ANYTHING 4 PROFIT (ANYTHING FOR PROFIT) (18 page)

              “Where they got her at now, mama?”

              “Greenville Memorial.”

              Ant pressed the end button on his phone, jumped up from the bed, and began getting dressed.

   “What’s wrong, baby,” asked the girl who’d just finished swallowing his unborn children. She was sitting at the foot of the bed, naked, watching him get dressed.

   Ant didn’t even bother to answer her question. He didn’t even hear her. Something had happened to Meka. He continued to get dressed, a million questions racing through his mind. After getting his last Nike on, he ran out of the hotel room down to his flip flop Corvette. He jumped in, put the key in the ignition, and left melted Pirelli rubber on the asphalt as he flew out of the parking lot on his way to the hospital.

              “I don’t believe that sorry ass nigga just left us in this room like this!” said one of the girls back at the hotel room.

              “See, I told you we should’a went ahead and robbed that nigga while he was knocked the fuck out.
Damn
!”

              Doing about 60 mph in a school zone, Ant D shifted into fourth gear and stepped on the gas, accelerating to 90 mph. He pulled his phone out and dialed Mike’s number. He hadn’t seen Mike since he left the club the night before, so there was no telling where he was at.

    Mike answered on the fifth ring. “Hello,” he said groggily.

              “Man, a muh’fucka done tried to kill Meka. She in the hospital.”

    Mike, who was still in bed at his apartment, knew from the sound of his homey’s voice that he wasn’t joking. Besides, that wasn’t the type of shit Ant would joke about anyway.

             “What hospital she in?”

             “Memorial.”

             “I’m on my way,” said Mike, and flipped his phone shut. He rolled out of bed and started getting dressed. Before he left the apartment, Mike went to the closet in his bedroom and grabbed the AR-15, which he kept fully loaded against the back wall. He placed it in a gym bag, threw some clothes on top of it, and then headed outside to his Escalade.

   Once inside the truck, Mike placed the gym bag on the floor of the passenger side. Wondering exactly what the fuck had transpired, he pulled out of his apartment complex and headed to Greenville Memorial Hospital.

Chapter 18

    As soon as Ant walked through the automatic glass doors of Greenville Memorial and into the waiting area, Gloria jumped up from her seat, ran to him and began crying uncontrollably. While clinging to her son, she said, “They tried to kill my baby! Somebody tried to kill my baby girl!” Gloria placed her head on his shoulder and sobbed.

              Ant D had been off the porch for a long time, and he had taken quite a few lives himself, so he refused to start that crying shit. He hadn’t shed a tear since he was thirteen, and he damn sure wasn’t about to start now. He needed to keep his emotions in check as much as possible in order to figure out what his next move was going to be. But he could understand his mama breaking down like that. She was after all a civilian in the war that took place daily in the inner city streets. And a war was exactly what was about to pop off behind that shit. He hugged his mother, and spoke in her ear. “Mama, you gotta calm down. We gotta be strong for Meka.”

             “I know, baby, I know,” said Gloria. She wiped her tears, and attempted to regain her composure.

             “What room they got her in? You done seen her yet?”

             “Yeah, I just came out of her room right before you got here. They got her in ICU, in room number 215.”

              Just then, Mike walked into the waiting area with a scowl on his face. He greeted Gloria and Ant, his adopted family. “What’s poppin’?” asked Mike.

             “We finna go upstairs and see her now. They got her in ICU,” replied Ant D.

              The three of them took off towards the elevator. Once they got in, Gloria pressed 2. ICU was located on the second floor. Once off the elevator, they walked pass a series of rooms before coming to number 215. A tall, balding, bespectacled, Caucasian man wearing a white lab coat was at the door writing on some type of chart. The man turned around as they approached. “Hello, my name’s Dr. Baker. Can I help you?”

              Ant D spoke up. “Yeah, we here to see Tameka Davis. Are you her doctor?”

             “As a matter of fact, I am,” said Dr. Baker in his nasal voice. “I was just making my rounds, checking her vital signs, and making sure that her condition hasn’t worsened.”

             “Exactly what is her condition?” asked Mike.

             “Well to be frank with you, somebody beat the crap out of her. She has severe bruising and swelling all over her face and body. A few broken ribs, and some missing teeth… And whoever the animals were that did this… also raped her. We tested her for STDs and HIV. Fortunately, everything came back negative. And as serious as all of that sounds, those are the least of our concerns right now. Due to severe trauma of the head, she remains comatose.”

             “Comatose? What the hell is that?” asked Ant.

             “She’s in a coma. And we have no way of knowing for certain if she’ll even come out of it. And if she does, she may not be able to function normally.”

             “What do you mean
function normally
?”

             “I mean even if she regains consciousness, there is a possibility…that she may never fully recover.”

              Gloria struggled to keep the tears fighting to come out of her eyes from sliding down her face. “Can we see her,” asked Ant.

             “Sure, but if y’all don’t mind, only one at a time. And only for a few minutes,” replied Dr. Baker, as he went back to writing on Meka’s chart.

