“Bail is set at five hundred thousand dollars. The defendant will be placed on house arrest with electronic monitoring and is restricted to the state of Connecticut until further order of this court. Passport surrender. Next court date will be set within ninety days.”
It sucked to have to stay in Connecticut. My doula, Reverie, who was also my cousin, and midwife were both based in DC. I could always ask them to stay with me the final week of my pregnancy and I could pay them for it. That’s if my brothers would pay for it. I ain’t the most cash fluid at the moment.
The gavel banged and my stomach sank because freedom with conditions was still freedom but being stuck in a state six hours from my family while eight months pregnant wasn’t what I needed right now. I needed Rita’s kitchen and my bed at her house and my brothers down the street. Instead I was getting an ankle monitor and a zip code I didn’t choose.
Five hundred thousand dollars. For most people, that number would be a death sentence. For a Banks, it was a phone call. I looked at Xander and he gave me a nod that wasn’t quitea smile but was close enough to tell me this was exactly what he expected. He’d already prepared for this outcome and had Justice on standby to wire the money. The man had dismantled the prosecution’s position in under three minutes and had the bail logistics handled before the judge finished talking.
I could’ve kissed him. I didn’t. But I could’ve.
The processing tookhours because the justice system moves at the speed of people who don’t care about your schedule. Paperwork, signatures, ankle monitor fitting, conditions review, more paperwork. By the time I walked out of that building the sun was setting and the air hit my face and I stood on the steps of the Hartford courthouse and breathed real air for the first time in over a week and almost dropped to my knees from the relief of it.
Rita was waiting at the bottom of the steps, sitting in the backseat of a black car service with the door open and her hands already reaching out before I made it down the last step. She’d hired a driver to bring her up from D.C.
I walked down those steps as fast as my swollen ankles would carry me, climbed into the backseat. She pulled me into her arms without a word. Her hands found my face and moved across it slowly, reading me through touch and intuition and a love so fierce it didn’t need eyes.
“My baby,” she whispered. “My baby. You’re okay. You’re right here. Thank you, Lord. Thank you.”
I buried my face in her shoulder and cried. I had to beat this murder charge so that I could give this baby the best life ever.
Rita rode with me to the furnished apartment Xander had set up in downtown Hartford. It was clean, stocked with groceries,had a real bed with real pillows and a bathroom with actual water pressure. Compared to where I’d been sleeping, it was the Four Seasons.
It felt good to be out of that cell. “Will you stay with me?” I asked Rita.
“Of course.”
“We need to get my father up here.”
“Yes, the fuck we do,” she said sternly.
In that moment, she meant business because she knew he was the key to undoing this.
13
Zephyr
By now that bitch-ass nigga and his pregnant bitch should be shark food. Because of them I lost my legs and because of me they lost their lives. I was so tired of those two walkin’ around all high and mighty. I got shot at the casino because of her brother’s friends. And Quest refused to kill her brother. It made no sense to me.
That’s why when Rodrigo approached me, I was quick to jump at the chance of revenge. Being confined to this wheelchair had destroyed me. But I was going to make up for it.
So, I gave them niggas everything. The gate code to the estate. The camera layout, including the fact that the hangar had no direct coverage. The departure time. The destination. The flight path. All of it gathered during the truce that my stupid brother thought was real. Mekhi walked into Quest’s casino and shook hands and smoked cigars and talked about peace, and while he was doing all that kumbaya bullshit, I was sitting in this chair collecting information and passing it along to men who actually had the balls to use it.
I agreed with Mekhi’s bullshit truce, because I needed to be back in Quest’s circle. I needed the access, the invitations,the casual conversations where Quest would mention his travel plans or his schedule without thinking twice about who was listening. And it worked. One day at the casino after hours, while we were discussing business, Quest announced Mehar was going to some private island near Bonaire for a babymoon, and I had the departure window and the destination before I rolled out of there. I texted Rodrigo that same night.
Quest’s ass thought he was untouchable. Thought his money and his name and his big-ass estate in Middleburg made him safe. But he forgot something. I used to be in those rooms with him. I used to run transport with him and Mekhi when we were all broke and hungry and riding together. I knew how he thought, how he moved, how he secured his shit. I knew the layout of that property because I’d been there a dozen times before the wheelchair. And I knew, because I paid attention while everybody else was getting drunk at his engagement party, that the hangar had a blind spot on the south perimeter camera that was wide enough to drive a truck through, let alone a motorcycle.
So yeah. By now, that nigga was at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea with his girl and his unborn baby and his twenty-million-dollar airplane. And I was sitting in my wheelchair in Silver Spring eating a ham sandwich and feeling better than I’d felt since the night my legs stopped working.
Good riddance.
“Zephyr, your brother is here.”
Bella was standing in the doorway of the bedroom with Amara tagging behind her, with a doll in her hand. She had that look on her face. The careful one. The one she started wearing after the first time I hit her, when she realized the man she fell in love with was gone, and what was sitting in this chair was something else. She didn’t flinch around me anymore. She justmoved carefully, spoke softly, and kept Amara between us like a shield she didn’t want to admit she needed.
“Then wheel me out there to him. Shit.”
She flinched at my tone. I didn’t care. “Stupid bitch,” I muttered under my breath as she positioned the chair and pushed me toward the living room. She heard it. I know she heard it because her grip tightened on the handles for a second before she let go. But she didn’t say nothin’. She never said nothin’ anymore. Just took it and kept moving and fed Amara and cleaned the apartment and did whatever I told her to do. Even suckin’ my dick. Which wasn’t as fun as it used to be before I got paralyzed. Now, my nerves ain’t work the same. She had to stroke and suck a while before I finally got hard. I couldn’t just do that by looking at her anymore. And to make matters worse, a nigga had to pop viagra to stay hard. She tried to please me but I wasn’t even feelin’ that shit no more.
And I blamed Quest for it.
