Unique II: Betrayal

Chapter 13 - Rikers

Someone great once said, “The ultimate measure of man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
     Fat Tee had no idea why that damn quote kept popping in his head.
    Sitting at one of the metal tables in the dayroom, Fat Tee kept trying to remember where he had heard it before. He thought it had been MLK Jr. He wanted to quote it in the letter to his attorney. He decided to move on to his next letter, and tried to focus on blocking everything out. He wanted to take his time to pen this letter, to be sure and give the details to his partner back home in Virginia of everything that had transpired with Unique and the diamonds. Though he might have to do a little time, best believe her ass was going to pay in more ways than one. The latter made him smile to himself. She was going to get hers.
    The noise was so loud that he couldn’t concentrate. Dudes in his pod were playing cards, watching the game, talking on the phone, and plotting against each other—he could barely hear himself think. If his cellie hadn’t asked for “private time,” Fat Tee could have written his letters in there—he would at least have been able to hear himself think.
    Fat Tee had been in the infamous Rikers Island jail for seven days now, and in that time he’d been in two fights and got his butt kicked both times but at least he fought back. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to do his bid like this. Rikers was tough enough as it was, but not being from New York put him at a major disadvantage—a foreigner in a foreign land didn’t usually fare well in prison. Shit, he might as well have gotten arrested in Mexico or Thailand.
    He touched the flattened piece of cold steel that was concealed under his shirt between the waistband of his pants and his side to make sure it was still there. He’d bought the knife off a Puerto Rican for fifty dollars, which he sold his sneakers to get. The knife gave him some comfort, but not much. The new kid always had to prove that he wasn’t a chump before someone else proved that he was. That was the way the machine worked. And Fat Tee knew, in his heart, he wasn’t built for this shit.
    He was counting down the days until Friday, when Fat Tee’s lawyer had promised to get him a face-to-face with the DA. If Fat Tee gave up the people he claimed he’d got the diamonds from, and it all panned out, they could make a deal.
    Fat Tee had absolutely no problem giving up Unique’s ass. Better her than him. The only thing he was upset about was that he didn’t know the name of that tight-ass bitch that was with her. But in the end it didn’t matter. He had no intentions on taking the rap. FUCK THAT!
    Fat Tee dropped the letter in the mail to his partner and then went back to his cell to get the address for his lawyer. Cats were giving him the screw face. Nothing new. These up-north niggas thought that they were all that, he thought, that’s why we send them back in body bags when they tried to hustle in Richmond.
    He hoped his cellie was finish beating his dick, or whatever it was he needed to be alone. Their cell was on the upper floor. To get up the steps he had to walk through a maze of mean-mugging convicts.
    “Pardon me,” he said, sliding through the gauntlet of thugs to get to the second floor. Never missing the opportunity to show that they had the upper hand on him, they acted like they didn’t want to move out of his way. They paid him as much attention as they would an annoying fly. The tension was thick as day-old oatmeal.
     Making it to the top of the stairs without incident was a chore in itself. Fat Tee quickly walked to his cell and saw that his cellie was gone. Good, he thought. Maybe he could get a few minutes of “private time” for himself.
     Inside the cell, and lying on the bottom bunk, was a Straight Stuntin magazine and a bottle of lotion. Fat Tee started to close the metal door to the cell when it stopped cold on its steel hinges. A boot had stopped it from closing.
    Then the owner of the boot, along with a friend, pushed his way in, and shut the door behind them.
     Fat Tee said, “My cellie ain’t here,” not knowing what else to say.
   One of the dudes that had bombarded their way into his cell sported a bald head, was six-foot-four or better, and built like the Incredible Hulk. His sidekick was his polar opposite. He was barely over five-foot-five and seemed childlike.
      “We ain’t checking for your cellie, bee,” the Incredible Hulk said, flexing his muscles. “We here to deliver a message to you.”
