My call goes to voicemail. The knot in my stomach tightens. Still. I have to remind myself that doesn’t mean anything.
“Kobe. It’s Cleo. Call me as soon as you get this message.” I turn over the car again and still nothing.
I look up in time to see Diesel exit out the back of the club with Beast, Madd, Matrix, and Bullet. I grab my shit and hop back out of the car. “Hey! Diesel. Wait up.” I race as fast as my pinched-toe silver pumps will allow.
Diesel, with his phone still tucked between his ear and shoulder, slows up.
“I need a ride. Any chance that you can swing by my place?”
He spears me with a singular look. “Hop in.”
Bullet opens the back door.
“Thanks,” I say, relieved.
Beast climbs in behind the wheel and Diesel climbs in from the other side. I only vaguely wonder about K-Bone, who we left stranded in VIP with Nefertiti.
Beast rolls out of the parking lot while Diesel punches another number into his phone. When his attempts are unsuccessful, his large hand tightens around the smartphone and the muthafucka warps instantly. He’s pissed.
They didn’t tell him.
Python and King Isaac, the only two men who could have leveled tonight’s attack, hadn’t clued Diesel in on their plans. All the GD soldiers and Queen Gs have been gossiping for the longest time about Diesel’s ascension in the Memphis game. After all, he’s been running shit and keeping muthafuckas fed since Python was forced underground.
Like Kobe said this morning, King Isaac’s return changes everything. Diesel is no longer successor to the throne. The expansion of his Southern empire is officially on hold.
An unexpected smile flutters to my face. This shit couldn’t have happened to a more deserving smug son-of-a-bitch.
With the radio off and the men blowing steam through their noses, the car ride is the most awkward one I’ve ever experienced in my life. I can’t help but curse every red traffic light that lengthens the ride. More than once, my gaze sneaks its way back to Diesel. I can’t help but be fascinated by his whole change in demeanor from just minutes ago in VIP.
Someone’s cell phone goes off and we all scramble to look at our screens to see which of our people are trying to get in contact with us.
“Python,” Diesel answers, sounding both overexcited and pissed off at the same time. The tension that was already in the car now rises to the level of being unbearable. The ache in my chest is either from my stomach looping into a giant knot or from my heart hammering against my rib cage. It only gets worse as the silence stretches while Diesel presses his ear to his phone and listens to his caller.
Beast’s curiosity has him daring glances to the back of the car through the rearview mirror.
I wonder if he’s any better at reading his boss’s expression than I am.
“A doctor?” Diesel says as if asking for clarification. “Where are you?”
Another long pause.
Car horns blare and I look in time to see that Beast must’ve shot through a red light and nearly caused a traffic accident. The car has also picked up speed as if he gives zero fucks about being pulled over by police.
I grope around my ass for the seat belt. Just because Beast doesn’t care whether his ass sees tomorrow doesn’t mean I’m ready to meet our Maker with him.
“All right. We’re on our way,” Diesel announces and then ends the call. Before Beast can spit out a question, Diesel announces, “Change in plans. We need to head out to Frayser.”
“Frayser?” I ask, twisting up my face. “You’re dropping me off at my place first, right?”
“Later,” Diesel says, already dialing another number into his phone.
“But—”
Diesel presses a finger against my lips to shut me up while he makes his call. For a second I’m too stunned to remove his hand from my mouth, but then when my pride and dignity kick back into gear, I brush his hand away and glare at him like he’s lost his mind. I shouldn’t have bothered, because his attention is on his call.
“I’m cashing in a chip,” he tells the other person on the line. “Where are you?”
I fold my arms and glare.
“Be ready in five minutes,” Diesel adds and then disconnects that call. “Beast. You remember where Dr. Ngozi stays?”
Beast shakes his head.
Diesel reviews a business card from the black billfold he keeps in his suit’s breast pocket and then leans forward to pass it up to Beast in the front seat.
Beast hangs a sharp right at the next light and I’m forced into the uncomfortable position of bringing the subject back to me.
