Justice
“You want more kids?” Prime asked me while we waited for everyone else to show up. We were in the hotel suite, a two-bedroom at the Four Seasons that Quest had booked because even in wartime the man refused to stay anywhere without thread count standards.
“I’m open to it but the two I got might be enough.”
“Shiiit, who you tellin’. I’m trying to embrace the baby stage right now because I do not want teenagers. I ain’t built for that.”
“Nigga, you’ve survived worse.”
“Ion about that. Ain’t shit worse than catching an attitude from a fourteen-year-old girl.
You walk in the room and she looks at you like you ruined her life just by existing.
And then one day some lil young nigga comes sniffing around and now you gotta decide whether to scare him or bury him. One day that’s gonna be Kheris.”
“Yeah, well, we might have to put the fear of God in a lil nigga named Jaylen before we worry about Kheris.”
“You just tell me when.” We laughed and dapped each other up. He knew I would be down to keep any lil boys away from my nieces just like he would do for me.
I thought about my girls constantly. How to raise them right when their mother wasn’t here to fill in the gaps I couldn’t see.
Monica would’ve known what to do with Storie’s attitude.
She would’ve known when to push and when to let go, when to be soft and when to put her foot down.
I tried my best but there were things a father couldn’t teach his daughters no matter how present he was.
They needed a woman’s touch, a woman’s perspective, a woman’s voice telling them the things about womanhood that I could only observe from the outside.
I wasn’t lonely. I got pussy from time to time.
Had my roster, a few women I took to hotels, one I even brought on vacation to Turks and Caicos last year.
But none of them ever met my kids. Nobody seemed worthy enough to sit at my dinner table and eat with the two people who mattered most to me.
The bar Monica set was too high for most women to reach and I wasn’t interested in lowering it.
We’d been through too much together, survived too much, built too much.
Starting over with somebody new meant opening up all those rooms in myself that I’d locked after she died, and I wasn’t sure I had the keys anymore.
But that was a problem for another day. Right now I had a war to run.
· · ·
Quest walked in first looking like a man who’d been sleeping in hospital chairs for a week, which he had. He’d of course showered and was wearing new clothes, but he still hadn’t had a haircut. And his eyes looked tired and weary.
Behind him came the Kings. Creed came in quiet and deliberate, scanning every corner before he sat down. Riot was next, more energy, more presence, dropping into a chair and spreading out like he owned the suite. Cannon brought up the rear and posted up by the window with his arms crossed.
We all said our greetings. They had become just as much my brothers as Prime and Quest had.
“We found them,” Creed said before anybody had a chance to settle in. “The Rios compound is outside Manassas. It’s a gated property, wooded, set back from the road. They’ve been there since the shipment got hit.”
“How solid is the intel?” I asked.
“Solid enough that I’d bet my name on it. We’ve had eyes on the property for seventy-two hours. Rodrigo’s there. Gabriel’s there. The younger one, Fosso, comes and goes but he’s been in and out. The mother is there too.”
“How many soldiers?” Quest asked.
“That’s the interesting part. Light. Maybe six, seven at most. Before the shipment blew they had a full rotation, twelve to fifteen deep. But when you can’t pay people they tend to find new employment. The Rios family is bleeding out financially and it shows.”
Riot leaned forward. “So we could take the whole compound at once. One coordinated hit, everybody inside, done.”
“That’s the idea,” Creed said. “But I don’t want to go in blind.
I’ve got drones coming in tonight. Military grade surveillance, thermal imaging, the works.
We fly them over the compound tomorrow night, map out every entry point, every patrol pattern, every blind spot.
We see who’s inside, where they sleep, how they move.
Then we build the plan around what the drones show us. ”
“That’s smart,” I said. “We go in with full intelligence and we don’t leave anything to chance.”
Quest had been quiet since Creed started talking. He was sitting on the edge of the couch with a look on his face that I’d seen a thousand times before. The calculating look. The one where his brain was running scenarios faster than he could speak them.
“What about Mateo’s wife and son?” he asked.
“LaLa and Paco are back in Colombia,” Creed said. “She took the kid and flew home after the shipment got hit. With the money gone, the security Rodrigo had on them bailed. They’re unprotected.”
