And somebody had taken that from him before it could happen.
There was a document in the file, a formal written request that Legal had somehow obtained. The man was in the streets really working when it came to finding out what happened to my father. I saw that now.
The document was from a credible source that witnessed a group of men who had significant money riding on Hood losing that fight. They were the kind of men who operated in the space between legitimate business and organized crime. Bookmakers. Men who moved large amounts of illegal betting money through what looked like investment operations on the surface.
They had approached my father and offered him fifty thousand dollars to throw the fight.
Of course he said no. From all the stories I’d heard, my father always stood on integrity.
Legal’s notes said that his best friend, my father, Hood had come to him after and told him everything. Told him the name attached to the request. The man behind it all who everybody called Veteran. Legal had written that name down, circled it and drawn a line to every other name in the file and that line connected everything.
Veteran. Wanted my father to throw the fight because of all the money they had riding on his opponent winning.
The night before his big fight Hood had gotten another message. They wanted to meet him again. Said they had another solutionthey wanted to discuss. Legal’s notes said Hood had called him that night and left a voicemail. He was taking Street with him to the meeting because his wife Kat was at her sister’s house with the twins. He said he thought it was going to be a conversation with another offer that didn’t involve throwing the fight. He sounded calm on the voicemail. Legal had the transcript of it right there in the file and I read it three times. I had to put it down the third time because my hands were shaking.
Hood, my father never came back from that meeting.
When Legal got the voicemail and rushed to the location he found a five year old Xavier Jr. standing in a parking lot holding his father’s bloody, lifeless body and crying in the dark.
I sat at Legal’s desk for a long time after I finished reading that. I never cried about shit, but this brought tears to my eyes as I sat there and held those papers.
I thought about Street. About all the times I had watched my brother move through life carrying something heavy that he never talked about. The way he fought — not just in the cage but every day, like he was always trying to prove something to somebody who wasn’t there anymore. I understood it differently now. He had been standing in that parking lot at five years old and something in him had never fully left it. My brother was only a baby when he witnessed our father life being taken, and I knew although he didn’t say it, that shit has to be eating him up. He was forced to be a man too early in life because the only man we had was stolen away from us. My brother never complained about shit, he just always did what needed to be done for his family.
I thought about my mama. About every morning she left that house before sunrise to go work a job that was killing her slowlyso her boys wouldn’t feel the absence of what Hood’s death had taken from us financially.
I thought about Legal. Going to court every day. Building a career. Sitting ringside at every one of Street’s fights with that specific look on his face that I had never been able to fully read until now. He had been carrying this for twenty years. Investigating it quietly. Hitting walls. Coming up short. Never telling any of us because telling us meant giving us a burden he had decided was his to carry alone.
I respected that and it broke my heart at the same time. All the people in my life had done all they could to protect and shelter us from pain.
I put everything back exactly the way I found it and I left Legal’s office. I sat in my car in the parking lot for almost an hour before I could drive. The people responsible for taking a great man away from his family, they needed to pay.
—
After that I couldn’t leave it alone.
I knew I should have. I knew the smart thing was to talk to Legal about what I found, then let him handle it the way he had been handling it. But Legal had been handling it for twenty years and this Veteran nigga was still out there. Still untouchable. Still a ghost that circulated through the streets. Getting to live his life after taking one away from us.
I had resources Legal didn’t have. I was young and I moved in circles that an old attorney couldn’t access. Yeah, my family kept me from the street life but I still was raised in the trenches before my brother pulled us out. I knew people who knew people and I started pulling threads quietly at first and then more aggressively. I knew that I needed to infiltrate my way in.
When I put my ear to the streets on who this nigga was, every thread led back to Tavarus.
Tavarus was Veteran’s foot soldier and flunky. His operation on the ground. The man who handled the day to day so that Veteran never had to get his hands dirty or show his face anywhere that could be traced back to him. When I realized that, I also realized I had found my way in.
I went to Tavarus.
When he found out who I was…Hood’s son, Street’s little brother — something shifted in his face that I peeped immediately. Not guilt exactly. Something more calculated than that. It felt like recognition. Like he had been expecting this moment and wasn’t sure yet what it meant that it had finally arrived.
He welcomed me in like I belonged there, but I felt like something was kinda off with him. Street never mentioned this nigga, but he ran it down to me as if Street knew him well and trusted him. I let him welcome me because getting close to Tavarus was the only way I was ever going to get close to Veteran. I immediately got my first back from him during that break, and I started moving it. I had to do what needed to be done because I was only in this shit for a greater cause. I wanted to show I was loyal and a hard worker so that I could get close to the nigga responsible for killing my pops. From what I could hear, over 20 years later, and he is still terrorizing the streets. That couldn’t keep happening.
I had been working that angle for months. Even after spring break was over, I was still getting and moving work for him. I even did the shit on campus so that I could make it look like I was serious. Yeah. It was dumb and risky, but my whole life had been a struggle all because someone took my father away fromus before we even got a real chance to have him.Right now, I was doing whatever it took and I’d deal with the consequences later.
For months, I built a good relationship with Tavarus and it was understood that me working for him would stay between us. He knew that it couldn’t get back to my family because I was a trophy son and the hood idol right now. That went without saying. We both had motives and it was cool. He had no idea what I was using him for. But then, while I’m home for summer break, two weeks ago, I was outside that trap house on Morrell. It was a regular day, and I caught a bullet to the arm. From my knowledge, nothing like that ever happened and the niggas didn’t have no active beef, so I was still lost as to how the fuck I wound up getting shot at.
I ended up in a hospital bed looking at my brother’s face while I lied to him about why I was there.
—
The hardest part of all of it wasn’t the bullet.
