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  After a long day at the studio, where she had castigated him for lame delivery, she had him stay behind for some vocal-relaxation exercises: She blew him. But she wouldn’t allow him to speak or come near her without a withering comment or a comparison to 50 or Nas or Jay-Z, or the ultimate insult, Eminem. (“That cracker makes niggaz like you look counterfeit!” she told him after a flaccid flow.)

  Jam-Bone Jones had been the same. He excoriated faggots but wasn’t beyond sucking off a vivacious she-male like Dominique, and he was definitely surprised that T-Sound had a little something extra.

  “What’s the plan?” asked Darlene, while testing Juliette’s serving etiquette. As the newly minted slut poured tea, Darlene grabbed “her” dangling meat and Juliette didn’t even flinch. How could she with her exacting cycloptric mistress watching her every move, ready to punish her with the severe sting of a silver-tipped riding crop. Tanya looked every bit the bitch goddess; she wore a white linen shirt, jodhpur breeches, and knee-high riding boots.

  “Well,” said Tanya measuredly, “I thought I would appeal to his masculine nature and tell him that a bunch of hot bitches—you all—wanted to meet him. This will be the night of the CD release party at Club Prospect. He’ll be high and ready … and hot. ¡Muy caliente!”

  * * *

  You got it! You got it!

  You know you got it

  When you see me

  Gunnin’ for yo’ ass!

  Blocks of motherfuckahs be running my way

  Niggaz be gone when they see my 47/AK

  Taking my time, drinking my wine

  Shot another nigga couldn’t tell time

  Back at da crib, laying back,

  Had a bitch suck my dick

  She drown when I didn’t hold back

  You got it! You got it!

  You know you got it

  When you see me

  Gunnin’ for yo’ ass!

  —“Gunnin’ for Yo’ Ass”

  The Source, Vibe, XXL, Murder Dawg Review, Rolling Stone, SPIN and even one commentator on National Public Radio proclaimed the era of The Code “The most vicious piece of misogynistic and anti-gay pornography ever produced by the team of Dr. Rhyme and T-Sound,” wrote a reviewer—and she liked it.

  “What’s not to like/I’m a powerful motherfuckah when I’m on the mike,” rapped Code as he walked the length of the bar at Club Prospect. The joint was jammed and nigga deep; the ’hood had turned out to see one of their own, who had gone platinum before the CD was even released.

  “King Kong with a powerful ding-dong!!!” he roared, thumping his chest, grabbing his meat. “Give me cash! I’m a ho’ too! You got it! You got it! I want it!” And they gave it to him—small green piles of dollar bills formed at his feet. Code tore off his shirt, used it to mop his face and chest, and thew it to his fans. Half-naked, his ripped musculature was coated in a thin sweat; he had the aura of a champion boxer, a new jack Muhammad Ali. As a matter of fact, he was thinking about calling himself that, toying with naming his next album Jihad Real Niggaz Die. He took in the adulation and the sullen stares of the wanna-be players, confident that he could whack any one of them as he jumped off the bar with his hands on his heater. A real nigga, he thought, was always ready to die. That’s why the likes of Eminem and the legion of other pallid wanna-bes were counterfeit; they weren’t going to die like real niggaz.

  Rhyme sat in a special VIP section of Club Prospect, a cushioned alcove that rose above the floor and allowed him to peer down at an elevated angle at the masses. Code was making his way through the crowd, toward the club’s door. Code’s executive producer made a phone call: All was ready. The place was stinkin’ on a midsummer night and management hadn’t fixed the air conditioner. Everything was set. Tanya had left and waited outside. It was 9 p.m. and a crowd was still waiting to get in to see “King” Code.

  With a phone to her ear, Tanya leaned against a car and took in a sultry summer breeze, an amazing relief after experiencing the sweatbox that passed for a club.

  “T-Sound!”

  Tanya, flipping down the cover of her c-phone, turned and saw him. He looked magnificent; the moonlight made his dark skin glisten. He was manly beautiful, gorgeous, and she was going to break him.

