Trust No Man 3

by Cash

  “I want to keep my baby,” she cried.

  Shawdy was fucking with my emotions. I said, “C’mon, Kamora, don’t switch up on me in the middle of the race. We already talked about this, and I thought we both agreed that we wasn’t having no kids because with the way we’re living ain’t nothing in our future but death.”

  “We don’t have to live that way.”

  “You may not, but I don’t have a choice. I’m gonna avenge my pop.”

  “And then what, bae?” she asked, rolling over on her side and looking into my eyes. “After you avenge your father, what will you do? What type of life will we have with all these murders on our conscience?”

  I stared at her in straight disbelief. I couldn’t figure out where she was coming from with that type of response. Shit, she had already bodied three muthafuckas before we hooked up, and together we had been dropping niggas with no regret. Now she was on some next shit.

  “I ain’t got no conscience, shawdy. Muthafuckas didn’t feel no type of way about killing my pop, so I don’t give a fuck about them. Now either you bustin’ ya gun right next to me or you’re falling back. Which one? I need to know how you’re rockin’.”

  When she took too long to answer, I said, “I thought you were Bonnie to my Clyde, but in a snap of a finger you’re some new bitch that I don’t even recognize. I can’t fuck with you no more ‘cause you sound like you’re capable of testifying against me like my mama did to my pop.”

  “Nigga, I’m not your dirty ass mama! If I’m nothing in this world I’m loyal to your black ass. Don’t you dare compare me to a snitch bitch!” Kamora was seething.

  “I don’t know what or who you are, shawdy.”

  “Wow. Is that really how you feel about me? I thought I had already proven to you that I’m a real ass bitch. And I thought I would never see the day when you would discount all that I’ve shown you. So maybe I don’t know you like I thought I did,” she countered.

  I glared at her. “Maybe you don’t.”

  I slid out of bed and put my clothes back on. My banger was on the floor next to my Jordans. I picked it up and snapped one in the chamber. “Something tells me I ought to do you right here, right now, or it’s gonna come back to hurt me,” I said in a threatening tone.

  “Would you really take my life?” asked Kamora.

  I saw the hurt in her eyes and heard it in her voice, but I could not allow it to cloud my judgment.

  “You damn right I would. Before I let you sell me out I would murk you with no remorse.”

  “Wow!” was all she said, but the look in her eyes said everything else.

  When I considered all that we had been through together, I lowered the banger and shoved it inside my waistband.

  Not another word was spoken between us the entire time I was packing my gear. Once I was through packing, I said, “Shawdy, I can’t force you to have an abortion, but I can’t stay with you if you don’t. I believe—”

  “Why bae?” Kamora interrupted.

  “Because the baby will be what they’ll use to make you flip on me.”

  “Never, bae.”

  “I can’t take that chance. So you have to decide right now what it is you love the most. If it’s not me I’ll walk out the door.”

  She broke down again. “How can you ask me to choose between you and your own seed?”

  “What you gonna do, shawdy?”

  She wiped at her tears and looked at me with an expression that was intense and unbreakable. “I’m not killing my child,” she replied.

  I tried one last time. “If I walk out of that door, I’m not coming back. I put that on my pop.”

  “Goodbye T. I’ll always love you.”

  I gathered up my bags and headed for the door hoping that Kamora would run up behind me and beg me to stay. Hoping that shawdy would come to her senses and realize that having a child was the wrong move, but my hopes were fruitless.

  At the door, I turned and said, “I only took half of the money out the stash spot. The rest is yours.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  Now I knew that Kamora had lost her mind, or else she was allowing her emotions to control her words. I just shook my head and walked out to my whip. Before pulling off, I looked up and saw Kamora toss a duffel bag outside.

  “Oh, hell to the no!” I said to myself.

  I jumped out and went to retrieve the duffel bag of money. Too much blood had been spilled to stack that check. I wasn’t about to let the dough just sit there.

