Carl Weber's Kingpins: Los Angeles

Book 11: Kingpins

by C.N. Phillips

Genres: African American Urban

Synopsis

Join in as C. N. Phillips paints a kingpin story the way it has never been done before. To some it will be a beautiful mural; to others it will be a brutal massacre.

Ever since he was a child, the only thing Cyril Anderson wanted was to be down with his brother Cane's crew. Cane Anderson, leader of the notorious Bankroll Crips, was invincible—or so Cyril thought.

On the night of Cyril's initiation, things take a terrible turn and leave Cane lying dead in a pool of his own blood. Now the leader of a blood-thirsty gang, there is only one thing that Cyril wants to do: seek revenge.

When he learns that the man behind Cane's death is none other than Arnell "Dubb" Lewis, the current kingpin of Los Angeles, it is up to Cyril to figure out why. He begins a bloody journey to redemption with a heart as black as the night sky and a team of loyal hitters behind him.

Release date: November 26, 2019

Publisher: Urban Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

“Bro, look at me! Look at me! Stay with me, Cane!” I said as I held my older brother in my arms. I looked frantically at the person in the driver’s seat of Cane’s ’86 Cutlass Supreme. “Drive faster, Nine!”

“Cuz, I’m going as fast as I can. Just keep the pressure on his wounds!”

My eyes fell back on my big brother, Cane Anderson. The Cane Anderson. He was supposed to be invincible; nothing was supposed to be able to touch him. However, there he was, lying in my lap, bleeding and struggling for air. I clutched him close to me and pressed the two pieces of his shirt that I’d ripped off on the places where he’d been shot. It seemed useless, because his blood was still seeping out and getting all over his precious white leather seats. My shirt and basketball shorts were stained with blood as well, but I wouldn’t let him go.

“Rell . . .” Cane’s voice came out as a forced whisper.

“Save your energy, bro. Don’t speak.”

“Rell,” Cane repeated, not listening to me. Shakily, he extended a bloody hand to my face and patted my cheek. “I want better for you.”

“Cane, we’re almost at the hospital, bro. Hold on.”

“It’s over for me. I can feel it. It’s all on you now. You got it, baby boy.”

His words were hitting me right in my chest. He was talking to me like it was the last time I was going to see him. He couldn’t die; I wouldn’t let him. But looking at the state he was in, I didn’t know what else there was that I could do. I felt useless.

“This is our life, Cane. You and me, remember? Forever! We’re almost there. Just hold on. Please don’t leave me.”

Cane smiled up at me with red teeth. It looked more like a grimace. He dropped his shaky hand back down to his chest and gave a pained chuckle. “You always did want to walk in my shoes, huh? But look at me now. You’re your own man, Rell. Be that.”

“I know who I am!”

“No, who you are is not who I am. You ain’t like me, Rell. You’re better. You’ve always been better.”

“Cane, I ain’t better than you, man. You’re Cane Anderson. The Cane Anderson, and that’s why you can’t die. You can’t—”

“Listen,” he interrupted. “You’ve always been better than me. I kept a lot from you. I thought I was protecting you. But it looks like I’ma just hurt you in the end. I was just trying to give you a better life. One that you could be proud of. I didn’t want to say good-bye like this, but I guess I don’t have a choice. You got the juice now, Rell.”

“Cane—”

That time when he cut me off, he grabbed my shirt and pulled me closer to him. “Everything that was mine is yours now. Take care of this car. You know she’s my baby. I love you, baby boy.”

“Who did this, Cane?” I asked, trying to ignore his words. I refused to believe that he was not going to be with me tomorrow or the next day. “Tell me! Was it the Mexicans? Cane!”

“I’m sorry. It was all for you, Rell.” Cane opened his mouth to say something else, but he started choking and no words came out.

His body began to convulse, and I did everything I could to stabilize him, but it was no use. Blood spilled out of Cane’s mouth, and his body jerked three times before he went completely still.

While we were growing up, Cane would always tell me not to cry. That a real man didn’t let others see him in a moment of weakness. Yet, right then, I felt the hot tears stream down my face and saw them fall on his cheek. I shook him, and when he didn’t respond, I shook him again.

“Bro . . .” I jerked him again. “Nooo. Cane . . . Cane!”

My face dropped to my brother’s forehead, and I cried so hard that my sobs were silent. No horror I had ever experienced in my life could compare to that moment. He was gone. My big brother was dead in my arms, and there was nothing that I could do about it.

“We’re here,” I heard Nine say from the front seat. “I’ll help you get him out.” Nine must have turned around in his seat and seen Cane, because the next thing he said was, “Oh, shit, cuz! Cane!” Then he jumped out of the car and started screaming, “Help! Somebody come help my friend! Please! Help!”