“I need to get home,” I say rather weakly.
“And we will get you home—later. There is something more important I have to take care of first.” His tone makes it clear that he wants no further argument from me.
I ignore it. “You can just drop me off up at the next corner. I’m sure that I can make my way home.”
Beast’s hard gaze shifts over to me in the rearview mirror.
Diesel’s mouth flattens into a firm, flat line. “Later.”
My heart shoots up into my throat, blocking any other response from spilling out of my mouth. Whatever the fuck that’s about to go down, I’m going to be a part of it whether I like it or not. Sullen, I shut the fuck up and sit in my seat while Beast chauffeurs us through the city at nearly eighty miles an hour.
When we pull up into a huge house in Germantown, a short, squat man rushes out with an old-fashioned doctor’s bag that I’ve only seen on television with doctors who run around making house calls.
Diesel climbs out of the backseat and rushes to greet the doctor, who I’m certain is African. There’s a brief shaking of hands and a number of words that I can’t make out through my rolled-up window.
Hopping out of the car here doesn’t even occur to me until after the square-shaped doctor has piled into the backseat with Diesel and me. Bullet and Beast remain in the front.
Dr. Ngozi smiles and pushes up his thick, black-rimmed glasses. I can’t get myself to smile back.With tension in the car being what it is, the last thing my system can take is the doctor’s cloying cologne. He must’ve taken a bath in the shit. I hit the button for the window but the child lock is engaged. “Can I please get some air?”
Beast takes a second from his NASCAR driving to unlock the window.
The first gush of air that streams into the car feels like heaven. My performance tonight already feels as if it was years ago. Kobe, please. Please. Don’t be entangled with this mess. I try again to call him, but the call goes to voicemail. I tell myself that I’m overreacting, but my anxiety refuses to abate.
Beast pulls up to a busted-looking warehouse out in the middle of Frayser. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that the place was haunted. Beast kills the engine and the men jet out of the car as if someone shot off a starter pistol. I’m stunned by how I’ve been forgotten. I consider staying my ass right here in the back of this expensive-ass car—until I spot about a half dozen crackheads in the general vicinity, creeping and shaking. I make the immediate decision to get my bougie-looking ass up into the scary-looking building with the brothahs with guns, rather than hang back in here with nothing but a .22 and a pair of stilettos against an army of crackheads.
I’m strong.
Not stupid.
I hightail it out of the back of the car and then race to the heavy metal door, but I’m totally unprepared for the bloody mess that is King Isaac and Python.
19
Lucifer
I’m hallucinating again—I must be. There’s no other way to explain the team of police officers that have magically appeared in these woods.
“I NEED A PARAMEDIC!” a woman shouts before storming to my side. The mangy dog that had been whining and fretting by my side for the past half hour returns and runs its funky tongue along the side of my head.
“Aaaargh!” I bear down as another contraction hits with the
force of a Mack truck. Sweat pours out of places on my body that I would’ve never thought possible. Nothing in my life has prepared me for this. I’m seriously having visions of taking a knife and cutting this kid out myself. The pain can’t possibly get any worse.
“Willow? You’re Willow Washington, right?” the wide-eyed cop asks, brushing back my wet hair.
I attempt to answer, but at the next small break between the contractions, I puff air in and out of my cheeks like a child’s imitation of a locomotive.
“It’s okay. It’s okay, Willow,” the female cop assures, but she looks and sounds as panicked as I am. “Help is on the way. We’re going to get you to the hospital, where you can deliver this baby. Okay?”
“Aaaargh!” My body locks up again and I bear down, pushing with everything I’ve got. I don’t have the strength to tell this woman that my child is ten weeks early . . . that there is zero chance of him surviving after the night that I’ve been through.
That harsh reality unleashes a lifetime’s worth of tears. I’m unabashedly caught up in my feelings and there’s not a damn thing that I can do about it. Why didn’t I take more precautions? How did I allow Shariffa and then the Gangster Disciples to catch me sleeping? The questions and the pain inch me closer to insanity.
