Read Online King's Justice: The Knights of Breton Court, Volume 2 by Maurice Broaddus - Free Book Online

was the world he knew best. Clouds, like torn fabric, churned with menace in the afternoon sky. Under the harsh glare of the sun, he dreamt of freedom. The sky stretched, an infinite canopy of possibilities. In it, he cold lose himself and fly. He could forget that he was surrounded by concrete and that his feet remained locked to his earthen path. He took in a deep breath.
      Rellik, a true OG, was coming home.
     
    After a few hours on the bus, Rellik was ready to stretch his legs. It took a while to get his mind around the name The Phoenix Apartments. When he went inside, the projects were still called The Meadows. His mother moved him and his brother there to start over. As a kid, he ran the hallways, threw rocks at passing cars, rang doorbells and ran, and raced swings in the playground only to leap from them at the apogee to go sailing along the concrete slab. He played stinky finger with Gayle Harmon in an alcove. Lost his cherry in an Impala in the parking lot. Despite the name change and a fresh coat of paint, it was still the closest thing to home that he knew. Some things never changed and some people were fixtures.
      "Look at this motherfucker right here," said an old man with a head too small for his body, from beneath the hood of a car. Revealing a teak complexion, and gray goatee, when he fully stepped from behind the car, he fumbled inside his shirt pocket for a pair of thick, black-framed glasses as if double-checking a vision.
      Rellik returned a long, penetrating stare. "Geno."
      The old man screwed up his face in mock disgust then raised his hand to give him a pound. Geno was one of the neighborhood home repair and handymen, and was old when Rellik went in. An odd-jobber by trade and practice, he could fix refrigerators or televisions, bring in free electricity or gas, even install AC. The story of his life fell into two parts. In part one, during his real life, he held various blue-collar jobs. Then his story went the way of many stories and slipped into part two. He got laid off, lost the lease on his apartment, and became homeless. He squatted in any vacant apartment in the Meadows, now Phoenix, staying out of folks' way except to offer his services. Since he didn't "truck with no drugs" – and neither brought nor followed trouble – he was loved by the tenants.
      "What's going on?" Rellik scanned the deserted lot. Eyes peeped him from the playground's lone bench attended by three boys. One took off after locking eyes with Rellik. Restless and frowning, still learning to wear the mask of street toughness.
      "Same old, same old. You probably know the comings and goings round here better than most."
      "They up there?"
      "What's left of them." Geno wiped the oil dipstick with a rag then returned the rag to his back pocket.
      "Same spot?"
      "Yeah. Too lazy to change things up too much."
      Careless and undisciplined. Too confident in their setup despite so much evidence to the contrary of it being a good one. Despite Five-O all but setting up shop here, coming and going as they pleased as if they owned the place. His boy from way back, Night had held things down, but with him out of the picture, operations were slipping.
      It had been a while since he'd been to Night's "penthouse", two adjoining apartments on the sixth floor, the top floor of the tallest of the Meadows-nowPhoenix. The first laid out with a large screen plasma television. Four junior knuckleheads wrestled over the Wii controllers, shouting at each other, as they trashtalked their way through a game.
      "I hope I'm not interrupting?" Rellik asked.
      The crew froze in their spots, a garden of hoodlum statues along the couch and from the kitchen a steady beam of bewildered glares as they wondered how this fool got into their place without making a sound. The front door was reinforced, a bar locking it into place to slow down anyone using a ram to bust in. A man stood guard on it. And yet here this man