And tonight we may all pay the price for that mistake.
He laid Blue down on the ground and instructed Grace to put pressure on her wound, while he rose to his feet with his gun discovering a new target.
“Bishop, you don’t know how I wish I had the time to do this with you,” Chris said to him and his Deacon. The dozen or more other Choir Boys, still dressed as first responders, looked on with fully automatic weapons at their disposal. “My partner’s life hangs in the balance. I need to get her to the nearest medical center right away. You are your heathens are in my way of accomplishing this.”
Bishop smiled through a mouth full of gold teeth and snapped out of long handgun and held it at an angle that made him look like an old school gangster.
The Deacon spoke as if he could read his leader’s mind.
“Well, don’t you cry, boy.” He said for his Bishop. “But it looks as if that white girl is as good as dead anyway. And if you don’t stop pointing that gun at my pastor, so will you.”
Chris felt a smile curl on his dark face. These two clowns are everything that the mass media makes our young people out to be: They believe that we are lazy, arrogant and stupid. Chris had made himself memorize the report on the Bishop. It had believed that the man had been responsible for fathering nearly a dozen children from nearly that many women—and that was before the Center of Disease Control reported that he’d contacted and was spreading HIV, especially to the harem he’d taken at Carver. He was a lifelong felon including murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
I’ll give your Peacekeeper’s this, Little Brother, by liberating Carver and shutting down his drug operations there you denied him a valuable source of revenue. And he’s been on the run ever since.
You should have stayed on the run, Bishop.
He could take him out with a single shot but…but at what price. What would happen to Grace Edwards and his partner Tabitha Blue? And he would surely sentence nearly a dozen other civilians from Martin’s clan to death as they would have to shoot themselves out of any mess that he’d created.
Bishop seemed to be putting Grace’s face to a name…
“Is that my, Grace,” The Deacon said for him. “Ain’t this something, fellas? I thought I’d never see your pretty face—and the rest of you again, girl.”
“I wish I could say the same.”
“Yea, you still a cocky, bitch, Grace,” Deacon continued on for his Bishop. “But I liked that about you. I should have known you were a undercover hoe. I should have known. You were smarter than the average hoe. You asked so many questions. And then you sacked your Peacekeeper dogs on my boys at Carver and I never saw you again. I should have known.”
“I was doing my duty,” Grace said as a matter of fact. “I did what I had to bring down you and your sick operation. It wasn’t personal.”
The Bishop waved his arms in exasperation and shucks his long braids back and forth. The deacon sa
id for him: “It was certainly personal when you were acting like you was my main squeeze over them couple of months. I put my other hoes aside for you. I was going to make you my queen. You were to be the Queen of Carver.”
Grace said, “Thank you, but no. You know, even I have to sacrifice my ideals to serve a cause greater than myself. Sometimes it’s the little things that you have to deal with the most—“
The Bishop mouthed something unfathomable and fired his gun into the air. Martin’s people took defensive positions.
The Deacon said: “Bring you black ass up here now, Grace.” When she didn’t move he repeated what he’d said and added: “I won’t ask you again.”
“Grace isn’t going anywhere with you two.” Chris said.
“Man, you are the fool who is going to get yourself and these country boys killed. I owe them already. “
“I might,” Chris nodded in agreement. “But know this: When I am through counting down from the number ten, that body count that you swear by will begin with you.”
The Bishop gritted his teeth; his Deacon looked nervous as he said: “My Boys will kill everyone they can, starting with you and Grace.”
“No they won’t,” Chris took five steps forward as to separate him from the others. “You’re Deacon and your Choir Boys are cowards. Sure, they have us outnumbered and outgunned but your number superiority is irrelevant because in their heart of hearts they are cowards. They serve you, a false god, out of fear not loyalty. The Choir Boys are only dangerous against the old the weak and the defenseless. The Peacekeepers took Carver simply because they weren’t