“Where is she?” Kaylen asked me with tears in her eyes. Things had finally calmed down to the point that I could send a quick text to her and Alexis about what was going on with Jazmyn. Kaylen came up right away. I hadn’t received a response from Alexis yet, though.
“She’s out of surgery. Mama is in there with her now. I’ve already had a chance to see her. She’s not awake yet. They said it may be a few days til she’s up.”
“Where are you going?” Kaylen asked me.
“I need to check some shit out.” I turned away and started walking towards the main entrance of the hospital.
“Kingston? What the fuck you got to handle while Jaz is laid up in this hospital?”
I ignored Kaylen’s questions and continued to walk out the door. I wasn’t her nigga; I didn’t have to answer shit that she was asking. I had other things to tend to. Someone was fucking with Jazmyn and made her want to end her own life. I needed to get to the bottom of it.
Fifteen minutes later, I was back in Jazmyn’s apartment going through everything. Jazmyn was always a neat person. Her home looked like a showroom at all times. Every piece of furniture matched perfectly together to match whatever theme she’d thought of and everything was in its place. You wouldn’t be able to tell any of that shit at the moment.
I didn’t know what I was looking for, so I decided to just pull everything out from wherever it was and see what I came up with. About thirty minutes later, every piece of clothing that Jazmyn had ever bought was out of her dresser and closet and on the floor. Every piece of paper was thrown across the floor. Everything was everywhere and I still hadn’t found shit.
“There has to be some shit in here somewhere,” I said out loud as I looked around the apartment. Then it dawned on me.
Jazmyn always said that the best place to hide something was in a place that was rarely used. I turned and looked towards the one place in the house that I knew my baby rarely ever set foot in for long: the kitchen. Jazmyn was a wonderful woman and she had many talents, but she couldn’t cook worth a damn. She could order up a great meal, though. She was smart enough to know her limits and she adapted.
I pulled open the refrigerator and looked inside. Nothing looked out of the ordinary…except that it was empty as hell. The only thing in it was water. I wasn’t too surprised though because she had been living at my house for the past few months. The cabinets were stocked with designer plates and glasses. All looked untouched and basically brand new. Nothing seemed out of place.
I grabbed the handle to the oven and pulled to look inside. It didn’t budge. I pulled again, a little harder. It still didn’t budge.
“Damn, Jaz, I know your ass don’t cook; but how the fuck is your oven practically cemented shut?” I tugged again and still was unable to open it.
This is where she hides things, I thought to myself.
I’d found her hiding place. I looked carefully at the double oven. It was the perfect safe. Out in the open where no one would suspect it. In all the years I’d known Jazmyn on a personal level, I’d never seen her open her oven but I didn’t think anything of it. She never cooked and no one ever cooked for her when they came over either.
I squinted as I looked at the panel. The numbers on it had to be the keypad for the code.
“What the hell would you make the code for this?” I thought to myself.
I knew someone like Jazmyn would change her code frequently. I also knew she wouldn’t be dumb enough to use something like her birthday or my birthday. I knew her favorite number was ‘7’. Her code to her debit card was ‘7-7-7-7’. I tried that. It didn’t work. I tried her mother’s birthday. Nothing. I tried my mother’s birthday. Still nothing. I tried ever birthday I could think of, frontwards and backwards. The door still remained closed.
I walked backwards from the oven and decided to sit there and think for a minute. It wasn’t like Jazmyn had a bunch of options for this code. Not any I could think of, anyways. All of the codes and passwords she had, that I knew of, were pretty simple. I looked over to the refrigerator again, but this time my eyes rested on the front of it. She had a small picture of LaShea taped to the front of it. I didn’t find it odd because Jazmyn loved LaShea as if she were her own daughter. What I did find odd was that the photo was in the kitchen, of all places. The one room she was least likely to use so she would never see the picture. Not only that, but Jazmyn’s entire home was done as if it were a model home. She didn’t have family pictures anywhere in the entire apartment.
