Chapter 18
Soon as I left from dropping Nariyah off, I had just merged onto that highway and my phone rang. Mars was calling me back.
“Aye. I’m following the nigga right now,” he said, I could hear the road noise loud behind his voice. “He went in that house with bags, then came out damn near running back to his car. What you want me to do?”
“Drop me a pin to where you at,” I said, gripping that wheel hard, my knuckles were damn near cracking. “Don’t let that nigga out yo sight for one second.”
Mars sent that pin over, and I followed it, pushing that truck harder than I probably should’ve on a highway this busy this early in the morning.
At first I was twenty-three minutes out, according to the map.
I put my foot down and prayed we ain’t get pulled over.
Right now, I had a gun on me still smelling like fresh gunpowder from Mallory, and I could not afford for no cop to run into that this morning.
It was a brand new body on that bitch and that’s the last thing I needed to go down for.
At the same time, I couldn’t afford to lose this window on catching up to Demon either.
Not after everything this nigga had done, and the ways he tried to cross my family.
Today was the end of that shit. You could mark my words on it.
This chasing niggas around the town ain’t ever been my game.
He was getting put down like a dog today.
My mind was running fast, faster than the truck even.
Twenty four hours ago, I ain’t have no brothers other than Zaire and Namier.
Now I was just supposed to accept that I had another one.
A nigga that had put a hit on my full blood brother, kidnapped my mother, kidnapped my stepdaughter, and way more shit.
Hell nah. I was about to end that nigga bloodline before the sun even got all the way up. Wasn’t no room left in my chest for confusion no more. It was time to get to work.
I had already made peace with the fact that killing my blood was something that I had to do.
This nigga was more of a problem than anything.
Maybe if the circumstances were different, maybe if he wasn’t trying to take everything we’d worked for, maybe we would have welcomed the nigga with open arms. That’s just not the case though.
He came with problems from the time my father cut business off with him.
It’s just his luck that I’m the problem solver.
I merged off the highway and onto the dirt service road and was right on Mars trail. I could see him and Demon clearly. I let out a long breath at the fact that I actually caught up to them. It was about to be smooth sailing from here. I knew what I needed to do.
“You niggas good?” I asked Zaire and Namier, checking the mirror.
“Hell yeah!” Zaire said, flat, checking his own weapon in his lap.
Namier just nodded, jaw tight, none of that comedy in him this morning at all.
Minutes ticked by fast, the road ahead blurring past, my mind running through every possible way this could go once we got to him. Mars called back, and I threw it on speaker.
“Aye, man, this nigga ain’t gone stop,” Mars said, voice tight with adrenaline. “He driving crazy as hell, weaving through traffic like he trying to shake me. Want me to shoot one of his tires out?”
Before I could even answer that, I heard it through the phone, tires screeching hard, and then the unmistakable crunch of metal folding into metal.
“What the fuck just happened?” I said, pushing that truck faster.
Turned out Demon had slammed on his brakes hard in the middle of that dirt service road, sudden as hell, no warning, and Mars ran straight into the back of him going full speed. It was clear Demon was gonna use this tactic to get Mars off his trail.
I guess the nigga ain’t think that whole move through fully, cause the impact was heavy enough that Mars had to swerve wild after the hit to keep from flipping his own car, and Demon’s whip went spinning off the road into a ditch, rolling once before it landed on its side.
We came up on that scene maybe ninety seconds later, dust still hanging thick in the air, Demon’s car settling on its side in a cloud of dirt. And Mars car was crunched up badly.
Me and both my brothers were out that truck before it even fully stopped rolling. Namier ran to check on Mars, who was climbing out his own car shaky but he was okay, cursing under his breath, holding his shoulder where the seatbelt had bit into him hard. Me and Zaire went straight for Demon’s car.
That car’s airbags had all deployed, and Demon was slumped forward against his seatbelt, half conscious, blood running from a cut above his eyebrow, mumbling something I couldn’t make out over the ringing still in my own ears from the crash.
I yanked that driver’s door open so hard the hinges groaned, and I grabbed him by his shirt and dragged his ass out onto that dirt road. He was dizzy, disoriented, legs not working right under him, barely able to hold his own weight up, blood mixing with dirt on the side of his face.