     The cell was small—six by nine—and with three people standing inside, they were already crowding each other’s space.
     Fat Tee tried to relax. The fingers of his right hand were twitching as they hovered near his waist, inches away from the knife. He hoped that he wouldn’t need it, but if he did he was ready.
     Looking the Hulk straight in the eyes, Fat Tee asked, “Who is the message from, man?”
    Hulk smiled like he’d just won the lottery and took the one lump sum before saying with great pride, “Kennard.”
     It took a beat for the name to register, and another heartbeat before it meant anything to him. Kennard, the man whose fiancée he raped, blackmailed, disrespected, assaulted, and nearly killed. A frigid fear, cold as the steel under his shirt, flowed through his veins.
    Hulk said, “He wanted to send his regards . . . and his condolences.” The sound in Hulk’s voice had the finality of the lid closing on a casket.
    Fat Tee swallowed the lump in his throat and his fear in one gulp. Both went down hard. The line had been drawn. He knew that this altercation would only resolve itself with bloodshed. Fat Tee reached for his knife, his eyes never swaying from the dead irises of Hulk.
    Fat Tee had his blade—a six-inch piece of flattened steel—firmly in his hand before the Incredible Hulk even knew what happened. This wasn’t his first fucking barbecue. Fat Tee knew what it felt like to kill a man, and had no problem experiencing that feeling again, dé-jà-fucking-vu. His only regret was that he hadn’t set it off on one of these fools off the break.
    Fat Tee watched the Hulk’s eyes as they tracked the movement of the knife arcing toward his head. Hulk tensed, causing a vein to bulge in the side of his neck. Fat Tee beamed in on the vein, using it as his target. He saw fear bungee-jump into Hulk’s eyes.
    They were grossly mistaken if they thought he would lie down and be punked simply because he was outnumbered. Niggas from the R didn’t roll like that, he thought, as the knife in his hand got closer to sending its own message. Fuck Kennard and the Hulk.
    The blade found its target and went in smooth and easy.
    Shock replaced the fear in Hulk’s eyes.
    But it wasn’t the shock of being stabbed in his jugular or the shock of bleeding to death in a jail cell.  It was the shock of being taken out by an out-of-towner.
    Fat Tee had underestimated Hulk’s little sidekick, who was actually the real threat.
   Though Junior was twenty-two years old, he looked to be no older than fifteen years old, and nobody on God’s green earth would judge from looking at him that he was a certified stone-cold killer. And when Kennard found out that BG was on the island, he sent word for him to do what he did best. And though it was greatly appreciated when Kennard dropped 10Gs off at his momma’s house, Junior would have killed Fat Tee for a box of cupcakes. The truth of the matter was that he got off on it.
    Junior’s ice pick penetrated Fat Tee’s side like a Ginsu knife going though warm butter. With the speed of a Chinese prep cook, Junior brought the blade end out, six or seven times, at the blink of an eye, crippling Fat Tee.
     Fat Tee tried to grab the pointed steel skewer sticking out from his kidneys like some type of sick human shish kebab, when he got hit again in the neck. Hulk had backed away to the door. How many hands did the lil dude have? Fat Tee thought as he started to lose consciousness.
    Fat Tee reached for the ice pick protruding from his neck.
    Fat Tee could feel the life dripping out of his body as the hired killers kept jack-hammering away with the two ice picks. He felt his body weakening. He was losing too much blood to survive, but that was the idea, right?
    Junior had finally stopped stabbing him. No need for the overkill, like he’d done Unique. They left him in the dark room alone.
    Fat Tee fought to stay alive but all he could hear in his head was his grandma’s voice, saying the same thing over and over like a scratched record: “Boy, if you don’t start believing in karma, you might as well go ahead and be an atheist and not believe in God. Because what you do to others will be done to you!”
    In that cold jail cell, alone, far away from home, Fat Tee fought to stay alive.
    But like premature ejaculation, death came quick.