After a while I can’t make sense of anything this cop is saying. The frenetic scramble of activity doesn’t seem like it’s happening to me but to someone who looks like me while I hover above myself.
I’m not going to make it.
Death doesn’t faze me. Sure, I’ll miss the love of my life and the unborn child that I have yet to lay eyes on, but there is something incredibly seductive about leaving the troubles of this world behind. No more banging. No more death and dead bodies. And no more trying to be hard twenty-four/seven and being afraid of showing my soft side to anyone but Mason. I hadn’t been able to show him until the night he knocked me up. Before then, I conveyed my love by showing him how loyal a soldier I could be.Wherever he and Bishop went, I wanted to be by their sides in the thick of things. Nothing scared me off—not even witnessing my father, Dough Man, gunned down in our front yard.
As I give my body over to the unrelenting pain, my mind tumbles back through time. The good and bad times sharpen into focus. It’s easy now to spot all the mistakes that I’ve made, some I would do over and others I cherish for the lessons that I learned.
“It’s not your time,” a voice as clear as a bell says to me. When I look around, it’s not any of the emergency responders who are scrambling to get me into an ambulance that catch my attention. It’s the unsettling image of my brother, Bishop. The gunshot wound to his head is still visible. I’m bothered and happy to see him again.When I last saw him alive we weren’t on the best of terms.
The Vice Lords had believed Mason was dead, and instead of the leadership automatically falling to me, his right hand, Bishop made it clear that my having a pussy should be a dis-qualifier. Our having never squashed our beef is painful, because I know that we eventually would have.
“It’s not your time,” he repeats.
But I don’t believe him. I’m not too sure that I want to.
“You gotta go back,” Bishop insists. His eyes are kinder than I remember, maybe because he senses how much I want to stay with him—at least for a while. With him, I am no longer seized by the never-ending contractions and Mason Junior’s dead body refusing to leave mine. Suddenly there are a million questions I want to ask, but none crest my lips and Bishop doesn’t say anything else. There’s that loving look of forgiveness and the expectancy for me to do the right thing.
Suddenly, my soul is sucked back like a super magnet. I’m slammed back into my body when I take in a huge breath of air.
“We have a heartbeat,” a man shouts.
I’m confused about my whereabouts even as my gaze dances around the cramped space. My exhausted body is still wringing with pain.
“Ms. Washington, can you hear me?” the young man asks. His grim face tells me that he doesn’t have too much hope of my surviving this nightmare either.
Tears pour from my rarely used tear ducts. Bishop’s disappearance feels like betrayal. It’s not logical, but emotions rarely are. I figure out that I’m in the back of an ambulance and redouble my efforts to concentrate on what the EMT is telling me, but the man may as well be talking in Greek. I’m only able to capture a few words.
Hospital. Baby. Push.
The back door of the ambulance explodes open and few more frantic EMTs jump inside. They lift me and carry me out.
The hospital. I hate hospitals. And just because it’s my turn being rushed through double-wide doors with a team of faces around me that I’ve never seen before, I’m not about to change my opinion anytime soon. Where is Mason?Where is that female cop from the woods? Hell. I’ll even take that foul-smelling, mangy dog as source of reassurance.
I don’t know what to expect. I should kick my own ass for not being better prepared.After all, I’ve known about my pregnancy since literally weeks after it happened.
Finally, I’m wheeled into a bright room where a red-faced white man rushes through an introduction while the nurse’s cold hands cram my legs into stirrups.
“Epi . . . epidural,” I beg. Pride be damned.
“Sorry. We’re too far along for that,” the doctor says, not sounding too damn sorry at all. I don’t understand why they can’t give me something. Don’t I look like I’m in sufficient pain?
My head hurts—badly. Images swim all around me.
The doctor rattles off something else, but I’m way past the point of understanding a word that he’s saying. All I can do is pray that the end is near.
But once again, God isn’t answering any of my prayers. Hours later, I hear the word C-section. At this point, I don’t care what the hell he does. I want this baby cut out of me. Now!