I patted him down fast, found his gun tucked at his waist and I took it.
Then I leaned into his car and found a wad of cash folded in his jacket pocket and pocketed that too.
I grabbed all his cards and anything valuable he had in that muthafucka.
I wasn’t about to leave nothing useful behind for nobody to find later, and wasn’t no way I was leaving that gun laying around neither.
Then me and Zaire got under each of his arms and dragged his weak ass toward our truck, his feet dragging useless behind him in the dirt the whole way, while his head was hanging low.
“You good?” I called over to Mars, who was leaned against his busted front end, checking his own body over.
“Yeah, I’m straight,” he said. “Damn! That nigga wild for that stupid ass shit! He fucked my whip up. But somebody coming to tow me now. Y’all go ahead, I got it from here.”
“You sure you don’t need to get looked at?”
“Nah, I’m good, Kaseem. For real. Go.”
We loaded Demon into the back of that truck between Namier and Zaire, both of them keeping their guns trained on him the whole time even half conscious as he was, and I pulled off fast, tires kicking up dirt behind us, that ditch shrinking in my rearview.
Demon drifted in and out on that ride, head rolling side to side, but by the time we were getting close to the compound, he was coming back to himself, blinking hard against the light, trying to sit up straighter in that seat even though he was now zip tied.
“Yo head hurt, huh, bitch?” Zaire said, watching him close. “That was some real stupid ass shit you pulled back there, nigga. You must wanted us to kill you today? Cause what did you really think was gone happen if the nigga ran into the back of you? You ain’t think that one through, fool.”
Namier let out a short laugh despite everything still hanging heavy over all of us.
“Fuck y’all,” Demon spat, voice rough, still groggy, blood crusting dry on the side of his face now.
“Chill when it’s a gun to yo head,” Namier said, pressing the barrel a little closer to his temple. “Don’t make me fuck up my brother truck with yo brains all over it.”
Right then my phone rang. Pops was calling.
“What’s up, Pops,” I answered, keeping my eyes on the road, one hand still tight on that wheel.
“Where you boys at?” he said, and something in his voice was off, almost upbeat in a way that didn’t fit what had been going on the last twenty four hours we’d all just been through. “I need you here for something. And bring your mother.”
“We almost back to the compound,” I said. “But we got something to handle first. I got Demon in the truck right now.”
“Oh, shit.” He let out a short laugh, cold, humorless, nothing warm behind it at all. “That’s even better then. Let it be a reunion.”
“What that supposed to mean, Pops? I ain’t following you right now.”
“When you get here, bring your mother, bring that boy, and come to the guest cottage. I’ll be waiting on you there. It’s gone make sense when you get here.”
He hung up before I could ask him anything else, and something cold settled low in my stomach hearing the click of that call ending. I called Sam right after, told him to have somebody bring my mother to the guest cottage, no explanation, just get her there quiet and quick.
A few minutes later we were finally pulling through them gates, and I let out a breath I ain’t realize I’d been holding this whole entire ride.
We finally had this nigga who’d been causing hell in our lives. Knowing today was the end of that. It was a big ass relief for me.
When I parked, I started grabbing all the guns we’d been riding with. I had to get them squared away too. I knew damn well that riding around with all this heat sitting loose in the car had been a real risk the whole drive home, one traffic stop away from a whole different kind of disaster.
Namier and Zaire kept telling Demon not to try nothing funny unless he wanted to get smoked like a brisket. The zip ties was all we had in the car and that nigga could easily break out that shit if he really wanted to.
As beat up and bloody as he was, I knew that he still had more fight left in him, because he wasn’t the nigga to just lay down and take his consequences.
When we got out that truck, my brothers manhandled him, dragging him toward the guest house while he talked all kinds of shit under his breath, still acting like a man in control even zip tied, bleeding, and getting pulled across gravel by two niggas who wanted him dead right now.
Soon as we stepped inside that cottage, I saw a man tied to a chair in the middle of the room, and everything in me went still for a second.
I ain’t seen his face in person since I was a little boy, but I recognized him instantly from old pictures scattered through our house over the years, the same face grinning next to my father in faded photographs from way back before I was even born hardly.