The Backstabbers

Crime Fiction by Robb White

Tre’Mayne stood there, eyes boxing the room same way he did every time, all five-foot-six inches in raggedy-ass wifebeater and high-tops. Mondair didn’t say a word, just held out his hand for his latest rap effort. Tre’Mayne was a one-man rap machine and he was harder to get rid of than the Tijuana clap. Every fuckin’ day he stood there waiting for Mondair to open is door to accept his chickenscratched, misspelled -to-fuck-and-back rap. Except everything he wrote was about himself, his rage against society, and it was crap.

“Gonna be a big-ass hit, Mondair,” he said. “You know what I’m sayin’, dog?”

“We gonna see ‘bout dat, homey.”

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Mondair glanced over the stained sheet of notebook paper . . . did he write it in his own piss? He saw the same half-assed rhymes, words Shakespeare couldn’t comprehend because they came from Tre’Mayne’s twisted brain. Misspellings a kindergartener wouldn’t make and sure as shit the same motherfuckin’ holy trinity of Tre’s old-school cliched mind: booty calls he’d never made, bling he couldn’t afford, and blunts he’d smoked with .

“Got this new club in’rested in my shit, dog . . .”

Oh fuck me . . .

Tre’Mayne bragged about clubs in WeHo who’d let him past the velvet rope when the pigs ate his brother. Chicks out for a night crossed the street if they saw his raggedy ass heading their way. Mondair’s caught Tre’s misspelling for Lamborghini, which came out closer to linguini. The day Tre’Mayne Donaldson ever sat his ass in a Lamborghini, he’d start lookin’ around for the lions and lambs lying down together as his grannie would say.

Too much crack for too many years. Now that xylazine and fentanyl were fucking up the streets, turning human beings into ass statues and zombies, he was worse than ever. Mondair hated himself for pitying him. Time was, Tre’ Donaldson was a badass, and you gave him respect or else you paid a price. Now he looked like the winner of the scarecrow contest, stick arms and all.

Without waiting for a cue, Tre’Mayne began spewing lines of his rap; when he finally stopped with a theatrical pant adding to the sheen of perspiration on his forehead, blinking under the fluorescent lights, he seemed to have cast a spell on himself with his own shabby performance. But his smile of accomplishment was angelic. Tre’s chemical odor bled into the air of Mondair’s stuffy office, like the rubbery smell of roadkill—not a good sign. Tre-Mayne was considered a walking psychopath between Devonshire and Reseda where everybody who spotted him coming gave him a wide berth. Rumor said he was jumped into the Blocce Crips at eleven, put in work until he was fifteen, and then did a stint in juvie gladiator schools before doing time in Sylmar and Downey for manslaughter. His last bid was at Twin Towers before being shipped on to Lompoc for second-degree murder at eighteen. He had the crazy eyes of convicts who’d been shanked and piped in the joint when he came out.

“I look it over, Tre,’” Mondair said, breaking the rapture of Tre’s trance. “Take this and get you some food, man.”

“Naw, naw, man,” Tre said, stepping farther into the tiny office, a sign he was going to perform. “I be happy to wait on the, the, uh, the, uh—”

“Contract,” Mondair finished for him.” The folded bill went into Tre’Mayne’s hand with the ease of a dope exchange down on the street.

“Yeah, yeah, the contract. Fifty-fifty, Mondair. You know I’m good for it.”

“I know that,” Mondair said. “I know that. You true. Consider this a down payment, right?”

“Right, down pay-MENT. I got you, bro. Aye foo, whachu you think, Mondair? Shit good or what?”

Same goddamn thing every motherfucking time. Despite himself, Mondair admired the old soldier, hated seeing him in his condition, but would give him his last dollar bill if it came down to it. Lord help me, it better not come down to it or I’ll be poor as a shithouse mouse if my deal with Ray-Ray don’t come through. That bastard, sell-out lyin’ ass dog . . .

As the indie music producer of Hardcore Rap & Hip-Hop Inc., Mondair Robison knew the rap scene backwards and forwards. Tre’Mayne was so far from making his prospect list that he might as well be standing on the Moon.  

