Eraserheads 2

Genres: African American Urban

Synopsis

In Brick & Storm’s Hood Misfits series, the motto is ENGA: Every nigga got an agenda, and in this tale, things are no different. Everyone has a secret.

There were two things of which Auto, leader of the elusive Eraserheads, was certain: Code, his partner and best friend, had betrayed him, and Caltrone Orlando, the biggest crime lord in North America, had marked him and his team for death. Crossing Caltrone Orlando had come with a steep price. Auto had suffered fatal losses to his team and business. 

Smiley hadn’t signed up for any of the madness that came along with being an Eraserhead, yet she found herself drawn to their leader in ways she hadn’t expected. The connection to the very man who has Auto in his crosshairs could ultimately lead to her downfall as well. 

Boots had only one agenda when he came to Atlanta: get inside of Caltrone’s operation so he could find a way to bring the criminal mastermind down from the inside out. Of course, even the best laid plans can go awry, and when they do, Auto, Boots, and Smiley find themselves in the fight of their lives.

Release date: August 27, 2019

Publisher: Urban Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

I left that cemetery with the weight of the world on my shoulders. For the last three days, I didn’t know whether I was going or coming. Life as I knew it had been turned upside down all in the name of my papa, Caltrone Orlando. It was all good just a few months ago. Business was booming. My family was still intact. Lelo was still alive to argue with Stitch. Seymore was still rolling around in his wheelchair, laughing and watching Reagan with a look of wanting in his eyes. Auto was still my brother. My pseudo-family was none the wiser about who I really was. Our merchandise was being transported without a problem.

Then it all went to hell.

I’d been a part of an elusive group called the Eraserheads. We specialized in a lot of things. To the outside world, we were just a group of young’uns who owned an auto shop. That was what we did on the surface to wash our money. Behind the scenes, we stole cars, chopped them up, rebuilt them, and then sold them to the highest bidder. We erased identities and made fake credit cards, bank cards, government-issued IDs, passports, and the like. We could erase your whole life if we wanted to, wipe out your bank account so smoothly that before you realized what was happening, it was already too late.

That was before Papa, my grandfather, pulled a triple cross that even I didn’t see coming. How he was able to reroute three shipments of our fleet of cars, then steal a shipment of unique bullets, which he’d already negotiated to buy from the dealer, and then make it seem like the dealer’s crew had double-crossed my crew was a conundrum. Although it shouldn’t have been. My old man was cold and calculating. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that he would be able to do something so crooked. Nothing should have surprised me when it came to my old man.

But like a sheep led blindly by a shepherd, I followed his lead no matter where it took me. I foolishly believed that because I was his favorite grandchild, he would never do anything that would cause me grief.

I couldn’t really explain what it was like to be an Orlando. We were either feared, hated, respected, or all three. Nobody wanted to cross us, and no one dared to tell my old man no. That was until Auto, the man who’d become my brother by default, came into the picture. He took me in and didn’t care that I had a sketchy background. He didn’t care that I kept the true nature of my blood family hidden. At least, he didn’t until it bit him in the ass. Auto told the old man no when he’d asked him to ship drugs across state lines for him, and it was an answer he’d come to regret.

Three of our friends had been killed in a hit orchestrated by Papa. Seymore, Dunkin, and Lelo had all been killed when Papa sent my cousins to spray the auto shop with bullets. I hadn’t been able to go to Seymore’s or Dunkin’s funerals, but there would be no way I would miss Lelo’s funeral. Lelo had been like a big brother to me, never letting anyone harm me but always quick to call me on my shit. I’d loved him like he was blood.

That still didn’t negate the fact that my family saw me as responsible for the deaths that befell those they loved. So going to Lelo’s funeral had been less than pleasant. Carmen, Lelo and Stitch’s baby mother, had all but smacked me hard enough to cause delirium. Reagan wouldn’t even spare me a glance, and Stitch, Stitch had gotten in my face. He’d yelled and cursed me to hell because he couldn’t understand why I would put them in such peril.

