Justice
Every time one fire was put out in this family, another one sparked just to remind us we weren’t allowed to rest. A nigga like me just wanted one regular Saturday.
One. Wake up, drop my kids off, maybe hit the office for a few hours, grab some food, watch the game.
That’s it. That’s the whole list. But being a Banks meant your Saturdays came with warrants and phone calls from your grandmother at eight in the morning telling you your pregnant sister just got dragged out of her kitchen in handcuffs.
Who in the fuck did the cops think Serenity killed?
I knew my little sister and she was soft.
Serenity couldn’t even watch scary movies without covering her eyes.
The only person I knew she’d ever killed was Mega, and that nigga deserved every bullet he caught.
But even that was hard for her. She cried about it afterward.
She cried about killing a man who kidnapped her and held her at gunpoint while she was carrying his baby.
That’s how soft Serenity was. So the idea that she had a murder warrant from Connecticut for some teacher she allegedly killed over a decade ago wasn’t making sense to me. Not yet. But I was gonna find out.
“Does this mean we ain’t gotta go to Pittsburgh?” Storie asked from the backseat. Attitude fully intact. Crisis or no crisis, this girl was still lobbying for her summer.
“Noooo! I wanna see Grammy!” Dream whined.
“Chill. You’re both still going to Pittsburgh. I just need to handle something first,” I said, pulling into Rita’s driveway.
Rita was standing in the doorway when we got out of the car. She wasn’t crying. Rita didn’t cry in front of people. But her jaw was set tight, her hands gripping the doorframe. She looked like a woman who had been holding herself together by sheer will since the cops left. And she was running low.
Dream ran up the steps and hugged her around the waist. Rita’s face softened for half a second. She put her hand on Dream’s head and said, “Hey, sugar. Go on downstairs and find something to watch on TV.”
Storie walked up the steps with her phone in her hand, barely looking up. “Hey, Grandma Rita. Can I have the wifi pass—”
“Storie Monique Banks.” Rita’s voice dropped to a register that could crack concrete.
She couldn’t see Storie’s face, but she didn’t need to.
Rita could hear disrespect in a heartbeat from across a room.
“Your auntie just got taken out of my house in handcuffs and you walkin’ up in here asking me about wifi?
Put that phone in your pocket, fix your face, and take yourself downstairs before I fix it for you.
And I promise you, baby, you will not like my version. ”
Storie’s mouth opened. Then closed. The phone disappeared into her pocket so fast you would’ve thought it was on fire. She walked past Rita with her eyes on the floor and headed downstairs without another word.
I almost laughed. Almost. Rita had a gift. The woman could barely see but she could shut down a teenager with the precision of a surgeon. I’d been battling Storie all morning and got nowhere. Rita ended it in three sentences. If I could, I’d send her bad ass to live with Rita.
But if I can handle the most dangerous thugs, then I can handle this little girl. It’s just a nigga needed a lil help.
I followed Rita inside and she closed the door behind us and the house was quiet in that heavy way a house gets when something bad has happened in it recently.
“Y’all can go down and watch TV,” Rita called out toward the stairs, making sure both girls were settled. Then she turned to me. “Sit down, baby.”
I plopped down on the sofa. Rita shuffled to the cabinet, poured two fingers of Banks Reserve into a tumbler, and handed it to me. Nine-thirty in the morning and my grandmother was serving me whiskey. That told me everything about where her head was at.
“Tell me exactly what happened,” I said. “From the beginning.”
Rita sat down in her chair, the one by the window where she always sat. “We were in the kitchen. Somebody knocked…” She began to explain.
“So they say she murdered a man named David Jamison. I don’t know who the fuck that is,” I shook my head.
“Boy, watch your damn mouth! You ain’t too grown to beat. I’ll tag you and that lil heifer downstairs.” Rita cracked a smile.
“Sorry, grandma. Do you know who that is, though? I’ve never heard the name.”
“Baby, I don’t. Serenity ain’t no killa! This is that damn Vivica. Even in death, she’s raising hell.”
“In hell, raising hell.” I shook my head.
“I’ll get it fixed. She will not be delivering my nephew in a jail cell. We can’t let what happened to Zainab happen to her.”
I pulled out my phone and called Xander Wall.
Xander and I went back to Hampton. His father was locked up doing life on drug charges and Xander had turned that pain into a law degree and a practice that specialized in the kind of cases that made other lawyers nervous.
He’d done work for us before and had gotten us out of a few binds.
He was sharp, discreet, and he didn’t flinch at complicated.
Right now, complicated was an understatement.
He picked up on the third ring.
“X, it’s Justice. I need a lawyer.”
“What’s up?”
“My sister just got arrested. Murder warrant out of Connecticut. Cold case. They’re extraditing her today. She’s pregnant and she’s sitting in a cell somewhere right now and I need you to get to her before they transport her out of state.”
Silence for two seconds. Then: “I’m on it. Send me everything you got. Name of the victim, arresting department, warrant number if you have it. I’ll be on a flight to Hartford by tonight.”
“That’s why I fuck with you, X.”
“Yeah, you know I got her.”
I hung up and looked at Rita. “Xander’s on it. He’s heading to Connecticut tonight. He’ll get to her. She’s gonna have a bail hearing and we’re gonna get her out. She’s not having this baby in a jail cell, Grandma. I promise you that.”
Rita nodded but her hands were still folded tight in her lap and I could see the tension in her fingers.
She wasn’t convinced. Rita believed in preparation, not promises.
She’d believe Serenity was safe when Serenity was standing in this living room with her belly and her freedom intact.
Until then, Rita was going to sit in that chair and worry with the intensity of a woman who had spent her whole life watching her family survive things they shouldn’t have had to survive in the first place.
“I need to call Quest,” I said, more to myself than to her. “He needs to know about this.”
I pulled up Quest’s number and hit call. It rang four times and went to voicemail.
I hung up and tried Mehar. Straight to voicemail. Didn’t even ring.
I looked at the time. They’d left yesterday afternoon.
The flight to the ABC islands was about four hours.
Quest booked a trip to a private island called Isla Solara, right outside of Bonaire.
Even with settling in and getting to the private island, Quest should’ve called by now.
He always called when he landed. Always.
It was a thing between us. You get where you’re going, you check in.
We’d been doing it since the transport days when a missed check-in meant something had gone wrong and somebody needed to start making moves.
But this wasn’t transport. This was a babymoon.
My brother was on a private island with his pregnant fiancée probably drinking something with an umbrella in it, rubbing cocoa butter on Mehar’s belly, being the over-the-top, rich nigga romantic that he was.
He’d call when he surfaced. Probably tomorrow.
Probably with a long story about the villa and the view and how he was about to buy the whole island because that’s what Quest does.
He sees something he likes and he acquires it.
I put the phone down and took another sip of Banks Reserve and told myself it was nothing.
It was probably nothing.
I sent him a text anyway. Call me when you get this. Serenity got arrested. Murder charge out of Connecticut. Long story. Need to talk.
Then I called Erika and asked her if she could drive down from Pittsburgh to pick up the girls from Rita’s.
She said of course. She said she’d be there by the evening.
I told her I’d explain later and she didn’t push it because Erika had been married into the orbit of the Banks family long enough to know that “I’ll explain later” meant the explanation was going to be exhausting.
I sat back on Rita’s sofa with the whiskey in my hand and my phone on my thigh and tried to organize the chaos into something I could manage.
Serenity. Connecticut. Murder. A dead man nobody had ever mentioned.
Vivica pulling strings from the afterlife.
And my brother on vacation not answering his phone.
A nigga like me couldn’t even get a Saturday.