Page 45

She started typing on her phone as she answered me.

“She wants to know if I’m bringing her after school. I already told this girl that I have to see if you’re up to it.

“That’s my baby. Bring her,” I said quickly.

“I figured you’d say that.”

She started typing a response while I leaned back in the wheelchair. Three weeks ago, I didn’t know if I was going to live. Today, I stood on my own legs for a few seconds. It wasn’t enough for me, and maybe it won’t be enough tomorrow either, but as I looked down at my feet, I had to admit something I hadn’t been willing to give myself credit for before. They had held me. For five seconds, they had fucking held me. Next time, I’d make it six.

Chapter 12

Trigga

Twenty-one whole days had passed since Ghost pulled out of my apartment complex in that black Camry, and nobody had seen his ass since. I stood outside MB’s Auto, staring across the lot while I finished the bottle of water in my hand. Business had gone back to normal around the shop, or at least as normal as shit could get after everything that happened. Cars moved in and out of the bays, music played somewhere inside, and every few minutes somebody called across the lot for somebody else.

If you didn’t know what had happened, you wouldn’t know anything had changed, but I knew better. Mr. Browne was still in an impatient rehabilitation facility learning how to walk again. Mali hadn’t driven since the shooting, although she swore up and down that she wasn’t scared to. I was driving her to and from school. If she didn’t want to face her fear right now of driving, I wasn’t going to force her. Ms. Eternity was close enough to having that baby that everybody jumped whenever the phone rang, and every person connected to the Browne family had spent the last three weeks waiting for me to find a nigga who seemed determined to stay gone.

Ghost hadn’t called me. He hadn’t called his mother either, according to Ms. Gia. He hadn’t used any cards anybody could trace. Mr. Browne had his connections on that. His ass still hadn’t popped up at any of the places that I knew him to go, and the black Camry had eventually been found sitting abandoned with nothing inside that told anybody where he went afterward. The nigga had disappeared.

And the longer he stayed gone, the more that shit bothered me. The door behind me opened, and I glanced over my shoulder as Sha stepped outside. He had his phone in one hand and a set of keys in the other, but I could tell by the look on his face before he reached me that he wasn’t coming with the update I wanted.

“Nothing?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

I shook my head and looked back across the lot. Sha stopped beside me.

“This nigga knows how to hide,” he said lowly.

“Yeah.”

That wasn’t surprising. Ghost and I hadn’t exactly spent our lives doing shit that required us to be easy to find. We knew how to move without leaving a trail. We knew what not to put on a phone, what places to stay away from when people were looking, and how stupid it was to keep using the same car after doing some shit in it.

The difference was that I’d never been on this side of it before. I’d never been the person trying to find him.

“The Camry ain’t give y’all nothing?” I asked.

“Not a damn thing. He cleaned that motherfucker out before he left it.”

I nodded. That sounded like Ghost.

“Where did you find it?”

Sha named an area that was a little south from us, and I frowned. It wasn’t somewhere I immediately connected to him, which was probably exactly why he’d chosen it. I rubbed my hand over my jaw as I thought about all the places Ghost and I had been over the years.

Every place I could think of had already been checked.

“I don’t see how he’s making moves and he broke,” I said.

“He’s a broke nigga with motion,” Sha said in an even tone.

That was the truth. Even before we started hitting licks, Ghost always found a way. My problem with him is that money was everything to him, and he moved like it. Also, as soon as money touched his hand, it left him. But he was always the kind to make shit happen whether he had a dime or not, and that was what worried me. If he was smart, he would have stashed away the money we had come across. That worried me more than anything because a nigga hiding because he was broke eventually had to come out. A nigga with money could sit still.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and looked at the screen.

Mr. Browne

I answered immediately.