“Did you really think they were going to welcome you with open arms?”

I looked to the left of me. There was a metallic blue Audi cruising beside me. Boots, a man who I originally thought had been the one to steal from me and my crew, was glancing back and forth from me to the road. There was barely any traffic on the side street leading away from the cemetery.

“Fuck off,” I told him.

He chuckled. “We had a deal. You weren’t supposed to leave my crib.”

“You said I wasn’t supposed to leave in the three days you allotted me. I didn’t.”

He stopped the car and looked at his watch. “Technically, you did, but we won’t get into that right now. Get in the car.”

I kept walking, ignoring him even when he stepped from the car.

“No. I have to go talk to Papa.”

“Why? So he can kill you?”

“He won’t kill me.”

“Bullshit. You betrayed family, blood family. He’s going to kill you. You even said so yourself,” he yelled after me.

I stopped then turned to look at him. On his head was a black Stetson to match his all-black attire. Black snakeskin cowboy boots adorned his big feet. There was a piece of straw in the corner of his mouth that moved each time he chewed on it.

“I need to make sure Auto—”

“You need to get in the car. You think your old man doesn’t have eyes out here right now? Think he’s not watching so he can calculate his next move? You asked me to make sure your people were secure, right? So let me do my job. Get in the damn car, Code.”

While his voice was calm, I could hear the sternness in his words. A few days ago, if he would have taken that tone with me, I probably would have tried to shoot him. I didn’t take kindly to any man trying to control me or tell me what to do. That had been the very thing that caused me and my grandfather to clash all the time. But I knew Boots was right. He’d proven himself to be a smart businessman during this whole thing. And while I was willing to put on a front, deep down inside I was scared shitless that Papa was indeed going to kill me.

I didn’t really care about the dying part. I knew that day would come sooner or later. It was the look of disappointment in Papa’s eyes that would probably cut me to the core. It was a strange relationship my family and I had, but you had to know the ins and outs of my family to understand it.

I slowly walked back to Boots’ car. Although he had the upper hand, his cocky disposition still annoyed me. I spit where he stood, then got in the car. I could hear him chuckling as he walked around to get in. I looked down at his feet as he did so.

“I know of a man who used to wear boots,” I said as I stared out the windshield.

Boots stilled beside me. Out the corner of my eye, I could see the muscles coil in his arm as he gripped the steering wheel.

“They called him Bootsy. Very eclectic individual, I’m told. You know why they called him Bootsy?” I asked Boots.

“No. I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Legend has it, he had a collection of boots from all over the world. He was fascinated by the craftsmanship. Bootsy always had a thing for craftsmanship, which is what made him a legend in the realm of assassins. I’m told that if Bootsy came after you, you were as good as dead. Was no way around it.”

Boots cut a glare at me that would have stilled Lucifer himself. I didn’t waver though.

“How long do you think it’s going to take Papa to figure it out, Boots?”

“Shut up.”

“Did you really think he wouldn’t notice?”

“Shut up.”

“You walk around here in fucking cowboy boots, boots period, and you really think there won’t be a connection made? You know, for as smart as you are, you really made a dumb decision. To wear boots, I mean. Bootsy used to be the only one to wear boots too—”

Before the words finished leaving my mouth, I had a gun to my head.

“I want you to shut up and I want you to shut up now. Another word from you and I pull my team from security detail on Auto and the Eraserheads,” he spat out venomously. “Say another word about boots or Bootsy or whatever, I’ll kill you dead before the old man has a chance to. Are we clear?”

When I didn’t answer him quick enough, he cocked the gun to show he wasn’t in the mood for games.

I made a show of turning to look at him. When I turned, the gun was aimed dead center between my eyes.

“We’re clear,” I answered.

“Good,” he said. “I’m from Texas. We all wear boots in Texas. Is every nigga who come to the A wearing boots connected to whoever this Bootsy nigga is? Who the fuck is Bootsy? I think I’d like him if he was styling like that. Besides, I think I look damn good in my boots.”

