All Hail the Queen (9 page)

Naeema glanced down at her watch as she stood among the crowd outside the movie theater in anticipation of the red carpet arrivals of all the celebrities attending the premiere. She wished like crazy that she wore something besides the gray cotton spandex jumpsuit she wore from Lucki Charmz. She loved the outfit she bought from one of her favorite online retailers but having strangers brush up against her bare back was really pissing her off. August heat was warm even at night and being pressed between hundreds of sweaty bodies wasn't helping a damn.

“Come on, Tank,” she said, tired of listening to Fevah's newest song “The Hottest” blaring around them on an annoying-ass loop. Between that and trying to block out a group of females running their mouths nonstop she was about to go crazy.

“I'm the hottest chick in the game . . .”

Naeema rolled her eyes.

“Is that Fevah?”

“Who the fuck is that?”

“How you late to your own shit?”

She could take the endless questions of the women over one of them giving a detailed, tongue-smacking
retelling of catching her man, Laranz, getting blown by her cousin.

“I'm the hottest chick in the game . . .”

With another roll of her eyes she checked her watch again. She had the tickets to enter the premiere in her fake Louis Vuitton bag, but once she arrived via the car service Tank hired for her she remained outside with the rest of the onlookers because she wanted to see Fevah's arrival more than she wanted to see her movie.

And she really could care less about the Brooklyn-born rapper that was taking hip-hop by storm. She wanted to make sure the cute girl with the waist-length weave and plastic surgery—created body wasn't feeling her man. She wanted to lay eyes on them and see their interaction for herself.
Fuck that movie.

She glanced over at the paparazzi and the TV cameras lining the red carpet as A-list to C-list stars posed for pictures or to answer questions fired at them by entertainment reporters.

The crowd began to stir and Naeema saw a lot of the reporters and paparazzi turn to look down the length of the red carpet. She turned to the left just as Tank's all-black Tahoe came up the street and pulled to a stop at the beginning of the red carpet.

Naeema blocked out the crowd's rising murmur as they wondered if it was finally the arrival of their beloved Fevah. She bit her lip and rose on the black wedge sandals she wore as Yani climbed from the passenger seat and Tank came around the front of the SUV to talk to him.

Yani opened the rear door and helped a small white woman in her forties out first. She announced
to the entertainment reporters that Fevah was about to hit the carpet.

Final-fucking-ly.

The crowd began to scream at the top of their lungs. Naeema pushed back as they all seemed to swell forward. “Damn, chill the fuck out,” she shouted over her shoulder.

The security lined up along the length of the rope holding back the crowd began to hold up their hands. “Stay calm, people. Everybody relax,” they commanded.

Naeema turned just as Yani stepped onto the curb to talk to the white woman as Tank walked his sexy ass to the rear door. He reached for the door handle and looked back at Yani and the woman Naeema assumed to be Fevah's publicist for some kind of go ahead.

The crowd continued to roar as the swell came forward again. Lights from what must have been a million camera phones were already clicking away around her. Naeema kept her eyes locked on Tank as she gritted her teeth and pushed back against bodies, scents, and voices. Shit.

He nodded at them just before he opened the door and stepped back. Fevah smiled and waved as she turned on the rear passenger seat to exit.

POW!

“Tank!” His name tore from her like a roar as his shoulder jerked back from the force of the bullet. The weight of his large frame pushed back against the passenger door, closing it.

Her eyes widened. Her pulse pounded. Her knees went weak.

Life moved in slow motion before her. Slow and torturous.

POW! POW! POW!

The bullets pierced his flesh and forced his body against the passenger door, and seemed to pierce her soul as well.

The crowd lining the streets outside the movie theater screamed, ran, or ducked for cover. Naeema climbed over the red velvet ropes corralling the movie premiere's onlookers. Her heart pounded as she rushed across the short distance, not caring if more bullets flew as she reached Tank. She caught his bloodied body just as it slid down the side of the car. Her knees gave out under the weight of his tall, solid frame but she did not—would not—let him go.

“Help! Somebody help,” Naeema screamed, looking around at those people still boldly standing around staring down at them.

“Na,” Tank moaned, turning his face against her body as he winced in pain.

Love for him filled her and she felt breathless with emotion. Naeema pressed her lips to his sweating brow. “I'm here. I got you. I'm here,” she assured him in a fervent whisper against the backdrop of the sirens growing louder in the air.

She clasped the side of his face as she looked down into the pain flooding his dark eyes. She bit back a gasp at the sight of the print she made against his cheek. The blood on her hands from his soaked shirt was sticky, wet, and warm. Tank's blood signaling his imminent death.

“Please God, no,” Naeema begged in a whisper, nearly choking at the thought of losing him. Tears flooded her eyes blurring her vision.

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 flooding 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.

Naeema struggled to her feet and looked down at the warm, sticky blood coating her hands. She looked up and then held her hand up to cover her face at the bright lights of the cameras beginning to point in her direction. The barrage of questions being shouted at her blurred into a roar.

The sirens blared as the ambulance raced by.

Tank.

She turned to follow it with her eyes.
What hospital? I don't know which hospital.

She scooped down to pick up her purse and raced around the vehicle.

“Yo.”

She stopped and looked across the wide expanse of the hood at Yani running over to her. “Don't
come near me. Stay the fuck back,” she told him, slamming her hand against the hot hood before pointing an accusatory finger at him. “Don't fuck with me, you punk-ass bitch.”

Something in her face must have hit home for him because he backed up.

