Havoc and Mayhem Read online

  “Leaving so soon?” The pimp asked with a red scorch mark over his greasy face and winded from running down three flights of stairs. “The party’s just starting!” He said and kicked Havoc hard in the face. “That’s for throwing that hot shit in my face.” Havoc tasted his blood and angrily went to stand. “Ah-ah-ah don’t even think about it. Not unless you trying to win first prize in a wet t-shirt contest.” The pimp warned holding his gun threateningly.

  Havoc cut his eyes at Mercedes trembling with fear then eyed his classy cherry red ‘1957 Chevy Bel Air across the street. Taking hold of the whistle around his neck, he blew into it, but it made no sound.

  “Yo homeboy I think your whistle’s busted. But if you trying to call the neighborhood watch you’re wasting your time. Cause I’m it!” Diamond Ken laughed.

  Havoc ignored the pimp and waited for something to happen. Inside of his car a pair of yellow eyes blinked open followed by a deep growl. The Chevy’s back door opened and everyone was magnetized as a huge paw stepped into the street making a crunching noise when it’s razor sharp nails dug into the ice. Havoc turned back to Diamond Ken with a devilish grin.

  “Nah, my dog whistle works just fine.” The Trouble Consultant said cockily. The fearless pimp was paralyzed with terror from what had stepped out of the car. Havoc got up and brushed the snow from his legs. “Oh, I see you haven’t met my partner. Diamond Ken…meet Mayhem.”

  The pimp was speechless. As soon as he laid eyes on the tan and reddish canine that stood at an imposing twenty-seven inches high and easily weighed one hundred and thirty pounds with its large wrinkled head, short black muzzle and big drooling jowls sporting a gladiator-pit style spiked red leather collar, he knew he was not dealing with an ordinary dog.

  Sixty percent English Mastiff and forty percent Olde English Bull dog. Bullmastiff’s were cross bred to be one of the most powerful super dogs on the planet. Prized for their size, speed, intelligence and tenacity, they have had many jobs throughout history. Romans used them as war dogs due to their temperament and aggressive nature. South African’s employed them to guard diamond mines. In England they bravely guarded livestock, assisting English gatekeeper’s as night watch dogs and were the primary source of defense against poachers during the 19th century. And in the 20th century, the Trouble Consultant’s loyal and unflinchingly protective companion against killer psycho pimps and other deviants.

  Diamond Ken’s face was tight with anticipation of what the freak of nature was thinking about doing to him. Prior to Mayhem the biggest, meanest-looking dog he had ever come across was Terminator, the ferocious rottweiler that guarded the auto body mechanic shop where he had his car phone and Alpine speakers installed. But compared to Mayhem that mutt was a poodle. Mayhem stretched with a yawn displaying sharp teeth that looked like they belonged in a shark’s mouth and caused a tidal wave of muscles to ripple from nose to tail. With shaky hands, Diamond Ken swallowed hard and aimed his shotgun at the large beast.

  “NO!” Havoc shouted and kicked the gun from the pimp’s hands as a shot fired and snow exploded around Mayhem. The Trouble Consultant then landed seven lightning-quick punches to his face and stomach until he folded up like lawn furniture.

  Holding his ribs and sucking oxygen, Diamond Ken struggled to his feet. Mayhem jumped into protective mode. Terrified, the pimp took off running. Havoc cut his eyes at his dog anxiously awaiting his next command. “Handle that!” Havoc instructed.

  In a flash Mayhem took off after the pimp and using the knock and pin method like its ancestors were trained to do against poachers it pounced on top of him and pinned his shoulders with overwhelming strength. A menacing growl drilled a hole in Diamond Ken’s ear but to his surprise it didn’t come from Mayhem, it came from Havoc.

  “Call off your dog man. Please!” Diamond Ken begged as the snow between his crotch turned bright yellow.

