Page 30 of This is Law

The sound of my voice caused him to look up, smile, and he came over, putting his hand out for me, and I slapped him up, and from there, we pulled into a father/ son embrace. I loved this nigga. I’m not even sure why I was getting in my head, worrying about the shit that my mama was in her room saying because I know that whatever she was trying to paint Dutch out to be, he wasn’t that. I knew the kind of life he lived. Dutch was cutthroat. This nigga has killed people for shorting him $5. I know he could move like he had a heart of stone, but I never saw that side of him. He was tough with me, but it was love in that toughness. Since I was a little boy, he would pull me in, kiss me on my forehead, and tell me he loved me, which is why I wenton to do that same thing with my sons. He taught me that a man could be hard and still have soft spots and my children just so happened to be my soft spot.

“They say when you want something, you gotta keep pursuing it. She going to fold one day. They always do. I haven’t met one yet that hasn’t folded,” he talked shit once we pulled away from each other. Tionna was right there, mumbling something under her breath, more than likely cursing this nigga out, and only she could hear herself.

“What you got going on? You in some kind of trouble?” I had to ask because lots of times when he would pull up randomly on me like this, he would need some kind of legal advice, or one of his men from his crew would be in trouble. I hoped that that wasn’t the reason why he’d pulled up on me though because I had way too much shit on my plate, and I couldn’t take on anything else.

“Nah man. Nothing like that. I just had a little meeting with a few of my guys down the street, so I figured that I would pull up on you. Ain’t seen you in a little minute,” he said, stepping back, with his arms folded, looking at me.

Dutch was a big dude, just as I was. He was hitting that gym hard, and even though he was older, that wasn’t an excuse for him to not go beast mode in the gym. He was dressed in an all- white fit. White button down, with the matching white pants. Because the shirt was short sleeve, you could see the two full sleeve tattoos that he had. He kept his head bald, and shiny, and he swears that the ladies love that shit.

“Aight. Come on to the back. I got a few minutes to spare,” I let him know.

Before I walked away, I let Tionna know that I was going to head to the office for a little bit with him, and she nodded, letting me know that that was fine. Dutch blew a final kiss at her, andshe just shook her head, rolled her eyes, and she got back to work.

We made it in front of my office, where I used my fingerprint to unlock the door. I pushed the door open, and Dutch came in behind me, catching it with his hand. I walked over to my desk, where I sat my briefcase down, and I tossed my phones on the table. From there, I took a seat in the chair that was facing my desk, and Dutch sat in the chair on the other side of the desk.

“I see you representing that rapper nigga, Reggie. I don’t know who he is, but Kross be playing that nigga round the crib. That’s a big boy, RICO case. I know those are your least favorite kinds of cases to handle. How you feeling about that?” he asked me.

“Shit, it’s a lot, but I’m built for this shit. The bullshit done already started though. The other night, me and Ya were leaving dinner, and these three lil niggas approached us. Out of the three though, it was just one of them that was doing all that talking. Putting out threats, telling me that I better do my job, and bring Reggie back home. Dutch, on everything that I love, it took everything in me not to stomp that nigga the fuck out. I’m a grown ass man. Nobody going to tell me what the fuck I should be doing,” I voiced, and he nodded his head to that. I noticed that his left eyebrow rose, and he scooted up in his chair a little bit, so that he could be seated on the edge of it.

“You got a description of what them niggas look like? A name? Anything? I’ll put one of my young boys on it, and we’ll have that lil shit taken care of by tonight. Shit, if you really want to, I can have them put down before the sun sets,” he responded, and I could hear by the tone of his voice that he was dead ass serious. That’s how Dutch was though. He felt like the answer to every problem was to kill a nigga. I’m sure he’d killed so many niggas in his lifetime that he probably lost count.

“Nah man. Skinny ass young niggas. Ain’t nobody worried about them. My sons can beat the fuck out of them,” I shot, just to give him an idea of how I wasn’t worried about them from the restaurant.

“Aight. Cool. Go back to the part where you mentioned you and Yaya going to dinner. Aren’t ya’ll divorced? Fuck ya’ll going out to dinner for?” he questioned, and I laughed because I could tell by the face that he made that he was genuinely confused.

“Yeah, but that meeting was business. It wasn’t personal,” I responded, technically not lying because it didn’t turn into personal until we got back in the car. The second Yaya ordered that bottle of wine, I already knew how our night would end. Soraya drinks wine, and it goes straight to her pussy. She was worse than a nigga that wanted to fuck once she gets a few glasses of wine in her system.

When it comes to anyone else, or anything, I have all the self-control in the world, but when it comes to that woman, I don’t know what self-control is, or how that shit even works. I swear, I wanted to push her ass off me, and tell her not to touch me, but when she climbed her ass over in the seat, started kissing, licking, and biting all over my neck, I couldn’t deny her even if I tried, and motha fucka I tried.

The head she put on me was amazing, too. My dick hadn’t been sucked like that in a very long time. Then, she asked a nigga so nicely to pull the car over on the side of the road, and fuck her, and I gave in to that. The second I got her back to the crib; the plan was to just walk her to the door. Suddenly, I had to piss, and on my way out of the door, there I was, crawling inside the pussy again. That pussy on her was the devil, and I knew that I needed to stay away.

