by D. L. Sparks
He wore the anger on his face like a Halloween mask.
He and Lincoln stood there for a second staring each other down. Lincoln was an inch or two shorter, but both of them were full of rage. The fire coming from them threatening to send this house and everything around it up in flames.
“Go ’head and toss me that gun Supercop,” Linc instructed.
Never taking his eyes off Linc, Trip pulled his gun out of his holster and popped the clip out. He cocked it, causing the lone bullet in the chamber to fly out. It hit the carpet with a thud before he dropped the gun next to it.
Linc walked over and bent down like he was going to pick up Trip’s gun but instead he stood back up, hauled off and punched Trip in jaw causing Trip to stumble into the wall.
My hand covered my mouth stifling the scream that tried to escape.
“I owed your punk ass that one.”
Trip straightened up, touched his lip and looked down at his hand for any evidence of blood.
“Did that make your bitch-ass feel better?” he asked.
The house phone rang out, catching all our attention. I swallowed a mouthful of nothing and attempted to speak.
“That’s India. I know it. Would you please let me answer it?” I begged.
Trip kept his eyes on Lincoln during my plea. The way his jaw was flexing, I knew he wanted to pounce on him.
Lincoln’s eyes met mine and he kept them there, waiting for the phone to stop ringing. I fought my tears, which were trying to force their way out. I didn’t want my sister here; I knew that she wasn’t going to allow too many more phone calls to go unanswered.
He walked over and sat down on the arm of our over-sized chair. With his gun still in his hand, he crossed his arms against his chest. “So, Trip, how does it feel knowing you fucked another man’s woman right out from under him?”
He clenched his fists. “Lincoln, I’m not about to have a showdown with you like two kids in a fucking cafeteria. You trying to tell me you shot my partner over some bullshit?”
My hand shot up, covering my mouth and silencing the scream lodged in my throat. My body shook as waves of sobs fought to get out.
“W—what is he talking about, Lincoln? Y—you shot Phil?”
Trip took a step closer to both of us causing Linc to stand to his feet. I took solace in the fact that he was tucked safely into his Kevlar vest.
Suddenly I wished I had one.
“Lincoln, this is between us. Let Idalis go. You got what you wanted. Leave her out of this.”
“Can’t do that. ’Cause without her this little reunion wouldn’t be possible.” He positioned himself in the middle of the living-room, blocking my line of sight to the hallway, standing between Trip and me.
“Look, you and I both know that it’s not gonna be long before they kick that door in and put a bullet in your head. Is that what you want? You want your son to know his father went out like a punk,” Trip asked.
Lincoln started laughing. “You worried about what my son thinks?”
He aimed his Glock at Trip.
I jumped to my feet. “No, Linc, don’t!” I screamed.
The phone rang again.
Its intermittent ringing was starting to mimic the ticking of a time bomb—a constant reminder of how out of control this situation was about to become.
“What, Idalis? Huh? You don’t want Trip to know that you ain’t what you claim to be?”
Trip looked at me. “What is he talking about, Idalis? What the fuck is going on?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I stood there for a second. Jaw gaping. Eyes fixed on Trip. I closed my mouth and looked down to the floor.
“Somebody better answer me,” Trip demanded.
Again ... the phone rang.
I looked up just in time to see Lincoln pull an envelope out of his back pocket. Trip never took his eyes off me. I looked at the folded wad of paper. My mind raced at what my heart already knew was inside.
In one swift motion Lincoln pitched the paper in my direction, never taking his eyes off Trip. I felt sweat bead up and run down the center of my back.
“Read it!” Lincoln yelled out. His voice echoed through the living-room, making me jump.
Trip’s eyes bounced back and forth between the two of us.
Confusion was etched all over his face.
My hands fumbled with the envelope and its contents.
Again.
The phone rang.
Chapter Thirty-one
Trip
Idalis looked at me, a look of regret and despair washed over her face as she started to read:
“The alleged father, Lincoln N. Briscoe, is excluded as being the father of the child, Cameron Allen Briscoe. For eight different genetic systems analyzed with the polymerase chain reaction, the alleged father, Lincoln N. Briscoe, failed to match the obligate paternal allele present in the child, Cameron A. Briscoe.”
I listened as she read the words, but I didn’t hear them. They rolled around in my head until they hit on something and finally registered. Bells and whistles started going off like I’d just gotten the high score in a pinball game. But I knew immediately from the tear-filled expression on Idalis’s face, this wasn’t a game.
Rage rode my body like a freight train and I felt myself losing control.
“Still think she’s perfect?” Linc asked.
His attitude was more than I wanted to deal with. I swear I wanted to shoot him, just to shut him up. I broke the stare I was holding with Idalis and looked at him.
“How long have you known this?”
“Known what? That you fucked my girl the weekend of your father’s funeral? Or that she had been trying to pass your seed off as mine?”
“That’s not true!” Idalis screamed out.
He turned to her. “Oh, it’s not? Then explain what you’re holding in your hand.