  Havoc was so furious with the chicken-shit pimp for almost shooting his best friend that he was tempted to give the command that would prompt the dog to rip out his throat. “Mayhem…come.” he called upon second thought, while throwing a kiss in the air and patting his thigh. Mayhem played deaf and leaned in inhaling deeply. With anxious fangs inches from Diamond Ken’s face hungry for a bite, the mythical looking beast could smell the fear come out of the pimp’s pores and fed off of it. “Mayhem I said, COME!” Havoc called again this time with base in his voice and the dog grunted like it was pissed and trotted over to his side. “Good girl. That’s my precious little girl,” he said bowing to kiss her on the head and she wagged her tail pleased she made her master happy.

  Havoc picked up Diamond Ken’s shotgun and placed it to the side of his head like he was about to make a hole in one. The pimp squeezed his eyes shut and screamed out, “Please don’t kill me!” More urine ran from his bladder.

  Havoc pumped the shotgun spilling blue shells all over the pimp. “You know, I was planning on beating the piss out of you, but I’ll fall back. Seeing as how you’ve already done that for me.” He said and dropped the emptied gun then stared at him lying there humiliated and exited without another word. Mercedes trailed behind.

  Happy to still be alive, Diamond Ken breathed a sigh of relief that is until he noticed all of the women whose flaws, weaknesses and addictions that he used against them to keep them under his thumb were watching him with Poetic Justice stretched across their lips.

  Realizing how weak he must look in his stable’s eyes the pimp quickly climbed to his feet worried that if he did not do something right now to regain his power over them, he would lose them as well.

  “G’wan! Take her junkie ass! Shit that hoe could use the vacation. But mark my words, she’ll be back. I mean shit, where the fuck else is a twenty-four seven, super-duper freaky hoe gonna go?” Diamond Ken called out in a voice as cold as ice chips, adding a sinister laugh for effect. Mercedes stopped dead in her tracks and spun around then marched right back over to Diamond Ken. “What, back so soon? That didn’t take long. Come on hoe. Come back to Daddy.” the vile pimp smiled with his arms open wide. Mercedes walked towards him and suddenly hauled off and slapped him hard across the face then began sobbing uncontrollably.

  Diamond Ken was furious that one of his women had the audacity to hit him and raised his arm to backhand her. Havoc cleared his throat then shook his head letting him know that he was about to make a huge mistake. The pimp’s arm wisely swung to his side.

  Havoc turned to Mercedes. “Let’s go.”

  With every ounce of water drained from her eyes Mercedes walked past the sad faces of fellow streetwalkers who desperately wished someone loved them enough to send a Brooklyn-Knight in crimson armor to rescue them. As soon as Havoc slid behind the wheel of his ride he removed his heavy four-fingered ring because it felt uncomfortable when driving and impossible to fire a gun while wearing and stuffed it back in his pocket. Then reached under his seat grabbed his Glocks then put them back in their holsters. Now he felt whole again. He glanced over at Mercedes. She was staring straight ahead with a blank look and rocking in her seat. Havoc shook his head with a sigh. Deep down he pitied her. She had borne witness to so many loveless acts of sex and violence yet she wasn’t even old enough to sit at a bar and order a drink. He eyed his dog in the rear-view mirror.

  “Gimme some,” Havoc said reaching an open palm over his shoulder and Mayhem placed her paw inside his hand to shake it. Then with a proud papa smile he twisted the key in the ignition. He was about to pull off when he heard someone screaming and shouting and looked out the window.

  As Diamond Ken went from demanding to begging on his hands and knees that his stable not leave him, it was painfully clear that he had collected his last pimp’s commission off of them. In the game of Macking and stacking, a Pimp’s job is to dress, rest, finesse and let his hoes take care of the rest. And any self-respecting flesh-peddler who can’t keep his shit together, much less his bladder might as well turn in his playa’ card and fill out an application
at some square-ass job somewhere because he was through in this field.

  “Damn, I guess it’s true what they say. Pimping ain’t easy,” Havoc said ruefully then disappeared into the night.

  He went in, got the goods and came out. Piece of cake.

  Chapter 2

  It’s the section that put the ‘crook’ in Crooklyn and the ‘Nam’ in Brooknam. The New York neighborhood where its occupants convince themselves as they’re trying to make it, that they’re gonna make it. The area that fills up a huge percent of New York’s state prisons. Brownsville, aka Thugs-Ville. Home of the brave where the moto is, ‘Brownsville, never ran, never will!’

