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  “Go fuck ya’self, bitch,” he told her, putting his hand on the desk, fixing to stand up.

  She was growing tired of his inability to cooperate, because she was not used to such disobedience. She was Madame. What she said went, and nobody said no to her. The rage filled her heart so suddenly and Lance didn’t have time to move his hand away. She pulled one of the instruments from her hair, revealing that it was really a long, sharp knife, and she brought it down with all her might.

  “Awwh!” he screamed in agony when she impaled his hand against the desk.

  Tears immediately came to his eyes as the pain set in and he tried to pull the knife from his hand. All that did was make the pain even more excruciating. He sat there trying not to move, panting with gritted teeth.

  “I did not say that you could get up,” she snarled and pushed him back into his seat. “This is a nice office you have here. I would hate to repaint it in your blood.”

  She pulled out her own phone from her clutch, pressed a button, and put the receiver to her ear. From where he sat he could see the woman with the machete answer the phone.

  “Bring them up here,” the woman instructed and disconnected the call.

  Minutes later his wife and daughter were being pushed on the floor of his office. Both had tears streaming from their faces, and they were shaking in fear.

  “Lance, what’s going on! What have you done?” his wife, Tanya, screamed at him. “Who are these people and what are they doing in our home?”

  “Daddy!” his daughter, Tiffany, screamed from where she lay on the floor. She saw his hand and the blood oozing from it and her eyes expelled panic. “Daddy, they killed all the workers. I saw Olivia on the ground when they brought us up here. Please do whatever they say. I don’t want to die!”

  Lance’s brow furrowed and he tried to eat the pain shooting up his left arm. He felt like a horrible parent. It seemed that his life of doing bad deeds had finally caught up to him. He looked at his nineteen-year-old daughter’s face and knew that, unlike him, she deserved to live a long life. He wished that he’d let her go off to stay in the college dorms over summer break. Now there was no telling if any of them would get out of this situation.

  “Listen to your daughter,” the woman in the dress suit told him.

  “Goddammit, Lance, do what she tells you!” his wife shrieked when he once again hesitated.

  “Okay,” he finally said. “Okay. I’ll call him.”

  “Good,” the woman said and, once again without warning, snatched the blade from his hand.

  “Fuck!” he howled. “Fuck!”

  The woman was unmoved by his grimaces; however, she allowed him a few moments to get himself together. Once his breathing was in order he looked again to his family on the ground and then to the phone in his lap. Knowing he had no other choice, he picked up the phone to dial the number to Quinton’s cell phone.

  “Before you make that phone call I must ask one question,” the woman interrupted him just as he was about to dial the number. “Is it true that the girl Dot shot was his daughter?”

  “Yes,” Lance answered, not seeing a point in lying.

  “And is Rhebecca truly dead?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman nodded and signaled for him to continue making the call. Once Quinton answered she was prepared to stick the blade in Lance’s neck if he tried any funny business. However, she was pleased by his performance.

  “Nothing much, man,” Lance responded in a rushed tone. “Just tryin’a see how you’re living. I heard about what happened down in Miami. Bruh, I swear on my mother that if I knew that nigga was on foul play like that I would have never sent you.”

  She listened to him read off the details from the piece of paper and, by the time he was finished, she wished she could give him an Oscar. When he hung up the phone he looked up to the woman with hot tears coming from his eyes.

  “I just betrayed one of my best friends,” he said, scrunching his face up. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because long ago your best friend stole something from me,” she told him, snatching the phone from his hand before strutting around the desk and toward the door. “And I want it back.”

  Lance noticed that she was exiting the room by herself and that the woman with the machete was advancing on him. “Wait, you said you wouldn’t hurt us! We had a deal!”

  The woman stopped in the doorway and turned her head so that she could look back over her shoulder. “I said I wouldn’t hurt you. I didn’t say anything about her.” She turned to the woman dressed in black from head to toe, except for the white mask on her face. “Make it messy, Tamia. You have two minutes.”

  She gave a sinister laugh and allowed her stilettos to stab the carpet under her feet as she walked away from the massacre waiting to happen. She barely heard the first gunshot or the screams that followed coming from behind her. She was too busy thinking about the way her plan was about to unfold.

  Chapter 12

  Ahli glanced in the rearview mirror and was given the image of her sister asleep in the back seat of the BMW. Her head was leaned against the window and Ahli imagined that it was cold on her forehead. Rhonnie’s expression was peaceful, the most peaceful she’d seen it in days, and that granted her solitude.

  Averting her eyes back to the highway ahead of her she focused on the path the bright lights were leading her to. The GPS in the vehicle said they were a little over an hour away, giving them an arrival time of midnight. She sighed and tried to listen to the music playing softly from the speakers, but she couldn’t focus on any of the lyrics because of the loud pitter-patter of the rain hitting the car. She began to think about how her life had changed so drastically in the course of three days.

