Bad Break: A Novel

Chapter Ten

Corrine Barkley was excited.

It was a feeling, she thought, akin to the first-date jitters.

She grinned and examined her face closely on her iPhone screen, with the camera reversed in self-portrait mode.

"Shhhck!"

She sucked a bit of spinach from her teeth, smoothed her blouse, checked her white on green Stan Smith classics for scuffs, and watched the street before her from the shadow of a never used fire escape.

Anyone needing to climb down to avoid flames might be better off accepting a minor burn vs. the tetanus shot they would most definitely need if they were scratched on that rusty mess.

She was relatively new to the game and had only moved about one hundred grams of weight.

But that was fifteen thousand dollars of revenue, and she had never earned that much money before -- not for herself or anyone else.

Her cut of the profits was just five percent or seven hundred fifty dollars, but it had been enough to whet her appetite for more, and faster.

So when her cousin told her of the potential for a big score, Barkley didn't think twice about it. She should have. Chain of command is an important element of narcotics trafficking.

But Barkley was a city mouse, not country. She didn't need the rookie's handbook. Or if she did, she didn't need the first ten chapters or so. She was past that stage of dealing.

"Step!"

She snarled at a would-be customer who'd sidled up looking for a half-gram fix. There was no way she was going to let a seventy-five dollar deal, for which she would keep less than four dollars, hinder her break. And she told the woman as much.

"I thought the customer was always right," the woman called over her shoulder, simultaneously scratching a head itch that wasn't there.

"Half? Not right enough, bitch! Keep it movin'! Take yo' ass down the block to McDonald's and see if they'll sell you half a cheeseburger, ya bum!"

Barkley chuckled at her own wordplay, suppressed her guilty conscience for the unnecessary mean-spiritedness, and resumed her daydream.

This was her destiny. She would be a queenpin soon enough.

One of the first lessons she'd learned in the early days was to keep a low profile. But there was some irony in that lesson since her mentor had discovered her through an article in The Daily Midway. And it's hard to be much more high profile than a front-page newspaper article that, via wire services, ended being republished in more than 400 daily newspapers across the U.S. and Canada.

He had known her mother as a close friend of his sister's for years.

And he'd even met Barkley at cookouts, picnics, block parties, and the like.

As a tyke, she was hardly ever more than a few inches from her mother's side, and nine times out of ten, when he spotted the pair, Barkley had a knee-high handful of her mother's slacks clutched tightly in a tiny fist.

But then she aged. Not into a teenager or young adult. Not yet. She "matured" from toddler to streetwise six-year-old, seemingly overnight.

Her mother hadn't noticed, not until that knock on the door. The navy blue uniform through the peephole. The fear that had gripped her as she wondered how her young daughter had died, followed by almost sheepish relief that in such cases the police department always sent two - either two detectives, a detective and a uniformed officer, or any sworn officer and a member of the clergy. Always two. Her daughter wasn't dead.