Back to the Streets Read online

  Flint

  Book 3: Back to the Streets

  Treasure Hernandez

  www.urbanbooks.net

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Copyright Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, I would like to thank God for all the blessings He has bestowed upon me.

  I will also like to thank all the Urban Books fans for supporting all the creative African-American writers.

  Please send all letters to Urban Books. They will make sure I get them.

  Holla at your girl!!!!

  Treasure Hernandez

  c/o Urban Books

  1199 Straightpath

  West Babylon, NY 11704

  Love & Peace,

  Treasure

  Chapter One

  Halleigh looked in the mirror and saw a person who bore no resemblance to the young woman she used to be. It seemed like just yesterday she was an excelling senior in high school and dating the most popular boy at school, who just happened to be the biggest up-and-coming basketball star since LeBron James. The two of them had shared champagne dreams of him signing a lucrative NBA contract and then moving the two of them as far away from the city of Flint as possible. But now, more than a year later, she was a high-school dropout, doing something for a living that she never imagined she could ever do.

  As Halleigh stood there, her mind wandered off to her first day on the job. She recalled walking through the park hand in hand with Mitch—she’d never forget the name of her first customer. She chuckled at the thought of how people could have mistaken them for longtime lovers instead of the strangers that they were.

  They weren’t even halfway to Mitch’s car when Halleigh’s nerves got the best of her. Her stomach churned, and she felt as though she might throw up. Now that she thought about it, she had thrown up just a little bit, enough where she could swallow it. As nasty as that might sound, she wasn’t about to let her customer in on the fact that she had no idea what the fuck she was doing. It might have been her first day on the job, but her customer didn’t need to know that.

  In the back seat of his ride, an old school song she had heard on the radio by LL Cool J crossed her mind: Back seat of my Jeep, let’s swing an episode. So now she was going to learn firsthand just exactly what LL meant—only, her episode was about to take place in the back seat of a 2007 Cadillac Seville.

  Sitting in that back seat, she couldn’t even remember how she had ended up there. Everything else that followed turned into a blur. Now all Halleigh could remember were two things: the name (Mitch) and the price (two-fifty). Two hundred and fifty dollars is what it had cost her first customer to take ownership of his merchandise, which just happened to be Halleigh herself.

  “What happened to me?” Halleigh asked herself. She shook her head in shame as she recalled her recent past. Not only had she been trickin’, but to escape the pain and the reality of what she was doing to herself, she added salt to the wounds by pumping drugs into her body.

  Before her days of whoring and drugging, her life had been all planned out, and not one of her plans had consisted of being pimped out to the highest bidder. She was supposed to marry Malek—a rising superstar athlete, and her savior—and live happily ever after. She’d wanted it all, everything that being on the arm of an NBA star offered, and was ready to accept her position as Malek’s wifey.

  Unfortunately, Halleigh’s real life didn’t live up to her fairytale fantasy. Her life had gone from heaven to hell in the blink of an eye, and she’d had enough. She couldn’t take this ghetto-ass lifestyle she had succumbed to.

  Halleigh felt the tears flow down her face. They weren’t tears of force that came from heaving and overreacting. They were true tears of a broken, hopeless spirit, and they stained her face as she looked down at the gun in her hand.

  The day Halleigh copped the gun, she had actually intended to ask her get-high buddy, Scratch, to cop her some heroin. But then, on her way to meet Scratch at their spot in the alley where they had initially met when he tried to rob her with a stick concealed to look like a gun, she noticed how people were looking at her now. She felt as if she were deformed or something, the way they grimaced.

  Having been nothing short of a dime-piece, Halleigh was used to turning the heads of gawking men. She was used to the envious glares of women, but this time, the attention she was receiving was different. They were stares of disgust and pity.

  As she walked by a used appliance store, she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the window. She stopped in her tracks and gasped at the frail sight before her. Slowly, her hands began to roam her face, just to confirm that the reflection was actually hers. Were those really her eyes she was looking into? Once upon a time those eyes had been full of life and energy, no matter how much negativity they had witnessed.

  Halleigh allowed her hands to roam down her body. Wearing tight-fitting jeans with knee-high stiletto boots and a sequined top, she thought she looked just fine, but underneath her hands she could feel almost every bone in her body, every rib. Taking a long, hard look at herself, Halleigh, too, was disgusted by what she saw.

  The storeowner interrupted her when he came out of the store and asked if he could help her with anything. Without saying a word, she walked off crying. As far as Halleigh was concerned, what she had just seen wasn’t her, but a disintegrating corpse of her former self. She was as good as dead. She felt like death anyway. Hell, she couldn’t remember the last time she had felt free and alive. That was the moment she decided she was better off dead than living the way she had been living.

  By the time she met up with Scratch, she had a plan all mapped out. As long as Scratch was willing to be her accomplice, she didn’t see how the plan could fail.

  When she asked Scratch to help her cop a gun, he wasn’t for it at first. He was trying to get high with Halleigh’s money, not waste it on a cold piece of metal. But after realizing that he could cop a gun and still have money left over to get a hit for himself, he obliged her. She hadn’t told him what she intended to do with the weapon. He never asked.