Since then, her ass been avoiding the fuck out of me. When I had to pick the boys up over the weekend, she stayed upstairs, never coming down. I called her while the boys were with me,and her ass wouldn’t pick up the phone. She could avoid a nigga all she wanted to though. She continues to tell on herself every time she gets around me, and it’s just the two of us. Her body still craved me. She still craved me, but she knew that she would never have me in the way that she used to because I made that shit clear to her that if we went through with this divorce, there wasn’t going to be any coming back from that shit.

“No disrespect because you know you my son, but nigga, I know what Soraya look like. That woman is beautiful as hell. No way you took her to dinner, let them young niggas get you all riled up, and you declined the beautiful woman that you came to dinner with, and didn’t take out pent up energy on her? Yeah, right. I don’t believe your ass. I know you cracked,” he said, and I was going to plead the fifth on that.

Just last week, after dinner, when I fucked again on my way out of the door, having her bent over in the foyer of the house, I had her hollering out to me, telling me to promise her that I wouldn’t tell anyone that me and her fucked. I didn’t promise her ass shit, but even though I didn’t, I would never do that shit to Yaya. I wouldn’t get around my niggas and boast about how I was still getting pussy from my ex-wife. I cared too much about her still to be doing shit like that.

“I went and saw my mama the other day,” I let him know after a few moments of silence.

Dutch had been smiling, but when I brought up seeing my mama, the smile was immediately removed from his face. He didn’t mug or anything. His face just turned serious. A lot of the memories that I had of my mom were of her in this fucked up mental space. I didn’t know the fun Solace, that loved to turn up, was into fashion and could out dress any other woman in Miami, or the one that could talk shit, and had hands on her that could beat anyone’s ass. Dutch knew my mama before all of this because of how long she had been with my pops, so he wouldoften tell me stories about her. From what he would tell me; I knew that she loved my pops. That nigga could do no wrong in her eyes. He told me that she was the kind of woman that would be ready to beat a bitch ass for even looking at my pops for too long. I just hated that I didn’t get to see that side of her. It still lived in her though because she has her days where I’ll pull up on her, and she’ll be in a feisty mood, ready to curse me, and the rest of the staff out at the facility.

“Oh yeah. How that went? I gotta go pull up on Solace. I don’t deal with shit like that too well. It’s like that ain’t the way that I wanna see her. I wanna see the Solace that used to be dripped in the latest fashion trends, hair done up, long ass fingernails, twirling her neck around, and shit. Seeing her in that facility ain’t ever been for me, man. Since she’s been in there, I only saw her like twice, and that was years ago. You remember that I would take you as a little boy, but I would always sit out front in the lobby,” he shared with me.

“She brought you up while I was there. Brought you up a couple of times,” I threw out. I said that I was going to drop it because this nigga had done so much for me over the years, raising me as if I was his own, but I needed him to sell this shit to me. I needed him to remove these crazy thoughts that were trying to make room in my head.

“I wouldn’t be surprised. Solace was my girl. That was my spades partner,” he blurted out, followed by him chuckling.

“Nah. She actually told me that I needed to watch your ass,” I responded, and once I did, that smile was completely wiped off his face. You could tell that he was shocked by my words because he ended up sitting up in his seat, and in a matter of two seconds, I watched him go from smiling, and laughing to anger, and confusion.

“Watch me for what? Fuck you think she told you that for?” he wanted to know. I didn’t respond. I didn’t want to flat outaccuse this nigga of anything because I didn’t know what it was going to be that I was accusing him of, so I kept quiet for a few seconds, just until I knew what I should say next.

“I love Solace like a sister Law, but you do understand that your mama not all the way there, right?” he asked me, after the silence had gone on for too long. There was a pen in my hand, and I was using it to tap it against the desk. That’s what held my attention, as my mind was going a million miles per minute.

“When them niggas ran up on my pops and killed him. Where you told me you was at again?” I even shocked myself when I asked him that shit because it didn’t matter that I tried to ask it in a nice way, it still looked like I was trying to accuse that nigga of something. He took it that way too. I could tell his eyes bulging at me, and there was a vein on the side of his neck that protruded, that he was offended. It wasn’t long before he shot out of his chair, and he walked around the desk, coming over to where I was seated.

“What the fuck is you asking me, Law? I got the upmost respect for Solace, so I’m fighting like a motha fucka to be mindful of my words, but at the same time lil nigga, you know mentally she not all the way there. That facility that she’s in got her talking crazy, and you know that. I don’t know what she getting at by telling you to watch me, and I don’t know if you trying to look too deep into that shit and convince yourself that I might have had something to do with Knox getting popped, but you need to dead that fucked up ass theory. Knox was my motha fuckin brother, and nobody can’t convince me that he wasn’t. I dropped to my fuckin knees, and I shed tears when I got the news that they killed my nigga. They took a piece of me when they took him from me. I was barely even starting the grieving process when I got my team together, put our ears to the streets, and we were trying to find out who did that shit. It was a clean hit because here we are, all these years later, and I still don’tknow who did that to my brother. When your grandma died, I didn’t know shit about raising a kid, but I would be damned if I let them put you in the system, so I manned up, and did what the fuck I had to do. Lil nigga, I raised you. Fuck is you talking about, man?” he was pissed, and he had every right to be because I was coming at him with something major. What stuck out to me was that he never answered my question though about where he was the morning that my pops was killed. He’s told me before, but I wanted to hear it again.

“Where you was at though?” I calmly asked him again.

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