Chaser Page 13

  I just stayed in bed mostly, gettin’ up only to eat, to use the bathroom, and to shower every night. I was depressed. I hadn’t answered my phone all weekend, not for Nasir, my mom, none of the workers at the shop, and not even Detective Daily. I didn’t even check my messages until that Tuesday morning.

  The first message was from Detective Daily; “Leah, you pulled a no-show on me. What’s goin’ on? Call me ASAP. I need a status on you.”

  The second one was from Joe, the painter. “Hey, Leah, it’s Joe. Joe Parker. Listen, um, I was wonderin’ if you was goin’ come through with that money like we been doin’ because I lost my ID and can’t cash my check. I was kind of depending on you Friday. What happened? Please call me because I need to get my check cashed. Thanks. ’Bye.”

  Then there was a message from Nasir, except he didn’t say anything. I knew it was him, though, because I heard scanners in the background.

  The last message was from my mom. “Leah, where are you? Answer ya phone. That guy Nasir been by here for you this morning. I didn’t tell him what happened, but maybe you should. Maybe he can kick Kenny’s ass for you. He seems like a nice guy. And it’s obvious you two like each other. Why don’t you leave Kenny’s sorry ass while you can. And give that nice guy Nasir a chance. Call me. Let me know you’re all right.”

  I hung up my phone, and the only person I called back was the detective. He didn’t answer his phone, so I left him a message. I simply stated, “Hi, it’s Leah. I am sorry for missing our meeting. An emergency came up. Call me to reschedule, please.”

  I ended the call and lay back down in my bed. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t feel any tears. I guessed I was all cried out.

  Nasir

  I hadn’t spoken to Leah since I dropped her off at her mom’s almost a week ago. I was a little worried because she seemed out of it that day, like she wasn’t herself. I hoped she was all right.

  I was at the barbershop sitting in the chair gettin’ a shape-up when I got a call from a blocked number. I answered it quickly, thinking it was Leah.

  “Hello.”

  “Nas,” my dad’s voice sounded, disappointing me. “Where you at?”

  “The barbershop,” I said.

  “Well, soon as you get done, I need you to meet me at the shop. I need to talk to you about somethin’, but not over the phone,” he said with a mixture of urgency and anger in his tone. “Hurry up, though,” he added, then hung up.

  My barber, Mel, finished me up. I paid him and then got in my truck and headed to the shop. Brock was in the passenger’s-side seat waiting for me. I had been lettin’ him chase with me those few days that Leah was MIA. He had been doin’ good listenin’ to the scanners, being able to make out what the dispatchers were saying through all the static, and he was starting to learn the different codes that some of the dispatchers used to describe accidents, like MVA, instead of just saying “auto accident” like they normally did. So I trusted him to sit in the truck and be my ears while I was in the barbershop.

  “Where you drivin’ to all fast?” he asked. “Ain’t no accident come out. I been listenin’.”

  “Naw, I know. I gotta go to the shop real quick. My pop wanna holla at me,” I told him.

  “Oh. What’s wrong?” Brock asked.

  “I don’t know. He sounded like he was mad though.”

  “All shit,” Brock said. “TGIAF.”

  “What? Fuck that mean?”

  “Thank God it ain’t Friday,” he explained. “Get that nigga mad on a Friday, and he mess around and don’t pay nobody. And I don’t need that kinda drama right now. A nigga gotta pay rent.”

  “Pay rent to who, ya grandmom? Don’t you still live in her basement?” I laughed.

  Brock played cool. “Yeah, but it’s decked out, though. It’s like my own little apartment down there. Got a bathroom, a TV, a mattress. Everything I need. And shit, long as the chicks dig it, I’m cool.”

  “What chicks? Chicks don’t dig bein’ in nobody’s basement on no mattress, dog. Especially not at ya age,” I teased him. “You thirty years old.”

  “Age ain’t nothin’ but a number, my nigga,” Brock said. Then he started rubbing his face. “Plus, I got this smooth baby face, nigga. The girls think I’m still in high school.”

  That was true, too. Brock didn’t have any facial hair, with the exception of a light-ass mustache. I could believe it when he said girls thought he was still in high school.

