Wifey, Part 1

by Erica Hilton

  “It’s not working,” Simone screamed.

  “OK, OK. Two seconds and I’ll be able to pull over,” I yelled.

  The next thing I knew, all kind of shit that looked like baked ziti that had passed through a blender was coming out of Simone’s mouth and landing all over the backseat of my dad’s Lexus.

  “Aggghhhhhh! I’m gonna kill you!” I screamed as I turned around and watched Simone continue to puke in the car.

  A long glob of spit was hanging from her mouth, and her eyes were teary. She looked like she was done bringing everything up.

  The next thing I heard was the sound of screeching brakes, followed by the loudest crash and bang, and our car spun around two times before coming to a stop. The crash had tossed me and Jada around and caused us to bang heads with each other. Simone had also been tossed around. She slipped off the seat and landed shoulder first into her own smelly vomit.

  “This is not happening! This did not just happen! Oh my God! I can’t believe this! My father is gonna kill me.”

  “Jasmine, they blew the stop sign though,” Jada said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  I just sat frozen behind the wheel and didn’t say anything, both of my hands gripping the steering wheel.

  “There is vomit in my backseat, and I just had an accident. And I got somewhere to go tonight! I don’t believe this shit,” I shouted.

  The driver from the other car came over to my car and tapped on the window, asking if we were all right.

  “What the fuck was you thinking?” I barked on the other driver after I opened my door. I got out and walked around to the other side of the car and surveyed the damage. “Urrggghhh!” I said, looking at the damage.

  The driver was saying something, but I was paying him no mind as I walked away from the car and tried to figure out what I was going to do. I walked a few feet away from the car and called Nico.

  “You need the address, right?” Nico asked me as soon as he answered my call.

  I sucked my teeth. “Do you believe that some clown just ran a stop sign and wrecked the whole side of the car?”

  “Miss, I didn’t run the stop sign,” the other driver said.

  “Yes, you fuckin’ did!” I shouted.

  “You a’ight? You didn’t get hurt, did you?” Nico asked.

  “I’m fine, but my car ain’t.”

  “You need anything? I can call my man and have him tow you to his body shop in Valley Stream if you need me to.”

  “No, I’ll be OK. I think I can drive it. I’m just gonna call the cops and report it. If I can’t drive it, I’ll call you back,” I said to Nico.

  “A’ight, you sure you all right, though?”

  I sighed once again in frustration, and then I lowered my voice so that Jada wouldn’t be able to hear everything I was saying.

  “Yeah, I’m sure. But I am disappointed though. This is definitely not how I wanted to end my night. I wanted to chill with you,” I explained to Nico.

  “We’ll make it happen,” Nico replied. “Yo, my phone is blowing up. I gotta bounce, but call me if you need me.”

  “OK,” I said and ended the call. I couldn’t help but feel frustrated.

  As I prepared to deal with my car accident, I was definitely hoping that I would get another opportunity to link up one-on-one with Nico.

  CHAPTER 8

  Nico

  When I reached my crib I ran inside and I found my four goons who I had sent to my house to make sure Mia was safe. Mia immediately ran and hugged me.

  “You OK?”

  Mia nodded her head rapidly. I could tell she was still shaken up.

  “The crib is good. We checked it top to bottom,” Earl said to me.

  “They take anything? Mia, did you see what they looked like at all?” I asked.

  Mia was so nervous, her body was literally trembling as I held on to her. She explained that she only could see the intruders on the surveillance camera and that they looked Spanish, but she couldn’t really tell for sure.

  “I don’t think they took anything,” Mia added. “But I don’t know for sure because everything just happened so fast.”

  I went upstairs and looked around. Other than the bullet holes in the walls and ceiling, everything looked in order. I went into my closet and saw that my safe hadn’t been touched. Then I went back downstairs to the main floor and looked around, and things looked cool. Some pictures and a lamp had been knocked over, and the front door was broken, but other than that, everything was good.

  I checked the basement and could tell that nobody had been there, so I quickly made my way back to the main floor.

  “Muthafuckas ran up in my crib with my girl up in here. Somebody is dying behind this shit!” I said, emphatically.

  By this time it was five in the morning, and my right hand, BJ, showed up at my crib with his cousin Lorenzo, who we all called Lo. Lo was from Harlem, but he ran with us and never really fucked with Harlem cats. About fifteen minutes later Bebo showed up, Corey, and one of my best soldiers.

  Everybody who I wanted to be there was there, so I sent Mia upstairs so we could talk without her being around and hearing more than she needed to hear.

  “Nico, just give me the word on who you want me to hit and it’s done,” Corey said.

  “I got a hundred thousand on the heads of the cats that ran up in my crib tonight. A hundred thousand for each body,” I confirmed. “Put the word on the street.”

  At that point BJ signaled for me to walk with him, so we could talk in private. We left the crew sitting in my dining room, and me and BJ walked outside to the front of the house out of the earshot of everyone.

  “The Colombians ain’t fuckin’ with us,” BJ said to me, referring to our connect.

  “What the fuck you talkin’ ’bout?”

  “On the way over here to your crib, Lo just told me that the Colombians think Bebo is a snitch and they ain’t fuckin’ with us,” BJ explained.

