Kiss the Ring (31 page)

She reached up with one hand to pound on the passenger door as she fought to remain rational and not let panic diminish her senses. She needed help. Tank needed help.

The driver's seat of the double-parked SUV Tank exited was still empty but the local rap artist, Fevah, he was hired to protect and her entourage of three friends were still all inside. “Open this fucking door,” Naeema roared, pounding hard enough for darts of pain to shoot across her entire hand.

Anger was an added layer to the myriad emotions engulfing her as the door remained closed to them but she was flooded with relief as an ambulance screeched to a halt behind the Tahoe. She pressed kisses to his face. “Hold on, Tank. Don't you dare leave me now,” she whispered in his ear in the moments before they took him from her.

As she sat in the street surrounded by the blood of the man she loved, her soul wavered between feeling as empty as her arms at the thought of losing him forever and a fiery anger that would only be quenched at finding out who shot Tank and why.

Whoever the guilty party was just invited hell into their lives.

1

“A
in't you gonna call the police?”

Naeema shifted her eyes from the items—her items—scattered about her living room and over to the blood still lightly oozing from the busted lip of the gruff man in his late sixties. Just minutes ago she had returned home to find her home had been broken into and Sarge on the floor, struck down by the thief during his escape.

“I'll get you some ice,” she said.

“No,” he said abruptly, dabbing at his swelling bottom lip with a wrinkled handkerchief from the pocket of his military fatigues.

The man hadn't seen a way in over thirty years but he stayed dressed for combat.

With one full-circle turn Naeema was confident nothing of value had been swiped. Although the house had five bedrooms and three full bathrooms with both a semi-finished attic and basement, her entire life was contained to the living room, with clear paths to the first-floor bathroom to the left and the kitchen to the right. It would take more money than she could save cutting hair to do anything beyond the elbow grease she put into cleaning the rooms of every disgusting remnant of the squatters who had lived in it all those years after her grandfather died. All those years she neglected it.

“No, Sarge,” she said, finally answering him as she tapped the gun she held against her thigh and released a heavy breath. “Looks like you stopped them before they could take anything.”

“But—”

“You know I don't fuck with the police,” she said, her voice hard and unrelenting.

He grunted.

It was funny how that one sound from the grumpy army vet was brimming with judgment and recriminations that she didn't miss. Naeema had come to know him very well since they'd become unconventional roommates almost two years ago. After leaving her husband, Tank, and the home they shared she returned to the two-story brick colonial where her grandfather had taken her in after the death of her single mother. It was abandoned and closed up by the city but Sarge had taken refuge in it from living on the streets. She allowed him to remain, not able to bring herself to evict the wild-looking man in the filthy army uniform. She had known firsthand during her wild teenage years what it felt like to not know where her next meal would come from or if she would have a roof to sleep under that night.

Sarge was slow to speak but when he did spare her a few words they were either funny or bizarrely insightful—and sometimes both. She had come to love the ornery old man—and she suspected that he cared for her, too—although she wouldn't dare tell him so.

Naeema put her gun back in its hiding place in the ash trap of the fireplace on the far wall of the living room before wiping her hands over her shaven head as she continued to take in the mess the thief left behind. “I guess I better clean all this up,” she said, her voice showing the lack of enthusiasm she felt about dealing with the mess.

“You got it.”

That was a statement and not a question. Of that Naeema was sure and she was able to smile even in the midst of her anger. When she first moved in with Sarge she had to convince the man to take advantage of the bathroom in the basement and that had taken some serious cajoling and then flat-out demanding. She wasn't shocked in the least that he wanted no part of helping her clean.

As she moved toward the kitchen door, Naeema picked up her mattress from where it leaned against her dresser and plopped it back down atop the box spring on the full-sized metal frame in the center of the room. She quickly snatched the brightly striped comforter set and the floral sheets off and left them in a ball in the center of the bed. There was no way she was going to sleep on them knowing a stranger had manhandled her bed.

Next, she bent down to pick up one of the frames holding a photo of her son, Brandon. Her anger returned in a rush at a piece of the shattered glass that tore the paper of the photo, making a white fleck on his cheek. Brandon was dead. Killed at just fourteen years old. She found vengeance—and some relief of her guilt for giving him away as a baby—when she sought and killed his murderer eight months ago.

She hadn't laid eyes on her son in nearly all his fourteen years. The pictures were a connection to the young man she grew to know during her weeks living under the alias of Queen as she moved among the band of thieves he called friends. One of whom had proven to be more foe than friend.

And she had proven to be his judge, jury, and executioner.

Fuck it and fuck him.

After she picked up the broken frames and removed each of the nine pictures depicting Brandon from kindergarten to eighth grade, she scooped up all her panties from the floor before tossing them back inside the large plastic container where she had kept them. “I don't even feel right putting these on ever again,” she said with a twist of her mouth, rising to set the container back upright.

Naeema bent again to stand her nineteen-inch flat-screen television back up. “No good son of a thieving bitch,” she snapped, eyeing the jagged crack across the screen.

She dropped to a knee to reach over and plug the set back in.

“I love you, Steebie—”

Naeema rolled her eyes at the rerun of
Love &
Hip Hop Atlanta
playing but Joseline's image was fractured by the crack in the screen. She cut the set off before lifting it to where she always sat it atop the container—a makeshift TV stand.

