He listened to two of his whores babbling in the bathroom. There were nine in his stable now, and three of them slept here in cots that he rented to them as part of their “arrangement.” A couple of the others still lived with their mommas, because they had children and needed someone to take care of the kids while they were on the streets, and he had rented floor space to the rest in the place over by the Point.

G-Mack rolled a joint and watched as the youngest of the three women, the little white bitch who called herself Ellen, strolled through the kitchen in her bare feet, eating toast with peanut butter smeared untidily across it. Said she was nineteen, but he didn’t believe that. Didn’t care none, either. There were a lot of men liked them younger, and she was taking top dollar on the streets. G-Mack had even considered setting her up somewhere private, maybe placing an ad in the Voice or the Press and charging four or five hundred an hour for her. He’d been about to do it, too, when all the shit had broken around him, and he’d been forced to watch his back. Still, he liked to take a little of her honey for himself sometimes, so it was good to have her near.

G-Mack was twenty-three, younger than most of his own women. He had started out selling weed to schoolkids, but he was ambitious and saw himself expanding his business to take in stockbrokers and lawyers and the hungry young white guys who frequented the bars and clubs on weekends, looking for something to give them a kick for the long nights to come. G-Mack saw himself in slick threads, driving a hooked-up car. For a long time he dreamed of owning a ’71 Cutlass Supreme, with cream leather interior and chrome spokes, although the Cutlass carried bullshit eighteen-inch wheels as standard and G-Mack knew that a ride was nothing unless it was sitting on twenty-twos at the least, Lexani alloys, maybe even Jordans if he wanted to rub the other brothers’ noses in it. But a man who was planning on driving a ’71 Cutlass Supreme with twenty-two-inch wheels was going to have to do more than push weed on pimple-faced fifteen-year-olds. So G-Mack invested in some E, along with a little coke, and slowly the dough started coming in swift and sweet.

The problem for G-Mack was that he didn’t have the backbone to enter the big time. G-Mack didn’t want to go back to jail. He had served six months in Otisville on an assault beef when he was barely nineteen, and he still woke up at night screaming at the memory. G-Mack was a good-looking young brother, and they’d had a time with him those first days until he tied himself up with the Nation of Islam, who had some big sonsofbitches on their side and who didn’t take kindly to those who would try to punk out one of their potential converts. G-Mack spent the rest of his six clinging to the Nation like it was driftwood after a shipwreck, but when he left he dropped that shit like it was damaged goods. They came looking for him, asking him questions and shit, but G-Mack was all done with them. Sure, there were threats, but G-Mack was braver on the outside, and eventually the Nation cut him loose as a bad deal. He still occasionally paid lip service to the Nation if the need arose, when he was around folks who didn’t know no better, but mostly he just liked the fact that Minister Farrakhan didn’t take shit from whites and that the presence of his followers in their sharp suits and shades scared the hell out of all those middle-class doughboys.

But if G-Mack was to raise the money to finance the lifestyle he wanted so badly, then it meant trying to score big, and he didn’t like the idea of holding that much supply. If he was caught in possession, he was looking at a class A felony, and that was fifteen to life right there. Even if he got lucky, and the prosecutor wasn’t having troubles at home or suffering from prostate problems, and allowed him to plead down to a class B, then G-Mack would spend the rest of his twenties behind bars, and fuck anyone who said that you were still a young man when you got out, because six months inside had aged G-Mack more than he liked to think about, and he didn’t believe that he could survive five to ten years inside, didn’t matter whether it was no class B, class C, or even class fucking Z.

What finally confirmed him in the belief that the pusher’s life was not for him was a raid on his crib by a couple of real bad-ass narcs. Seemed like they’d turned someone who was even more scared of prison than G-Mack, and G-Mack’s name had come up in the course of the conversation. The cops hadn’t found nothing, though. G-Mack always took the same shortcut onto the streets, slipping through the burned-out shell of another three-story behind his own that in turn backed onto a vacant lot. There was an old fireplace in there, and G-Mack hid his stash inside it, behind a loose brick. The cops took him in, even though they’d got fresh air in return for their warrant. G-Mack knew they didn’t have nothing on him, so he kept quiet and waited for them to let him walk. It took him three days to work up the courage to go back to his stash, and he off-loaded it five minutes later for half of what it was worth on the street. Since then, he’d kept his distance from drugs and instead found another potential source of income, because if G-Mack didn’t know shit about the drug trade, he did know about pussy. He’d had his share, and he’d never paid for it, at least not up front and in cash, but he knew there were men out there who would. Hell, he even knew a couple of bitches who were selling it already, but they didn’t have nobody to look out for them, and women like that were in a vulnerable position. They needed a man to take care of them, and it didn’t take long for G-Mack to convince them that he was just the man to do it. He only had to hit one every so often, and even then he didn’t have to hit her hard, and the others just fell in line behind her. Then that old pimp Free Billy had died, and some of his women had come G-Mack’s way, expanding his stable still further.

Looking back, he couldn’t remember why he’d taken on the junkie whore, Alice. Most of Free Billy’s other girls just used grass, maybe a little coke if a john offered it or they struck lucky and managed to hold something back from G-Mack, not that he didn’t search them regularly to keep that kind of theft to a minimum. Junkies were unpredictable, and just the look of them could put the johns off. But this one, she had something, ain’t nobody could deny that. She was just on the verge. The drugs had taken some of the fat off her, leaving her with a body that was just about perfect and a face that gave her the look of one of those Ethiopian bitches, the ones that the modeling agencies liked on account of their features didn’t look so Negro, what with their slim noses and their coffee complexions. Plus she was close to Sereta, the Mexican with the touch of black to her, and that was one fine-looking woman there. Sereta and Alice were Free Billy’s girls, and they made it clear to him that they came as a pair, so G-Mack had been content to live with the arrangement.

At least Alice, or LaShan as she called herself on the streets, was smart enough to realize that johns didn’t like track marks. She kept a stash of liquid vitamin E capsules among her possessions, and squeezed the contents onto her arm after she shot up to hide the evidence. He guessed she shot up in other parts of her body too, secret parts, but that was her business. All G-Mack cared about was that the marks didn’t show and that she kept herself together while she was hooking. That was one good thing about heroin users: they got the nod for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes once the drug kicked in, but thirty minutes later they were ready to go. They could almost pass for normal then, until the drug started wearing off, and they got sick again, all itchy and antsy. Mostly, Alice seemed to have her habit under that kind of control, but G-Mack still figured when he took her on that the junkie didn’t have more than a couple of months in her. He could see it in her eyes, the way the hunger was biting more deeply now, the way her hair was slowly turning white, but with her looks he could still get good money on her for a time.