The Mike Black Saga; MOB (15 page)

Jackie drove by and picked up Ronnie, who opened the rear door for Travis. He jumped in as the vehicle passed. They drove to the drop-off point and parked behind an Infinity X4 SUV. “What’s up with the SUV, Jackie?”

“Special request from Murray,” Jackie answered as they exited the Pontiac, took off their trench coats, and got in the SUV. No one said a word while they traveled to Murray’s. Jackie drove, Travis sat in the back seat with his head down, and Ronnie sat up front. Travis noticed how heavily Ronnie was breathing. “You all right, Ron?”

“I’m cool,” Ronnie answered. But he wasn’t. As much as he talked about it, this was the first time he’d ever shot anybody, and it had him shaken. Ronnie didn’t know if the driver was dead. He tried to force the image from his mind, but he kept seeing the driver knocked off his feet from the impact of the 12-gauge round.

When they arrived at Murray’s house, Travis and Ronnie got out and went straight to the clean vehicle. Jackie drove the SUV around back of the house and went inside to make the deal with Murray. Since it was all prearranged, Jackie returned quickly with the twenty grand Murray had promised for delivery of the vehicle.

Once they got back to Travis’s house, they sat around the dining room table and watched as Travis counted the money. They knew it was a lot, but they really weren’t prepared for what Travis was about to say. “There is four hundred and fifty-six thousand dollars here.”

“What?” Jackie and Ronnie both sat with their mouths wide open.

“That and the twenty grand Jackie got for the SUV, minus the forty-seven six we gotta give Freeze, leaves us with one hundred and forty-two thousand, eight hundred dollars each,” Travis said to the sound of silence.

At noon, Travis sat by the phone waiting for a call. He had called and left a message for Freeze hours ago and still hadn’t heard from him. He was restless and just a bit nervous. This was the biggest job they had ever run, and that worried him. What Travis thought would be a quick hit for some easy cash turned out to be nearly half a million dollars.

He reached for the television remote and turned to channel 7. As expected, it was the top story. Travis listened as the reporter spoke of the daring daytime robbery of an armored truck, which left one man hospitalized with injuries related to gunfire. Travis interpreted that to mean the bullet hadn’t gone through the vest. The driver was only hurt by the fall he had taken from the impact of the bullet. Travis was glad that the man wasn’t going to die.

Then something happened that caught him completely off guard. The entire robbery was captured on film by the store’s parking lot cameras. Travis got up and poured himself a drink. How could he have missed the cameras in the parking lot? As much time as he had spent watching that lot, how could he have missed that? Then he began to ponder the possibility that he could have been caught on tape during one of his many surveillance runs through the parking lot.

The knockout punch came. A uniformed police sergeant appeared on camera to say that the three masked suspects involved in this robbery appeared to be the same three suspects in a jewelry store robbery last month in Manhattan.

Travis was hot, and he knew that he didn’t want to be sitting around with $142,000 of stolen money in the house. In the past, he was able to get money into his account in the Caymans though one of Ronnie’s Wall Street contacts. This was too much cash, though, to trust in anybody’s hands but his. Travis called Freeze again, and left another message. This time he called right back.

“I need to see you,” Travis told Freeze.

“Yeah, I know. Met me at the 205
^th
Street train station in thirty minutes,” Freeze said and hung up.

Travis packed up the money, a few clothes, got the title for his car, and headed out the door, cursing all the way.
How the fuck could you have missed that?
Thirty minutes later, Travis was standing on the platform at the 205
^th
Street train station, which was the last stop on the line, waiting for Freeze to arrive.

When the train arrived at the station, Freeze got off and approached Travis. The two men embraced as black men do, and Travis discreetly handed Freeze an envelope. “That’s forty-seven six,” Travis said.

Freeze smiled. “You’re hot.”

“I know this.”

“Who did the shooting?”

“Ronnie,” Travis replied, knowing how Freeze would take it.

“Figures. You need to lay low for a while.”

“What I got to do is get this money out of the country as soon as possible. I need to go to the Cayma—” Freeze cut him off quickly.

“I don’t need to know all that. You get to Miami. When you get there, you go to a private charter service called Pete’s. You talk to Pete personally. You tell him that Mike Black sent you, and if he gives you any shit, which he won’t, remind him that he owes Black a favor. You understand?”

“I understand.”

“Good luck,” Freeze said then got back on the train. 

Travis drove south doing the speed limit until he was too tired to go any farther. He got off of Interstate 95 at David McLeod Boulevard, Exit 160-A in Florence, South Carolina, and checked into a Red Roof Inn for the night. When he got settled into the room, Travis called to check his messages. Both Jackie and Ronnie had called him several times, wondering where he was. Each wanted to talk for obvious reasons, which they didn’t go into over the phone.

Me’shelle had called, too, and she left her number. This made Travis smile for maybe the first time that day. As much as he wanted to call her right away, he thought it would be best to call Jackie first. He went to a pay phone and called Jackie. “I’ll call you back in ten minutes,” she said.

Jackie went to a pay phone and called Travis back. He explained to Jackie that he was out of town on business and would return in a day or two. “We’ll all get together and talk things though when I get back. In the meantime, try to relax. Everything is gonna be fine. But maintain all security protocols until further notice.”

