The gun sat on the nightstand next to my water cup like it belonged there, and maybe in our life it did. My daughter was two floors above me sleeping in an incubator, my fiancé was somewhere in Baltimore planning to kill people, and I was lying here with fresh stitches and a feeling in my gut that wouldn’t let me close my eyes.
38
Justice
“You want more kids?” Prime asked me while we waited for everyone else to show up. We were in the hotel suite, a two-bedroom at the Four Seasons that Quest had booked because even in wartime the man refused to stay anywhere without thread count standards.
“I’m open to it but the two I got might be enough.”
“Shiiit, who you tellin’. I’m trying to embrace the baby stage right now because I do not want teenagers. I ain’t built for that.”
“Nigga, you’ve survived worse.”
“Ion about that. Ain’t shit worse than catching an attitude from a fourteen-year-old girl. You walk in the room and she looks at you like you ruined her life just by existing. And then one day some lil young nigga comes sniffing around and now you gotta decide whether to scare him or bury him. One day that’s gonna be Kheris.”
“Yeah, well, we might have to put the fear of God in a lil nigga named Jaylen before we worry about Kheris.”
“You just tell me when.” We laughed and dapped each other up. He knew I would be down to keep any lil boys away from my nieces just like he would do for me.
I thought about my girls constantly. How to raise them right when their mother wasn’t here to fill in the gaps I couldn’t see. Monica would’ve known what to do with Storie’s attitude. She would’ve known when to push and when to let go, when to be soft and when to put her foot down. I tried my best but there were things a father couldn’t teach his daughters no matter how present he was. They needed a woman’s touch, a woman’s perspective, a woman’s voice telling them the things about womanhood that I could only observe from the outside.
I wasn’t lonely. I got pussy from time to time. Had my roster, a few women I took to hotels, one I even brought on vacation to Turks and Caicos last year. But none of them ever met my kids. Nobody seemed worthy enough to sit at my dinner table and eat with the two people who mattered most to me. The bar Monica set was too high for most women to reach and I wasn’t interested in lowering it. We’d been through too much together, survived too much, built too much. Starting over with somebody new meant opening up all those rooms in myself that I’d locked after she died, and I wasn’t sure I had the keys anymore.
But that was a problem for another day. Right now I had a war to run.
• • •
Quest walked in first looking like a man who’d been sleeping in hospital chairs for a week, which he had. He’d of course showered and was wearing new clothes, but he still hadn’t had a haircut. And his eyes looked tired and weary.
Behind him came the Kings. Creed came in quiet and deliberate, scanning every corner before he sat down. Riot was next, more energy, more presence, dropping into a chair and spreading out like he owned the suite. Cannon brought up the rear and posted up by the window with his arms crossed.
We all said our greetings. They had become just as much my brothers as Prime and Quest had.
“We found them,” Creed said before anybody had a chance to settle in. “The Rios compound is outside Manassas. It’s a gated property, wooded, set back from the road. They’ve been there since the shipment got hit.”
“How solid is the intel?” I asked.
“Solid enough that I’d bet my name on it. We’ve had eyes on the property for seventy-two hours. Rodrigo’s there. Gabriel’s there. The younger one, Fosso, comes and goes but he’s been in and out. The mother is there too.”
“How many soldiers?” Quest asked.
“That’s the interesting part. Light. Maybe six, seven at most. Before the shipment blew they had a full rotation, twelve to fifteen deep. But when you can’t pay people they tend to find new employment. The Rios family is bleeding out financially and it shows.”
Riot leaned forward. “So we could take the whole compound at once. One coordinated hit, everybody inside, done.”
“That’s the idea,” Creed said. “But I don’t want to go in blind. I’ve got drones coming in tonight. Military grade surveillance, thermal imaging, the works. We fly them over the compound tomorrow night, map out every entry point, every patrol pattern, every blind spot. We see who’s inside, where they sleep, how they move. Then we build the plan around what the drones show us.”
“That’s smart,” I said. “We go in with full intelligence and we don’t leave anything to chance.”
Quest had been quiet since Creed started talking. He was sitting on the edge of the couch with a look on his face that I’d seen a thousand times before. The calculating look. The one where his brain was running scenarios faster than he could speak them.
“What about Mateo’s wife and son?” he asked.
“LaLa and Paco are back in Colombia,” Creed said. “She took the kid and flew home after the shipment got hit. With the money gone, the security Rodrigo had on them bailed. They’re unprotected.”
Riot looked at Quest. “Why didn’t you finish her off the first time? She’s the one who told Rodrigo about Mateo. None of this would’ve happened if not for her.” Riot was the wildcard but Quest had a soft spot for kids.
Quest rubbed his hands together slowly. I could see him turning the question over, measuring it against the version of himself that had spared LaLa and Paco in Mateo’s living room. That version of Quest felt like a long time ago.
