Trickery by Noire

“I will, baby, but you better watch more than that, Lil Lee. You better watch more than that.”
     
     

CHAPTER 12
     
    It was getting late when fourteen-year-old Taleah left the Crossover Community Center and walked back to her apartment building. An alarm was ringing loudly as she entered the lobby, signaling that once again that the elevator was stuck between floors, probably from some hoodlum kicking the shit outta the exterior door.
    Sighing, the young girl headed towards the building’s stairwell. She held her breath against the familiar onslaught of pissy air as she pushed against the door and began dashing up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Taleah made it all the way up to the third floor before she was forced to take some air into her burning lungs, and after inhaling one deep breath she sped up to the fifth floor. Exhaling with relief, she pushed through the exit door, turned the corner, and to her horror and surprise, she ran dead smack into a monster from her nightmares. 
    “Sup, Taleah,” the tall, skinny dude with the cornrows said as he stared at her from a pair of cold, merciless eyes. Taleah was mute with fear as he pushed up on her and forced her back through the door and into the pissy stairwell.
    She had been terrified of running into him ever since the night her best friend Princess had been found dead and she was forced to tell Trey where Princess had copped her drugs.
    Unbeknownst to Taleah, she had been spotted spittin’ fiyah on the stage at the Crossover Community Center earlier in the day. No, not by an A&R agent or by a big-time executive of a music label, but by a chick who was so diabolical and cold-blooded that she had busted up in a church and spit down into the casket of a pregnant thirteen-year old girl, and then viciously flung a handful of crack vials into the face of the corpse.
    “I want you to get that lil bitch Taleah,” Lil Lee had placed a call and barked an order to the undisputed most brutal member of the Divine Nine. “I want you to fuck that stank ho up!”
    Lil Lee pictured the way Trey had sat with his arm wrapped protectively around young Taleah at Princess’s funeral that day, and how he had pushed her safely to the floor when the gats came busting out. That niggah was gonna learn that nobody he cared about was safe from the grip of Lil Lee. Nobody.
    Locked in the glare of a murderer’s eyes, Taleah trembled. She had feared this day was coming. She had dreamed of it. She knew Trey had made the wrong drug dealer pay for Princess’s death, and now her best friend’s real killer had come to snuff her life out too. Tears fell down her cheeks. Her entire body was stiff with terror as the nightmare from her dreams fumbled in the pocket of his hoodie and came out with two small vials.
    “You know the rules, baby. Around here snitch-bitches get all kinds of stitches,” the young man said quietly as he backed her up against a cold wall. “But that ain’t always true.” He put his head back and laughed, and the cruel, eerie sound bounced off the concrete walls and echoed throughout the empty stairwell.
    “Sometimes snitches don’t get stitches,” he told her as he pulled out a clear glass stem and started packing it with crystals. “Sometimes them muh’fuckas just get . . . high. ”
     
    $$$$$
     
    It was real late when we got back to Trey’s apartment, and the house was so quiet that I could tell right away that Chiney wasn’t there. I didn’t have to wonder where she was because I already knew she was somewhere out on the streets chasing her girl Venus and chasing a high too. I understood how much it hurt Trey to see Chiney getting strung out on that street shit, but my mama had been a stone-cold junkie and I didn’t think barring Venus from his crib was gonna stop his sister from getting her fix.
    “You hungry?” Trey asked me as we walked into the living room. I plopped down on the couch. “Yeah,” I said. “A little bit.”
    I sat there