When It All Falls Down 2 - Strapped Up: A Chicago Hood Drama (A Hustler's Lady)

by Tamicka Higgins

“I saw y’all niggas on the news,” Byron said. “Y’all actually gettin’ quite a bit of press and shit, especially for a city as big as Chicago and shit. They cut into the news to talk about y’all niggas. I must admit. Y’all did that shit kinda smooth. Y’all was definitely smooth with it, I will say that. They even showed the camera photos and shit from inside of the bank on the news. Can’t even tell it’s y’all niggas, lookin’ all cleaned up and shit in your suits and shit. Man oh man, y’all is some bold niggas.”

  “Nigga, whatever,” Jackson said. “I don’t even know what the fuck you talkin’ bout.”

  “I bet you don’t,” Byron said then chuckled. “I bet you don’t. Well, from what it’s lookin’ like, my company might be stayin’ with me a little longer than I thought. That’s alright, though. Once I get them back to the main crib, stuff will be different. I got different ways that I can keep them busy, especially this thick lady over here. This bitch is thicka than a snicka, I tell’ya, and she lookin’ like she want some of the Byron all to herself.”

  At this point, Tramar could no longer take it. He wished he could jump through the phone and literally strangle Byron to death. His forearms pumped up as the rage ran through his veins. Without even thinking, and ignoring Ayana’s efforts to stop him from walking forward, Tramar stepped over to Jackson and spoke into the phone.

  “Nigga, I’mma kill you!” Tramar said. “I swear to God I’mma kill your ass if you put one fuckin’ finger on my stepmama. I’mma kill you, nigga. You hear me?”

  Byron laughed. “Nigga, okay,” he said. “If you say so. You over there talkin’ all that shit, but little do you know I done already touched the bitch. Granted, I ain’t gone nearly as far as I’d like to with her, yet. But, I’m being a gentlemen and giving her enough time to get comfortable and stuff. She in the other room if you wanna talk to her. She kinda busy, though. With what happened to your daddy and all, she prolly ain’t really thinkin’ straight.”

  Immediately, Tramar’s heart jumped. It thumped so hard that Jackson and Ayana could practically see it under Tramar’s dress shirt. Without thinking, Tramar grabbed Jackson’s phone from him. He spoke into it as loud as he could.

  “Nigga, what the fuck did you do to my daddy?” Tramar asked. “What the fuck you do to my daddy, nigga?”

  Ayana rushed over to Tramar and grabbed his shoulder. She’d never seen him so angry. She thought that Tramar was simply trying to be tough about the situation, even if he wasn’t really in any sort of position to truly scare Byron. However, when she looked into Tramar’s eyes, she knew that she was looking into the eyes of a man who had the capacity to kill if it was necessary. She looked back at the phone, petrified at the words that could come out of Byron’s mouth next.

  “Nigga, calm down with your bitch ass,” Byron said, sounding relaxed. “Your daddy is still alive, for now. I mean, dude is beat up pretty bad. But, when a nigga went in to check on him and shit a little bit ago, after seeing y’all cowboy niggas on the news, he looked alright. I looked into his eyes, and they still swollen shut, but he gon’ be all right. I ain’t gon’ let the nigga die, if that’s what you worried about, unless I don’t get my money, that is.”

  With his nostrils flared as far as they could go, Tramar shook his head. He still couldn’t believe that because of his and Jackson’s actions, his family had been pulled into a whirlwind of trouble. He shook his head and began to pace around the room.

  “Where you at, nigga?” Tramar asked. “Tell me where the fuck you at, nigga. You supposed to be a real nigga and shit, then why don’t you come and deal with us face to face? Huh, nigga? You just a pussy ass, little dick ass nigga, like I thought. Fuck you, nigga!”

  Byron chuckled. “Said the one who out there robbin’ banks and shit to get my money,” he said. There was a long pause filled by heavy breathing. “Look here, niggas. Y’all betta be gettin’ my money together quick or else the phone calls is gon’ stop. You wanna talk to your stepmama, Tramar, huh?” Byron’s voice mimicked that of a toddler’s who had just been learning to speak. “Huh? You wanna talk to your stepmommy.”

