When Lovie was first born, I said I would get out of the business. But it was one of those things that was easier said than done. My family operated a lucrative drug ring. I was strong enough to distance myself from the drugs, but I still worked with my family as an enforcer and head of security. Whenever we had issues with enemies, I handled it or sent someone on my team to do so.
Every once in a while, I also hired myself out to anyone who needed my services. There was a part of me that got great pleasure out of fucking somebody up. The pain that came from losing Sandy, raising my daughter alone, and being an immortal black man was a lot to take on. I take that back; I wasn’t really raising Lovie alone. My mother had taken to her as if she was her daughter instead of her granddaughter, and my father and siblings helped out sometimes too.
“I’m going to come and get you from grandma and pop pop’s house as soon as I can, Lovie. Put that lip back in.”
She smiled softly as I pinched her cheek. With my case going on right now, I felt like it was best if she stayed with my parents until I got everything taken care of. I still planned to visit her, but I didn’t want her in the house with me. Pierre’s trust was fucked up at the moment, and if he felt like me or anyone else that was picked up would snitch, he would strike and hit anyone attached to us to keep us silent.
“Yes, sir,” Lovie agreed as she wrapped her short arms around my neck. I held her for as long as I possibly could since I wouldn’t be able to tuck her in and kiss her goodnight tonight.
When I released Lovie, she skipped over to the couch where her grandmother was seated and sat next to her. My mother wasted no time pulling Lovie into her side as she flipped through the channels on their eighty-inch TV.
“I’m out, Ma,” I announced, turning and heading for the door. I’d already given her a goodbye hug, but that was before Lovie chased me down for another hug. This last one made five since I’d told her I was leaving in her room at my parent’s home. She’d followed me all the way down, hugging on me every so often.
My father was sitting outside with no shirt on, in forty-degree weather, smoking a damn cigar. You could tell he was from Chicago. People often migrated and traveled between Memphis and Chicago for some reason. It was on a trip to Memphis to see family that he met my mother. They fell in love, and he ended up moving to Memphis to be with her. There weren’t as many jobs available there as it was in Chicago, so he went to the streets to make some fast money.
What started out as him working as a lookout for Fat Tony turned into him being a corner boy. Eventually, he started his own organization. Now, he ran it with his brothers and my uncles. My brother and a few of my cousins and I were their second in command. We didn’t even have to get our hands dirty to make money, but again, breaking a nigga off was a way to relieve stress for me. I was starting to regret the last hit I did though.
Pierre took over South Essence. He gave the corner boys that ran the blocks out that way some product to push as a show of his desire to work with them. They really didn’t have a choice other than working for him or moving to another part of the city, so they accepted the product and started to move it for him. With each delivery, their cuts got smaller and smaller, so eventually they rebelled.
They ended up taking Pierre’s product, selling it, and pocketing all their profit. When they didn’t deliver that package, Pierre called me and my crew in. We took care of all twelve of them with no problem. Unfortunately, one of them was smart. He wrote a statement naming Pierre as the person responsible for his death, and he went a step further to say that I was the man Pierre typically used when he had these kinds of issues.
Outside of his statement and a bullshit ass witness saying they saw me on the corner when everything went down, the state didn’t have any evidence against me or my crew. They still picked us up for twelve counts of murder three weeks ago. I had my first court date in two days, so that meant I had twenty-four hours to find this witness and make them disappear. There was no doubt in my mind that it was someone who knew one of the victims and was just saying they saw me to get a conviction.
I never left a trace.
Even when a motherfucker could see me in these streets, they didn’t see me.
I was just that damn good.
“You find out who it is yet?” my father asked, staring out into the distance.
“Nah, but I will.”
He nodded as he looked down at his phone. “I know you will.”
There was nothing else that needed to be said between us. I had a duty, an obligation, to handle this shit before I stepped foot in that courthouse. If this went to trial, my family would be in the spotlight, and we had our hands in too many illegal dealings for that. We were dealers, hitmen, gun slangers, and some of us were immortals.
How in the fuck would they explain being in a jail cell at the age of one hundred one minute and randomly vanishing the next?
You’d think with us being able to live forever that we’d have some kind of superpower, but that was it. Just life forever in this fucked up ass world we lived in.
“Keep my daughter safe,” I demanded, stepping off the porch.
“Don’t I fucking always?”
I smirked with a nod. “Still.”
“I got you, young blood. You just make sure Pierre knows Malik men are loyal. If he makes a move because he questions that, he will start a war that he will not win. Make sure he knows that there will be bloodshed, and I will personally wipe out everyone in his family and keep him alive just to make him suffer if he comes for you or my granddaughter.” I turned back to look at him as he kissed his teeth. He put the cigar between his lips as his eyes tightened. “And get me that witness, Hareem.”
I nodded again before turning and walking away. If there was one thing enemies learned quickly about the Malik dynasty, it was that we didn’t make threats… we made promises. And we never made a promise we couldn’t keep. Pierre would get one warning out of my father because of how long they’d been working together, but not even the longest of business relationships would spare him if he crossed that line. The moment my father made the order, I would strike – and I didn’t give a fuck what it would take – I’d bury a million motherfuckers to make sure my Lovie stayed safe.
I ended up meeting with Pierre at Emma’s Soul Food Kitchen. He voiced his concerns about the loyalty of my men, and after I assured him that they were solid, he seemed okay. They could have easily shaved off some of their potential time by admitting Pierre hired the hits, but I was confident that it wouldn’t even get to that point. No witness, no case.
On my way out of Emma’s, I saw an older woman struggling to carry a brown box into the antique store that was next door. With no hesitation, I walked over to her and took the box from her.
“Thank you, baby. I sholl appreciate the help.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She opened the door for me, and I carried the box over to the counter. Instead of waiting around to see what all they would buy just in case she needed help taking the box back out to her car, I made sure to tell the woman behind the counter to help her carry whatever they didn’t want out for her. She agreed, and the older woman handed me a gold lamp as her way of thanking me. I tried to give it back to her, but she insisted on me taking it. The only reason I did was because it looked like the genie lamp in Aladdin and that was one of Lovie’s favorite movies so I would clean it off and give it to her.