Snapped (8 page)

After the results came back, he had sat his daughter down and explained why he was opting for dialysis as opposed to a transplant. “What if I take your kidney, and then something goes wrong? I saw a segment on
Dateline
where a man got his son’s kidney and the son died during the operation. I couldn’t live with myself if that happened to you.”

Dominique had laughed. “Daddy, that’s not gonna happen.”

Bill had shaken his head. “Well, if it did, they might as well bury me, too. ’Cuz it would kill me. I’m going on dialysis. It’s no big deal. Just three days a week for three hours. It ain’t like I got a whole lot of other stuff to do.”

Reluctantly, Dominique had acquiesced. Through the years since then, Bill had become a favorite patient of the staff at the dialysis clinic he attended. In a way, he enjoyed the three days a week when he could go in and flirt with nurses and techs who were half his age. The other two days of the week, he looked after Dominique’s daughter, which was another highlight for him. He loved his granddaughter and enjoyed the time he spent with her. Octavia enjoyed it, too, although she wished that just once she’d have the opportunity to do whatever she wanted with her afterschool time.

Today, she had a modern dance class scheduled for four o’clock, and as usual, her mother would be picking her up afterward. She felt trapped and babied, while all the other
kids her age seemed to be enjoying freedom and privileges that Octavia only dreamed about.

As she sat on the train with her long legs crossed, a young man got on with an iPod in his hand. He sat across from Octavia and smiled at her. She smiled back. He was cute! He looked like he was from the same tribe as Kobe Bryant. He was tall, dark, and handsome, and he seemed to only have eyes for Octavia.

The boy checked her out and smiled again, liking what he saw. Her prep school uniform looked sexy as hell to him. Her long bare legs were on display in the pale blue skirt she had hiked up higher than she wore it at school. Octavia had rolled the skirt up at the waist and folded it over in order to shorten it to about midthigh. On her feet she wore a pair of ballet flats, and her crisp white blouse was unbuttoned nearly halfway, her red bra visible beneath the fabric. She had a North Face book bag sitting on the seat beside her, and he wondered if she was a stuck-up private school chick. He decided to find out.

Taking the headphones out of his ears, he leaned toward her. “How you doing? My name is Dashawn.”

Octavia felt like she was in a movie. Guys never seemed to notice her—at least, not the ones she found attractive. The boys at her school were either white boys from wealthy families or black boys who wished that they were white boys from wealthy families. Octavia’s type was the athletic, rap-music-listening, basketball-dribbling category that Dashawn seemed to fit into.

She smiled back. “Hi,” she said. “My name is Octavia. Nice to meet you.”

Dashawn thought she sounded very proper, unlike the
girls who lived uptown near him in Harlem. “You got a boyfriend, Octavia?”

She shook her head. “Nope.” She was enjoying flirting with a handsome stranger on the train this way. “How old are you?” she asked.

“Sixteen,” Dashawn said. “How about you?”

“Fourteen,” she lied, though she rationalized that it was only a little white lie. She would be fourteen in a couple of months.

“That’s wassup,” Dashawn said. “So can I get your phone number so I can call you and get to know you?”

Octavia nodded and exchanged phone numbers with the handsome stranger. When her stop came, she waved good-bye to him and sauntered off the train as if she were strolling down the catwalk. She knew that Dashawn was watching her and she wanted to give him a show. As she went to dance class and changed into her leotard, she suddenly felt more grown up. And she liked it.

Frankie walked into
his house and found it empty. Breathing a sigh of relief, he tossed his keys on the coffee table and headed straight for the kitchen. On the counter he found a note his wife had scribbled for him on her way out the door. It read,

Baby, I went with Misa to do some school shopping for Shane. I’ll be home soon. There’s a dinner plate in the microwave for you. I love you.

