Street Hustle

The thirteen-year-old girl, Princess, stood on the shadows of the streetlight. It was dark but it wasn’t entirely dark just yet. The sun had set, but the late-night hue still populated light throughout the darkened streets. She was one of his many street workers. The police came down a lot lighter, by law, for those under the legal age limits. This made them the perfect little soldiers. He had realized this quickly, and then had went on to further notice it was even more predominate with females. He was an adept entrepreneur, which means as soon as this was made obvious to him, he had immediately started recruiting exclusively girls. Now he had a small army of ten to fourteen-year-olds running his street corners.

Fourteen was that magic number. Anything older and you ran into danger of them getting charged as an adult. But what kind of judge would charge a fourteen-year-old as an adult? It did happen, but it was rare. And his business ran on percentages, margins, and flow.

He had found that there were other complications of using women on the corners. Rape was an ever-present danger. The prospect enraged him, and he did everything in his power to minimize it. But the harsh reality of the streets is that it still happened, and not as infrequent as it should have.

He’d been running his twenty-five corners for the last ten years. It was a brutal climb to the top of the streets. He was still not as major of a player as he ambitiously sought, but he held his ground firm. And he did it by running an army of girls, and young women. When one of his street girls reached fifteen it was time to move them out of the handling and selling and move them to the protection department. He had found this a solid method to drastically reduce the number of assaults that the girls suffered. They all had one or two older girls watching from the other edges of the streets.

It turned out that the police didn’t want to charge girls who shot would-be rapist down in the street either. Another added benefit to using the women. With a network as large as his domain, there was at least one man that would taste the dirt every month. The women would terrorize the local businesses and residence as well if it was required, which meant no one was saying anything to the cops. The fifty dead men over the last years hadn’t seen one of his girls put in prison on murder.

The cops would send them away on weapons charges. He had found that every one of his older girls were fully prepared to risk the weapon charges if it meant keeping the perverts off the younger girls. It might have something to do that most of his current older girls had been raped by similar men. It also probably explained why not one of them hesitated to put a man down.

He drove his unspoiled 1969 Stingray up to Princess. The shimmering car reflected every ray of light on the street. She quickly handed him the bag of money that she had collected over the last three hours. Her time for the night was coming to an end. His oldest, most trusted girls drove the fully retrofitted ’68 Chevelle Super Sport behind. Princess handed them the drugs that hadn’t sold that night, the left-over stock.

He had strict rules for the girls. At the top of the list was that they never kept stock, and they never used. The minute they used; they were off his payroll. And he paid them well, everyone of them made significantly more than what they would make flipping burgers, and they wouldn’t be able to do that for years yet. They could cruise the streets in a hundred-g rides, or they could use one time. Entirely up to them, but it was nonnegotiable.

The third car pulled up and Princess jumped in. That would be her ride home. He’d drive by two more girls on this run before the drugs were moved back to a different safehouse, and the money was taken to another group of girls who would be doing the nightly counts. Her two shadows jumped in the fourth car. This one was nondescript and would shadow the rest of the cars as much as possible. But the shades, as they were called, always followed the drugs.

It had taken him years to create this well-oiled machine. He often thought about those early days, when he was slinging on the streets, just like Princess had done tonight. He didn’t have the help of the shades when he was on the corners. He’d broken bones and been shot three times the first couple years. He finally climbed the ranks when he shot his former lieutenant. He had been on the streets all day and was eventually jumped. He lost the drugs and the money to rivals. His lieutenant tried to kill him for the mistake, he took two more slugs that day before he put the entire clip into his boss. That quickly resolved the issue.

He signed his death warrant by killing a lieutenant in the organization though. Especially since he lost all the money as well. There was only one thing to do and that was get all the money back and setup operations and do that before the rest of the gang came down on him. He wasn’t in a position to run the rest of his life. He was all in. A bullet in his abdomen and a bullet in his shoulder hindered him, but it didn’t stop him from shooting up the rival’s safehouse and taking not only his original stock and money back, but half of their stash as well.

