Eraserheads Read online

  Eraserheads:

  A Hood Misfits Novel

  Brick & Storm

  www.urbanbooks.net

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Prelude - Auto

  Chapter 1 - Smiley

  Chapter 2 - Code

  Chapter 3 - Boots

  Chapter 4 - Auto

  Chapter 5 - Smiley

  Chapter 6 - Code

  Chapter 7 - Boots

  Chapter 8 - Auto

  Chapter 9 - Smiley

  Chapter 10 - Code

  Chapter 11 - Boots

  Chapter 12 - Auto

  Chapter 13 - Smiley

  Chapter 14 - Code

  Chapter 15 - Boots

  Chapter 16 - Auto

  Chapter 17 - Smiley

  Chapter 18 - Code

  Chapter 19 - Code

  Chapter 2 0 - Boots

  Chapter 21 - Auto

  Urban Books, LLC

  300 Farmingdale Road, NY-Route 109

  Farmingdale, NY 11735

  Eraserheads: A Hood Misfits Novel

  Copyright © 2018 Brick & Storm

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior consent of the Publisher, except brief quotes used in reviews.

  ISBN: 978-1-9458-5543-6

  This is a work of fiction. Any references or similarities to actual events, real people, living or dead, or to real locales are intended to give the novel a sense of reality. Any similarity in other names, characters, places, and incidents is entirely coincidental.

  Distributed by Kensington Publishing Corp.

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  Prelude

  Auto

  “Yo, Auto, some shit done went down with Lelo and Stitch.”

  Those were the words that started all the mayhem. If I’d known those words would come with a whirlwind of change, I would have pulled Lelo and Stitch out of that desert and just said fuck it. I would have strategically found another route to have our merchandise transported. But in the line of work I was in, if you didn’t address disrespect, it was like a domino effect. Niggas would start coming out of the woodwork to test you. Would see the glitch in your system and start to take advantage of it.

  My head jerked up as I sat in my office. Many days I’d sit there and have flashbacks when shit wasn’t going right. Anytime something fell off course, I would always think back to those days when I was in the system. Being a juvenile offender had started me on my way to a life of crime.

  Lelo and Stitch were supposed to check in hours ago, and when they hadn’t, my spidey senses kicked in. I’d gotten so used to the smell of the shop that I could oftentimes taste the grime and oil in the back of my throat. Now I tasted rage.

  I frowned at Seymore as he used his hands to roll his wheelchair into the room. He was covered in oil and transmission fluid. Smelled like he had been outside. I never knew exactly how to explain that smell, but Mama Joyce, one of my foster moms, always hated when we smelled like outside. As an adult, now I hated the smell too. Seymore was eighteen years old. He was a kid I’d rescued from the system. A bullet to the back had cut down his chances of ever walking again. But he could work on an engine like a pro. He was ASE certified, just like all the mechanics in my shop. The one thing I liked about him was that he never let his disablement slow him down.

  “The fuck you mean, something went down?” I barked at him.

  He adjusted his thick glasses. “Lelo said he been trying to call you, but you ain’t answering, so he called the shop.”

  “Why in hell didn’t he call Code?”

  “Said she ain’t answering, either.”

  I slapped my hand down on the desk, then stood, remembering I’d left my phone in my car, on the charger. It was a bad habit of mine that I had to break, especially in the business I was in.

  Who am I? I laughed inwardly. I really had no idea who I was. I knew what the hood had raised me to be, but that was about it. I’d never really known my mother. I remembered faint images of her smiling face. When I was four, some woman decided she didn’t like an Asian woman on her corner. Took a blade to my mother’s neck. I’d been in the system ever since.

  I could never really explain what it was like to grow up the way I did. From the womb right to the bowels of the hood, I’d been thrown. I was the product of rape. I wouldn’t know my father if he slapped me in the face. I’d gone from foster home to foster home during my childhood. Met a lot of people along the way. Some good. Some I couldn’t give a fuck about in the long view of things.

  Being an Asian kid in a majority black hood, I had had to learn how to survive by any means necessary, and I had had to do it quick. There was no room for the weak in the jungle. You had to adapt. It was the survival of the fittest, and I’d seen plenty of niggas who weren’t fit to survive. All I knew about my culture I’d learned from reading. I knew I was Asian. Just didn’t know which country in Asia I’d come from.

  The streets of the A had turned me into the businessman I was. Me and my crew specialized in what some would call the auto business. From the car lot we owned to the industrial-sized auto shop, if you wanted something, we got it for you. We stripped cars down to their skeleton and rebuilt them. We could transform your ride into whatever you wanted, however you wanted.

  Did we always get the cars or the parts legally? I’d plead the Fifth. We “borrowed” cars from all over the globe. Had them delivered to us, made the vin numbers disappear, stripped them down, distributed the parts, and rebuilt them into custom-made rides you couldn’t find anywhere else. If the law had been looking to take us down, they’d call us a chop shop, but we were much more than that.

  We called ourselves Eraserheads. From skimming credit cards to erasing a bad credit history and even erasing your identity, for the right price, we could do that for you. Our names resonated in the underground sector. Yet we worked only with those who we knew had our best interests at heart.

