Read an Excerpt

Carl Weber's Kingpins

ATL

Urban Books, LLC

Saint

Jonesboro, GA Neighborhood of Goodman

Ever wonder why niggas in the hood always fighting to live then, basically, living to fight? I mean, the homie Pac wasn't fucking around when he asked that same question himself. Too many of us are just scraping by trying to make it, trying to give pieces of ourselves for the area we live in every gotdamn day only to end up with a bullet inches from our heart. Or with a bullet blasting out our brains or spine, dying on the hot or cold concrete with trash blowing over our bodies as if our lives, the purpose of our being born in this fucked-up nation, ain't meant shit. Ultimately, it really didn't.

Yeah, but anyway. Pac ain't have the answers, and here's a nigga like myself sitting on the top of my crib overlooking my community, my neighborhood, while staring at the sparkling lights of the Roanoke enclave of Jonesboro wondering the very same thing. Jonesboro was one city. The shit was split up into two halves: the haves and the have-nots. Roanoke was the come up, where all the rich White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, and whatever else lived.

While their poor counterparts lived in my area of Jonesboro: Goodman. Shit was just that simple. One side of Jonesboro was rich and prosperous: the haves. That was the Roanoke neighborhood. The other side of Jonesboro was the hood of all hoods. That was Goodman: the have-nots.

We all were one with the same county, same city, but separated by a set of railroad tracks built back in the days of segregation. True story, it ain't like nothing really changed, except we now we're separated by class and money. Oh, well.

"Saint!"

Goodman was a chill place mixed with a lot of fucked-up situations. Like, on some real shit, as I enjoyed the taste of my Black & Mild mixed with some Kush — a sweet type — several rounds had gone off within the same hour window. Somebody was dead; that was verified by the late-ass flashing lights of five-o. Where I was at, I saw the niggas who did it. Saw one run past the towing yard where I lived, and saw two others hop back in a junky silver Impala. I clocked the license plate, too, out of habit.

In my business management books for my online classes, I was doodling. Nothing but scribbles lined the border and I placed the number of the license plate in it. Nothing in me was a snitch, so that's not why I did it. The reason it was there was because of my job. I worked two of them: one, a regular job as a tow truck driver/ mechanic for my mother's towing company, and another as a part- time runner for our area big man, Blanket.

Blanket was a kingpin, a drug lord, the leader of one of the most known drug havens in metro Atlanta. Since I was a kid, that nigga's name rang heavy in the streets. The shooting took place in Blanket's zone. I had to note the shit, so that I could erase some motherfuckers for acting up when they weren't supposed to. So, when I wasn't taking online classes for the sake of my mom's business, and working for her, I ran the streets for extra dough for my apartment, for my mom, and to keep our area straight.

"Saint!" I heard again.

Leaning back on my hands, I spit several sunflower seeds on top of the head of the nigga who yelled my name.

"Uggg, you stay a bitch-ass nigga," was shouted at me and it made me flash my teeth in a deep laugh.

"And you stay holding deez nuts. Whatcha want, Sinner?" I lackadaisically said back.

The sound of this fool climbing up to where I was had me glancing his way. He was dressed in the similar type of clothes I wore when I wasn't working: black boots, loose-fitting black jeans, a medium-size shirt, and a black-and-white casual jacket around his waist. I gave a scowl when I stared at my twin brother. He had my jacket on. Pushing up, I rushed him and landed him on his back. I was in my gray work overalls, which made it easy for me move around for what I was about to do. Thumbing my nose, I aggressively reached out for my twin; then we started scrapping like we always did. At twenty-one, my twin was called Sinner and I was called Saint. We were assholes with some good qualities, cut from the same cloth, though we didn't facially look the same.

We both were six feet tall with natural red hair. Mom always said we had our father's cinnamon brown skin. I had a patch of hair on my chin, where my twin had full beard. My tats were on my neck, shoulder, and back, where my twin's were on his hands, forearms, and neck. We both had the same brown eyes and body type, a muscular average-athletic build, kinda like Usher when he was younger. We both played basketball in high school, so I guess that was why we were made how we were. Sin and I also had the same movements. If it was dark enough, you'd think we were identical when we weren't. We also had our own language, twin talk.

"Niggahhh ... Saint ... Santana, fuck, get off me!" Sinner shouted.

Yanking my jacket off of him, I pushed off him, backed up, and ran a hand through my wooly red fade. "You always taking my shit. Just walking up in my place and claiming shit, nigga. What you want?"

Running a hand over his large, cottony red afro, Sinner laughed as if he didn't give a shit. He never gave a shit about taking my material things. So when he slid a hand over the hair lining just his jaw line, then slid his hands in his jeans, I just shook my head and listened to him talk.

"Unk said Blanket is looking for you," he said matter-of-factly.

