Rodrigo
My mother’s screams could be heard from every room in the compound.
She was in the upstairs bedroom clutching Manny’s high school graduation photo against her chest, rocking back and forth on the edge of the bed with a rosary wrapped around her wrist so tight the beads were leaving marks in her skin.
The saints on the dresser watched her fall apart.
They were supposed to offer comfort but my mother was inconsolable.
“Mi bebé,” she kept saying between sobs that came from somewhere deeper than her chest. From her gut.
From the place where she’d carried him for nine months and raised him for twenty-one years and fed him and yelled at him and prayed over him and sent him to Georgetown so he could be something better than us. “Mi bebé, mi bebé, mi bebé.”
I sat on the bed next to her and put my arm around her shoulders and felt her entire body shaking against mine.
She was a small woman, barely five-two, but her grief was enormous.
It filled the room. It pressed against the walls.
Mothers don’t grieve quietly. They grieve with their whole bodies, with sounds that don’t have translations, with a fury directed at God for allowing this to happen and at the world for being the kind of place where a twenty-one-year-old boy gets burned alive in his family’s restaurant.
She grabbed my shirt, pulled me close, and looked up at me with eyes that were swollen and red, searching for something I wasn’t sure I could give her.
“Prométeme,” she said. Promise me. “Promise me you’ll make them pay for what they did to my baby.”
“I promise you, Mamá. On Papá’s grave. On Mateo’s grave. They will pay for Manny.”
She held my face and kissed my forehead.
Her tears landed on my cheeks, mixing with mine because I was crying too.
I just wasn’t making sound because the head of the family doesn’t get to make sound.
The head of the family holds it together so everyone else can fall apart.
That was the rule my father taught me before he died and I’d been following it my whole life even when following it felt like swallowing glass.
I gave her a Valium and a glass of water.
Waited until her breathing slowed, her grip on the photo loosened, her eyes got heavy.
She fought sleep because sleeping meant accepting that this was real and tomorrow Manny would still be dead.
No amount of rosaries or saints or promises from her oldest son would change that.
But the valium won. She drifted off still holding the photo and I pulled the blanket over her, stood up, and looked at her for a long time before I left the room.
She was sixty-three years old. She had buried a husband, buried Mateo, and now buried Manny.
Three men she loved taken from her by violence.
She kept a candle lit for each of them on the dresser next to the saints and now there were three flames instead of two and I swore on everything I had that there would not be a fourth.
· · ·
The compound was a property we’d owned for years outside Manassas, Virginia.
Gated, wooded, set back from the road with enough acreage that the neighbors couldn’t hear anything they shouldn’t.
We used it for storage mostly, moving product through on its way to distribution.
But right now it was home base because every other property we owned in the DMV was compromised.
The Banks had proven they knew where to find us and I wasn’t going to sit in a location they could touch.
Gabriel and Fosso were in the basement when I came downstairs. The basement was set up like an office, long table, maps on the wall, laptops, burner phones lined up in a row. It looked organized. The men in it did not.
Fosso was hunched over the table with a rolled bill in his hand and a line of snow disappearing up his nose.
He sniffed hard, wiped his nostril with his thumb, and leaned back in his chair with his eyes wide and his jaw working in circles.
He’d been getting worse since the shipment got hit.
Snorting more, sleeping less, talking faster and making less sense every time he opened his mouth.
My youngest brother was dead and my other youngest brother was turning into a liability in real time.
Gabriel sat in the corner with his arms crossed and a look on his face that hadn’t changed since we got the news about Manny.
Flat, dark, empty. Gabriel didn’t process pain the way the rest of us did.
I hadn’t seen him shed a tear. Instead he shut down.
He didn’t cry or yell. He just went cold and waited for someone to point him at a target.
He was the one who’d ridden the motorcycle onto the Banks property.
He was the one who’d crawled under that plane and compromised the fuel lines. He’d done his part perfectly.
The fact that Quest was still breathing wasn’t a failure of Gabriel’s execution. It was God deciding He wasn’t finished with that man yet. And honestly, that scared me more than anything else about this situation. You can fight a man. You can’t fight a man God is protecting.
“Forty million,” Fosso said, sniffing again.
“Forty fucking million, Rodrigo. Gone. And you know what that means? Our suppliers in Bogotá aren’t extending us more credit.
They’ve already started shifting volume to the Ramirez family.
Ramirez! Those bottom-feeding pieces of shit are eating our market share while we’re sitting in a basement in fucking Virginia hiding from a liquor company. ”
“A liquor company that just killed your brother,” Gabriel said from the corner without moving. “Show some respect.”
“I’m showing reality, hermano! Our business is bleeding out. We can’t re-up. We can’t pay our distributors. Half our people haven’t been paid in two weeks and you know what happens when soldiers don’t get paid? They start looking for new bosses. We are fucked.”
“Watch your mouth,” I said.
“For what? Mamá can’t hear me, she’s knocked out on Valium. And the saints don’t speak English.” He laughed at his own joke and nobody else did because nothing was funny and Fosso was the only person in the room too high to understand that.
I walked over and grabbed him by the collar and pulled him out of his chair until we were face to face. His pupils were blown wide and his breath smelled like shit from all the liquor he’d drunk. As I held him, I could feel his pulse hammering through his shirt.
