Kiss the Ring

by Meesha Mink

  “Yo, Naeema.”

  She turned just as Grip silently opened the door to the SUV.

  Mone opened his mouth like he was ready to fire a dozen different questions at her but she recognized the exact moment he stepped back from his curiosity.

  As she gave him another smile and slid onto the backseat she didn’t doubt he was remembering that curiosity was indeed the very thing that killed the cat.

  • • •

  “Are you sure about this, Naeema?”

  She looked at the detailed sketch the tattoo artist Shades had done, incorporating all nine of her son’s school pictures interwoven with roses and scrolls and a cross to create what would be a full sleeve for her left arm. “Yup,” she said, looking over at the tall, skinny white dude with blond dreads.

  He was the same man that she—and Tank—had trusted to do the tattoo on her mound.

  “I need at least two sessions—maybe three because of all the detail, and that swelling’s gonna hurt like a bitch,” he warned her.

  “Two. I’m stronger than I look,” she told him, tapping the top of the counter in the front of his one-room tattoo shop on Halsey Street in Newark.

  “It’s gonna cost you.”

  “It’s already cost me more than you know, Shades,” Naeema said, pausing for that familiar soul-searing pain she used to feel when she spoke of her son. It was there but not as strong. Not as piercing. Vengeance was healing her wounds. Time would erase them. Thank God.

  She reached into her bag and pulled out the wad of cash to toss at him. “Are you tatting me up today or what, Shades?” she asked. Smiling although she felt the sadness in her eyes.

  He caught it with one hand and removed the rubber band to count the stack of fifties. She knew it had to be three grand or better. “Shit, let’s get it,” he said, replacing the rubber band and tossing the stack into the register.

  She dropped her purse on the floor and pulled up the sequined half-sweatshirt she wore, exposing her sports bra and the arm she wanted tatted, while he dropped down onto his stool and slid on a fresh pair of gloves. She lay back on the bench and extended her arm as she stared up at the colorful artwork covering the entire ceiling.

  She finally felt free to spend the ill-gotten gwap. The inked memorial to her son—finally claiming him as she should have in the past—was perfect.

  Epilogue

  Eight months later

  “I guess I should introduce myself,” Naeema began, pushing her shades atop her closely shaven head as she looked down at the headstone of Brandon Dashawn Mack. “Then again I know you’re in heaven and I believe you’re looking down at everything . . . and so I guess you know I’m Naeema. I’m your mother.”

  She licked dryness from her lips and wished her eyes suffered in the same way. One lone tear raced down her cheek. She let it roll. “And I hope you can see now more than I ever showed while you were here on Earth that I loved you.”

  Naeema smoothed her hand up and down the length of her arm, stroking the many faces of her son depicted in her tattoo sleeve. “I don’t do graveyards. The one and only time I fucked with one is when your great-grandfather Willie made me go for my parents’—your grandparents’—funeral. The whole time my little scaredy ass was thinking about all the dead bodies in the ground looking like zombies and shit.”

  She looked around at the many headstones and burial plots. “Just like I am now,” she admitted softly with a half-smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

  Using her thumb she stroked the side of his ring that she wore constantly on the middle finger of her right hand. “I just . . . uh . . . . wanted to get as close to you as I could down here and let you know that I have so many fucking regrets when it comes to you. I shoulda did better by you. I coulda did better by you. So please forgive me.”

  Sniffing back more tears she lowered her shades over her eyes. She felt like there was much more she could or should say, but she released a heavy breath and pressed her lips together. The horse was dead and the milk was spilt.

  “Happy birthday, Brandon,” she whispered just as a cool spring breeze touched her face and swept away her words.

  Naeema turned away with many more words left unsaid and made her way across the burial grounds, trying her best to maneuver between the plots to avoid stepping on the resting places of the dead. When she reached the concrete paved lane where she had parked her motorcycle she pulled on her pink helmet.

