by Meesha Mink
“Naeema?”
“How you doing, Ms. JuJu?” she asked as she walked to the door and left the house without looking back one last time. I’m free.
“My arthritis been acting up and the doctor said—”
“Ms. JuJu, did Brandon have on his chain the night he was killed?” Naeema asked, knowing she was being rude.
“He sure did. I just assumed it was stolen that night.”
“It was, Ms. JuJu. It was,” Naeema said, as the cab pulled up and she opened the door to climb into the back. “Let me call you back.”
“How you been, Naeema?”
“I’m better now.”
“Good.”
“Bye, Ms. JuJu,” she said. “And thank you.”
Naeema ended the call as she settled against the backseat of the cab.
“Where to, ma’am?” the driver asked, looking at her in his rearview mirror.
She started to give her own address but caught herself. The charade was over but she still didn’t want to be tracked down, especially when Bas realized that she was gone. For good.
Don’t lose it, Naeema. Play this shit smart.
“Newark Penn Station,” she said.
She had the upper hand and she had to use it to her advantage.
She looked out at the beautiful sprawling homes lining the streets of Forest Hill, but her focus wasn’t on them. Naeema was on the hunt for a killer and now she had her focus locked on the right target.
Lying motherfucker.
Last night, for the first time, she had noticed that Brandon wore his ring and a long gold necklace with a lion medallion in every damn picture on his Facebook. Every single one. But the fact hadn’t really mattered to her until she realized that she’d seen that same chain on his killer earlier that night.
She dug her fingers into her thigh so deeply that she was sure she left tiny bruises in the flesh.
Lying thieving motherfucker.
As the pieces to the puzzle had finally slid together and locked into place, she had floated somewhere between joy and rage. The shit seemed so clichéd but just when she was contemplating admitting that she had to walk away from the chase for her son’s killer, everything became clear as day.
She didn’t know whether to cry or laugh.
For the rest of the morning she lay there stiff as a dead body with Bas’s arm draped over her while she tried to find a reason for her son’s murder. Although her gut had always told her one or all of them was behind it, she just couldn’t make sense of why he did it.
With the light of day she realized it really didn’t fucking matter. Lying, thieving, bold, murderous, soon-to-be-dead motherfucker. She picked up her phone and started to dial 69 on her speed dial but she put the phone away again. This is my fight . . . and I gotta learn not to rely on Tank anymore.
She didn’t allow herself to feel anything about the strain between them right then. She was flooded with enough emotions, and spending time on her disappointment in her husband wasn’t going to do shit but fuck up her focus. She’d have to deal with her relationship with Tank another time.
Naeema paid the cabbie once he pulled up outside Penn Station. Her intention was to hop in another cab and head home but first she walked inside and headed for the waiting area where she had once spent so many nights trying to stay warm and off the actual streets of Newark. Everything looks so different, but my memories ain’t changed.
In those weeks, up until she got placed in foster care, she had done more to nurture her son while he was in her womb than she had once she birthed him. I did the best I could.
Turning, she walked back out of the grand-looking building to climb into the back of one of the many waiting cabs lining the streets. As soon as it pulled up to her house, she quickly paid her fare and rushed up the stairs to unlock her front door. With a lift and a push she entered. She snatched off the wig and tossed it into the cold fireplace before she moved her TV off the hard lid of the container and pulled out the smaller plastic box.
Brandon’s ring was nestled in the corner. Naeema picked it up. The sunlight beaming through the window made the gold gleam.
She took it off the chain and slid it onto her index finger. Tonight, under the cover of darkness, she would kill the man responsible for her son’s death, and then tomorrow she would say good-bye to the wigs, the false identities, and the fake detective work to get her ass up and go cut hair for a living as Naeema Cole.
Tonight all the Foxy Cleopatra Christie shit came to an end.
She was ready.
• • •
Naeema sat on her bike in the drive of an abandoned house across from the old church that housed the Make Money Crew’s hideout. She wasn’t playing like she was one of them anymore. She had finally tossed her burner phone into the fire, although she knew Bas was blowing that number up while he wondered what happened to his Queen.
She never really was yours, motherfucker.
She was glad to be free of him because her mind was saying this could never work between them, but her pussy was a deceitful, no-manners bitch.
With her eyes trained on the overgrown fields surrounding the church she calmly waited. There was a path through the high grass that led to the back of the street behind it. They usually parked their personal vehicles another block over, in the lot of an abandoned supermarket, and walked over to take the path to the side entrance into the church. The entire block was mostly empty and you would never know the abandoned church with its boarded windows was being used.
Some of Bas’s clever shit.
Naeema pressed the black leather gloves down onto her hands and zipped her black pleather jacket up to her neck. The sun was gone and there was a slight chill in the early-October air. Winter in the northeast was brutal and she suddenly realized she had to make sure the house had heat. Fuck around and find Sarge down in that bitch like a big-ass angry ice pop.
“What’s that?” she mouthed as she climbed off the bike and used her foot to put down the kickstand.
