Chapter 8
EXODUS
“How it go?” I asked Solo on the other end of the phone as I pulled into the parking lot of the abandoned potato chip factory Zeke had us at.
“Smooth,” Solo said through a deep breath. “You ain’t heard shit yet?”
I shook my head and killed the engine to my truck. “Hell naw.” I brushed my hand over my waves and looked towards the building. “It’s smooth though. You know it’s a reason for everything. I got a solution.”
“You do?”
I nodded. “Hell yeah. Big G put me up on game a couple ago.”
“If it came from Him, then it’s a move.”
“Fa sho. I’ll be back in about two.”
“Bet.”
We hung up and I stuffed the phone into the pocket of my gray joggers.
Solomon was at the house with moms. I had a couple of moves to shoot with Kiss and Zeke, so I called him up and had him sit with her.
He’d been at the crib all day with her, too.
I did the hard part—got her up and showered—all he had to do was walk and sit with her.
Anyway… yeah, today was a busy one. I had a couple of things to handle down at the docks.
Had to meet with Detective Graves and now I was out here in The Bricks on the westside with Zeke on a mission at damn near midnight.
I didn’t know what he had going on. After we left the sit down with Detective Graves, he got a call and told me we needed to stay out this way for another hour or so. We stopped at Coney, ate in the lot, and here we were.
Speaking of Coney. Shorty was there. Sereia.
She worked there. Had to take her back to The Woods.
She was into some shit. About to get into a scrap.
I had to step in the middle of that shit and take her back to the crib.
She didn't need to be stomping around this bitch at eleven o’clock at night anyway.
On the way there, I was hit with a message.
Not one that came from my phone nor neither one of my brothers.
A nudge straight from Big G. She was the one.
I got a look at her through the rearview mirror and heard ‘hire her’.
So, it was a wrap on Guiding Light Nursing.
You see how there was a delay? Yeah, that wasn’t coincidental.
A nigga was looking in the wrong direction.
Like I said before, me and Big G had a thorough ass relationship.
Any time He told me to move, I moved. I pulled up at her entrance, got out, and told her I needed her tomorrow.
She was perplexed—looked at me like I was crazy but didn’t question much.
I didn’t know what her background was. Doubted she knew anything at all about nursing.
But that didn’t matter. Neither me nor Genny knew what we were doing and moms was doing just fine.
I wasn’t drawn to her credentials. It was her heart.
Her spirit, though heavy, had a lightness to it.
She was in pain but underneath all of that grief was a beautiful young woman who just needed a chance.
And well… shit… I was going to give it to her.
“What you on, fool?” Kiss asked, ashing the blunt before passing it to me.
Zeke moved to the middle, leaning on the backs of our chairs. “Come in and see, pussy.”
I pulled from the blunt, looked at him through the rearview and pulled from it again before finally putting it out. I grabbed my keys, and my gun and got out.
It was pitch dark out. The only light illuminating the large parking lot was one attached to the grimy building. A few feet up ahead I noticed a family of rats scurry by. Could have been possums though, they were so got damn huge.
The nighttime air brushed by my face, giving me a whiff of the mountains of trash in the alleyway behind us.
I pinched my nostrils and fixed my attention on Zeke with a frown.
Millard's Potato Chip factory had been closed for over a decade. The residents from the neighborhood used the alley to store overflowing trash the garbage company failed to pick up. Fiends gone off only God knows what lingered around the area, polluting it with dirty needles and a bunch of other shit. The area around Millard’s was deserted and abandoned as hell, but that didn’t stop a few stragglers from hanging around.
Teenaged kids that had no business in the area, prostitutes…
it was a real shithole. A shithole Solomon and the congregation tried to clean up countless times. But clearly failed.
“What?” Zeke asked me, stuffing his gun into the back of his pants.
“Fuck we out here for?” I questioned, looking around, eyes settling on a parked white van with blacked out windows.
“I just said come and find out, nigga, damn. Don’t you trust me?”
He walked off and Kiss and I followed him. Whole time, I kept my head on a swivel. Had to.
We made it to a worn, black metal door with a little window on top of it.
Zeke tapped on it a couple of times, and turned away, looking around like Kiss and I.
After a couple of seconds, I put my eyes on the little window and made eye contact with a pair of cocked eyes I could recognize anywhere. Cash’s.
