5 Minutes and 42 Seconds by Timothy Williams Page A

it. It was always, “Smokey, suck my dick.” I ain’t sayin’ I wanted him to say I love you or nothing like that. I’m just sayin’. I was only sixteen.
    I don’t know. It ain’t no beef between me and Fashad. I guess it’s just like we both gladiators, and both of us can’t be Russell Crowe. Somebody got to go upstate.
    The feds already knew I was working for him anyway, so there was no point in lyin’. I told them I would help, and they said nobody would ever know.
    The very next day Fashad called me into his office and told me the feds was watching him, and if some shit went down we had to know how to handle it.
    I just nodded my head. I tried to stay calm, but I was sweatin’ and shit. I asked him how he knew and he told me them muthafuckas been fixing a light across the street from his house for three weeks. Said it don’t take no damn three weeks to fix no light, and that the muthafucka wasn’t never broke in the first place.
    You never know who or what niggas like Fashad know. I mean, hell, Fashad could probably buy the whole damn police force. I just hoped he hadn’t thought of it already, or I was dead.
    He called Cameisha and told her to come down to the dealership. Once she got there the three of us had to come up with a plan to keep Fashad out of jail when the house was raided. In other words, Fashad had to come up with a plan and we had to do whatever the hell he said. He told me he was going to call me as soon as one of his informants tipped him off, because it was too risky to call his house from a phone he knew was tapped. After that, I was to call Cameisha. Cameisha’s supposed to wake everyone up and start the drill, where she and her children get rid of all the cocaine in the house and hide the money from the feds. He told me to go back to the house to help Cameisha figure out how to store the money away in the closet.
    When we got there. Cameisha showed me the money in a blue suitcase with the little roller thingies on the bottom. It had to be at least a million.
    I asked her had she ever counted it. She said she never had a reason to, but she was “going to count it now.”
    That’s when I knew that money was mine. What had she done for it? I mean she might be his wife and shit, but what had she done for it? I was the one who was there in that goddamn office every muthafuckin’ day. I was the one who had to put up with his shit in his apartment for two years. I was the one on the corner for him. What had she done ? And plus when Fashad go up for this shit, there ain’t gonna be no money left. I don’t know nobody else. I can’t be on nobody else’s corner, I ain’t the bang-bang shoot-’em-up type. I’m an artist. This money is gonna last me until I make my first album—and who knows how long that’s gonna be.
    She called her kids down, and I was still staring at the money—my money.
    â€œWhat you doin’?” asked JD, the oldest boy—he’s only nine but he got Fashad’s instincts. He knew there was something fishy about the way I was staring at his daddy’s money. His five-year-old brother, Taj, stood behind him like I was a gun and his big brother was a bulletproof vest.
    â€œLeave him alone,” said a voice.
    I turned around and saw the most fucked-up-lookin’ bitch I ever seen in my life. Her hair was about four different colors, and she had a big gap in her teeth. She was all fat and shit—reminded me of a sumo wrestler. Charcoal black to boot. And she kept lookin’ at me like I was a muthafuckin’ Sean John model.
    â€œHi. I’m Dream.”
    When me and Cameisha was teaching the kids the drill, I realized Dream could be my ticket out. I been plottin’ and plannin’ ever since. Now I got this shit figured out.
    My name is Smokey Cloud, and when that trumpet sounds, that money is going to be mine.

CAMEISHA
    L ast night Fashad