  Ayana, Tramar, and Jackson listened as a door opened and a woman, who was clearly sobbing, screamed to be let go. “Shut the fuck up, bitch!” Byron commanded. “Before I give that ass something to really cry about.”

  “Nigga!” Tramar said. He hated that he felt so helpless. “Nigga, where you keepin’ them? You betta not do shit to my fuckin’ stepmother, or I’mma really kill you nigga.”

  “Here, talk to your stepmama for a second, nigga,” Byron said, sounding as if he could care less about what Tramar was saying.

  A few seconds passed before Tramar could hear his stepmother’s voice coming through the phone. “Tramar?” she said, clearly sounding distraught. “Tramar?”

  “Miss Vivica,” Tramar said. “You not hurt, is you? That nigga ain’t hurt you, did he?”

  “Tramar, I’m okay,” Vivica said. “Baby, what is goin’ on? What have you gotten yourself into? Who is this crazy ass nigga, Tramar? Who is he?”

  As Tramar was about to say something, he could tell that Byron had pulled the phone away from his stepmother. She’d still been talking, her voice fading away in the background. Seconds later, the sound of a hard slap came through the phone. Tramar cringed, realizing that Byron had just slapped his stepmother as if she were a grown man.

  “What the fuck you do to my stepmother?” Tramar yelled. “What the fuck you do to her?”

  “Nigga, shut the fuck up!” Byron snapped back.

  Just as Byron had begun to yell something else, the three of them could hear Vivica talking about the house’s address in the background. Before she could finish, there was another slap and the phone line cut off. Instantly, full of rage and anger, Tramar walked back to his side of the motel room. All Ayana could do was watch as Tramar slammed his fist into the wall.

  “Can’t believe this shit!” Tramar yelled. “I can’t fuckin’ believe this shit.” He then turned and looked at his boy Jackson. “Nigga, you sure you don’t know where else that nigga could be.”

  Jackson held up his hands in a peaceful way. “Tramar, I swear man,” he insisted. “I told you everything I know about his nigga. I don’t know where else he could be, I swear I don’t.”

  “Man, fuck this shit,” Tramar said, sitting back down on his side of the bed. “Let’s count this money so we can figure out what our next move is gon’ be. And I gotta go pick up my son Quan tomorrow morning. Fuck, this shit is fucked up.”

  “Hold up,” Jackson said. “You gotta do what tomorrow morning? Pick up Quan? Nigga, where the fuck you gon’ keep him if we got all this goin’ on? Why the fuck would you even agree to do some shit like that if you knew that we was gon’ be havin’ to do all this shit to come up with money to get your family back? Nigga, what the fuck was you thinkin’?”

  “Man, I know,” Tramar said, shaking his head. “That’s why…”

  Ayana cut in and cut Tramar’s sentence off. “That’s why I’mma watch him while y’all out there doin’ what y’all gotta do,” she said. “That’s why I’mma watch his son. Tramar don’t need no more problems with his baby mama. Jackson, you know that bitch, Precious. You know how crazy she is.”

  Jackson snickered. “Your words, not mine,” he said, backing away from the topic. “And, all right. If that’s what y’all niggas wanna do, then that’s what y’all gon do. I wouldn’t have did no shit like that, but whatever.”

  The conversation fell flat as the three of them went back to counting the money. Once they’d gotten close to finishing up their respective piles of stacks and then the smaller bills, Jackson ran to his motel room. In a matter of minutes, he’d come back with his share of the money that he and Tramar had gotten from Byron’s house on Monday. Tramar then pulled his money out of the hiding spot. About thirty minutes later, Ayana then Tramar, then Jackson each announced how much money they’d counted. Tramar had pulled his phone out and added up the numbers as they’d been thrown i
nto the air.

  Once the numbers had been added up, Tramar stood up and gripped his head in frustration. Even though Ayana hadn’t been the best math whiz, especially considering the grades she’d gotten in math class in high school, she knew that the numbers being thrown out into the air were not going to add up to a million dollars.

  “Tramar?” Ayana asked, standing up. She walked around the front of the bed, closer to him, wanting to approach this situation with some tact. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What is it?”

