Street glanced over at me. “You good?”
“I’m good,” I said. “Just glad that’s over.”
He nodded and drove and I rode with everything running in the back of my head. The burner call was already made. My runners were already moving and enroute to get that bag from this nigga. The pickup was already in motion on the other side of the city while we were sitting in that warehouse shaking hands.
By tonight this was going to be finished.
All of it other than the niggas we had to check. Damn, taking bread from this nigga felt good.
—
I dropped Street off and told him I had moves to make and would link with him later. He didn’t push it because he knew what I meant when I said I had moves.
I went home first and checked on Sandra and told her a few more hours and she was going home. She nodded and looked at me in that way she had developed over the last twenty four hours that I wasn’t going to think too hard about. She told me that before she left, she wanted to feel me one more time. And guess what, my dumb ass stopped what I was doing and gave her the dick that she begged for.
I couldn’t lie. That shit was even better and wetter than last night.
Trying not to get in my head over that fire ass twat, I made the call from the burner.
I had coached her through it before I left for the warehouse that morning. We made the call early. She knew what to say, when to cry, when to beg. She had looked at me while I explained it with this expression on her face that was somewhere between cooperating and something else I couldn’t name and then she had nodded and said she understood.
I put the phone on speaker and held it up.
Tavarus picked up before the second ring.
“I need the hundred thousand tonight,” I said through the distorter I had on the burner that dropped my voice into something unrecognizable. “You got the instructions. Follow them exactly and she comes home tonight breathing.”
“I have the money,” Tavarus said and his voice was different from the warehouse. Stripped of the businessman composure. Raw in a way that told me whatever else he was, he loved his wife. “I just need to know she’s okay.”
I held the phone toward Sandra.
She didn’t hesitate. She cried on cue, told him she was scared, told him to please just get her home, hit every note I had told her to hit and then I pulled the phone back.
“Tonight,” I said. “Don’t try anything.”
I hung up and looked at Sandra.
She looked back at me.
“You did good,” I said.
“I want to go home now. He sounds devastated.” she said. Quiet. And for the first time it didn’t sound like she was performing it.
“Tonight,” I told her. “I promise.”
—
My runners were three niggas I had been using for two years. Young, hungry, smart enough to follow instructions and not ask extra questions. I had positioned them at the pickup location two hours before the drop time and positioned myself a block and a half away in the Tahoe where I could see everything without being seen.
The exchange went smooth. Tavarus’s man showed up with the duffel, handed it off at the location I had specified, and was gone in under four minutes. My runners brought it to the secondary location. They made sure they weren’t being followed, then they came three blocks over where I was waiting.
I unzipped the bag and went through it fast.
I found the tracker in the lining of the bag on the second pass. Those niggas must thought they were dealing with a rookie? I knew everything to look for. The magnet was small, flat, magnetic. Professional. I had been expecting it because I would’ve done the same thing in his position. I transferred every bill into the clean bag I had brought, took my time making sure there wasn’t a second device anywhere in the cash itself, and when I was satisfied I tossed the duffel in a dumpster on the next block and paid my runners their cut in cash on the spot.
They left.
I sat in the Tahoe alone and unzipped the clean bag and looked at a hundred thousand dollars sitting in front of me and let that sit for a second.
