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  The club went silent: The doors were locked and all the customers witnessed the legendary Bad One in action. Only a few were disgusted by Code’s criminal-mindedness. Most of the patrons, young men and women from the neighborhood, had become inured to the random display of violence, which was increasingly the soundtrack to their reality. Watching Code was like watching a power fantasy in actual play. He was a brother in control and knew how to handle another nigga. Even the club’s exotic dancers stopped moving and watched Code at work. Finally, one of the men was given permission to reach into his jacket pocket and retrieve a card with Dr. Rhyme’s telephone number.

  With his 9mm’s barrel jacked up against the roof of one of the nigga’s mouths, his foot on the neck of the other emissary from Rhyme & Crime Records, dialing his cellphone with his thumb, Code found that the doctor was in New York. The doctor wanted to know if he was ready to be a serious music playa. If so, would he join him for dinner in Manhattan?

  Used to Mickey D’s or curry goat with dirty rice and beans, Code and his thuggish trio of bodyguards rolled into an Upper East Side restaurant on 61st Street. Their presence caused some consternation (it was mainly the display of do-rags, sports jerseys, oversized trousers, and untied shoes) until Dr. Rhyme approached the maitre d’ and interceded. A gray velvet jacket was placed on Code, and his boys were told to park their rumpled asses at a bar that kept him in their eyesight.

  “I’m sorry about that misunderstanding with yo’ niggaz,” said Code as he sat down, referring to Rhyme’s messengers.

  Dr. Rhyme was gracious; as a former Cali gang-banger, he understood the dictates of security; it was the code of the streets. Obviously, his agents hadn’t approached Code with respect, and respect was important. He would dispose of them accordingly.

  Code was nodding to all that Rhyme said, but kept his eyes on the most magnificent-looking one-eyed bitch he had ever laid his own bloodshot eyes on. She was dark, and Code, like most niggaz, tended to go for the current J. Lo model of Boricua negritude. But T-Sound was fine, despite the one eye, and she displayed her finery with even more subtlety when she excused herself and went to the ladies’ room. Code assumed that she sucked Rhyme’s dick; that’s what bitchez were good for. That, and giving a nigga a son. Rhyme recognized the trajectory of Code’s male gaze.

  “She’s one of my producers,” said Rhyme. “T-Sound discovered your tape and listened to it. Girl got ears.”

  “And one eye,” Code retorted. Not bad for a one-eyed bitch—and with a wicked ass to boot, thought Code. If she didn’t return, he’d have to start licking the chair she sat in.

  She was Tanya Sonido, from el barrio, and Code was trying to calculate how he could get her away from his new contact, the man who was going to produce his way outta the ghetto. He may have to kill him to snatch her. He had done it before—but before business?

  “Will she be my producer?” asked Code.

  Rhyme looked at him. “You don’t mind a woman producing your sound?” This was unheard of, and Rhyme recognized that this was one nigga who didn’t give a fuck what other niggaz said or thought.

  “Shit, she could suck my dick while doing it.”

  Rhyme nodded: “Yeah, she’s a bad motherfuckah …”

  “You Negroes talking about me?” asked a suave voice.

  The two turned around and found T-Sound standing behind them. She returned to her seat and flashed the whitest pair of teeth that Code ever saw on a black woman. It was also her almond-shaped eye and wide, sensuous smile. She was an older woman, maybe about thirty. She probably knew how to really fuck a man. Not like these amateur bitchez who watched skeezer videos and acted like they could hump. This bitch could probably fuck as well as a dude; that is, putting her back into it as if she had a dick. Men knew how to fuck; bitchez just got laid.

  Dinner proceeded with Rhyme and T-Sound finding their prospective new talent something to eat on the exotic menu. After coffee and cognac, they—Code, along with his boys—went to Rhyme’s nearby hotel room and discussed his vision for his project, The Code

  While fixing drinks at the room’s wet bar, Rhyme saw the effect that T-Sound’s bod was having on Code. It was her pulchritudinous figure and that black eye patch. There was something mysterious, remotely kinky, about a fine-looking woman wearing an eye-patch that got some men’s third leg thumping in their pants. There was heat between them, the bitch and the nigga. Rhyme watched them as they sat down and talked about his lyrics, life, and production ideas; who he listened to and what he wanted to incorporate. It would be a chronicle of gunz, bitchez, and bodacious niggatude. Code was surprised that T-Sound had produced many of the CDs that he liked and had been deejaying in clubs. Code mentioned that he enjoyed listening to women screaming and hollering, and told her that he watched a lot of porn.