  Soon she was driving through the streets of Newark with the sun warming her back and arms in the off-the-shoulder T-shirt she wore with capri jogging pants. She felt more relaxed and calm than she had in months.

  The murders of Nelson, Red, and Bas were never very far from her thoughts. Justifiable? Yes, to her. Criminal? Yes, to the police.

  She had moved through her life waiting for the police to bust her door open and drag her ass in. Every day for weeks she had stalked the news about them even being missing. She hadn’t seen anything and didn’t think it was smart to ask Tank to check with his contacts at the police department. Everything was copasetic and she could finally unclench her ass and get back to normal. For now.

  And she wasn’t the only one.

  Two months after the murders her conscience had led her to hop on her bike and secretly check on some of the pawns in the chess game she won against her son’s killer. Driving by Vivica’s apartment and seeing Hammer press kisses to Viv’s neck as they sat on the porch had almost made Naeema steer into oncoming traffic. The fuck? Guess they’re helping each other through their grief. Fuck ’em.

  Brianna, her son’s first love, was still working at her grandmother’s diner and Naeema was glad to see some of the sadness gone from her eyes as she passed the teenager waiting at a bus stop down the street from the diner. God bless her.

  Rico hadn’t let Naeema whipping his young ass in that hotel in front of his girl stop his fist flow. The black ribbon from the funeral home on the front door of his mother’s home was a testament that his fight with Naeema wasn’t the last one he’d lost. Rest in more peace than you did while living . . .

  Mr. Warren had never returned to West Side High School but when Naeema discovered he was teaching at a private school near where he lived she had politely sent an anonymous email to the headmaster advising him of his newest teacher’s sinful desires. Without any other real evidence it was the best she could do to at least put the school on alert. Nasty-ass bastard.

  She was surprised when Chance, her sperm donor, showed up on her front step with his eyes more clear of his drug addiction. Thinking he had come to retaliate, she had squared up with her fists ready to fly until he asked her if she had a picture of Brandon. Long moments had passed as she stood there staring at the man who used to be the boy she loved. She was surprised by the pity she felt for him and even more surprised when she gave him not only an already framed photo but also Brandon’s chain. With tears in his eyes as he promised to honor her request to never darken her step again, Chance had begun his long walk home with the chain clasped tightly in hand. I can only pray he didn’t sell it.

  They all had been changed. She knew she would never be the same. She shifted back and forth between being okay with that and not.

  Releasing a breath less heavy with troubles, she turned her motorcycle around the corner of Eastern Parkway. Her eyes instantly fell on Coko’s small brick home. The lights were on in the house like always but it was definitely empty. Naeema had no clue if the woman was dead or alive. High or sober. She hadn’t seen Coko for more months than she could remember. She hoped she was in a long-term rehab facility. Prayers up . . . blessings down.

  Naeema had just parked her motorcycle in the garage when her cell phone sounded off. After she removed her helmet she pulled it from inside her bra and checked the screen. With a smile she answered the call. “Hey, Ms. JuJu,” she said.

  “How’d it go?”

  “It went good. Real good,” Naeema assured her as she closed the garage door and locked it.

&nbs
p; “And you like the headstone I chose?”

  “Trust me, Ms. JuJu, when it comes to Brandon there is nothing I could have wanted you to do better,” she said, still apologizing for a night when liquor, weed, and her guilt had sent her to the woman’s house to accuse and blame.

  The line stayed quiet for a few seconds and Naeema didn’t fill the silence. Ms. JuJu had told her a long time ago to stop apologizing. Still Naeema knew the woman to whom she’d entrusted her child appreciated Naeema’s thanks.

  “I got banana nut bread,” Ms. JuJu finally said.

  Naeema smiled. “Then I got a trip to make to your house to get it,” she said, crossing the backyard and stepping over the broken step to reach the back door to her house.

  She paused.

  The door was slightly ajar.

  Her heart pounded.