              Ant D went into the room first. He’d seen worse, and in fact had done worse to people. But seeing his twin sister, one of the only people he actually loved, lying up in that bed with tubes running through her body was enough to break even a cold hearted nigga like him down. He and Meka had been through so much together over the years. He told himself that he wasn’t going to cry, and he was doing a good job until he walked over to her bed and saw what the fuck them niggas had done to her. His sister’s face was beautiful, but they had her looking like Emitt Till up in that muh’fucka.  Her face and head were so swollen that if not for the birthmark on her lower neck, he wouldn’t have believed he looking at his own twin sister. A single tear escaped from his right eye and slowly trickled down his cheek. He grabbed Meka’s hand and spoke to her, not knowing for sure if she could hear him. Deep inside, he had a feeling that she could.

              There were some things he had to get off his chest. “Meka, what it is, baby girl? I really don’t know what to say other than this. Yo’ ass better not die on me, I know that shit. We done been through too much together, ya heard? I need for you to be a soldier, and pull through for me, so we can get them niggas that did this shit to you.”

   After a few seconds of intense silence, Ant said, “I…I know I don’t ever tell you this shit but…I love you, Meka. Anyway, I’ma get at you later, sis. Alright?”

   As Ant D turned and walked out of the room, he said to himself, “I
swear
somebody’s gonna die behind this bullshit.”

Chapter 19

   Mike walked into the hospital room next. He sadly looked at the girl who over the past five years had become the sister he’d never had. Looking at Meka laid up in the bed like that with a ventilator breathing for her put Mike in a zone. He stood there trying to keep his emotions under control, and reflected back on his life, and the first time he’d met Meka….

              Ever since the day Tracy Dillinger had given birth to Mike, he’d constantly been on the move, from one foster home to another. Tracy’s parents had been too ashamed of the circumstances behind Mike’s birth to take him in.

              Tracy’s father and Mike’s grandfather, John Dillinger, was a pastor with one of the largest churches in the upstate of South Carolina. He had a strong flock of followers that were willing to follow the articulate, charismatic, young Black preacher to the end of the earth, if he led them there. But what would his congregation and the community have thought about him if they had found out that his own daughter had had unprotected sex with a man twice her age? What kind of man could lead a church, but couldn’t keep his own daughter from getting pregnant before the age of 16?

               So when Tracy became pregnant and told her mother, who was director of the choir, and also the Sunday school teacher, it was immediately decided that the pregnancy would remain a secret, and never be discussed outside of the house.

              An abortion was out of the question though. For Pastor D, as his flock so affectionately called him, was a deeply religious man with the belief that abortion was an abomination; murder of an innocent life. So while he was very deeply concerned with his appearance in the community, he was even more concerned with his appearance before God. Therefore he wasn’t willing to be an accomplice to murder, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant the life. No, Tracy would have the baby, give it up for adoption, and then the whole family would move on and learn from that terrible mistake.

              All during her pregnancy, Tracy’s mother, Esther, would go to clothing stores and buy her daughter clothes that were many sizes too big for her small frame, in order to conceal the fact that she was with child. If anybody asked about the clothes, Tracy was to say that she had just put on some weight. They knew it was a sin to lie, but the Dillingers looked at it as a necessary evil. It was just a little “white lie.”

              But it turned out that the clothes and lies weren’t even necessary. Tracy was so depressed about the fact that the man who’d swore he’d never leave her was gone, she barely ate. Add that to all of the additional stress that came with trying to keep her pregnancy a secret. Three months into her first trimester, she had actually dropped a few pounds. She wasn’t getting the proper nutrition for herself, let alone for her baby.

              But the baby boy in her womb was a fighter who refused to be denied the opportunity to walk on this earth and kick up a little dust while he was here. Eight months into her pregnancy, Tracy prematurely gave birth to Michael Trevall Dillinger… losing her life in the process.

              Pastor D and his wife immediately put the baby up for adoption, and told the congregation that Tracy had died from a rare disease that she’d been battling for months. They even went so far as to take their family name away from the baby, so know one would ever connect the dots. The changed the baby’s last name to something more common, like “Smith.”

              The pastor and his wife were uncomfortable with the lie they were telling, but it became easier to deal with as the years went by. Though they both severely missed their only daughter, Pastor D and his wife never spoke about their feelings. It was just a dark cloud that hovered over their lives as the years passed. Each year the memory of what had happened faded, until finally it seemed as if the whole experience had been nothing but a bad dream that was finally over. But for young Michael, the nightmare was just beginning.

              Anybody who’s ever been a foster kid knew that was a lonely, insecure life to live. Oftentimes the family who took a child into their home only did so to receive the check that was allotted to them each month from the state. The child could suffer physical abuse, neglect, or both. After the child became too much of a burden, they were shipped back to DSS to be placed into another home. The older the child got, the less likely it was that they’d be permanently adopted by a family. That usually left the adolescent questioning why nobody wanted them, or why they weren’t good enough.