I hear the words spinal tap. At long last, relief from my body’s pain, but not my head’s. In fact, my head feels as if it’s about to explode wide open. Though I can’t quite feel my lower extremities, there’s an extreme amount of pressure and then nothing. Is it all over?
I lift my heavy head. Beads of sweat roll all over my body. Everyone’s faces have lost their color, even the only black nurse in the room. I know before anyone tells me. “It’s dead, isn’t it?” I can’t get the pronoun he past my lips. I’m already retreating from acknowledging its humanity. If I do, I may lose what’s left of my sanity.
The doctor doesn’t answer. The doctor and nurses begin a rash of frantic activities.
“Doctor?”
To my amazement, he turns his back on me. The room blurs behind a wave of tears. Don’t ask him again. Don’t. “Doctor, please. Tell me. Is it . . . ?” A boulder of emotions lodges in my throat, and despair clutches my heart, despite my lame attempts to stop it.
He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead.
A strangled cry pierces the silence. Startled, my despair transforms to joy. “I’m a mother. I’m really a mother.” I laugh and then reach for the baby, but a small glass casing—an incubator—is wheeled into the room while nurses wash and wrap the baby with quick efficiency.
“Wait. I want . . . I want . . .” The pain in my head detonates. A white light flashes before my eyes. I gasp and then collapse into total darkness.
20
Cleo
The Frayser warehouse
“Check out my boy first,” King Isaac tells Dr. Ngozi, shrugging him away even though he looks the worse of the two.
The nervous doctor questions whether Isaac is sure, but at Isaac’s decisive nod, he turns to Python, who puts up the same protests.
“No. No. Do him first,” Python insists. “I’m good. I’m good.”
The doctor’s frustration eclipses his nervousness after a solid minute of their back and forth.
Python is examined first. He pulls off his black, tight-fitting T-shirt and reveals an incredible muscular body and heavily tatted chest. I have always known t
hat Python was an incredibly fit guy, but there’s no denying how physically cut he is. He’s not handsome by any means, but throw a paper bag over his head and there isn’t a sister alive who wouldn’t work that body. While I assess Python, I become aware of being watched.
I cut my gaze from Python over to Diesel. His hard expression is of constrained anger. The fuck? It’s not like he’s my man or some shit.
“Thanks for finding us a doc,” King Isaac tells Diesel.
Diesel returns his attention to King Isaac. “Not a problem.”
Silence stretches between the men before Diesel asks, “So does anybody care to fill me in on what the hell went down tonight? The streets are on fire and y’all got me standing up here holding my dick, not knowing shit.”
“We were taking care of some family business,” King Isaac says with a shrug. “I think that we got our point across tonight. What do you think, Python?”
Python winces as the doctor punctures his shoulder with a needle and thread. “We definitely got our point across. I hate that that bitch Lucifer got away. If we’d kept hold of her, we could’ve brought that damn Fat Ace to his fucking knees tonight. Squash this shit once and for all.”
Lucifer? I stiffen.
“You are the one who took your eye off of her and she blew the back of Slim’s head off and nearly killed us in the process,” King Isaac reminds him, disappointed.
“Yeah. That shit was a fucking rookie mistake, but the bitch is like a fucking terminator. You can’t put her ass down. Pregnant or not.”
“Don’t worry. Fat Ace will come gunning for us soon. When he does, we’re going to bring the hammer down on that ass for blasting up Peaches’s funeral. Disrespectful muthafuckas.” King Isaac shakes his head. “Y’all young niggas ain’t got no fucking kind of home training. Unwritten rule has always been that you let muthafuckas bury their dead.”
A soft murmur of agreement floats around the room among the Gangster Disciples. I, on the other hand, return my hard gaze back to Diesel at the memory of him handing Beast a bundle of wrapped cash the afternoon of the shooting at Momma Peaches’s funeral. I have no proof what the money was for, but I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that somehow he was involved. Just as I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that he also had something to do with his aunt’s death. My problem is that I haven’t been able to work out why he would do it.
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