Page 68 of Justice

JUSTICE

“What’s wrong?”

Prime was watching me from the passenger seat as I cut my Maybach GLS across two lanes without a blinker. We were supposed to be headed to Freetown to survey some of the abandoned buildings. But then Skye’s name lit up my phone. And as soon as I heard that sweet voice I knew before she finished her first sentence that my afternoon was over.

What she laid on me, though, I wasn’t ready for.

My fuckin’ daughter had skipped school. This little girl was already on punishment. But she had taken her fifteen-year-old self into Pentagon City in the middle of a Wednesday to meet a grown man.

Some pedo nigga that I was about to have to beat the brakes off.

“That damn girl.” The words came out like poison. “We gotta get to Pentagon City. Now.”

“What the fuck happened?”

“Storie.” My jaw was locked so tight it ached. “She ditched school to go on a lil date. With a grown man. At the mall.”

Prime ain’t say nothing to that. He just sat in it with me.

Every time I hand that girl an inch of rope, she finds a way to hang herself with it. I thought we made good the other night. I’d given Storie her mama’s bracelet. Promised her a car, all in the name of loving her back into the light. And this is what she did with it. Snuck off to meet a man old enough to know exactly what he was doing.

My temples were pounding. There was a headache building behind my eyes. I pushed that Maybach up over ninety on the parkway.

“Justice.” Prime’s voice was even, careful, the voice you use on a man standing near a ledge. “I need you to breathe, bruh. I know you mad but you can’t lose your cool.”

I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t. Every ounce of the cold I’d spent my life keeping had gone somewhere I couldn’t reach.

I’d bent over backwards to protect that girl, and she kept walking herself straight to the edge, daring me to catch her. And I didn’t know what to do with her anymore. That was the God’s honest truth. Do I pull her out that school? Put a guard on her around the clock? Lock every door in my house from the outside like she was a prisoner instead of my child? Was that where we were now? Because I’d rather her hate me from behind a locked door than bury her. I’d take her hate over her funeral every day of the week.

And that man. That grown-ass man with his hand on my baby.

He was already dead. He just didn’t know it yet. Mercy was never on the table. A man puts his hands on my child, he’s not getting a lesson. He’s getting buried. I’d smile at his people at the funeral, go home, and sleep like a newborn.

Because here’s what my daughter didn’t understand, sitting up in that mall thinking she was grown, thinking she was slick. There is not a predator alive slick enough to take something of mine. Not one. They see a young girl and think easy. They don’t know whose blood she carries. They don’t know her daddy has put men in the ground for less than what he just did and slept fine that night.

She was fifteen. Too young to know what real danger looked like.

And the most dangerous man headed to that mall wasn’t the one with her.

It was me.

I don’t even remember parking. I don’t remember the doors.

I came through that mall like something let out of a cage, Prime a half step behind me telling me to slow down, telling me to think. I couldn’t hear him. There was a sound in my own ears drowning him out, low and steady, like blood moving too fast. I hit the food court and scanned it once.

I found them.

She was on a bench by the escalators. My baby. Fifteen years old, in an outfit I’d never seen and never bought, sitting hip to hip with a man pushing thirty like it was the most natural thing in the world. He had his arm stretched along the back of that bench behind her. This nigga was way too comfortable, taking his sweet time with my child.

And I stopped being a person. Whatever keeps a man walking upright, talking calmly, doing the math before he moves — it left me all the way.

He never even saw me. I was on him before he finished his sentence, both hands in his shirt, ripping him up off that bench so hard his feet left the ground. The first punch took him somewhere in the face and I felt bone move. He went back over the table behind him, trays and drinks crashing down with him, and I went with him, on top of him, my knee in his chest.

“Daddy!”

I didn’t hear her. I was too far gone to hear anybody.

“How old are you.” My hand was back in his collar, dragging his face up to mine, blood already sheeting out his nose. “HOW OLD ARE YOU.”