  “You just fuckin’ with me, right?” I said with a smirk on my face. I tapped BJ on his bodybuilder chest with my fist.

  “The word is, the feds just got Ren, and with Bebo just coming home, they putting two and two together and saying shit ain’t a coincidence and wondering why he only did seven years and not more,” BJ continued to explain. “That money we sent with Lo, the shit came back to us.”

  “The money for the last go-’round?” I asked.

  BJ nodded his head.

  “So we got no product, and our connect ain’t fuckin’ with us,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  I kept quiet and thought to myself for a minute, and it was like BJ could read my mind.

  “You thinkin’ Bebo got his hand in this shit, right?” BJ asked me.

  “Bebo could be snitching, and that’s why he’s been talkin’ ’bout us eatin’ off the same package with different crews. But he ain’t been to my crib since he came home. Only a few niggas even know that I rest way out here.” I paused in contemplation. “Shabazz sent them muthafuckas to my crib tonight. Put a bounty on his head. One hundred grand for the muthafucka that bodies him. Two hundred if he’s brought to me alive.”

  BJ kept quiet, but Lo spoke. “You wanna put in your own work on that dude, right?”

  “You already know how I get down.” And so did Shabazz. I knew he was ghost and wouldn’t resurface on my territory until he sang me a lullaby. I don’t know what gave me away; maybe I was a little too aggressive at Bebo’s party. See, I was the one who had orchestrated the hit on Skeen, and that was because from behind bars, Bebo was planning the ultimate takeover. He felt that he’d started Ghetto Mafia from the ground floor and when he got jammed up the streets forgot about him and the name Bebo was now replaced with Nico. Someone as egotistical as Bebo couldn’t let that shit ride. He
couldn’t appreciate where I was taking our organization. Him and Skeen had been playing checkers and making moves that they thought I didn’t know about. But the whole time that they were playing checkers, I was playing chess.

  Shabazz, on the other hand, was too much of a wild card, and I had a strong feeling that once Bebo came home, him and Skeen would use Shabazz as the trigger man to take me out and take over the empire that I’d helped build.

  Yeah, I was hoping that Shabazz would have gotten murked when Skeen got murdered. That was the plan, but it turned out not to be reality.

  It was all good, though, because if the streets couldn’t locate Shabazz, I knew I had a new sexy pawn in this chess game that I could use to get at him.

  “So what about product?” BJ looked at me to see what I wanted to do.

  “Give me a day, and I’ll get you the name of these Haitian dudes out of Miami. I want you and Lo to go down there and chop it up with them, and that can be our new connect for right now until I sort out what the fuck is going on.”

  BJ looked at me and nodded his head. He gave me a pound before we went back inside my house, and I addressed everybody.

  “Yo, something is definitely up. I need all y’all speaking to your people to see what they know or what they hearing and let’s see what comes back about this shit. And let everybody know the hundred thousand is good money.”

  Everybody was clear on exactly where I was coming from, and nobody had any questions.

  “And if y’all see Shabazz, tell that nigga to holla at me,” I said, giving everybody a pound before they left my crib.

  CHAPTER 9

  Mia

  A few days had passed since our house had been broken into. In the days that immediately followed the break-in, Nico had hired a private security firm to station an armed guard in front of our home on a twenty-four-hour basis. So I felt pretty secure whenever I was home or whenever I left to go out. But emotionally I didn’t feel secure at all. In spite of everything that had happened with the break-in, Nico still wasn’t immediately answering my calls or returning my calls right away. And whenever we were together, he rarely answered his phone or talked freely in front of me.

  For the most part I had grown used to Nico’s ways, and I knew he was really no different than a professional athlete or a celebrity—being a target of gold-digging women. Although I grew used to Nico’s philandering ways, it was never something that made me feel good on any level. One way that I reasoned his infidelity was, I had always told myself, as long as I didn’t see anything or as long as he didn’t fuck with anyone I knew personally, then I could pretty much act like I didn’t care, even though in reality I did care.

  But that Wednesday following the break-in, there was something I couldn’t just ignore, and that was a text message that Jasmine had sent to my phone. The text said:

  Sorry again about Saturday night. Call me when you can. Stop hiding. LOL. Maybe we can link up today. And can you give me the number to your man’s body shop?

  I replied right back to the message and told her that she had sent the text to me by mistake. And it took her about fifteen minutes before she replied back to me.

  LOL. I’m sorry Mia. You can delete that. That text was for someone else. So how you been?

  I didn’t respond back right away to Jasmine, but something in my gut told me that she meant to send that text to Nico and ended up sending it to me by accident. I knew Nico wouldn’t let me look at his phone, so what I did was, I found a copy of an old Sprint bill and went online and logged into Nico’s Sprint account. I’d secretly gotten his username and password a few months back when he’d inadvertently scribbled it on our light bill. I looked at the numbers he had called, and I looked at the numbers that had called him during the past couple of days.

