Chapter 2
I didn’t sleep after that call.
I laid on the couch with my eyes on the ceiling and Simone’s soft snoring coming from the bedroom. I had my phone face up on my chest. The crib was quiet, dark and felt like it was closing in on me a little bit at a time.
Somebody on the other end of that phone had called me Deon.
Not Gutta. But Deon. My government. The name that not even the people closest to me would use. That detail alone told me this wasn’t some random street shit. Somebody was doing research.
And they said I had a target on my back and from the callers tone, I believed that shit.
I sat up, put my feet on the floor and stayed there in the dark trying to think straight. So much had transpired today, a nigga didn’t know if I was going or coming.
Every threat I ever had to handle, I could trace back to a source.
I always knew who was coming, why and what my options were.
This was different. Private number, unfamiliar voice and a message that could connect to more than one thing I had done in my life.
Not knowing which one it was about meant I couldn’t figure out how to move next.
So I ran through all of it in my head from all angles.
Sandra was the first place my mind went to.
Four years ago I had taken Tavarus’s wife out of a grocery store parking lot at gunpoint and held her for four days while I extorted her husband for a hundred thousand dollars.
She had gone back home safely. I had walked away clean.
She had looked me in my eyes before I let her go, and she told me what happened between us was going to her grave.
She made it clear that she was going to tell her husband that she never saw her abductors faces.
I laughed when she said it, because at that time I was a young hot head, and I didn’t give a damn if she told him who I was or not.
I had heat for that nigga because of what he did to my cousin.
At the same time, I knew there was no way Sandra could tell him who I really was, even if she wanted to.
She didn’t have my name, the only way that she could describe me was by my face.
There was several black niggas in the hood with a dimple and deep waves in his head.
I had believed her when she said that she wasn’t going to tell him anything though.
I knew exactly why she wanted to keep me a secret, and I respected her freaky ass for it.
She begged for the nigga that kidnapped her to fuck her, and she allowed me to do it raw.
Ain’t no way that she was ever gonna go home and tell all that to her husband. No way.
Still, Tavarus was thorough in a way that most people underestimated.
Patient. The kind of man who absorbed information quietly and held it until he knew exactly what to do with it.
If he had ever put together that it was me behind what happened to Sandra he would have sat on it.
Watched. Let me get comfortable. Let me build something worth destroying before he destroyed it.
Maybe I was being paranoid, but that’s the kind of nigga that he was, and I knew that.
The timing of all this shit made my stomach turn.
Me and Simone were putting an offer on a house.
Street about to fight for a world title.
My corner man money coming in consistent and legitimate.
Everything finally lined up in the right direction for me.
That was exactly when a patient man made his move.
What better time to try and take me down? I had the life niggas would pray for.
Then Amara’s face came back to me.
All day I had been thinking about that baby since I left that store.
Every time I got close to focusing on something else that little girl’s face pulled me right back.
My jaw. My nose. My eyes looking up at me from the cereal aisle like she already knew something the rest of us were still figuring out.
I had to know. Was that baby, my baby?
I picked up my phone and found Sandra’s number.
She had given it to me the day I let her go.
Said she would make her husband get her a new phone the next day since I had destroyed her old one.
She said that she’s had that number for years and that she’d never change it.
I had kept it for four years without using it and without deleting it and now I finally understood why.
I went to her number that I had saved, and I sent a text.
Me: You know who this is. We need to talk. About the little girl you had with you in the grocery store. She looked too familiar for me to just let slide. I know what I saw. You know what I saw, and we need to get to the bottom of a three year secret.
I sent it before I could talk myself out of it and put the phone down on the cushion beside me. It was late, so I wasn’t expecting a message back tonight.
Three minutes passed.
Then my phone buzzed.
Sandra: You have the wrong number.
I stared at that for a second, then I typed back.
Me: Nah. I have the right one. If you wanna keep shit cool between us, please don’t play with me about something so serious. I’d hate to have to blow up yo spot.
She left me on read for two full minutes and then she texted me back. She knew what kind of nigga I was, just from our short encounter. I could be dangerous, or I could be a nice nigga. She knew first hand that it depended on the way she’d act.
Sandra: There is no truth to know. My daughter is my husband’s child.
Don’t contact me again. Ever. If you do I will tell my husband somebody has been harassing me and I will let him handle it.
Do not reach out to me again. Especially not now.
Live your life Gutta. And yes, I’ve done my digging too.
I read it three times.
Then I put the phone face down on the couch cushion. I leaned back and looked at the ceiling.
She had shut it down so fast and so hard that it almost felt rehearsed. Like she had been waiting for this moment and had her response ready before I even sent the message. She wasn’t about to keep me from what was mine.
—
She was going to protect her life that she’s built with that nigga, and as much as I understood that, I still had to be real with myself.
I couldn’t even be mad at her for it, but again, she wasn’t about to deprive me from knowing the truth and letting me decide what was next.
Sandra had a husband, a home, a daughter she was raising and a marriage she had decided was worth keeping.
What I was offering her was chaos. A conversation that blew everything up. Her whole life that was built on a lie.
A man from her past who had no place in her present coming back around asking questions that had no easy answers. Hell, what we had was brief and never should have happened, but since it did, we both had to face the music.
She had made her choice. I did too.
The problem was that her choice left me sitting on this couch at four in the morning with a baby face burned into my memory and I couldn’t stop thinking about.
My heart beat differently now, and I couldn’t explain this shit.
Yesterday, being a father never crossed my mind.
Since I’ve seen that little girl, I didn’t want to go on without knowing if she was mine.
I knew that if she was, I was at risk of losing a lot, but I would gain a daughter.
I couldn’t claim what I couldn’t prove. I couldn’t prove anything without Sandra and Sandra had just made it crystal clear she wasn’t going to cooperate.
The hardest pill to swallow was that little girl who looked exactly like me, she was being raised by a man who probably wasn’t her father.
In a house I had no access to.
I picked up my phone one more time.
Opened a thread to a number I hadn’t used in almost two years. Somebody who specialized in finding things people didn’t want found. No trail, no questions, just results. I knew exactly how I was going to handle Sandra. I just needed to handle the threat on my life first.
Me: Need you to run a private number for me. This shit is life or death type urgent. I’ll make it worth your while, especially if you get me the info in a timely manner.
After the message was sent, I sat back on the couch listening to the sound of my clock on the wall tick.
Two things were sitting on me that I couldn’t put down no matter how hard I tried. Somebody wanted me dead and I didn’t know who. And I had a child I couldn’t claim and didn’t know how.
Either one of those alone was enough to keep a man up all night.
Both of them together at the same time with Simone sleeping twenty feet away thinking everything was fine — that was a different kind of weight. The kind that settled into your chest and tugged at a nigga heart.
I couldn’t sleep tonight if I wanted to.
I also couldn’t get in the bed with my girl, she knew me and she would fa sho’ know that something was wrong.
But I stayed still on the sofa and let my mind work because that’s all I could do right now.
Work the problem. Stay calm. Figure out the next move before the next move figured me out.
Whatever was coming I wasn’t going to let it catch me slipping.
—
I must had dozed off somewhere around five in the morning because the next thing I knew, I felt somebody was standing over me as I slept.
Being a nigga from the hood, my body automatically woke me up from that feeling.
I jumped up out of my sleep, and off that couch so fast I almost knocked Simone down.
“GUTTA—”