Chapter 9
I shot up out of my sleep so fast, I woke up in a cold sweat. Everything that happened these past couple of months was catching up with me. I had a war wound to prove that. I reached over and grabbed my bottle of water off my nightstand.
I put my face in my hands and stayed there for a minute. The dream happened again. It’s like, I knew every night that I closed my eyes, I was more than likely about to have the same one.
The dream was always the same. I could see my father’s death vividly, like I was standing right there watching it happen. I was one year old when my father died.
I didn’t have a memory of it, nor was I there to actually witness it.
But, ever since I read those files in Legal’s office I had been dreaming it like I was there.
Like my mind had built the scene from the documents, the photographs and the voicemail transcript.
Now, my mind had decided to play it back for me every night whether I wanted it to or not.
I laid back, stared at the ceiling and thought about how I got here.
—
It started during spring break.
I had come home from Austin for the week to chill with my moms. A nigga couldn’t lie, I was homesick and missing my moms like crazy.
We’d never been away from one another more than a few days.
College was a whole new life for me, and I just had to adjust. I was for sho’ a mommas boy, she was all I knew, but I kept that shit in the house.
Outside, niggas knew not to play with me.
On the field or in real life. Melo had gone to see some girl he’d been talking to in Houston instead of going home with me, so I had a few days to myself.
Yeah, I loved twin, but we ain’t had time apart since we came into this world.
I wanted to do my own thing at times, and so did he now.
Things moved fast once I touched back down in Dallas for my break.
Legal called me the second day I was home and asked if I wanted to come by his office, catch up on how school has been and earn a lil money working with him while I was here.
That was Legal’s way of saying he wanted to spend time without making it into a big deal.
He was like that. Always had been. He showed up in ways that didn’t announce themselves loudly.
He wanted to put some money in my pocket, but wanted to make it seem as if I was working for it, although I knew he wouldn’t want me to do much.
I rode over there the same day that he had called.
We ordered food and talked for a couple hours about school, football and where I saw myself in five years.
Legal was one of the few people in my life who talked to me like I was a full grown man with a real future and not just Street’s little brother or one of Hood’s boys.
He had always done that with me and Melo both.
I loved him for it even when I didn’t say it.
I was kickin it with him at his office when he got a call that pulled him into court unexpectedly.
He told me to make myself comfortable and familiar with everything in the office.
He’d told me that I could start organizing all his files in alphabetical order, all except for the large file cabinet in the corner of the office.
That one was already sorted and off limits.
He left me the code to his filing cabinet and said that he’d be back in a few hours.
I wasn’t looking for nothing. I was just working like he’d asked me to.
That’s what I need people to understand if they ever found out what I did.
I wasn’t snooping or going through his shit.
I wasn’t trying to get into something that wasn’t my business.
I was cleaning up around his desk at first because Legal kept papers thrown around, unorganized and that shit bothered me.
I knew he was a busy man and had to do multiple things at a time, so I was just going to fix it up for him.
I was straightening files and putting folders back where they belonged when I saw a name and file number on a sticky tab that he had underneath everything else on the desk.
Xavier Hood Hendrix Sr.
I stood there holding that tab for a while. I realized, the tab had the exact location of which file he’d placed my father’s folder in. I thought about it long and hard before I decided to go into that file cabinet. It just so happened to be the one that he told me that he didn’t want me to touch.
What was inside changed everything for me, and that moment led up to the position that I was in now.
—
Legal had been building a file on my father’s murder for years.
Decades. There were documents in there going back to right after my father died.
Legal had police reports, witness statements that went nowhere, photographs of the murder scene that I had to put face down on the desk because I wasn’t ready for what they showed.
There were notes in Legal’s handwriting on yellow legal pads.
Pages and pages of them. Names, dates, connections he had traced, lost and picked back up again over the years.
From what I could see, Legal was trying to solve his best friends murder but kept hitting dead ends.
My father had been one fight away from becoming a legitimate heavyweight contender.
The biggest fight of his career was scheduled and if he won, a title shot was right there in front of him.
Hood had been the real big name, and everyone who knew my father had always told us that.
Everybody who saw him fight said it. Legal’s notes confirmed it.
He had the hands, the power, the heart, everything Street has right now but twenty years earlier.
And somebody had taken that from him before it could happen.
There was a document in the file, a formal written request that Legal had somehow obtained. The man was in the streets really working when it came to finding out what happened to my father. I saw that now.
The document was from a credible source that witnessed a group of men who had significant money riding on Hood losing that fight.
They were the kind of men who operated in the space between legitimate business and organized crime.
Bookmakers. Men who moved large amounts of illegal betting money through what looked like investment operations on the surface.
They had approached my father and offered him fifty thousand dollars to throw the fight.
Of course he said no. From all the stories I’d heard, my father always stood on integrity.
Legal’s notes said that his best friend, my father, Hood had come to him after and told him everything.
Told him the name attached to the request. The man behind it all who everybody called Veteran.
Legal had written that name down, circled it and drawn a line to every other name in the file and that line connected everything.
Veteran. Wanted my father to throw the fight because of all the money they had riding on his opponent winning.
The night before his big fight Hood had gotten another message.
They wanted to meet him again. Said they had another solution they wanted to discuss.
Legal’s notes said Hood had called him that night and left a voicemail.
He was taking Street with him to the meeting because his wife Kat was at her sister’s house with the twins.
He said he thought it was going to be a conversation with another offer that didn’t involve throwing the fight.
He sounded calm on the voicemail. Legal had the transcript of it right there in the file and I read it three times.
I had to put it down the third time because my hands were shaking.
Hood, my father never came back from that meeting.
When Legal got the voicemail and rushed to the location he found a five year old Xavier Jr. standing in a parking lot holding his father’s bloody, lifeless body and crying in the dark.
I sat at Legal’s desk for a long time after I finished reading that. I never cried about shit, but this brought tears to my eyes as I sat there and held those papers.
I thought about Street. About all the times I had watched my brother move through life carrying something heavy that he never talked about.
The way he fought — not just in the cage but every day, like he was always trying to prove something to somebody who wasn’t there anymore.
I understood it differently now. He had been standing in that parking lot at five years old and something in him had never fully left it.
My brother was only a baby when he witnessed our father life being taken, and I knew although he didn’t say it, that shit has to be eating him up.
He was forced to be a man too early in life because the only man we had was stolen away from us.
My brother never complained about shit, he just always did what needed to be done for his family.
I thought about my mama. About every morning she left that house before sunrise to go work a job that was killing her slowly so her boys wouldn’t feel the absence of what Hood’s death had taken from us financially.
I thought about Legal. Going to court every day.
Building a career. Sitting ringside at every one of Street’s fights with that specific look on his face that I had never been able to fully read until now.
He had been carrying this for twenty years.
Investigating it quietly. Hitting walls.
Coming up short. Never telling any of us because telling us meant giving us a burden he had decided was his to carry alone.
I respected that and it broke my heart at the same time. All the people in my life had done all they could to protect and shelter us from pain.
I put everything back exactly the way I found it and I left Legal’s office. I sat in my car in the parking lot for almost an hour before I could drive. The people responsible for taking a great man away from his family, they needed to pay.
—