The notorious Blanket was employer to both of us. No one knew who Blanket was, or saw the nigga, but we knew he had eyes on everyone in Goodman. All things guns, drugs, sex, and more went through Blanket. Smaller dealers were on the block, but even they knew not to fuck with Blanket, except for Guerilla. Guerilla was the other kingpin of metro Atlanta, the only nigga stupid enough to go head up with Blanket. For as long as we could remember, Guerilla had been around too. In the hood you were either on Blanket's team or you were a fucking monkey.

Anyone who rolled with Guerilla had to be offed, no questions about it. The hatred between Blanket and Guerilla was so deep that there had been times where both my brother and I had been asked to roll up on his corner in the Goodman hood, and trail his crew. A week later, whoever we followed would disappear and the distribution flow would revert to Blanket.

It was some foul, crazy shit, but it was what it was. We survive however we can. Funny enough, Blanket stressed responsibility with our kills and to never let a bullet fly stray. If so, it was our heads.

"I'm where I always am. Tell that nigga that I'll get at him in a few here," I said over my shoulder as I took several steps back to where I was sitting, and dropped back in my seat.

Sinner's footsteps followed. He sat by my side, took my bag of sunflower seeds, and tossed some in his mouth, spitting out the shells as we spoke. "Mom hit me up. She said stop turning off ya cell and routing pickup calls to the house."

Frowning, I stretched a boot out and stared at the back of my twin's tattooed hands as he dug in my bag of sunflower seeds. Maya Black, formally Payne, Ms. Maya, or Auntie Maya in our neighborhood, called the shots in our family. At forty-two, our mama was the baddest bitch around according to the old heads in the area. No lie, my mom was a beautiful woman, but that's not why she garnered that title. After my pops died when we were around eight years old, my mom and uncle became the heads of Black Towing and Rentals.

Before that, she ran a little sweetshop in the back of the establishment. Something she did for the kids in the neighborhood and to keep me and my brother out of her hair. We Blacks were well known and something like royalty in the area because of the founder of Black Towing, my grandfather, Sonny. Founded back in the start of the seventies when my grandpops left the Army after serving in Vietnam, Sonny found himself in Jonesboro, Georgia, due to the Greyhound bus he was riding on breaking down in the town.

He and a friend were heading to Miami for some sun, but that all changed when he stayed at a hotel in the Goodman neighborhood. How I remember my grandpops telling it, he was grabbing a pop when a fly sista with a big red afro and a bow in her hair walked by in the baddest pair of jeans that showed off an ass for days. Grandpops explained that he had never seen a sista in person with red hair like hers who wasn't mixed up. He'd only seen it in National Geographic magazine with the brothas and sistas in Africa who use a special mud to tint their hair red. That's how red it was, he told us as kids. Long story short, he spit some game, they ended up hooking up, and he permanently made his home in Goodman with her. My grandma Inez and my grandpa Sonny married. My uncle Jarvis was born; then my dad Will followed a year later.

During that time, Grandpa Sonny used his G.I. money to open the towing shop, and money they comped back was used to help build up our part of Goodman. Man, it was rumors that my grandpops was a smooth man. If you ever saw that movie with Denzel Washington as a notorious drug dealer? Yeah, supposedly my pops had some swag like that, connections like that, but no one could ever prove that shit. I knew that no one in the family believed that shit, either. He was a normal dude from New Orleans who had a love for cars and who loved helping the community any way he could, so there was no truth in the whispers about that at all.

Anyway, my grandparents ran the business for years until my grandpa died the week my mom and dad had finally gotten married. It was the same day my pops died, too. Both of them ended up shot in some freak accident as they were driving to turn in the marriage license. Funny enough, about two months after that, my grandma Inez died from a broken heart and that was that. My mom and Uncle Jarvis ended up taking over the shop and here we were today.

Before all of that, the shop was where my mom and dad met, outside of high school. My mom begged my grandpa to work for them because she wanted to do something different from the girls in the neighborhood. She later told my brother and me that it was to get close to our dad. My mom always told us how she fell for a boy everyone called Rooster because of his red hair and his brother Red. How he used to walk her home with her best friend from school, even though she never asked him to, just to protect her, he'd say. Life was simple back then.

In our part of Jonesboro, everyone knew to come to the Blacks for anything. The same could be said today, except now the environment was different. My mom stopped the sweetshop and we now did block events in the spring and summer. Though Jonesboro, as a whole, was run by drug lords who stifled the county, there were a few people who tried to push to bring back the safety in our neighborhood of Goodman. Even with the property taxes going up, people's houses being taken from them, people dying from bullets every day, and even though my brother and I helped in a lot of that shit, Goodman might have been hood, but it still had a lot of soul.

But, yeah. Where there's good, there's bad. Guess my twin and I were somewhat of a disappointment to my grandfather's legacy, due to the bad we helped bring about. Oh, well. He and my pops never should have died.

