by Xuri Foxx
Carl had been calling Shay’s phone for the past hour and there had been no answer. It wasn’t like her at all, especially when she knew he was coming. And especially, when she had just texted him earlier in the morning telling him how much she missed him and couldn’t wait until he got there. His concern had grown tenfold as he had his car service plowing through the streets from Hayward to San Leandro after his charter had landed. Nothing seemed immediately off when he pulled up at Shay’s residence, but it didn’t stop him from bolting from the backseat and to the front door to run in with his key.
“Shay! Baby, you here?!”
The first sign of alarm was when Jada Pinkett, the puppy he had bought for Shay, didn’t come running from the back of the house as she always did whenever he visited. He felt a knot in the pit of his stomach and his senses told him that something was very wrong. Since her garage was directly attached to the kitchen and the kitchen was immediately to the left of the hallway, Carl threw that door open quickly and looked inside, spotting both of her cars. Fuck, he thought to himself as he inwardly panicked, this shit is not good. His heart began to palpitate as he made his way toward the living room. The further he progressed into the house and Jada Pinkett never came and Shay didn’t answer to his call, he already knew that he’d be met with something gruesome. As a last resort, he yelled out “Shay!” again, this time more like a whisper than anything because he knew that she wouldn’t hear him. And when he rounded the corner into the living room, he was faced with his worst fear.
He ran to her immediately, and sunk to the floor beside her, picking her bloody and nude body up into his arms, cradling her in hopes that he would feel some form of life inside, but the chill of her skin told him that it wouldn’t happen. She was gone. His Shay was gone…forever. He pulled her back to stare into her lifeless eyes. It was as though he was looking for her to tell him what had happened outside of what the obvious told him—that someone had violated his love. Another man had touched her in the worst kind of way and then murdered her.
Carl’s eyes filled with tears as he held his head to the ceiling. He cradled Shay in his arms, and there he allowed his mourning began. It was where he realized that the life he finally thought he’d found had been savagely taken away from him. And as he decided his next steps, he thought about Jada Pinkett. He looked around the room and even as dark as the moment was, a smile crept across his face, because it was then that he also realized that if the dog was missing, it put him that much closer to who had committed this crime against the woman he loved.
Oh yes, motherfucker, justice will be served. But not in the way you think, he thought to himself as he dialed 9-1-1…
The call after that was to Khalil.
9
Jazzmina
I drove through the gates and up the driveway, hoping that since I’d been gone for a minute that everybody would’ve left. My mood hadn’t changed. I still didn’t feel like talking to anybody and I sure as hell didn’t feel like seeing anybody. I just wanted time to process the information that kept playing over in my head. Initially, the way it was put to me, I thought that DJ had a car accident. That’s horrible enough, but to find out that he was murdered still had me fucked up. That shit was not something I would ever get used to. I found myself wondering all type of shit. Did they watch as his car flew went off the embankment? Did they stay behind to make sure that he was dead? Who the fuck were they? And why the fuck did they want to take my uncle away from me? The only thing I hoped for was that some cop would show the fuck up—this time to let us know who was responsible. That was the only thing worth hearing. And if they thought they were dealing with just some regular ass black folks, they had another thing coming because I planned to stay all up in their asses about this shit. It wasn’t going down as a muthafuckin’ cold case. Shit, what the fuck else did the Tracy police department have to do?
I managed to slip back inside undetected, and went straight to my room. I pulled out my extra iPhone charger to charge my uncle’s spare, hopped in the shower and then sprawled across my bed with the lights out. No TV, no music, just me and my thoughts. Somewhere around an hour later, I heard a light knock at my door, then heard it push open. I quickly closed my eyes and cursed myself for not locking my damn door.
I heard her walk across my room, then hover over me before she sat down. “Jazz, are you awake, babe?”
I wasn’t asleep, but I didn’t particularly feel like talking either and that’s all Eva had been trying to do since I came home from school. The shit had actually been getting on my nerves quite a bit. She needed to not push so hard and let me come to her when I was ready.