  When Tramar turned back around and faced Ayana and Jackson, a tear had strolled down the right side of his face. He shook his head, clearly angry and frustrated. “We gon’ have to hit another bank tomorrow,” he said, solemnly. He then shrugged his shoulders. “We ain’t got no choice. We gon’ have to get another fuckin’ bank tomorrow. This ain’t enough money. It just…It just…. It just ain’t enough money.”

  “How much we short then, nigga?” Jackson asked, not wanting to hear the answer. While he had definitely been down for helping his boy get his family back, the idea of robbing multiple banks within such a short timespan, just did not sit all that well with him.

  Tramar paused for a moment before he answered Jackson’s question. “We need like two hundred thousand more,” he said. “Like a little more than two hundred thousand more fuckin’ dollars.” Tramar sat on the bed. “Fuck.”

  “Fuck,” Jackson said.

  Even though Ayana had been safely sitting in the parking garage during the robbery, she didn’t like what she’d just heard either. In fact, the entire time that Tramar had been in the bank with Jackson, she was worried beyond belief. Knowing that they’d have to do it all over again tomorrow, and with Quan staying over in the motel room, only made things all the more worse. She shook her head and buried her face in her hands.

  “It’s just that simple,” Tramar said. “We gon’ have to get this shit tomorrow. We gon’ have to.”

  “Then what if…” Jackson began to say, his words trailing off. He waved his hands, letting them know that he wanted to back away from the conversation.

  “Naw, what?” Tramar said, forcefully. “Then what if what?”

  “What if?” Jackson said, hesitantly. “Then, nigga, what we gon’ do if we rob the bank tomorrow, one of them small ones that be open on Saturdays and shit, and we still ain’t got enough money? What we gon’ do then?”

  “The game changes then,” Tramar said. “It’s just that simple, nigga. The game changes. We gon’ have to do what I was sayin’ we shoulda did to that nigga when we was up at his place on Monday. We gon’ have to kill that nigga. I don’t care if I got enough money or not. I’m not gon’ just let my family sit up and be held hostage somewhere like this is some fuckin’ mob shit. I don’t give a fuck if we gotta set the nigga up. If we can’t come up with enough money by the day he said, then we just gon’ have to kill him.”

  The motel room was silent for several minutes after Tramar’s statement. Ayana looked down at the dirty red carpet that covered the floor. She realized, at that very moment, that she was seeing a side of Tramar she’d never seen before today. He looked as if there was no doubt in what he’d just said.

  Chapter 6

  Later on that evening, Tramar called Precious. The two agreed that Tramar would come to her place to pick Quan up on Saturday afternoon, sometime between 12 and 2pm. He and Ayana talked more about her watching Quan while Tramar and Jackson were out, hitting the next bank. Ayana assured Tramar that not only would his son be well taken care of, he would go unaffected. She would make it her personal duty for the little boy to never think, for one minute, that anything was going on with his father. She knew that she could at least do that.

  Around 10 o’clock that night, once the sun had gone down and the eyes of the world didn't seem so focused on them, Ayana rode with Jackson and Tramar as they drove around, trying to figure out which bank they would hit in the morning. They decided that they wanted to hit a bank that was in somewhat of a secluded area, and preferably in a wealthier, suburban area where maybe the bank would have more money on hand than one in a rough part of the city. After riding around different affluent areas south of Chicago’s southside, they decided to change the plan up. They decided they’d go over into Indiana, into some of the small towns with money, and see how they felt about robbing a bank over there.

  After quickly riding through Gary, Indiana, which was dilapidated with some parts only being sidewalks and burnt buildings, they rolled through Chesterton, a town of about 40,000. They noticed that a bank sat just east of the town’s downtown, which was only made up of a strip of businesses along Main Street. However, what was different about this bank, and this town really, was the fact that it sat on the other side of train tracks – train tracks that essentially split the town in half. It looked to them that the train tracks were probably used on a regular basis.

  They sat in the bank parking lot for a few minutes, looking at the area and seeing how quickly it would be to get to the nearest interstate.

  “Naw,” Tramar said, looking at wooded areas off in the distance, serving as a backdrop to the town itself. “We not gon’ run for the highway cause you know they gon’ be expectin’ some niggas to do some shit like that. You heard what Byron said, y’all. They done already got us on the news and shit. And you know cause we a couple of niggas, they gon’ be thinkin’ to look for us on the south side and shit with all the savages.”