Camille

Frankie was glad that she wasn’t there. As much as he loved Camille, she had been smothering him with attention lately and he was tired of it. She woke him up with breakfast in bed, came into the shower while he was in there so that she could wash his back, walked him to the door when he left, called him several times throughout the day, and was standing there when his car pulled into the driveway most nights. His dinner was always ready, his laundry and dry cleaning were always done, the house was always spotless. And while Frankie appreciated the fact that he had a good wife who loved him without question, lately he found himself wishing that she had some interests other than him to keep her occupied. In fact, he wished she had more interests so that she could be more interesting to him! She was so predictable, and it was beginning to bore him. He sincerely loved Camille, but lately he wondered if love was enough.

He took a bottle of water out of the fridge and went upstairs to his bedroom. Stepping into the huge room covered wall to wall in plush carpet, he kicked off his Timbs. Camille was an impeccable housekeeper, and Frankie appreciated that because he was a neat freak. Growing up in a strict household, he and his brother had been treated like soldiers. Cleanliness and organization were things that were ingrained in him from early on, and they were qualities that he still valued. He flipped on the TV and watched the news while he stepped out of his jeans and peeled off his sweater. After turning on the shower in his big adjoining bathroom, he looked at his reflection in the mirror. He admired his good looks with a smile and then left the bathroom to allow the water to get piping hot, the way he liked it. Now clad in just a wifebeater, boxers, and a pair of black socks, he sat on the edge of his California king–size bed and watched a
story about a brazen bank robbery in South Ozone in which two people had been shot. The robbers had escaped with an undisclosed amount of cash, but the whole scene was captured on surveillance cameras. Frankie shook his head, thinking that it was just a matter of time before the guys who did it were caught. Bank robberies had too much potential to go wrong. Dye packs, silent alarms, armed guards . . . there were bound to be casualties.

He didn’t liken the casualties of the bank robbery on the news to the casualties of the life he lived as part of the Nobles crime family. Frankie had little sympathy for those who played the drug game and lost. He did, however, hate to hear of innocent bystanders, people who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time because a gang of young fools got some guns and played with them as if they were toys. He had seen many innocent people fall victim over the years, and it fueled his belief that the game had changed forever.

Back when Frankie came into the life, there had been three or four top hustlers, each of whom controlled a crew of soldiers, all of whom made money. There were guns, and there were also violence and casualties. But not on the scale that existed today. In Frankie’s opinion, once guns had become available to young knuckleheads in the hood who had no leaders to follow, the whole game changed. It became a free-for-all instead of the grown man’s game that it once was.

His cell phone rang, and he reached for it. Glancing at the caller ID, he had to suppress a smile.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” Gillian said softly. She sat on a stool before her vanity mirror, her makeup all laid out before her and her
hair pinned up in curlers. She looked at her reflection and hated how her heart rate sped up when she heard his voice. She was in her old bedroom at her parents’ home. It was a place where she had pined for Frankie in silence for years before she’d grown up and gotten over it. Even though she was four years younger than Frankie, Gillian had had a secret crush on him from the very beginning. When Frankie married Camille, Gillian had suffered in silence. She had hoped that Frankie would see her as more than a “lil sis.” Unfortunately, he had only had eyes for Camille back then. Gillian often wondered what might have been.

Sitting in her old bedroom brought back tons of old memories of the days when she had yearned for him. The party was just an hour away, so she’d opted to get dressed there as opposed to going all the way home. After Frankie left, as she sat there in the familiar surroundings of her childhood, she had felt the need to come clean with him. The last thing she wanted was for Frankie to go to bed that night thinking that Gillian was a snake. “Are you busy? I wanted to explain what happened earlier,” she said.

Frankie walked into the steamy bathroom and turned off the shower, then sat back down on his bed. “I’m listening.”

Gillian sighed. She tweezed her eyebrows as she spoke. “Besides you, Baron is my best friend.”

Frankie didn’t bother to fight the urge to smile this time. The bond between the two of them was often an unspoken one, so it was nice to hear her express the fact that he was special to her.

“We didn’t grow up in the same house, but we were as close as possible under the circumstances. I look up to him. You know that.”

“So why did you tell Pops about the shit with Dusty?” Frankie asked, turning the volume on the TV down.

