PRL Serials

Sonny doesn’t live in Knoxville, Tennessee anymore. He left shortly after the death of his boss, the man known as Darker, who died at the home of his greatest rival, the man Fire, who was also killed. He’d seen both of their dead bodies with that of the man Smoke, another old school criminal that he had worked with before they all died. 

Sonny moved back to his hometown of Winston Salem, North Carolina to live with his mother, who could not have been happier to have him home. He is glad to make her happy, and his first day back at her house, she fussed over him and made him more food than he could eat in one sitting. He had the mothers of his two children bring them to spend time and his mother was so proud and beaming that she hardly interacted with her grandchildren. It was just beautiful to watch them together, her son with his own children in her house. 

If she hadn’t been so overwhelmed by emotions, she would have wondered why Sonny had suddenly returned home. She would have been skeptical, like how the last time he showed up at her house it didn’t take him long to get into trouble before he was off again.

Sonny is not the same criminal that he was, but his mother would have good reason to be suspicious of her son’s presence. Sonny is furious, about everything that his life had been, and he is determined to help other people like him avoid the fate of watching the people closest to you be wounded or killed. 

Today, Sonny goes to a local community center where he finds a group of young people waiting eagerly for him. 

“Hey y’all!” Sonny says excitedly when he sees the group excited to see him. “Let’s get this homework done.” 

Sonny sits with them around a table and he takes time with each, helping however he can before moving on to the next. It’s how he spends the majority of his days. Sonny doesn’t have a day job, he had been extremely successful and prudent as a drug dealer and he had essentially retired before his twenty fifth birthday. He made regular, anonymous donations to local community service organizations that he had been able to work with personally since moving back with his mother. His community, or communities so similar to his own that he had no trouble relocating to, had given him everything because he had taken advantage of their weaknesses. He wanted to use that weakness to foster strength. 

As Sonny gets lost in his tutoring, a man enters the front door of the community center where he asks the young lady at the front desk a question that she answers by pointing Sonny out with the students.

The man is almost as tall as Sonny, but they are so close in height, that any outside observer may assume they are the same size. The man wears a hat backwards on his head and he turns it around before he taps Sonny on the shoulder. When he turns to answer, Sonny is met by the nephew of his former boss, the vision of his old friend, his one time best friend, Corey. Corey’s shooting had precipitated his return to the south and his working with Detective Paul Young in Knoxville. 

“You jus disappear nigga?” Corey asks with a big smile on his face.

Sonny feels a mix of things, but he is mostly alarmed to hear the n word around the children he is tutoring. He had made it his mission to stop using the word because his mother had always hated it and he has been trying to be a different person, a better person. He leads Corey away from the table and they stand outside catching up. After they hug and trade niceties, Corey gets serious. 

“You ain’t even come to the funeral,” Corey says, “Darker woulda been sad about that. You was a son to him.”

Sonny shakes his head. “It’s sad what happened to him, but Corey, you know how it is. Dead bodies show up, we lay low, and I was here, just decided to stay.”

“But you can’t call me or nothing?” Corey says. “I was worried about you. Thought maybe you had died too.”

“I’m sorry about that, but I just had to stay low key.”

Corey nods and then he fills Sonny in on their business since his disappearance. 

“Niggas thought you had flipped on Dark or something. But I knew that wasn’t in you.”

Corey stares at Sonny as he talks and even though he never doubts that his old friend had anything to do with the murder of their boss, he does doubt that Sonny is excited to see him. 

“What’s really up man?” Corey asks eventually. 

Sonny looks around. The sun is shining in the neighborhood that had been mostly unchanged since his youth. The same schools, hospitals, stores, even the community center, still occupied the same places even if they had been renovated. Sonny remembers the point in his life when things like that on the surface of the community became inaccessible to him, when he embraced the underground to become a drug dealer. 

“I’m just not about that life anymore,” Sonny says nervously. “I love you like a brother, but I can’t…”

Corey cuts him off and throws his arms around Sonny’s neck. Sonny is scared at first, and then he returns the hug; it’s the first the two have ever shared. 