  Every nigga had an agenda. One of my homeboys I’d met in one of the group homes I’d been in had taught me that long ago, and I’d kept it with me. Even as I’d selected my team, I’d kept that motto in mind. Shit had been off with Code lately. Some shit wasn’t adding up. Although we were partners in this business, sometimes Code made me question if we had the same agenda.

  Chapter 1

  Smiley

  All that nigga had had to do was die.

  All he had had to do was die in that fucking car crash after leaving my mama and me. He’d beaten her ass to a bloody pulp while I lay on the floor at her feet, with his boot print on my damn face. All he had to do, since we meant nothing to him, was die.

  Then we could have gotten his military benefits. I wouldn’t have had to get lost in the streets just to keep a roof over our heads. Keep food on our table. Keep the bills paid up. Keep my mama supplied with the meds she needed for her sickle-cell anemia. Finish out my community college classes, which my mom had insisted I take. But no, he hadn’t even handled that right. He hadn’t died in the fucking car crash, like all drunk drivers should.

  So I had had to snatch and take to the streets, while being smart about it, all because of that nigga. But had he died when he was supposed to? Nah. He hadn’t been able to give us that peace.

  While chilling in the streets and taking care of home, I had to listen to caseworker after caseworker deny my mama what she needed. Because of my thieving habits, I had been put in a scared-straight type of juvie program at fourteen, and then I h
ad got out and started the process all over again. Yup, that crap had had me abandoning my mama for a little bit, but it had only made me stronger in the process.

  I used to listen to a badass street poet in Decatur whom my mom had a lot of respect for, and he influenced me a great deal. The poet used to say to us girls, “When a woman is a survivor, if she can make it through the shards of glass that are life, then she is a queen worthy to tackle the jungles of the hood.” So I remembered that. Well, I tried to at least.

  Then one day, by the grace of God, I got an excellent piece of mail. One last reminder of that nigga who had skeeted me out in my mama’s womb. Info on that nigga registering in New York, at the VA. See, how it worked was, since he was still married to my mama, all that type of information still needed to come her way. So that meant that they had to update her too about the possible pension coming his way.

  Yeah, that nigga had messed up with that little bit of info, and now his blood was on my hands.

  But it was whatever. My mama was dead because he had refused to send money to help her. She had left me a little old ranch-style, white house with a wraparound porch and a couple of grand she had hiding in her account from when she used to work for the state. All of it just for me. I had also got that nigga’s pension money. Albeit a little late. Funny shit, that was.

  Fuck that nigga. Glad I had watched him down too many psych meds mixed with coke and his favorite white Hennessy. Shit, what did you expect from a wife-beating, wife-raping, gloating sociopath with the mind of a marine?

  Anyway, now, at age nineteen, I was about to get locked up for being stupid and trusting a bitch because she had said her baby needed some necessities, like milk and diapers. The little change I was making while working at Morton’s The Steakhouse wasn’t shit. Stealing was my forte. The more I stayed in the streets, the better I got it. I had learned how to skim ATMs from this white girl I used to run with. Most people did it the hard way, like busting the ATM open and taking the cash. Actually, those people were stupid.

  The white girl had taught me how to skim. Skimming was like identity theft for debit cards. We used little hidden electronics to get the information stored on a person’s card and to record PIN numbers. Most people paid no attention to what was going on when their card didn’t work the first time around at an ATM. They’d take the card, look at it like something was wrong with it, then put it back in the slot to try to withdraw cash again.

  It had started off small, a couple hundred here and there, and then I had started to go for more. When skimming got too hot, I had started swiping credit cards. Creating new cards with fake identities had become a hobby of mine. Mix that with joyriding in cars I would steal just to get around and I was good in my little gig, until this scared-ass broad had ratted me out. Now I sat staring at a sour-faced nigga who looked like Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

  Trick had ratted me out, and now I was stuck. I hated disloyal bitches, and it just proved again that the only person I could trust was myself, now that my mama was gone.

  “You’re too pretty to be a thug. All that pretty hair on your head. And those big copper-brown eyes lined up like you’re some kind of Egyptian queen. Granted, you’re sitting here looking like some Afrocentric goth too. That black lipstick on those big lips of yours clashing with your cocoa-butter skin.”

  Uncle Phil rubbed his double chin while eating me up with his eyes.

  “Damn, you’re pretty . . . but you gotta be fucking stupid to be running the streets, stealing credit cards, Ms. Gaines,” he declared.

  My nose crinkled up, and I felt sick to my stomach. This fool was watching me like he wanted to screw me. Matter of fact, I knew he did. It was all in his eyes. Yup, I was sitting there looking like an Afrocentric goth. It was my thing.

  I sported a ripped-up black-and-white printed top that showed my bare stomach and a hint of my side tattoos, especially the ankh resting on my hipline. Ripped blue jean shorts with black leggings and black boots constituted the rest of my attire. The hair the detective liked, my black sister lock extensions tipped in purple, fell over one of my shoulders and hanged down to my breasts. Half of my hair was shaved off and revealed the hooped ear cuff in my ear. In my nose was a small gold hoop. I tapped my middle finger, the one that was missing the midi knuckle ring I usually wore. It was back in my locker at work. Assholes had snatched me up before I could change into my work clothes.

