Season 1, Episode 3: "Brand Loyalty"

The bullet on the carpet seemed to glow under the dim living room light. Jamal’s mother, Joyce, stood frozen. The shattered glass of the front window lay between them like a border neither was brave enough to cross.

"Get in the kitchen, Mama," Jamal said, his voice dropping an octave into a register she had never heard before.

"Who did this?" she whispered, her hands shaking as she clutched her nurse’s scrub top. "Jamal, what have you done?"

He didn't answer. He couldn't. He just watched the red bandana wrapped around the brick. He realized that C-Grip wasn't just coming for his street corners anymore; he was coming for his sanctuary.

The War Room

Later that night, Jamal met Little Mike and Ray-Ray in the garage. Mike had the "strap" he’d bought—a rusted but functional .38 revolver. Ray-Ray looked like he wanted to vomit.

"They went to his house, man," Mike hissed, checking the cylinder. "The rules are gone. If we don't hit back, we’re done. C-Grip’s people are already telling the fiends that our work is 'poisoned.'"

Jamal looked at the revolver. He hated the sight of it. It was loud, clumsy, and final. He preferred the quiet math of the kitchen. But he knew that in South Central, your "brand" wasn't just the quality of your product; it was the weight of your shadow.

"We don't hit C-Grip," Jamal decided. "Not yet. We hit his pocketbook. We find out where he’s dropping his main supply and we intercept it. If he can't pay his soldiers, they won't fight for him. That's the only loyalty these streets understand."

The Heist

Under the cover of a humid Friday night, the trio followed one of C-Grip’s runners to a stash house near the 110 freeway. Jamal watched from the shadows, calculating the timing of the drop. He wasn't a gangster; he was a strategist.

When the runner stepped out of his car with a gym bag, Little Mike stepped from the darkness, the .38 trembling in his hand. Ray-Ray grabbed the bag while Jamal kept watch for the police "ghetto bird" circling three blocks over.

They got away clean, but as they opened the bag back at the garage, they didn't find money. They found four kilos of uncut powder.

The Moral Debt

Jamal stared at the white bricks. This was more "chicken" than he had ever seen. It was enough to make him a king, or enough to get them all executed.

He returned home to find his mother sitting in the dark, the window now boarded up with plywood. She didn't look up when he walked in.

"I found a thousand dollars under your mattress today," she said, her voice hollow. "I didn't touch it. I felt like if I did, my hands would never be clean again. I don't want a king in this house, Jamal. I just wanted a son who graduated."

The Cliffhanger

Jamal retreats to his room, the weight of the stolen kilos and his mother's words crushing him. His pager goes off. It’s a code he doesn’t recognize—a series of 9s.

He goes to the payphone on the corner. A voice he doesn't know, cold and professional, speaks: "You have something that belongs to my organization. C-Grip was just a middleman. You have twenty-four hours to return the bag, or we stop looking for you and start looking for the woman in the nurse’s uniform."

Jamal realizes he didn't just rob a local dealer. He robbed the cartel.