  “So do I,” she said, “but I like to watch men getting their asses busted.”

  Code smoothed the waves on his head. “Shit, the only people who do that are faggots.”

  “Yep, and they be the only ones getting it up the ass, baby. I especially enjoy she-males busting a nigga’s ass.”

  “Whut?” He looked at Rhyme and then back at her.

  “Have you tried it?” asked T-Sound, an inquisitive arch rising over her good eye.

  “Fuck no,” laughed Code, slightly put off that a bitch he was getting hard for would ask a 100-percent black man like himself that kind of question. “I’m the fucker; not the fucked!”

  “Too bad.” She looked him over as if she were imagining herself doing something very nasty to him.

  “If you were a dude, I’d have killed you for …”

  Tanya tossed her head back. A mane of rich black hair swept through the air as she sat invitingly across from him. Her legs were parted slightly, as if she was offering a taste of herself.

  “Well, come on, nigguh,” she challenged. “You want to slay me like you do those niggaz back in Brooklyn? Or you wanna fuck this Boricua bitch? This black bitch? This disease-free bitch? I got something for you.”

  She rocked her head as if she was good to go, kicking it to him in Spanish. “Yo, popi …”

  Rhyme watched him. Tanya was taunting him before a room full of men, his niggaz. This would have been different if it were just him and the boys, but Tanya was playing with fire. A few seconds went by and Code gave her a hard nigga stare, an icy glance that he had perfected when deciding another man’s fate.

  Rhyme understood what was going on and walked over with a drink and handed it to Code, who took it down in one swallow and said to his boys, Bebop and Cisco, “Let’s roll. I’ll have my lawyer contact you about a contract. Bitch, I’ll see your fine ass in the studio.” He grabbed a fist full of crotch before he went out the door, then added, “You better not bend over while we’re there, or you’ll get this!”

  With that, they left.

  “Damn, that nigga was fine,” moaned Tanya as she grabbed her own crotch, taking a drink from Rhyme. “I wanted to fuck his ass there on the spot!”

  “Shit, that boy would have shot you, Tanya.”

  Tanya reached down and pulled up a Glock pistol from between the cushions of the couch. “Or he would have died trying. How much do you think we can get for him?”

  “Well … if we do this CD, he’ll be a premium,” surmised Rhyme.

  A few months later, a contract signed and time spent in the studio, Tanya walked into Club Prospect on Franklin Street and sat down beside Code, who was sticking dollar bills in a dancer’s G-string with his teeth. He could feel himself thickening even when she sat an inch or so away. Lately he had been having dreams about her … pulling her clothes off, inching his way down to her crotch, getting her hot and nasty for his coup de grâce. But now she wanted to talk about some business, music business.

  “Look, one of them sounds like someone is being choked to death,” she said, flicking an ash of her clove cigarette into a tray on the bar.

  It was homage to an original gangsta, the legendary Nate Ford
, he told her. Ford excelled in the “asphixiation of love,” a love/death grip. Ford had learned that by choking a bitch, his hands on her throat, he could involuntary cause her vaginal muscles to firmly grip his dick as he simultaneously exploded into and suffocated her.

  Not even the Marquis de Sade had that one in his arsenal of techniques, Ford was reported to have told a Russian business associate as they sat around one evening laughing over coke and cognac. “Kinky technique,” Code explained. Ford had even shown his Russian guest a video of himself snuffing a young Puerto Rican woman. On the tape, Ford leered into the camera and then, with the brio of ultimate contempt, pulled out and discharged over the dead woman’s body. “Good to the last drop,” Ford then said. This was the sort of video that Code collected.

  “That’s what you want on your debut album?” asked T-Sound. “You want people to see you as a sick, demented fuck?”

  “I don’t care what people think,” snarled Code, his eyes narrowed nearly to slits, mocking an African mask. “I am the last of a dying breed: the last of the bad-ass niggaz. True to form, true to the code: I just want niggaz to buy my music …”

  “And shine your shoes …”

  “Whut?”