When he releases Sonny, Sonny sees that Corey is smiling bigger than he’s ever witnessed. 

“I had to see it,” Corey says. “Glad you got out.” He waves and turns to leave. 

“You can stay. You can do it too.”

Corey doesn’t say anything in response, he just lifts a hand with two fingers, wishing his old partner in crime all the peace that he can manage. 

Detective Paul Young leaves a meeting with the Internal Affairs Unit. He had been meeting with the Chief of Police for over a year to discuss the evidence that he had of police corruption within his own department. The Chief, a woman named Evelyn Thompson, has a lot of respect for Detective Young; the man loves his job so much that he had turned down numerous promotions so that he could work to close cases that had pestered him for years. Even though one of his big targets is now dead, Chief Thompson knows that Young is motivated to put cuffs on the young man named Yuri James, who everyone believed to be the current head of criminal organizations that stretched from the southeast and up through New England. So when he came to her with his concerns that someone within the Knoxville Police Department seemed to be undermining his investigation, she took him very seriously and contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigations Knoxville Field Office where her good friend Dotty McDermit was the Special Agent in Charge. She has made frequent trips to the department where the three make lists and discuss possibilities.

The meeting today had gone well. Everyone fingers Detective Marcus Colston as the likely culprit based on evidence Agent McDermit has discovered from his cell phone usage and trackers on his service vehicle. What perplexes McDermit most is Colston’s lack of diligence. He had made no attempts to conceal his communication with one of the dead crime leaders, the man named Smoke, as though he hoped to get caught, though he had not betrayed himself in any other way over the course of their investigation. After the death of Smoke, Colston seemed to have no other criminal connections, and the investigators had to assume that Smoke was the only man that he answered to. 

Young is not happy as he gets into his car and heads to the home of his colleague, the man that he had known for at least a decade, the man who had watched his back on multiple occasions and Young had trusted him with his life. He is eager for this all to be over, he is eager to no longer be in the dark about the people he sees everyday, the people he defends as heroes and admirable members of their community. The erosion of public trust in civil institutions like local police departments was a scary thing to a man like Young who believed in the promise of America. In order to ensure the rights of every citizen, Young believed that a trusted and reliable police force was necessary to maintain order in a society, how else to make the guarantee of freedom to pursue happiness? Corruption of that force tips the scale of power away from the citizens and that was not only criminal, but not in keeping with the American ideals that Young possessed. It was an affront to his entire way of life and he wouldn’t, he couldn’t if he wanted to, allow himself to be deterred in his mission to arrest Detective Marcus Colston. He had enabled murderers and rapists, maybe even the weirdness that Young had witnessed, and still had nightmares of, when he was fighting monsters in North Carolina about a year ago. Worse than all of that, to Young anyway, though he won’t admit this out loud, he had definitely contributed to the disappearance of Yuri James. Even if he didn’t know the young man, nephew of the now deceased drug leader Fire, Colston’s meddling had given Yuri enough of a heads up to avoid capture. Or that’s what Young knows but can’t prove. Yuri seems to have disappeared completely, but someone is running things in the place of the three dead kingpins. 

At Colston’s house, Young is happy to see his car in the driveway. The man lives alone, he doesn’t have a family, and Young is happy that there won’t be any innocent bystanders. 

He knocks at the door and is startled when it swings open. He has a feeling in the pit of his stomach as he instinctively draws his weapon and calls loudly inside for Colston. When there is no answer, it confirms the feeling, Colston is dead.

He finds the man strung up in his living room, dangling slowly with his pants around his ankles. Young thinks it odd to find a suicide with his pants down, but then it dawns on him that Colston must have been autoerotically asphyxiating himself and he had made a mistake.

But why was his door open? And it seemed that a table had disappeared from the middle of the floor; Young could see the groves in the carpet.

Young calls an ambulance and his Chief, who brings the Special Agent. They will wrap the case soon after. There will be two arrests of other officers believed to have aided Detective Colston, and everyone will move on. But not Young. Colston’s death is too convenient, even if there are no signs of any outside interference.