The door to the church opened and closed but she couldn’t tell who had just entered or left the building. She pulled on her spare all-black helmet and hopped on the bike. As soon as the motor revved she took off, entering the street and then turning the corner by the church and going down to the end of the block to check for oncoming traffic before she sped up the one-way street.
As lights suddenly flashed, she cut through two parked cars and up onto the sidewalk. She slowed down and sat idling as she waited twenty feet down from the overgrown field connecting the back of the church to the next street.
A figure stepped through the break and turned up the street in the opposite direction.
It’s him.
Adrenaline made her heart pound.
She waited to see if anyone was coming out behind him before she revved the motor and sped off the sidewalk and back into the street just as he crossed it to reach the lot. Knowing he was strapped, she hit him with the bike from behind, knocking him forward onto the sidewalk. She pulled up and onto the sidewalk, already reaching with one hand behind her for the 9mm in the waistband of the black jeans she wore like a second skin. She pointed it at him down on the ground as he struggled to rise up to his hands and knees. “Don’t do nothing stupid, Nelson,” she said in a cold voice, her anger sparking as the chain fell forward on his neck and the lion medallion dangled from the end of it.
She had to maneuver like crazy to back the bike into the parking lot as she kept the gun trained on him, while he looked up at her lost as a motherfucker. “Don’t fucking move or I will blow your fucking head off.”
Naeema climbed off the bike and walked over to press her boot onto his back and push him back down onto the cold concrete of the sidewalk. She looked up and down the street to make sure no other crew members or random strangers got near them.
“Queen?” Nelson asked as she patted him down.
“Shut the fuck up,” she snapped, pulling a switchblade from the pocket of his hoodie.
Naeema opened it. The knife was serrated with tiny sharp teeth along the edge of the blade.
She closed her eyes as she recalled the image of her son with his neck slashed open. The edges of the cut hadn’t been smooth. Nelson’s knife was just the tool to make the rough cut.
No gun.
She stood up and kicked him in his sides as she pressed her lips into a thin line.
He cried out and rolled onto his side as he brought his knees up to his chest like it would ease the pain.
“Get up,” she snapped.
Nelson coughed. His eyes were tightly closed.
She bent over to press the gun to his temple.
“A’ight, yo. Damn,” he swore, struggling to lift his portly frame up to his feet.
She backhanded his ass, causing his head to swing to the left as the connection echoed in the air.
WHAP.
Hatred for him and the brutality he put her son through made her growl as she eyed him. “Let’s go,” she said, coming around with him but never removing his head as the target of her gun.
“Go where?”
Good question.
All her plans to take him to an abandoned building to kill him flew out the window when she chased him. She looked around and then jerked her head in the direction of the trees, bushes, and high grass separating the parking lot from a house hollowed out by a fire in the past.
“Through there,” Naeema said, roughly nudging him across the unlit parking lot.
She looked back at the sound of a car starting and Nelson turned and grabbed her wrist. “Silly bitch,” she said, not even stressing as she kneed him in the nuts and then roughly pushed him back enough to kick him square in the chest between his fluffy boobs. He fell back to the ground.
“What do you want, yo?” he cried out, sounding tired and worn out.
She pressed the foot of her thigh-high boots against his cheek. It was the car down at the corner, in front of a small house. Still, both Red’s and Hammer’s cars and a small blue Porsche sat parked next to Nelson’s Cadillac convertible. They could be coming out any second. She couldn’t fight all four.
“Get up,” she snapped again, kicking his thighs when he took too long.
With her gun pressed to his back she led him across the lot and through the high grass to the abandoned house. The exterior walls of what appeared to be the kitchen were missing and she moved him deeper inside the charred mess to the living room. A large rat scurried across the blackened hardwood floors bold as hell.
Is this shit even safe?
Only the streetlight in front of the house lifted the dark shadows of the house as she pushed him down onto the floor.
She finally took off her helmet and dropped it to the floor by her boot.
“Queen?” he asked again, his eyes taking in her shaven head and makeup-free face as he looked up at her.
She shook her head. “That’s what your mouth say,” she told him, squatting to tap the barrel of the gun against his soft chin.
“You think Bas gon’ let you get away with this?” Nelson asked, sounding a little cocky at knowing his captor.
“You think I should just let Bas know you killed Brandon?” she asked, her voice filled with menace as she pierced him with cold eyes.
His round face filled with shock before it changed in an instant with his anger. “Trust me, I know he’d kill me for Brandon. Trust me,” he said with attitude. “But I didn’t kill Little Dude.”
“Liar.”
“I didn’t.”
“Or should I go through with my plan to kill your punk ass for taking out my son, bitch?”
She didn’t know which part of the bombs she’d just dropped on his ass was the cause for it, but it was clear his mind was fucked.
“And then you got the nerve to wear his chain?” Naeema spat as she boxed him in the face. She snatched the chain from his neck and then swung it at him, landing the lion medallion across his forehead, where it broke the skin. Worse was coming for his ass anyway so oh the fuck well. “That’s how I know you did it, dumb ass.”