  “Skip it,” said T-Sound. She wasn’t going to engage in self-disgust just because of dealing with low-lifes like him. This was a business, and it sometimes became nasty when dealing with nasty people.

  “T-Sound …” he rolled off his tongue.

  “What?” She was looking at a dancer who could have made better money by keeping her clothes on.

  “How’d you lose your eye?”

  “Fighting a nigga who wanted to get some free pussy the hard way,” she coolly replied. “He didn’t understand any part of the word no.” She went into her hand purse and pulled out a matching onyx cigarette case and lighter.

  “Did he get any?”

  “No,” she said, lighting the cigarette. Tanya turned and faced him fully. A shadow fell across her face, the dark patch growing into a partial shroud over one side of her head. “All he got was an eyeball, but his balls got some of this!” She pushed a little black switch upward on the lighter with her thumb, and a gleaming, sharp two-inch blade appeared.

  What Code found menacing wasn’t the blade, but that she was too cool; nothing frazzled her. She was just like him: a deadly nigga. Weeks ago he had walked into the recording studio with his boys, armed, stinking of liquor, and she had thrown out his bodyguards with her even bigger, badder, and bolder bodyguards, niggaz who worked day jobs with the city’s most feared gang, NYPD. He tried to stare her down during a disagreement about one song in which he was going for the soap-soft. After dissing women for ten tracks, he wanted to include some lovey-dovey sop—asking a “girl” if she would love him even if he didn’t have money—after having extolled the sociopathic virtues of getting it by any means necessary on the rest of the recording!

  T-sound had told him: “Look, it is clear to me that even though you enjoy fucking us, you don’t like or have any respect for women. So who are you trying to fool with this track, your mother? Niggaz like you don’t have mothers. You’re the classic son of a bitch, tu sabes?

  She told him this an inch from his face, like a Marine DI to a jarhead, and added: “You gonna be hard, be hard all the way. No half-steppin’. Save that pussy love shit for your second album—if you live that long.”

  Tanya Sonido. She looked like a woman, smelled like a woman, and even dressed like one. She wore the kind of clothes—dresses, suits, or blazers with jeans—that accented a woman’s best features, and she had rounds of features like the military had rounds of ammunition in Iraq. A phat, firm ass that didn’t bust out the seams like other nigga bitchez; voluptuous breasts that hung underneath her shirts in their own right, not assisted by silicone injections. She had nice calves and strong-looking muscles that ran along her thighs, evidence of gym work, and nice definition to her shoulders and biceps. The bitch was built. She was hard like him: ghetto—but she had style and grace, and wasn’t nigga-down 24/7. That was all he could ever be, and he was beginning to suspect that this was limiting.

  T-Sound exhaled some smoke from her nostrils: “Hear that, Code? Hear 50 Cent kickin’ it on the jukebox? That’s the nigga you ought to have a problem with, not me. I’m on your side.” She set down her cigarette and looked at him, her full red lips slightly parted. “Or are you having trouble concentrating?”

  Suddenly it was getting hot. OGs had talked about a special kind of woman that men found hard to beat, hard to resist. The French called them femmes fatales, mysterious women that could do a nigga in if he wasn’t careful. Code realized that his dick was getting hard due to his overpowering lust and fear of her. She could do what no other man or woman had ever been able to do: read him. She knew what he wanted from her, needed from her, and what he could never allow anyone else to do: become close to him. His rules of engagement dictated that he possess no friends, only associates; that he have no real love, only pussy; no family—that had been destroyed years ago.

  But Tanya was different; she took her time with him. She reminded him that despite being shot four times; despite never being convicted of killing two men and exterminating another man and his two children; despite raping or gangbanging a dozen women of various races and nationalities, as well as engaging in numerous hold-ups and burglaries; and despite selling vast quantities of controlled substances, he was just breaking twenty-two. She could be his mentor and get him out of a life that he didn’t mind rapping about, but had worn thin since the last time he was shot. The code dictated that a nigga didn’t last too long.

  But he did have a problem with her, and she had scoped that out earlier.

  “You want to fuck me, right?” prompted T-Sound. She reached over in his direction to get another napkin from a bar dispenser for her drink. “No can do. Someone else has fucking rights to my cunt.”

