Or was I the guy who had just had one of the best dates of his life, who had intentionally been sensitive and listening, and had found that in listening to Tabby I'd found a deeper level of enjoyment than I'd ever had before with a woman?
As these whirled through my mind, another, darker voice whispered to me, one that I had tried to suppress for a very long time. What if I was the asshole, the player, the criminal I was on the path to becoming in my teen years? What if everything I'd done since then, the years of struggling as a bartender, running for city council, hell, even trying to date a woman as classy and high quality as Tabby Williams was just a front, a desperate attempt to run away from what I really was? What if I was just another kid from the ghetto who'd drunk his first malt liquor before he could do long division, and whose chemistry knowledge depended mostly on how to mix household stuff together to get somebody high? What if I was just another piece of Playground trash?
I looked up at my mask, a simple black hood, and made a decision. If I was trash, then so be it. I'd heard somewhere, I didn't remember where, that sometimes, to combat evil, you didn't need good. You just needed a different kind of evil.
Pulling off my Spartans shirt, I reached for my uniform.
* * *
An hour later, I was crouching in an alleyway in Filmore Heights, listening as three of the Latin Kings were talking business outside a brownstone apartment across the street. I was using a cheap parabolic microphone, the sort you could get from just about any electronic shop for about a hundred dollars, and had to wince every time a car or bus drove by on the street, overwhelming the microphone and temporarily deafening me. Thankfully this late at night, few people were stupid enough to try and drive through Filmore Heights unless they were looking for trouble. The Kings used a lot of code words, but if you grew up in the bad part of town, you knew what was going on.
"Orale. After the hit on that group of Eights the other night, El Patron is worried. Thinks Filmore's gonna cook off," one of the Latin Kings, a short skinny guy in a black tank top said. "Wants us soldiers to keep our eyes out for trouble."
His compatriots, one bald and overweight while the other was long haired and looked kind of like a rat, nodded. Rat-face, who had a black and gold Latin King bandanna tied around his forehead, reached between his legs for the forty ounce malt liquor on the steps and took a pull. "Es frio, man. You know the GD's ain't gonna come up here. They're just gonna bark and talk shit like the little bitches they are."
The big man interjected. "They outnumber us, and if they think that the attack on the white boys was done by one of us, they might just find the stones to do more than bark. They could find their teeth."
The three Latin Kings nodded. I'd seen the video, and while my face was never shown, there were enough flashes of skin from my movements that it was easy to tell, even in the cheap black and white security footage, that the attacker wasn't black. If the Gangster Disciples thought that the attack was done by another gang, it would have either come from a Latin King, who were mostly light skinned to light brown Hispanics, or an outside white gang, the nearest of which was on the far side of The Playground.
"I'm more worried if it's the Snowman," One commented, earning alarmed looks from the other two.
"Homie, don't even whisper that shit around here,” Big man hissed. "I'm just happy he's stayed pretty much in the Confederation stomping grounds. Filmore Heights was just an affiliate of them, he's left us alone so far."
"And let's hope he stays that way," Rat-Face added. "I don't need a bomb in my mailbox, or a sniper shot in my grill."
"Shit, that'd improve your looks," one joked, causing the three of them to laugh. The Rat-Face guy was a remarkably ugly man, that was for sure. "Hey, did El Patron have anything to say about when we might get a new load for the streets? My cousin's running low, and a lot of customers are feenin'. I know it's been tight the past few months, but I'm 'bout at the point of whipping up some bathtub crystal if we can't get the good stuff goin'."
A car drove by, so I missed a few seconds of of reply. "... in about a week. They're just trying to work it all out."
I was so absorbed in what the Latin Kings were saying that I didn't hear the person creeping up behind me until I was dragged back and slammed against the brick wall of the alley, pulling the earphones from my head, the parabolic microphone clattering on the pavement. Staring me in the face was another man, all in black, his face obscured by a glued on face-mask. "You're dead, amateur," he rasped in my face. "You're playing a game that you aren't ready for."