“Me and Brandon both got that chain,” he stuttered. “We bought them at the same time.”
“Liar,” she said.
She’d checked the date on Brandon’s Facebook and he owned that chain months before, when Bas told her they first met.
She popped his bottom lip so hard that it bounced up and down. Nelson yelped like a hit dog.
“He was like a little brother, huh?” she said bitterly, tossing back the lies he gave to her the night before.
She boxed him in his gut. “No, he was fourteen years old, you stupid motherfucker, and there wasn’t shit in this world he could’ve done to you to deserve you running him over and then cutting his throat and leaving him in that street to die.”
She took a deep audible breath as tears welled up. “I’m going to kill you,” she promised him in a whisper that seemed to echo around them.
Fear filled his eyes even as his lips stayed pressed in a straight angry line.
“I am going to leave your dead body here for the rats and the dogs to eat on until you rot and burst from the maggots eating your dead ass from the inside out,” she said, stroking his fat bottom lip with the barrel of the gun. A tear raced down her cheek and landed on his chin. “And then I will pray every day that your worthless-ass soul rots in hell.”
The smell of his pee filled the air.
“And that’s still more than your motherfucking ass deserves.”
She stood up and shoved the necklace and medallion in her back pocket with his knife as she backed away from him. “Why’d you kill him?” she asked, struggling between her heart breaking with sadness and her soul blazing with rage. “Why?”
Nelson said nothing, just closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the charred wood floor.
She looked up as car lights came on and the parking lot got a little bit brighter.
“Help me!” Nelson cried out.
Naeema jumped on top of him and pressed the barrel of the gun between his plump, ashy, quivering lips. “Go ahead, open your mouth. Scream for help like a bitch so I can slide this pistol dick farther down your throat just before I blow the back of your head out.” She pushed the gun until it tapped against his teeth.
The lights from the car disappeared and the room darkened just a little bit again.
Naeema climbed off him and backed up with her gun still locked and loaded on him as she looked through the missing rear wall. “They’re all gone. Not that they woulda helped you anyway. This jam you in, you dumb fuck, is a rock and a hard place,” she said.
She tilted her head to the side as she stepped up and looked down at him.
Trust me I know he’d kill me for Brandon. Trust me.
Naeema shook her head and released a heavy breath as she tried to pull forward a memory. Something else he said. Something that seemed so innocent . . . then.
Bas took him under his wing and shit. Just like he did me.
She stood above him and straddled his thick form. “You killed my boy because you were jealous of him and Bas being close?” she asked, her voice rising with each word to a roar.
Bas took him under his wing and shit. Just like he did me.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Naeema grunted as she kicked him square in the nuts and then jumped out of the way when his body made like a cheese curl and he hollered out in pain.
Naeema dropped to her knee and pressed the ring she wore on top of the glove against his mouth. “Kiss the ring,” she said. “Kiss it and beg me not to kill you.”
Nelson’s face was still twisted with pain as his eyes shifted down to her hand. “Please . . . please don’t kill me,” he said before he puckered his lips against the gold metal.
She frowned in disgust at the feel of his wet lips and wiped her hands against her jeans. “Did Brandon beg you for his life?” she asked him.
Nelson lay flat on his back. “Nothing I say is gonna keep you fro
m killing me,” he said, his voice cold and flat.
“Nothing,” she agreed with a sad shake of her head.
She sat back from him. “You recognize the ring, don’t you? He was wearing it and the chain the night you killed him,” she said. “I guess you ain’t had time to snatch his ring too.”
“The chain was in the way when I cut his throat.”
Naeema took a step back. “Well, ain’t shit in the way of this motherfucker.”
She fired her gun.
POW!
The kickback knocked her shoulder back a little but she watched the bullet go straight between his eyes. Moments later, thick crimson blood pooled from the back of his head. His body convulsed twice before the look in his eyes was filled with death.
Her hand dropped down to her side, smoke filtering up from the hot tip of the gun she still held.
She stood there, shaken by it all; she tilted her head back and her chest rose and fell deeply with her heavy breaths.
It was all finally over.
She felt weak and spent and just wanted to crawl into her bed, cover her head with pillows, and sleep. Yes, she had taken a life before but never like this. She was shaken and maybe not as hardcore as she thought. Her anger at his words had fired that gun even more than her will to kill him out of revenge for Brandon.
With one last look back at Nelson’s dead body, she left the abandoned house and walked back to her bike, dropping the gun and his knife in one of the saddlebags as she fought not to give in to her tears and the steady trembling of her hands. She climbed onto her motorcycle and was happy to speed away from the scene of her crime.
16
Naeema sped through the streets of Newark, easily zooming in and out of traffic and taking turns to avoid red lights. She was more running toward home than running away from the murder she’d just committed. Time had settled her nerves because she did what she had to do. Nelson killed Brandon—a fourteen-year-old man-child—over a jealous rage like a man-bitch.