I turned back to the keypad and entered in LaShea’s birthday, which was also the day Jazmyn had killed my wife. I heard a click and the handle unlatched and swung open by itself. I felt a small pang in my chest as I thought about LaShea but brushed it off. I had to focus.
When I looked inside the oven, I was surprised that there wasn’t much in there. There was a shitload of money, about 50 bands of hundred dollar bills. There was also a book. It looked like a journal. It was bound in leather and had what looked like a solid gold pen sitting on top of it. I grabbed it and opened it up.
The first few pages seemed to be some kind of system she used to track payments.
Job 1: 6 Gs
Job 2: 4 Gs
Whatever it was she was getting paid to do was bringing in a lot of money and she did a lot of it. I was all the way up to job 175 before I decided to stop skimming and just flip through the book. I stopped when I noticed pages of writing with dates at the top. I recognized the writing as Jazmyn’s. When I skimmed the pages, I could tell it was a journal that she was keeping. She’d written down her thoughts.
I didn’t want to start working with Crimson again, but I’m not sure I have a choice. I don’t know how long I can keep all these secrets away from Kingston. He will figure out that I’m not working at a law firm at some point. I have no cases, no clients. This lie won’t be able to go on forever.
I paused from reading and thought about that for a minute. It did cross my mind that there was something fishy with her job situation. She never wanted to talk about it. She never invited me to see her office. Then the strange gift that came in…the car. She didn’t seem happy about it at all. She had been afraid. And the woman who brought it didn’t look like any lawyer I had ever met.
I went backwards in the journal to see if I could find anything written around the day that she’d killed Shanice. I felt a feeling of anxiety creep up through my spine when I saw the date in the right hand corner. She’d written an entry. A short one, but it was still there.
Crimson is making me do it. It’s either her or me so I have to do what I have to do. I hope Kingston can forgive me.
The ink was blotted out and smudged. I almost couldn’t read it.
“She was crying,” I whispered to myself.
She didn’t want to kill Shanice. This Crimson woman made her, I thought to myself.
Suddenly, I heard something at the door. It was a subtle sound, but I heard it all the same. I wasn’t alone. I tucked the journal underneath my arm and closed the oven. I could hear someone messing with the lock on the door as I crept into the pantry and closed the door behind me.
As soon as I closed the pantry door, the front door swung open and a woman appeared. I squinted through the small slits of the pantry door to see who it was. She was a beautiful woman with golden honey skin. She was wearing a leather crop top and a mini-skirt with leather stiletto boots. She seemed familiar and I couldn’t place where I knew her from until my eyes focused on her long, blood-red hair that fell down her back in loose curls.
That’s the woman who brought the car to my house! She brought the car for Jaz!
My heart dropped as I began to understand the situation. Jazmyn was being blackmailed by this woman and she had been doing it right in front of my face. This woman had walked up to my home. I spoke to her and had no idea what she was doing to the woman I loved.
I was about to charge out of the pantry and fuck that bitch up but then she pulled out the longest blade I had ever seen in my life from behind her back.
Did this bitch just perform a magic trick? Where the fuck was that shit hiding?
She started whistling and walking around the apartment slowly as I watched. She was so light on her feet it was insane. She was wearing heels, but you couldn’t hear anything as she stepped on the marble tile leading down the hallway. She was swinging the blade as she walked and whistling a song that sounded an awful lot like “Die Tonight” by 50 Cent. I didn’t need to read any more of Jazmyn’s diary to know that this was Crimson and this bitch was crazy as hell. You could see it just by looking at her. She was deadly and had an aura of death around her. She was like the Grim Reaper in a leather skirt.
I watched her as she walked into Jazmyn’s room. I couldn’t see anything, but I heard her opening and closing doors. I heard the bathroom door open as she walked in there as well. She was looking for Jazmyn and, from the long ass blade she was holding in her hand, it wasn’t to have a chat over tea either.