She looked around the room at the rest of her things scattered on the floor and her eyes fell on the stairs leading to the second floor, wondering if the intruder had violated her privacy up there as well. She rarely ventured upstairs. Her wedge sneakers pressed a shard of glass and snapped it in two against the faded wood floor as she moved across the room to stand at the foot of the stairs. She flipped the switch, brightening the dusty glass-covered light fixture on the slanted wall covered in faded blue-and-white-striped wallpaper.

Ain't shit up there to steal.

She was halfway up when she stroked her palm with her fingertips, wishing she held her gun. She couldn't explain the fear that caused the soft, short hairs on her nape to stand on end. The drawn-out creak of one of the steps didn't help at all.

“Aight, Naeema, get your shit together,” she reprimanded herself, dashing up the rest of the stairs.

As quick as a booster trying to make it out the door of a store without getting stopped, Naeema stuck her head inside four of the five bedrooms quickly lifting the light switch to fight the darkness caused by the boards on the windows. In each there was more of the same. Empty rooms. Faded and peeling wallpaper. Dull wood floors. Memories of better days.

At the bedroom just off the top of the stairs, Naeema leaned in the doorway as she flipped the switch.
If these walls could talk.

There were many a night she had starting smelling her own ass and thinking she was grown enough to either sneak out or sneak boys in during those late hours when her grandfather slept. He wrongly assumed that the room closest to his master bedroom would help him shelter and protect the preteen who came to live with him after her mother's death, but he overlooked the closeness to the stairs that had become her escape route to freedom. Wildness. Boys. Sex. Drugs.

Naeema couldn't do shit but shake her head. She once rejected everything her grandfather offered that she needed like love and stability. To her the room with the pink and white walls with teddy bear stencils was worse than any jail cell on
Orange Is the New Black
.

“Just young and dumb,” she said with a heavy release of breath before turning off the light and walking across the open hall to the closed door leading to her grandfather's room.

She reached for the clear-glass door handle but her hand paused just above it, her long stiletto-shaped nails causing a claw-like shadow against the wood. In all the years she lived with her grandfather he had always taught her that his bedroom was off-limits.

“A man deserve some privacy in his own house,” he said.

Naeema had pushed the limits on many things but she never fucked with crossing the threshold into “his” space. Not once. Even when she returned to take over her claim on the house after his death she had pressed Sarge to clean out any sign of the vagrants that had squatted.

Naeema forced herself to grip the knob, turn it, and then push the door open wide. “Shit!” she swore as a mouse jumped from the windowsill, raced along the wall, and disappeared under the closet door.

She made a note for Sarge to lay out more traps and poison. The fight against mice and roaches in the hood was an everyday struggle. That was one war Naeema was determined to win.

With her focus off the rodent, it sunk in that her grandfather's room with its dark green walls was the only one with the windows uncovered and the glass free from the harm of rocks thrown by bored children. She knew it had to be because the room was on the side of the house where there was only a small backyard cushioning it from her next-door neighbor's.

There was dust and some minor clutter in the corners but as with the other rooms it was empty as well. Naeema closed her eyes thinking she could almost smell her grandfather's aftershave above the stench of uncirculated air and mouse droppings. Almost.

She turned, closing the door behind her.

Naeema didn't bother with the bathroom or the trap door leading to the attic. She quickly descended the stairs and cut off the lights. The upstairs was even more of a reminder that she had to find the time and the money to finish renovating the house. It was barely a step above the shitty dump the squatters wallowed in.

At the sound of tires squealing loudly on the asphalt outside she moved to open the front door, turning the knob and lifting the door to unjam it from a botched job by a bootleg handyman she hired to hang it.
You get what the fuck you pay for.

Standing on the top step she looked up and down the length of the slanted street. The sun had faded and there was just barely a breeze in the June air. Nearly every porch was occupied by residents thinking they could escape the heat of their homes.
Maybe someone saw something.

People in the hood barely missed a damn thing but it was a toss-up whether they gave enough of a shit to “snitch.” Hood politics were legendary. Naeema came down the stairs feeling ready to risk it. There had been at least a dozen or more break-ins on the street for the last couple of weeks, and that had to be enough to make someone speak up about seeing someone running from her house.

She reached the bottom of the steps and took a moment to smile in pride at the gate to the fence now reattached and hanging properly. One lost wrestling match too many with the gate that used to swing with the same abandon of a sweated-out track of a weave from a woman's head. Just no structure. No control. Plain disrespectful.

Now just a thousand other things to do on my list.

Closing the gate behind her and hooking the new bright aluminum latch to the pole, she glanced over at the small brick house to her right. She hadn't seen her neighbor Coko in more weeks than she could count. Maybe even months. The lights were on in the house so someone was paying the bill but Hunga had not appeared recently. The young woman had long since succumbed to a heroin addiction that left Naeema having to help her last year after finding her passed out on her porch from an overdose.

Turning away from the house, she went walking up the street with long strides meant to defeat the steady incline and make sure it didn't defeat her. She walked past the few porches that were empty and stopped at a powder blue two-story colonial with white shutters.

A tall, slender light-skinned woman with a wild, curly, bright red Afro glanced up from the head of the preschool-age child sitting between her freckled knees on the step. The little girl offered her a welcoming smile. The woman did not.