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“You just fuckin’ with me, right?” I said with a smirk on my face. I tapped BJ on his bodybuilder chest with my fist.
“The word is, the feds just got Ren, and with Bebo just coming home, they putting two and two together and saying shit ain’t a coincidence and wondering why he only did seven years and not more,” BJ continued to explain. “That money we sent with Lo, the shit came back to us.”
“The money for the last go-’round?” I asked.
BJ nodded his head.
“So we got no product, and our connect ain’t fuckin’ with us,” I said.
“Exactly.”
I kept quiet and thought to myself for a minute, and it was like BJ could read my mind.
“You thinkin’ Bebo got his hand in this shit, right?” BJ asked me.
“Bebo could be snitching, and that’s why he’s been talkin’ ’bout us eatin’ off the same package with different crews. But he ain’t been to my crib since he came home. Only a few niggas even know that I rest way out here.” I paused in contemplation. “Shabazz sent them muthafuckas to my crib tonight. Put a bounty on his head. One hundred grand for the muthafucka that bodies him. Two hundred if he’s brought to me alive.”
BJ kept quiet, but Lo spoke. “You wanna put in your own work on that dude, right?”
“You already know how I get down.” And so did Shabazz. I knew he was ghost and wouldn’t resurface on my territory until he sang me a lullaby. I don’t know what gave me away; maybe I was a little too aggressive at Bebo’s party. See, I was the one who had orchestrated the hit on Skeen, and that was because from behind bars, Bebo was planning the ultimate takeover. He felt that he’d started Ghetto Mafia from the ground floor and when he got jammed up the streets forgot about him and the name Bebo was now replaced with Nico. Someone as egotistical as Bebo couldn’t let that shit ride. He
couldn’t appreciate where I was taking our organization. Him and Skeen had been playing checkers and making moves that they thought I didn’t know about. But the whole time that they were playing checkers, I was playing chess.
Shabazz, on the other hand, was too much of a wild card, and I had a strong feeling that once Bebo came home, him and Skeen would use Shabazz as the trigger man to take me out and take over the empire that I’d helped build.
Yeah, I was hoping that Shabazz would have gotten murked when Skeen got murdered. That was the plan, but it turned out not to be reality.
It was all good, though, because if the streets couldn’t locate Shabazz, I knew I had a new sexy pawn in this chess game that I could use to get at him.
“So what about product?” BJ looked at me to see what I wanted to do.
“Give me a day, and I’ll get you the name of these Haitian dudes out of Miami. I want you and Lo to go down there and chop it up with them, and that can be our new connect for right now until I sort out what the fuck is going on.”
BJ looked at me and nodded his head. He gave me a pound before we went back inside my house, and I addressed everybody.
“Yo, something is definitely up. I need all y’all speaking to your people to see what they know or what they hearing and let’s see what comes back about this shit. And let everybody know the hundred thousand is good money.”
Everybody was clear on exactly where I was coming from, and nobody had any questions.
“And if y’all see Shabazz, tell that nigga to holla at me,” I said, giving everybody a pound before they left my crib.
CHAPTER 9
Mia
A few days had passed since our house had been broken into. In the days that immediately followed the break-in, Nico had hired a private security firm to station an armed guard in front of our home on a twenty-four-hour basis. So I felt pretty secure whenever I was home or whenever I left to go out. But emotionally I didn’t feel secure at all. In spite of everything that had happened with the break-in, Nico still wasn’t immediately answering my calls or returning my calls right away. And whenever we were together, he rarely answered his phone or talked freely in front of me.
For the most part I had grown used to Nico’s ways, and I knew he was really no different than a professional athlete or a celebrity—being a target of gold-digging women. Although I grew used to Nico’s philandering ways, it was never something that made me feel good on any level. One way that I reasoned his infidelity was, I had always told myself, as long as I didn’t see anything or as long as he didn’t fuck with anyone I knew personally, then I could pretty much act like I didn’t care, even though in reality I did care.
But that Wednesday following the break-in, there was something I couldn’t just ignore, and that was a text message that Jasmine had sent to my phone. The text said:
Sorry again about Saturday night. Call me when you can. Stop hiding. LOL. Maybe we can link up today. And can you give me the number to your man’s body shop?
I replied right back to the message and told her that she had sent the text to me by mistake. And it took her about fifteen minutes before she replied back to me.
LOL. I’m sorry Mia. You can delete that. That text was for someone else. So how you been?
I didn’t respond back right away to Jasmine, but something in my gut told me that she meant to send that text to Nico and ended up sending it to me by accident. I knew Nico wouldn’t let me look at his phone, so what I did was, I found a copy of an old Sprint bill and went online and logged into Nico’s Sprint account. I’d secretly gotten his username and password a few months back when he’d inadvertently scribbled it on our light bill. I looked at the numbers he had called, and I looked at the numbers that had called him during the past couple of days.
