Charm City Read online

  Table of Contents

  Synopsis

  By the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  About the Author

  Books Available from Bold Strokes Books

  Synopsis

  On the streets of inner city Baltimore, loyalty means more than love. Raq Overstreet has pledged her loyalty to Ice Taylor, the drug kingpin who made her a star. The cheers Raq receives during the underground boxing matches she excels in almost make up for the hardships she has to endure as she establishes her reputation as the most intimidating enforcer in Ice's crew. Almost.

  Raq's growing feelings for Bathsheba Morris put her loyalty to the test. For the first time, she allows herself to dream of a life different from her own. But Raq's dream could turn into a nightmare if she discovers Bathsheba is not the naïve newcomer she claims to be but an undercover cop trying to infiltrate Ice's organization in order to bring him and everyone who works for him to justice.

  Charm City

  Brought to you by

  eBooks from Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com

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  Please respect the rights of the author and do not file share.

  By the Author

  By Mason Dixon

  Date With Destiny

  Charm City

  By Yolanda Wallace

  In Medias Res

  Rum Spring

  Lucky Loser

  Month of Sundays

  Murphy’s Law

  The War Within

  Charm City

  © 2014 By Mason Dixon. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-62639-181-9

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, New York 12185

  First Edition: August 2014

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Cindy Cresap

  Production Design: Susan Ramundo

  Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])

  Acknowledgments

  Life is composed of a series of choices. Some good, some bad. Some easy, some difficult. The characters in Charm City have made some tough choices and are trying to live with the results.

  My decision to adopt the Mason Dixon pen name was a tough one as well—I get a thrill each time I see my name on the spine of a book I’ve written—but the results of the move, including a Lambda Literary Award nomination for Mason’s first book Date With Destiny, have been much better than I expected.

  Mason’s books will continue to feature women of color as the main characters, and I hope they will continue to reach an audience. I don’t write because I want to make a political statement. I write because I have stories to tell. Stories that feature fictional characters as diverse as the ones readers encounter in real life. Love is love, no matter the ethnic background of those feeling its effects.

  Thank you to Radclyffe and the rest of the BSB team for allowing me to create my stories using all the colors in the rainbow.

  Yolanda “Mason Dixon” Wallace

  Dedication

  To my boo. Thanks for always having my back.

  Chapter One

  Raq knew her hand was broken even before she heard the bones snap.

  Ice had said her opponent—a five-foot-nothing Asian chick who had lots of speed but very little power—had a glass jaw. But when Raq landed a hook that left her hand looking like she had a bag of rocks under her skin, the shit felt like reinforced steel.

  The Asian chick went down from the blow and stayed down for the count. That was no big surprise. Ice didn’t believe in weight classes, so Raq outweighed her opponent by a good thirty pounds. As soon as she tapped her once, Raq knew it would be lights out. But even though her opponent lost the fight, she put Raq out of commission for two months. Eight weeks without a bout had put a serious hurt on Raq’s pocketbook.

  Ice had offered her some other jobs so she could make some paper while she healed up, but those gigs didn’t pay nearly as much as her primary one or earn the same amount of respect on the streets. Not the gigs she was willing to accept, anyway. For her, the underground fights she participated in were a way of life. For Ice, they were nothing more than a nice sideline. The icing on an already sweet cake. She knew how he made his real money, but she didn’t get down like that. Never had. Never would.

  Today was her first day back in the gym since the uptight nurse at the free clinic cut off her cast with a tiny saw she had allowed to drift a little too close to Raq’s skin. Raq flexed her fingers as she tested the tape on her hands. Her right hand felt pretty good, but the left was a little tight. The hand was already swollen, and she hadn’t even thrown the first punch.

  “What up, Raq?”

  “Wassup, Zeke?” she asked, giving him a pound.

  Zeke Walker’s build was slight, but his voice was deep. Just like his father. When he said, “Same old, same old,” he sounded just like the old man.

  The sign outside the run-down building read Pop’s Gym. Ezekiel “Pop” Walker Sr. had been retired for five years now. His son, Ezekiel Jr., had taken over the business, but he hadn’t inherited the name. Not all of it, anyway.

  “You ready to do this?” Zeke asked.

  “Ready and willing.”

  “After you warm up on the jump rope, I’ll work with you on the heavy bag. Then you can finish up with some speed work on your own.”

  “What about sparring? There must be someone here who needs some ring work today.”

  “Plenty, but I don’t want you to take too much of a chance on that hand on your first day back. I don’t want Ice to come after me if I let his moneymaker get hurt.”

