Retribution (31 page)

“Fuck, Pash…aaaah, shit…motherfuckgoddamn…I
got
you, Pash…”

There's a fine line between contempt and compassion…

“M
ona, how are you
really
holding up, girl?” I ask, eyeing her over the rim of my flute. This is the first time I've seen her since last Monday. We're out having brunch in the city. I had called her late last night, when I'd finally gotten home from sucking down Stax's dick, to check in on her. He'd mentioned as he was pulling his boxers up over his long dick that she didn't seem herself. That she seemed real distracted and jittery lately. And that he was worried about her. Shit, I wanted to tell him I was worried about her, too. The last thing I need, or want, is for her to start confessing shit. Or having a damn nervous breakdown.

So here I am…on a Sunday afternoon, sitting in a private booth at a swanky restaurant in Tribeca with my dearest friend—and the cousin of the man I'm planning to shut down, trying to assess whether or not she's going to be an asset or a liability in all of this. Because the wheels are starting to spin and once this shit starts rolling full speed, it's going to get real ugly. So I need to be absolutely sure whether or not she's going to be able to keep it together or end up fucking us all over in the end. Bottom line, friend or not: if Mona needs to get knocked in the head, then I'll let Booty take it to her skull. That's not something I'm willing to do.

She casts her eyes down to her half-eaten Cajun shrimp salad, then over toward the huge glass window, the early afternoon sun streaming in and basking the room in a golden glow. She blinks. Clearly her mind is somewhere else besides here.

I reach over the table and touch her hand. “Hello? Hello? Earth to Mona.”

She looks at me. “Huh? Did you say something?”

I smile. “I asked you how you were holding up.” I decide not to mention what Stax had said, or anything else about my unexpected
meeting
with him. I think that information will throw her over the edge for sure.

She lifts her fork and starts picking over her salad. “I don't know, Pasha. Some days, I think I'm good. Like I can do this. Like I can put it all behind me. And go on with the rest of my life, unmoved by it all. Then other days, I feel like I'm coming undone. Like my emotions are in overdrive and I'm about to crash.” She shakes her head, blinking back tears. “Lately, I don't know if I'm coming or going.”

I nod, knowingly as I take a slow, deliberate sip of my Mimosa. I wait for her to say more.

“I'm so fucking torn. I know he fucked my life up. I know I should have told someone what he was doing to me. But I
liked
it. I
wanted
it. Then other times, I hated it. And didn't want it. I loved him and
hated
him at the same time, Pasha…”

Suddenly Jasper comes to mind. Before he had me kidnapped;
before
he fucking tried to have me killed, when we were both so in love—or at least my version of it. His face, his smile, the way he used to touch me. The way my body always responded to him—even after what he'd done to me.

Fucking bastard!

She stabs a large shrimp with her fork, lifting it to her lips and taking a tiny bite. “Pasha, I hate this feeling. And I feel so guilty for having wished him dead. Now he is. And I feel even more ashamed for feeling relieved that he is. That I will no longer have to look in his face and be reminded of…”

I lean over and squeeze her hand.

“I've never forgiven myself for giving up our baby, Pasha…”

I gasp, covering my hand over my mouth.
I thought she'd had an abortion.
Before I can open my mouth to ask, she's already explaining. She tells me a month after she told her parents she was pregnant, that they shipped her off to a private home for unwed mothers in Indiana, where she stayed until after she gave birth. Two weeks later, her parents flew down to bring her home. Because she hadn't been showing when she left, she was able to come back to her life, leaving behind her darkest secret, like nothing ever happened. And her having ever been pregnant was never talked about again.

“I erased that entire part of my life from my memory. I blocked it. Hid it—from myself, from Avery. Well, at least I thought I did…until now. Until Cassandra. Until JT's death.” She wipes a tear from her eyes. “You are the only person, besides my parents, who knows about my son. I don't think you or anyone can ever understand the hollow feeling of being forced to give up a
baby
that you know you'd never be able to care for, or love, because of how it was conceived. No matter how badly I
thought
I wanted to keep him…JT's
baby
…I couldn't without looking into his innocent face and it being a constant, burning reminder that I was sexually molested by my own cousin and that my son was the result of that sick, twisted shit. And I did nothing to stop it.”

