“Well whatever she’s going through, she needs to go through it away from me. I keep my distance of respect for you and your pops. You know that. But she came at me today on some ‘I lost everything, I lost you’ shit, and I’m telling you right now—she needs to not cross me again.”
The room got quiet for a second. Zephyr looked up from his phone but didn’t say anything. He was smart enough to stay out of this particular conversation.
“That was her son, Quest,” Mekhi said carefully. “She can visit his grave.”
“She can visit whatever she wants. She don’t ever need to speak to me. I’m not asking, Mekhi. I’m telling you.”
Something passed between us that had been sitting underneath our friendship for fourteen years. The understanding that his sister had taken something from me that I could never get back, and the only reason we were still brothers was because neither of us had ever let that truth fully surface. We’d built a wall around it. Sealed it off. And every now and then it rattled, and we both pretended we didn’t hear it.
“I’ll talk to her,” Mekhi said.
“Appreciate it.”
He picked the toothpick back up. I adjusted my cufflinks. The wall held.
“Aight,” Mekhi said, shifting gears the way we always did, abruptly and without looking back. “Let me show you what Zeph found.”
Zephyr stood up from the couch and walked over to the desk, pulling up something on the laptop. He turned the screen toward me. It was a series of surveillance screenshots—grainy parking lot footage, a gas station camera, and what looked like a traffic light capture.
“The snake tattoo,” Zephyr said. His voice was lower than Mekhi’s and he used it less, which meant when he talked you listened. “I had to bribe every gas station and convenience store within a five-mile radius of the warehouse for the week before the fire. Nothing from our own footage—those cameras were wiped clean. But the gas station across the highway had a camera facing the road, and it caught this.”
He pointed to a still frame. A figure on a motorcycle. It was a sport bike, dark colored, stopped at the light about a quarter mile from the warehouse entrance. The resolution wasn’t great, but you could make out a lean build, a dark hoodie, and a right hand gripping the handlebar with something visible on the knuckles. A tattoo.
“Can’t see the face,” I said.
“Nah. But the bike is distinctive—Kawasaki Ninja 400, black with green accents. And the tattoo on the hand is a snake. I’ve been asking around, and there’s a crew out of Baltimore called the Black Vipers. Small group, maybe seven to ten deep. They all rock viper tattoos—hand, neck, forearm. It’s their thing.”
“What do they move?” I asked.
“Small work,” Mekhi said. “Weed, some pills, a little coke, nothing major. They’re not heavyweights. They just dabble in low-level shit. They’ve been around for a couple years, but they ain’t on nobody’s radar.”
“So a small bike crew from Baltimore that moves weed and pills decided to torch a Banks Reserve warehouse.” I let that sentence sit in the room so everybody could hear how ridiculous it sounded.
Zephyr nodded. “That’s what doesn’t add up. These ain’t the type of dudes who go to war with us. They don’t have the resources, the motive, or the balls. Somebody pointed them at us.”
“Exactly.” I stood up and walked to the bar cart, poured myself two fingers of cognac, and took a slow sip. “This wasn’t their idea. Somebody hired a crew with no connection to DC, no ties to us, no history—specifically because they’d be ghosts. Untraceable. You want to hit somebody without it coming back to you? You don’t use your own people. You go out of town and find somebody hungry enough to do it for the right price.”
“So the question isn’t who lit the fire,” Mekhi said. “It’s who paid for the match.”
“And whoever that is had inside information,” I continued. “The security rotation, the camera positions, which warehouse to hit for maximum damage. That’s not something you Google. Somebody close to us is leaking, or somebody with access to our operations fed it to whoever hired these Viper boys.”
The room was quiet while that sank in. Inside information. Those two words sat in my chest like acid because the list of people who knew our security protocols was short, and every name on it was somebody I trusted.
“What do you want to do?” Zephyr asked.
“First, I need an ID on the rider. The bike is a start. That’s specific enough to narrow it down. Cross-reference that with anyone connected to the Black Vipers and see if we can get a name. Second, I need everything you can find on this crew. Who runs it, how they recruit, where they operate, who they take jobs from. If somebody hired them, there’s a money trail somewhere.”
“And when we find the rider?” Mekhi asked.
“We don’t touch him yet. He’s a foot soldier. I don’t want the hand—I want the brain. We find this kid, we follow him, and he leads us to whoever signed the check. That’s the person I want in a room.”
Mekhi nodded. Zephyr was already typing something into his phone.
“One more thing,” I said. “Keep this tight. The four of us and Justice. Nobody else. If we do have a leak, I don’t want whoever it is knowing we’re this close.”
“Done,” Mekhi said.
I finished the cognac and set the glass on the cart. Dapped Mekhi up, then Zephyr. The handshake with Mekhi felt a little off. Probably because I had threatened his sister. And Iunderstood the importance of protecting your family more than the next nigga, but his sister did me dirty. And he knew the details of that.