  Raq looked longingly toward the ring, where two male heavyweights in thickly padded protective gear were doing more clinching than punching. She had never fought against a man for pay, but she had sparred with several of them before. She had held her own each time out. She had even knocked one down with a right hook he hadn’t seen coming. He had tried to play it off like he had slipped on a wet spot on the canvas, but she could tell by the glazed look in his eyes her punch was the real reason he had ended up on his ass.

  She wished Ice would set up a bout for her against a guy—especially one of those cocksure hotshots who thought they were all that because they’d managed to get in a lucky punch a time or two—but he kept saying “the streets weren’t ready.” More like the odds weren’t long enough for him to turn a suitable profit. When the money was right, maybe she’d finally get her shot.

  “You know where everything is,” Zeke said, pulling her out of fantasyland. “I’ll come back in half an hour and spot you on the heavy bag. Cool?”

  “Cool.”

  She gave him another pound a
nd picked up a worn jump rope with heavy wooden handles. The wood had been worn smooth over time, and the once-white rope had faded to a dusky gray.

  Raq flicked her wrists, whipping the rope over her head and down toward her feet. Her heart rate rose as she quickly found her rhythm. She used to hate training, but she hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it. The sound of the rope whipping through the air and slapping on the scuffed floor beneath her bouncing feet. The smell of sweat, blood, and spit buckets. The sense of belonging.

  Pop’s wasn’t one of those upscale places where yuppies spent their lunch hours working out in designer wind suits and two-hundred-dollar tennis shoes. It was the kind of place frequented by plain folks in sweatpants, ratty tank tops, and run-over boxing shoes with soles as thin as a sheet of notebook paper. It was the kind of place where desperate people tried to buy a ticket out of the ’hood.

  No one came to Pop’s because they wanted to. They came because they had to. They came because they had nowhere else to go. They came because Pop’s offered their best chance to make a name for themselves on something other than a police blotter. They came because this was the only place that would allow them to put their pictures alongside Jack Johnson, Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Marvin Hagler, Sugar Ray Leonard, Tommy Hearns, and Mike Tyson on Pop Walker’s Wall of Fame. They came because the only people who believed they could be anything but crime statistics were a skinny old man and his son.

  Raq felt sweat roll down the intricate tracks of her cornrows and soak into the thin cotton of her wife-beater. She felt something else, too. The electric heat of someone’s eyes on her. She scanned the faces on display in the floor-to-ceiling mirror on the opposite wall until she locked eyes with the only other woman in the place.

  The woman was pounding the hell out of the speed bag—both the bag and her hands were moving so fast they were nothing but blurs—but her eyes were focused not on the bag but Raq’s face. Her eyes were nearly the same shade as her skin, a rich dark brown. Her black hair was pulled back into a ponytail that bounced between her shoulder blades as she moved. Her workout gear was loose fitting, but Raq could tell she had a banging body beneath the baggy clothes. Despite her sharply defined muscles, she projected an air of femininity. The perfect blend of hard and soft.

  Raq was twenty-six. The woman appeared to be a year or two older. Her age might have been a mystery, but one thing was certain: she didn’t look like any of the women from around here. She didn’t look like the kind who would go in for a quick fuck and wouldn’t expect or ask Raq to call in the morning. She probably had to be wined and dined before she gave it up. Raq was down for that. As good as the woman looked, she was down for whatever.

  Raq squared her shoulders, gave the woman the nod, and mouthed, “Wassup?”

  The woman laughed and shook her head as if Raq needed to step up her game.

  “Wipe the makeup off your face,” Zeke said as he helped her slip on a pair of boxing gloves, “because you just got clowned.”

  “Who is she, anyway?”

  Raq pounded her fists against each other to check the gloves’ fit, then dug a right into the heavy bag before following up with a tentative left. The jab didn’t have much pop on it, but her hand began to throb nevertheless. She pulled back even more, not wanting to risk re-aggravating her injury. Zeke wasn’t the only person Ice would come after if she hurt herself today.

  “Bathsheba Morris.” Zeke leaned his shoulder into the bag to absorb the blows. The stocking cap he wore to maintain the waves in his closely cropped hair made him look like he had a giant condom on his head, but it got the job done. “She’s been coming in three times a week for the past month or so. She hasn’t been in the ring yet, but if she’s as good in there as she is on the speed bag, she might give you a run for your money.”

  Raq doubted that. She had yet to meet a woman who could challenge her in the ring or out. Before she busted her hand, Ice had said he was tempted to have her fight two at a time to see if the matches would last longer. She would have been down for that and still might be if it meant she got to take home twice the pay at the end of the night.

  “Bathsheba? She must have one of those mamas that prays all the time.”

  “Either that or she watched too many Pam Grier movies back in the day.”

  “Can you blame her? That sister was fine.” Raq circled the heavy bag like she was stalking an opponent. “What does Bathsheba do?”