He opened the door just enough for us to walk in.
He held his hand out for us to dap. Kiss dapped him up—I didn’t.
I never did. I didn’t want whatever he had on him to get on me.
Be it germs, or energy, I was smooth on it.
Niggas knew though. I didn’t shake hands.
As a token of respect, I made direct eye contact and nodded. Which I did with him.
He nodded, and said, “Big Dawg. You good, baby?”
“Hell yeah,” I grumbled, looking around, noticing water leaking from the high pipes. “Get to why we here so I can get the fuck out of here.”
Places like this made me uncomfortable. Not because I was scared or no shit like that.
Too much shit lingered on the walls in this bitch.
Buildings like these held a bunch of memories.
Stale, lingering energy that made me uncomfortable.
A lot happened behind these walls, with the majority of it being after it closed down.
Zeke sucked his teeth and walked off. We followed up until we got to the middle of the factory where I was sure morning meetings were once held.
The space was big and unoccupied. Well… free of clutter and machinery at least. Seated in the middle of the room was a young white woman, bound to a chair, her dusty blonde hair tossed wildly in her face.
Her mouth was covered with duct tape. Her legs and arms too.
She squirmed. The light from the moon creeping into a broken window showed me the look of terror written on her face.
Kiss and I looked at each other before simultaneously turning to Zeke.
“It’s under control,” Zeke said. “Nobody’s looking for this crackhead bitch.”
She murmured, her words fighting against the tape covering her mouth.
“Nobody’s looking for a white crackhead,” Kiss said with a snort. “Yeah, aight.”
“You think she would be here if I felt like somebody was?” Zeke shot back.
I said nothing.
Stood there with my hands resting in front of me, fingers interlocked, staring at her.
I didn’t have anything to add. Not yet. I would.
In a few days. Maybe in a few weeks… months.
When timing permitted. When this backfired and there was some fallout behind it.
I didn’t know for sure. I never knew shit for certain.
But things like this, if not properly handled, came back to haunt you.
And because I knew my brother, better than he knew himself on most days, I knew he hadn’t done his due diligence.
Every t wasn’t crossed… every i might’ve been dotted but with shit like this you have to be meticulously careful.
And that wasn’t Zeke. He trusted himself too much.
Zeke walked around, glancing from the bitch to us, and then back at the bitch again. “She told me the house would be empty. She told me she knew his schedule and—
“You trusted the word of a crackhead bitch?” Kiss asked, asking what I was thinking.
I took in a deep breath, shifting my eyes away from Becky, over to Zeke. His eyes caught mine for a second before he looked away, wildly running his hand over his wild locs.
“She a crackhead but she ain’t a crackhead-crackhead.”
“A crackheads a crackhead,” Kiss stated, spitting a couple of feet away.
Zeke waved him off, glanced at me, and then away again.
“Why am I here, Zeke?” I asked, finally speaking up.
“I’m sayin,” he said. “I got the bitch responsible for what happened to bro. You… I’m… shit… I’m handlin an issue.”
“Say you got the bitch responsible for what happened huh?” I asked with a snort.
We had different opinions when it came to who was responsible.
It was Zeke. And shit… maybe it was me. Even if it was a little.
But the bitch sitting in the chair? Nah.
It wasn’t on her. Zeke wasn’t the brightest but I expected better out of him.
What I could see was that he’d reacted off emotion.
When he knew, first hand, that in this business…
or hell, in life in general… there was no room to make decisions based purely off emotion.
Emotions will get you fucked up every single time.
“So, what? You gon’ kill her?” Kiss asked. “When you weren’t supposed to be makin plays in the first place?”
Zeke was quiet for a second. He looked between the four of us.
Pacing, he looked again. There it was. That realization of fucking up.
I watched as his stride flipped. Noticed when his eyebrows bounced a little.
He knew he’d fucked up. He knew he’d fucked up royally.
Tying this bitch up, bringing her out here.
Hell, bringing us out here to witness it was a dumb ass move to make.
“The move would’ve been legit if—”
“If you hadn’t made it in the first place,” Kiss interrupted.
My eyes went back to Becky. She squirmed, trying to free herself from the metal chair. Eyes wide, looking back and forth between us, scared as hell.