He laid his gun on his lap then cranked his car as he chuckled. I shook my head at his arrogance but said nothing in return. I didn’t know if any of what I’d said had been the truth. I had no idea if Boots was connected to the legend of a man my grandfather sometimes spoke highly of. As far as I knew, Boots had come out of thin air. But it was the nature of my bloodline to fuck with people mentally. And since I felt as if Boots had too much control over me, to gain some of it back, I had to fuck with him the way I did.

We pulled off, and silence enveloped us while he drove through Jonesboro. Traffic on Tara Boulevard wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Jonesboro reminded me of a town that was stuck between the past and the future. Actually the whole county of Clayton reminded me of such. In one part of Jonesboro, it would look as if you’d just walked into Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Then, on the other side, it looked as if they needed to catch up to the new millennium. Old storefronts and plantation-style houses still littered quite a few of the streets.

In the midst of the silence, my mind was rambling, thinking about nothing and everything so I could figure out just when my life took a left turn and ventured onto the road paved to hell. The moment you were born an Orlando, whispered in my mind.

“Oya is going to try to get your boy Freddie so we can make sure he’s safe,” Boots finally said, breaking me free of my mental prison.

“She should leave him where he is. He’ll be fine. I shot him so it wouldn’t look like he was going against Papa’s wishes.”

I felt when he glanced at me. “So you’re just going to leave him up shit creek?”

“It’s not about that. If she goes in—”

“She’s already been on the inside.”

“Then I can assure you, once she goes back, Papa won’t let her out. She’s everything he likes in his women. She’s dark, built like an Amazon, and smart as a whip. Don’t let her go back in.”

“And what about Freddie?”

“He won’t leave anyway. He can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Papa has his daughter. Freddie will never leave unless he can get her, too. The only way Oya convinces him to leave is if she can assure getting to Cuba to get his daughter. And that won’t happen. If you even look at that man’s grandchildren the wrong way, you’re dead.”

Boots sighed and shook his head. Papa was big on family, and from the time we came from the womb, he was in his grandchildren’s lives. They loved the old man about as much as I did. He could do no wrong in their eyes. It wasn’t until they came of age that they realized his unconditional love came with a steep price. “Blood in, blood out,” was a part of the Orlando creed.

Boots drove toward 75 North, heading into downtown Atlanta. Traffic was light, but Georgia’s highway patrol was on the hunt. Every three or four miles I saw they had someone pulled over.

“I need my merchandise back,” he said to me.

“What?”

“My bullets, I need them back.”

I chuckled. Through the whole melee it had totally slipped my mind that Auto still had the man’s bullets. Shaking my head, I told him, “Good luck with that.”

“This isn’t a game.”

“I’m sure it isn’t, but I don’t know why you’re telling me. Auto just told me I was all but dead to him.”

“That doesn’t mean you don’t know where my shit is.”

I looked at Boots. Tried to look past the fact that he was good on the eyes and had just put a gun to my head.

“Sorry to tell you, I really have no idea where Auto put your shit.”

“I knew you would say that.”

“So why did you ask me?”

“I wanted to see where your loyalty lies.”

I shrugged. “I don’t get it.”

“You’ll always be an Orlando, but your loyalty is still split. You know where my shit is.”

I rolled my eyes. “Okay, Boots, whatever you say.”

“When you lie, you look at me. You look me right in the face and lie with ease. That’s some weird shit. Most times, when people lie, they tend to look away from the eyes. You will look me right in the face, eyes never wavering, and lie to me.”

I gave something of a cool smile, more of a smirk, while thinking about what he said. He was right. My poker face was strong, but that came from years of growing up in a family of men whose entire agenda was to break a woman down to her bare minimums.

“You’re asking the wrong person about your bullets. You need to talk to Auto. That’s all I can tell you.”

“I figured as much,” he responded.