  “The party is in there,” he said, pointing back to the club.

  “Nigga, are you high?” she asked.

  “I’m always high when I’m with yo’ fine ass.”

  Before he could say another word, she embraced him and burned his lips with an infinite kiss, brushing a thumb against an exposed nipple on his chest.

  “Goddamn …” he said, catching his breath. “You can bring a nigga down with that.”

  “I want you to meet some people, Code,” she said softly. “I’m having a special celebration at my place …”

  “Naw, I got my peeps, my crew back there, and …”

  “… and then you can fuck me, really fuck me …”

  Code looked at her. “We’re talkin’ pussy, right?”

  “All that you can eat, nigga …”

  “I’m way down for that.”

  “What about your peeps?”

  “Fuck ’em!”

  They wouldn’t even have to take a car. Her place was only a few blocks away and they walked over hand-in-hand, crossing Washington Avenue, passing the stores he had once robbed, the owners he had brutalized because they didn’t move fast enough or didn’t have enough cash on hand. Code was excited. Things were finally coming together, coming his way. He could now get off the streets and do new things, like take the time to think about what was going on. No nigga had the time to think in the ’hood; it was all about survivin’. He had crawled, inched, shot, knifed, and fucked his way to this moment with this incredible woman.

  When they turned onto Prospect Place, their pace slowed. A swarm of emotions swelled up in him; Code was feeling something that he had never known existed.

  “Yo, I got to tell you something,” he said, stopping at the ground floor entrance that led to her playroom and dungeon. She had a series of reinforced restraints ready for him.

  “What?” she replied, as she unlocked the door; she felt that he sensed what was about to transpire.

  “I … I …” he grappled. “Shit …”

  “What’s wrong, baby?” solicited Tanya, caressing his face. He was so handsome, she thought. So beautiful, but deadly.

  “I’ve never been in love before,” he answered, looking at her with open and inviting eyes, no longer, at least at this moment, suspicious slits of mayhem.

  Warmly murmuring a response, Tanya thought that this was indeed a very nasty business, but peered at him intensely and pressed him against the door, then knelt down. All that could be heard was the un-zipping of his trousers; all that he felt was her warm and experienced mouth, and the joy of repetition that her tongue offered. After she voraciously milked him, Code was changed. He was left feeling woozy, as if he been spiked, Vanessa Del Rio’d. Slowly, he opened the door and entered the basement that was blasting his music, the sound of the hip hop generation. It was young men like him who had dethroned a previous generation and ushered in the reign of the new HNIC, a reign in which authentication meant death.

  Half-dressed as he had been since leaving the club, Code, still dazed, walked into a room with scores of naked women who appeared glad to see him, kissing his keloid medals of the street. He was offered a palette of tastes: breasts, asses, thighs, legs, buttocks, vaginas, cunts, and pussies. While being told that they were making a home movie of his triumph with a bevy of hot bodies, he didn’t notice that he was also being given the “Dawg of the Year Award,” a choke collar. Dominique fastened it around his neck just as Darlene lowered his trousers and stripped him of the rest of his clothes and his 9mm. The women admired his flaccid male-thang that ran halfway down his thigh. They could tell that he was happy to be in their presence, even happier when a group of them began devouring him, attending to every part of his body with probing hands and tong
ues, rubbing their sticky, lubricated orifices against his street-toughened, muscular black body.

  When Francesca slipped on the black metal handcuffs, Code was still woozy from the weed and booze and Tanya’s mouth-fucking, and didn’t think too much about it when he was made to kneel down to service Dominique, who waited with opened legs; her warm aroma greeted his quivering nostrils. This was fun: doing dawg duty amongst all the booty. But his enthusiasm waned when he discovered Dominique’s ever-enlarging cock staring him in the face—and hers was just as large as Code’s. Protesting, struggling against the handcuffs now holding his arms behind his back, Code was forced into service upon feeling the cold barrel of his own “nigga-stopper” behind his right ear and the grip of the choke chain around his neck. Knee-deep into deep-throating Dominique, Code could feel his own backdoor being prepared for a rear-entry maneuver.

