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Two weeks later, Lamar had been home for a couple of days and still had no clue who shot him. Due to the severity of the head graze, he suffered short-term memory loss. The only thing that he recalled from the night that he was hit was someone running off and leaving him to die. When he first awakened, he barely remembered his first and last name, let alone who may have shot him. Every time he tried to put the pieces to the puzzle together, a migraine forced him to stop thinking.
Amilli tried helping him recall by going through his cell phone call log. His last cellphone call was from Gunna, but he had no idea what he had said that had him out of the Sofitel Hotel and in Southwest. He didn’t even remember taking his daughter to Nikia before he went there and couldn’t imagine the damage he would have caused had he left Celebrity with Amilli.
* * *
DAYS LATER AS AMILLI drove Lamar’s Porsche through the inner city traffic from a doctor’s appointment, something came back to him.
“Awww, shit, aye, Amilli, take me to my crib up Northeast,” he commanded her in an uneasy voice.
On the ride up to Northeast Philadelphia, she finally filled Lamar in on the episode at the hospital between Nikia and Gunna. At first, Lamar was angry with Gunna for putting his hands on his daughter’s mother, but once Amilli told Lamar about Nikia’s remark before leaving the hospital, he lost it.
“Oh, aight, then. So the bitch said, ‘fuck me,’ huh?”
“Baby, calm down. I told you she was no good. I don’t just talk just ‘cause I got these juicy lips and wet mouth,” Amilli said attractively, winking an eye at Lamar, hoping to calm him down.
A few more minutes of talking and driving, they pulled up in front of Lamar’s Frankford Avenue stash spot.
“Hold up, I’ll be a couple of minutes,” he said, climbing out of the car.
He let himself in his place and to his surprise found everything out of place. Pictures were snatched down from the walls. The sofa and love seat were flipped upside down and slashed exposing its stuffing. A lot of holes decorated the walls.
Lamar darted straight for the kitchen and checked his hiding spot underneath the refrigerator, for the money that he had neatly hidden under the tiled floor. After moving the refrigerator to the side, he pulled up a few pieces of the tile and saw that his money was still there.
“Rookies,” he said under his breath, before going to search his other spots.
He pulled a decoy air conditioner from the living room window and opened it up. He found that his money was there, too. Afterwards, Lamar bolted next door through the back door to where he’d left his last shipment of cocaine. Inside the basement, Lamar turned on the light and from a short distance, saw the picture on the wall that hid a safe behind it on the floor. He hurried to open the safe, and his heart dropped to his nut-sack. He’d been robbed. Inside of the safe was a set of keys and a note. He grabbed the note and read it:
I DON’T GET MAD, I GET EVEN. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN. YOU CAN HAVE THE JERSEY HOUSE, THE CAR, AND THAT BITCH, AMILLI. THE DRUGS WILL DO. SEE YOU IN TRAFFIC, BUT I DOUBT IT.
DADDY’S GIRL, NIKIA