As he fussed with Idalis, I took a slight step to my right, watched as she fidgeted where she was standing.
I forced myself to see past her swollen lip and red, tear-filled eyes.
I fought the urge to run to her and wrap my arms around her.
Instead, I tried to give her an out.
“Baby girl, look at me.”
She looked up and our eyes met as tears streamed down her face.
“Tell me something. ’Cause right there’s a lot of fucking talking going on but I’m not hearing shit.”
“I had an idea,” she said, barely above a whisper.
“An idea? Why didn’t you say something?” I asked.
She averted her eyes. “I didn’t know how.”
That answer pissed me the fuck off. I wanted to walk out of that house and leave her there with his crazy ass and never look back.
I wanted to forget that I ever knew her.
But I couldn’t. Our fate was sealed almost four years ago.
For the first time in our lives we’d allowed our friendship to turn into something more the night of my father’s funeral when Idalis came to sit with me at the hotel. She knew I refused to go to the funeral and shed tears for a man who’d gotten enough from me already and she stayed with me and never denied me anything, even, a night of lovemaking we neither regretted but agreed never to mention again.
The next morning, I cleared out of my room and was back in New Orleans before my father’s body was cold in the ground and she went home to Linc. That was almost four years ago.
Cameron was just over three.
I turned my attention back to Lincoln. “So you been holding on to this all this time? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“You’re what’s wrong with me.”
“Don’t blame your shit on me!” I growled through clenched teeth. “This ain’t a fucking game, Briscoe! You fucking with people’s lives.”
He smirked. “Fuck outta here with that shit man, you don’t give a damn about her! If you did you wouldn’t have fucked her and rolled up outta here like you did.
“You wo
uld’ve manned the fuck up and stayed and fought for her ass, but instead you got the ass you been wanting since grade school and left.”
“When did you get this test done?” I asked.
“About a month after he was born.” He smirked at Idalis. “One of those afternoons when I told Idalis she could have some “mommy” time. Me and little man took a trip downtown to visit my friend in the forensic lab.”
Idalis was sobbing so hard she could barely speak, “W—Why didn’t you just s-say something?”
Linc rushed toward her and pulled her up by her neck. I fought the urge to pounce on him, at least not yet; not while he had that gun on her.
“That was all you needed to go runnin’ off to be with his ass.” He tossed her back on the couch. “You think I don’t know how you feel about him? I’ve known that shit since college.”
I dropped my head. Emotions rushed at me so fast... . I didn’t know which one to address first.
A son.
I had a son.
The house phone rang. A few moments later the phone on my hip vibrated. I’d been dealing with that dance since I’d been in the house. I figured it was either Idalis’s sister or Lenny.
This shit needed to end, now.
I gave Lincoln a quick once-over. Just like me, his Kevlar was secured around his chest. Other than the Glock, he kept intermittently pointing at me; I spied another gun tucked in the waistband behind his back. When he wasn’t paying attention, I’d already moved to my right, getting out of his direct line of fire and clearing the entryway to the hall.
Fire rose in my chest.
I taunted him, made him focus his anger on me instead of her. “So because I laid pipe to your girl you decide to start shaking down dealers and knocking off people to make yourself feel like a man?”
He looked up and gave me a sly grin. “Hey, I ain’t kill nobody pot’na. That dude Geech was outta control and all you got on me is a bunch of hearsay from some shady pushers lookin’ to catch a deal.”
“What’s your defense for shooting my partner, other than stupidity?”
“Aye man, I was just a cop trying to maintain his position in a bust gone wrong.”
He cracked a smile.
That was too much for me at that point.
The phone rang again and Idalis looked toward the kitchen.
Wide-eyed and frantic she looked up at me.
In that moment we were two scared kids.
And it was time for me to sneak her out of the house safely.
I took a breath.
And gave her a wink.
She made a break for the door, catching Lincoln off guard. When he spun around to reach for her, I snatched the gun from behind my back and popped a bullet in his leg, causing both of them to tumble to the carpet, and making him drop his gun.
I kicked the gun out of the way as Idalis scrambled to her feet and headed toward the front door. I saw him about to go for the gun behind his back and pointed my Glock at his head.
“Please give me a reason!”
The gunfire caused the house to flood with agents and officers. All of them with guns drawn.
“Spencer!” Lenny called out.
“In here!”
Lincoln lay there for a moment, glaring at me, before he slowly pulled his hand from behind his back and tossed the gun in my direction. It landed on the carpet, near one of the agents, with a soft thud, setting off something inside me. I tucked my gun behind my back and hit his jaw so hard—I’m surprised my hand didn’t break.
I got in two more blows before being pulled off him for the second time in as many weeks.
Lenny pushed me toward the front door. “That’s enough, Spencer!”
They pounced on him and started cuffing him. I heard his rights being read just as I approached the front door.
“This shit ain’t over, Supercop! You’ll see me again! Believe that!” he called out to me.
Without looking back I answered, “Looking forward to it, Lieutenant Briscoe.”
