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  If that was not bad enough, Eddie Tate was gaining the support of more and more delegates every day. Marcel had learned right before coming to this meeting that ten more delegates had openly pledged their support to Tate. And they had also committed themselves to campaigning for Eddie to win over more undecided delegates. That was not good. Marcel had been working hard to convince those undecided delegates to pledge their votes to Sonny. But so far he’d been able to grab only a handful of folk in this group.

  Marcel was sick of Eddie Tate and Theophilus Simmons. He had never liked them, and he had been working for over twenty years to take them down. But no matter what he did, and how good the plan, it never worked. It was as if there were angels shielding them, thwarting every single thing he thought to send their way. And that was exhausting.

  People just didn’t realize how much time and energy was used trying to do harm to another person. It was hard work. But Marcel reasoned that somebody had to do it—especially where Theophilus and Eddie were concerned. So if anybody was going to take those two down, it might as well be him. They had caused Marcel a whole lot of suffering, and he deserved to be the one to get the glory from putting Eddie and Theophilus in their place.

  Marcel looked at his watch and hoped that his crew would show up soon. They had a lot of work to do, he was tired, and he wanted to get this meeting rolling. There was a late-night party in Bishop Conrad Brown’s suite. He had promised Bishop Brown that he’d help get the party started with some WP21. He could make some money with the little bit of WP21 in the personal stash he kept on hand for moments just like this. And if the fine conference hos he’d connected with earlier showed up at the bishop’s suite as promised, Marcel could count on half of the delegates in Bishop Brown’s district casting votes for Sonny.

  The very next day Sonny was sitting across from Marcel, wondering why Marcel looked so tired. He said, “You getting old, bro. Times past, you could hang out all night with some adventuresome hos, and then go through the next day with more zeal and energy than a brother who had caught a night-full of Zs.”

  Marcel drank his cup of coffee in three gulps. He was so tired he could barely move.

  “Sonny, man,” he said in between long yawns. “Who knew that Bishop Conrad Brown was a freak?”

  “You lying, man,” Sonny said with a chuckle.

  “If I’m lyin’, I’m flyin’,” Marcel told him. “I gave Conrad a taste of WP21, and he ran through three hos just like that… ratta-tat-tat.”

  “So where were you when all of this was going on, Marcel? You have never been the kind of brother to steer off on Freaky Lane.”

  “And I’m still that way, Sonny. I’m a player and a ho’. But I ain’t nobody’s freak-a-leak. Man, I ended up spending the night in one of the spare bathrooms, in the tub, with a blanket, a pillow, and a fifth of Hennessey.”

  Sonny’s eyes got big as he tried to form his mouth to ask the next question.

  “No, Sonny, man,” Marcel said, rubbing that tender spot between his eyebrows, “the bishop didn’t have all of the women in his room together. We are, after all, at a church conference. He took more WP21 than he should have, and needed three women, back-to-back, to help him get back to normal.”

  Sonny was cracking up. He said, “You mean to tell me that old stuck-up, uptight, white-boy-talking Conrad Brown needed three women to work off WP21?”

  Marcel nodded. He could hardly believe it himself, and he had been there.

  “I don’t understand why you didn’t just get up and leave,” Sonny was saying, interrupting his thoughts.

  Marcel closed his eyes, sighed, and said, “I had to go to the bathroom—bad. And when I came out, stuff was happening.”

  “Then why didn’t you act like you couldn’t see them, and hurry out of there, Marcel?”

  Sonny was having a hard time understanding why Marcel had gotten stuck like that. He knew he would have found a way to get out of that room if he had been in that situation.

  “I did do that, Sonny, man. But the bishop kept calling me, telling me not to leave because he might need some more of that ‘love potion.’ Every time I tried to get out, he tried to get me over to where he was. So I pretended to have an upset stomach from a stomach virus, and made the bathroom my home for the night. It was the best I could do under the circumstances. The bishop had just promised up the delegates from his district, and I couldn’t risk making him mad.”

