Page 98 of Love & Vendettas

“So, G, you weren’t in the car?” Aris asks.

“No, I wasn’t. I walked toward the car, but once I was on the other side, where you couldn’t see me from the street, I ran along the wall that divided the parking lot from the highway. Once I got to the end of those bushes that covered them, I was far enough away that I was safe. At that point, all I had to do was use the key fob to start up the ignition, which ignited the bomb,” Ghalen explains.

“That’s fucked up, yo!” Jamal exclaims.

“Did your family know you weren’t dead?” Hakeem asks.

“Nobody knew except Detective Malone and a couple of other detectives working the case. It was hard as fuck on my family, though.”

“Yeah, I can imagine it was,” Malik agrees.

“Shit, nigga. This makes me wanna pull yo’ big ass up and kill yo ass all over again,” Jamal professes.

“Yeah, had niggas like J shedding thug tears,” Malik confesses, mugging Ghalen.

“Yo’ punk ass too,” Jamal reveals. “Had us niggas up here fucked up, and yo’ ass was alive! This is fucked up.”

Changing the subject, Noble comments, “Parker’s traitorous ass got off too easy in my opinion.”

“Nah, that muthafucka suffered,” Janel counters quietly with a distant look in her eyes.

“When did your family find out?” Aris asks.

“This morning. After they . . . well, can I say anything?” Ghalen asks, looking at me.

I look to Bayleigh, and she nods, closing her eyes.

“So, they finally got concrete evidence against Essence Hamilton for killing Riley. The man she paid to kill her, Derek Sawyer, agreed to turn state’s evidence against her. Sawyer got immunity because he recorded their conversation with Essence when she ordered them to kill her. He turned the recordings in as well as handed over a key to a storage unit.

“That sick bitch wrote down everything she’d been plotting against Zaire, his family, his businesses, even how she got Parker involved, and her detailed plans to kill Riley and Parker when she finished with them. She didn’t kill Riley the way she’d originally planned, but she still had her killed.

“Not to mention that she had journals going back thirty years. In one of them, she wrote that she had set Z’s daddy up by planting drugs in his house to take him down, all because he wouldn’t leave their mama. She even had information about concealing evidence in some of the cases she worked on over the years. And it was all right there in black and white in a journal in that storage unit,” Ghalen explains.

“What the fuck!” Kim mutters, shaking her head.

“We ain’t seen that shit on the news yet,” Malik declares.

“The arrest just happened this morning. They haven’t released it to the media yet. But when they do, there will be a frenzy in this city like nothing we’ve ever seen,” I explain.

“Yeah, they contacted my wife this morning and had her and the kids brought to the station before they told them.”

Ghalen gets choked up for a minute, and I take over.

“Detective Malone visited me at the same time they called Pam. He came to my home this morning and told me what was going on.”

“You had to think that nigga was lying,” Noble states.

“I did at first, but I know that he wouldn’t fuck with me like that. So, I went down to see what was what, and my big homie here was standing there smiling at a nigga,” I profess, looking up at Ghalen and smiling at him.

That shit was emotional this morning. I almost didn’t make it here to the office for this meeting, but too much shit had to be taken care of. Ghalen’s been my big homie almost as long as Parker.

“Damn, that nigga was ruthless,” Malik huffs.

I press a button in the middle of the table again.

“Yeah, he was. But like I said before, it’s a different day. We’ve talked about that shit for the last few months. Now we gon’ dead that shit right along with that dead nigga. Essence Hamilton was nothing more than a gnat in the big scheme of things, and she’s been squashed. Who’s ready to rise?” I ask, standing.

“We are!” Their voices rise in unison in an ecstatic shout.

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