Hardboiled Horror by Jonathan Maberry

Author:Jonathan Maberry [Maberry, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Scott Sigler, JournalStone, Nancy Holder, Jonathan Maberry, Josh Malerman, Seanan McGuire, Heather Graham, Hardboiled Horror
ISBN: 9781947654006
Publisher: JournalStone
Published: 2017-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

-3-

Kenya told me the story. It was long and she rambled a bit, but here are the bones of it. Yeah, pun intended.

She lived a couple of streets over from my office, so location was as important to her as my claim of protection. Her block was rough; it wasn’t the worst in Philadelphia, but it was a contender. A lot of the homes were boarded up, though it didn’t mean they were empty. Some were occupied by squatters—the endless flow of the disenfranchised who were on the run from something. Abusive families, bad decisions, their own memories, their lack of expectations. Take your pick. Some of the abandoned places were crack houses or needle palaces, and I guess if you’re getting that high you don’t give much of a shit about where. Her neighborhood was mostly black, but the template works for whites, Latinos, or any other group. Race doesn’t much matter. Lack of money, an indifferent upper class, and crushed hope deal those cards.

There are gangs all over Philly, just like in any big city. The gang that ran Kenya’s neighborhood didn’t have a cool nickname. No Crips or Bloods like in L.A. There was more of a dog pack mentality, with the gang gradually taking on the name of whoever was top dog, meaning whoever kicked the most ass. That kind of celebrity was usually short-lived. For the last few years it had been Baby Hulk’s block. Baby Hulk was one Nicholas Powell, a twenty-eight-year-old thug who was only five foot six inches tall but nearly as wide. He’d gone into prison at twenty and when he made parole at twenty-four it was clear he’d spent every minute inside clanking weights. Massive muscles and clinical anger management issues. Hence the name. He took the gang over from his big brother, Donnie, when said sibling went down for a murder two fall and was sent off to prison for fifteen-to-twenty. Kenya didn’t know exactly what Baby Hulk’s gang did, but she said, “Probably drugs. I mean…what else is there?”

This is a twelve-year-old girl. The sadness of that kind of worldly wisdom came close to breaking my heart.

Baby Hulk was known to knock teeth out—apparently one of his favorite hobbies. He did it to anyone who gave him shit, and apparently a lot of people fell into that category. Even some of his crew sported gold replacements for teeth he’d forcibly removed. Both of his lieutenants, Grayman and Topper. When I later looked them up, I was surprised to learn that these were not nicknames but actual surnames. Weird.

After Baby Hulk took over the family business, things more or less settled down on the block. There had been some pushback from neighboring gangs, but Baby Hulk and his crew kicked enough ass to reinforce the accepted boundaries, just not so much that the other gangs felt a need to go to war. After all, war would interfere with business, and each of these smaller groups worked part of a bigger drug distribution system run by more dangerous predators higher up on the food chain.

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