  “Unlike you,” Brock went on, “who look like somebody’s old-ass sugar daddy.”

  I chuckled and continued to be entertained by Brock as I weaved in and out of the traffic heading to the shop. Brock had me laughin’ the whole way. He was a natural comedian. That was why I fucked with him heavy. He was the coolest dude you could meet, always smiling and laughin’, even when shit wasn’t goin’ his way. He was the type of dude you would never see mad. Life was just funny to that nigga. So no matter what obstacles he faced, like not being able to read and write, and having been abandoned by his mom and dad when he was a kid, he always seemed to be the happiest dude on the planet. That was why, out of all the guys who worked at my dad’s shop, I clicked with him the most. He was just a positive person. He was my homie.

  I pulled up to the shop and threw the truck in park. On my way out, I turned to Brock.

  “I’ma need you to hold it down for me while I see what my pop want. It might be a little slow now with the morning rush hour almost over, but don’t be discouraged. You just gotta ride it out, ’cause ever so often somethin’ come out and you can get it because you the only nigga that stayed out during the dry period. All the other niggas go in,” I schooled Brock.

  “I’m cool, though. I can stay out all day long as I can play the PlayStation. Man, that’s the best thing you could’ve put in ya truck.”

  “It was either that or get a daily blow job to keep me still,” I told him.

  “Well, I think you made the right choice. A blow job only lasts about five minutes. You would be ready to roll after that.”

  I laughed and said, “Nigga, you funny at breakfast.”

  At that moment the scanner produced a long and steady beep, which usually preceded a call to an accident. Brock and I both grew quiet as we listened for the dispatcher to announce the emergency.

  “Medic Nine, Four-seven and Baltimore…” the female voice said.

  “You heard that?” I asked Brock.

  “Yup. Four-seven and Baltimore,” he repeated.

  Then the voice came back: “Robbery victim shot in abdomen. Suspect a black male wearing dark blue Dickies and a navy baseball cap headed south on Baltimore on foot.”

  “Damn,” Brock said, “I’d rather be funny at breakfast than shot at breakfast. Niggas be wilin’ early in the morning.”

  “You stupid, man,” I said as I got out of the truck. “I’ll call you when I need you to come pick me up.”

  “All right,” Brock said, getting out of the passenger’s side and walking around to the driver’s seat.

  I walked in the shop and sensed an eerie feeling right away. I spoke to Frank, the parts manager, who was organizing a bunch of different parts on a shelf. Then I said what’s up to Joe Porter and the rest of the workers. They all said what’s up back, but none of them had a joke. None of them asked me to hold a couple dollars. None of them had an outrageous story to tell me. Nothin’. They all seemed like they had lost a loved one. I wondered what I was walkin’ into.

  I went in my dad’s office, and he had a bunch of papers laid out on his desk. He wasn’t frowning or nothin’, but he looked upset.

  “Shut the door,” he instructed.

  “What’s up?” I asked, following his instructions.

  “Yo, you know anything about Leah washing my checks?”

  Immediately, I thought about how I had been giving Leah checks every Friday, and my defenses went up. I couldn’t let that be known, especially not now while there seemed to be a problem. “Naw! What you mean?” I dumbed down. />
  “I mean, like taking checks that I write out to people and changing them to be made payable to mafuckas she know.”

  “I know what washing checks means. But I don’t know nothin’ about Leah doin’ that.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m positive. Why, what happened?”

  “Well, recently I had moved some money around, and a check I wrote bounced. I had ya mom pull up the account online to see which check it was, and it was made out to somebody I ain’t know. So I looked into it and found a bunch of payroll checks that I had wrote out to my employees that ended up being rewritten to other mafuckas who I ain’t never hear of. So I started askin’ questions around this mafucka, and eventually I got some answers. What she been doin’ was takin’ everybody’s paychecks every Friday, washing them, and depositing them in bank accounts that belong to other businesses or people. Like this one,” he said, holding up a computer printout of a cashed check. “I wrote this check out to Joseph Parker—”

  “The painter? Joe?” I clarified.