“Jazz…” she said again, rubbing her hand down my hair. I still didn’t respond. “Well, when you feel up to it, there’s still plenty of food downstairs. I also had my aunt make you a peach cobbler to go with it.”
She sat bedside for a few more minutes, and after I stopped thinking about when the fuck she was gonna get the message and leave, I started to lightweight panic about what would happen if my uncle’s phone rang while she was in here. I would have to hop up then to beat her to the phone and then I’d be up stuck with her ass for hours. At some point, she finally figured shit out and left. When my door closed, I waited a few minutes before I rolled over onto my back to look up at the ceiling. There was no way in hell I was gonna make it to sleep.
Several minutes later, I heard the door open again. I didn’t even try to conceal the fact that I wasn’t sleep this time. Fuck it, I thought. Maybe company is what I need.
“Hey…” I heard the voice say. “I know you’re awake, girl. Sit up and talk to me.”
I turned my head toward the voice and slowly pulled myself upright. “Why you coming up in here all bossy and stuff, Khalil?”
“Because you can’t be pushing away the people that’s here for you,” he scolded, while adjusting the overhead dimmer to its lowest level. “All up in here trying to act like you sleep when Eva came in,” he chuckled. “Where did you disappear to earlier?”
“I was in DJ’s office.”
“Quit playin’!” he said, frustrated. “I went in there right before I went to look for your car. Now, where did you disappear to? I called your cell a few times and you didn’t answer. You know that since we don’t know what happened with DJ, that it’s not the time to be out here slippin’.”
Khalil was my uncle’s right-hand man, and his protégée. He was only four years older than me, at twenty-eight years old, but sometimes I swore he thought he was my daddy. Whenever my uncle wasn’t bossing up, Khalil was. I guess they were just tag-teaming on keeping me on a straight path since I had been known to stray. I adjusted my eyes and yawned while looking at him. He had switched from out of his suit and was now wearing what I liked seeing him in—sweats, and crisp white Nike tee. He was fine and he knew it. And so did all the bitches. I had seen him with more than a few over the years, and not none of them did I think was good enough. I wondered sometimes if he ever saw me through those pretty ass hazel eyes, in the way that I saw him. He walked toward the bed with his caramel, bowlegged ass, with all his damn cuts and tattoos showing; teasing a bitch. I didn’t even have business sizing his fine ass up right now. Hella inappropriate, but all I knew was that I wouldn’t have minded lying up in his arms to relax a little bit. Especially, since sleep didn’t seem like it was gonna fuck with me tonight.
“I’m not slippin’, Khalil. I just had to run out and get away for a minute.”
“Well, you wasn’t gone long enough to make it to Oakland and be laid up under that nothing ass nigga you insist on fuckin’ with, so where did you go?”
“Aww, you sound a little jealous,” I teased.
“Not at all.”
I smirked slightly. “You sure about that?”
“Where did you go, Jazz?”
“Why, Khalil?”
“Because now since DJ ain’t here, I need to watch out for you. And I plan to do just that. So, again…where did you go?”
>
I was getting more pissed by the minute at how far up in my business Khalil was trying to be. He wasn’t givin’ up no dick and he wasn’t trying to put a label on me either, so I didn’t owe him explanations. But the look in his eye made me fall back just a bit. He meant business.
“I had to make a run to Dublin real quick to meet somebody.”
“Meet somebody like who?”
“Damn, Kha—”
“Stop fuckin’ around, Jazz! You haven’t cried, you haven’t talked to no damn body. A muthafucka is worried about you,” he said reluctantly. “I need you to be cool.”
“You do, huh?” I said, rolling my eyes super hard, and smacking my lips in the process.
“I do. Now ain’t the time for you to be checking out and shit. We gotta be a unit, and a unit looks out for each other.”
“We ain’t never not been a unit, Khalil.”