“Okay, Tee. I’ll do that, but this is fucked up.”

“I know, Jackie, I know. How is Ronnie?’

“He is on fire,” Jackie replied. “But I’ll keep him in check until you get back.”

“Do that. And keep him away from Freeze,” Travis said and hung up the phone. Then he went back to the room and called Me’shelle. “Hello, Me’shelle. This is Travis. I hope it’s not too late to be calling you.”

“Well, actually it is, Travis, especially on a school night. But for you I’ll make an exception this one time. How are you?”

“I’m good,” he lied. “Out of town on business. I should be back in a day or two.”

“Really? Where are you?”

Travis paused. “In South Carolina, but I’ll end up in Miami.” He didn’t think it was necessary to tell Me’shelle where he was going or why. However, he did give some thought to the mountain of lies he was building.

“I’ve never been to Miami,” Me’shelle said.

“Well, if this wasn’t a school night, I’d invite you down, show you the town.”

“Can I have a rain check?”

“But of course. Any time. Any time you want to go anywhere, all you have to do is say so,” Travis boasted.

“So, you got it like that, huh?”

Travis looked over at the suitcase filled with money and smiled. “I do all right. I’m not a rich man or anything like that, but I can afford to do most of the things that I want to do.”

“It’s not like that for me. Don’t get me wrong; I love kids and I love teaching them. I get real satisfaction knowing I have a hand in shaping their futures, so it motivates me to do the best job I can. I just wish it paid more.”

“Maybe I’m just stupid like that, but I think you and all teachers have the most important job in the world. I think your job is much more important than some guy who calls himself a CEO, whose biggest decision is what time to tee off. I think you should get paid based on level of importance. But like I said, I’m just stupid like that.”

“No, I don’t think so. I think you got it right. But anyway, you’re not gonna have me up all night talkin’ my head off like you did last night. I’m going to say good night. Call me tomorrow, but please, make it a little earlier, okay?”

“Okay, Me’shelle. Maybe when I get back you’ll do me the honor of having dinner with me.”

“I would be happy to.”

“Good night, Me’shelle”

“Good night, Travis.”

Me’shelle drifted back to sleep thinking of traveling to new and different places. She had never been anywhere except Columbia to visit her grandmother during the summer. Those trips ended when her mother died. She had planned to go to Jamaica with her girlfriends one summer, but that was the year her father died and she just wasn’t feeling it. Since then, Me’shelle hadn’t left New York, not even across the bridge to New Jersey.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go anywhere or that she was afraid to fly or anything like that. She just never had the time. When she wasn’t teaching during summer break, Me’shelle would volunteer to work with children in one program or another. It was her way of giving back.

She also never had anyone who wanted to travel with her. During her years in a relationship with Trent, he was the one who never wanted to go anywhere. He would always ask, “Why do we need to leave New York when everything you could ever want to do is right here?”

She fell asleep with a smile on her face, thinking about how eager Travis seemed to travel with her.

Meanwhile, back in the Bronx, Jackie met Ronnie at Cynt’s. When she got there, Ronnie was sitting alone at the bar, not surrounded by dancers as he normally would be after a job.

Jackie stepped up to the bar and motioned for Sammy. “Henny straight up, and one for my friend here,” Jackie said. As Sammy went off to pour the drinks, Jackie turned to Ronnie. He had been there for hours and had already had his share of Hennessey. “I talked to Travis.”

“Where the fuck is he?” Ronnie asked.

“Somewhere in South Carolina.”

“What the fuck is he doing there?”

“Says he down there on business and he’ll back in a couple of days.”

“This nigga gone and we in some fucked up shit up here!” Ronnie said.

“You ain’t gotta get loud about it. I know the shit is fucked up.”

“We were on the fuckin’ news, Jackie. The fuckin’ news. How the fuck could he have missed some fuckin’ cameras in the fuckin’ parking lot, Jackie? You tell me that shit. Travis is slippin’! You hear me?”

“Yeah, I hear you. Your voice carries. Keep it down before you get us put out of here. These niggas don’t need to know our business.”

“Fuck that. Let them try to put my ass out this mutha fuckin’ place, as much money as I spend off in this bitch. That nigga is slippin’ and he gonna get us all fucked up.”

Jackie leaned close to Ronnie. “Let me ask you a question. You were in that lot twice. Did you see any damn cameras? I didn’t.”

“No, but that ain’t my fuckin’ job.”

“I went there while we were in the planning stages and I didn’t see anything.”

“Travis is supposed to see all that shit and plan for it.”

“He can’t see everything, Ronnie. That’s why he brought us in on the planning, so we could be on the lookout for shit like that too.”

“I don’t give a fuck,” Ronnie said. “Look, Jackie, Travis been actin’ real funny for the last couple of weeks. He missed that camera shit, and now he’s gone. What’s up with that?”

“You sayin’ he did that shit deliberately then bounced on us?”

“That’s how it looks to me.”

“That’s because you’re drunk, Ronnie. You’ve known Travis just as long as I have, so you know he’s not like that. We’ve gone too far and too fuckin’ long together,” Jackie said, grabbing Ronnie by his shirt, “for you to believe some shit like that. Come on. Let me take you home.” Jackie pulled Ronnie’s arm. He jerked it away.