  Sonny scratched at the back of his head. He was glad that he hadn’t had to endure that. He would have never pegged Bishop Conrad Brown as the freak of the week.

  He picked up the bag of WP21 and stared at it, as if it would give him a clue to making this all work on his behalf. This had been a genius of a plan when Rucker first put it on the table. But this thing was definitely not going as planned, and things were beginning to get out of hand.

  The door of the suite opened and his least favorite negro in the world came strutting through the door grinning and wearing some big white aviator sunglasses. Sonny had always thought that he hated Theophilus Simmons more than anybody else in the world until he met Rico Sneed. But nothing Theophilus had done to make his life hard, including helping to get him demoted and sent to Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina, could make Sonny dislike the man more than he did Rico. And that was saying something, since Rico was technically on his side of the fence.

  Sonny just could not stand Rico Sneed. He had disliked that skinny, big-tooth-grinning-over-nothing, Milk-Dud-shaped-head negro on sight. Sonny Washington had never met such a mediocre and plain negro who had such an overinflated opinion of himself. Rico was basically just the tech boy. But sometimes he acted as if he were large and in charge of this entire operation simply because he was the only one on the team with computer skills.

  A tall, red, freckled, and bulky young man was following Rico with three small baggies filled with very pale powders in pink, yellow, and beige. Rico wasn’t the only one these preachers weren’t taking to. This new boy rubbed them the wrong way the moment he walked through the door.

  Rucker Hemphill and Larsen Giles, who had just finished meeting, came out of one of the other rooms in the suite. Larsen took one look at Rico’s friend and decided that he was too quiet and smug for his own good. He was the kind of man who lay in the cut planning dirt on a brother, just waiting for the perfect opportunity to go in for the kill.

  That boy had walked up in this room as if he were paying the rent. Didn’t he know better than to act like that in a room of prominent preachers and bishops? That was the problem—neither of these young men knew his proper place.

  “Did I sleep with you last night?” Larsen Giles asked Rico.

  “Huh?” Rico mumbled.

  “You really are as dumb as you look,” Larsen told him. “You and your friend here walked into a suite that I am paying for, eyeing my liquor, earning extra cash because of us, and you two have not spoken a word to any man in this room. Don’t you have any kind of home training?”

  Rico looked at Kordell, who stifled an urge to shrug his shoulders. Kordell didn’t care what these preachers thought about him. But Rico cared because he’d been around them enough to know that a slip in what they called “home training” could cost him dearly.

  He said, “My apologies, Bishop Larsen,” and then walked over to the table with the Southern Comfort and the whiskey glasses.

  “Bishop, if I may, I’d like to use some of your whiskey to show you all something.”

  Larsen nodded, wondering what Rico was going to show him with a glass of Southern Comfort. It wasn’t as if watching a man drink up his liquor were a novelty to him.

  Rico got three glasses and filled them with whiskey. Kordell handed him three baggies filled with different-colored powders. Rico put one tablespoon of the first powder in a glass, then a tablespoon of the second powder in the next glass, and did the same with the third powder and glass.

  He said, “I know you all are having trouble with supply and demand. So I went and found
two of my old track-and-field teammates from college, gave them some of the WP21, and asked them if they could reproduce this stuff. One of them was a chemistry major in college. He could make anything in the chem lab. The other…”

  “Can we presume that this brother sitting here is the other one of them?” Marcel asked, clearly impatient with Rico.

  “No, Rev. Brown. This is my friend, Kordell Bivens. My college friends live up in western North Carolina.”

  Rico had to work hard to hold his peace. The last time he had gone off on one of them he had found himself lying on the floor. These were some arrogant preachers, and they all got on his nerves.

  Both Rico and Kordell were little boys when the last “business” had been established. But they knew that these men were greedy, messy, and careless, and had barely escaped arrest, prosecution, and some time in jail. Back then, and now, they didn’t have enough hands-on action with their business. It was because they were spoiled and always looked to others to do all the work—clean or dirty.