  “Ms. JuJu, let me call you back,” Naeema said, ending the call.

  There had been a dozen or more break-ins on the block in the last couple of weeks and Naeema knew Sarge would never leave the door open. Never. “Shit,” she swore, wishing she had her registered gun in her hand and not hidden away in the living room.

  She backed up to the door and used her elbow to slowly ease it open. The lights were off and she stood there trying to hear over the deafening pounding of her heart. It was quiet. Too quiet.

  Naeema stealthily moved across the kitchen floor using what little light streamed beneath the kitchen’s door to guide her steps. Leaning toward the door she listened. She tensed at the sound of a low moan. “Sarge,” she whispered, pushing the door open.

  Sarge’s prone body lay by the open door. She raced over to him and stooped to gently turn him over. “Are you okay, Sarge? What happened?” Naeema asked, her anger rising in a flash at the sight of blood oozing from his busted bottom lip.

  “I snuck up on ’em,” he said, sounding winded.

  Naeema leaned his head against her lap as she looked around at her living room. Everything that didn’t belong on the floor now lay there tossed aside like trash. The bins. Her dresser drawers. Her mattress. Her clothes. The pictures of Brandon she’d carefully placed in frames and hung proudly about the room. Her privacy. Her dignity.

  All of it had been violated.

  Naeema felt her breath coming in short puffs like she was trying to let off the steam rising off her white-hot anger. This was an intrusion she would not accept.

  The front door had not been open when she first came home. All of this had to have gone down while she was parking her bike in the garage. They must have attacked Sarge and run out the front door just before she entered through the back.

  Lucky motherfuckers.

  She helped Sarge to his feet and led him to sit on the edge of the box spring. Naeema left his side just long enough to wet a washcloth in the bathroom and she brought it back to him to press to his swelling lip.

  “I tried to stop ’em,” Sarge said.

  “Don’t worry about it, Sarge. I know you did,” Naeema said as she walked over to the fireplace and opened the empty ash pan. Relief flooded her that her gun had not been discovered. She picked it up.

  “Call Tank,” Sarge said, his voice stern.

  Naeema shook her head. In the seesaw of their off-again, on-again relationship they were definitely off again. And she was okay with that. “Trust me I’m gonna find out who is behind this and make them realize that they fucked with the wrong one,” she said, checking that the gun was loaded before she cocked it.

  Click.

  Turn the page for a sneak peek at Meesha Mink's next novel

  All Hail the Queen

  Prologue

  Murder was nothing new to her.

  Naeema “Queen” Cole had given birth to one life but had taken many more than that in the name of revenge. Still, the first loud echo of a gun being shot into the night caused life’s motion to slow down.

  POW!

  “Tank!” Naeema cried out from her spot near the front of the crowd in front of the movie theater as the bullet entered the shoulder of the man she loved.

  His body jerked as he fell forward closing the double-parked SUV’s passenger door from the bullet’s force.

  POW! POW! POW!

  She gasped as each bullet pierced his flesh. His thigh. His stomach. His chest.

  The crowd lining the streets outside the theater screamed, ran, or ducked for cover. Naeema climbed over the red velvet ropes that corralled the movie premiere’s onlookers. Her heart pounded as she rushed across the short distance, not caring if more bullets flew as she reached Tank. She caught his bloodied body just as it slid down the side of the car. Her knees gave out under the weight of his tall, solid frame but she did not—would not—let him go.

  “Help! Somebody help,” Naeema screamed, looking around at those people still boldly standing around staring down at them.

  “Na,” Tank moaned, turning his face against her body as he winced in pain.

  Love for him filled her and she felt breathless with emotion. Naeema pressed her lips to his sweating brow. “I’m here. I got you. I’m here,” she assured him in a fervent whisper against the backdrop of the sirens growing louder in the air.

  She clasped the side of his face as she looked down into the pain flooding his dark eyes. She bit back a gasp at the sight of the print she made against his cheek. The blood on her hands from his soaked shirt was sticky, wet, and warm. Tank’s blood signaling his imminent death.