Gillian stopped midpluck and stared at her reflection in the mirror. She searched her own eyes as if she were searching her soul for the true answer to that question. “ ’Cuz I can’t watch this shit fall apart right in front of my father’s eyes, Frankie. It would kill him.” Gillian found herself choking back tears. Struggling to keep her voice under control, she continued. “Daddy spent his
whole life
building this business. All of the connections he’s made over the years, all the time he spent on the grind, and all those years he spent in jail while me and my brother grew up . . . he paid his dues and he put this together. And when he came home he gave it all to Baron. I respect that. In fact, I think it would be great if my dad could retire for real, Frankie. Really hand this shit over to his firstborn and kick back somewhere in retirement. I could go legit. Every opportunity to go straight is available to me. But Baron is squandering this shit. He’s been doing it for years. The parties, the fucking payoffs, the gambling, all the losses we suffered, all because of Baron spiraling out of control. You know it and I know it. But Daddy doesn’t know. He thinks he knows, but he really has no idea.”

Frankie frowned. “Yes, he does, Gigi. Don’t get it twisted. Pops is not out of touch with what’s going on with Baron.”

“He doesn’t know the half,” Gillian said, tweezing again. She began to tell Frankie the whole truth. “My brother came to me a few months ago for money. He said he wanted to take some money out of the restaurant and invest it on some bullshit—”

“Wait a minute,” Frankie interrupted. “Baron took money
out of Conga? Who let him do that? Your mother?” Conga was the upscale Cuban restaurant in Harlem that Nobles had opened for his wife. Mayra ran the day-to-day operations, and both Baron and Frankie held meetings there from time to time. It was the family restaurant in more ways than one. But Baron had always assumed that Mayra was in control of the finances for the successful venue.

“She runs it, but Daddy was handling the financial aspect of everything. And it was going well. Mommy was happy, the restaurant was getting great reviews, a few celebrities stop through from time to time, all that. But you know that Daddy’s getting old.”

Frankie was the one who let out a sigh now. He hated to acknowledge the fact that Nobles was aging. Lately, he was forgetting things, and that had never been like him. The multiple sclerosis was definitely taking its toll on Nobles. “Yeah. And?”

“He’s too proud to tell his son that he can’t handle some things. I think he’s too proud to tell you, too. You know you’re like a son to him. I think it’s some man thing. Like a pride thing.” Gillian peeked over her shoulder to make sure no one was listening. She turned back to the mirror and began applying her smoky eye shadow. “Anyway, he called me into his study and told me that he wanted me to take over my mother’s books at Conga. You know that I was a business major at Columbia, so it was no big deal for me. But I noticed little errors here and there. Shit that Daddy would have normally never missed. I saw that he was starting to forget things and it was costing us. So it was good that I took over. Then he let it slip to Baron in a conversation that I was doing the books at the restaurant.”

“He forgot that Baron didn’t know?” Frankie was aware that Nobles’s memory had suffered as a result of the MS.

“Exactly. And once Baron found out, he didn’t make a big deal out of it. After all, it is my mother’s business and I’m her child. It’s natural that when Daddy was ready to pass on responsibility for it, that it would go to me. The thing is, right after he found out about that, he came to me for a loan.”

“A loan? Against the restaurant.” Frankie was shaking his head. That could only mean one thing. That Baron had exhausted all or most of his own cash and was desperate. That’s the only reason Frankie could imagine for Baron to go crawling to his sister for money.

“Exactly. Talking some bullshit about an investment. I saw right through it so I made him tell me the truth. He owes Jojo money.”

Frankie frowned. “Baron owes him money?” He thought about the beef between Baron and Dusty at the club recently. Frankie had been on the dance floor with Gillian, having a great time, when all of a sudden there was a fracas at the bar. Frankie wondered now if that argument had erupted as a result of the money Baron owed Dusty’s brother, Jojo. And if that was the case, Frankie no longer felt that Baron was right for murdering Dusty. This meant that the beef with Jojo would inevitably escalate to heights none of them wanted.

“Yes,” Gillian said. “His gambling is out of control, and he messed around and wound up owing Jojo a lot of paper. He’s my brother, so I gave it to him.” Gillian moved on to the other eye, switching her BlackBerry to her other hand.