  This time, however, they were going to have to roll up their sleeves and earn this money. As far as Rico was concerned they needed more control over manufacturing WP21. They didn’t need to rely on some old man over in Africa to control the supply needed to meet the growing demand for the drug.

  Rucker picked up the glass with the pink powder in it and sniffed it. This stuff wasn’t funky enough to be some decent WP21. He put that glass back down and picked up the one with the yellow powder. No smell at all, just a whiff of some very good liquor. No chance that stuff was WP21.

  “What about the drink with the beige powder in it, Bishop?” Sonny Washington asked. He’d gotten a whiff and that stuff smelled so bad the whiskey couldn’t even cut that nasty mess. Rucker picked up the glass and raised it to his face. His eyes watered, the stuff smelled so bad. He gulped it down and went and sat down and waited for something to happen. It didn’t take long.

  Rucker grinned and then asked, “You got a woman waiting for me to wear this stuff off?”

  Kordell, who believed in always being prepared, started laughing. He walked to the door of the hotel suite and beckoned for a fine sister named LaShaye Boswell to come in. The tall, honey-colored sister with a short curly Afro went and stood by the man who had obviously swallowed that drink. She wrapped Bishop Hemphill’s arms around her waist from the back and walked him out of the conference room to the back of his suite and closed the door.

  “I guess that’s the one we want,” was all Bishop Giles could say, and put several blocks of cash on the table. He’d planned on giving it to Cleotis, until the fool had the audacity to put him on hold at a time like this. Election day was getting closer and closer, and they needed to do five times better than they were doing right now.

  Larsen didn’t know why they had thought they could do business with Cleotis Clayton on this level a second time. This was the same Cleotis who had stood back and let that Saphronia McComb James beat the living daylights out of Marcel twenty-three years ago. They must have been awfully dumb, greedy, and desperate to venture down that road again.

  Rico picked up the two thick wads of bills. He wanted to count them so bad but knew better than to do so in front of these men, who would have considered such behavior offensive and in very bad taste. A mistake like that could cost him this business.

  Kordell was practically sweating, he wanted his cut of the money so badly. Rico had been his boy for some time now, and always looked out for him. This wouldn’t be the first time they had gotten into some dirt together. But it certainly was the first time that they had gotten paid for the dirt. To say that he and Rico had hit pay dirt was an understatement.

  “How much can your contacts make for us? And can we have it at the official opening session of the Triennial Conference?”

  Kordell mustered up his best poker face to hide his surprise. Based on all the hustle and bustle going on around Eva T., he could have sworn that the conference had already begun. But obviously that wasn’t the case—which explained why all of those blocked rooms here at the Governor’s Inn had not filled up with people.

  “How much do you want, Bishop Giles?” Rico asked, trying to act as if he had all of this under control with his suppliers, Harold and Horace Dinkle. He hoped the brothers wouldn’t ask for too much of his hard-earned money now that they were under the gun time-wise.

  Those Dinkles were some crazy, smart, beer-guzzling, drug-making white boys who would hurt you bad if you messed with their money. They liked Rico. But the brothers made it clear to their only black friend from college that he, too, could be found lying in a ravine, praying that a wandering bear didn’t find him before help came, if he tried to run some game on them.

  Naturally, Rico had lied to those white boys about how much money he could get, just as he and Kordell called themselves running game on these preachers. They wanted that money. And they wanted to control this situation. It didn’t occur to either Rico or Kordell that those two white boys had not issued an idle warning. They meant what they said, and could learn to live without their only black friend from college if they had to. Plus, those preachers had already made a secret pact to sacrifice Rico to the authorities if anything went wrong.

  FIFTEEN

  Cleotis, Big Dotsy, and Grady Grey had spent so much of their time with Bishop Hemphill and his boys they had almost forgotten that there were some real and decent preachers out there, and that a lot of them were at this conference. Sometimes the Marcel Browns and Sonny Washingtons of the world could make you become jaded and distrustful where preachers were concerned. So it was a like a breath of fresh air to run into young, saved, and sincere ministers like Obadiah Quincey and Denzelle Flowers.

