Justice
Six calls. Four texts. Zero answers. And I was done telling myself it was nothing.
It had been two days since Quest left for his babymoon.
Now look, I knew my brother. Quest on vacation was a different animal than Quest at work.
The man was capable of going ghost for a day if Mehar had his attention, which she always did.
I could see him leaving his phone on silent while he rubbed her feet on some balcony overlooking the ocean, ignoring the world because the world wasn’t her and therefore wasn’t relevant.
I got it. He was in love, about to be a father.
He’d earned a few days of being unreachable.
But this wasn’t a few days of being unreachable. This was silence. Complete, total, nothing. And I knew the difference.
Quest always checked in when he landed. But this time, he didn’t call. Even after the text about Serenity, he hadn’t responded. That shit was weird. My brother wasn’t the type to ignore family.
I was sitting at my desk at Banks Reserve staring at the Q4 projections on my screen and not absorbing a single number. The girls were with their other family.
I picked up my phone and called him again. Rang twice this time before the voicemail kicked in. Shorter ring meant either the battery was dying or the phone was damaged or it was sitting at the bottom of the ocean.
I didn’t like any of those options.
Called Mehar. Dead. No ring. Straight to that automated voice. The person you are trying to reach is not available. Yeah, no shit.
I put the phone down and rubbed my temples.
Picked it back up. Put it down again. This was the part I hated.
The waiting. The not knowing. I could handle problems. Give me a problem with dimensions and I’ll solve it.
But give me a blank space where information should be and I lose my mind, because the blank space is where your imagination fills in the worst possible answers.
I called Prime.
He picked up on the first ring because Prime always picked up on the first ring. That was his thing. If you called Prime, he was already reaching for the phone before it finished buzzing.
“What’s good?”
“Have you heard from Quest?”
Beat of silence. “Nah. Not since he left for the trip. Why?”
“He’s not answering. I’ve called him six times in two days. Texts aren’t delivering. Mehar’s phone is completely dead. Nothing.”
Another beat. Longer this time. I could hear Prime thinking and Prime thinking was a specific kind of quiet. It wasn’t empty. It was loaded. It was the quiet of a man running scenarios in his head and eliminating the ones that didn’t end in violence before he spoke.
“That’s not like him,” Prime said. His voice had dropped half a register.
Subtle. Most people wouldn’t catch it. I caught it because I’d been hearing that shift since we were kids.
Relaxed Prime talked in his chest. Alert Prime talked from somewhere lower.
Somewhere closer to the version of himself that most people never met and never wanted to.
“I know it’s not like him. That’s why I’m calling you.”
“Aight. Let me have Zainab try Mehar. Sisters talk different than we do. If Mehar’s ignoring us, she’s not ignoring Zainab.”
“Bet. Call me back.”
I hung up and waited. Leaned back in my chair, stared at the ceiling, tried to talk myself out of the feeling that was settling into my chest like concrete.
There were reasonable explanations. Bad cell service on a private island.
A resort with spotty wifi. Quest being so wrapped up in Mehar that the outside world didn’t exist. All reasonable. All plausible.
All bullshit and I knew it.
My phone buzzed. Prime.
“Nothing,” he said. One word. No inflection. “Zainab tried three times. Mehar’s phone is off. Zainab said she hasn’t heard from her since the night they left.”
The night they left. Which meant Mehar hadn’t contacted her sister in two days either.
Mehar and Zainab talked every day. Every single day.
Through everything, the warehouse, the recovery, the pregnancy, they had not gone a single day without talking since Mehar came home.
If Mehar wasn’t answering Zainab, something was wrong. Period.
“I’m calling the resort,” I said.
“Do it now. I’m staying on.”
I pulled up the booking confirmation from Quest’s email.
He’d given me access to his accounts months ago because I managed the finances and Quest didn’t have the patience for receipts.
Isla Solara. Private island rental outside of Bonaire.
I found the contact number and three-way called it while Prime stayed on the line.
A woman answered. Pleasant voice. Slight accent. “Isla Solara, good afternoon.”
“Yeah, hi. My name is Justice Banks. My brother, Quest Banks, booked a stay at your property. He was supposed to arrive two days ago. Can you confirm whether he checked in?”
Typing in the background. A pause. Then: “I’m sorry, Mr. Banks. We show a reservation for Quest Banks arriving on Friday, but the guest never arrived. We attempted to reach the contact number on file but were unable to connect. The reservation is still active and we’ve been holding the property.”
The guest never arrived.
Five words. Five words that rearranged every molecule in my body.
I gripped the phone so hard my knuckles ached.
The room got very still and very loud at the same time.
I could hear Prime breathing on the other end, steady, controlled, but I knew that breathing pattern.
I knew what it meant. It meant Prime was already past worry and into the next phase.
The phase where plans get made and people get found.
“Thank you,” I managed. “We’ll be in touch.”
I disconnected the resort and it was just me and Prime on the line. Neither of us spoke for about five seconds. Five seconds that felt like five hours.
“He never made it,” I said.
“I heard.”
“Prime, he took off from Virginia two days ago and never landed. His phone is dead. Mehar’s phone is dead. Nobody has heard from either of them.”
“I know what it means, Justice.” Prime’s voice was flat now.
Not angry. Not scared. Flat. Which was worse than both because flat meant Prime had already accepted the worst-case scenario and was building a plan around it.
“I’m calling the Coast Guard. I’m calling the FAA.
I’m calling anybody with a boat and a radar. ”
“I’ll pull his flight plan. He filed one before he left. Tail number, departure time, route, fuel load, all of it. If something happened mid-flight, the data will tell us where.”
“Do it,” Prime said. “And Justice?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t tell Grandma. Not yet. Not until we know something.”
He was right. Rita was already holding Serenity’s arrest in one hand. And I needed her to focus on that. I didn’t want her distracted with Quest’s disappearance. I know she liked to display her strength but that kind of news right now could hurt her health.
“Agreed,” I said.
“I’m on my way to your office. Don’t move.”
The line went dead. Prime didn’t do goodbyes. He did arrivals.
I put the phone down on my desk and sat there in the quiet of my office.
Q4 projections still glowing on my screen, the Banks Reserve logo on the wall, the weight of everything pressing down on me like a ceiling that was slowly lowering.
My sister was in a jail cell in Connecticut.
My brother was missing somewhere over the Caribbean.
His pregnant fiancée was with him. And I was sitting in an office doing math while my family fell apart in two different directions at once.
A nigga like me couldn’t catch a break. Not a Saturday. Not a Tuesday. Not a single solitary day where somebody I loved wasn’t in danger or in custody or in the wind.
I pulled up Quest’s flight plan and started reading.