Chapter 9 #2
After that I couldn’t leave it alone.
I knew I should have. I knew the smart thing was to talk to Legal about what I found, then let him handle it the way he had been handling it.
But Legal had been handling it for twenty years and this Veteran nigga was still out there.
Still untouchable. Still a ghost that circulated through the streets.
Getting to live his life after taking one away from us.
I had resources Legal didn’t have. I was young and I moved in circles that an old attorney couldn’t access.
Yeah, my family kept me from the street life but I still was raised in the trenches before my brother pulled us out.
I knew people who knew people and I started pulling threads quietly at first and then more aggressively.
I knew that I needed to infiltrate my way in.
When I put my ear to the streets on who this nigga was, every thread led back to Tavarus.
Tavarus was Veteran’s foot soldier and flunky. His operation on the ground. The man who handled the day to day so that Veteran never had to get his hands dirty or show his face anywhere that could be traced back to him. When I realized that, I also realized I had found my way in.
I went to Tavarus.
When he found out who I was…Hood’s son, Street’s little brother — something shifted in his face that I peeped immediately.
Not guilt exactly. Something more calculated than that.
It felt like recognition. Like he had been expecting this moment and wasn’t sure yet what it meant that it had finally arrived.
He welcomed me in like I belonged there, but I felt like something was kinda off with him.
Street never mentioned this nigga, but he ran it down to me as if Street knew him well and trusted him.
I let him welcome me because getting close to Tavarus was the only way I was ever going to get close to Veteran.
I immediately got my first back from him during that break, and I started moving it.
I had to do what needed to be done because I was only in this shit for a greater cause.
I wanted to show I was loyal and a hard worker so that I could get close to the nigga responsible for killing my pops.
From what I could hear, over 20 years later, and he is still terrorizing the streets. That couldn’t keep happening.
I had been working that angle for months.
Even after spring break was over, I was still getting and moving work for him.
I even did the shit on campus so that I could make it look like I was serious.
Yeah. It was dumb and risky, but my whole life had been a struggle all because someone took my father away from us before we even got a real chance to have him.
Right now, I was doing whatever it took and I’d deal with the consequences later.
For months, I built a good relationship with Tavarus and it was understood that me working for him would stay between us.
He knew that it couldn’t get back to my family because I was a trophy son and the hood idol right now.
That went without saying. We both had motives and it was cool.
He had no idea what I was using him for.
But then, while I’m home for summer break, two weeks ago, I was outside that trap house on Morrell.
It was a regular day, and I caught a bullet to the arm.
From my knowledge, nothing like that ever happened and the niggas didn’t have no active beef, so I was still lost as to how the fuck I wound up getting shot at.
I ended up in a hospital bed looking at my brother’s face while I lied to him about why I was there.
—
The hardest part of all of it wasn’t the bullet.
The hardest part was Melo.
My twin had known something was off with me for months before I got shot. We had been in each other’s space our whole lives and there wasn’t a part of me that he couldn’t read even when I was doing everything right to hide it.
He had asked me straight up twice what I was into and both times I had given him enough to get him off my back without giving him the real answer.
Both times I had felt the shift when I lied, like something that didn’t even happen between us, it was happening now.
We’d always been one another’s keeper, but I immediately felt a shift when he saw me changing.
Me and Melo didn’t keep secrets from each other.
That was just the truth of how we had always been.
We covered for each other with Street, covered for each other with our moms, covered for each other with coaches, teachers and everybody else who came through our lives.
But between us there had never been a wall.
Building one now was costing me something I didn’t wanna lose. That was a bond with my brother.
He deserved to know.
I knew that. I had known it since the night I sat in Legal’s office and read those files. Melo deserved to know what happened to our father the same way I deserved to know. He deserved to make his own decision about what to do with that information.
But if I told Melo I had to tell him everything.
And if I told him everything, the he was going to tell Street, and if Street found out he was going to try to handle it himself.
Street had a world title fight coming and a temper that could put him away if he acted impulsively.
I was not about to be the reason my brother’s whole future went sideways.
So I kept the wall up.
And I laid here in my room at three in the morning with my arm throbbing, my heart heavy and the dream still sitting behind my eyes. I made myself say what I had been avoiding saying since I got out of that hospital.
I was going to find Veteran.
Not for me. But for that five year old boy in the parking lot who never got to stop being five years old nor could he erase the tragedy he witnessed. For the man who left a voicemail saying he was getting with some guys and he thought it was just going to be a conversation and never came home.
For Hood. For my father’s legacy. The nigga responsible needed to die that same way. Me and my twin never got to experience having a father. My mother never got to experience a soft life with her husband being the provider for his family.
I picked up my phone off the nightstand.
Opened the thread with the unsaved number.
Typed four words.
I’m still in. Talk.
Put the phone face down, laid back, closed my eyes and waited for whatever was coming next. I had school in the fall, so this shit needed to be dead, asap. Literally.