I picked up the phone and dialed the last person on earth I should be talking to.
“Hey, Julius. I need a ride.”
6
Mega
When Vivica first approached me about dismantling the Banks empire, I thought it was going to be an easy move. She had all the insight. Knew all the secrets. Knew where the money was hidden, who was laundering what, which trucks were carrying more than bourbon. This would be over in a matter of months.
I thought by now I’d be living in peace with the money I stole from them, somewhere far away with my phone off. But that’s not the case. Even with her daughter in my grasp it wasn’t enough to get things poppin’. And speaking of which, I hadn’t heard from Serenity in over a month. The bitch straight ghosted me. Didn’t even tell her mother where she was.
I leaned over the coffee table and hit the line. Let the burn travel up through my sinuses and settle behind my eyes until the room sharpened and my thoughts stopped racing in circles and started racing in a straight line. Better. Not good, but better.
Samaya was standing in my living room looking like she hadn’t slept in days. Her locs were messy, her eyes were swollen, and her belly was rounder than the last time I’d seen her. She was maybe five or six months along now and she was shaking.
“They took him,” she said. “Some man kicked through our door and grabbed Bryce. Just snatched him up and threw him in a car. And Keyvon got shot at the casino and he’s in the hospital with cops outside his room and I can’t even see him without signing in and showing my ID. What are you gonna do about this?”
“Shut up,” I said. “Let me think.”
“Don’t tell me to shut up! That’s my man and the father of my baby and he’s been gone for hours and nobody is telling me anything!”
“I said shut the fuck up, Samaya! Damn! Give me a second!”
She flinched but she didn’t leave. She stood there with her arms wrapped around her belly and her chin trembling and waited because she didn’t have anybody else to go to. Keyvon was locked up in a hospital bed with police on him. Bryce was gone. And I was the only person left with any power, even though that power was shrinking by the hour.
“Tell me what the man looked like,” I said. “The one who took him.”
“He was tall. Light brown skin. Had a scar on his chin and shoulder-length dreads. Tattoos all over his body, his arms, his neck, everywhere. He didn’t say nothing to me. Barely even looked at me. He just came for Bryce.”
It was Mekhi.
I sat back on the couch and pressed my thumb and forefinger against the bridge of my nose. Mekhi Black had Bryce, which meant Quest was right behind him. Those two moved as a unit. Always had. If Mekhi grabbed Bryce, it was because Quest told him to, and if Quest was collecting Vipers then he was building a trail that ended at my front door.
“Shit,” I said. “We’re in trouble.”
“What do you mean we’re in trouble? Get him back!”
“You don’t understand who has him.” I looked at her. “The Banks brothers have your man. And if they’re squeezing him for information, Bryce is gonna talk.”
“Bryce would never snitch,” she said fast, with conviction. “He’s not like that. He would never.”
“Yeah, well, he ain’t dealt with those niggas before.”
She opened her mouth to argue but I held my hand up and she stopped. Smart girl. She was learning when to push and when to fall back, which was more than I could say for Serenity who never learned that lesson and ended up wherever the fuck she ended up because of it.
I thought about my options and the list was short. The Vipers were done. Keyvon and Jerome were in the hospital with charges stacked on top of charges. Bryce was in a basement somewhere getting worked over by men who had been doing this since before he was born. The rest of the crew had scattered back to Baltimore the second things got hot, because loyalty only goes as far as the paycheck and the paychecks had stopped coming weeks ago.
Vivica was pressing me from prison for results I couldn’t deliver. She wanted the Banks empire dismantled and Serenity back under her influence and neither of those things were happening. Every move I’d made in the last six months had either failed or backfired. The warehouse fire just made Quest angry. The casino shooting put my soldiers in custody and paralyzed Zephyr, which turned Mekhi into something I wasn’t prepared to deal with. A man grieving his brother’s legs was a man with nothing left to lose, and men with nothing to lose were the most dangerous men alive.
I leaned forward and hit another line because the first one was already fading and I needed to stay sharp. The coke wasn’t doing what it used to do. Six months ago a line would keep me locked in for hours, clear and focused and ready to move. Now itjust kept the shaking at bay and gave me about twenty minutes of thinking straight before the crash started creeping back in. I was using more and feeling less and I knew what that meant but I wasn’t ready to look at it.
“Go home, Samaya,” I said.
“I’m not going home without answers.”
“I don’t have answers right now. I need time to figure this out. Go home, lock your door, and don’t talk to nobody. Not the cops, not your friends, nobody. If anybody comes asking about Bryce or Keyvon or me, you don’t know shit. You hear me?”
She stared at me with those red swollen eyes and I could see her calculating whether I was somebody worth trusting anymore. The answer was probably no, but she didn’t have better options so she picked up her bag and walked out without saying goodbye. The front door closed behind her and the house was quiet again except for the bass from the speaker in the corner that I’d left playing on loop because silence made me hear things I didn’t want to hear.