“Mona, what JT did to you was
not
your fault. JT was a sick bastard.”

She blows her nose in a napkin, then takes a sip of her drink. “I know he was. And, deep down in my heart, I
know
he got exactly what he deserved. I can only imagine how many other girls he'd molested. Sometimes I wonder if that's the real reason his mother sent him to live with us. Because he'd done something to his younger sister, Trisha.”

I'd only met Trisha once, so I don't really know much about her. But I wouldn't put shit pass him. At this point, nothing would surprise me. I toss back the rest of my drink, flagging over the waitress.

“Mona, I'm sorry you had to go through all that. I wish I could have been there for you so you wouldn't have had to carry that burden alone.”

She gives me a faint smile. “Thanks. I appreciate that.” She releases a heavy sigh. “Talking to you, and you just being here for me, has really helped—a lot. All these years of carrying this around…” She pauses when the wiry blonde with the perky breasts comes to the table. I tell her we'd like another round of Mimosas.

We eye her as she walks off toward the bar. “I never knew how toxic holding all this shit has been for me. How it's affected my relationships with men, why I never trusted them. How it has even affected my marriage in some ways. By pretending that it never happened, I really thought I could go through life and be okay. And I was okay. I
thought
I was okay. But the noose was still there. Dangling over my head. I have spent most of my life waiting for it to finally drop around my neck and slowly tighten. And it has. I guess I have Cassandra's messy-ass to thank for that.”

I shake my head. “How did she even find out about it?”

Mona shrugs. “I have no idea. Shit, who knows how that crazy bitch knows half the shit she does.” The waitress returns with our
drinks, placing them in front of us, then asks if we'd like anything else. Mona waves her on. “No, we're good. Thanks.” She waits until the waitress is out of earshot and leans in. “I didn't even want to tell you this. But, do you know that sick bitch had the audacity to call me and threaten to put what she did to JT on
me
if I ever slipped up.”

My mouth drops open. “She did
what?”

“You heard me. That
bitch
said if the shit ever hits the fan and it gets out that she had anything to do with his disappearance, that she was going to tell them that I”—she lowers her voice to a sharp whisper—“hired her to
kill
him.”

I stare at her in utter disbelief. “Ohmygod…what the fuck is wrong with her? Cassandra is really out of control.”

“Miss Pasha, girl, I do
what
ever I gotta do to get the job done, goddammit. A nigga-bitch tries to fuck me over, I'ma fuck 'em first. And, trust, sugah-boo. I'ma tear they asshole out the frame. It's gonna be rough ‘n' goddamn dirty…”

“Pasha, I'ma tell you like this: I think there's a whole lot more to Cassandra than we need to know.”

Yeah, I think you're right.
I nod, knowingly, keeping my thoughts to myself.

She shoots me a warning look. “All I can say is,
don't
ever get on that bitch's bad side. She's more gangster and grimy than some of them hood niggas out there in the streets. I'm convinced that bitch is treacherous.”

I sigh. “She's a loose fucking cannon.”

“Yeah, and that, too. Don't tell her I told you what she said to me, though. I don't want that crazy bitch jumping up in my face.”

“Don't worry. Not a word. Knowing her, she'll blab it out at some point when she thinks one of us is trying to
do her.”

“Fuck her. I don't want shit else to do with her ass. If I can help it, I'm staying the hell away from her and all of her ghetto-ass fuckery.”

I take two long sips of my drink. Mona does as well. She sets her flute down, glancing around the restaurant. She leans in. “Has she mentioned anything to you about where JT's”—she mouths—“body's at?”

I shake my head. “Not a word.” In all honesty, I'm glad she didn't tell me when I asked. Knowing what she did to JT's corpse, or who helped her dispose of it, is something I don't need to know. It's bad enough I know
she
killed him.

