It wasn’t Nena’s concern. It was Keigel’s. He had to figure out how to clean this up. If it were left to Nena, she’d order a dispatch of the whole crooked Flush crew for the simple fact they liked to prey on the unprotected, something she and the Tribe vowed to disallow.
She studied him. Keigel needed to start thinking on another level if he wanted to continue in the Tribe’s good graces. People joined the Tribe because they wanted to, not because they were forced. And to do so, they needed to be aligned with the Tribe’s beliefs. Keigel dealt drugs, and while the Tribe didn’t believe in peddling poison to their own people, they didn’t stop him from doing it either. They allowed him free rein to do as he pleased in his little Miami world. Because he was under Nena’s protection, he was under the Tribe’s as well. That was their gift to him.
Maybe one day, Keigel would move beyond wanting to only make fast money and seek more for himself and the people in his territories, find a greater cause to fight for. Nena could only hope. But right now, Keigel served a purpose for her. She needed to be able to move freely about this area of the city. She needed to be like a ghost to do her dispatching and Tribe business unencumbered, and Keigel kept the other, smaller gangs in check so she could do so.
“I’m sure all she did was remind them they were on your turf, especially after they said, ‘Fuck Keigel.’”
His jaw tightened, and his eyes went flat. Keigel could be a clown, rough around the edges even, but he knew what respect should look like and demanded it.
“Don’t tell me that.”
“If I were you, I would make a clear statement. You’re chief around here. Send a clear message. Let them know they owe you for causing trouble and bringing it to your turf. You won’t have any more problems from them or any of the others if you do that. They owe you.” She kept her voice even. “And you owe the woman for taking care of those idiot would-be rapists.”
He pulled a face. “How do you figure that?”
“She put you in the perfect position to affirm your authority over your territories. Who knows, maybe they’ll be scared now, thinking you have some secret killer to take them all out. Maybe they’ll all fall in line now, hmm?”
They had an understanding, Keigel and Nena. No one messed with the quiet woman who lived alone at the corner house in the neighborhood. The woman who came and went as she pleased, looked like a goddess, and was lethal as hell—Keigel’s words, not hers. Keigel would clean up the mess with the Flushes. He’d send a message like she recommended. And he’d do it because he had no plans to end up like them, taken down in a dirty-ass alley. There wasn’t a need to tell him the girl was the child of a federal attorney.
Nena sighed, begging her mind not to think about Cortland Baxter, how he’d looked at her when she’d brought Georgia home, and how she wanted him to look at her like that again. The feeling was unsettling. Her hands, she realized, were trembling, and so she folded them into her lap, where Keigel wouldn’t mistake her emotion.
Nena had thought she would never want a man to look at her with the interest and the want that Cortland had looked at her with the other night. She didn’t want it, love, a relationship, did she? Was it even possible for her after all she’d endured?
No, she didn’t want it. She couldn’t want him. Because tomorrow, she’d have to do her job, be Echo again. There was no room for Cortland Baxter in her world, or any world, because the Tribe had decreed his dispatch. And Echo was the one assigned to carry it out.
16
BEFORE
When I come to, my stomach heaves, but nothing but bitter bile comes up. I turn my head, spitting out the slimy mess so I do not choke or vomit even more.
Maybe I should choke and die. Death would be better, so I am not forced to live with what these men have done to me. Nor do I want to live with what I have seen: the death of my brothers, the dissolution of my father, the destruction of my home and everything I know. The destruction of me.
My body is ablaze from the insects scurrying across the ground beneath me. It burns from the inside; the molten lava between my legs liquefies every part of my insides. I do not need a doctor to tell me something in me is ruined. I know my body well enough to know it is broken beyond repair, somewhere inside, somewhere down there. Never again healed, and I, never again whole.
Someone—I do not know who, nor do I care—eventually cuts me loose from the tree. They do not attempt to make me walk, hoisting me up roughly upon their shoulders and tossing me into the bed of a truck already teeming with girls of various ages. Whoever drops me among them does so with no care, and my body is again awash with new pain. But I cannot give up here. I must see to Papa. I must see what has become of N’nkakuwe in my absence. With effort, using the sides of the vehicle to assist me, I pull myself to a sitting position, ignoring the whimpers and squeals of the girls around me.