The back door of the Cutlass was suddenly yanked open, and Cane was taken from my arms. I watched as hospital personnel put him on a stretcher and rushed him toward the emergency entrance. I must have gotten up to follow them, because somehow I was out of the car. Nine and I ran behind the stretcher. Once we were inside, the nurses pushed Cane through a set of double doors, but when Nine and I tried to go through too, they stopped us.

“Wait out here,” one of the nurses said and pointed in the direction of the waiting room. “Please.”

I knew the drill: you sat down in the lobby and waited for them to tell you what you already knew. I slowly walked toward the large waiting room, ignoring the eyes on my bloody clothes, and took a seat in the corner. I felt Nine sit in the seat next to me, but we didn’t speak to each other. There were no words to say. Cane was supposed to be bulletproof, at least that was what I used to tell myself. When I got old enough, I’d realized that gang life was more than just throwing up sets, talking cool, and making money. I’d been thirteen when I actually started paying attention to the things happening around me. After our father died in a construction accident at work and our mother overdosed on pain medication due to the stress of it all, we’d lived with our grandmother, Nanny Lu, our mother’s mother. She was poor and couldn’t afford to take us in, but she had, anyway.

“Family doesn’t turn their back on family,” she would always say.

She was an old LOC, so she and Cane had connected on levels he never could with anyone else. She was born and bred in the hood, and in her eyes, Cane could do no wrong. Even when her daughter would tell her about all the fights he’d gotten in, she would defend him.

“He’s a soldier, that’s all,” she would say in defense of her grandson.

I recalled this one time I was with her at church. Cane was supposed to have come with us, but he’d never shown up. I could tell she was unsettled the entire sermon, but I didn’t understand why. When we got back to her house, the first thing she did was turn on the news in her kitchen and sit at her moonstone kitchen table. It didn’t dawn on me until the breaking story came on the TV that she was looking for something. Well, she found it when she saw Cane’s mug shot plastered all over the television screen.

“The men seen pictured here were arrested last night in connection with the burglary of a Beverly Hills home,” said the TV reporter covering the story. “It is said that they made away with over two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of items. More on this story when we return.”

Nanny Lu flicked off the television and then dropped the remote on the table. She stood up, and although she was only five feet five, with a petite frame, right then she seemed like a giant. She exhaled a long breath as she made her way to the phone on the wall in the kitchen.

“I knew someone had rummaged through my bill stack,” Nanny Lu said aloud to herself as she picked up the phone and dialed a number. “He’s getting sloppy. Now, if he’s going to do something like that, the least he could do is tell somebody.”

I didn’t understand why my brother would have even tried to break into and enter somebody’s home. I knew he was a Crip and he sold drugs, but I didn’t know he was out there doing anything like that. Seeing him on the television and the camera shots of the house that was burglarized put fear in my stomach. There were police cars and yellow tape everywhere. That was never a good thing. Thoughts of me never seeing my big brother again crossed my thirteen-year-old mind that day.

“Bruno,” Nanny Lu said into the phone, twisting the cord in her fingers. “Oh, shut up, you old fool! I ain’t calling you for nothing like that now. I wouldn’t even let you sniff this cat if you paid me! I’m calling to cash in on that favor that you owe me.”

I never knew what kind of favor Nanny Lu cashed in. All I knew was that Cane was home in twenty-four hours, and I never heard anything else about it. Still, that was enough to make me want to stick close to him. He and Nanny Lu were all I had left, and losing them would mean losing myself. That was when I started banging too. I already knew how to fight, but I learned how to shoot too. Nanny caught me with my first pistol at age fourteen, and instead of telling me to stay off the streets, she said something completely to the contrary.

“You young black boys have only three ways out these days. With a book, a ball, or a gun. Since you’ve obviously made your choice, just do whatever it is your brother says to do out there. And there is only one rule.”

“What’s that?”

“You always come home to me, hear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

A sudden clearing of a throat cleared my mind of its thoughts and brought me back to the present. I glanced up and saw a tall Caucasian doctor with blond hair looming over me. His jaw was clenched, and his eyes spoke the words I was expecting to hear.

“He’s . . . ,” he began.

“Gone,” I said, finishing for him, nodding my head twice as more tears fell from my eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” the doctor said. “We did everything we could. However, he was pronounced dead on arrival.”

It looked like Cane was going to officially break our promise to Nanny Lu tonight. As I thought about Cane, the doctor’s words began to run together and he faded into the background. I stood up to leave, not noticing that Nine was no longer beside me or even wondering where he had gone. After I took a few steps, he reached out and tried to grab my arm to stop me but was unsuccessful. I think he said something about needing some more information, but I wasn’t trying to hear all of that. I was trying to get ghost. I left him standing there, calling after me, and I didn’t stop moving until I was back outside.

