Kiss the Ring (21 page)

Naeema didn't give a care about where Tank was taking her as they sped through the streets. She just closed her eyes and enjoyed the ride. It wasn't until he pulled to a stop that she opened her eyes and looked around her. She smiled at the royal-blue canopy of the house on the corner of South Eighteenth Street and Madison Avenue that housed D & J Country Cooking, or Dick and Judy's as everyone called it.

Best soul food in the city, hands down.

Naeema's stomach grumbled at the smell of food in the air as they climbed off the motorcycle. “How you know I needed some good food in my life?” she asked as they walked to the corner entrance.

Tank just laughed as he opened the screen door for her. “I ain't forgot you can't cook,” he teased her.

“TV dinners don't count?”

“Hell no.”

Dick and Judy's wasn't big. There were just four small booths and a counter with seats, but what it lacked in size it more than made up for in good down-home cooking. They served everything from homemade biscuits to oxtails with everything in between and all the Southern sides a mouth could water for. The heat from the kitchen filled the
restaurant and made you feel like you were in the South during a heat wave. The only thing it was missing was a jukebox playing good hole-in-the-wall music like Tyrone Davis and Marvin Sease.

She ordered lemonade and smothered pork chops. Tank got sweet tea and the oxtails. Their meals came with white rice and they decided to split a side of macaroni and cheese.

When the waitress left with their order, Tank looked at Naeema across the table. “I wouldn't have judged a decision you made when you was just a kid, Na,” he said, his eyes serious.

She glanced out the window at the large yellow apartment building across the street. “Plenty of teenagers raise their kids, Tank,” she said. “I brought him into the world, somebody else raised him, and some scroungy motherfucker took him out.”

“And you're trying to find out who killed him.”

She shifted her eyes back to him. “How'd you find out he's my son?” she said, purposefully avoiding his comment.

He shrugged one broad shoulder. ‘“I have my ways. You was too caught up in his murder, and that last night we spent together, when you was waking up in dreams yelling out his name and shit, I decided to see just what was going on. Since you wouldn't tell me.”

She sat back as their drinks were set before them.

“Anything else you want to tell me, Na?” he asked.

She shook her head and opened the straw to slide into her lemonade.

“Naeema.”

She locked eyes with his.

Tank pressed his elbows on the top of the table and
leaned in toward her. “Let the police handle this before you get yourself into a situation you can't get yourself out of.”

Situation?

Naeema shook her head at an image of Bas's tongue licking her nipples. Guilt flooded her for fucking Bas, but she pushed that aside because she knew Tank
had to be
fucking somebody. His sexual appetite was ferocious. It was nothing for them to go at it two or three times a day and he stayed ready. There was no way in hell he was running around without pussy on deck.

Shaking her head again, she ran her hands over her closely shaven head. “Tank, stop lecturing me,” she said, sounding exhausted.

“Stop lying to me, yo,” Tank countered.

“I know how to take care of myself.”

He captured both her knees between his under the table. “Because I taught you . . . and you're not ready to be out here playing vigilante or Foxy Brown or some shit. This real life.”

“Foxy Brown is a bad bitch,” Naeema said, thinking of the sexy heroine from one of those 1970s blaxploitation films her grandfather used to watch all the time.

“You do know I mean the chick from the movie and not the rapper, right?”

She rolled her eyes and looked up as the waitress brought their steaming hot plates of food. “Stop. Playing,” Naeema said, moving her glass out of the way.

“That report I gave you isn't up-to-date,” he said, not even glancing down at his food before him. “And the info that's in there now I wouldn't give to you knowing you on the manhunt for a killer like you're a marshal or some shit.”

Naeema dropped her fork and the chunk of pork chop on it. “What's in it?” she asked, her mind already spinning with the possibilities.

“Na—”

“What's in it?” she repeated, her voice cold as she stared down at some spot on the table that she never really focused on. She was trying like hell not to flip on Tank's ass in public. The more he held out, the more the countdown continued. Slow but steady.

Tank picked up his fork.

Naeema yanked his plate from in front of him.

Tank sat up straight and yanked it back, his face lined with annoyance.

“He was my son and I ain't never did shit for him,” she stressed.

“And what purpose would dying for him serve?”

Naeema pressed her hand to her chest as she spoke. “I just want to know what happened to him,” she said, switching gears on him.

Tank sat back in his seat and eyed her. “They were looking into a cell phone grab your son did a few weeks before his death,” he said. “But the body of the dude who owned the cell phone has been in the morgue unidentified since about a week after the robbery.”

One less motherfucker to hunt for. Good.

“What else?” she asked.

“Nothing else. Not yet,” he said.

Bullshit
.

Naeema focused on her food even though her appetite was gone.

“At least let me help you, Na,” Tank said.

She took a bite of the macaroni and cheese. “I got something that needs your help,” she said, meaning to flirt to get him off her trail.

Tank swiped at his mouth with his napkin. “I didn't come to see you about that.”

“So you don't want it no more?” she asked, her eyes on him as she chewed slowly.

“I'll always want it . . . but I don't need it, yo,” Tank's eyes dipped to her cleavage exposed by her shirt.

“And it don't need you,” she shot back smooth as hell.
Dicks are a dime a dozen.

Naeema looked away as she drifted back to the moments of her ass high in the air as Bas tore the pussy up.

“Here,” he said.

She looked over at him as he held his palm out with a bulky gold ring in a small plastic bag.

“It's your—It's Brandon's,” Tank explained.

Naeema gasped a little as she took it and pushed the bag from the plastic. She slid it onto her index finger and held up her hand. It was real gold but the diamonds were fake. Not even cubic zirconia. More like tiny rhinestones or some shit. It couldn't have cost more than fifty dollars, but for a fourteen-year-old kid with no ends that must've seemed like a million bucks.