  Barbara Jean Holiday paced her living room floor chain smoking like an expectant father. She was fifty with the blurry features of a woman who must have once been a pretty teenager.

  She sat down for a second then got up and paced some more wondering how to prevent what happened from occurring again. After receiving a phone call from Havoc saying that he was bringing her daughter back home safe and sound she could not sit still. In fact, she did not even realize it was a new year until forty-five minutes into it. Riddled with worry and nervous energy she tapped the bottom of a pack of Kool cigarettes then lit one and looked out the window at the drabby, tall brown Tilden housing projects surrounding her, smothering her, caging her. Down below were the kids she watched grow up, some she even baby-sat, tranquilized by malt liquor, squeezing off rounds into the air, laughing and celebrating what they considered was living.

  “If I owned Hell and these projects, I believe I’d rent out this place and live in Hell.” Barbara sighed.

  When she first moved into the projects it was a completely different place to live. She had neighbors of different races and cultures. There were vegetable gardens outside of her window. And weekly tenant association meetings where neighbors brought delicious dishes and discussed things going on in the community and how to better improve it. Now it was a gloomy, depressing place where odd characters came and went at all hours. Daylight drug dealing was common and occasional gunshots were followed by the screech of tires.

  Raising two kids on her own was no picnic and doing it in a hard-core high crime zone was even tougher. When neighbors reported that her oldest child Mercedes was spotted hanging out with a rowdy bunch of kids that cut class, drank, smoked and did Lord knows what else, Barbara did not want to believe it. But she had to come face to face with reality when she found a bag full of small plastic capsules filled with tiny white rocks in her daughter’s bedroom that she promptly flushed down the toilet. Fed up with her daughter’s dances with trouble, Barbara confronted Mercedes about it. Mercedes claimed she was simply holding them for a friend and did not even know what that stuff was.

  Barbara may have been born at night, but it wasn’t last night, and she refused to believe such a tired ass story. A shouting match ensued which resulted in Mercedes storming out saying that since her privacy was not respected there, she would no longer live there. For weeks Barbara was worried sick and heard nothing. Then on Christmas Eve, her nine-year-old son Elijah came home to report that he overheard the older kids gossiping about how his sister was strung out and prostituting somewhere out in East New York. Barbara did not know what to do. Since her daughter was eighteen she was not a minor, and not considered a runaway. Therefore, New York’s finest would not waste their time searching for yet another missing black girl, hooked on the new wave drug, ‘crack’. A cheaper form of rock cocaine that caught people like an ambush and turned them into addicts at an alarming rate.

  This was too much for Barbara to deal with by herself and she needed help. But where was this help going to come from? Purcell her children’s father and a pitiful excuse for a man, left her and the kids with nothing but the pain of abandonment. And her family and friends had their own problems. Then one day while she was at the incinerator dumping the trash and feeling sorry for herself, Maxine, the resident Wilona, offered some free advice about her predicament.

  “Say gurl, I ain’t trying to be all up in your business, but I heard about your trouble with Mercedes. Now word on the street is that there’s a man who can help. He’ll listen to your story, and he’ll make a judgement. If he thinks you’re wrong, you’re out on your ass. If he thinks you’ve been wronged, then you’ll never have a better friend.” Maxine then handed Barbara a black business card with bold red letters that said:

  NEED RELIEF FROM THE BEEF? THEN CALL HAVOC & MAYHEM TROUBLE CONSULTANTS AT 476-4678 REASONABLE RATES, SATISFACTION GUARANTEED

  Barbara studied the card and twisted her face a little skeptical. “Havoc and Mayhem huh, what is this dial a joke?”

  “Trust me, he ain’t no joke!” Maxine said like she knew from personal experience, “He’s a man of honor and when he says he will do something, you can best believe it’ll get done.”

  Left with no other alternatives, Barbara took the card then went inside her apartment and made a phone call…

  A sharp knock at the front door awoke Elijah and he sat up on the couch and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Barbara replaced a picture of the sweet little girl in pigtails, taken at Sears way before she became a junkie prostitute, back on the mantle, gently ran her fingers through her son’s curly Afro and walked over to the door. She looked through the peephole, took a drag then exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke through a frustrated sigh before unbolting a series of locks, chains and a long metal bar over the door. Havoc stood beneath a lonely flickering light bulb taking up almost all the space in the narrow graffiti covered hallway with his massive red frame.