  Cleotis was sitting in Eva T.’s cafeteria sipping on a cup of hot coffee. How many times had his mother paid somebody off to let him enroll in Fisk University, Atlanta University, Virginia Union in Richmond, North Carolina Central University here in Durham, and North Carolina A & T in Greensboro, only to have to sit back and watch him flunk out of school over some foolishness?

  He drank some more coffee. It was good—tasted like a cup of gourmet brew. This place made the best coffee, and he always made sure that he got a cup when he was on campus. Cleotis liked Eva T. Marshall University. It was a beautiful campus—trees, flowers, red brick walkways, gardens, ponds, those lovely buildings, and even lovelier coeds. It was like being in Heaven without the penalty he feared he’d have to face when he stood before the Lord for all the mess he’d been involved in throughout his life.

  The whole week Cleotis had been in Durham and on this campus, he had walked around regretting that he had never appreciated college until now. Maybe if his mother had sent him here he’d have a degree and a different life. Being here had to be the best experience for these students. The dorms were nicer than many at historically black colleges. Each had large rooms with a private bathroom shared by only two residents. That was sweet. One of the major complaints coming from his cousins who went off to college was about those community bathrooms. Cleotis was a spoiled only child, and he couldn’t imagine sharing the bathroom with a bunch of folk.

  What many people didn’t know about Cleotis Clayton was that all those years sitting up in church, wishing with all his heart that he could be anywhere other than Greater Hope Gospel United Church in Memphis, Tennessee, had made an impression on him in spite of himself. Cleotis had absorbed a lot during those years, and could quote Scripture with the best of them. In fact, remembering Scripture at a moment’s notice had kept him safe in some of the scariest situations. And Cleotis had definitely had his fair share of scary situations.

  When Denzelle Flowers walked into the cafeteria, the first person he saw was Cleotis Clayton. The two men had made only a brief acquaintance with each other here in this cafeteria. Denzelle hadn’t said more to Cleotis than good morning, and that the best cup of coffee to be had in Durham could be found at the cafeteria on Eva T. Marshall University’s campus. But something told him that h
e needed to talk to this brother this morning.

  Denzelle walked right over to where Cleotis was sitting and sat down at his table. Cleotis was surprised. He had secretly wanted to talk to Denzelle Flowers. And the brother was right here, obviously wanting to talk to him, too.

  Cleotis took a quick look at what the young brother was wearing. He always believed that a brother without flair and style was a brother who wouldn’t be able to hold a decent conversation with him. He was impressed, and Denzelle passed his test with flying colors.

  The preacher was “clean” in a pale orchid-colored Italian silk suit with a double-breasted jacket, white jacquard print silk shirt with a diamond pattern on the material, a gray-purple-and-orchid pocket handkerchief and some of the sharpest dove-gray gators he’d seen in a long time. He knew the young brother had purchased this suit in Chicago. Cleotis loved Chicago. And he always bought several sharp suits whenever he was in the Windy City.

  As a matter of fact Rev. Flowers reminded Cleotis of this man in Chicago named Bernie Mac, who was a very talented and funny comedian. The only difference between the two men was that the comedian was a rich chocolate color, and Denzelle’s skin was a very mellow caramel. The resemblance between the two men was so striking, they could have been kinfolk—high cheekbones, slanted eyes that could broaden and get big and wide when they got excited about something, and big grins that revealed good sets of white teeth.

  Cleotis was sure that this brother had more than his fair share of women—which had to be kind of hard for a preacher trying to live right and be right. If there was one thing Cleotis Clayton was good at, it was sizing folk up. And he knew that this man was decent. Now, the good Rev. Flowers was definitely a playboy down to the bone. Because it was clear that this black man loved himself some black women. But he was a good man nonetheless—just needed to get married since he was a preacher. But Cleotis also figured that the young brother was hardheaded, enjoying chasing tail too much to submit to this truth.