Wifey 4 Life (17 page)

I instantly felt a lump form in my throat, and I felt sweat seeping
through my pores from my armpits. I did my best to remain calm, because Walt was
a pro when it came to sniffing out a liar. I didn’t want that to happen with me,
so I held my composure and pulled myself together.

“Well, what happened was, my cousin Nikki got caught transporting
some product for Ricky, so when the narc busted her, they locked her up, refusing
to give her bail because they knew the feds would pick up her case. So when the
feds picked up the case, Nikki got scared. She freaked out and started telling everything
she knew about Ricky’s drug dealings, so she wouldn’t have to do time. And when
the indictments came through, everybody but me got arrested.”

“Why is that?”

“Why is what?” I asked, knowing damn well what he meant. I tried
to throw a stupid card out there to see if he’d bite.

“Why didn’t you get arrested?”

“Because she told them I had nothing to do with his organization.
She told them I didn’t even know that she was transporting drugs for him. She said
she went behind my back and did it.”

“And the feds bought that story?”

“Evidently they did, because they didn’t touch me. Now, they
came by my shop and harassed me a few times to see if what Nikki was telling them
was a lie, but other than that, they didn’t fuck with me.”

Walt stared deep into my eyes. I’d heard people say that you
could tell when a person was lying by looking into their eyes, so I guessed that
was what he was trying to do. I just acted normal and rode with it.

“When did you get out of the Witness Protection Program?”

Oh my God!
Now where in the hell did that question come from?
I’d never mentioned to anyone that I was in that program but my immediate family.
But apparently word got into the streets. I hadn’t spoken to Walt or seen him for
two years, so I knew this was a trick question. It was a test to see if I snitched,
even though I claimed that I hadn’t. No one went into the Federal Witness Protection
Program unless she was an informant who needed to be protected from the niggas
she testified against. Or if she was an innocent bystander who witnessed something
that could cost her her life, which wasn’t my case. Those are the two options. That
was it, cut and dry.

I looked at Walt like he was out of his damn mind. “I was never
in the Witness Protection Program. I mean, don’tcha have to testify against someone
and be afraid for your life to go into something like that?”

Walt looked deeper into my eyes. “That’s what they say.” He took
another sip of his beer. “Then where did you disappear to?”

“What do you mean? I was home,” I lied.

“You sure? I mean, you know you can tell me anything. I used
to take care of your butt just like you were mine, so you know your secret is safe
with me.”

“So did my uncle, and look what he did to me,” I said underneath
my breath.

“You say something?”

“I just said I know I can trust you.”

Walt poured the last of his beer into his mouth and set the bottle
on the coffee table. He looked back at me without blinking. I was extremely uncomfortable,
but I didn’t let him know it.

“I read in the newspaper that Ricky got murdered by a couple
dudes from a Spanish mob,” Walt said. “Was that true?”

I sighed heavily. “That’s what I was told.”

“Why you think they did it? Did he owe them money?”

“Not to my knowledge. I don’t think he owed anybody.”

“Think he turned snitch?”

“Walt, I can’t tell you what Ricky had going on. He pretty much
kept me out of the loop with everything dealing with the streets. The only thing
he couldn’t keep from me was all those bitches he fucked around with.”

Walt was about to comment, but a knock on the back door prevented
him from doing so. “I’ll be right back,” he told me and stood. He headed toward
the back door.

While he went to see who it was at the door, I let out a loud
sigh. I felt like he’d had me in a fucking chokehold while questioning me, and that
wasn’t a good feeling.

Walt returned to the living room, accompanied by a young guy,
who looked to be around twenty-five or twenty-six. Average height and clean-cut,
he reminded me of the comedian Mike Epps. He looked at me with a serious expression.
He was definitely here on business.

“Griff, this is my stepdaughter, Kira. She’s the one I was telling
you about.”

Griff nodded. “What’s up?”

“Hey.”

Walt asked me, “You ready?”

“Yes.” I didn’t know why, but my heart started beating like crazy.