  Her future was looking more and more like the road she was driving on; she didn’t know what was around the bend. Whenever she tried to think about what would happen after this last job she came up blank. She was ready to live a normal life, like Rhonnie always talked about, but exactly what was a normal life? Would she still be able to sleep soundly like a baby? Or would she have nightmares for the rest of her life? The identity she currently had was who she’d been for so long that she didn’t know how to be anybody else. What happened to her father should have been an eye-opener and instilled fear in her heart. Instead, she harbored rage. A rage that needed an outlet; so would she ever be normal?

  “You know you’ll be all right, don’t you?”

  Brayland’s groggy voice interrupted her thought process. He had dozed off for a while, but he’d been up for a few minutes just watching her facial expressions change. He couldn’t begin to imagine the thoughts in her head, but he had a good idea that none of them were good.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I know when things like this happen the worst place you can go is backward. There isn’t a point in chasing the past,” he told her, thinking about his own life.

  “But I’m so mad,” Ahli breathed, scrunching up her face and trying to keep her tears in check. She didn’t remember a time when she cried so much. “I should have been there. I should have saved him!”

  “You can’t blame yourself for this, Ahli.” Brayland’s voice was stern. “You said it yourself: Quinton was a man who did many things, things that some wouldn’t be too proud of. Stop beating yourself up, because when it comes down to it you can’t change the fact that he’s dead. Love him, mourn him, and remember him for the man he was. But don’t ever get caught up in telling yourself what could have happened. You’ll drive yourself crazy.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know the half of what I’m feeling so don’t try to fucking tell me how I should handle anything!”

  “I don’t?” The vein in Brayland’s temple showed and he breathed deeply, turning his head to look out the window. He knew everything was still so fresh in her mind and she might have just needed an outlet for her anger but, still, what she said definitely struck a nerve for him
. He focused on the trees slightly blowing in the night breeze as she pushed eighty on the highway, and he thought about just letting what she said go.

  Fuck that, he thought, and turned his head back to her. “Maybe I don’t know what you’re going through or how you’re feeling, but let me switch shit up for you right quick. In the line of work that you do, how many men have you killed? How many funerals have you been the cause of? How many fathers do you think you took from some little girl? Now you know how they feel.”

  Ahli’s breath got caught in her airway. She wanted, needed, to say something, but she couldn’t find the words. Her hand twitched on the steering wheel because she had the sudden urge to slap him for speaking to her in such a way. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t because he was right and that was the toughest pill to swallow.

  “It’s an unruly exchange, but sometimes we cash in on the horrible things we’ve done in the worst ways. Quinton’s death being one of them.”

  “So you’re telling me to just get over the fact that I saw my father stabbed to death in his favorite chair a few days ago?”

  “No. What I’m saying is that unless you have a time machine there is nothing you can do to change the fact that it happened. No matter how much you cry or take your anger out on others it, ain’t never gon’ change that fact.”

  “So what am I supposed to do? Just forget.”

  “Nah. You’re going to get this money. And I’m going to help.”

  Ahli nodded but didn’t say a word at first, for fear that her voice would betray her. She didn’t speak again until she was sure she had control of her emotions. “After the job is over, are you going to leave?”

  “Not even if you asked me to,” he replied, placing a hand on her thigh and squeezing it affectionately.

  She turned her eyes from the road for two seconds so that she could smile and nod at him. “Okay. After th—”

  Boom!

  The sound of the tires blowing drowned out what she was trying to say and she temporarily lost control of the car. They began to swerve violently and she gripped the steering wheel, trying to keep them all from going off of the road and into a ditch. She veered too far left and drove the vehicle straight into the headlights of an oncoming semi truck.

  In the back seat, Rhonnie had woken up and screamed when she saw the truck headed straight for them. Ahli used her whole body to turn the steering wheel all the way right, swerving the car before they hit the semi head-on. When she was able to finally pull over on the side of the road she cut the engine off and let her forehead fall to the top of the steering wheel, breathing heavily. Her heart felt as though it were going 500 miles per hour in her chest, and she couldn’t get the sick feeling out of the pit of her stomach. From behind her she felt Rhonnie’s hands on her shoulders, pulling her back so that she was sitting straight up in her seat.

  “Wh . . . what the hell was that?” Rhonnie breathed into Ahli’s hair when she wrapped her arms around her sister and hugged her tight. “What just happened?” Ahli didn’t answer her but Rhonnie could feel her heart throbbing under her wrists. It made her hug her big sister even tighter.

  “You got a flashlight in here, Rhonnie?” Brayland asked, looking around.

  “Yeah, right there in the glove compartment.”

  “A’ight,” he said when he had the long black flashlight in his hands. “Y’all stay here.”

  Brayland opened his door and got out to check out the damage on the vehicle. The girls saw the light from the flashlight moving around in front of the vehicle for a few seconds and prayed silently for the best.

  Rhonnie let go of Ahli and leaned back in her seat. Her heart was beating fast and she was grateful for the miss. Not for herself—she was ready for the pain within her heart to be ended—but she was grateful that nothing happened to Ahli. Rhonnie sighed and watched the flashlight moving around the car, and it reminded her of police officer’s bright light looking for any reason to book them. She just hoped the damage to the car wouldn’t be too bad. When Brayland returned, completely drenched from the rain, to the car, the look on his face didn’t offer them any reassurance.

