Baby

twenty-nine

Today was the beginning of the plan.

I didn't know this because I had been told any detail about the plan; I knew this because of the way everyone on the east-side was rushing around, like demon-possessed.

My man was not one of those to be rushing around. His work was done, what was left was to watch the outcome of his scheming.

It began when an empty warehouse in Abel's name was blown to splinters. The coppers rushed to the scene, all giddy at the prospect of inter-gang violence.

What they didn't know, and would never come to know, was that this was all organized by my man. They would never come to know this because when the dust settled and the flames were put out, the insignia of the west-side crew was stamped in the dirty and desolation.

The police department was abuzz.

Slowly, it seemed, the west-side was creeping over no man's land. Shops and businesses in the divide that serviced mostly us were blown to smithereens. This again, wasn't the doing of the west-side.

Leaving their signature all over the place, arrests were bound to happen. And those who weren't arrested, were persecuted by their own on suspicion of being a mole.

In a day, over half the of the west-side members were in jail, waiting for someone to pay bail.

My man, with his suave calm, watched it all burn. There was something patterned in the way that the businesses burned down, and then I realized what it was. The rat infestation that him and Abel were so focused on; the rats had made dens in those specific shops.

I couldn't figure out if they were informers to the police or to the west-side, but I knew that they would be dead by the next morning.

By late noon, when everything had settled and people weren't running around so scattered, my man and I locked up and left the apartment with Jupiter by our side.

"How would you like to upgrade our housing Baby?"

Standing on the street corner, several blocks away, I looked at him funny when he asked that. I hadn't put two and two together until the building crumbled to the ground. The foundations rocked, and everything I had known since I was seventeen collapsed in on itself.

"I really hope you know what you're doing."