“Go ahead and follow Griff outside. I’ll come out in just a minute.”

Walt headed down the hallway that led to his bedroom. He didn’t
have to tell me he was going in the back to retrieve his pistol, or whatever type
of machinery he had stashed away. I knew him well enough to know that he wasn’t
going to leave his house without carrying something heavy-duty.

I was hesitant to follow Griff outside. Shit, I didn’t know him
from a can of paint. For all I know, he could’ve been there to kill me like my uncle
and everyone else who had it in for me. But I took a chance. I figured if he got
me after everything I’d been able to escape that night, then it really was my time
to go.

There was a dark blue Caravan with tinted windows sitting outside.
I saw a guy in the driver’s seat waiting patiently. By the time we reached the van,
Walt had come outside.

“When you get in, sit in the last row,” Griff told me as he rolled
back the door.

As I climbed into the back, I noticed that there were large sheets
of heavy-duty plastic spread across the floor of the van and draped across the middle
seat. Seeing this type of shit gave me the chills and made me want to step back
out of the van and run as fast and as far as I could. I’d known cats who laid down
large amounts of plastic in their vehicles because they didn’t want blood to splatter
all over the place after they’d butchered somebody. I was just hoping that it wasn’t
my blood they were after.

Walking across the plastic covering was pretty noisy, but I made
the best of it.

Griff turned around in his seat to make sure I hadn’t damaged
the plastic in any way. The driver didn’t look my way at all. He didn’t turn around
one time to see who I was or how I looked. That shit gave me the creeps, but, hey,
what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t get back out of the van and tell them I didn’t
need their help. They would’ve looked at me like I was fucking crazy, so I took
a seat and said a quick prayer before we pulled off.

“Let’s get the show on the road!” Walt said as he slid the van
door closed and sat down in the row ahead of me.

“W
here we going first?” Griff asked from the front passenger
seat.

“Let’s ride out to Huntersville first,” Walt said. “I want to
see if these niggas are still at the spot where they had her.”

Knowing we were on our way to the house where I had been held
and tortured made me nervous. I thought about the possibility of falling back into
the hands of my uncle or one of those retarded-ass niggas if Walt’s plan went sour.
I didn’t like the thought at all, so I tried to block it out of my mind.

There I was in the back of a van about to witness a fucking
bloodbath. If I wasn’t angry and bitter, I would not have been able to take
that ride with them. I was the type of chick that didn’t like controversy. That
was why so many niggas used to get over on me. I was used to sweeping shit under
the rug, so I wouldn’t have to deal with it.

But tonight I felt different. I was tired of being walked on.
I needed to show motherfuckers I wasn’t a woman that could be pushed down and abused.
And I meant that from the bottom of my heart.

Walt didn’t live that far from Huntersville. The drive from his
house to the spot where I was couldn’t be more than two miles, if that. During the
course of the drive, while Walt made comments about their plan, I kept looking out
the window, pretending I was uninterested.

“You got all the tools we gon’ need?” Walt asked.

Without turning around, Griff said, “Yes.”

I wanted to know what kind of tools they were talking about.
Since Walt was the go-to man when it came to getting burners, they had to be talking
about something other than guns.

While I racked my brain trying to figure out what they were talking
about, Griff pulled out two loaded pistols, laid them across his lap, and began
to do an overall inspection of them. I heard him eject the magazine, and then I
heard him push it right back into the handle. Then he performed the same routine
with the other pistol. I couldn’t see what kind of semi-automatic weapons they were,
but from the sound of them, I assumed they would do the job.

“Which street do we turn on?” the driver asked.

Walt turned around and looked at me. “Which street did you say
it was?”

“The house is on B Avenue.”

“Which side?” the driver asked.

Walt turned around and looked at me again. Before he could repeat
the driver’s question, I blurted out, “It’s the third house on the left.”