  “Yeah,” my dad said. “But she gave Joe cash and took his check, erased my writing, and wrote it out to whoever she wanted to, basically usin’ my check to pay other people for shit like plumbing services, construction work, interior design, property management, all this shit.” My dad was rummaging through the many printouts of checks. “The bitch is slick.”

  I got a little shook up. I didn’t want my dad to find out that I had been a participant in what was looking like a scam against him. First of all, that wasn’t the case. I never intended to scam my pop. I would have never been down for no shit like that. I mean, granted, I was wrong for goin’ behind his back with the shit that I had done, but it was not on some scandalous shit like what my dad was revealing to me. I needed to get to the bottom of what Leah had goin’ on and the scope of what she had possibly involved me in.

  “I don’t get it, though,” I said, trying to wrap my head around what my dad was suggesting of Leah. “If she had the money to give Joe and everybody else, why wouldn’t she just use it to pay all the people you say she paid with the checks? Why would she need people’s checks at all? I don’t see the point. Maybe Joe and everybody is throwin’ her in the fire to cover their own ass, and maybe they chose to blame Leah because she’s the only one not here anymore to defend herself.” I didn’t want to believe for one second that Leah would fraud my pop. Not my pop. I mean, she might have been capable of doin’ her share of dirt, especially with a nigga like Kenny in her ear. But I refused to believe that she was capable of crossing me or my mothafuckin’ family.

  “Naw,” my dad disagreed. “None of these niggas are sophisticated enough to have been able to pull off nothin’ like this. That’s number one. Plus, don’t none of them have the money to cash nobody’s checks.”

  “True,” I mumbled. As hard as it was for me to face, my dad was right.

  “It had to be Leah, dog. She was usin’ me to clean that nigga Kenny’s money up,” my dad concluded. “I told you she was fuckin’ trouble. Didn’t I say it?”

  I nodded, then went deep into thought. “But that’s crazy, though,” I said. “What was she thinkin’?”

  “Yo, get her on the phone right now,” my dad demanded.

  Without hesitation I dialed Leah’s cell. There was no answer, like I figured. Ever since I dropped her off that past Friday, she hadn’t been answerin’ any of my calls or callin’ me. I went to redial her from the shop phone just to see if she would pick up then.

  “Naw,” my dad stopped me. “Don’t even worry about it. I ain’t goin’ ask her shit. Joe said she still be meetin’ them after work on Fridays to switch off. So this Friday I’m goin’ go to the 7-Eleven where she meet everybody at, I’m goin’ catch her ass in the act,” my dad concluded.

  On that note, my dad told me that if I spoke to Leah between then and Friday, not to say anything to her about the checks. He didn’t want her to be tipped off.

  I gave him my word that I wouldn’t warn her, but deep down I wanted to. I wanted to ask her straight up if she had done what my dad’s workers had said she’d done. But shit, she wasn’t even answerin’ my calls, so I couldn’t ask her shit if I wanted to. And it was eatin’ at me, too. I started thinking that maybe that was the reason she had been duckin’ me. Maybe she got wind of the fact that she had been exposed. Whatever the case may be, I was anxious to find out the truth. I found myself counting down the three days until Friday.

  It was prom season, so over the past week limos, gowns, and suits had flooded the streets. It seemed like every time I turned around, somebody I knew little sister or cousin was goin’ on a prom. And on that particular Friday I had like five people to see off between seven and nine. But first and foremost, I had to go with my dad to the 7-Eleven to see what the hell was goin’ on with Leah.

  We were in my dad’s Yukon. We didn’t want Leah to see my truck or my dad’s truck and get scared and leave. It felt like we were on a stakeout.

  “I swear on everything if this shit go down, all them niggas is fired. And that bitch, oh man, I got some plans for her ass, too,” my dad said, spazzin’.

  I wasn’t mad like my dad, not yet anyway. I really was hopin’ that we were wastin’ our time out there. I hoped Leah wouldn’t show. I didn’t want that shit about her to be true.

  My heart was starting to beat faster as the clock crept up to five fifteen, the time Leah was expected to pull up into the parking lot. I was looking out the side mirrors to see if I could spot her. There was no sign of her, and I started to feel anxious. I willed the clock to fly past 5:15 and for Leah not to show. I wanted more than anything for it all to be one big misunderstanding.