Mondair grew up in a South Central hood run by sets of the One Eleven Crips. They were still there, beefing with the Rollin’ 90’s. He’d sold the home his mother left him to purchase microphones, head phones, and expensive audio equipment he discovered later he didn’t need. He sank his life savings into monitors, computer, audio interface, MIDI controller, and enough cable wire to wrap around Hollywood High’s football field.  

Mondair’s tiny office window looked out on the traffic on West Pico below. At two-eighty, with the flab accrued from a bad diet of orange soda pop, Little Debbie Snack Cakes, and Hot Pockets, it would have been easy for him to grab Ray-Ray by his skinny neck and toss him through it. The image of the popular rapper’s flailing arms on his nosedive to the sidewalk gave Mondair a flicker of grim pleasure. He’d ten times rather hear Tre’Mayne pounding through his bars, stepping on his own lyrics with those dumbass repetitions, bobbing in Mondair’s tiny office like a welterweight on crack. Tre’Mayne imitated whatever rap artist caught his fancy that week, this time bending his torso and hunching down like a man with constipation squirming on a broken toilet seat. Even Tre’s irritating habit of stopping mid-line to “explain” a bar that didn’t need explaining, except to a moron, was preferable to listening to Ray-Ray’s glib lies.

Ever since Mondair discovered Da-Zee and was promoting her career around the clubs in WeHo and better night spots where more hip-hop was shouldering its way through the door, not just weekends, everybody east of between Compton and Boyle Heights was ringing his digits or trying to buy him drinks in the clubs.

“Check this out, Mondair,” some clubber would say, grabbing his triceps as he passed. “I just wrote this one last night . . .”

Got-damn club music with all that Nu-Disco crap, House, and fifteen flavors of techno muscling through the music scene. With Da-Zee’s crisp lyrics and wide-ranging voice, he was finally getting his foot in the door, bringing her own slant to thug life. The fact that she had a private-school education and her father was a tenured professor at UCLA in economics made no difference to her art. Whatever the magic was, Da-Zee (née Daisy Lynne Culpepper) had it. She already had her own following of peeps from club to club. He booked her at a small club near Bardot on North Vine close to the bigger action. He was within sniffing distance of success when “Rollin’” Ray, the Rap Machine, happened to be slumming, as he’d call it, and heard her on stage. Like the two-faced, lyin’ bitch he was, he told her he, Mondair, was holding her back and only he, Ray-Ray Moore, had the juice to make her wildest dreams come true. The last time they spoke, Moore said zip about buying her contract. Instead, he insulted him by offering Mondair a paltry finder’s fee for her release from his contract.

Same shit every time. Bust your ass trying to make it and you not only got the rich white dudes and their greasy lawyers to contend with but your so-called homeys are stabbin’ you in the back and smilin’ in your face the whole time. Mondair told himself to snap out of it. Self-pity got you nowhere in this business. He crooned the lyrics of one of his favorite Motown group, the O’Jays’ classic tune “Back Stabbers.”

Some important people around Sunset Boulevard were showing interest, too. The other day while working his part-time Uber gig, he returned to find Ray-Ray’s business card slipped under his door with a peremptory Call Me scrawled beside the address of his plush mansion in the Hills. He guarded Da-Zee like a mother hen and its lone baby chick. Ray-Ray told him his so-called contract was “full of more holes than a colander,” according to Ray’s lawyer, a Princeton snob. Since then, he upped his baseline surveillance for more trickery from the famous rapper.

Mondair always warned his out-of-town passengers about dangerous places around Crenshaw to avoid, the gang stores, schoolyards, and parks marked with their signs. “You don’t wanna be hangin’ there,” he’d say. “Those guys don’t mess around. They don’t play.” He wanted to say: “except with easy targets like you two young fools,” his last passengers from the Rams stadium he drove into Crenshaw after the game. They wanted him to pull over so they could take selfies at a Westmont store tagged up with signs marking out Rollin’ 90’s, Pirus, and Raymonds territory layer by layer. You could read the warfare going on just from the sprayed-over and crossed-out gang symbols. Too many active gangs between there One Ten freeway and the stadium. From one day to the next, you didn’t know which gangs were beefing with which without a score card. “Situation’s crazy,” he told them “You guys hang your ass out where it hasn’t chilled down, and some banger will shoot you to put in work or just to see if his roscoe works.”  

