Читать книгу Taboo 2: - Yoshe - Страница 10

Anwar Jones arrived on Riker’s Island from the Brooklyn courts. He walked into the facility intake area with a serious attitude and a frown on his face. He looked around at all the inmates who were being temporarily held in the large cell areas, waiting to be housed. He felt out of place from the rest of the scruffy-looking men who eyeballed him.

Anwar was decked out from head to toe in casual high-end clothes, from the Moncler spring jacket to his True Religion jeans, down to the brown Louis Vuitton sneakers on his feet. The David Yurman dog tag that he wore around his neck glistened in the dimly lit area, and his Mont Blanc spectacles gave him the look of a scholar. Anwar’s caramel-colored skin looked freshly scrubbed in comparison to the graying skin of some of his future cellmates, and most of them were younger than he was.

As he walked past the officers that worked the area, his Dolce & Gabbana cologne lingered in their nostrils.

“Yo!” Anwar called out to one of the officers standing nearby. “What pen you wanted me to go in again?” he asked.

The officer looked up. “That pen over there,” he said, pointing to an empty pen in the corner.

Anwar looked at the officer up and down. “Yo, ain’t that the ‘Why Me?’ pen? Why are y’all puttin’ me in a cell all by myself?” he asked, referring to the pen that officers used to isolate disruptive inmates.

The officer laughed and used his pen to point at Anwar’s attire. “Man, look at all that designer stuff you have on. I don’t want to put you in the pen with everybody else and somebody try to take them expensive sneakers off your feet and the shirt off your back! Fuck around, they might even go for the pants, too!”

Anwar smirked. “C’mon, homie, do I look like I’m pussy to you? Just put me in the pen with the regular niggas! I’m a G! They know better than to fuck with me!”

The officer looked at Anwar and hesitated for a moment. He didn’t want to be responsible for anything jumping off in one of the pens because someone tried to get the well-dressed man for his things.

After a few seconds, the CO walked toward the Brooklyn pen and opened it. Anwar walked in and sat on the bench by himself. The CO shrugged and went back to his paperwork. Anwar looked around at the other new admissions and smirked to himself. He was thirty-five years old, and most of the inmates in there looked like little Similac babies to him.

Anwar was a professional convict, just like more than half of the inmates being held at Riker’s Island. He hailed from Bedford-Stuyvesant, starting out as a young knucklehead roaming the streets. He caused havoc for no apparent reason at all and grew to become an adult with no regard for human beings. He portrayed himself as an honorable man to those he claimed to care for. Unfortunately, during this bid, Anwar would find out that he had love for no one, and eventually would realize that he had no loyalty to anyone, not even to himself.

He remembered being on the Island, back in the day, when he and his crew used to get it on with the Puerto Ricans. It was nothing but alarms and waves of response teams coming to the housing areas on Rikers back in the early ’90s. There were riots and slashings, all kinds of incidents happening in the jails, and Anwar was a part of that history. Anwar was a different type of dude; a regular guy he wasn’t. Unfortunately, the Department of Correction was going to find that out.

Anwar sat on the hard bench, leaned his head back against the brick wall in the pen, and closed his eyes. When he did this, Anwar felt someone sitting down next to him. He immediately opened his eyes.

“What’s good, my nigga?” the man greeted him. Anwar checked the guy out to see if he met the necessary requirements to be in his presence.

“Who are you? Do I know you?” Anwar asked while admiring the expensive Michele timepiece the guy was wearing on his wrist.

“Damn, B, you don’t know who I am? It’s me, Scooter!”

Shamel “Scooter” Abrams was a street hustler/ stick-up kid from Harlem. He was a direct descendant of Senegalese parents, who had done everything but disown him due to his trifling ways. Influenced by negative people, he chose to follow an untraditional lifestyle instead of the customary West African traditions that his parents had instilled in him. Scooter had been in and out of jail since the age of fifteen, and he continued his jail stints into his adulthood. The streets and jail were all he knew.