“It was in evidence.”

She dropped her head and pressed her lips to it, feeling just a little bit closer to the child she'd selfishly left behind. “I thought I had time to fix shit,” she admitted, her voice broken.

Tank reached across the table and stroked her free hand with his thumb.

She met his eyes. “Thank you so much. I don't even deserve anything of his. But thank you.”

“Stop beatin' yourself up, yo. You gave birth to him. You chose to carry him and give him life and that ain't no little thing, Na. For real, yo,” Tank said. “His father ain't even done that.”

Naeema looked up. “You know who his father is?” she asked, surprised.

Tank shook his head. “Nah. I just assumed if you gave him up for adoption, that fool wasn't no help to you.”

Naeema forced a smiled that instead came off sad. “No he wasn't. I ain't laid eyes on that motherfucka since before the baby was born.”

She took a deep breath and for the first time ever told someone else about the pain and shame she felt that night she was put out on the street pregnant and broke. It felt like a weight off her soul to speak on her struggles being homeless and pregnant.

She wasn't surprised to see the anger in Tank's eyes.

“Chance Mack, huh?” he asked, already pulling his iPhone from his pocket and walking out of the luncheonette.

Naeema didn't bother to stop him. She had enough battles to fight and was fine with Tank taking on that one. What Chance and his mother/father did to her was fucked up.

She looked down at the ring. If it was in the police's possession, then he was wearing it the night he was killed. She didn't even realize she was crying until the tears blurred her vision.

Naeema knew she had to finish what she started and find her son's killer. She was determined to question Hammer and Nelson once and for all but she knew she couldn't make
a sudden reappearance without getting shit straight with Bas first.

Swiping away her tears, Naeema reached for the burner cell in her pocketbook and powered it on. She ignored the alert that she had a dozen or more voice mail messages on the five-dollar phone. She pulled up Bas in her contact info and dialed his number while she looked out through the mesh of the screen door at Tank's imposing figure pacing back and forth on the street as he talked on the phone.

“So you all right now, Queen?”

“You called me?” she said, surprised that the sound of his voice in her ear excited her.

“You got jokes?”

She used her thumb to circle the ring around her index finger. “That hot-ass mess that went down with your
situation
was pretty fucking funny, dude.”

“I didn't want to hurt her like that,” Bas said, sounding less than pleased.

“Or me either, right?” she asked, faking like she was upset.

“You know that.”

“No, I don't. I told you I don't like sharing dick, Bas,” Naeema said.

“You not.”

“So what happened?” Naeema took a bite of her food.

“She left. I didn't stop her . . . but I wish I did because she took my powder.”

“No she didn't,” Naeema admitted around a mouthful of mac and cheese.

The line went silent.

“I didn't know you fucked with blow,” he said.

“I don't. I just didn't want it to hype up an already
fucked-up situation, you know?” she said, her eyes zoned in on Tank.

“I need that package.”

“Don't need it. Want it,” she said in between bites of food.
Lawd, these people can cook.

“Don't
fuck
with me about it,” Bas said, his voice filled with all kinds of threats.

And just like that all the niceties were shot.
“My bad,” she said.

“Hold on to that until I get back in town.”

She watched Tank end his call and turn to walk back inside Dick & Judy's. “When will you be back?”

The screen door opened and slammed closed.

“Next week sometime.”

“Can I holla at you when you get back?” she asked.

“We gon' do more than that,” Bas promised.

Not if I wrap this shit up before then.

Tank already had her dick-struck and mind-fucked. She didn't need another dude—especially a coke-sniffing thief—fucking with her emotions. She was ready to slip back into her life and a world where Bas Jones did not even exist.

“My birthday is next week, so bring me back something good,” she lied.

“What you want?”

“Let me call you right back,” she said before snapping the plastic phone closed and silencing the ringer.

Tank reclaimed his seat and began shoveling into his food.

“Did you find him?” Naeema asked.

“Not yet.”

“And what do you plan to do with him when you do?”

He didn't answer her.

Naeema left it the fuck alone. Tank was cool as hell as long as he wasn't crossed. Chance Mack didn't know it yet but he'd just made the shit list for something he did fourteen years ago.
Fuck him.

They ate their food in silence. Naeema spent most of her time looking out the window at the traffic-free street and wondering what Tank really thought about her now that he knew the truth about Brandon.

“Do I need to check if those dudes Brandon was friends with are still alive?” Tank asked suddenly.

Naeema stiffened and she avoided his all too knowing eyes. “I'm not a killer, Tank.”

“Oh, you not?”

Naeema closed her eyes as a vision of a bloodied body with a neck slashed by a razor blade flashed. A scene from her past. She blinked and shook her head before she locked eyes with him. “That was different,” she said, angry that he'd brought up a secret she shared with him.

“Murder is murder.”

That is a story for another time.

“Take me back to the barbershop,” she said, jumping to her feet and damn near flipping her plate.

“Sit down, Na,” he said, calm as hell as he kept on eating his food.

“Or?” she snapped, her temper turned up.

“
Or
 . . . sit down, Na,” Tank repeated like he was speaking to a child.

Ignoring his demand, she crossed her arms over her chest and turned to lean against the frame of the window as she looked out of it.

Tank just chuckled at her.

“Don't bring it up again,” she said, glancing back at him over her shoulder.

He said nothing.

Looking back at the window, Naeema was surprised to see a black SUV with the darkest tint ever on its windows pull up and park on the street right outside the large bay window.

Tank's cell phone began ringing just as the rear doors of the SUV opened. She recognized the damn near seven-foot dude who climbed out on the street side. He was Grip and he worked for Tank doing security. She squinted her eyes as someone else tried to leave the vehicle but Grip reached in one strong arm and mushed whoever it was before solidly closing the door.