For the rest of the drive, he was silent, and I was fine with that. I found the more Boots talked, the more I became mesmerized by the man he was. I didn’t have time to be in my feelings about a nigga. In the end, they were all like Papa and all the men he warred with. I had yet to find a man who wasn’t consumed by rage, revenge, money, or power.

I was content to be as silent as Boots until he ventured onto the exit for Moreland Avenue. I glanced at him as he drove casually with one hand. The muscles in his jaw ticked. His brown skin as smooth as mine. While his right hand gripped the steering wheel so tightly you could see the white of his knuckles, his left one stroked his beard as if he was in deep thought.

There was no need for me to pay attention to my surroundings since I knew the area very well.

“Where are we going?” I asked him once we passed the Starlight Drive-In movie theater. The bottom of my stomach started to rumble. I ran a hand through my hair. Chewed down on my bottom lip as my leg started to shake.

Boots didn’t answer me. After a few more miles, he didn’t have to. We turned down a side street whose name was hidden in the tall trees just above the street sign. All the houses seemed to be run-down and abandoned, but I knew that to be furthest from the truth. There were no children playing on this street. People who had been sitting out on their lawns and on their front porches started to go inside their homes. Frankie Beverly and Maze stopped singing about what would happen before they let go. The old folk went inside and the young ones started to file out. Wife beaters and Dickies were worn like it was a uniform requirement.

Mean mugs and grilled-out scowls adorned the faces of the males and females who let their eyes follow Boots’ car.

“We shouldn’t be here,” I told him.

Boots cruised all the way down to the end of the street. Just beyond the dead end was a warehouse hidden behind barbed wire and a secured gate. Boots stopped his car right at the entrance of the gate. Before he could even put the car in park, red beams decorated the interior of his car and us.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I snapped at him.

“My bullets in there?” he asked me.

How he’d found this place was beyond me. It scared me, to be honest. If Boots had found this place, that meant he was more powerful and resourceful than I’d thought. Auto kept this place hidden, secured by the neighborhood he took care of. No one on this street ever had to worry about anything, all because they were family and kept his secrets safe here. Anytime we stole high-end cars and wanted to wait until the heat died down, we would hide cars in the secret warehouse. We always hid things here. It was where we’d placed Boots’ bullets when we’d taken them.

“We need to leave—”

“We will. As soon as you tell me what I want to know.”

I shook my head, then opened my car door. I made sure not to make any sudden movements. I stepped out one foot at a time, hands in the air as I did so. A line of red dots decorated my chest.

“It’s just me,” I said with a smile. “It’s Code,” I yelled into the camera sitting at the top of the light pole.

“What you doing here?” a soothing masculine voice rang out.

I turned to see Wolf holding a shotgun at his side. Behind him were six more of his henchmen. Wolf and all of his brothers looked, exotically, like wolves. Their eyes were cunning and hypnotizing. They drew you in with their intensity. Wolf and all six of his brothers stood well over six feet and were built like they lived in the gym. Wolf’s ropy locs fell around his sculpted chocolate brown shoulders and gave him a mysterious appeal. His white wife beater clung to the muscles in his chest, and my pussy jumped in remembrance of what he looked like naked and felt like inside of me.

“Is Auto here?” I asked.

“Nah, but you knew that already,” Wolf answered.

He held up two fingers and pointed at the Audi. His brothers fanned out then surrounded the car, guns drawn.

“Who’s driving?” he asked me. “And what the fuck you doing here, Code?”

“I have to have a reason for being at my own warehouse?”

“You do when Auto says you’ve been erased.”

“What?”

“You’ve been erased,” he repeated, this time with a smirk on his face.

Wolf still had a bit of animosity toward me since I’d broken our arrangement off with him. He wanted more than I was willing to give, and that had never sat too well with him. But that wasn’t important at the moment. What had my attention was that he’d said I’d been erased.

I didn’t know if I was nervous or if anxiety was riding me, but my body felt as if it were shaking internally. My palms and every pressure point I owned started to feel warm. Sweat beaded my forehead as I snatched my phone from my hip. I dialed Auto’s number at the shop.

