The way he said it almost made me laugh, but nothing in me was laughing tonight. “Shona let you leave?”
“Shona told me if I didn’t get my ass up here and figure out what happened, she was gon’ look at me different,” he said. “And I ain’t dealin’ with that on top of all this. Nigga, I ain’t never been no pussy, I’m just glad she was on the same page, or she would’ve been one mad female tonight ‘cause no matter what, I was comin’ to this hospital.”
That sounded exactly like Shona, and for one second it took some of the weight off me because it reminded me people were still living ordinary love lives in the middle of all this madness. Some shit I was soon to be doing when my baby got here, I just didn’t know how the fuck the King of Miami was supposed to live a regular life without a crab in the bucket ass nigga trying to take my spot. Life just didn’t work like that, especially in the underworld.
Dique came off the elevator a second later and joined us and he still had that look in his eyes. “So where we at?”
I looked between both of them and kept my voice low. “We got footage, come on.” I ordered.
One of my people had gotten us access to a quiet family consultation room down the hall from the elevators, away from the cameras and away from civilian ears. The room smelled like hospital coffee and Lysol and there was a TV mounted on the wall we weren’t using because we already had better equipment than that. Tone set the laptop down and pulled up the clips our shadows had been gathering since the ambulance left the courthouse. The first angle was dirty and shaky, just enough to catch the shooter blending in with the press. The second was a lil cleaner. It came from a traffic camera across the street, and when Tone slowed the footage down, all of us leaned in a little harder and closer.
The fake reporter moved through the crowd like he belonged there with the camera on his neck. He was dark skinned with a Polo shirt tucked in. Everything about him looked cheap and manufactured. It was definitely the kind of disguise a street nigga thought passed for polished because he doesn’t know what real polished looks like.
Tone froze the frame just as the dude adjusted his sleeve. “Right there.”
Dique leaned down. “That’s Riverside.”
He was right, you could see the ink from his tattoo just enough when the sleeve lifted up with a snake curled around a gun barrel. South Riverside was Kilo’s Opps. That wasn’t cartel nor nothing from overseas. Definitely wasn’t no big, organized move meant for us. It was just regular hood beef with enough hate behind it to turn reckless.
I sat back in the chair and stared at the still image, letting all the pieces line themselves up in my head. Kilo had beat a serious body on the strength of Carmen’s defense. The city was already talking about it. Every street nigga who hated him would’vebeen talking about it too. If they couldn’t touch him inside the courtroom, then they’d try to hit what helped him walk free.
“They came for her,” I said feeling the itch in my trigger finger thinking about the many ways I wanted to break every bone in somebody’s face. Under no circumstances was a Royal to get touched, especially what belonged to me. See, niggas knew better, but they thought that disguise would help them get away with it.
Tone didn’t say nothing at first, Dique did. “You sure it wasn’t for Kilo?”
I looked back at the clip and saw the shooter didn’t track Kilo, and he didn’t track the center of the group either. He tracked Carmen when she stepped forward and started talking. He was waiting for a clean shot while she stood there exposed in front of the cameras, doing what she always did when pressure hit… handling it.
“They know Kilo survived because of her,” I said. “That verdict was on every channel and every blog. If you can’t hit the man, you hit the person who got him out. It’s street logic, and you know this shit is dirty and stupid at times, but it’s logic.”
Dique’s expression changed, and I knew we was on the same page. “So all that shit wasn’t about us at all,” he groaned. “Them niggas went at Carmen because she beat the case.”
Tone’s jaws got tight. “Which still made it about us the second they did it.”
“Exactly.”
That was the part people outside of this life never understood. Intent stopped mattering once blood hit ground near mine. Whether they were aiming at her because she was my wife or because she was Kilo’s lawyer didn’t change what happened. They still opened fire on a pregnant woman. They still made me kneel in blood I thought was hers. They still let my unborn child feel fear before the baby ever felt sunlight. Theyhad me, Dominic Royal fucked up. For all of those reasons, it made this shit personal, and we didn’t even deal with small shit because that wasn’t our world anymore.
Dique pushed back from the table and started pacing again, even slower. “Niggas think they bigger than the program.” he said. “Somebody behind that had them feeling bigger than they is.”
“Maybe,” Tone said. “Or maybe they just stupid and emotional. Hood niggas love crashing out when pride get involved. We know, we done lived that life.”
I stood up because sitting was making my body feel trapped especially when I wanted to kill somebody. I walked over to the little window in the room and looked out at the hallway where officers were posted every few feet. None of it mattered. Not them. Not the hospital. Not the city. All I could see was Carmen’s face when I got to her on those courthouse steps.
“We don’t move tonight,” I said. “At least not on the outside.”
That made both of them look at me. Dique was the first one to challenge it. “The fuck you mean not tonight? Them niggas just?—”
“I know what they just did,” I cut him off. “And if I move tonight, loud and emotional, all that does is make it easier for the law to connect what comes next back to this hospital. I’m not doing sloppy shit. I’m not giving the city something clean to point at.”
Tone slowly nodded because he got it before Dique did, everybody knew Dique was a hot head. “So we gather first.” Tone retorted.
“We gather everything,” I said. “Names. Blocks. Affiliations. Who gave the green light. Who handed him the camera. Who knew where Carmen would be standing. I want all of it.”
Dique still looked like he wanted to break something, but he understood the value in patience. We weren’t regular street niggas. We had the luxury of planning our violence.
“And when we get it?” he asked.
I looked at both of them and let the silence fill our space. “When we get it,” I said finally, “we clean Riverside the fuck up.”