  “Where is she?” Barbara wistfully asked darting her eye’s everywhere. Havoc cleared his throat and held out his hand rubbing his fingers together.

  “Oh right, I’m sorry. I’m just real anxious to see my baby.” Barbara apologized handing Havoc a thick envelope.

  The Trouble Consultant bowed slightly and stepped to the side revealing a worn out looking Mercedes, badly in need of a hot shower, a home cooked meal, a warm bed and most of all, her mother’s love.

  “My baby,” Barbara whispered stepping forward and her eyes filled with water. Mercedes may have only been gone a little over two weeks, but the effects from the fast lifestyle she lived made her look way beyond her eighteen years. Barbara embraced her daughter and they both gave in to their tears. As Barbara led her into their apartment, she looked back to thank Havoc, but he was already gone.

  There was no need for thank yous, the Trouble Consultant was simply doing the job he was paid to do.

  Chapter 3

  His eyes roving, Havoc nodded to ‘You Belong to the City’ feeling every bit a man of the street as he streaked past the Galaxy Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue where hookers tricked and nickel and dime drug dealers stood around pushing weight like it was popcorn at a Saturday matinee. One building dissolved into another, some bustling with life, some empty and boarded over but all the same. Turning off Atlantic Avenue and onto Eastern Parkway, he spilled out behind the Brooklyn Public Library across from Prospect Park and weaved through the entanglement of monuments and green parks where tourists flocked and weekenders played volleyball. This was all that most visitors saw as worthy in Brooklyn, having been fed a steady diet of negative headlines about the rest of his beloved borough, and it pissed him off hearing all the dissenting shit about his beloved hometown from people that didn’t know jack-shit.

  It was two thirty-seven in the am as Havoc pulled up in front of the Kum-Pow Chinese takeout restaurant on the corner of Myrtle Avenue in the Clinton Hills section of BK. After switching off the ignition he lowered the radio and reflected on yet another job he awaited payment for.

  It was a criminal plan hatched from hunger and stupidity, all designed to snare a lousy fifty-dollars’ worth of Chinese food, and now, sadly, a man’s son may never reach his full potential.

  On Christmas Eve of the previous year John Chung, a hardworking immigrant from South China got a call for a huge order at his r
estaurant. Like always he sent his eighteen-year-old son Timothy to deliver the order. Once young Tim arrived at the nearby Ingersoll Houses he quickly learned that he was set up by a couple of crackheads to be robbed. Outnumbered, he willingly gave up the food but that wasn’t enough for the fiends and they proceeded to toss a blanket over his head and pummel him with a brick so that he could not identify them. It was a stupid idea that went bad pretty fast.

  The degenerates would have gotten away with it were it not for the fact that they were stupid and bragged about the deed to whoever listened until it eventually got back to the victim’s father. With his son in a coma, and those that knew something foolishly honoring the phrase ‘snitches get stitches’, combined with the police dragging their feet and insisting they needed more proof than hearsay because the call was made anonymously from a pay phone, Mister Chung’s grief turned to anger and his anger turned to resolution. It was around that time when he decided to call the phone number on the black card with bold red letters that mysteriously found its way under his windshield wiper. After a week of staking out Timothy’s attackers and paying a snitch to get them to admit their guilt on tape, Havoc and Mayhem moved in and did what they do best. Later, in between his last consulting gig of 1987 and his first of 1988, he briefly called Mister Chung to inform him it was taken care of and that he would be stopping by his restaurant at closing time to pick up the other half of his payment.

  Havoc observed John Chung pull the gate down over his restaurant then tapped his horn. The balding Asian man was momentarily startled then smiled when he recognized Havoc and went over to him.

  “All I hear all day in my restaurant is people talk about how the wicked men who hurt my son got their just deserves. How ironic it is that they hurt my son for food and now they will never be able to eat solid food again without the aid of false teeth.” the small man said and handed Havoc an envelope stuffed with money. “Here is payment, for job done well.” He bowed.