“We’re sorry, but the number you have reached is no longer in service,” greeted me.

My eyes started to burn with anger as I blinked rapidly. I dialed his cell. All I got was a busy signal. I tried again with the same outcome. I called Reagan, Stitch, Jackknife, and even Lelo’s cell for the hell of it, and I got the same thing. Wolf chuckled. Any other time his chuckle would have given me goose bumps. It was deep and melodic with the power to make a woman wet her panties. None of it had that effect on me at the moment.

I forgot about Boots in the car behind me. I didn’t even see that the red dots decorating my body had started to do the same to Wolf and his brothers. I called Wells Fargo, then Bank of America. I called Regions and Suntrust, only to find that all my accounts had been wiped clean. If I knew Auto, then I knew the wiping out of my accounts meant he’d also erased my existence. I could guarantee that my social security number along with my driver’s license, and anything else that made me Maria Rosa Orlando, was nonexistent.

Erasing someone wasn’t all that hard when you had all the right provisions set in place. The program we ran was a very intricate system. It took years to set everything in place. Training was always intense and thorough. We had people set up in several banks around the area to pull off such heists as stealing money from someone’s bank account or shutting an account down altogether.

All Auto had to do was make a fake ID with my name on it, have someone pretend to be me, and walk inside any bank where I had an account set up. Since we had someone working in high positions in all of the banks, it would be easy to shut down my accounts and no one would bat a lash, especially since it was “me” who decided to close out my accounts.

Erasing someone’s identity was a bit harder. Technically you couldn’t erase someone completely unless you killed them or made them a new identity. Still, you had to kill the “old them” to make the “new them” seem more legit. It was a tricky scheme, but it could be done. And since I wasn’t dead, the idea of being erased frightened me.

“Fuck you, Auto!” I screamed. He’d obliterated me. Expunged my very identity and left me with nothing.

“Now that you know I’m telling the truth, tell the driver to exit the car and we won’t have any problems,” Wolf coolly ordered me.

“No need for her to tell me to do anything, my good men.” Boots’ smooth Texas drawl washed over me. I could hear his boots crunching against the gravel behind me.

“Nigga, are you wearing cowboy boots?” Wolf cracked. “And a cowboy hat? My nigga, what?”

Boots gave a lopsided grin that said he was used to catching people off guard with his attire. Even though it felt as if anger rumbled in my gut like the beginnings of a volcano about to erupt, I could tell that the smile on Boots’ face wasn’t a friendly one.

“You niggas, as you all like to call each other so much, need to pay more attention to your surroundings,” he said, then pointed at Wolf’s chest. “Call your boss and tell him the outside of his parameters have been penetrated. Now your boss and I have had some run-ins with one another over the last couple days. I’m sure you know it wasn’t because we chose to. But since you six are only peons, ain’t no need for this nigga in cowboy boots and a Stetson to get into the logistics of this shit. Once you call your boss, tell him we need to have a sit-down conversation to discuss something he still has that belongs to me. You got that?”

As Boots spoke, Wolf looked down at his chest to realize his heart had a target on it. He balled his lips, then looked over at Boots like something stunk.

Instead of Wolf addressing Boots, he looked at me with a scowl. “So you brought this nigga to our door?”

My chest was still on fire with the knowledge that I’d been erased. “I didn’t bring him here.”

“Then how the fuck did he know where to come?”

I yelled, “I don’t know!”

“Sure, bitch.”

Before Wolf’s next breath, I’d punched him in the face. His neck snapped back and the shotgun in his hand fell to the ground with a loud thud before he got his balance and charged at me. To my left, his brother, Siberian, lunged at Boots, only to find the tip of Boots’ boot in his nuts. Siberian groaned and fell over. Shots rang out, and another brother, Amoux, caught a bullet to his shoulder. His screams and yells halted the other brothers’ fight. Amoux screamed so loudly I thought his soul was being ripped from his body.
. . .