“I’m sure, baby. I know not to open my mouth.”
Ish looked at her and nodded his head as he slowly paced back and forth in the emergency room, while Simone sat on one of the hospital beds waiting for the doctor to come back.
Ish liked Simone, but not nearly as much as she liked him. He had been mainly using her to sign for FedEx packages that contained drugs. See, Ghetto Mafia had a group of corrupt FedEx employees in Miami and in New York’s JFK Airport who were able to get drugs on board FedEx airplanes for them and also get them on to specific FedEx delivery trucks.
Ghetto Mafia had been able to get drugs delivered to almost any location in Queens they wanted. They would always switch the drop-off locations to lower the risk of getting busted. They would also always have the package come in the name of a chick that they trusted, and they would have the girl sign for the packages. Just in case they ever got caught, they could always plead that the package wasn’t in their name, and therefore they weren’t responsible for it.
With BJ in the hospital, Bebo and Lo dead, and Nico laying low in Miami, Nico had been forced to have the FedEx packages go to Ish. Nico never wanted to tell anyone other than BJ exactly where his stash houses were. And even with BJ laid up, and although Nico was running out of options, he still didn’t take the chance on telling Ish the location of the stash houses. Instead, Nico had the FedEx re-up packages come directly to Ish’s house, so if anything went wrong, Ish would be without excuses.
Nico started having the FedEx packages delivered to Ish’s house right after Ish and Simone had met at the strip club. Right from the jump, Ish knew that Simone was real needy and that she was on his dick, so he was easily able to convince her to have her name on the packages. He also convinced her with no problem at all to be at his house on a regular basis to accept the packages and sign for them.
Ish was thankful that the robbery hadn’t happened forty-eight hours later, because had it happened on Monday instead of early Saturday morning, the robbers would have made off with a couple of bricks of heroin and coke that would have been in the house. The fact that the masked intruders had only taken the two pounds of weed and a relatively small amount of cash made Ish believe that Simone sincerely didn’t have anything to do with the robbery. It would’ve been very tempting for her to set up the home invasion for the same day that he expected a re-up shipment.
Ish disregarded the hospital rules against talking on cell phones and spoke to Nico on his brand-new prepaid phone. He knew to never use his regular cell phone when talking with Nico, and he also knew to never give out Nico’s number.
“Ish, I don’t give a fuck what you gotta
do, but you gotta find out who those muthafuckas were and handle that shit!” Nico ordered.
Ish tried to explain, as he had done before, that the two dudes had masks on and that Simone hadn’t seen their faces.
“Ish, that’s your fuckin’ problem! We got ten ki’s coming on Monday, and you already know that I can’t have the shipment stopped. Yo, word on everything, Ish, don’t fuck up this re-up!” Nico ended the call by hanging up on Ish.
“You believe this nigga Nico is upset with me over this shit?” Ish said to Simone.
Right at that point the emergency room doctor walked in.
“Okay, so we have good news. The X-rays were negative, no fractures or broken bones of any kind.”
Ish’s mind was somewhere else, so he paid the doctor no attention.
Simone had questions about her teeth and getting cosmetic surgery done, but since the doctor wasn’t a dentist, he explained to her that he wouldn’t be able to give her any real answers. He then told Jasmine that she could get dressed and that he would write up a prescription for her for painkillers.
“The nurse will be right out with the prescription and to sign you out.”
Simone thanked him, and she started to get dressed so she would be ready to go as soon as the nurse got there.
***
“Don’t let Nico stress you, baby,” Simone said to Ish while they pulled into the parking lot of Walgreens so she could get her prescription filled.
“Fuck that nigga! He on the phone talking that gangsta shit while his pussy ass is hiding out in Miami.”
Simone was feeling a little bad. She was down on herself because she felt like, had she been a little more observant of her surroundings, maybe they wouldn’t have got robbed and then Ish wouldn’t have been feeling any stress. But there was nothing she could really do.
After they left Walgreens, Simone was too afraid to go back to Ish’s house alone. So she asked him to drop her at her own apartment and told him that she would only stay at his house while he was there. Ish dropped her off and headed straight to the barbershop that Bebo had owned while he was still alive.
Ish was determined to find out who had robbed him. He figured, if the streets were talking, then he knew he could count on finding out what was being said by just listening to what the people in the barbershop had to say.
***
As soon as Simone locked the door to her apartment, she went right to her bathroom mirror and stared at her face. She couldn’t believe how horrible she looked, but she knew she was lucky to be alive.
After she finished looking at her face in the mirror, she popped one of her painkillers into her mouth. As soon as she did that, her cell phone started vibrating.
“You don’t how to text me back or call me?” Jasmine asked.
Simone sucked her teeth. “So you didn’t hear what happened?”