  Now, here Halleigh stood in the bathroom of what she called home, which was nothing more than another prison, as far as she was concerned. Manolo, a.k.a. Daddy, told them when they could leave, when they couldn’t, and how long they could stay gone. He needed to know where his money was at all times.

  If only I could see the look on that motherfucker’s face when he finds me, Halleigh thought with a half-witted smile, the gun to her temple. His greedy ass probably won’t even see my brains splattered all over the walls; he’ll see a pile of useless currency.

  Halleigh trembled as the cold steel pressed against her clammy skin. Her body began to break out into a cold, nervous sweat.

  Moments from her life flashed before her eyes—all the heartache and tragedy she’d experienced—and she had a drastic decision to make. Live or die? Fight or retreat? Win or lose? She was tired of struggling to survive in a city that had no love for her. She was choosing death, and there was no turning back.

  Halleigh put her finger just
above the trigger. She squinted her eyes closed tight, and just when she was about to squeeze, there was a knock on the door.

  “Hal, what are you doing in there? Open the door!” Mimi’s voice came from the other side of the bathroom door, where she stood in the hallway. “You’ve been in there forever. What’s going on?” This was the second time in the past half hour Mimi had knocked on the door to check on Halleigh. She felt as though something wasn’t kosher.

  Halleigh, who had actually been locked in the small bathroom for the past forty-five minutes, didn’t respond.

  “Halleigh?” Mimi called again. “Open the door. Why you locking doors around this mu’fucka anyway? You know Manolo will have a fit.”

  The last time one of Manolo’s girls called herself “locking a door,” Manolo made it so that she never wanted to be locked up behind a closed door again in her life. For hours Manolo kept her locked inside a dark closet. The girl lost her mind and had to be committed to an institution afterwards. As hard as Mimi had tried to calm the girl down, it was to no avail. Come to find out, the girl’s stepfather used to lock her in the closet when she was twelve, but not before running up in her like she was a grown woman.

  Mimi had relayed the story to Halleigh, so she hoped Halleigh would take heed and unlock that door with a quickness.

  Halleigh’s arm shook uncontrollably as Mimi continued knocking. “Just pull the trigger,” she whispered to herself. “All of the pain will go away if you just pull the goddamn trigger. Just end it.” A small cry escaped her lips. She lowered the gun.

  “Halleigh? Are you all right? You crying?” Mimi said, her tone now filled with concern.

  “Open the damn door.” The fear in her voice translated as if she was angry.

  When Halleigh failed to respond, Mimi sensed that something was terribly wrong. “Tasha!” she turned around and yelled. “There’s something wrong with Halleigh!”

  Wearing only a bra and panties, Tasha appeared from behind her bedroom door. “What do you mean, something’s wrong with her?” she asked. With Tasha being in charge of all of Manolo’s girls, she was definitely concerned. If anything happened to one of them, she would be the first person Manolo looked to.

  “I mean she’s in this mu’fucka with the door locked and she’s crying and shit.” Mimi then began to whisper. “I don’t want the bitch to do nothing crazy. You know she just been through all that shit with Malek.” Mimi then got an I-told-you-so attitude. “I told y’all she wasn’t cut out for this shit.”

  “Fuck you whispering for? Like she can’t hear you.” As far as Tasha was concerned, this was not the time for Mimi to be right about her call on Halleigh, especially since Mimi was the one who brought her to the house and got her into the game in the first place.

  Tasha came out of her bedroom and walked up to the door. She put her ear against it. She, too, could hear Halleigh whimpering. “Hal, open up the door so we can talk,” she urged. She picked up from where Mimi left off and began knocking on the door. “Halleigh, listen, just open up the door.” Tasha, her eyes wide with fright, turned around and stared at Mimi.

  “I told you,” Mimi said, folding her arms pretzel-style. After all the drama and heartache that Halleigh had experienced, Mimi wasn’t surprised that she was flipping out. As a matter of fact, the only thing that did surprise her was that she hadn’t done it sooner.

  In all honesty, Mimi thought that Halleigh wouldn’t last after her first trick. But she didn’t care, considering she had already gotten her $500 finder’s fee for bringing the new girl home.

  Halleigh could hear Tasha and Mimi calling for her, but ignored them. She knew what she had to do, and she wasn’t going to let anything distract her from doing it. She lifted the semi-automatic to her head again and cocked it. No matter how hard Halleigh had tried to convince herself over the past few months that things would get better, they hadn’t. She felt that shooting her brains out would be a quick end to what felt like a long, miserable life.

  Click! Click!

  “Oh shit!” Mimi panicked. “Was that a fuckin’ gun?”

  Before Tasha could reply, they heard loud sounds coming from the bathroom.

  Bam!

  Mimi and Tasha hit the deck, faces buried in the brown carpet.

  “Does that answer your question?” Tasha said to Mimi.

  “That crazy bitch is trying to shoot us,” Mimi whispered.

  After a few seconds of silence, Tasha stood up and pounded her open hand frantically against the door. “Halleigh, if you trying to fuck with our minds, it worked. Now open the damn door!”