  Upstairs, Tanya was offered a cognac by Juliette and sighed as she began the bidding, watching Code’s ravishing on the monitor. In a few days, the training would begin and she would bust his opened, dark ass with her own twelve inches—without lubrication. As a fully equipped hermaphrodite, she would teach him how to service her wet slit while he lay on his back in a supine position with his legs and arms beneath him. His transformation from man to bitch would begin. In a few more weeks, Code would disappear and be corseted, shaved, lipsticked, and turned into “Charlene,” sold to the highest bidder. Code’s disappearance would drive up The Code’s sales and further the rumor that the system had taken down another black man. No one would believe that he had been turned into a woman-manufactured male slut, especially not the brothers on the street. But T-Sound knew differently. Music, like sex, was a nasty business, a very nasty business.

  PART III

  Cops & Robbers

  CAN’T CATCH ME

  BY THOMAS MORRISSEY

  Bay Ridge

  The fuck are you doing?” shouted the squat, muscular man from his van. “I was just gonna park there!”

  Detective Sal Ippolito heaved his bulk from the car and felt his temper start to rise. Control. He took a calming breath through his nose, enjoying the aromas wafting from the open back window of Epstein’s Bakery, and tapped his windshield. “See that red light on my dashboard? That little sign next to it? I’m a cop. I get to park here because I’m working. Find somewhere else.”

  “You see this sign?” The man slammed a stubby-fingered hand on his door, above the Bay Ridge Bread and Bakers lettering. “I’m working, too. I got to pick up bread for my route. ’The fuck am I supposed to do that if you’re in my way?”

  Ippolito took another breath. Another delicious nose-ful of cookie-bread-donut goodness warmed his freezing nostrils. “Look,” he said, restraining his annoyance. “It’s Christmastime. How about giving me a little present by not busting my balls? The longer I stand out here talking to you, the longer it’s going to be until I take care of things inside, and the longer until you get to pick up your bread. Go have a cup of coffee. Go do some shopping. Go do anything else, because until further notice this bakery is a crime scene and no one goes in or out. Capice?”

  “It’s 4 o’clock in the morning. ’The fuck am I going to go shopping?” The squat man slammed his van into gear. “Crime scene, my ass. Go commit grand theft donut, ya fat pig.”

  Ippolito unconsciously rubbed his basketball stomach, fighting the desire to chase him down for premeditated assholery. “Hell with it.” Crystals of salt and half-melted slush crunched underfoot as he turned and walked to the rear door. “At least I can resist temptations.”

  Entering the bakery was like walking into a brownie: warm, moist, and sweet. Steam and heat thickened the atmosphere in a delightful contrast to outside. Ippolito licked his lips, taste buds searching for some of the chocolate or almond that flavored the air.

  “H—hello?” A tiny, wizened woman edged into the kitchen. She was so bundled up against the cold, Ippolito doubted she would have been able to swing the fire axe she grasped. “Who are you?”

  “Police, ma’am.” He slowly took out his badge. “Detective—”

  “Sally! Little Sally Ippolito!” The woman relaxed and lowered the axe. Its weight made her lurch forward. “Not so little anymore, eh?”

  Ippolito frowned before he recognized her. “What are you doing here, Mrs. Funerro?”

  “I called you people.” The old woman shuffled over to lean against a sink filled with batter-crusted trays and pans. “Eppy used to save the first loaf of bread of the day for me. I haven’t been sleeping well lately, so I thought I’d surprise him coming by. I’ve done it before when my goddamn insomnia kept me awake. I think that snippy waitress at the Bridgeview gave me regular coffee when I asked for decaf, just to be mean—”

  “Mrs. Funerro, what happened? The operator said you told her there was trouble.”

  “I didn’t want to say too much over the phone because I wanted to get this,” she shook the axe, “to protect myself.”

  “From what?”

