Читать книгу Hell's Diva: - Anna J. Stewart - Страница 9

Thou shall not kill.

Ten Commandments

“Mommy, Daddy, get up! Please, Mommy!” Mecca crawled out from under the bed and ran to her parents. Mecca cried, shaking her parents. Both of their eyes were open with the blank stare of death in them. A look Mecca would never forget. Mecca ran to the phone that was hung up on the kitchen wall near the refrigerator. She stood on her toes to reach the phone, and dialed a seven-digit number.

“Hello.”

“Aunt Ruby? My mommy and daddy gone,” Mecca cried to her mother’s younger sister.

“Baby, where they at?” Ruby asked tersely.

“They lying on the couch,” Mecca said, sniffing and sobbing loudly. “And they won’t get up, they bleeding.”

Ruby instructed Mecca to open the door when the neighbor knocked. Ruby had called a friend of the family who lived on the ninth floor along with Mecca and her parents, and asked her to go check on the apartment and Mecca until she got there. It would only take her about a half an hour.

The neighbor, a girlfriend of Mecca’s mother and Ruby, knocked on the door. When Mecca let her in, the woman, used to seeing murders growing up in the rough Brownsville section of Brooklyn, still reacted as if this were her first time seeing dead bodies. She covered her mouth, ran into the bathroom, and the food she ate for breakfast and lunch found its way into the roach-infested toilet. Afterward, she called the police. They arrived just as Ruby did. Ruby saw her niece sitting at the kitchen table with a plainclothes white female officer kneeled down in front of her. Mecca ran to her aunt as soon as she saw her. Mecca cried as they made contact. Ruby picked her up, and while hugging Mecca she looked at the bloodstained sheet that covered her sister’s and brother-in-law’s bullet-scarred bodies, not believing what took place.

“Everything is going to be okay, baby. Auntie’s here,” Ruby whispered in Mecca’s ear as she tried to offer her some comfort. Her parents were killed right in front of her, so Ruby knew there was only so much she could say or do at the moment.

“Don’t tell these cops anything, okay, baby? Don’t ever speak to the cops. They are bad people! They’re just like the people who did this bad thing to your mommy and daddy. Auntie gone take care of this, all right?” Ruby gave the white female cop a menacing look, whispering to Mecca as she rubbed her back.

“Uh huh,” Mecca mumbled, agreeing to her aunt’s wishes. Mecca whispered in her aunt’s ear, “Auntie, I know who did it!”

“Tell Auntie later, okay?” Ruby whispered in Mecca’s ear before putting her down on the floor.

“Is it okay if we talk to your niece?” the officer asked indistinctly, approaching them with a notepad in her hand, poised to write whatever Mecca was willing to share.

“No, it’s not okay,” she said. “She didn’t see what happened. Her mother and father are dead, she’s eight years old, and she’s been through enough.”

Ruby grabbed Mecca by the hand and they left the apartment. Mecca’s mother’s prayer was answered. Mecca left Brownsville, but her life in Brownsville was traded for another notorious Brooklyn neighborhood, Coney Island. On the drive to Coney Island in Ruby’s 1982 black and yellow Camaro, Mecca informed her aunt about what she saw and heard when her parents were killed.

“Daddy talked to this guy. His name is Darnell. He’s Tamika from my school brother,” Mecca said in her childish tone.

“Auntie knows who you’re talking about,” Ruby said in a hoarse, scratchy voice. She held up two fingers to Mecca while she switched lanes on the Belt Parkway. “It was two of them?” Ruby asked.

“Yup, two of them. The other one didn’t take his mask off.”

Ruby nodded her head. She tried to hold back the tears because she wanted to be strong for her niece. Mecca needed her aunt, and if she saw Ruby crying Ruby figured Mecca would be deeply affected by first the loss of her parents, and the sadness of her aunt. Ruby wiped her eyes and tried to swallow the lump in her throat. She glanced over at Mecca, who was staring out the passenger window at cars and the grimy Brooklyn neighborhoods that lay along the side of the Belt Parkway with tears running down her face. Ruby watched a roach crawl out of the collar of Mecca’s pajama top. She grabbed it and smashed it in her hand.

Mecca turned and stared at her aunt as Ruby smashed the roach. They looked into each other’s eyes, both understanding the silent language that Ruby would smash the people who killed her sister and brother-in-law, just like she did that roach. Without any words, Mecca continued watching the scenery through tear-blurred eyes, knowing her life from then on would never be the same.