Tre’Mayne’s eyes suddenly focused on Mondair. “You know what I’m sayin’? That shit is gonna go viral, you’ll see. VI-ral, bro.”

Donaldson was the only person he knew who walked around without fear. He was as obvious as a dog’s balls coming down the street with his loopy grin and slender arms slathered with jailbird tattoos. Puckered flesh from bullet wounds dotted his back and shoulders like tiny assholes. A crooked worm of scar tissue ran from below his right eyes down the side of his face to his jaw. Mondair knew a dozen dudes from his old hood who thought they were tough. Tre’Mayne Donaldson was tough. A Gang Unit detective told him most of the gangsters he dealt with were “punks without Daddies.” Donaldson, he said, was different. Way different.

Mondair was irked at the cop. He had a few scars to prove his own street cred. “Like, how?”

“Back seat of my cruiser had this weird smell for a week when I hauled him downtown for the stash house killings at the Lake Forest Apartments,” the cop said. “Profiler from the FBI told me that’s a chemical smell, forget what the fuck one, but he called it the odor of madness.”

Mondair thought of that every time Tre’Mayne pounded on his door, uttering the same thing over and over: “I know you-all in there, Mondair. Don’t be hidin’ now. I know ya’ll in there, muhfuckah . . .”

“It’s got . . . real potential, Tre,” Mondair always said into the eerie silence. “I’ll get back to you tonight. We’ll talk some.”

“You ain’t just sayin’ that to get me gone, is you, Mondair? I mean, you and me, we go way back, you know what I’m sayin’.”

The same motherfuckin’ thing . . .

On the street, gangsters considered Tre an amiable sociopath and let him be. He tried to explain to him without hurting his feelings that he had the same chance of making it in the music business, locked tight as a frog’s asshole, as Mondair had of getting a lap dance in Mecca during Hajj. He’d disabused wanna-be rappers before with no trouble and didn’t have difficulty doing it. Something in his back brain, however, told him he’d better find the perfect way of letting Donaldson down easy. Meanwhile, Tre would be back pounding on his door with new raggedy-ass rhymes as bad as the ones before.

Mondair counted Tre’Mayne’s steps down to the street; he had a habit of going halfway down, bolting back up the stairs with a new idea or demand.

Tre’Mayne and Ray-Ray, twin devils in his life. How to exorcise them both?

His ringtones began Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, snapping him out of the reverie. Few knew Mondair had a college scholarship and training in classical piano until the money ran out. He kept a tote of paperbacks in a closet with every work of Sartre and Camus in his office closet. The music and his existentialists kept the forces of darkness at bay.

Letishia Maythe left a phone message. She called herself Crystal Meth, and was bombarding him with emails and phone calls ever since he talked a couple club owners into letting her have time. She had talent but she was a diamond-in-the-rough unlike the natural Da-Zee. He called her back.

“Letishia, Mondair Robison returning your call.”

“Hey, Mister Robinson. You got any open spots in the studio for me? I’ve got—”

“Letishia, it’s Robison without the n.”

“Yeah, yeah, uh-huh. You got any time or bookings for me?”

It was like that cartoon where that tiny red devil with his pitchfork plants himself on your shoulder and whispers his evil into your ear. Mondair couldn’t speak. The plan incubating in his brain seemed to materialize out of nowhere in images and bright colors.

“Letitia, sweetie, call me back in twenty. I might have a gig lined up.”

“Yessir, I’ll surely do—”

He thumbed her off, not wanting to lose a precious second of the inspiration that flashed across his brain pan like a gift from heaven. Or maybe not heaven but the other place, the one his grandmother used to terrify him about where bad souls were stabbed on the tines of pitchforks and shoveled into coal furnaces while a cuckoo clock on the wall chirped out a baleful message: “You’ll never get out . . . You’ll never get out . . .”

It was truly wicked. But would it work?