  Then my dad sat up in the driver’s seat and adjusted the rearview mirror. “I think this is her,” he said.

  A gray Maserati, the same color as Kenny’s, pulled into a parking space two cars away from where my dad and I were parked. It was Kenny and Leah. Kenny was driving. Leah was in the passenger’s seat. Once parked, neither of them got out of the car. Instead, they waited while Leah made a phone call on her cell. Seconds later, a scared-looking Joe walked out of the store. He glanced over at my dad and me and twitched his eyes, lookin’ real suspicious. He walked over to Leah’s car. As they were exchanging something, my dad and I walked up on them.

  “Get the fuck out the car, man!” my dad instructed Kenny. Then he turned his attention to Joe. “Yo, Joe, give that mafuckin’ money up. Nasir, get that shit from ’im.”

  At that point Joe handed me the cash Leah had given him. He started apologizing and beggin’ my dad for forgiveness, talkin’ about he didn’t know what Leah was doin’ with the checks. My dad wasn’t tryin’ to hear none of that shit, though. He told him he’d better leave now while he still had legs to do so. Joe took off running out of the parking lot and around the corner.

  Meanwhile, Leah’s face looked like she had just seen a ghost. She had one hand over her heart and everything.

  “Fuck is you doin’, man?” I snarled at her, not able to withhold my anger toward her.

  “Get them fuckin’ checks from her, Nas!” my dad said. Then he turned back to Kenny, who remained in the car with a smirk on his face while he sipped on a supersized McDonald’s drink.

  “Niggga, you heard what the fuck I said! Get out the mafuckin’ car! I know it was you who put her up to this shit!” My dad approached the driver’s side, where Kenny was sitting.

  “Whatchu talkin’ ’bout?” Kenny asked with arrogance.

  My dad then opened the door himself and gripped Kenny up out the car. At that Kenny threw his drink on my dad and swung on him at the same time. My dad didn’t swing back, but he pulled out his pistol and cracked Kenny across the face with it.

  Leah screamed and started crying as she fiddled to open the glove compartment and retrieve two checks. Her hand shaking, she handed the checks to me, practically throwing them at me.

  I quickly glanced at the checks and started to stuff them in my pocket when
I had to take a second look at them. One was made out to me, dated for last Friday, the day I had dropped Leah off at her mom’s, then hadn’t heard from her again. I put that one in a separate pocket from the one that was made out to Joe. I had to remember which pocket I put which check in because I didn’t want to run the risk of giving my dad the check that was made out to me. That would have put me in the same category as Joe and them other niggas—sheisty. And even though my reasons for giving her checks were different from the others’, my dad wouldn’t have seen it that way. Goin’ behind his back was goin’ behind his back. Disloyalty was disloyalty.

  My dad had Kenny pinned up against the Maserati. And I could see that my dad was ready to hit him again. That’s when I rushed over to stop him, and not for Kenny’s sake either, ’cause truth be told, I wanted to fuck him up myself. I heard sirens, and I didn’t want my pop goin’ to jail, especially not for no-nut-ass nigga like Kenny.

  I pushed my dad toward his car. In the meantime, Leah had gotten out of the car. She was still crying, pleading for the commotion to stop.

  “I’m sorry! Please stop!” she sobbed to my dad and me.

  “LEAH, COME THE FUCK ON, ’FORE YOU GET LEFT!” Kenny shouted, as he scurried into his car. “FUCK YOU CHASIN’ AFTER THAT NIGGA FOR?”

  But Leah didn’t take heed. Instead, she completely ignored Kenny.

  At that, Kenny put the car in reverse, and as he was speeding out the parking lot he was shouting, “WAIT RIGHT HERE, MUTHA-FUCKA! I GOT SOMETHIN’ FOR YA ASS! BOTH OF Y’ALL NIGGAS!”

  “ALL NIGGA, YOU AIN’T GOT SHIT!” my dad shot down Kenny’s threats.

  “LEAH, YOU’S A DEAD BITCH, TOO!” were Kenny’s last words before he sped out of the parking lot and disappeared into the traffic.