  “How bad?” Ahli asked.

  Brayland shook his head. “Bad. Looks like you hit something sharp in the road. Both tires are done for and the bottom of grill is fucked up from skidding on the concrete like that.”

  “I have insurance,” Rhonnie chimed in. “I can call my provider and get someone sent out to us.”

  “Nobody is gon’ come in a storm like this for some hours,” he said. “And I don’t know about you, but I’m not waiting here for that long without food and shit.”

  “Okay, well, where are we gon’ go then, Sherlock? We’re in the middle of nowhere!”

  Ahli could hear them going back and forth but she wasn’t really paying attention. All she could think of was that it was her fault that the car was messed up. If only she hadn’t taken her eyes off of the road, she would have been able to divert from whatever she’d run over in the road.

  “Dammit!” She banged on the steering wheel with her fists, causing the whole car to shake. “Shit!”

  Brayland grabbed a hold of her arms and held them although she tried to break free. “Hey.” Brayland gripped her wrists tight. “Hey! Stop!”

  “Yeah, stop it, Ahli! It will be okay!”

  “No! No, it won’t be! I just fucked everything up!”

  “No, you didn’t,” Rhonnie said, pointing to the clock in the car. “It’s only ten o’clock. If I call them now they’ll for sure be here by the morning and we can hit the road again. We will be okay, sister. We’re going to make this job even if it kills us.”

  “Or not.” Brayland looked at Rhonnie like she was crazy before pulling Ahli to his chest and stroking the back of her head. “We’re gon’ be all right. First thing we need to do is get out of this car before a state patrol officer finds us.”

  “Yeah, imagine trying to explain why we have all of these unlicensed weapons in here. I think I have some umbrellas in my trunk, and maybe even some rain ponchos.”

  Ahli nodded in Brayland’s shoulder and pulled away from him. She knew they were both right. They needed to leave.

  “I think I saw something back there that said there might be some restaurants and motels up farther that way. That will be our best bet until someone can make it out to help us with the tires.”

  “Okay. I’ll make the call now.”

  While Rhonnie was in the car on the phone with her insurance company, Ahli and Brayland were rummaging around in the trunk for the umbrellas and ponchos. The thunder and lightning accented their moods and the rain was coming down so hard that it was difficult to hear anything around them.

  “Here!” Brayland yelled when he finally found the army-print ponchos. “Put this on!”

  There weren’t any umbrellas but the ponchos had hoods on them, and that would have to be good enough. He handed her the lighter of the two duffle bags and threw the heavy one on his own shoulder. The only thing on his mind was getting out of the rain. He waited for Ahli to give the other poncho to Rhonnie so they could start their hike to nobody knew where.

  “You were right!” Rhonnie yelled over the rain. “They said they can’t send anyone out until the storm is over! And that most likely won’t be until the morning!”

  They began to walk in a single-file line, much like the way most kids do in elementary school, being sure not to get too far away from each other. At first Brayland wanted to clown Rhonnie for the kind of ponchos she had in her trunk; however, they helped when it came to the heavy rain that was falling around them.

  They walked for at least fifteen minutes without coming up on any buildings, and Ahli kept trying to reassure herself that they just needed to go a little farther. There had to be a gas station or something they would be able to stop at. When the twenty-five-minute mark was coming up she was about ready to head back to the car. She turned around with a completely wet face to tell them that she thought that maybe she was mi
staken, but she was blinded by a pair of headlights slowing to a stop next to them. They all took a step back, not knowing who was on the other side of the window, but when it rolled slowly down they became at ease.

  “What are you guys doing out in a storm like this?” a young woman called out. It was dark, but her golden brown skin seemed to pop in the flashing lightning. She had luscious, full lips, pretty brown eyes, and her straight hair was pulled back into a neat ponytail.

  “Our car broke down back there!” Brayland replied.

  “That BMW? I just drove past it not too long ago! Where are you guys headed?”

  “Just to find shelter until we can start moving again in the morning!”

  “I know a place!” she yelled. “You guys were headed in the right direction because it’s actually not too far from here! I can give you a lift if you want.”

  Brayland looked at the girls to see if it was okay with them.

  “Boy, if you don’t get in the damn car!” Rhonnie pushed past him and got in the front seat of the Toyota. “Come on! I’m not trying to be in this rain for another second!”

  “Here, let me pop the trunk. You can stuff your bags back there!”

  Once they were all safely in the dry car, the woman pulled off in the same direction that they were going.

  “Thank you so much. We really appreciate it!” Rhonnie said, studying the woman’s profile.

  “No worries,” she replied. “I’m just glad I was around to help. What happened to your car, anyways?”

  “My sister ran over something in the street,” Rhonnie said, shaking her head. “Blew out both of the tires and almost got us killed by a semi truck.”

  “Well, now.” The woman laughed. “Forgive me for laughing but that sounds like an eventful night.”

  “Yeah, tell us about it,” Ahli said from the back seat.

  They drove for about five more minutes until they finally reached the apparent destination. Although Ahli was wary at first to get into the car with a complete stranger, she realized they would have been walking for at least twenty more minutes and that would have been horrible.