37. JUSTICE
JUSTICE
But back then when I was arrested I didn’t have shit to lose. Right now I was worried about my family back home. I knew Prime would watch over my kingdom. And I knew in my heart Skye would help him hold it down.
I just didn’t like not being there for them.
I sat on the metal bench with my back against the block wall and my eyes half closed, not sleeping, just waiting the night out.
There were maybe six of us in there. A drunk snoring in the corner.
Two young boys who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, trying to look harder than they were.
And a big one across from me who’d been watching me since they walked me in, sizing me up, working something out in his head.
I already knew what it was. I’d worn it my entire life.
I looked like money. I was the only one in there with a suit on.
Despite having another man’s blood on my knuckles, I looked like a man who had something.
And there’s a certain kind of man who sees that and cannot leave it alone.
Sees a clean, quiet, well-off Black man in a cage with him and takes it personal.
Like me having money is a thing I did to him.
He pushed up off his bench and crossed the cell. Then he stood over me, close, blocking the light, waiting for me to look up at him like that was supposed to mean something.
“You lost, pretty boy?” The nigga was loud so the young ones would hear it. “This ain’t the country club. What you in here for, tax fraud?”
Without opening my eyes, I replied, “Nigga you stink. Go sit your funky big ass down.”
“Fuck you just say to me?”
I opened my eyes.
Here’s what men like him never understand until it’s too late.
They see the suit. They see the calm. They think that means soft.
They think a man who talks low and moves slow is a man who won’t do nothing when it counts.
But they’ve spent their lives around loud men.
Barkers. Chest-beaters. Men who tell you exactly what they’re gonna do before they do it, if they ever work up the nerve to do it at all.
Those men, he can read. And those men don’t scare me either.
Me, he couldn’t read.
Because the loud ones want you to feel it coming.
I don’t. I’ve never once in my life told a man what I was about to do to him.
I just did it, and stepped over what was left.
That’s the difference between us that this fool was about to learn.
He came up on the quiet one thinkin’ he was gon’ bitch me.
Put me in my place like I was some simp.
He had no idea he’d just walked up on the last face some men ever saw.
He reached down to grab a handful of my suit jacket.
I came up off that bench and had his own arm turned back on him before his fingers closed, spun him, and got my forearm locked across his throat from behind, deep in the v of my elbow where the pressure does its work. He was bigger than me. Didn’t matter. Big just meant you hit the floor harder.
He thrashed. Grabbed at my arm. His elbow came back and caught me in the ribs. I barely felt it. I was somewhere cold and familiar, a place I know better than my own living room.
“Shhh,” I said in his ear, calm like I was lulling a baby to sleep. “Stop fighting it. You fight it, it just hurts more.”
The young boys were on their feet now, pressed to the far wall.
The drunk kept snoring. And I held that man up on his toes with his own weight helping me kill the lights in his eyes, counting it out in my head, because I wasn’t trying to catch a body while in this cell. I was just trying to make a point.
He went slack.
I dropped his big ass on the ground, head cracking against the concrete floor.
Tax fraud, I thought to myself. That was a lil funny. But I don’t fuck with the IRS. There’s only two things I’m scared of… Rita and the IRS.
I stood up and looked at the two young boys frozen against the wall. “He’ll probably be aight. Check on him in the morning.” I went back to my bench. Sat down. Closed my eyes again. But not to sleep. Just to think.
Nobody in that cell said one more word to me the rest of the night.
With the excitement handled, the night got long and quiet, and my mind went where it wanted to go.
It went to her.
Even here. Even in a cage with a man laid out on the floor a couple of feet away, some fool part of me was thinking about Skye.
The weight of her across my chest in that theater.
That sound she made. I had a woman under my roof who tasted like the first good thing in three years.
Now here I was in a county cell, thinking about the curve of her hips instead of my own arraignment.
But it wasn’t just her body I kept circling. That’s what surprised me.
It was the scar. How she flew up off that couch when my fingers found it.
The tired eyes she covers with makeup. The jump in her when a board hit the concrete at the stable.
Somebody did something to that woman. Bad enough to make her flinch at loud sounds.
Bad enough to put a fake name in her mouth and bury everything that came before it.
Somebody hurt her. And then, if the story she gave me was even half true, somebody left her for her own sister on top of it.
I found myself wanting to know his name.
Not to talk to him. I was long past wanting to talk to men who put their hands on women.
I wanted to know his name so I’d have it.
So it would be sitting in my pocket, ready, for the day I decided to go collect on it.
Because a man who could do enough to a woman to leave a scar like that on her chest was a man who needed to meet somebody like me exactly once.
I’d been that somebody plenty of times, for plenty of women, for a lot less reason than I was feeling right now.
I didn’t even have the man’s name and I already knew how it would end if I ever got it. And I would eventually get it.
Then, because a cell gives you nothing to do but sit in your own head, my mind went to Storie.
It always came back to Storie.
I thought about her face at that mall. Dry and bored, watching them cuff her daddy on a food court floor like it was a show she’d seen before and hadn’t cared for the first time either. And I made myself sit in a thing I’d spent a year refusing to sit in.
Where does a child get that from?
Because I know myself. I know what runs in me.
I come from people who did what they had to do and slept fine.
My grandmother built an empire on liquor she wasn’t supposed to be making and men she paid to look the other way.
I have put hands, and worse than hands, on people who had it coming.
Then walked away and eaten a good dinner that same night.
There is a coldness in the Banks blood that goes back further than any of us can name.
A thing in us that can look at a hard choice and just make it.
I always thought that was my burden to carry. My cross. The price of keeping everybody else safe.
Sitting in that cell, I started to wonder for the first time if I’d passed it down.
If my baby girl came out of me carrying the cold and not one thing to aim it at.
No empire to run. No enemies to keep off her family.
Just the ice in her veins, a dead mother, and a father who kept trying to love it out of her.
When maybe the truth was simpler and worse.
Maybe she was just like me. And maybe I was the last person on earth with any right to be scared of that, seeing as I made her.
Maybe I did this. Maybe she’s mine in the one way I always prayed she wouldn’t be.
I put my head back against that cold block wall and closed my eyes.
And the last thought I had before my mind bounced off to other things was a dumb, small, human one. I wondered if a single one of those therapists I’d been leaving messages for had bothered to call me back yet.
Somebody was going to have to help me save my child.
I just hoped to God it wasn’t already too late.