5 Minutes and 42 Seconds

by Timothy Williams

Overview

Cameisha Douglass has it all — a sprawling home in a posh neighborhood, a fancy car, three healthy children, and a husband, Fashad, who is devoted to her. Her biggest worry is catching her daytime soap operas before the kids come home from school and her husband returns from work, "businesses" that everyone knows are mere fronts through which he launders his drug-dealing money. But as the emotional and sexual secrets of her family come to the surface, she can no longer deny that her life is not all that it seems. While family members point fingers at one another, the real threat may come from the outside, specifically from Smokey, a mixed-race twenty-year-old high school dropout and would-be rapper whose issues with sexual and racial identity fuel his inner rage.

Written by a daring young author with a compelling voice, 5 Minutes and 42 Seconds is a fast-paced and edgy thriller that explores the questions of identity and sexuality with refreshing vigor.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060837686
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/30/2006
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

A native of Ohio, T. J. Williams is an undergraduate at Princeton University. This is his first novel.

Read an Excerpt

5 Minutes and 42 Seconds

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By Timothy Williams

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2006 Timothy Williams
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060837683

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Chapter One

The Drill

Inside a perfect house, in a perfect neighborhood, on a well-paved street with mansions to either side, a trumpet sounds, and the procedure begins.

Cameisha Douglass stands at the bottom of the stairs, trumpet in hand. Her hair still wrapped in a sleeping bun, her face thick with the makeup she slept in just in case her philandering husband, Fashad, comes home for a change.

"Cold blue!" she screams, not realizing the proper term is "code blue." Feet pitter-patter in the distance as the children move toward their designated stations. Her youngest children, Taj and JD, have both the most important and easiest task. When the trumpet sounds, they are to run to the bathroom, remove stockpiles of cocaine from beneath a panel in the floor, and flush their father's coke down the toilet. For now, they are flushing the flour Cameisha switched with the real stuff earlier. The job is simple, the children young and impressionable.

With her daughter, Dream, things are more complicated. Dream doesn't bother getting up when she hears the signal. Cameisha barges into her daughter's room without knocking. Dream slightly removes the covers from her face revealing a round, full face, caked with makeup, imitative of the thinnermush of CoverGirl supporting her mother's much thinner features.

"If you don't get your black ass out that bed and do what your stepfather told you to do, I will beat the black off of it," says Cameisha.

Dream rolls over, ignoring her. Cameisha grabs the covers and Dream tugs them back -- Cameisha gives her an impatient motherly stare. Dream lets go of the covers, then throws a fit, as if she is the youngest child in the household. Nevertheless, she gets up soon after.

Cameisha passes the bathroom where the boys, kneeling like altar boys, flush the cocaine. Ten seconds later she's back down the stairs, busy with her own task of removing clothes from the living room closet, thus making room for a trap door that is to be cut in the interior of the closet. By the time she removes the last garment, Dream has reluctantly mobilized and stands in the hallway with a chain saw, ready to cut. But before Dream gets started, Cameisha presents her with a wooden box. "Practice on this," she says. "I ain't fuckin' up my closet for nothing."

Dream rolls her eyes, then starts the chain saw. Taj and JD scurry about upstairs, shaking salt shakers to throw off the scent when the dogs come. Dream finishes cutting. The four of them race to a television that isn't really a television and remove a huge sum of money from the hollow space inside, where wiring and electronics used to be. They rush and sweat as they transfer the cash from the TV to the safe. Quality time, the Douglass family way.

Cameisha checks her watch, stops the timer. "Five minutes and forty-two seconds," she says. "That should be fast enough."

Continues...

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Excerpted from 5 Minutes and 42 Seconds by Timothy Williams Copyright © 2006 by Timothy Williams. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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