“Get it together,” I said. “Right now. I don’t care how much of that shit you put up your nose, when you’re in front of me I need you focused.
You need to be useful or you’re the problem.
And I don’t need more problems, Fosso. I need soldiers.
You want to be a soldier or you want me to put a bullet in you myself before the Banks get the chance? ”
He held my stare for about three seconds and then something behind his eyes recalibrated. Not sobriety. Just enough fear to cut through the cocaine and remind him who he was talking to. I let go of his collar. He sat back down, wiped his nose, and kept his mouth shut.
“Now. The Banks have hit us twice,” I said, sitting at the head of the table. “The shipment and Manny. Both in the same week. This isn’t random retaliation, this is coordinated. They have intel. They have resources. And they are coming for every piece of this family until there’s nothing left.”
“Then we hit them back,” Gabriel said.
“With what?” Fosso cut in. “We’re broke. Half our guys are ghosts. We don’t even know where most of their family is.”
“We know some things,” I said. “Walk me through what we have.”
Gabriel uncrossed his arms and leaned forward.
“The casino and distilleries have security that’s too tight.
Armed guards, cameras everywhere, panic systems. We’re not getting in there without a small army and we don’t have one.
Prime took his wife and kids into hiding somewhere, and we don’t have the location.
Quest’s Middleburg estate is empty. The sister and the grandmother are somewhere in Connecticut but we don’t have an address. ”
“What about Quest himself?”
“Last confirmed intel was Grenada. He got his woman and the baby off that island and flew them somewhere stateside.”
The door at the top of the stairs opened and Mooki came down. He was one of our best scouts, a Dominican kid from the Bronx who could find anybody anywhere if you gave him a phone number and twelve hours. He had his laptop under his arm and the look of a man who’d earned his money.
“I got something,” he said. “Quest and the woman are at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. The baby’s in the NICU. Premature, hooked up to machines. They’ve got private security but it’s only two guys rotating shifts. Not police, not military. Private. Which means they can be handled.”
Fosso sat up straight and his eyes went bright with an energy that made my stomach tighten. “The hospital? Blow the whole thing up. Send a truck through the fucking lobby. End this shit tonight.”
Every person in the room looked at him. Gabriel. Mooki. Me. The silence lasted about four seconds and it was the most eloquent response anyone could’ve given.
“You fuckin’ idiot! You blow up a hospital,” I said slowly, “and every federal agency in this country puts our names on a list we can never get off. We’re not terrorists, Fosso.
We’re businessmen who happen to kill people when they deserve it.
There’s a difference and the difference is what keeps us out of Guantánamo. ”
“Then what’s the play?” Gabriel asked.
“We need an in. Someone inside that hospital. A nurse, an orderly, a custodian, somebody on that floor who we can pay to give us access or information. We don’t go in loud.
We go in smart. We find someone who needs money.
That should be easy. Everyone can use more money. They get cash and we get what we need.”
“I’ll handle it,” Mooki said. “Give me forty-eight hours. I’ll find someone on that NICU floor who’s got a debt, a habit, or an ex they’re trying to get away from. Everybody’s got a price.”
“Go.”
Mooki went back up the stairs and I sat at the table and stared at the map on the wall.
Red pins for Banks properties, blue pins for confirmed family locations, black pins for targets we’d already hit.
There were a lot more red pins than blue and that gap was the problem.
We were swinging in the dark while the Banks operated with precision and intel that we couldn’t match.
The truth I didn’t want to say out loud was that we were losing.
Not just the war. The business. The family.
The foundation our father spent his life building was cracking.
A family of niggas from DC who made liquor and ran a casino were dismantling a cartel piece by piece, and I still couldn’t figure out how they had the firepower and the intel to pull it off.
I thought about Manny. Not the strategy of his death but the reality of it.
My little brother tied to a chair in our own restaurant, smelling the gas, hearing it hiss, knowing what was coming.
Did he call for me? Did he think I was coming to save him?
Did he die thinking his big brother had let him down?
That thought was going to live inside me forever.
Right next to Mateo. Two brothers gone. Both because of Quest Banks.
Mateo underestimated him and paid for it with a bullet in his own living room.
I’d been more careful, more patient, more strategic.
I’d used Zephyr. I’d used Gabriel. I’d played the long game.
And the long game got my baby brother burned alive in Mamá’s restaurant.
Fosso was sniffing again. Gabriel was staring at the wall.
The compound was quiet except for the hum of the generator and the distant sound of traffic on the highway.
Somewhere upstairs my mother was knocked out while I tried to figure out how to take down a family.
Mateo got us into this mess when he tried to kidnap Mehar.
If he knew what the fall-out would be, would he have done it?
“Gabriel,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“When we find a way in, you’re the one who goes.”
“Fosso,” I said.
“What.”
“If you snort one more line in front of me tonight I will break your fucking nose. Go upstairs and sleep.”
He looked at me for a second like he wanted to argue. Then he pushed back from the table and went upstairs without a word. The door closed. It was just me and Gabriel in the basement with the maps, the pins, and the silence.
“We can still win this,” Gabriel said.
I didn’t answer because I wasn’t sure he was right. But I couldn’t say that out loud because the head of the family doesn’t get to say that out loud. The head of the family holds it together so everyone else can fall apart.
That was the rule. And I was so tired of following it.