Chapter 241: The Price of Respect

Thirty seconds.

That was the number the driver had thrown out before speeding off.

Lucas didn’t even make it that long.

He’d barely taken five steps toward the fence when three men peeled off the wall behind him, moving slow, moving casual, the way predators moved when they already knew the outcome.

"Yo. Nice kicks."

Lucas didn’t turn around.

"Nice watch too."

A hand landed on his shoulder, gripping hard, spinning him around before he could react.

Up close, the guy was big. Gold chain. Do-rag. Breath like cheap liquor and cigarettes.

"Empty your pockets, pretty boy."

Lucas looked at the hand on his shoulder.

Then he looked at the man’s face.

Calm.

Almost bored.

"You sure you want to do this?"

The man laughed, glancing back at his boys.

"Hear this dude? He asking me if I’m sure."

That was the wrong thing to say.

Because the moment he laughed, his grip loosened.

And that was all Lucas needed.

He stepped in instead of back, closing the distance, driving his shoulder into the man’s chest hard enough to knock the air out of him. The guy stumbled into his friend, both of them tangling up, and by the time they untangled themselves Lucas was already three yards clear, hands loose at his sides, not even breathing hard.

Silence.

The two who’d stayed quiet were staring now.

Not at Lucas’s watch.

At Lucas.

"...The hell was that."

The big one straightened up, rubbing his chest, glaring daggers.

"You got hands, huh?"

"I don’t want trouble," Lucas said. "I came here for the court."

That got a reaction he didn’t expect.

The three of them looked at each other.

Then they laughed. Loud. Genuine. The kind of laugh that had nothing to do with mocking him and everything to do with disbelief.

"Court?" the big one repeated. "You mean you walked into 24 Mob... for basketball?"

"Yeah."

"Man’s crazy."

They didn’t rob him.

They didn’t apologize either.

They just walked off, still laughing, already forgetting he existed.

Lucas exhaled slowly and turned toward the fence.

---

The court was worse up close than it looked from the taxi.

Cracked concrete. Rims with no nets, bent slightly from years of guys hanging off them after dunks. A crowd loose around the edges, some watching, some ignoring the game entirely, more interested in their phones, their drinks, their conversations.

The game itself was chaos. No structure. No rotations. Just bodies colliding under the rim while someone screamed for the ball that never came.

Lucas walked up to the sideline.

"Yo, can I get next?"

Nobody looked at him.

"I said can I get~"

"Man sit down."

He tried again with a different group.

Same result. A shrug, a half glance, then straight back to whatever conversation he’d interrupted.

He wasn’t being disrespected on purpose.

He was being ignored, which was worse.

To this neighborhood, he wasn’t a threat, wasn’t competition, wasn’t even a person worth acknowledging. He was scenery. A rich kid who’d wandered somewhere he didn’t belong and would leave in twenty minutes once reality set in.

Lucas stood there for a while, watching.

Thinking.

Then something clicked.

He remembered every documentary, every interview, every old street legend talking about how they’d broken into scenes like this. It was never about talent first.

It was about respect.

And around here, respect started with something simpler than skill.

---

Two blocks down, there was a corner store with bars on the windows and a hand-painted sign that read BEER ~ LIQUOR ~ LOTTO.

Lucas walked in.

The cashier behind the bulletproof glass barely looked up.

"How many crates of beer do you have?"

That got his attention.

"...What?"

"Crates. Beer. How many."

The man squinted at him like he was checking for a hidden camera.

"You want crates? Like, plural crates?"

"Fifteen, to start."

The cashier blinked slowly, then started laughing, the kind of laugh that said he’d seen a lot of strange things in this store but never this.

"Kid, you got fifteen crates of money?"

Lucas pulled out his phone.

"Try me."

Ten minutes later, two teenagers from outside the store were dragging crates out to the sidewalk under Lucas’s direction, both of them completely bewildered about why a stranger was paying them twenty bucks each just to carry beer two blocks.

---

By the time Lucas reached the court again, word had already started to spread.

"Yo, that’s the dude from earlier."

"He got beer?"

"Nah, he can’t have~"

"Look."

The crates came into view and conversations died mid-sentence.

Lucas set the first one down, cracked a bottle open, and drank half of it in one go before setting it back on the crate.

Nobody moved.

Then he grabbed a second bottle and held it out toward the nearest group.

"Anybody want one?"

For a second, silence.

Then a guy in a faded Bulls jersey stepped up, took the bottle, sniffed it like he was checking it wasn’t poisoned, then drank.

"...This real?"

"Real as it gets."

Word moved through the crowd faster than any rumor Lucas had ever seen. By the time the fifteen crates were half gone, more people were showing up, drawn by whispers that some rich kid was out here giving away free beer for no reason.

Fifteen crates became twenty.

Twenty became thirty.

By the time Lucas stopped counting, he’d bought thirty-seven crates total, enough that the corner store cashier personally walked over just to see it with his own eyes.

The basketball game had completely stopped.

Every single person on that court, every spectator on the sideline, every dealer posted up on the corner, all of them were circled around Lucas now, drinks in hand, watching him like he was the most interesting thing to happen to this block in months.

A guy with a scar over his eyebrow stepped forward first, clearly older than most of the crowd, clearly someone people deferred to without needing to be told why.

They called him Ghost.

Nobody outworked him on this court. Nobody outscored him either. Three years running, he was the reason 24 Mob’s court had a reputation at all.

"Aight." He took a slow sip. "You clearly want something. What is it?"