  I felt a pain in my heart as I drove away from there. Kamora and I had been ride or die with each other from the moment we first kissed, and now it was over in the blink of an eye. From that night forward, it was like a part of me was gone. Now, I really had that ‘fuck the world’ attitude.

  CHAPTER 19

  “Yeah, fuck the world!” I shared my feelings with Inez. I was sitting on her living room couch blazing a blunt. My head was still spinning about Kamora.

  “Boy, you’re trippin’. What do you expect? Of course she don’t want to kill her baby.”

  “I expected shawdy to keep it gangsta. How is she gonna be Bonnie to my Clyde in a maternity dress?”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to be Bonnie. Can’t she just be Kamora? You have to understand that pregnancy is something very special and sacred. What if your mother had aborted you?”

  “What? I should’ve aborted her ass,” I argued and Inez couldn’t help but laugh. We both knew that Shan was only the vessel through which I came into this world. A mother she was not.

  “But you can’t compare Kamora to Shan,” objected Inez. “Kamora will probably make a good mother. And for you to break up with her because she doesn’t want to abort her baby is dead wrong. I expect much better of you. See, that’s what I loved about your father. It didn’t matter how he felt about those other women who had children by him, he always loved and provided for all of his kids. That’s what a man does, Lil T. I know you’re a gangsta in the mold of Youngblood, but there was a soft side to him when it came to his children. If it wasn’t, Shan wouldn’t be alive today, and he would’ve probably never gotten caught for those murders. But when he broke in the house to kill Shan, he ran into you in the hallway. He just could not kill her in front of you.”

  “He should have,” I stated.

  “That’s neither here nor there. It must not have been in God’s plan for it to happen.” Inez waved off my comment.

  “I didn’t know you believed in God.” I coughed, choking on the Kush smoke.

  “Of course I believe in God, boy.”

  “You don’t go to church,” butted in Tamia who had just come downstairs into the living room.

  “Church is in the heart,” replied Inez. “Now go back upstairs so I can finish talking to your brother.”

  “Okay,” said Tamia. But before she left she turned to me and held out her hand.

  I placed a couple hundred dollars in it and she skipped off. I caught a glimpse of Bianca glaring at me from the staircase. Whatever, shawdy, I thought.

  When the two of them vanished back upstairs, I picked back up on my conversation with Inez.

  “I thought Kamora was a pitbull in a skirt, but she ain’t no killa. She just did what she did to impress me.”

  “She did it out of love for you. Don’t you ever think she just enjoys all of that. She was doing it because you needed her by your side,” reasoned Inez as she uncrossed her legs then crossed them again.

  “Is that why you set up King for my pop? Or did you do it because you’re a true rider?”

  “I did it because I would’ve done anything for him. That’s how deep my love was for him. But don’t get it twisted. I never pulled the trigger. I’m not no killer. And even now, all these years later, I still have nightmares about what I did. Women aren’t like men; we have fragile emotions and a guilty conscience when we hurt someone.”

  “You think my pop had a conscience?” I asked.

  “Definitely. But no
t for the enemy.”

  I nodded my understanding, leaned back on the couch and gathered my thoughts. When they were clear I blurted out, “If Kamora has the baby, I’ma do what a man is supposed to do, but I can’t fuck with her like that no more. She broke her word to me.”

  “Lil T, you’re being unfair to her.”

  “Well, life is unfair. Then you die.” I grunted as I lifted myself up and headed for the door.

  As soon as I stepped off the porch I was swarmed by APD! “Get on the ground! Get on the fuckin’ ground! Now!” they shouted.

  In the backseat of a police cruiser, headed to jail, I was suddenly thankful that I had absentmindedly left my nine on Inez’s coffee table along with the bag of Kush that I had been smoking. This was one time being high saved my ass, because the nine indeed had been used in a murder. Still, I wasn’t out of the clear. I was being arrested for some reason or other, and it damn sure wasn’t no misdemeanor shit. Not with the way APD and plain clothes detectives bum rushed me. I figured that Bianca had dropped a dime on me. Fat Stan had probably told her that I had shot him. Yep. And that’s why shawdy was standing on the staircase grilling me. “Well, I guess shit could be worse,” I said to myself in resignation. I didn’t like it one bit, but at least I wasn’t being snatched up on a body charge. I could make bond on this.