"I'm going to make my pickups. She needs to stop stressing," I said, annoyed. Glancing at my twin, I gave him a look. "I'm working, right? Why can't you do it, Will?"

Will Black Jr., aka Sinner, gave a quick laugh then smirked at me. "Because I run the front desk, Santana, and since Mom is happy with me today about me having a gallery show with my class, I get to do what I want!"

Of course. Will was the spoiled one because he came out of the pussy first whereas, because I looked like our dead pops more, Mom always stressed responsibility with me. Will was at Atlanta Metropolitan College, the bulk of my fam's money going to helping him study graphic design, whereas I was online with some of it helping with me learning business management. For years, it was like we had flipped roles. He acted younger and I acted older. I wasn't complaining, but the shit always annoyed me; though, we loved each other without question or issues.

Sinner tossed the bag at me and I snatched it out of midair. Then he spoke, "We're kings in a valley of weeds."

I sighed and replied, "If we don't handle the overflow then our yard starts to look weak."

"Right," Sinner said while staring at the same city view as I was. Sinner always quoted our mom with that line, but he was right.

I always came up to the roof just to get a feel of something normal. I didn't have to think of my mom, who I loved; didn't have to think about work, or the streets, or our natural talent for killing. I could think about classes and acting normal while staring at Roanoke, dreaming of building up my family's wealth. Roanoke owed Goodman. Fuck them and how they did us.

"A'ight, let's get busy then." Standing, I popped some seeds in my mouth then threw the bag back at my brother while cleaning up my books. "Mom's just going to be pissed that we in the streets as usual. She'll get over it."

Sin gave a goofy laugh then agreed.

Our mother hated everything that was the streets. Yet, she knew everything that always went on. She hated Blanket. Hated Guerilla. Hated Royal Realty who were sweeping through the hood taking houses from us poor motherfuckers, just to flip them and gentrify our hood. Word in the street, the Royals were scaring people, especially old people, into selling their property. They also were known for using eminent domain. My mom hated that family with her lifeblood.

So, whenever she heard about us being in the streets, or saw us doing what we do, my brother and me always got a foot in our ass because, as she saw it, we had no reason for helping a dealer. Yet, bills were always late, the shop was being threatened to be taken away, and niggas stayed breaking in our spot.

So, yeah. We ain't have a reason. Fuck that. My brother and I were a product of our environment. Bang, bang.

Anyway, we both ended up in my apartment over the tow shop. I moved in to stop the thief. Sinner lived with our mother in his own place built as a separate apartment in the basement of her large yellow Craftsman-style house. Always close, the house was only a block away. I glanced at the graffiti art resting on the surface of a canvas my brother made out of junk hanging on the main wall of my bedroom. Quickly dressing, I pulled on my boots that opened at the top, pulled my straps on, added a layer of protection, buttoned up my short-sleeve top over it, and put my watch on.

I brushed my chin beard, then slid the brush in my back pocket. As I headed out, I stopped to stare in exasperation at my twin. Nigga was digging in my fridge, going at the food my mom had stocked it up with. On the counter was a sandwich, which I jacked, took a bite of, and walked off with.

"Let's go, asshole. We got money to make," I said, slamming the screen door of my place.

After that, we both ended up in my black GMC Yukon XL, driving out of the gates that surrounded the family towing yard. Music cranked up, hyper rap blasted and we headed to our zone. A zone was a local hub where a part of Blanket's crew reigned. It was nestled on the other side of Goodman, near the northeast tracks. Our shop was at the city exit. We rode through the block, watching our front and back.

Smoothly turning down MLK Drive, we rode past a large green bungalow house with a gang of rides outside of it. I slowed down to make sure everything was good and Sin spoke up: "Dee Dee is having a party. We got invited but you know how you are around Dee Dee."

"Yeah, I want to choke her ass. Shawty doesn't know not to keep touching my dick," I said in annoyance.

"Ha! Your, dick, my dick. Her throat, her kitty. She stay trying to snatch," Sin added, laughing. "Hold up, slow down. Roanoke tags."

Slowing down, I waited for a silver Audi to park. As it did, my brother watched the car empty out with a gang of females. Ass, breasts, and curves were on display even though they were dressed in tight jeans and cropped tanks. I found myself biting my lip with a smirk, until my gaze latched on to the driver: a shorty with a wild mane of kinky, curly sandy brown hair. Miss Pretty Dark Butterscotch was laughing and, as she smiled, a large gap flashed. Baby girl was a unique breed, something that drew my attention with her mother Africa earrings and gold necklace on her chest that said HIPSTER RICH.

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Excerpted from Carl Weber's Kingpins by Brick, Storm. Copyright © 2016 Brick & Storm. Excerpted by permission of Urban Books, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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