  “I came to the back door, because I know Eppy leaves it open sometimes to let the heat out—isn’t that a silly thing in this cold?—and when I called out, he didn’t answer. I found him in the front. Well, his body. I was going to call Father Mulhern, too, over at St. Patrick’s, but then I remembered Eppy is—well,—Jewish. I don’t know what those people do about death. Maybe I should call a rabbi?”

  “Mrs. Funerro—” Visions of being trapped in the old lady’s apartment when he was a grocery delivery boy years ago, delayed by tales of sciatica and back spasms, made him cut her off. “Did you say Mr. Epstein is dead? You found his body?”

  She exhaled. “I thought the police were observant. How will you find clues if you aren’t even listening to what I say?”

  Ippolito unholstered his gun. Mrs. Funerro gasped. Putting a finger to his lips, he crept to the doorway with the surprising grace of the obese.

  “I told you, I found his body. There’s no one else here now.”

  He scanned the shop. Formica cases sat packed with fresh racks of oversized chocolate chip cookies, perfectly frosted layer cakes, and pastries of every shape and filling. Glass and stainless steel reflected the holiday window lights while the Now Servin sign was reset to zero, a string of number tabs hanging below it like a tongue. A flat tray filled with some kind of cookie waited atop the serving counter to be put away. Everything looked as normal as any of the dozen bakeries and bagel shops around the neighborhood, except for the wide red puddle staining the black-and-white tile floor. A slight slope had allowed it to spread almost to the front door.

  Ippolito sighed. “Oh boy.”

  Epstein’s body lay facedown behind the serving counter. Ippolito crouched and rolled him partway over. The front of his baker’s whites was now squishy scarlet from the nasty, raw gash at his throat, while dozens of tiny rips revealed more wounds on his body. Their edges looked as though something had been gnawing at him.

  What the hell? “You were the only person here?” he asked without turning. “No one else? No animals, dogs, or some rats, maybe?”

  “Rats? Eppy kept a clean shop.”

  He gently set the body back down. No sign of a struggle was in evidence, but a gingerbread figure lay near Epstein’s outstretched hand in a grotesque parody of the dead man. The cookie wasn’t a traditional shape; still humanoid, it looked like a man in a suit and hat, holding a gun. The white frosting gave it a pin-striped suit and mobster attitude, still evident even though half its head and one shoulder had been bitten off. It had apparently come from the sheet of similar cookies inside the case—all those rows were symmetrical except the top, which presumably was missing the half-eaten one. Ippolito picked up a sheet of wax paper.

  “Hello, saliva traces and DNA.”

  He started to rise, when he noticed something on the glass inside the case. In front of all the mouth-watering treats (Resist the temptation! he scolded himself), words had been written in what looked like Epstein’s blood:

  R
un, run, as fast as you can

  Can’t catch me …

  Mrs. Funerro came up behind him. “Did you find something? Is that a clue?”

  Quickly he stood, using his bulk to block her view of the body and, more importantly, the writing. “You must have watched police shows on TV. You know I can’t say anything.” Especially if I don’t want everyone from here to Astoria to know about it He held the half-eaten cookie behind his back. “Forensics will tell us what happened. For now, I need you to do something very important.”

  The old woman leaned forward conspiratorially. “You want me to canvass for witnesses? I could do that—I know everyone from Shore Road to Fort Hamilton Parkway. Maybe somebody saw something. That snippy waitress got her break at the diner a little while ago. Maybe she knows something—she’s always talking to those boys who go in there, the little gossip.”

  “No, no, that could be dangerous.” Ippolito put an arm around her skeletal shoulder and guided her through the kitchen to the rear door. “I need you to go back to your house and write down everything you saw and experienced here tonight.”

  “Write down …?”

  “You’re our main witness right now. We need to protect you.” He nodded solemnly. “I’ll have a car sent to watch your door, too. Just in case.”

  Hope enlivened her voice. “Am I … in danger, you think?”

  “Just in case.” He touched one beefy finger to the side of his nose. “But do me a favor—no axes. We can’t have our most valuable witness hurting herself.”