Page 73 of Justice

But back then when I was arrested I didn’t have shit to lose. Right now I was worried about my family back home. I knew Prime would watch over my kingdom. And I knew in my heart Skye would help him hold it down.

I just didn’t like not being there for them.

I sat on the metal bench with my back against the block wall and my eyes half closed, not sleeping, just waiting the night out. There were maybe six of us in there. A drunk snoring in the corner. Two young boys who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, trying to look harder than they were. And a big one across from me who’d been watching me since they walked me in, sizing me up, working something out in his head.

I already knew what it was. I’d worn it my entire life.

I looked like money. I was the only one in there with a suit on. Despite having another man’s blood on my knuckles, I looked like a man who had something. And there’s a certain kind of man who sees that and cannot leave it alone. Sees a clean, quiet, well-off Black man in a cage with him and takes it personal. Like me having money is a thing I did to him.

He pushed up off his bench and crossed the cell. Then he stood over me, close, blocking the light, waiting for me to look up at him like that was supposed to mean something.

“You lost, pretty boy?” The nigga was loud so the young ones would hear it. “This ain’t the country club. What you in here for, tax fraud?”

Without opening my eyes, I replied, “Nigga you stink. Go sit your funky big ass down.”

“Fuck you just say to me?”

I opened my eyes.

Here’s what men like him never understand until it’s too late.

They see the suit. They see the calm. They think that means soft. They think a man who talks low and moves slow is a man who won’t do nothing when it counts. But they’ve spent their lives around loud men. Barkers. Chest-beaters. Men who tell you exactly what they’re gonna do before they do it, if they ever work up the nerve to do it at all. Those men, he can read. And those men don’t scare me either.

Me, he couldn’t read.

Because the loud ones want you to feel it coming. I don’t. I’ve never once in my life told a man what I was about to do to him. I just did it, and stepped over what was left. That’s the difference between us that this fool was about to learn. He came up on the quiet one thinkin’ he was gon’ bitch me. Put me in my place like I was some simp.

He had no idea he’d just walked up on the last face some men ever saw.

He reached down to grab a handful of my suit jacket.

I came up off that bench and had his own arm turned back on him before his fingers closed, spun him, and got my forearm locked across his throat from behind, deep in the v of my elbow where the pressure does its work. He was bigger than me. Didn’t matter. Big just meant you hit the floor harder.

He thrashed. Grabbed at my arm. His elbow came back and caught me in the ribs. I barely felt it. I was somewhere cold and familiar, a place I know better than my own living room.

“Shhh,” I said in his ear, calm like I was lulling a baby to sleep. “Stop fighting it. You fight it, it just hurts more.”

The young boys were on their feet now, pressed to the far wall. The drunk kept snoring. And I held that man up on his toes with his own weight helping me kill the lights in his eyes, counting it out in my head, because I wasn’t trying to catch a body while in this cell. I was just trying to make a point.

He went slack.

I dropped his big ass on the ground, head cracking against the concrete floor.

Tax fraud, I thought to myself. That was a lil funny. But I don’t fuck with the IRS. There’s only two things I’m scared of… Rita and the IRS.

I stood up and looked at the two young boys frozen against the wall. “He’ll probably be aight. Check on him in the morning.” I went back to my bench. Sat down. Closed my eyes again. But not to sleep. Just to think.

Nobody in that cell said one more word to me the rest of the night.

With the excitement handled, the night got long and quiet, and my mind went where it wanted to go.

It went to her.

Even here. Even in a cage with a man laid out on the floor a couple of feet away, some fool part of me was thinking about Skye. The weight of her across my chest in that theater. That sound she made. I had a woman under my roof who tasted like the first good thing in three years. Now here I was in a county cell, thinking about the curve of her hips instead of my own arraignment.

But it wasn’t just her body I kept circling. That’s what surprised me.

It was the scar. How she flew up off that couch when my fingers found it. The tired eyes she covers with makeup. The jump in her when a board hit the concrete at the stable. Somebody did something to that woman. Bad enough to make her flinch at loud sounds. Bad enough to put a fake name in her mouth and bury everything that came before it.