Riot looked at Quest. “Why didn’t you finish her off the first time? She’s the one who told Rodrigo about Mateo. None of this would’ve happened if not for her.” Riot was the wildcard but Quest had a soft spot for kids.
Quest rubbed his hands together slowly. I could see him turning the question over, measuring it against the version of himself that had spared LaLa and Paco in Mateo’s living room. That version of Quest felt like a long time ago.
“I showed mercy,” Quest said. “I let her and the boy live because the boy didn’t have anything to do with his father’s bullshit. That was a mistake I don’t plan on making twice.”
“Both of them?” Prime asked from across the room. His voice was even but I could hear the weight underneath the question. Prime had done a lot of dark things in his life but children were a different conversation.
“Both,” Quest said without hesitation. “I can’t leave that boy out there to grow up knowing the Banks family killed his father, his uncles, and his cousin.
You give a kid that kind of origin story and in fifteen years he shows up at your front door with a gun and a grudge.
I’m not passing that problem down to my daughter. ”
Riot nodded and dapped him up. “I’d do the same. You don’t leave loose threads when the thread is gonna grow up to be a rope.”
“If any of us had lost one of our brothers when we were kids,” I said, “we’d spend our whole lives trying to get even.
Every single one of us in this room would.
So every Rios has to go. The plane crash alone makes this unforgivable.
They tried to kill an unborn baby. You don’t come back from that.
There’s no treaty, no truce, no negotiation that fixes what they did. ”
The room was quiet for a second. Six men sitting with the decision they’d just made. Fathers, all of them, planning to wipe out another family down to the children. The moral weight of it should’ve bent us. Maybe it did. But nobody in that room was bending far enough to change their mind.
“Creed,” Quest said. “The drones. When can you have them over the compound?”
“They’re being shipped to a location in Fairfax tonight. I’ll have them airborne over Manassas by tomorrow night. Give me twenty-four hours of surveillance footage and I’ll have a full tactical picture. Patrol rotations, heat signatures, entry and exit points, all of it.”
“Do it.”
“One more thing,” Creed said. “This compound is rural but it’s not remote. There are properties within a mile radius. Whatever we do, it needs to be contained. No explosions, no fire, nothing that draws attention from a distance. This has to be surgical.”
“Surgical is what we do,” Prime said.
Quest stood up and looked around the room at each of us, knowing he had a solid team.
“Tomorrow night we get the intel. The night after that, we finish this.” He looked at me.
“Call Rita. Tell her to stay in Hartford and keep her head down. Call Serenity and tell her the same. Nobody moves, nobody travels, nobody does anything that puts them in a position to be touched. We go dark until this is done. As a matter of fact, get security on them. I don’t want no mishaps with our grandmother and sister. We gotta protect them and that baby.”
“I’m on it,” I said.
“And Justice?” He paused at the door. “Thank you. For everything you did while I was gone. The search, the plane, the boat, the war. I know what you did to Manny. I know what it cost you. And I need you to know that I see it.”
I nodded because that was all I could do. My brother just told me he saw me. After thirty-something years of being the background brother, the quiet one, the one who kept the lights on while Quest and Prime got the glory and the headlines. He saw me. And that meant more than he probably realized.
“That’s what brothers are for,” I said.
He gave me a look that said everything his words didn’t. Then he walked out with the Kings behind him and I sat in that hotel suite alone and pulled out my phone to make the calls he’d asked me to make.
Rita and Serenity first. Then I called for security for both of them. Then the security team at Hopkins. Then the casino. Lockdown protocol across the board. Nobody in, nobody out, nobody exposed.
Tomorrow night, the drones would fly over the compound in Manassas. Twenty-four hours after that, the Rios family would cease to exist.
I thought about Dream’s goodnight text. Sweet dreams, Daddy. And I thought about LaLa’s son Paco, who was roughly the same age as Dream, living in Colombia with no idea that a room full of men in a Baltimore hotel suite had just decided he didn’t get to grow up.
I pushed that thought down and dialed Rita’s number. Some thoughts don’t deserve airtime. Not tonight.