Little Layer's Arc

Chapter 8 of 7

Layer cleaned the lot himself. But Dreads Washington's words stayed with him. Your name on it now. Layer knew how this ended. Dreads had spent weeks working back through the men who set up his son. Now he blamed Layer for the block killing. A man like Dreads did not send a warning twice. He came, and he came first. Layer needed to find where Dreads holed up and settle the debt before Dreads settled it for him. He asked the corner. He asked runners, the woman who ran the little store on the block, the old heads who saw everything from their stoops. Nobody knew where Dreads slept. The big man moved like smoke. He had learned to use the fear his face put in people, and that fear kept mouths shut. Two days passed. Layer found nothing. Breeze found him in the back room, breaking down a fat purple bud into a jar. She was Jason's girl, small and sharp-eyed, and she read a room faster than any soldier Layer had. She had told him once to fight his own fights so the fallout stayed his. She watched him now and did not smile. "You're hunting a man who hunts better than you," she said. "He knows where you sleep. You don't know where he sleeps." "So I keep looking." "You're two steps behind. Get Jason." Layer shook his head. Jason had pulled the trigger. If Jason cleaned up the mess, the crew would see Layer as a man who could not answer for his own block. He set the jar down. "My name's on it. Not his." He went out alone that night. He worked the far edge of the block, knocking on doors, spreading cash. One old man finally talked. Dreads had rented a room above a shuttered shop three streets over. Layer felt his pulse jump. He had the address. He had a chance to move first. He never got to use it. Dreads was already there, waiting in the dark stretch between two dead streetlights. He stepped out of a doorway, huge, calm, dreadlocks hanging past his shoulders. He had a gun in his hand and it was already up. "You came to me," Dreads said. "Saves me a walk." Layer reached for his waist. He was fast. Dreads was faster, and Dreads had the drop. Two shots cracked off the shop walls. Layer went down on the pavement. His own gun skittered into the gutter. He tried to breathe and could not find the bottom of it. Dreads stood over him. He did not gloat. He looked down the way a man looks at a job done. "Your ground. Your debt," he said. "Now we're square." He turned and walked into the dark, and this time nobody crossed the street because nobody was there to see. Jason found out before sunrise. A runner had heard the shots and found the body. Jason came fast, and he came with soldiers, but there was nothing left to save. He knelt in the street beside his brother. He had killed Big L to avenge their mother. He had brought Layer in as his right hand, the only blood he had left. Now that blood lay cold on the pavement over a killing Jason himself had done. Breeze stood back and let him grieve. She had warned Layer to bring Jason in. He had chosen to carry it alone, and it had crushed him. She did not say it out loud. Jason knew. Layer had set out to avenge Big L. That road had turned on him early, when he learned Big L killed his mother and his own brother pulled the trigger in return. He had given up revenge and chosen family instead. He had built a block, held a crew, and answered for it like a leader answers. In the end the debt he died for was not even his own. He had taken it on because his name was on the ground where it happened, and he would not pass it up the chain. He died a right hand to the last, paying for the man above him. The mission that started him was already dead. What killed him was the loyalty he chose in its place.