  Downtown at the Pretrial Center, I was taken into a cold room and made to wait over two hours before someone came in to talk to me. I knew that it was one of the tactics they used to unravel a muthafucka because it had been tried on me once before. Me unravel? Imagine that!

  I had my feet propped up on the table and my hands behind my head when two detectives walked into the interrogation room. One was a short, fat black dude in his forties, I guessed. The other was about 5’11”, medium build, brown skin and kind of put me in mind of P. Diddy. He wore a thick, platinum chain around his neck and he was dressed like a street nigga who was in his mid-thirties and still had swag. I recognized him immediately. On the streets he was known as Smooth. His sullied reputation preceded him.

  It was rumored that Smooth robbed and extorted some drug dealers and provided protection for a few others. And it was said that he wasn’t above fabricating evidence to ensure a conviction. It was well-known that Smooth got just as much hood pussy as the hood superstars.

  In other words, Smooth had his hand in a whole lotta shit, and his badge gave the nigga immunity. Looking at Smooth and his little fat partner, who had just introduced himself as Thomas, I felt my throat dry up, but I disguised my nervousness like a true street veteran.

  If they were waiting for me to break the ice, I hoped they packed a lunch and a change of clothes. Thomas grilled me with the most intimidating face, but my expression remained unchanged. That seemed to bother him. He swiped my feet off the table with his arm and pushed me over in my chair.

  “I know all about you . . . you little thug!”

  I got up off the floor, uprighted the chair and sat back down without responding in any way.

  “I know who your father was. We executed his murdering ass, didn’t we, Smooth?” Thomas said to his partner, trying to blow me. But I remained calm and quiet.

  “Oh, he’s hard. We’ll see how long you last when I send you to prison for life. You’ll be somebody’s bitch in no time at all.”

  I found a spot on the wall and stared at it. There wasn’t a nigga on God’s green earth that could make Trouble his bitch. Three life times behind bars couldn’t bring a bitch out of a nigga, unless there was a bitch hidden inside him all along. Thomas was just talking because he had a tongue and didn’t know what the fuck else to do with it.

  Smooth threw several enlarged black and white photos on the table in front of me. They were crime scene photos of BoBo and his girl. “The way we’re hearing it, that’s your work, lil homie”

  I remained silent.

  “Terrence Whitsmith Jr, aka Little T, aka Trouble, aka Coward. Do I need to go on?” asked Thomas.

  I didn’t remark. I listened to them read my street file for twenty minutes. Some of what they said was accurate, but other things were bullshit that snitch niggas blamed on me, although I had not committed that particular crime.

  “We all know about you, Trouble. You have all of the drug dealers afraid. Now really, I don’t give a rat’s ass about some worthless piece of slime drug dealer. You all can kill each other and I wouldn’t lose one night of sleep. But when you kill innocent women and make their children orphans that’s when I gotta nail your ass.” Thomas went on and on.

  When Thomas grew tired of talking, Smooth took over, employing a much kinder interrogation technique.

  “Maybe you were put in a situation where you felt you had no choice but to kill them. I can understand that,” he said.

  As before, my expression remained blank. These two fools didn’t know who they were tryna run that routine on. Although I was young, I knew the rule—keep your mouth closed.

  Two hours later, they had worn themselves out. That’s when I finally spoke.

  “I’d like to call my lawyer,” I said.

  It turned out that Bianca hadn’t dropped a dime on me about shooting Fat Stan, which was good because it would’ve complicated my relationship with Inez and Tamia. But someone had dropped a dime about BoBo, and only two others besides myself had known that I smashed the nigga and his bitch. Kamora knew, but I didn’t even waste time considering her. Shawdy had nothing to gain and everything to lose had she done that. The only other person that could’ve dropped a dime on me was Zeke.