The driver slowed down at the corner of Church Street and B Avenue
and then made a right turn. My heart started beating uncontrollably as soon as we
approached the house. To my surprise all the lights were out, and it looked deserted.
My chances of seeing those animals getting paid back for all the shit they’d put
me through began to look slimmer and slimmer by the minute.

“It doesn’t look like anybody is there,” I said.

The driver slowed down a little bit more.

“She’s right,” Griff said.

“What y’all want me to do?” the driver asked.

Walt told him, “Circle around the block one time.”

“Whatcha wanna do that for?” Griff asked.

“I wanna see if any one of those niggas is walking around in
the streets.”

“Well, we might as well drive down every block, if you wanna
see that.”

“A’ight. Well, let’s do that then,” Walt said.

After getting the OK from Walt, the driver pressed down on the
accelerator. He drove down every street in Huntersville. Every block and side street
this place had, we were on it, but we had no luck finding the motherfuckers who’d
assaulted me.

At the end of every street we drove through, Walt shook his head.
After the driver had driven down every street in Huntersville, he pulled over on
the side of Goff Street and asked Walt where he wanted to go next.

Walt looked back at me. “You ready to pay that Tony guy a visit?”

I tried to reply, but I got a lump in my throat, so I had to
give him a nod instead. But then I thought about it. I wanted to know if he planned
to have me somewhere around so I could see the nigga’s face when he was down on
his knees, crying and begging for his life.

“I know we hadn’t discussed it,” I said, “but I was wondering
how you planned to get Tony and my uncle. I mean, Tony may be easier than my uncle
because he ain’t gonna have his kids with him. I was with him when he dropped them
off, so there’s a good chance that he could be home alone, unless he got word that
I escaped. And as far as my uncle is concerned, it would be crazy to go in his house
when his wife is there, because if she saw one of y’all trying to take out her husband,
she’s going to scream or call the police. She’s one crazy bitch! And I hate her
fucking guts.”

“Don’t worry! We got all of that under control. Just sit back
and relax, because all we’re gonna do is ride by your uncle’s house to see if he’s
there,” Walt told me. “And if he is, we gon’ go to Tony’s place to snatch him up
and use him to get your uncle to come out of his house.”

“Oh, OK.”

I sat back in the seat and watched as the driver took directions
from Walt. My uncle lived in the plush part of Virginia Beach. His neighborhood
was seventy-five percent Caucasian, ten percent black, and the other fifteen percent
was a mixture of Hispanic and Asian. The houses in this community were priced at
a half million dollars or more. For years, I wondered how he was able to afford
his home on his salary as the general manager at Wal-Mart. When I finally found
out that he stole a lot of high-end electronics from the warehouse and sold them
on the streets, I almost fell out. I knew his self-righteous ass was into some type
of illegal doings, and I didn’t buy that bullshit act when he and his wife used
to talk trash about Ricky. In my opinion, he acted like he was a bit jealous, because
Ricky and I lived in a neighborhood similar to his, but we were so much younger
than him.

The ride to my uncle’s house took the driver approximately twenty
minutes, but to me it seemed like forever.

“Make a left turn on the next street,” I instructed the driver.
I had a funny feeling that my uncle was two steps ahead of us, and was squatting
somewhere in the bushes alongside his house, waiting patiently for us to drive by
so he could do some damage.

“After you make the left, keep straight, and make another left
at

Evergreen Place,” I said.

It seemed like the closer we came to Lanier’s house, the more
nervous and jittery I became. I was a fucking nervous wreck. I had never before
ridden around in a van and pointed out niggas for another nigga to kill ’em. Hell,
I was married to a fucking notorious gangster, and he didn’t get involved with
shit like this, so this was something new to me.

I pointed. “It’s the fifth brick house on the right side.”

“I don’t see any cars in the driveway,” Griff said.

“They probably got them inside the garage.” Walt turned around
to face me. “Do they normally park their cars inside the garage?”

“Yeah, sometimes they do.”

As we rode by, everyone in the van noticed that all the lights
in the house were shut off, except for a light coming from a room on one side of
the house.