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A half hour later, Hooks hit a speed-dial key on his cellular phone as he watched Carmelita, sitting up in bed beside him, take a fat pinch of crushed marijuana from a clear plastic zip-top bag and refill the bowl of the glass pipe that had been on the desk.
“Don’t forget I need you to call your brother after that bowl’s burned,” Tyrone told her. “I got a job for him.”
“What you want with Ruben?” she said, picking up a matchbook from the bedsheet.
“Baby girl, what’d I tell you about asking so many questions?” Tyrone said, then barked into the phone, “Yo!”
“You call that calling me quick?” DiAndre Pringle answered.
“I had something I had to do first.”
Carmelita giggled.
“Whatever, Ty,” Pringle said.
Hooks guessed that Pringle had overheard Carmelita, and grinned at her.
“Listen,” Pringle went on, “I wanted you to call quick ’cause I’d just got an idea for you.”
“This about me performing at that Turkey Day gig?”
“No.”
“What? I’m still doing the gig, right?”
“Yeah, Ty. But you want to work another gig?”
Hooks looked at Carmelita, grinned, then said, “Depends. I don’t know. Might be busy. When?”
“This afternoon.”
“Today? You messing with me?”
“No. You heard that the Rev is putting on a rally, right?”
“Rally? About what?”
“About all the killing that’s going on. About stopping Killadelphia.”
Hooks felt the hair on his neck stand up.
He can’t mean what happened this morning.
How’d he know about my boys?
Unless somebody else went and talked . . .
“Going to be lots of people at the ministry here, Ty. And I figured you’d be really good at really amping up the crowd.”
Yeah, he does mean my raps.
“How much?” Hooks said.
“How many people?”
“No. How much I get paid?”
