After that the line went dead.
I sat in the dark with my phone in my hand. That call sat on top of everything else that was already sitting on me.
Could it be about Sandra? About what I did four years ago. About the hundred thousand I took from Tavarus while his wifewas in my back bedroom and his people were running around the city looking for her.
Could be something else from a different direction I hadn’t seen coming.
I didn’t know.
What I knew was that somebody had been watching me for four years and waiting, tonight they had decided to let me know they were there. And that kind of call was never just a warning.
It was always the beginning of something bigger.
I put my phone down and looked at the ceiling.
Amara’s face looked back at me from somewhere behind my eyes.
My jaw. My nose. My eyes on a little girl whose mother had walked back into my life today in a grocery store. It was like the universe had been waiting four years to drop that moment on me. Yes I was reckless with her, but I never imagined a baby would be the outcome. Was this baby mine?
If she was mine then Tavarus had been raising my child without knowing it.
If she was mine then the target on my back was heavier and more personal than anything I had been prepared for.
I already knew though.
Somewhere underneath all the maybe and the math, I already knew that shit when she bumped into me today at that store.
She was mine.
Ididn’t sleep after that call.
I laid on the couch with my eyes on the ceiling and Simone’s soft snoring coming from the bedroom. I had my phone face up on my chest. The crib was quiet, dark and felt like it was closing in on me a little bit at a time.
Somebody on the other end of that phone had called me Deon.
Not Gutta. But Deon. My government. The name that not even the people closest to me would use. That detail alone told me this wasn’t some random street shit. Somebody was doing research.
And they said I had a target on my back and from the callers tone, I believed that shit.
I sat up, put my feet on the floor and stayed there in the dark trying to think straight. So much had transpired today, a nigga didn’t know if I was going or coming.
Every threat I ever had to handle, I could trace back to a source. I always knew who was coming, why and what my options were. This was different. Private number, unfamiliar voice and a message that could connect to more than one thing I had done in my life. Not knowing which one it was about meant I couldn’t figure out how to move next.
So I ran through all of it in my head from all angles.
Sandra was the first place my mind went to. Four years ago I had taken Tavarus’s wife out of a grocery store parking lot at gunpoint and held her for four days while I extorted her husband for a hundred thousand dollars. She had gone back home safely. I had walked away clean. She had looked me in my eyes before I let her go, and she told me what happened between us was going to her grave. She made it clear that she was going to tell her husband that she never saw her abductors faces. I laughed when she said it, because at that time I was a young hot head, and I didn’t give a damn if she told him who I was or not. I had heat for that nigga because of what he did to my cousin. At the same time, I knew there was no way Sandra could tell him who I really was, even if she wanted to. She didn’t have my name, the only way that she could describe me was by my face. There was several black niggas in the hood with a dimple and deep waves in his head.
I had believed her when she said that she wasn’t going to tell him anything though. I knew exactly why she wanted to keep me a secret, and I respected her freaky ass for it. She begged for the nigga that kidnapped her to fuck her, and she allowed me to doit raw. Ain’t no way that she was ever gonna go home and tell all that to her husband. No way.
Still, Tavarus was thorough in a way that most people underestimated. Patient. The kind of man who absorbed information quietly and held it until he knew exactly what to do with it. If he had ever put together that it was me behind what happened to Sandra he would have sat on it. Watched. Let me get comfortable. Let me build something worth destroying before he destroyed it. Maybe I was being paranoid, but that’s the kind of nigga that he was, and I knew that.
The timing of all this shit made my stomach turn. Me and Simone were putting an offer on a house. Street about to fight for a world title. My corner man money coming in consistent and legitimate. Everything finally lined up in the right direction for me. That was exactly when a patient man made his move. What better time to try and take me down? I had the life niggas would pray for.
Then Amara’s face came back to me.
All day I had been thinking about that baby since I left that store. Every time I got close to focusing on something else that little girl’s face pulled me right back. My jaw. My nose. My eyes looking up at me from the cereal aisle like she already knew something the rest of us were still figuring out.
I had to know. Was that baby, my baby?
