Chapter 16 Mekhi
Mekhi
“Don’t let him kill me,” Janelle whispered.
She was laid up on a pullout bed in a spot I kept in Hyattsville that nobody knew about.
Not Quest, not Zephyr, not my mama before she passed.
I bought it cash six years ago through an LLC that wasn’t in my name for exactly this type of situation.
The kind where you need to put somebody somewhere and have the world forget they exist for a while.
Janelle’s head was wrapped in white gauze and the bruise on the side of her face had turned a sick yellow-green.
Eleven stitches in the back of her skull, a concussion that had her throwing up every few hours, and eyes that looked like a woman who had finally realized she’d gone too far but couldn’t figure out how to get back.
“I’m not gonna let him kill you, Nelle. But what the fuck were you thinking?”
“I just wanted him back.”
“Wanted him back.” I repeated it because hearing it out loud was the only way to process how insane it sounded.
“You kidnapped his girl. Chained her to a ceiling. Left her hanging in a warehouse with a man who couldn’t even wipe his own ass.
And you thought that was gonna get Quest back?
In what universe does that work, Janelle? ”
“I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“Nah, you was thinking real clearly. You planned this for months. You followed that girl, found her storage unit, extracted Thad, rented a warehouse. That ain’t impulsive.
That’s calculated. So don’t sit here and tell me you wasn’t thinking clearly because you was thinking clearer than you been thinking in years. You just wasn’t thinking smart.”
She looked away from me and I could see her jaw working, grinding on something she wanted to say but kept pulling back.
I knew my sister. I’d known her my whole life.
I could tell when she was holding something back because her left eye would twitch and she’d start picking at her cuticles. Both things were happening right now.
“What ain’t you telling me?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Janelle.”
“It’s nothing, Mekhi. I just… I made mistakes. With Quest, with Quindon, with all of it. And I thought if I could just remove her from the equation, maybe he’d remember what we had.”
“What y’all had died when Quindon died. You know that.”
Something flickered across her face when I said Quindon’s name.
Quick, almost invisible, but I caught it because I’d been reading my sister’s face since she was in diapers.
It wasn’t grief. It was guilt. And the guilt looked different from the guilt I’d seen before, heavier, older, like it had layers I hadn’t peeled back yet.
“Quest got a vasectomy because of what you did,” I said.
“You understand that? That man loved that boy so much that when he found out Quindon wasn’t his, he decided he was never having kids again.
You took that from him. And now you took his girl too.
How many times are you gonna blow up this man’s life before you let him be? ”
“You don’t understand everything that happened.”
“Then explain it to me.”
She opened her mouth, closed it, shook her head. “Not right now. I can’t.”
I stared at her for a long time. My baby sister with the busted head and the secrets she wouldn’t let go of.
I loved this woman. Loved her since the day my mama brought her home from the hospital and put her in my arms and told me it was my job to protect her.
And I’d been doing it ever since, through bad boyfriends and bad decisions and a shopping addiction that put her ninety-four thousand dollars in the hole.
But this was different. This wasn’t a bad decision.
This was a crime. And the man she’d committed it against was the closest thing I had to a brother outside of Zephyr.
“Stay here,” I told her. “Don’t leave, don’t call nobody, don’t post nothing. If you go outside, I can’t protect you. You hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“I mean it, Nelle. Stay put.”
I left the apartment and sat in my truck and stared at the steering wheel.
My phone had been buzzing all morning. Business calls, transport schedules, Zephyr’s physical therapy coordinator asking me to confirm his next appointment.
Life was still happening even though mine felt like it was burning from both ends.
My little brother couldn’t walk. My sister was in hiding. And my best friend wanted her dead.
Twenty years. Me and Quest been rocking for twenty years.
Since we was seventeen running product in Banks Reserve trucks because his granddad’s company was bleeding money and nobody had a better idea.
I taught him the street side. He taught me the business side.
We built something together that turned both of us into millionaires and I never once questioned his loyalty or his judgment. Not once.
Until now.
My phone rang. Quest’s name on the screen. I let it ring twice before I picked up because I needed those two seconds to put everything I was feeling behind the wall.
“I got a lead on Mega,” he said. No hello, no how you doing. Straight business. That’s how it was between us now. “Riggs Road in Northeast. You in or not?”
“I’m in. When?”
“Now. Meet me on the corner of Riggs and South Dakota in thirty.”
“Aight.”
He hung up without saying bye. I did the same.
I made it to the corner in twenty-five. Quest was already there, leaning against the Maybach with his arms crossed.
He looked like he’d finally slept since the last time I saw him, which was more than I could say for myself.
Fresh clothes, fresh cut, jaw set tight.
He looked like a man who had something worth protecting and was done negotiating with anyone who threatened it.
I parked behind him and got out. We stood on that corner about six feet apart and the distance felt like six miles. Two men who used to finish each other’s sentences standing in silence because neither one of us knew how to start a conversation that didn’t end in a threat.
“Where’s Janelle?” he asked.
“Where’s Bryce?”
He looked at me. I looked at him. Neither of us answered. Two men holding each other’s blood hostage and both of us knowing it. Stalemate.