Two things had to drop: Ray-Ray had to be home and persuadable. Mondair’s dealings with the Hollywood mogul were always one-sided and reminded him of the adage that big fish eat little fish.

“Mondair, Mondair. My man. What’s shakin’, yo?”

Not only home but high from the sound of it. Giggling in the background confirmed it. One of Ray-Ray’s white flunkies. “I’ve got me a talent you must see, Ray. Bigger than Da-Zee.”

“You a lyin’ ass dog, Mondair. Da-Zee gonna be big. Maybe bigger’n me.”

Ray-Ray’s humble brag encouraged Mondair.

“Do me a solid tonight, Ray. Join my girl Crystal at Sardi’s for a cameo, rap a few with her and I’ll sign off on Da-Zee—and for that finder’s fee you mentioned.”

“Well, shee-yit, I don’t know, Mon-dair.” Stretching out his name the way he did to mock someone. “I don’t do those gutter places no more, you know what I’m sayin’? Background chatter suddenly ceased. The king must have waved an imperious hand for silence. Another good sign.

“Da-Zee’s yours, bro. I’m gonna lock Crystal Maythe into a contracttonight.”

“Got you a new protégé, huh. Crystal Meth, you say, huh? I like it, bra.” Interpreting Ray-Ray’s tone to mean: stoopid.

“Send me a few lines so I don’t fumble around up there like a fuckin’ clown. I got a rep, you know.”

“What about that finder’s fee?”

“Hey, motherfucker, me showin’ up is all you’re gonna get. Be satisfied with that.”

Click, gone. That narcissistic prick.

Mondair collapsed in his squeaky office chair from the stress. A smile creased his face when he realized the harder past was over, the unpredictable part was coming up. Rollin’ Ray and his stainless-steel Rolls, his money, his women, his invites to every A-list party. The establishment wrapped Ray-Ray in its arm and shut everyone who didn’t conform out. The Hollywood music scene was rocked by a recent federal raid on the mansion of one of the biggest names in rap. Rumors abounded of big names appearing on raunchy sex tapes involving drugs and sex workers, a sordid scandal that hadn’t died down and kept big shots like Ray-Ray at home maintaining a low profile.

He had no time to savor progress. Crystal hit up his ringtones. Before she had time to say “Hello,” he told her about the gig at Sardi’s and the rap he was emailing that he wanted her to do last. “Got a surprise for you tonight, baby girl. Somebody big from Capitol s’posed to be there.”

Mondair grabbed Tre’Mayne’s sheet off his desk and went to work on it. He deleted all but one of the “you-know-what-I’m-sayin’” repetitions sprinkled throughout like every other sentence in Tre’s speech. He cleaned up grammar, chopped through the dumber “bitches and bling” gibberish, fixed misspellings, and increased tempo to old-school, East Coast, rap with one-hundred-twenty BPM instead of Tre’Mayne’s half-witted doggerel beat. The turntablist at Sardi’s was good and owed him. He’d work on it before Crystal performed.

He emailed the lyrics to Ray-Ray, who texted back: “Lamest ass shit I ever seen homes U owe me big”

One last piece of the puzzle. His hand shook. Tre’Mayne had a survivor’s instinct that would put a Norwegian rat to shame. He once walked through an Eleven Deuce Hoovers kickin’ spot and came out unscathed.

Mondair hit the streets, made a few calls from Uber. He stopped in Skid Row to give money to an old friend from the hood, deep into the throes of a skin-rotting Tranq addiction.

“You ain’t got to do this, Mondair,” the friend said from inside his cardboard house. He folded the bills and tucked them into his socks. He’d lost money to pickpockets a couple times when he was zombied out. Addicts didn’t like handling someone’s dirty feet and smelly socks rooting for money.   

Traffic on Alameda slid by in the falling afternoon light, a silver snake of chrome and winking red taillights. Two hours to get cleaned up, pick up Crystal, and head for the club.

* * *

Mondair still didn’t see him. It was getting late. Crystal was doin all right up there but she was one away from her last set. The crowd was with her. Mondair paced at the bar, smoked outside, looking everywhere, and downing more bourbon than was good for him.