Anwar tilted his head back. He remembered the face. “Oh, shit, what’s good, homie?” They gave each other a pound with a hug. “Yo, you all right, son? What you doin’ in here?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m straight. They just got me in here on some bullshit assault charge. I’ve been home for a minute and now this.” Scooter checked out Anwar’s expensive clothing and was impressed. “I see that you still be chillin’.”

Anwar smiled. “What you mean? I stay fly all day, every day. If you know me, then you know that.”

Scooter laughed. “Yeah, you right. What you doin’ in here, B?” he asked.

Anwar sighed. “Man, these bird-ass cops was supposedly doin’ a routine traffic stop when they pulled me over. They was talkin’ about how my registration was fucked up on my G35 convertible. Okay, cool. I’ll take that, but you ain’t gonna pull me over, tell me to get out my shit, try to frisk me, and then wanna search my fuckin’ vehicle. I went in on them dudes and they arrested me for obstruction and resistin’ arrest. So now I’m in the bookings, right, waitin’ for my case to be called. A nigga thinks he’s goin’ home, right, but when I went to court, I got remanded into custody. Now I’m here on this rock, man. I’m tight because I’m supposed to be done with this shit.”

Scooter rubbed his bald head. “Me neither, B.” He looked around and leaned over to Anwar. “You know I used to fuck with this CO broad in here, right?” Scooter said, totally off the subject.

Anwar yawned. “Oh, yeah?” He couldn’t care less about Scooter’s sexual exploits. He just wanted to go home.

“Yeah, man. I smashed that pussy in my cell and everything.”

Anwar put his hand under his chin. “Word? What’s the broad’s name?”

“Miss Phillips. Monique Phillips. That was my bitch.”

Anwar shook his head. He wasn’t feeling the way Scooter was running his mouth, which was a no-no in jail and on the streets. With Scooter mentioning the female officer’s name, Anwar took this gesture personally, because he was presently seeing a correction officer named Deja Sutton.

“Word? So that was your chick or your turn?”

Scooter smiled. “Nah, that was my chick. That woman was in love with me.”

When Scooter turned his head briefly, Anwar noticed the long slice on the side of his face.

“Yo, what happened to your face, man? Who cut you like that?”

Scooter’s hand went for the keloid scar on his face. “Yo, this dude snuck me when I was upstate,” Scooter lied. “In the Green,” he added, referring to the Greenhaven Correctional Facility.

Anwar shook his head and inspected the scar. “Damn! Somebody got your ass real good, too.”

As Scooter continued to run his mouth, Anwar tuned him out and watched his surroundings. He saw a few females walking in and out of the receiving room, which was where inmates were held, but one in particular caught his eye. She came in there to drop off a worker to the intake officers who were working with the new admissions. Anwar watched as she sashayed across the intake in her fitted uniform pants.

Scooter fell back against the wall as if he had seen a ghost. “Did that bitch walk out yet?”

“What bitch? And why are you actin’ all paranoid and shit?”

“I’m talkin’ about the female officer who just walked in here and dropped an inmate off.”

Anwar looked around. He didn’t see her anymore so he figured she had walked out already. The pen that they were sitting in was toward the back, and she would not have been able to see them unless she walked over there.

“She’s gone. You had a problem with her, son?” Anwar asked.

“I ain’t really had no problem with the bitch. That chick is one of Phillips’s homegirls. I don’t need them broads to know that I’m in here again if I can help it. I hope they don’t put me in Five North!”

Anwar shrugged. “Who gives a fuck about where you go, son? This is jail. Plus, it’s no way that you can hide from two broads that work here.”

Scooter wiped the sweat from his bald head with the back of his hand, while Anwar gave him a strange look.

“Why was you avoidin’ that chick anyway?” Anwar asked.

Scooter sighed and leaned his head against the wall. He closed his eyes.

“Her name is Miss Howell,” Scooter said. “Don’t you remember her? She works in Five North.”

“Miss Howell? That’s who that was?” Anwar asked, looking towards the door.

“Why? Do you know her?” Scooter asked.