  As I scanned the phone numbers my heart was beating fast from anxiety. I was hoping I didn’t see Jasmine’s number. But, sure enough, I saw an incoming call from Jasmine to Nico right around the time my house had gotten broken into. And I also knew Nico was real cool with this white boy who owned a body shop, so it wasn’t hard for me to connect the dots and know that Jasmine meant to send that text to Nico.

  Immediately I just felt sick to my stomach, like I wanted to throw up. My mind was racing with all kinds of thoughts. I was wondering how long Nico had been talking to Jasmine. Was he fucking her? Had he played me by using me to deliver money to her? Was the money really for her personal pockets and not for extracting viable information about Shabazz? What did he see in her that he didn’t see in me? Was it because she was in school and I wasn’t? Was she the reason he hadn’t taken me on any vacations recently?

  I didn’t know exactly what to say or what to do. And although I was a quiet person by nature, I was never a person to hold my tongue, and I wasn’t going to start now. I didn’t hesitate any longer and I called Jasmine to confront her.

  Jasmine picked up on the second ring.

  “Mia, I’m sorry about that text,” she said, sounding like she was snickering or laughing as if things were funny.

  “Jasmine, I’m not a dummy!” I shot back into the phone. I knew I caught her off guard.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t play stupid. Are. You. Fuck-ing. My. Man?” I asked her in a cadence that stressed each syllable.

  Jasmine was silent. I kept quiet too, waiting for her to blink first.

  “You just joking with me, right?” she asked with a fake chuckle.

  “Do I sound like I’m joking?” I asked and mocked her with a fake chuckle of my own.

  “Mia, really? You’re that insecure? I send you a text message by accident and you come at me like this?”

  “Answer my question! Are you fucking Nico?”

  “No, I’m not fucking Nico,” Jasmine replied short and blunt.

  “So why are you calling him at all times of the night?”

  “Seriously, Mia? Like, are you really serious right now? OK, first of all, don’t call my number with no bullshit like this. I don’t care who you are or who your man is, you can’t disrespect me!”

  I could feel my ghetto side starting to rise up to the surface. “Ain’t nobody disrespecting you!” I yelled into the phone.

  “You calling my phone all outta pocket and cursing and shit. That is disrespect! And if you wanna know who your man is fucking, then you should ask your man. And don’t call me no more with this bullshit, or we gonna have a problem!” Jasmine hung up the phone.

  I was beyond heated and ready for war, so I called her right back.

  “Mia, stop calling my phone!”

  “You broke-ass ghetto bitch! Let me tell you something—If I find out you called my man one more time, I’m whipping your little project ass!”

  Jasmine started to laugh into the phone. “Whateva, Mia. I ain’t hardly from the projects and I ain’t hard to find. If I ain’t at school, then I’m on a hundred and ninth avenue and Guy R. Brewer Boulevard, so whateva you wanna do, bring it. But you better come correct! And if I wanted your man, believe me, I could have him.”

  “Oh, now you talking real reckless I see?”

  “Why are you still talking to me?” Jasmine screamed.

  “You right. I’m done talking. But test me if you want to, bitch!” I hung up, abruptly ending the call.

  I wanted to call Nico, but I didn’t. I figured, if he was talking to Jasmine, she was going to let him know what happened, and if he said something to me, then that would be the confirmation I needed to know that he was actually fucking her.

  I sat down on my bed, feeling like someone had just gutted me. But there was no way I was going to let that bitch take my man. She had no idea who she was fucking with.

  CHAPTER 10

  Jasmine

  When the call ended with Mia, I was so vexed. I was definitely in fight mode and
ready for war. At the same time, I realized I had fucked up by accidentally sending her that text message and I wanted to make sure that I hadn’t put Nico in a bad spot. I had sent the text to Nico like I had initially intended to do but he didn’t respond so I didn’t know what to think.

  I paced around in my motel room wondering what Mia was really going do. She seemed far from the rah-rah type, but at the same time I knew that it was always the quiet ones that you had to watch out for because they were the ones that would strike like a snake and catch you off guard. I called Simone just to let her know what was up.

  “Get your sneakers and Vaseline ready,” I said to Simone. This was the first time I had spoken to her since she threw up in my father’s car that night. And I was still upset with her.

  “You got beef?” Simone said without hesitation. Simone was all over the place at times and she pissed me off a lot, but she was my home girl for real and always had my back, no matter what.

  “Yeah, this bitch named Mia, she just called my phone flipping the fuck out, talking about why I was calling her man and all that bullshit. She’s like if I call her man again there’s going to be a problem. So I was like, ‘Bitch, you know where to find me. I’m right in the hood—a Hundred and Ninth and Guy R. Brewer Boulevard—and if I wanted your man, believe me I would have him.’”

  “You ain’t gotta say nothing else,” Simone said. “I’m getting dressed right now.”

  “Nah, I’m not even home. Fuck her ass. I’m just saying be ready because if this bitch show up at my crib later on tonight or whenever on some bullshit I’m calling you.”

  “Oh, no doubt, I’m there. You know I got your back. But who is Mia? And who is her man?”

  “Her man is Nico. You was probably too drunk to remember he was the one who bought us the bottle of Nuvo at the club the other night. He gave me his number, and I called him. These chicks kill me, always ready to step to the next chick, but it’s their man that they need to be checking.”