By one a.m., he was admitting failure when a commotion out front drew his attention to the door. Over the tops of heads, he saw people surrounding the stage part like a bow wave. Voices picked up the name and soon a wild chant burst for “Ray!” “Ray! “Ray!” His boys surrounded him, kept the surging crowd back, a lord among serfs. Even Crystal halted in mid-song to bellow his name at the mic—unnecessarily because the hive  knew Rollin’ Ray-Ray was in the house. He took the stage in a leap, embracing the audience’s love with open arms and then approached Crystal in exaggerated strides. She ran into his arms and they hugged. The crowd went wild, clapping and shouting their names in tandem.

Crystal didn’t let him down. She and the DJ had done good work mending what he’d patched together of Tre’Mayne’s rap. Ray joined her in the final stanza, taking the mic, and the crowd began shouting his name over the lines, a good thing. A clutch of younger women took over the front of the stage and gave Ray-Ray such adulation that he didn’t have to do more than stand still, a hand waving over his crotch. Crystal belted out a repeat of the final stanza of Tre’Mayne’s defiant, abrasive words but all attention had shifted back to Ray-Ray.

When Ray jumped off the stage and his entourage formed around him, Crystal began a new rap about dystopian Oakland, hoping Ray-Ray would stay behind, his natal city after all. Ray-Ray ignored her to greet some people, slap hands with people shouting his name or asking him for an autograph. After a few minutes of being adored, he left with the same commotion he’d entered the bar.

Mondair felt a tug on his triceps. When he turned around, a man in his mid-forties with upswept hair, scruffy beard, and gold around his neck smiling in his face. He reeked of expensive cologne. He handed Mondair the legal documents to sign away rights to Da-Zee without a word. Mondair pretended to look them over and handed them back. The lawyer’s mouth opened.

“I ain’t signin’ shit,” Mondair said and walked away. He didn’t look back when the lawyer began sputtering some legal mumbo-jumbo.

Screams. People began running into the club from the parking lot. He couldn’t hear what they were shouting but it had to do with Ray-Ray. One of the club’s two bouncers blew past him in a fast trot, shoving people pout of his way. Mondair saw the glint of metal in his hand from the bar lighting.

Shots. Two. Then three in rapid succession.

A bouncer staggered into the bar holding his belly. A red splotch spread downwards from his chest to blend in to the one he tried to hold back with his fingers. Two men lowered him to the floor and bellowed for someone to call Nine-One-One.

The whole bar was chaos and confusion. People ran every which way, screaming and bawling. Ray knew the back exit to the parking lot would trip the fire alarm but that hardly mattered.

Tre’Mayne lay spreadeagled on the asphalt. One of his sneakers was off his foot. Ten feet from him a circle of bodies surrounded a prone body on the ground. Some waved guns around. Half were shouting orders no one followed. He saw two men on their knees tending to Ray-Ray, one holding his head up, weeping, the other trying to stanch blood from a sucking chest wound with his rolled-up tee shirt. Sirens warbling Doppler screams in the balmy night air.

Ray walked back into the club and decided it would be easier to walk around the bar to fix his own drink. He sat at the bar sipping slowly, savoring the heat on his tongue and esophagus. He saw his own reflection in  the bar mirror. He looked like the only calm man having a drink in a bar mad with people running around, hugging one another, crying, and some even praying.

Mondair’s mind, despite the struggles of growing up terrified in a California war zone of mindless killing, worn down by poverty and the ravages of time and money worries, was still sharp. He’d read Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” when he was a freshman in college and admired it so much that he memorized it.

To his own grinning reflection in the bar mirror, he raised a toast, reciting the last sentence of the existentialist’s famous essay: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

---

Bio: Robb White lives in Northeastern Ohio. A Derringer-nominated author, he has three series detectives: Thomas Haftmann, Raimo Jarvi, and Jade Hui. Betray Me Not was selected for distinction by the Independent Fiction Alliance in 2022. Fade to Black is a collection of noir tales, and Jersey Girl is his latest thriller. A forthcoming crime novella is Easy Money from Brick Tower Press.

Cover photo by pexels, edited by The Yard.

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