“True dat, but now even more so. Feel me?”
“Yeah, I feel you.”
“So, where did you go then?” he asked again, not letting up. “Because the way I see it is if it was somebody in the family…in the circle…then you wouldn’t have had to go meet no damn body because everybody that mattered was already here at the manor. So, what’s good?”
I took a deep breath and looked away from him. My first instinct was to just tell him the truth, but then there was the part of me that didn’t know if telling him that truth—a truth that I wasn’t even sure of yet—was the best thing. When I realized just how much I was over thinking and how I actually needed Khalil’s input for this particular situation, I surrendered. I got off my bed, and was about to walk across the room to my bedroom door.
“Where you goin’?” he queried, standing up to block me.
“Calm down,” I sighed, looking up at him, standing mere inches from his chest. Damn, you sexy as hell, was all I could think being that close to him. I cleared my throat. “I’m just going to lock the door real quick. Be right back.” Before I walked back to my bed, I grabbed my uncle’s spare off the stand near my walk-in closet, and held it up. “You recognize this phone?”
He tilted his head to the side and gave me a look that said, ‘Really?’ “You’re not serious. That’s a damn iPhone that nine out of ten muthafuckas are walking around with. That’s what you got up to lock the damn door for?” he laughed. “You sure you okay?”
“Whatever,” I replied, plopping back down on my bed. “This is DJ’s phone. A spare phone apparently. I found it earlier in his desk drawer in his office. There were a bunch of text messages on it and then it started to ring and…then I answered it.”
“So, you found that phone in DJ’s office, it rings with a call from a stranger and you take yo’ ass to meet the person not knowing who the fuck it was? See, that’s that bullshit that I was talkin’ about. You’re really telling me right now that you went to meet a muthafuckin’ stranger in the middle of us tryin’ to figure shit out?”
And when he put it like that, I felt stupid all of a sudden. I had acted on impulse and at the time I didn’t see anything wrong with it. “Yeah…” I slowly responded.
“You heard how stupid that shit sounded even rolling off your tongue, huh?” he shot. “All the shit going on and you—”
“Stop gettin’ all bent, Khalil. Just let me tell you. Her name is Danielle—Dani for short.”
“That name don’t sound familiar to me. Who is she?”
“She said that she was Uncle’s woman. Said he bought her a house in Castro Valley and that…you ready?”
“Yeah.”
“…that they lived there together, was about to live together full time.”
“Hellll naw,” he said. “Real talk? And you met this female?”
“Yeah, earlier. She was devastated. Like for real hurt. She didn’t know what happened and said she had been trying to reach Uncle for the past week. She broke down when I told her that we buried him today. I won’t even lie, at first I flashed on her hard because it just seemed suspect to me. I mean, shit, you know…he’s with Eva. I know my uncle had his player ways and shit, but to have a whole other bitch with a whole house and shit in a whole other city?”
“Shit,” Khalil remarked, just as stunned as I was initially. He inhaled a deep breath, then exhaled. “That nigga didn’t tell me shit about this girl. And then he bought property for her? I gotta look into that. You said you have her number?”
“Yep. I told her that I would be in touch. I don’t know what for now since Uncle ain’t here, but I told her I would check in on her from time to time.”
10
Khalil
Two days later when I rode up to the house in Castro Valley, I didn’t know what to expect. In all the time that I’d been rocking with DJ, this Danielle woman hadn’t ever been mentioned; it was weird because I thought we pretty much told each other everything.
The street was pristine, and lined with what I knew to be million dollar homes. Immaculate ass houses, with lawns that looked like they hadn’t ever been walked on, and so fuckin’ elite that you could see through everybody’s house. I could definitely see DJ living like this, so if this was his chick, I could see why he’d set her up in something as nice. But she had to be real special for that shit.
At the top of an incline, the street came to a dead end and rounded into a cul-de-sac. The address that I had in my GPS told me it was the house that sat right in the center at the tip of that island. I pulled into the driveway next to a newer model SUV Rover. Shit, unless this girl is paid on her own, DJ was in deep!