Not once during the melee had Yani gotten close enough to the scene for Naeema to even remember he was there. She gave him one last glare and then jerked the driver's side door open to climb onto the seat.

“Who the fuck are you?”

Naeema gripped the wheel and shifted her eyes from the bright red rear lights of the ambulance to the three women sitting in the SUV's backseat. The one in the middle with a waist-length black weave with burgundy tips was Fevah. All three were crying, shivering, and clutching one another's hands.

Naeema could care the fuck less . . . or at least she wanted to.

She looked at them and back to the red lights of the ambulance getting smaller in the distance.
Fuuuuuuck.
“That's my husband that was shot,” she said, turning back around to accelerate the SUV forward. “I have to get to the hospital.”

“Wait . . . what?”

Naeema flexed her shoulders in irritation as she sped like crazy to catch up with the ambulance.
I should have rode with him. Why didn't I ride with him? Tank, please hold on. Please.

“I want to go home. Take me the fuck home,” Fevah said, hitting the back of Naeema's seat.

Naeema lifted one hand from the wheel long enough to shoo her words away like aggravating flying pests.

“TAKE. ME. THE. FUCK. HOME.”

Naeema's lips tightened in anger. She opened the armrest and pulled out Tank's Glock. She pressed it between the wheel and her hand as she continued to dip and weave around the traffic, as she stayed pressed to the ambulance's tail. “My motherfucking husband was shot trying to protect you and I am going to the hospital,” she said, her eyes shifting to them in the rearview mirror and back to the busy traffic-filled street ahead of her. “Either shut the fuck up or get the fuck out. Choice is yours.”

The three women all resumed their crying.

The ambulance breezed through a red light. Naeema stopped just long enough to check for oncoming traffic before she ran it.
Tank. Please hold on.

POW! POW! POW! POW!

She blinked with each echoing memory of gunfire.

Her eyes dipped down to the blood on her hands. She bit her bottom lip as a tear raced down her cheek and salted her mouth.

“I'm the hottest chick in the game . . .”

At the ringtone, Naeema took her eyes off the bright lights of the hospital up ahead in the distance to look at Fevah in the rearview mirror as she answered her iPhone.

“Yes, I'm still in the SUV.”

The ambulance made a sharp left and Naeema followed.

“They canceled the premiere?”

POW! POW! POW! POW!

Naeema flinched again.

“Tell the police I am safe and we're pulling up to—”

“Bellevue Hospital,” Naeema provided as she eyed the sign on the corner detailing directions to the medical center.

“This shit is crazy, yo,” Fevah said to whomever was on the phone. “I could've died tonight.”

“Word,” one of her friends co-signed sadly.

Naeema pulled the SUV into a parking spot next to the ambulance.

“The fuck we gon' do now, Fevah?”

“They sending a car for me.”

Naeema gripped the door handle but she stopped at the loud snorting coming from the rear of the SUV. She glanced back just as Fevah sniffed again and pinched her nose before she passed a thick glass vial of coke to one of her friends.

Coke was meaner than weed but Naeema wasn't judging a damn thing. Right then she would gladly smoke a fat blunt to ease all the emotions beating her the fuck down.

“Nobody followed us. Stay in here. It's bulletproof,” Naeema told them before she took the keys out of the ignition.

“You know y'all fired, right?” Fevah asked, wrapping her fingers around the vial.

“Bitch, please,” Naeema drawled. “You know we quit, right?”

She grabbed her bag before she rushed from the car just as the EMTs lowered Tank's stretcher from the ambulance.

POW! POW! POW! POW!

“How is he?” Naeema asked, as she slid her bloody hand into Tank's as she ran alongside the stretcher inside the emergency room's open double doors.

“Alive . . . barely.”

Tank's face was covered with an oxygen mask and there was an intravenous line in his arm. His eyes were closed.
His breathing was slow and labored. Blood soaked his clothing and the stretcher. The bullets tore jagged holes in his flesh.

“Tank, I'm here,” she said to him. “I'm here, baby.”

She felt someone undo her hand from his. She held the fuck on even as her body went weak with fear and her shoulders sunk as she cried.

“Ma'am, please. Let go of him.”

Naeema uncurled her fingers and moments later their touch was broken. She stumbled backward as she watched him until the doctors and the stretcher disappeared from her view behind double doors. She trembled and felt as if she stepped out of her own body.

She couldn't wrap her brain around never seeing Tank alive again.

“No. No,” she gasped. “No.”

POW! POW! POW! POW!

She squeezed her eyes shut but then opened them quickly as the image of Tank's shooting began to replay against her closed lids. Clear. Vivid. Brutal.

Tank was shot.

She bit her bottom lip to keep from screaming at the top of her lungs with all her fear and rage.

Tank was shot
.

She felt her knees go weak and she didn't stop her body from sliding down the length of the wall until she sat on the floor with her feet spread wide.

POW! POW! POW! POW!

Naeema drew her feet in and wrapped her arms around her chest. She sat her chin in the groove between her knees and closed her eyes. The image of Tank's body riddled
with bullets was replaced with the graphic scenes of her son's body from the crime scene photos. Scenes of his brutal death.

I can't lose Tank too.

She stroked the wide gold band of the ring she wore—her son's ring. The same ring she made his killer kiss in the moments just before she shot him to death without remorse. She looked down at the ring now covered with the blood of the man she loved.

Tank's shooter would pay too.

She rose to her feet and took a seat in one of the waiting room chairs.

In the midst of her misery her anger gave her strength. Not much. But some. Enough. For now.

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