  “I don’t know. Since you’re so full of questions, why don’t you ask her some of them?”

  “Maybe I will.”

  Zeke grunted as Raq put all her strength into a right that landed squarely on the bag’s duct-taped center. “Damn, girl. You could have broken someone’s rib with that punch.”

  Raq smiled at the comment. Mike Tyson, her idol, would have been proud. Before he turned into the circus act who chewed on Evander Holyfield’s ears and guest starred in Hangover films, he had been the man who had tried to shove Jesse Ferguson’s nose bone into his brain.

  Raq performed a left-right, left-right combination and turned to see if Bathsheba approved of her show of strength, but a wiry Mexican featherweight was working the speed bag Bathsheba had been using only minutes before. Raq saw her heading for the women’s locker room. Just before she turned the corner, Bathsheba stopped and looked over her shoulder as if she wanted Raq to follow her.

  “Hell, yeah. That’s what’s up. I’ll be back in a minute, Z.” Raq loosened her gloves with her teeth and quickly pulled them off. “I need to take a piss.”

  “Yeah. Uh huh.”

  She could tell by his tone he knew she was lying, but if anyone would understand, he would. She would bet serious money none of the guys who trained at Pop’s knew Zeke was gay, but she had seen him hugged up on the drag queens at Club Peaches enough times to know he didn’t frequent the place for the overpriced drinks.

  When Raq got to the women’s locker room, which was more of a closet than an actual room, Bathsheba had already unwrapped the bright pink protective bandages on her hands and pulled on a dry sweatshirt over her damp T-shirt. Like Raq, she probably didn’t feel safe taking a shower in a facility filled with a bunch of testosterone-filled guys with impulse control issues.

  Raq leaned against one of the dented metal lockers Pop had snatched up after one of the local schools shut its doors for lack of funding or lack of interest. Around here, it was hard to tell.

  “I saw you on the speed bag. You got some pretty fast hands. What else can they do?”

  Bathsheba smiled and shook her head like she had in the gym. “Is that really the best you can do?” she asked, tossing her duffel bag over her shoulder.

  Raq shrugged. “This isn’t the kind of thing I normally do.”

  “So you don’t go around trying to pick up strange women in gyms every day?”

  “No, just three times a week. Isn’t that how often you come in?”

  Bathsheba flashed a glimmer of a smile. Raq was an expert at reading people’s body language. She usually smelled fear when she bore down on someone in the ring. Now, all she could sense was interest.

  “Have you been watching me or something?” Bathsheba asked.

  “I don’t have to. I have people everywhere.”

  “I’ll watch my back from now on.”

  “I’d rather watch your front.”

  Bathsheba groaned and rolled her eyes. “That was your worst one yet.”

  “That’s ’cause I was trying to make you smile. See? It worked.” Raq took a step closer. “I’m Raq.”

  “Oh, I know exactly who you are.” Bathsheba folded her arms in front of her chest, framing a pair of nicely sized breasts. Raq licked her lips as she imagined getting a taste of them.

  “Then why don’t I know you?”

  “You and your people must not have been paying attention because I’ve been right here the whole time.”

  “Let me make up for that mistake.”

  “How?”

  Raq m
oved closer still, but Bathsheba didn’t give ground. During a fight, Raq liked to crowd her opponents into a corner and wale on them until they went down or their seconds threw in the towel. Bathsheba probably tried to keep the action in the center of the ring, where speed mattered more than power.

  “Let me take you out for a drink or a bite to eat. Can I get your number?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t give away things that need to be earned.” Bathsheba spread her arms and indicated the body Raq had been ogling all afternoon. “You have to earn this.”

  “Don’t worry,” Raq said after Bathsheba stepped around her and began to walk away. “I intend to.”

  *

  Bathsheba’s hands shook as she sat behind the wheel of her car. She had campaigned for this assignment because she thought she was most qualified to take it on. The other officers in Major Crimes knew the streets of the Middle East as well as she did, if not better, but their faces were so visible in the rundown area infamous for its rampant crime and numerous abandoned houses, the people they wanted to take down knew exactly who they were and where to find them.

  She had grown up in this neighborhood. Come of age here. But she had gotten out when she was sixteen. After ten years in DC, where she was known by her middle name instead of her first, she was back.

  Isaac “Ice” Taylor had been running the streets of East Baltimore for almost eight years, quite an accomplishment for a man still on the right side of thirty. He owned several legal businesses ranging from a real estate agency to the soul food restaurant that served as his headquarters, but his illegal empire was even more vast—drugs, prostitution, and illegal gambling on everything from dogfights to underground bare-knuckle boxing matches.