I cut my engine, hopped out my whip and accessed the alarm—like I even needed to in this damn neighborhood. But shit, white people steal too! I chuckled to myself. Instinctively, I turned around to look behind me because this was one of those neighborhoods where they probably got alarmed if they saw more than one black person. But I didn’t see anybody, so that was cool. I walked up to the double doors and rang the bell, and about a minute later, the doorknob turned.
Danielle appeared at the door in one of those powder blue girly sweat suits and some matching footies, with a head full of braids pulled up on top of her head and secured by a bandanna. She was fine as hell too. I could see why DJ was into her.
“Hi…Khalil, right?” she asked.
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“Come on in,” she offered, stepping to the side to allow me inside. Once I got in, I stood by the door’s entrance waiting to follow her lead and took that time to look around her place. It was what I’d refer to as chic. A lot had gone into the detail of the multi-leveled place. I could hear DJ now telling his woman to, “Spare no expense.” The place had him written all over it. I’d been inside of every piece of real estate owned by the man, and all of it was fit for a king—and in this case, his queen, too.
“You can have a seat wherever you like, Khalil.” She went and took a seat in a red oversized chair sofa with an ottoman in front of it, and trained her eyes on me. I could tell that she was ready for an interrogation.
“Y’all have a lotta red going on in here,” I stated, taking a seat across from her in the middle of a large pearl sectional.
“Yeah, DJ wanted burgundy, but that’s too dark for me and so masculine, so we came to a compromise.”
I laughed out loud. “A compromise?! You got jokes. You won, basically. Red and burgundy are two different shades completely! Red is loud as hell and burgundy is just kinda laid back.”
“Nooo, not really. Red is just more…shall I say…symbolic. Burgundy doesn’t stand for anything. And it’s just dark for no reason,” she giggled.
“And I can see right there how that debate went—with DJ on the losing end.”
“He didn’t lose exactly. His office is burgundy. I tried to fight him on that too, but he insisted.”
“Well, it’s good to know that my man won at least part of what he wanted out the deal.”
“He got me out of the deal,” she commented with sadness in her voice. “He was…”
Her words were cut all of a sudden. I watched her try her best at not getting choked up. She shifted in her seat, and reached to pull the braids that had somehow fallen around her face, into submission.
“Well, it’s really nice in here. The two of y’all came up with a real nice scheme. You might have a future in design, woman.”
It was my best attempt at saving her from the moment she was close to sinking into. We were both in mourning, and I was sure that aside from her not wanting to face reality for the umpteenth time…that DJ was really gone, that she was taking my feelings into consideration as well. She seemed like that type of person.
“Thank you, Khalil. I’m no designer,” she stated shaking her head, then looking around the large room. “Derrick was the designer and all this is a reminder of him. We met with the team step-by-step all the way through—together. Most men probably wouldn’t have sat through that. Most men would probably have come in on the tail end of everything and made the remarks about what could’ve been better. But Derrick…he…was right there.”
“I know you miss him. We all do. I’m sorry for your loss. That’s not something that I’ve said and I apologize for that.”
“It’s okay, Khalil. I understand. I was looking forward to meeting you and Jazz soon, but I’m just sorry that they were under the circumstances that they were. I know how much he loved family.”
“Yeah, DJ was the ultimate family man. He was good to all of us.”
The room stood still as Danielle and I both fell into silence, for our own separate reasons. I had been going so strong in my quest for answers that I had shook off all the pain I was feeling. It was replaced by anger. All I thought about every day was finding out who did DJ and making sure that I got the chance to settle the score. That’s where my thoughts were. But then I had to make sure that everybody around me was okay too: Jazz, Eva, the businesses, and now, the woman who by all accounts, DJ cared a lot about. There was no way I could abandon her. DJ wouldn’t have wanted that.