“Your phone has been ringing all morning.”
“Shit, what time is it?”
“Eleven.”
“Damn, why didn’t you wake me up? I told you I go to church with my folks on Sundays.”
“You were sleeping so peacefully,” she smiled.
I lifted my phone and saw that my mother had called me ten times. “I’mma hit you later. I gotta slide.”
“Okay. Can you have somebody drop some more weed off for me?” Claudia begged.
“Yeah,” I lied on my way out the door.
I wasn’t sending her shit. She couldn’t even wake a nigga up.
On the drive home, I mentally prepared a speech to give to my dad. Everything was spiraling out of control, and as much as I loved this shit, I was tired. At forty-eight years old, I was ready to step out of the fucking way. If Uncle Montell decided to be spiteful and cut us out, so the fuck what. We had enough money put up to pivot and sustain. The fact of the matter was Lil Q wasn’t ready, and I’d be damned if my father sank his claws into him like he did me. I was comfortable handing shit off to my eldest son Tech because he didn’t take no shit, not even from me. I was positive that the same would go for my father.
When I got home, my father’s truck was already parked in the driveway. Rob was still behind the wheel when I approached it.He rolled the window down with a blank expression on his face. “He’s already inside.”
“How long y’all been here?”
“Maybe five minutes,” he responded after checking the time.
I started for the house and the door swung open like he was waiting for me. “You think it’s okay to disappear off the face of the earth for an entire week?” He snarled, sending himself into a coughing fit. I silently entered the house and closed the door behind me. “I’ve been running around handling shit in my condition while trying to hold those fucking vultures off!”
“Look, I got a lot of shit going on. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
“Why? Because you lost that whore?”
I gently massaged my temple on my trek into the kitchen because this motha fucka was already making my head hurt. After grabbing a bottle of water from the refrigerator, I led the way to my office. My dad followed my every move in his chair, making it hard for me to fight my urge to flip his ass out of it. “It’s noon, I ain’t ate all day and you about to give me a headache.”
“Well, where the hell you been? What you been sleep all day? And when did you get that stupid ass shit on the back of your head?” He interrogated.
“Let’s just cut to what you came over here for. I ain’t in the mood for all this today.”
“Alright, I can tell you’re tired. You look like shit,” he spat, pulling his chair right next to where I sat behind my desk. “Me and your mother came up with a compromise that can work for everybody, and Montell is cool with it. We can split the responsibility evenly down the middle. Lil Q and Karmello can run shit together. You need to do whatever you need to do to get Lil Q to come home. Fuck whatever he got going on in Tampa with Marissa. In the meantime, I need you to do whatever you doto pull money from our offshore accounts. I agreed to buy your uncle out on some shit because he all bitter about his kids being cheated out of power.”
“How much you need?” I inquired, ready to get him the fuck up out of my face.
“A million.”
“Alright, one day you gotta learn how to do this on your own,” I expressed, pulling my MacBook open.
“Why, when I got you?”
I didn’t justify that with a response. Instead, I logged into the offshore bank portal to make the transfer and get him out of my face while I thought of another plan. When I talked to Quincy and Lil Q two weeks ago, I had ulterior motives. I wanted to see if their mother had that nigga around them and thankfully she hadn’t. During that conversation, I learned that Lil Q was actually thriving up there. He spent the last year at a public school that he didn’t get kicked out of and he made the Dean’s list twice. I wasn’t dragging him back here for this shit.
My body was moving on autopilot making the transfer until I attempted to initiate the wire transfer and received an error message.
Transaction rejected due to administrative lock.
I logged completely out and made a second attempt only to receive the same error message. Pulling the landline on my desk closer to me, I lifted the cordless phone and initiated a call to my liaison, Jabari. He answered on the second ring, and I went through the steps to verify my identity before diving into my issue.
“I keep receiving an administrative lock on the wire transfer,”I complained, irritation lacing my voice.
“Please give me one moment to take a look,”Jabari replied. The phone fell silent and Jabari’s computer keys clicking on the opposite end of the phone was rapid then suddenly stopped.“I see. The transaction was blocked manually. Looks like the authorization was overridden by the acting administrator of the holding company.”