Anwar folded his arms. “Yeah, yeah, I remember that broad from Five North,” Anwar lied. He knew of her, all right. He had just never seen her in person. “She’s cool, I guess,” he said. “I don’t really know that much about her.”

Scooter smirked. “Yeah, that’s the bitch that was fuckin’ with that dude, Rah. You know, Rasheed? Rasheed with the locks in his hair? He’s from the Stuy?”

“Nah, I can’t say that I know that cat,” Anwar replied, telling another lie.

Of course I know Rasheed. That’s my brother from another mother, he thought. Curious to know what Scooter had to say about Rasheed, Anwar played along with the man. “I probably know him by face, though. Why? What happened?” he asked.

Scooter leaned in closer to Anwar. He wanted to make sure that no one heard what he had to say.

“Well, that CO bitch, Miss Howell, is Rasheed’s baby’s mother!”

“Is that right?” Anwar replied, although he knew that already.

“That’s right! He was fuckin’ with Miss Howell around the same time I was dealin’ with my broad, Miss Phillips. He was in love with that chick, too.”

“I could see that happenin’. She seems like she’s an official chick.”

Scooter sucked his teeth. “Please! Nobody can’t tell Miss Howell that she ain’t the flyest shit poppin’! Bumass bitch! These broads ain’t shit, B! That’s why I treat ’em the way I do!”

Anwar didn’t know that the man before him was living a “downlow” homosexual lifestyle. Scooter had sex with women sometimes, but he actually preferred men.

Anwar looked around at the officers at the desk. After being subjected to Scooter and his excessive talking, being alone in that “Why Me?” pen wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

“Well, I’m the one shot that bitch-ass nigga!” Scooter blurted out of nowhere.

After he said that, Anwar officially marked him as a clown. One of the things that a person shouldn’t do while he’s in jail is snitch on anyone, especially himself. Anwar thought that Scooter might have known better, but it was obvious that he didn’t.

“What bitch-ass nigga? Who are you talkin’ about?” Anwar asked with an annoyed look on his face. He just wanted Scooter to keep quiet at this point.

“I’m talkin’ about Rasheed. When I was locked with him, like, three years ago, he got me set up. Just before he was about to go home, he got these two Blood dudes, Pretty and Valentine, to try to cut me. I don’t know why, because me and Rah ain’t never had no problem with each other; at least, I thought we didn’t. So one day, I’m in my hood, mindin’ my business, and who do I see? I see Rasheed! I went and pulled a gun out of my stash and capped one in his ass!” Anwar realized that Scooter probably had gotten that cut when he was on Riker’s Island after all. He could see Rasheed being responsible for that.

“So, is that the reason you’re in here now? Because you shot bitch-ass Rasheed?”

“Nah, this is for some other shit,” Scooter replied.

Anwar shook his head and smirked. He then got up and walked toward the front of the pen. An intake officer walked by. Anwar gestured for him to walk toward where he was standing.

“When y’all told me that I had to go in that pen by myself earlier, I didn’t want to. But look, man, this motherfucker behind me hasn’t stopped talkin’ since he got in here. Personally, I don’t want no dealings with that dude. Could you just put me in that pen over there, my man? Please. Damn!”

The officer glanced at Scooter, who was running his mouth with someone else in the pen.

“Wow!” exclaimed the officer. “That’s that snitch, Abrams. I don’t blame you, man. Nobody wants to deal with that dude anyway.”

The CO looked at an empty pen and took that assortment of keys off his belt. He opened the gate for Anwar to walk out.

“Yo, B!” Scooter called out. “Yo, where you goin’?”

Anwar sighed loudly. “See what I mean, man?” The CO who took him out of the pen laughed.

After a few hours passed, Anwar lay down on the hard bench in the pen. He blocked the loud walkietalkies and the other noises that were associated with jail. Scooter had him stressed out. What was only supposed to be a routine traffic stop had turned into an arrest, then turned into him being sentenced to ninety days on Rikers. Now that Scooter had decided to confide in him about the shooting of Rasheed, Anwar had no other choice but to finish him off. After what Rasheed had done for him back in the day, he owed his friend that much.