35. JUSTICE
JUSTICE
“What’s wrong?”
Prime was watching me from the passenger seat as I cut my Maybach GLS across two lanes without a blinker.
We were supposed to be headed to Freetown to survey some of the abandoned buildings.
But then Skye’s name lit up my phone. And as soon as I heard that sweet voice I knew before she finished her first sentence that my afternoon was over.
What she laid on me, though, I wasn’t ready for.
My fuckin’ daughter had skipped school. This little girl was already on punishment. But she had taken her fifteen-year-old self into Pentagon City in the middle of a Wednesday to meet a grown man.
Some pedo nigga that I was about to have to beat the brakes off.
“That damn girl.” The words came out like poison. “We gotta get to Pentagon City. Now.”
“What the fuck happened?”
“Storie.” My jaw was locked so tight it ached. “She ditched school to go on a lil date. With a grown man. At the mall.”
Prime ain’t say nothing to that. He just sat in it with me.
Every time I hand that girl an inch of rope, she finds a way to hang herself with it.
I thought we made good the other night. I’d given Storie her mama’s bracelet.
Promised her a car, all in the name of loving her back into the light.
And this is what she did with it. Snuck off to meet a man old enough to know exactly what he was doing.
My temples were pounding. There was a headache building behind my eyes. I pushed that Maybach up over ninety on the parkway.
“Justice.” Prime’s voice was even, careful, the voice you use on a man standing near a ledge. “I need you to breathe, bruh. I know you mad but you can’t lose your cool.”
I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t. Every ounce of the cold I’d spent my life keeping had gone somewhere I couldn’t reach.
I’d bent over backwards to protect that girl, and she kept walking herself straight to the edge, daring me to catch her.
And I didn’t know what to do with her anymore.
That was the God’s honest truth. Do I pull her out that school?
Put a guard on her around the clock? Lock every door in my house from the outside like she was a prisoner instead of my child?
Was that where we were now? Because I’d rather her hate me from behind a locked door than bury her.
I’d take her hate over her funeral every day of the week.
And that man. That grown-ass man with his hand on my baby.
He was already dead. He just didn’t know it yet. Mercy was never on the table. A man puts his hands on my child, he’s not getting a lesson. He’s getting buried. I’d smile at his people at the funeral, go home, and sleep like a newborn.
Because here’s what my daughter didn’t understand, sitting up in that mall thinking she was grown, thinking she was slick.
There is not a predator alive slick enough to take something of mine.
Not one. They see a young girl and think easy.
They don’t know whose blood she carries.
They don’t know her daddy has put men in the ground for less than what he just did and slept fine that night.
She was fifteen. Too young to know what real danger looked like.
And the most dangerous man headed to that mall wasn’t the one with her.
It was me.
I don’t even remember parking. I don’t remember the doors.
I came through that mall like something let out of a cage, Prime a half step behind me telling me to slow down, telling me to think. I couldn’t hear him. There was a sound in my own ears drowning him out, low and steady, like blood moving too fast. I hit the food court and scanned it once.
I found them.
She was on a bench by the escalators. My baby.
Fifteen years old, in an outfit I’d never seen and never bought, sitting hip to hip with a man pushing thirty like it was the most natural thing in the world.
He had his arm stretched along the back of that bench behind her.
This nigga was way too comfortable, taking his sweet time with my child.
And I stopped being a person. Whatever keeps a man walking upright, talking calmly, doing the math before he moves — it left me all the way.
He never even saw me. I was on him before he finished his sentence, both hands in his shirt, ripping him up off that bench so hard his feet left the ground.
The first punch took him somewhere in the face and I felt bone move.
He went back over the table behind him, trays and drinks crashing down with him, and I went with him, on top of him, my knee in his chest.
“Daddy!”
I didn’t hear her. I was too far gone to hear anybody.
“How old are you.” My hand was back in his collar, dragging his face up to mine, blood already sheeting out his nose. “HOW OLD ARE YOU.”
“I’m twenty-eight, man, I swear to God.” His hands scrabbled up between us, useless. “She told me she was eighteen! She said eighteen, I swear to you—”
“She’s fifteen.”
I watched it land. Watched the floor drop out of his eyes when he understood what he was pinned under.
“Think real careful,” I said. My voice came out worse than any yell, low and dead and even, that old cold pouring back into me at the worst second of my life. “About the very next thing that comes out your mouth.”
Then I stopped talking. Talking was done.
I hit him. I hit him again. I hit him for the hand on her back, for the outfit I didn’t buy.
And I would have kept going until there was nothing left to hit.
I know that now. I knew it then. There was no bottom to it.
Somewhere far off a woman was screaming for security.
My baby was hollering my name. It all came to me through water, muffled and slow, none of it as real as the man coming apart under my fists.
“JUSTICE.” Prime’s arms locked around me from behind, both of them, hauling me up and back with everything he had. “That’s ENOUGH. Look at me. LOOK at me. Cameras, Justice. Everywhere. It’s done. We’re done.”
I felt him straining against me. It took a grown man built like Prime to drag me up off that floor.
He got me up onto my feet. Two steps back. The man stayed down on the tile, curled around himself, wheezing red, a hundred phones pointed at all of us.
And there was Storie.
She stood a few feet off with her arms crossed, looking at me.
Not one tear on that child’s face for the man bleeding on the ground or the father who’d just put him there.
She looked at me like you’d look at a stranger who’d made a scene and embarrassed you in front of people.
All attitude. And the first thing out of her mouth was not I’m sorry. It was not are you okay.
“How did you even know I was here?”
That’s what she wanted to know. Standing over a bleeding man with her daddy’s chest still heaving.
Who told.
That was all that was in her head, and something in me went cold looking at her, colder than the rage had been, because rage I understood. This I didn’t.
“Let’s go.” I took her by the arm, firm, and she snatched against it hard.
“Get off me! You’re embarrassing me!”
“I’m embarrassing you.”
“Everybody’s looking!”
“Let them look.” I got my hand around the back of her neck, squeezing hard. Any tougher, the life would’ve lifted out of her body. She would’ve been joining Monica in the afterlife.
It was the only way left to move a child who had lost every right to move herself.
I walked her toward the exit while she twisted and cussed and clawed at my wrist. She told me I was hurting her, which I ain’t care.
Told me she hated me, which I heard. Told me I couldn’t tell her what to do, which was the funniest thing she’d said all day.
We didn’t make the exit.
They came across the concourse fast. Two cops, a pair of county officers a beat behind, hands already up, already telling me to stop, to let the girl go, to get down on the ground.
“That’s my daughter,” I said. “That man back there is a child predator who came here to meet a fifteen-year-old girl.”
“Sir. Put your hands where I can see them.”
Prime slid in beside me, palms open, talking slow and easy. “Officers, that’s his child. He’s her father. That man on the ground is who you need to be putting cuffs on.”
“Everybody’s gonna get sorted out. Right now I need him on the ground.”
I looked at my brother. My brother looked at me. And we both already knew exactly how this went. A Black man standing over another man he’d beaten bloody in a public mall does not get to explain himself first.
I got down on my knees on that food court floor.
They pulled my hands behind my back. The metal went cold around my wrists. And the mall watched it happen, phones up, a Banks down on his knees on the tile like a common criminal.
The last thing I saw before they walked me out was my oldest daughter.
Standing with a cop’s hand on her shoulder, watching them arrest her father, her face completely dry.
“I’ll take her back to the house and sit with the fam until we bail you out,” Prime yelled as they hauled me away.
I wanted to break her damn neck. But this was my fault for not controlling myself. That was it. I was putting her on punishment until she was forty.