  There was no reply from the other side.

  “Say ‘Boo,’ fart or do something, damn it. Just at least let us know that you’re okay.”

  That’s when it hit Mimi what was really going on. She immediately stood up from the floor. “Oh my God! She shot herself, didn’t she?” she asked Tasha. “The broad done shot herself!” Mimi shouted in a panic. “Tasha, do something! Ain’t there a key to this motherfucker?” Mimi tried to turn the knob.

  Tasha felt helpless. As the madam of the house, she was supposed to keep all of the Manolo Mamis in line. That was why Manolo had appointed her to the job. But, as a woman, Tasha also felt like she was supposed to protect them. She hated the fact that she might not have been able to protect one of the girls from her own self.

  Tasha stepped back a couple of feet and mustered up all the strength she had in her body. Next, she charged toward the bathroom door and threw her body against it. When she finally broke it off its hinges, she raced into the bathroom to find Halleigh laid out on the floor with blood behind her head.

  “Halleigh, baby girl, what have you done?” Tasha said as she kneeled down next to Halleigh’s body.

  The moan that was released from Halleigh’s lips startled her.

  “My head . . .” Halleigh moaned. “I think I hit my head when I fell.” Halleigh grabbed the back of her head.

  The sound of the gunshot had been deafening as it ricocheted off the bathroom wall. On top of that, the force of pulling the trigger on the weapon had been so great that it knocked Halleigh off her feet and onto the floor.

  Tasha didn’t know whether to be happy that Halleigh was alive, or pissed that she had scared them half to death. “Fuck is you doing?” Tasha screamed, deciding to be mad. Her shoulder throbbed from the impact of breaking into the bathroom door, but she disregarded the pain as she picked the gun up from the floor and handed it over her shoulder to Mimi.

  “Hey, watch how you handling that thing,” Mimi said, carefully taking it from Tasha’s hand. She then disappeared to get rid of the gun.

  Tasha didn’t pay Mimi any mind. She focused her attention on Halleigh, who began to shake life a leaf.

  Halleigh looked down at the blood on her hand then at the bullet hole in the wall. “I could have . . .” Halleigh hesitated. “I could have . . .” Her cries built up in her throat as she struggled to contain her emotions.

  “Shhh. Come here,” Tasha said, pulling Halleigh close and comforting her. “It’s okay, Hal. Everything is gon’ be all right.”

  After a few moments, Tasha pulled away from Halleigh and looked at her. “I’ve told you that everything is going to be all right. You just gotta hold on, ma.” She put her arms around her friend again and rocked her slowly.

  Mimi reappeared at the doorway after burying the gun in a drawer full of lingerie. She looked down at a visibly shaken Halleigh. “Is she all right?” she asked Tasha.

  “Yeah, she’s okay. She’s gon’ be fine,” Tasha replied, still holding Halleigh tightly.

  Mimi was never one to get emotional. The only thing that made her cry was missing out on money, so when Tasha looked up and noticed Mimi’s eyes full of tears, she outstretched her other arm to invite Mimi into the embrace. Mimi quickly bent down and filled in the circle and hugged Halleigh as well.

  “It’s time for this to stop,” Tasha stated, her voice cracking. “We can’t do this to ourselves anymore.
Manolo is the only person getting something out of all this.” Tasha looked around. “So he keeps a roof over our heads—We can get that shit on our own.” She shook her head. “I can believe we’ve been selling ourselves short all this time. I mean, he’s beaten Hal down to the point where she feels she needs to take her own life. This is bullshit. Nobody should have that much power over us. Nobody!” Tasha had to fight back her own tears. “You and me, Mimi, we’re a different breed. We’re strong. We can handle this life better than Halleigh, but look at her. Look what this is doing to her.”

  Mimi nodded.

  Tasha shook her head. “First she was trying to kill herself by shooting that shit into her body, and now she’s trying to shoot herself, period. This is crazy.”

  “When black people start killing themselves, oh yeah, you know shit done got too crazy,” Mimi agreed.

  Halleigh was too distraught to reply. She had just attempted to take her own life—and she might have succeeded if not for the fact that her heroin-wasted muscles couldn’t even hold the weight of the gun to aim properly. Otherwise, her two friends would’ve been weeping over a bleeding corpse. But that’s what Halleigh felt like, anyway—dead, and bleeding on the inside.

  “I hear what you saying, Tash,” Mimi stated, “but you know as well as I do that there ain’t no way we leaving Manolo and living to tell about it. Ya heard me?” Mimi stood up. “You already know how he is, Tasha. You’ve been around longer than any of us. So you tell us what happens when a chick tries to walk away from Manolo.”

  Tasha relaxed her arms to her side and just swallowed.

  “Exactly!” Mimi said, smacking her lips. “So you can give your ‘Obama speeches’ all day long, telling us what we need to do, but I want you to show me how we’re supposed to do it. Tell me, Tasha, how are we supposed to get out of this situation? And if we do make it out, how we gon’ survive? All we used to doing is selling pussy. So what’s the difference whether we’re selling it for ourselves or Manolo? Selling pussy is selling pussy.”