  “Please God, no,” Naeema begged in a whisper, nearly choking at the thought of losing him. Tears filled her eyes blurring her vision.

  She reached up with one hand to pound on the passenger door as she fought to remain rational and not let panic diminish her senses. She needed help. Tank needed help.

  The driver’s seat of the double-parked SUV Tank exited was still empty but the local rap artist, Fevah, he was hired to protect and her entourage of three friends were still all inside. “Open this fucking door,” Naeema roared, pounding hard enough for darts of pain to shoot across her entire hand.

  Anger was an added layer to the myriad emotions engulfing her as the door remained closed to them but she was flooded with relief as an ambulance screeched to a halt behind the Tahoe. She pressed kisses to his face. “Hold on, Tank. Don’t you dare leave me now,” she whispered in his ear in the moments before they took him from her.

  As she sat in the street surrounded by the blood of the man she loved, her soul wavered between feeling as empty as her arms at the thought of losing him forever and a fiery anger that would only be quenched at finding out who shot Tank and why.

  Whoever the guilty party was just invited hell into their lives.

  1

  Two months earlier

  “Ain’t you gonna call the police?”

  Naeema shifted her eyes from the items—her items—scattered about her living room and over to the blood still lightly oozing from the busted lip of the gruff man in his late sixties. Just minutes ago she had returned home to find her home had been broken into and Sarge on the floor, struck down by the thief during his escape.

  “I’ll get you some ice,” she said.

  “No,” he said abruptly, dabbing at his swelling bottom lip with a wrinkled handkerchief from the pocket of his military fatigues.

  The man hadn’t seen a way in over thirty years but he stayed dressed for combat.

  With one full-circle turn Naeema was confident nothing of value had been swiped. Although the house had five bedrooms and three full bathrooms with both a semi-finished attic and basement, her entire life was contained to the living room, with clear paths to the first-floor bathroom to the left and the kitchen to the right. It would take more money than she could save cutting hair to do anything beyond the elbow grease she put into cleaning the rooms of every disgusting remnant of the squatters who had lived in it all those years after her grandfather died. All those years she neglected it.

  “No, Sarge,” she said, finally answering him as she tapped the gun she held again
st her thigh and released a heavy breath. “Looks like you stopped them before they could take anything.”

  “But—”

  “You know I don’t fuck with the police,” she said, her voice hard and unrelenting.

  He grunted.

  It was funny how that one sound from the grumpy army vet was brimming with judgment and recriminations that she didn’t miss. Naeema had come to know him very well since they’d become unconventional roommates almost two years ago. After leaving her husband, Tank, and the home they shared she returned to the two-story brick colonial where her grandfather had taken her in after the death of her single mother. It was abandoned and closed up by the city but Sarge had taken refuge in it from living on the streets. She allowed him to remain, not able to bring herself to evict the wild-looking man in the filthy army uniform. She had known firsthand during her wild teenage years what it felt like to not know where her next meal would come from or if she would have a roof to sleep under that night.

  Sarge was slow to speak but when he did spare her a few words they were either funny or bizarrely insightful—and sometimes both. She had come to love the ornery old man—and she suspected that he cared for her, too—although she wouldn’t dare tell him so.

  Naeema put her gun back in its hiding place in the ash trap of the fireplace on the far wall of the living room before wiping her hands over her shaven head as she continued to take in the mess the thief left behind. “I guess I better clean all this up,” she said, her voice showing the lack of enthusiasm she felt about dealing with the mess.

  “You got it.”

  That was a statement and not a question. Of that Naeema was sure and she was able to smile even in the midst of her anger. When she first moved in with Sarge she had to convince the man to take advantage of the bathroom in the basement and that had taken some serious cajoling and then flat-out demanding. She wasn’t shocked in the least that he wanted no part of helping her clean.