“So what you gon’ do?”
“I don’t know. Emerald ain’t the same girl she was when she left. She been through it, and she’s raising and taking care of her brother. The only reason she’s doing this is for the money. Her pops lost everything, he killed himself, and she has a daughter that she lost custody of. I’m trying to be there for her, but she’s giving me push back because of Jordan and this whole situation.”
“Sounds like you got some choices to make.” I resumed rolling the blunt because it was damn sure needed after this information dump.
“Ma tried to pay her to back out. Shit is messy.”
“You think that’s a good idea? Maybe you should find somebody else.”
“Jordan’s already set on using her,” Ivo conveyed, clearly stressed the hell out by the entire situation.
“Jordan don’t know you fucking her,” I pointed out with a shrug. “I’m sure if she had all the facts, she would feel the same as Ma.”
“I want to be with Emerald and I want to give Jordan a baby.”
“That shit don’t even go together,” I noted, shaking my head.
“Nigga, you walking around out here with three baby mamas, the fuck you mean?”
“That’s different. You married to Jordan. You actively using Emerald to give your wife a baby, then what, you leave Jordan and go be with Emerald, co-parenting this baby? Why not avoid that altogether and just keep it a buck with Jordan?”
“Because I love her and I don’t want to hurt her. I feel like if I just leave her after everything and we don’t have this baby, it just might break her. You wasn’t here, but that last pregnancy took her through it. It was the furthest she’d gone in any pregnancy and we was both hopeful about it. We even knew the sex this time. It was a little girl. I had a daughter and then she was just gone.”
I empathized with that. Although the situations with my baby mothers wasn’t ideal, I wouldn’t trade my kids for shit. One thing they knew for sure was Daddy was gon’ step behind them regardless of my relationship with their mamas. They all needed to know and recognize that real men stood ten toes and did men shit.
“I can’t tell you how to move in this situation. I can give my opinion and say I think it’s a bad idea because in the end, that child you bringing into this world will also be affected. I also know how you felt about Emerald.”
“How I feel about her,” he corrected me. “The minute I laid eyes on her, all that shit came back like I was sixteen again.”
“’Cause you soft,” I tittered.
There was a moment of silence between us while I rolled up and Ivo pulled out the artillery and ammo we were going to need for this mission. He sat checking every clip and counting bullets before loading them into duffel bags for transport.
“I know I ain’t say it before, maybe because I wasn’t sure how I felt at first, but . . . I’m glad you home, bro.”
I hadn’t expected that from him. Ivo and I were thick as thieves when we were kids, right before Brick was born. We were closer in age but also competitive at the same time. Basically, we could talk all the shit we wanted or square up with each other, but the next mothafucka could never.
“Shit ain’t been the same since you left. I think that broke something in Pops too. He tried to cover it up, but we all knew.”
The mention of our father got me thinking about our meeting and what Lathan brought up. Little did that mothafucka know, but he was on my list. He’d already shown and proved with Chino that he had no control over his crew. We couldn’t afford to sit around waiting for the next nigga to be disobedient. Only reason I was biding my time is because I wanted things to calm down first before we moved. Taking Lathan off the board opened up territory, and there would no doubt be a scramble for it. I was about to let the other families know how this next movement was going to go. The time for all the hustling and traps was done. I was ready to build a more sophisticated network, and I needed everyone to fall in line with it.
“What was going on before he died? What happened?” I questioned.
“He was ready to step down and hand it over to me. Said he was done and wanted to spend his time with Ma traveling and shit. Said it was time.”
“What about surveillance? Do we know who all was in the building that night?”
“We went through the footage. There was nothing out of the ordinary. There was a cleaning crew two floors down and two guards. One in the lobby and one walking the perimeter. It was late too.”
“You checked out this cleaning crew?” I asked, stuffing the blunt to wrap.
“Yup, everybody was legit.”
“You send the footage to Moniece? Just to make sure it’s not doctored?”
Ivo frowned. “I didn’t even think about that. Everything looked normal.”
“Something ain’t right about this shit. Somebody got close enough to him to take him out, and it had to be somebody inside.”