  “Yeah, you right,” Jackson said. “But what you thinkin’ that we should do?”

  Tramar pointed toward the hilly, wooded area in the distance. “Do some shit like take the long way home, through the woods and shit and come up on the other side of the city or some shit.”

  Jackson nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I see what you sayin’. Betta yet, though, I got another idea.”

  “What is that?”

  “Why don’t we do two banks at once?” Jackson said. “Nigga, you saw how smooth we was with that shit downtown. Nigga, I dare say we looked like a couple of professionals up in there. Not one of us broke a sweat or nothin’, and we did everything just the way we’d talked about.”

  “Yeah, you right about that shit,” Tramar said, thinking back to earlier in the afternoon. “That shit was crazy as fuck, but we did do it smoothly. So, you sayin’ that you think we can do a bank each, basically killin’ two birds with one stone and shit?”

  “Right,” Jackson said, nodding his head. “I don’t see why we couldn’t, nigga. Plus, look at how small in size some of these little town banks are.”

  “Yeah,” Ayana said from the back seat. “They are small. And you know there ain’t gon’ be no traffic in some of these places on a fuckin’ Saturday morning.”

  “Yeah, that could work in our favor,” Tramar said. “Or it could work against us. I don’t know how many niggas they got out in these towns and shit, but every time I bring my black ass over here, I sure don’t see a whole lot of us. Maybe they stay hidden and shit.”

  “I don’t know,” Jackson said. “But if we hit two of them at once, that’s twice the money in the same amount of time. And since the banks is small, less employees, so less to control. All we gotta do is make sure that don’t nobody move their hands and do nothin’ like pullin’ the alarms and shit. That’s all we gotta do. Like you said, nigga. Control the shit.”

  “What if one of these little rinky dink banks got a guard or somethin’?” Tramar asked. “What we gon’ do, shoot them in they knees and shit?” He chuckled.

  Tramar noticed that Jackson and Ayana had not responded to his rhetorical question. “Y’all seriously think we should do some shit like that shit?” he asked. “Okay, then.”

  “Nigga, I’m just try’na get your family back for you,” Jackson said. “I swear, that’s all I’m try’na do. I promise, once we get away with this shit tomorrow, I won’t even step my black ass into another bank for the rest of my life. Shit, I don’t even wanna go into a check cashing place. I just wanna get this
money and get your daddy and stepmother back, and we through with this shit. You know me, nigga. I like to stay under the radar.”

  Tramar, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, looked into the rearview mirror. He looked into Ayana’s eyes. She instantly knew what his eye contact was saying, as it was referring to her inference about Jackson over the last couple of days. She looked away, feeling a little guilty that she’d even said those things about Jackson when he was proving more and more, as they made their moves, that he truly was ride or die for his boy Tramar.

  When they went back to their motel rooms that night, the three of them decided that they’d get up in the morning and check out. Even if the police weren’t officially on their cases yet, with names and descriptions, the three of them decided that it’d be best if they just kept moving until everything died down. If they’d learned one thing so far it was that staying in place wasn’t always the best option.

  Again, Ayana lay awake at night with so many thoughts running through her mind. At first, she tried to force herself to go to sleep. She looked over and saw that Tramar had quickly fallen to sleep. However, for her, the struggle to sleep was more difficult that it had been the night before. Tonight the paranoia was so much more to deal with for Ayana. Every time she heard a car pull into the motel parking lot during the night, she opened her eyes wide and look at the window. She lay in the motel bed, practically in constant fear, that any minute some sort of government agents would bust into the door with guns drawn and ready to shoot anyone inside who so much as breathed too hard.

  Ayana felt even more trapped when Tramar rolled over in his sleep. Out of habit, he wrapped his strong arms around her and held her tightly as he continued to snore. While Ayana would normally welcome such a gesture, something about it happening tonight was completely different. Being wrapped in Tramar’s arms caused her to feel very trapped and vulnerable. Now, more than anything, she wanted to keep her eyes on the door. She wanted to watch the movements of the shadows of people passing by the motel room door. For most of the night, she struggled to get any sort of sleep whatsoever. Every little noise seemed to be twice as loud. And it didn’t help that she was literally sleeping on top of a bed with a pile of money under it.