When I spotted the car where Nine had left it, I saw that the doors were still wide open and that Nine had made his own parking spot. Everything had happened so fast, and with each step I took as I headed over to the coke-white Cutlass, I realized that I had gone inside the hospital with a brother and was leaving without him. I sat down on the leather front passenger seat but kept my feet planted on the sidewalk. I was in such a daze that I didn’t see Nine walk up to the car.

“He’s gone,” I heard Nine say when he got to where I was. “My nigga is gone, man.”

As he stood outside the car, he started going crazy. Shouting into the night sky and punching the air. Cane had been his best friend since before they could walk, so I knew we shared the same pain. I sat there, not moving, and didn’t feel a thing, not even the air around me. My head snapped up when Nine got in the car, slammed the door, and put the key into the ignition.

“What did he say to you?” he asked quietly.

I looked at him, and it was the first time I really saw him tonight. He too had blood all over his clothing, but I paid more attention to the clothing itself. He was dressed in tan slacks, a nice silk burgundy button-up, and whatever new designer shoes he had grabbed for the night. Cane had been dressed nicely too, and this fact didn’t raise any alarms in me until now. I shut my door and leaned back in my seat as he drove away from the hospital.

“What happened tonight?” I asked him, ignoring his question. “How did whoever did this get close enough to fire on us, cuz? How did they even know Cane would be at my basketball game?”

Nine sighed as he drove and gripped the steering wheel. I waited, but he ignored me the same way I had ignored him.

“What the fuck happened tonight!” I bellowed with my deep voice as I punched the glove compartment so hard that I left a dent.

“Look, Rell—”

“Ain’t no ‘Look, Rell’ when my brother’s body is getting colder by the second. I’m not going to ask again.”

“It’s complicated,” Nine said. “We’re street niggas. All we have ever known how to do is get money. Dub came to us—”

“Dub, as in the kingpin Dub?”

“Yup. When he came to us, asking for a few favors, we didn’t pass up the paper. It’s always good to have your hands in a few pots. Still, we knew we were playing with fire by accepting the jobs. I tried to warn Cane about continuing business with a nigga like Dub, but he wasn’t trying to hear all of that. After the first jobs were completed, he said just a few more jobs and we would be out, so I agreed to it. If Cane was driving, then I was riding, I didn’t trust Dub, but I trusted my dog. Dub sent us on missions, impossible missions, and we came out swinging every time.”

“So he was impressed.”

“I don’t know what that nigga was.” I watched as Nine’s jaw clenched. “And to this day, I don’t give a fuck. The money was just addictive, but just like with any other addiction, it came back to haunt us. Cane told Dub that we wanted out.”

“But he wasn’t tryin’a let either of you leave.”

“Nah, that wasn’t it. If Cane wanted out, he was out. We were supposed to be done with Dub, but one of the jobs we did had unruly consequences. Consequences that would have affected the whole hood if we didn’t dead the situation.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“The last job we did, shit went left, and we had to fix it. But . . .”

“But what?”

“The last conversations Cane had with Dub were heated. Still, Cane held up his side of the deal. I don’t think Dub would do no shit like this.”

“Like what?”

“Kill Cane.”

One month before . . .

“I seen you hit that three from the outside like it wasn’t nothin’ to you, little G!” I smiled at my baby brother, Cyril, who was over in the passenger seat. “You were out there killing shit, bro!”

“You know I pop out a little bit,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, like it was nothing to him. “The other team had some weak shooters. It wasn’t hard to get a lead on them.”

“Yo, fuck them other niggas. I’m talking about you. I don’t know why you never went on to play college ball.”

I shook my head, thinking about the opportunity Cyril had missed out on. In high school he had been the star basketball player and had averaged forty points a game. His senior year he’d been granted a full-ride scholarship to UCLA, which he’d turned down. I knew why he’d stayed, though. Still, my mans had had a future outside of the street life. He’d just decided not to take it.

He grinned back at me and put his hand in the pocket of his royal-blue basketball shorts. “You know why I didn’t go play college ball, bro,” he said, pulling out a fat roll of hundred-dollar bills. “That reason being this right here. I mean, I like ball, don’t get me wrong, but I was never tryin’a make a career out of it. That was years ago. I wish y’all would let that go. And if me balling is all that important, watching my neighborhood games should fill that little void in your and Nanny’s hearts. But I don’t have any regrets about anything.”

“All I’m saying is you could have gone all the way.”

“But I didn’t.” Cyril turned his lip up and made a sou. . .