Chubbie digs his fingers into my shoulder, scraping his nails into the skin until I grit my teeth.
“Oh yeah, that’s right. That fine ass sister of yours did.” Melo chuckles. “She called me all the way over to your house and begged me to rescue her sorry-ass baby brother because for the first time in her life, her ole’ daddy couldn’t do it. She still going through that lesbian phase because of what happened? Tell her my dick can cure that. Jamari would be happy for me to have her. He always said he’d let me taste her.”
I suck up a wad of spit and hawk it at him and it splatters against his cheek.
Chubbie drives his heavy fist into my eye before I can even get the satisfaction of seeing Melo’s reaction. Stinging heat creeps across my face and a groan crawls up my throat, but I hold on to it, keeping my body straight and my head up.
A gun cocks from somewhere in the dim shadows of the garage. I cut my eyes from one side to the other looking for whoever he had lurking, but all I find is Rasheeda standing in that same spot near the back door with her fist to her lips.
I look back at Melo as he wipes the thick glob of spit from his cheek, nodding. “So this is what we’ve come to after I’ve been gracious enough to keep you alive and keep the laws out of yourlife? I was even kind enough to put you on a payment plan for utilizing my time and resources.”
“Do it,” I grit out. “Your nuts big enough, ain’t they?”
I can’t say that word again, because I hear Slim in my ear, whispering about how much she doesn’t like it.
“Do it?” Melo’s eyebrows raise. “Oh, he on a mission, ain’t he, Chubbie?”
Chubbie huffs.
“So you agree with him?”
“He’s already sinking your ship, brother,” Chubbie replies.
“Is that so?”
Chubbie tsks, looking off to the side. “You let him keep running around this place like it’s his and you’ll keep having messes to clean up—first it was Jamari and now Wendell. He’s loud. Cut the root, Mel.”
Melo looks back at me.
He squints his eyes, tilting his head. “Yeah, but you know, one thing I’ve learned over the years when dealing with a rotten root is that sometimes it’s best to let it fester. Big Mama said sometimes you can’t take it out too quick because it’ll shock the rest of the plant—especially a fragile one. She said you can leave that rotten root in the very place it’s accustomed to and eventually it’ll die. Then you can trim the rest of the roots it poisoned one by one until they’re all gone and that fragile plant can flourish.” He reaches out, picking up the pendant on my necklace. “I think I want this rotten root to sit for a while.”
He turns the pendant left and right like it holds the answers to every problem he had with me.
He drops it and looks back up at me. “So, no, Pup. I can’t kill you right now. So you go back and tell your sister, Kenny Fairchild’s wife, and any other root that you’ve poisoned around here that you owe me fourteen hundred dollars every goddamn Sunday until I say you don’t. That’s what—six thousand amonth? Seventy-two thousand dollars a year? That’s doable for an everyday working nigga like you, right? Think of it as the Lovelaces’ contribution to my campaign.”
His eyes veer down my chest and stop on the right side of my body. “I think he needs a reminder of whose neighborhood this is, Chubbie. What you think?”
Chubbie yanks my body back and before I can blink, Melo pulls an open pocketknife from his slacks, slicing through the side of my body he stared at. Warm blood trickles out, and the sting makes me suck in a breath.
Rasheeda lets out a quiet gasp.
I grit my teeth, staring at the weeping gash in my stomach until Chubbie yanks my head back to look at Melo. I try to shrug him off while the skin around the deep cut throbs, but he buries his nails deeper into my skin, anchoring himself to me.
Melo shakes his head. “You a cocky motherfucka, huh?”
“Nah—just a motherfucka,” I hiss.
He laughs like we’re passing jabs back and forth on the block. He laughs so hard that he even sheds a tear.
He swipes it away while his laugh echoes through the garage, then he sniffs, pointing his bloody knife at the ground. “Nigga, I got parks named after me around this bitch. When you gonna get it through your thick skull that this is mine?Allof it. I’m tryna take care of business, but you’ve made that real hard these past two months. It seems like every bad thing that happens around here leads back to you—the root.”
He turns around, pointing the bloody knife at Rasheeda. “You take another text from that sister of his and you’ll be back begging your husband for crumbs every month. Am I clear, Rasheeda?”
“She…she was just checking in on their balance, Mr. Barnes. That’s a lot of money to pay every week with no formal agreement in pla?—”
“Let me rephrase my original statement—if you keep meddling in me and Pup’s business, you gonna be changing his shit bag instead of fucking him? Am I clear?”
“Yes…yes, sir.”
