Trickery by Noire Read Free Book Online

the trigger as many times as he wanted to. But until then he just had to wait.
    Flex’s grandmother had come to New York City outta the deep South, and the churchified old lady had always told him that the best way to kill a snake was to cut off the head. Flex grinned. Salida McKay’s head was about to get chop-chopped.
     

CHAPTER 5
     
    A’ight, this shit here looks a whole lot better, Mizz Salida.”
    Freeze Dodson held out a bright pink sample of the crystallized mixture of meth that him and his crew had just spent the last few days mixing, cutting, and cooking upstairs in the G-Spot’s cut room. He was Salida’s number one street pharmacist and he was damn good at churning out batches of crystal and powder for her left and right, but just a couple of weeks earlier he had almost got himself fired for pissing Salida off.
    It wasn’t his fault though, Freeze thought. Salida was bent in about twenty different directions, and she had gone off on him when she dumped some special chemicals into his mix and he complained that it made the batch come out too strong.
    “This shit ain’t even smokable,” Freeze had told her. “We put this out on the streets and it’s gone fuck around and give them fools a heart attack. I think we need to cut it again.”
    Salida had narrowed her eyes and shaken her head. “Hell no. We ain’t cutting shit! Put it out there just like that. We’ll get these fools hooked on it first, and then when they’re jonesing so hard till they start banging down our doors, that’s when we’ll cut the mixture back.”
     Freeze didn’t have no choice but to cook the overload of toxic chemicals in the mix like she had ordered him to. But Salida had been right ’cause that shit had worked. The corners they manned had turned into Meth-Head Central, and they couldn’t produce the shit fast enough to meet their growing demand. The nice-sized batch of strawberry-scented crystals they were about to package today would bring in a quick hundred grand on the streets, which Salida would promptly pocket and make disappear.
    Freeze knew their young clientele could go through that much ice in just a day or so. Bizz was booming, and they were drawing in droves of white boys and Asian kids from colleges all over Manhattan and the Bronx.
    “Let me see,” Salida sauntered over to the table where he was working. She tipped around cautiously on her toes, careful to avoid any of the chemicals and paraphernalia used to produce their lethal product.
    “You burn any yet?”
    Freeze nodded. He had burned a small amount, but he hadn’t smoked none of that shit. He mighta been a dope dealer but he wasn’t no fool. He had been around hardcore drugs all his life, but the most he did was fuck with a little weed and occasionally hit a couple of lines of blow. Besides, he was way too fuckin’ handsome to get high on his own supply. That shit woulda had him walking around digging holes in his face tryna get at the imaginary bugs crawling around under his skin. Nah, he was cool on all that. Give him some good Cush any day of the week, but smoking meth was for the dummies of the world.
    “Want a tester?” Freeze asked Salida, partitioning off a small portion and scooping it into a small vial that was stamped with her custom-designed neon-pink serpent logo.
    “Yeah,” she said. “Give me two. One crystal and one powder.”
    “You need a dun dun?” he asked as he passed her the drugs.
    “No. I already have one,” Salida said as she thought about Nooni who was still chained up in the Dungeon and jonesing like a feen. She took the first vial Freeze gave her and stuck it inside her jacket pocket, and she placed the second one inside the top drawer in the cut-room’s office. She glanced at Freeze and narrowed her eyes. This new shit better be as good as he said it was. Some of the early batches they had cooked up had just been pretty good in terms of quality, but Salida had wanted more than good. At the time wasn’t