  While Uncle Phil babbled on about how pretty I was, how well my curves went with my thin frame, and how he liked that I had tits big enough to play with but small enough that they weren’t smothering, I yawned. Dude was trying to get me to respond. I had nothing to say. Nada. I sat with my well-known blank stare and counted off the time. Five-o had me in here on suspicion. That had become apparent when the Michelin Man, the man sitting next to Uncle Phil, revealed that my supervisor thought he had seen me taking cards with Keisha on camera.

  Shit was funny, because I never was that open with it. Why? Because I had a photographic memory, plus an app I had created on my cell. I took all the personal information I needed, then used it later to track them down on the Net and go from there. Sometimes I’d also overcharge a card by ringing up a greater amount, as if the customer wanted cash back. That way I could pocket a little change. Well, this time, I had been trying to get Keisha to charm and distract the customers as I worked their card and hit them with tiny surcharges. This broad instead had got scared and had freaked out in the restaurant.

  I had had to stop what I was trying to do, clear out the app I had on my cell that was the hidden card-jacking program, and do things as normal. So what the cops had got on the cameras was really me acting normal and charging the customers as I usually did. I realized that Keisha hadn’t played me all the way to the left. She couldn’t have, anyway, as I had never told her how I took from the customers. Keisha had just said that I was helping her take cards, which was a damn shame since I had been helping that bitch out.

  “So tell me, Nia, why would you mess up a good thing at Morton’s and steal from your employer and their customers? From your records, it looks like you’ve been doing right. You were raised well, and you’re going back to school too, little thief. Shit, what’s up your sleeve, then, little Miss Brown Sugar?” Uncle Phil said.

  My eyes got wide. I looked away and bowed my head in fake shame. “I didn’t steal anything. Keisha is just tripping from all those hormones and stuff because she’s pregnant again. I promise. What you see is me doing my job. I’m not stealing from those people.”

  Like hell I wasn’t. The customers I would steal from were mainly the rich assholes with the nasty attitudes and blinged-out wrists. So I was lying, and since Uncle Phil was all on my pussy, I figured I’d play the game. Besides, I was mentally freaking the heck out. I didn’t want to get caught. I didn’t want to be locked up again, and I really wanted to go home. But if I showed fear, these cops would chew me up. I hated cops, anyway, due to their crooked-ass ways.

  Anytime my mama had called those niggas for help, it was as if she had called for nothing. My daddy’s last name being what it was, the cops were in his pocket. So I was playing hard just to figure out how to get out of this mess. Tears rimmed my eyes. I glanced up at him, then down again. I crossed my arms, then shook my head, as if I was angry. I was a good actress. Could get an Oscar for most of the shit I’d acted my way out of.

  “I just lost my mama, okay? I don’t have time to think about taking shit. I mean that. I just want to go home and try to get my mama’s shit together so I can bury her peacefully,” I said, choking up. I bit my lip.

  That was another lie. In keeping with my mom’s request, I had had her cremated and had snuck her ashes into the Atlanta Botanical Garden and had poured them out among the yellow lilies, her favorite. I checked out the detectives, but my stares were greeted with silence. I wasn’t sure if the punks believed me, so I turned in my chair, and that was when I noticed a new face. Some blond guy in uniform. He whispered some
thing to the Michelin Man.

  A frown formed on the Michelin Man’s face, and he addressed me. “Ms. Gaines. It looks like we can’t hold you any longer. This is your lucky day, but we will be looking you up again.”

  Delight flashed in my eyes, but my face didn’t show it. My mama had called me Smiley. She’d given me that name when I was a baby because I was always smiling. But I had stopped smiling long ago, when my pops had started beating her. Those memories haunted me no matter how far I ran from my past.

  I asked the detectives why they were letting me go. They igged me, but then the blond told me it was because they had nothing on me, except a camera shot of me that wasn’t clear. And, of course, the detectives then opened their mouths to let me know that they would be watching me and hauling my ass back in once the investigation was done.

  I really didn’t care about all that. I just needed to get out of this place. I didn’t need these fools breathing all down my neck, all because Keisha had got scared and hadn’t been able to follow through. I couldn’t blame her for that, but there was something about her that was rubbing me the wrong way about the whole situation. But I didn’t have time to think about it.

  Once the paperwork was processed, I was taken from one holding cell to another one. About two hours later, they finally let me out. I went back to my job, cleaned out my locker except for my uniform, and headed home. I didn’t want to talk to my bosses. I knew they already viewed me as sketchy due to all of this, but I kinda hoped that it all would blow over somehow. Maybe my mama would look out for me, because I was doing all of this just to survive until I figured out what I wanted from this life.

  Back in my neighborhood, I clutched my bag and rushed past houses and neighbors, who always looked out for us in this dangerous but safe zone. I knew it sounded crazy, but even though this neighborhood was kinda dangerous, we weren’t the trap. My area was actually cool. Every Saturday there was an event called Spoken Word in the Park, with damn good barbecue, soul food, and all kinds of vendors.