Taboo 2:. Yoshe

jail, you never can say.”

      “Yeah, you’re right.” Sierra paused and changed the subject. “Lamont, I’m so sorry about yesterday. You shouldn’t have to apologize to me. It’s just that I really love you and I don’t want to be hurt again. I have a habit of gettin’ with someone and the person turns out to be a different person. I’m older now and I can’t afford to do that anymore. You say you love me and I believe you. I just don’t wanna find out years later that you never loved me at all. I would be so crushed.”

      “I know, baby, I know. I’m not here to hurt you, okay? And let’s not forget that you’re a heartbreaker too.”

      Sierra laughed. “I thought I was that chick, shoot, you couldn’t tell me nothin’! But I shut that down a long time ago. I’ve been through too much over the past few years.”

      “The both of us.”

      Sierra heard a loud buzz in the background and she jumped up to see the red lights in the corridors spinning. That meant that it was an alarm. Lamont had to go.

      “Baby, I’ll speak to you later,” said Lamont.

      “Go ahead, I hear the alarm. Be careful.”

      Lamont hung up the phone with a smile on his face. He snatched his walkie-talkie and ran out of the control room to the response area.

      Chapter 5

      Anwar

      Anwar Jones arrived on Riker’s Island from the Brooklyn courts. He walked into the facility intake area with a serious attitude and a frown on his face. He looked around at all the inmates who were being temporarily held in the large cell areas, waiting to be housed. He felt out of place from the rest of the scruffy-looking men who eyeballed him.

      Anwar was decked out from head to toe in casual high-end clothes, from the Moncler spring jacket to his True Religion jeans, down to the brown Louis Vuitton sneakers on his feet. The David Yurman dog tag that he wore around his neck glistened in the dimly lit area, and his Mont Blanc spectacles gave him the look of a scholar. Anwar’s caramel-colored skin looked freshly scrubbed in comparison to the graying skin of some of his future cellmates, and most of them were younger than he was.

      As he walked past the officers that worked the area, his Dolce & Gabbana cologne lingered in their nostrils.

      “Yo!” Anwar called out to one of the officers standing nearby. “What pen you wanted me to go in again?” he asked.

      The officer looked up. “That pen over there,” he said, pointing to an empty pen in the corner.

      Anwar looked at the officer up and down. “Yo, ain’t that the ‘Why Me?’ pen? Why are y’all puttin’ me in a cell all by myself?” he asked, referring to the pen that officers used to isolate disruptive inmates.

      The officer laughed and used his pen to point at Anwar’s attire. “Man, look at all that designer stuff you have on. I don’t want to put you in the pen with everybody else and somebody try to take them expensive sneakers off your feet and the shirt off your back! Fuck around, they might even go for the pants, too!”

      Anwar smirked. “C’mon, homie, do I look like I’m pussy to you? Just put me in the pen with the regular niggas! I’m a G! They know better than to fuck with me!”

      The officer looked at Anwar and hesitated for a moment. He didn’t want to be responsible for anything jumping off in one of the pens because someone tried to get the well-dressed man for his things.

      After a few seconds, the CO walked toward the Brooklyn pen and opened it. Anwar walked in and sat on the bench by himself. The CO shrugged and went back to his paperwork. Anwar looked around at the other new admissions and smirked to himself. He was thirty-five years old, and most of the inmates in there looked like little Similac babies to him.

      Anwar was a professional convict, just like more than half of the inmates being held at Riker’s Island. He hailed from Bedford-Stuyvesant, starting out as a young knucklehead roaming the streets. He caused havoc for no apparent reason at all and grew to become an adult with no regard for human beings. He portrayed himself as an honorable man to those he claimed to care for. Unfortunately, during this bid, Anwar would find out that he had love for no one, and eventually would realize that he had no loyalty to anyone, not even to himself.

      He remembered being on the Island, back in the day, when he and his crew used to get it on with the Puerto Ricans. It was nothing but alarms and waves of response teams coming to the housing areas on Rikers back in the early ’90s. There were riots and slashings, all kinds of incidents happening in the jails, and Anwar was a part of that history. Anwar was a different type of dude; a regular guy he wasn’t. Unfortunately, the Department of Correction was going to find that out.

      Anwar sat on the hard bench, leaned his head back against the brick wall in the pen, and closed his eyes. When he did this, Anwar felt someone sitting down next to him. He immediately opened his eyes.

      “What’s good, my nigga?” the man greeted him. Anwar checked the guy out to see if he met the necessary requirements to be in his presence.

      “Who are you? Do I know you?” Anwar asked while admiring the expensive Michele timepiece the guy was wearing on his wrist.

      “Damn, B, you don’t know who I am? It’s me, Scooter!”

      Shamel “Scooter” Abrams was a street hustler/ stick-up kid from Harlem. He was a direct descendant of Senegalese parents, who had done everything but disown him due to his trifling ways. Influenced by negative people, he chose to follow an untraditional lifestyle instead of the customary West African traditions that his parents had instilled in him. Scooter had been in and out of jail since the age of fifteen, and he continued his jail stints into his adulthood. The streets and jail were all he knew.

      Anwar tilted his head back. He remembered the face. “Oh, shit, what’s good, homie?” They gave each other a pound with a hug. “Yo, you all right, son? What you doin’ in here?”

      “Yeah, yeah, I’m straight. They just got me in here on some bullshit assault charge. I’ve been home for a minute and now this.” Scooter checked out Anwar’s expensive clothing and was impressed. “I see that you still be chillin’.”

      Anwar smiled. “What you mean? I stay fly all day, every day. If you know me, then you know that.”

      Scooter laughed. “Yeah, you right. What you doin’ in here, B?” he asked.

      Anwar sighed. “Man, these bird-ass cops was supposedly doin’ a routine traffic stop when they pulled me over. They was talkin’ about how my registration was fucked up on my G35 convertible. Okay, cool. I’ll take that, but you ain’t gonna pull me over, tell me to get out my shit, try to frisk me, and then wanna search my fuckin’ vehicle. I went in on them dudes and they arrested me for obstruction and resistin’ arrest. So now I’m in the bookings, right, waitin’ for my case to be called. A nigga thinks he’s goin’ home, right, but when I went to court, I got remanded into custody. Now I’m here on this rock, man. I’m tight because I’m supposed to be done with this shit.”

      Scooter rubbed his bald head. “Me neither, B.” He looked around and leaned over to Anwar. “You know I used to fuck with this CO broad in here, right?” Scooter said, totally off the subject.

      Anwar yawned. “Oh, yeah?” He couldn’t care less about Scooter’s sexual exploits. He just wanted to go home.

      “Yeah, man. I smashed that pussy in my cell and everything.”

      Anwar put his hand under his chin. “Word? What’s the broad’s name?”

      “Miss Phillips. Monique Phillips. That was my bitch.”

      Anwar shook his head. He wasn’t feeling the way Scooter was running his mouth, which was a no-no in jail and on the streets. With Scooter mentioning the female officer’s name, Anwar took this gesture personally, because he was presently seeing a correction officer named Deja Sutton.