“We doing this or not?” I said.
He pushed off the car and walked toward the address.
I followed. We moved in sync the way we always had because twenty years of operating together puts something in your muscle memory that anger can’t erase overnight.
He went left, I went right. He covered the front, I covered the back.
We didn’t need to discuss it. The choreography was automatic even if the trust behind it was gone.
The house on Riggs Road matched the description.
Big, white shutters, two-car garage. Quest kicked the front door on the second try and we went in hot.
Living room cleared. Kitchen cleared. Bedrooms cleared.
Basement cleared. Every room in that house was empty.
Not just empty like nobody was home. Empty like somebody had packed in a hurry and bounced.
Drawers pulled open, closet half cleared out, a pizza box with two slices still in it sitting on the counter.
He’d been here recently. Maybe even today.
Quest stood in the living room looking at a ring camera mounted above the front door. He reached up and ripped it off the wall with one pull, wires and drywall dust coming with it. He turned it over in his hands and looked at the lens.
“He saw us coming,” Quest said.
“Or somebody told him we was coming.” I looked at him and didn’t blink. “Your boy Bryce is the one who gave you this address, right? The same lil nigga who robbed you and burned your warehouse? And you just trusted him?”
“He’s cooperating.”
“He’s full of shit is what he is. He probably called Mega the second you left him and told him to dip. That kid can’t be trusted, Quest. I been telling you from the jump.”
“You been telling me from the jump that you wanted to put a bullet in his skull before you knew who he was.”
“And maybe I should’ve. Because now Mega’s in the wind and we got nothing.”
“We got the stash house on Benning Road.”
“Which is probably cleaned out too if Bryce tipped him on this one.” I shook my head. “You protecting that kid because his sister got you wide open. That ain’t strategy. That’s emotion.”
“Don’t talk to me about emotion. You got your sister in a hideout somewhere refusing to give up her location while she recovers from kidnapping my girl. That’s emotion too, nigga.”
“My sister is my blood.”
“And Mehar is mine.”
“See, that’s what I can’t get past.” I took a step toward him. “You known this girl for a few months. A FEW MONTHS. And you willing to throw away everything we built, everything we bled for, over a bitch you just met.”
I saw it coming but I didn’t move. I let him hit me because part of me wanted this fight as bad as he did.
His fist caught me on the left side of my jaw and my head snapped to the right and the taste of blood filled my mouth immediately.
I came back with a right hand to his ribs and felt it connect solid and he grunted but didn’t fold.
He threw another one, caught me above the eye, and I felt the skin split.
I grabbed his collar and tried to pull him toward me but he was already ahead of it, broke my grip with one arm and cracked me across the mouth with the other.
I swung wild and he slipped it like he’d seen it coming before I even threw it.
That was the thing about fighting Quest. You couldn’t surprise him and you couldn’t outlast him.
He was faster, stronger, and meaner when it mattered.
He came back with a combination that caught me in the stomach and the jaw and my knees buckled for a second and that was all he needed.
He grabbed me by the back of my neck and drove my face into the kitchen counter and I hit the tile floor hard enough to see white.
I tried to get up but he was already over me with his fist cocked back and murder in his eyes. Real murder. Not the business kind we’d done together for twenty years. Personal. This was a man looking down at me deciding whether to end something that couldn’t be unended.
He didn’t swing. He stood up and stepped back. His breathing was heavy but his voice came out steady. Not a mark on him.
“We’re done.”
I rolled onto my side and spit blood onto Mega’s kitchen tile. My eye was swelling shut and my jaw felt like it was hanging wrong. “What, nigga?”
“It means the partnership is over. You’re not cleaning money through my casino anymore. Your transport contracts with Banks Reserve are terminated. Whatever business connects your name to mine, consider it severed. Effective now.”
I sat up slow. Leaned my back against the cabinet under the sink and looked up at this man I’d known since we was kids. This man I’d helped build into what he was. This man whose trucks moved my product and whose casino laundered my cash and whose family I’d protected like my own for two decades.
“Aight,” I said. I spit another mouthful of blood onto the floor. “Cool.”
He looked at me for another second, turned around, and walked out the front door.
I heard his car start and pull away and then the house was quiet and I was sitting on a dead man’s kitchen floor bleeding from my face and trying to figure out how I lost my best friend, my brother’s legs, and my entire financial infrastructure in the span of two weeks.
I sat there for a long time. Then I pulled out my phone and called the only person in my life who hadn’t betrayed me or threatened me or cut me off.
“Hey, big bro.” Zephyr’s voice was tired but warm. He was always warm, even from a hospital bed, even after everything. “You aight?”
“Yeah,” I lied. “I’m good. How you feeling?”
“Same as yesterday. Still can’t feel my legs. Still fine as fuck though.”
I almost laughed. Almost. “That’s debatable.”
“You sound funny. What happened?”
“Nothing. Just had a long day.”
“Mekhi. What happened?”
I leaned my head back against the cabinet and closed my eyes and told the truth for the first time all day. “I think I just lost Quest, bro.”
Zephyr was quiet for a minute. Then: “Fuck that nigga. It’s war now.”