Mona shudders. “Regardless of what he did to me, or to…anyone else, his wife and family still deserve some sort of closure. The waiting, the not knowing, is the worst part for us all. Him missing is driving everyone crazy. And the longer he stays gone, the worse it gets. Leticia and his mother are really going through it.”

I nod understandingly. Yet, I have mixed feelings about the whole thing, but I keep it to myself. She's right. They do deserve some type of closure. But, niggas like him turn up missing all the time. Niggas like him get dropped all the time. So they should already know. A nigga like him is dead. There isn't going to be a body, so they might as well slap a 16-by-20 picture of his grimy ass up on an easel, toss a bed of flowers up on a closed empty casket, and grieve their loss.

Then they can all stand up, teary-eyed and broken, at the foot of his coffin and lie about how fucking wonderful he was; how much of a loving husband and father he was; how he loved his family and friends. No one will stand up and tarnish their memory of their beloved. No. They wont dare stand up and say how he was fucking Mona, or how many times he gave his wife STDs
and beat her ass. They'll be no mention of him trying to rape Cassandra, or whomever else. And they'll definitely be no talk of how he was one of the niggas who eagerly forced my mouth open and shoved his dick in it. No. That nigga would go to his grave, taking every one of his dirty little secrets with him. So for that, fuck closure for them. And fuck him!

“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Mona says, bringing me out of my fog, “They're going to offer a reward to anyone with information leading to his whereabouts.”

I blink. “A reward? For how much?” I ask, surprised. But what I really want to say is, “for what?” I almost fall out of my seat when she tells me fifty thousand dollars. “You have
got
to be fucking kidding me?” I hiss. “A
fifty
-fucking-thousand-dollars. Really?”

She nods.

“Mmmph. I wonder whose bright idea that was. Let me guess. Jasper's?”

“Yeah, and I believe Stax's.”

She drinks her Mimosa, and after a brief moment, quickly scans the restaurant, then turns her attention back to me, sighing. “And the irony of it all is, I don't know where his body is. But
I
know exactly what happened to him. And I can't say shit about it.”

I swallow back the memory of his dick and nut in my throat, hard. I blink back the frozen image of his sliced-off dick sealed in a Tupperware dish, tucked down in the bottom of Booty's freezer. I reach for my glass and take a greedy sip, then say, raising my flute, “Here's to secrets.”

She rolls her eyes. “This shit's not funny, Pasha.”

I set my flute back on the table. “I never said it was. But understand this: we all have them. You. Me. Jasper. JT. Cassandra. All of us. Shit we've said or done that we hope like hell no one else
ever finds out about. Or shit we've done with others that bind us. Secrets, girl; the kind that'll make some of us cringe, or give us nightmares, or have us losing our minds over. The kind that'll keep a bitch paranoid and have a nigga putting a bullet in someone's head if the shit ever got out. The kind of secrets that if they ever crept out and got into the wrong hands could cost us
every
thing. So,
no
, Mona, there's nothing funny about it. But it's real. So here's to secrets. And lies. And pretending.

“At the end of the day, you and I both know.
Payback
is a bitch. And the one thing that has always stuck in the back of my head is my grandmother always saying, ‘the knife you wield at someone else is the same knife that'll do you in.' Now I don't know where she got that shit from and I've never asked her. But I
knew
what she meant. What comes around goes around, whether we like it or not. So judgment day is somewhere around the corner waiting for
all
of us.”

“I know it is…” She goes silent, looking down at her plate. She plucks another shrimp with her fork, then bites into it. I sip my drink as she chews, allowing a momentary muteness, strained and unchartered, to sweep around us.

She finally looks up from her plate and asks about my situation with Jasper. “What do you plan to do?”

I give her the update, purposefully ignoring the question. Tell her how about him putting his hands on me down at the shop. About me trying to chew his balls off, about the restraining order against him. “And his ass still keeps calling me and leaving crazy-ass messages, like it's nothing.”