  On the outside, Zeke talked all that killa shit like he would rather take to war than pay street taxes. But he must have feared me inside so much that he was trying to use po-po to get me off the streets. Old heads knew that we 1990’s babies were quick to murder some shit. For the most part, we owned the streets because most of us had nothing to lose. Our mamas were crackheads and our pops were either in prison or dead. So we were off the muthafucking rack, dumb-wild with that banger in our hands. We feared nothing and no one because we had nothing and no one.

  On the other hand, old heads like Zeke had wives and families that they always had to consider. Seldom did they want to go all out and risk losing everything that they had hustled so many years to get. So they were no match for the new generation of killas like myself. Besides, I had the true G blood of my pop in my veins.

  From the interrogation room, I was taken up on the sixth floor and detained for suspicion of murder. Up on the floor it was like a hood reunion. All of the homies were up there waiting to be sent over to Rice Street to await trial for whatever they were in jail for. Most had body or armed robbery charges. I chopped it up with them, but I mentioned nothing about my own charges. Trust No Man was still the code I lived by.

  A day later, Swag’s lawyer came to see me at the jail. “I’ll have you out of here in forty-eight hours. They have nothing on you. So just relax and keep your mouth closed,” he cautioned.

  “Will do,” I assured him.

  Two days later, I was back on the streets. Swag picked me up in his black Aston Martin. Every female deputy at the jail was all on his dick as we left the Pretrial Center and hopped in his whip.

  “I see you’re still thuggin’ it,” Swag said to me as we drove out to his estate in Buckhead.

  “Unc, you know how I rock, so it ain’t nothin’ to discuss. I appreciate you sending that lawyer down to see me, though.”

  “That wasn’t shit. But for real, Lil T, one of these times I’m not gonna be able to get you out. That’s what I’m tryna prevent, because before your pop departed I promised him I would look out for you.”

  “Unc, my pop didn’t depart. Those crackers executed him. Let’s keep it gangsta,” I corrected him.

  “I know that, Lil T. I was right there when those muthafuckas stuck the needle in his arm. And like I’ve always told you, your pop died like a soldier. That’s why niggas still talk about him to this day. But I know that before he died, he was worried abou
t you. I’m not tryna take the gangsta out of you. That’s something that was passed down to you through your bloodline. I’m just tryna get you out of the streets because the true gangstas are behind a desk in a plush office high up in the skyline,” said Swag. But he could tell that I wasn’t tryna hear no lecture, so he let it rest.

  “Anyway, I’m doing a concert up in New York this weekend with Trey Songz. You wanna roll with me? We’ll go fuck some of these up North bitches since I heard you and Kamora broke up.”

  “I might roll with you. I’ll let you know,” I said.

  “Man, it won’t hurt you to get away from the ‘A’ for a weekend. In fact, that’s what you need to do because you know po-po is watching you.”

  “Yeah, I feel you. Let me see where Kamora’s head is at first and I’ll let you know.” I gave him my word and then called Kamora.

  Her head was in the same place it was the last time we talked. No matter what I said she would not change her mind. “I’m not killing my baby. Lord knows I’ve done a lot of dirt, but that is something I will not have on my conscience.” She stood firm.

  “Well, I’m through dealing with you, shawdy,” I said.

  “If that’s how you feel. But I’ll always love you and be waiting for you to come back to us,” she said.

  I hung up the phone.

  “Let’s go bone us some New York bitches,” I announced to Swag. He smiled and gave me some dap. “Can I call Criminal and invite him, too?”

  “Yeah, I fuck with Criminal,” agreed Swag who was always one hundred.

  CHAPTER 20

  The weekend in New York turned out to be just what I needed to get Kamora off my mind. Those up North bitches couldn’t get enough of our Dirty South swag. I dicked about eight bitches in three days and went through a whole box of Magnums.

  When we got back to the ‘A’, I flipped on the switch and got right back into beast mode. I loaded up the yoppa and set out to send a message to Zeke that siccing po-po on me would not get me off his ass.