That’s when the bad years began. Retaliations moved through the streets, and as they did, the streets ran with blood. They knew he was behind the hit on the safehouse, and he had protection, so the other gangs didn’t come after him directly. But they did kill his older brother and cousin. The close confidants he was building within his own personal combatants, returned with taking out another safehouse. The bloodshed continued for two years. All told, sixty funerals would grace the projects. Every couple weeks, another several bodies would be stacked up. The culmination came when it was clear that there would only be one gang left in the area. A calculated hit took out three separate groups of the rival gang, and left thirteen people dead in one day, and took out the power structure of the rival gang.

He had grown to a solid mid-level shot caller during this time. He now ran his own streets, his own crew, and his own protection and arms. No one messed with him on his streets, and as long as he kept the money funneling up to the senior leadership, they didn’t mess with him either. His crews consisted of just shy of one hundred people. The cops, of course, were entirely clueless thinking it was just a small street corner group.

He wasn’t thirty yet, but he’d been running on the streets for eighteen years. He had been running the streets for the last ten years. He had girls old enough to be leaving the life and working in his legitimate businesses, the businesses that laundered the money he didn’t syphon up to the gang lords.

He wondered what his life would be like if he hadn’t gone down this path. What would have happened if he didn’t join his brother in the life? Perhaps it was inevitable. Perhaps it happened when his father went to prison. There was no way that his mother could make enough money on her own to feed the family. That meant that him and his brother had to do something, so they joined the source of income in the area. The gang.

Those first years they didn’t make much money. But they made enough to keep their mother and sisters fed. That was all they were trying to do. Keep the family together, feed the family. His older brother would later stare blankly up at him from a bloodied sidewalk. Eyes glazed over, lifeless.

He swore he would protect the rest of his family at that point. Several years would go by, but after that he moved his entire family out of the projects. His mom, two sisters, and younger brother all moved to a nicer neighborhood, deep in the suburbs. He made the point to live on the opposite side of town, making sure they were entirely isolated from his lifestyle. It was the least he could do.

He had split from the other cars quite a while ago and was rolling into the safehouse. He walked to the door and rang the bell. Security cameras looked out from every aspect of the house, so his girls inside already knew it was him. The automatic door popped open after multiple locks disengaged. And he strolled in like he owned the place. He did. He threw the bags of money to the women who started counting, while he walked over to grab a bottled water.

The usual small talk, chatter, and pleasantries were exchanged while he waited. Strictly speaking he was done for the night and could have left, everything after this point the girls could handle. But this process is what kept the money flowing, and these women were some of his most trusted. His operations depended on them transferring this money to the legal businesses to be laundered into nice legal bank accounts.

Princess and the other two girls, plus the three which were closed out right before, had brought in twenty thousand dollars. Not a bad take for three hours of work for six corners. He might have expected more, but on a weekday in the middle of the week. He couldn’t complain. The two girls who were running the safehouse tonight pulled out the small black notebook that recorded the nightly earnings. They meticulously noted down what corner earned what, and the collective totals. The small black notebooks were key to part of the success. They kept ten different ones, each for their specific job function. They never crossed, and the money was never traced between them. Any compromised notebook would only give a very limited view of the operation, and that was the point. Every two months, every notebook was given to an accountant and transferred to spreadsheets. Then the notebooks were burned, he watched it personally.

They joked some more as they were closing the paperwork. They were pulling out the second set of notebooks which would record where the eighty thousand dollars would be distributed between three legitimate businesses, and twenty percent would go to the gang leadership. They expected fifty percent, but he had long convinced them both that he was less profitable than he appeared to be. But also, that protecting and sheltering his crew, and paying them better than any other crew in five square miles did a lot to buy loyalty.

The house was locked up and he headed home. He knew his girls had it taken care of to deliver the money to the next set of hands in the many exchanges to protect the flow of currency. It was just another successful day.

It had been a lot easier the last five years. But he still didn’t sleep. He constantly looked over his shoulder, constantly wondering when the sins of his past, and present, would catch up to him. How safe was he really? Any day could be the day a rival from inside of outside came for him.

Perhaps today was that day.