I stepped out into the moist night air and took a deep breath. It was that time of night when yesterday passes off the baton to tomorrow. Usually, we’re all asleep when the hand-off happens, and are lucky enough to wake to a new day of sun and possibilities.
Not this night.
The lights from the ambulance lit up the night sky.
Neighbors were gathering outside; some snapping pictures on cell phones while others positioned themselves trying to get a glimpse of what had disturbed their peace. News vans were coming from all directions trying to be the first to break the story. My phone vibrated and I pulled it out.
It was Trinity.
“Trip, what is going on?” She was frantic. “Dionne has been calling me and India texted me twice and I’ve been blowing up your phone. Are you okay?”
“I’m good. Where’s Mama?”
“Asleep.”
“Good.”
“What’s going on Trip? Is Idalis okay?”
At that moment I looked up and saw Idalis sitting on the back of the ambulance. An EMT was tending to her, and Dionne was huddled next to her. I moved toward them, keeping my eyes on Idalis. She looked up when she saw me coming.
“She’s fine. Trin, I’ll be by there in the morning, a’ight?”
“Okay. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
Just as I stepped onto the street, India pulled up. I stopped dead in my tracks as she hustled to get out of the car. I watched her open the back door and unbuckle Cameron from his car seat.
She pulled his tiny, sleeping body out and headed toward her sister, causing me to change direction and head back to my truck. This was too much for me to deal with right now. It was something that didn’t need to be done in front of Cameron.
I opened the door to the truck and glanced at Idalis. The EMT was securing a bandage to her head, but her eyes were still on me, pleading for understanding and sympathy.
Two things that I couldn’t summon for her right now.
As bad as I wanted to go to her, I couldn’t.
Instead, I jumped in my truck and sped off into the night.
Chapter Thirty-two
Idalis
“India, just let it go.”
I tried my best to get comfortable on the couch in my mother’s living-room. Cameron was laying on my chest sleep and his body was generating heat and making me uncomfortable. There were boxes of things stacked in the hall and in the corners of the small room. My life had been reduced to what was in those boxes, or rather, what the Feds let me take out of the house.
The investigation into Lincoln prompted them to seize a lot of things, including our home and my club. Luckily, my car was in my name and I had proof that I was making payments out of my own account, or they would’ve taken that too. Thanks to a good attorney and a word from Trip, I wasn’t held accountable for anything that he’d done. But that didn’t help the fact that I was now one of the many homeless people in Atlanta.
“Look, I know he’s still here.”
I rolled my eyes and looked up at her. “You know this how?”
“Dionne told me. She saw him at the J.R. Crickets, the one off Camp Creek. Phil got out of the hospital last week.”
“And what does that mean? He’s here and hasn’t called me, so why should I call him?”
She put her hands on her hips. “You can’t be serious. After what you did? After what Lincoln’s crazy ass did? Hell, I can almost see why he is staying away from you.”
After getting his gunshot wound treated, Lincoln was discharged into police custody almost three weeks ago. He’d been calling asking me to come by the hospital and see him, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Plus Dionne and India had threatened my life if I went anywhere near him. Once he got booked into the jail someone slipped him a cell phone, which was making it easy for him to aggravate the hell out of me. While he waited for trial, the threatening calls started coming and I knew that until he was tried, he was gonna ma
ke my life miserable. And the fact that he was in isolation gave him plenty of time to make all the calls he wanted. I threatened to report that he had a phone, but he just laughed and told me that he’d fuck another female CO and have another cell phone before the charge hit his file.
“Look, I understand where you’re coming from. Just give me some time.”
“Time for what? You’ve had long enough. And now that what you’ve been unsure about all these years is confirmed you just wanna sit on your ass and do nothing.”
“Just because he knows doesn’t change anything. I’m sure all he cares about is going back to New Orleans and putting this behind him.”
“How do you know that, if you haven’t talked to him? And what about Cameron? You’re being selfish, Idalis.”
“Whatever, India.”
“Did you see him when you went to take the paternity test?”
I shook my head.
“No. He had already done his part and left before Cameron and I got there.”
Trip wasted no time pulling strings and dumping court papers into my lap requesting his own set of paternity tests be done. I guess he needed to see it in black and white on his own terms. So I took my baby downtown and let them swab his cheek and mine. I told him that the test was so Santa could make sure he was the real Cameron. He just giggled and went along with the test without a problem.
She sucked her teeth. “So what now? Y’all just gonna avoid each other altogether? That’s real smart.”
I rolled my eyes. “What are you gonna do? Tell on me?” I shifted on the couch, trying not to wake Cameron. “Take Cam upstairs for me and go away, India.”
I didn’t need to look at her face to know she was pissed. She scooped my baby up off my chest and the next sound I heard was the front door opening as I rolled over and started flipping channels.
A few minutes later I heard the door open and close again and India appeared in the doorway to the living-room.
“India, I’m not in the mood to argue with you. Would you please ...”
I looked up and the expression she had on her face was disturbing. She stood there, holding a certified letter in her hand. “Idalis, the mailman just came. This is for you.”