“Dom,” I heard her say. She walked out from the hallway holding her cellphone to her ear and her blade in the other hand. “She isn’t here but I’ll find her. Her place is a fucking mess so someone may have gotten to her before I got here. Who knows what the fuck she was involved in, messing with that light-skin nigga she been fucking. I told her she needed to kill his ass. Niggas are liabilities.”
Well, damn. Heartless bitch, I thought to myself.
“Anyways, I’ll get Dutch on it.” She paused and I watched her facial expression change as she listened to the person on the other line. “What do you mean Ty wants me in Miami? Shit! You know why I can’t go down there, Dom. I’m not trying to be down there with him and his bitch Vanessa.” She paused again and I could see her growing even more agitated. “Fine. I’ll be on the next flight out.” She hung up the phone.
“Shit! I’mma fuck Jazmyn’s bitch ass up on sight when I find her!” she yelled.
She stuck her knife into Jazmyn’s designer white leather chaise lounge and dragged it through, from top to bottom; totally ruining the chair. She did the same with the matching sofa and loveseats.
“I can’t wait to slit that bitch’s throat for this,” she muttered as she started walking towards the door.
I was livid as I listened to her talk about Jazmyn. I squinted in the darkness for anything that I could use to beat her ass to death. But there was nothing besides a few canned goods and a broom in the closet with me. As I shifted to look around, I must have made a sound because I noticed Crimson stop walking and turn towards the pantry. I stood still and waited to see what she was about to do. When I saw her walking towards me, I braced myself. There was no doubt that I wanted to kill her, but I knew I wasn’t at all equipped to do the job now. From the way that she wielded that machete around like a Spartan, I knew I was gonna need more than my fists to get rid of her crazy ass.
I moved slowly backwards so that I was lying flat against the side of the pantry as I watched her. She was standing directly in front of the door looking through the shade with a calculating look on her face. If it wasn’t so dark, she would be staring right at the left side of my face. She didn’t even seem to be breathing, she was so still. Slowly, she reached out and grabbed the handle to the pantry door. I sucked in my breath and turned my head to face the other end of the wall. I slid my hand over slowly to where the broom handle was and grabbed it. It was my best line of defense to kill this bitch if something happened.
Click!
She opened the pantry door only enough to slide her head through the door. Though it was a large pantry, she was so close, I could smell the scent of her perfume. It was a faint smell, not very dainty or feminine, but there was a scent all the same. I stared at the side of her face at her golden skin. She was a beautiful woman but it was like she had a dark cloud over her. A dark cloud of death, torture and punishment. When I’d looked into her eyes, I saw how black and void they were. She was emotionless and didn’t care about anything or anyone.
Her eyes continued to search the vast pantry quickly and I knew at any moment, she was going to push the door further and turn to her left to where I stood. I didn’t have anything to battle her with other than the broom, but I would have to work with what I had.
I guess I’m just gonna have to beat this bitch’s ass Mike Tyson style, I thought to myself as I gripped the handle harder. I was ready for combat when her phone rang. She exhaled before answering and I swear I could almost feel the cool air of her breath hit me.
“Speak,” she answered after pulling it out from God knows where.
How the hell this chick got stuff stashed all over her body when she is damn near naked?
“You already booked it? Alright. I’m on my way.” She hung up the phone. “Fuck!” she yelled. “This shit is not going to end well.”
She walked out the door and I waited a few minutes before walking out of the pantry. I grabbed a sheet of paper and jotted down some details that I would need for later.
Crimson, Dom, Ty and Vanessa were the names that I had so far. Crimson was headed to Miami and I intended to get down there to get at her as soon as I could. I knew Dom was the nigga that Jazmyn was fucking around with when we were on the outs for a minute. I knew enough about him to find him if I needed him. As for the other two, Ty and Vanessa, I didn’t know anything about them, but I was going to find out. And if I needed to pay them a visit after dealing with Crimson and Dom, I would.