  “Rhyme?”

  She shook her head. “No, we’re partners. My wet-box is saved for someone else … but you can either fuck my ass or come in my mouth. Two out of three ain’t bad, is it?”

  T-Sound, looking at her watch and announcing an impending meeting, told him that if he wanted to do it, it had to be now, in the piss-smelling, HIV-potential men’s room of Club Prospect. “And you better get that tongue of yours good and moist, because you’re going to stick it up my ass before you stick your third leg in me. See you in a few minutes, chocolate.” She slid off her seat and grabbed a handful of him at his below-the-belt area. “Hmmm, I’m gonna like this entering my back door. She slipped into the men’s room, making sure the video camera would capture them at the right angle.

  Code went to work on his tongue. Water, followed by orange and grapefruit juice, and then some club soda with a twist of lime. He purchased a few sample bottles of one of those new-fangled sweet-tasting cognacs that all the niggaz had been singing about and promoting over the airwaves and in intellectually deficient shop-and-fuck magazines. He was going to drink them out of her ass-crack. Armed with them in the side-pockets of his urban fatigues, Code pulled out his notebook and jotted down a few pre-coital lines:

  Now what does a nigga

  Have to think about

  When a goddamn nasty bitch

  Offers her ass or her mouth!

  * * *

  The Prospect Place Ladies’ Auxiliary liked what they saw. They saw fine-looking black meat inching in and out of an even finer, perspiration-coated posterior—Tanya’s. The audio portion was still better, with Tanya saying all kinds of nasty things Español, and the preferred exclamations in Niggaese about bitch this and bitch that

  “Believe me, girls, this boy can barely read,” confirmed Tanya, “but he knows how to work a woman’s ass.”

  The women cackled and hooted when Tanya told them that she had emptied him three times, enjoying the feel of his warm spunk oozing down her legs as she left him nearly drained on the john at Club Prospect.

  “Watch this, ladies,” she
said, directing their attention back to the TV/video monitor. The tape showed a limp but massive black snake slowly retreating from Tanya’s rear.

  “Mon Dieu, that boy is hung!” said Francesca, an Afro-Francophone from Paris. “But can he eat?”

  “He can be trained,” Tanya commented with an authoritative crack of her crop against her boots. “Any man can be trained under the proper regimen.”

  “What’s the word on the bidding?” asked Janette.

  “It’s starting at a million,” replied Tanya.

  “What?” said another woman, Carmen. “Why so much?”

  “Because your GOP friends in the Log Cabin Society and several of the Sons of the Confederacy want a raw nigga as much as some of you do,” Tanya explained, “and when The Code is released and he suddenly disappears, he’ll be a collector’s item.”

  “No wonder they call it the Log Cabin Society,” quipped Dominique.

  “I heard that even a few Saudi princes are taking a bid on him,” commented Francesca. “Non?”

  “Oui,” affirmed Tanya. “Raw niggaz are the rage; hip hop has advertised that.”

  The women assembled at Tanya’s Prospect Heights brownstone, the crème of nouveau black womanhood, were wealthy. Businesswomen, achievers, well-known role models, church-going hot moms—they had all acquired a taste for supine men, especially hard-co’ raw niggaz. Over the years, certain people had tried to eradicate the scourge of what some called gangsta rap, but had been less than successful. While others had managed to assassinate some well-known acts and perpetuate the myth that their deaths had been the result of incessant male-ego feuding, Tanya had been developing the art of “slutting,” turning street niggaz into cunt-lapping dawgz.

  There was no better example of her handiwork than “Juliette,” a corseted, black-fishnet-wearing, muscular servant whose pecs had been tagged with the emblems of his gang-banging days. Jam-Bone Jones had been lured to Tanya’s basement months ago. She could always pick the sluts by their inordinate fear of “faggots.” These young ghetto bucks were obsessed with homosexuals and treacherous black women—people who had to be either exterminated or kept down. She could always tell which ones could be flipped. In her mind, Code was no different. Soon after showing him that her ass-muscles could squeeze him into a climax, she knew she had him hooked. She had even encouraged him to include the piece he had written about their toilet tryst, “Slutz and Dawgz,” on The Code That way, she thought, his mind would always be on her and what she could do for him—and him.