Page 69 of Justice

“I’m twenty-eight, man, I swear to God.” His hands scrabbled up between us, useless. “She told me she was eighteen! She said eighteen, I swear to you⁠—”

“She’s fifteen.”

I watched it land. Watched the floor drop out of his eyes when he understood what he was pinned under.

“Think real careful,” I said. My voice came out worse than any yell, low and dead and even, that old cold pouring back into me at the worst second of my life. “About the very next thing that comes out your mouth.”

Then I stopped talking. Talking was done.

I hit him. I hit him again. I hit him for the hand on her back, for the outfit I didn’t buy. And I would have kept going until there was nothing left to hit. I know that now. I knew it then. There was no bottom to it. Somewhere far off a woman was screaming for security. My baby was hollering my name. It all came to me through water, muffled and slow, none of it as real as the man coming apart under my fists.

“JUSTICE.” Prime’s arms locked around me from behind, both of them, hauling me up and back with everything he had. “That’s ENOUGH. Look at me. LOOK at me. Cameras, Justice. Everywhere. It’s done. We’re done.”

I felt him straining against me. It took a grown man built like Prime to drag me up off that floor.

He got me up onto my feet. Two steps back. The man stayed down on the tile, curled around himself, wheezing red, a hundred phones pointed at all of us.

And there was Storie.

She stood a few feet off with her arms crossed, looking at me. Not one tear on that child’s face for the man bleeding on the ground or the father who’d just put him there. She looked at me like you’d look at a stranger who’d made a scene and embarrassed you in front of people. All attitude. And the first thing out of her mouth was not I’m sorry. It was not are you okay.

“How did you even know I was here?”

That’s what she wanted to know. Standing over a bleeding man with her daddy’s chest still heaving.

Who told.

That was all that was in her head, and something in me went cold looking at her, colder than the rage had been, because rage I understood. This I didn’t.

“Let’s go.” I took her by the arm, firm, and she snatched against it hard.

“Get off me! You’re embarrassing me!”

“I’m embarrassing you.”

“Everybody’s looking!”

“Let them look.” I got my hand around the back of her neck, squeezing hard. Any tougher, the life would’ve lifted out of her body. She would’ve been joining Monica in the afterlife.

It was the only way left to move a child who had lost every right to move herself. I walked her toward the exit while she twisted and cussed and clawed at my wrist. She told me I was hurting her, which I ain’t care. Told me she hated me, which I heard. Told me I couldn’t tell her what to do, which was the funniest thing she’d said all day.

We didn’t make the exit.

They came across the concourse fast. Two cops, a pair of county officers a beat behind, hands already up, already telling me to stop, to let the girl go, to get down on the ground.

“That’s my daughter,” I said. “That man back there is a child predator who came here to meet a fifteen-year-old girl.”

“Sir. Put your hands where I can see them.”

Prime slid in beside me, palms open, talking slow and easy. “Officers, that’s his child. He’s her father. That man on the ground is who you need to be putting cuffs on.”

“Everybody’s gonna get sorted out. Right now I need him on the ground.”

I looked at my brother. My brother looked at me. And we both already knew exactly how this went. A Black man standing over another man he’d beaten bloody in a public mall does not get to explain himself first.

I got down on my knees on that food court floor.

They pulled my hands behind my back. The metal went cold around my wrists. And the mall watched it happen, phones up, a Banks down on his knees on the tile like a common criminal.