Tempest giggled slightly. Didn’t Kensington realize she couldn’t keep a baby inside when it was ready to come out?
“Just hang in there with me, Kensington. We’re almost there,” Tempest fibbed. They were still more than four miles from the hospital. “Just take deep breaths.”
Tempest grabbed her cell phone off the passenger seat again. Just like before, it gave two short beeps when she hit the power button, letting her know the battery was low.
“Shit!” Tempest was bordering on a panic attack.
“Why are you cursing? I’m the one in labor,” Kensington managed to utter between breaths.
“Why didn’t you call me sooner?” Tempest demanded to know. “Why’d you wait until you were so far along?”
“I wasn’t sure it was labor!” Kensington snapped back at her. “My water never broke!”
Tempest rolled her eyes in disgust and clamped her hand over her mouth. She felt like screaming, but realized it wouldn’t resolve anything. She was just glad Kensington had phoned her at all. It showed a degree of trust, and it meant Kensington had grown to depend on her. She wouldn’t let her down. She couldn’t.
“Kensington, lay your head back against the door and elevate your feet on the seat,” Tempest instructed. She pulled the car over into the closed-off lane nearest to the curb, put it in park, and opened the driver’s-side door. “I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?” Kensington yelled out after her, all the while obeying the instructions she was given. Another contraction kicked in, this one stronger than the last. She yelped out in pain.
Tempest ran up to a group of men standing on the sidewalk. It didn’t take a genius to deduce they were slanging dope.
“Listen, I need your help,” she blurted out.
“With what?” one gold-toothed nucca in a three-hundred-dollar jacket and a two-hundred-dollar pair of basketball shoes asked out of curiosity. He looked her up and down, sizing her up. “You’re not 5-0, are you?”
“No, I’m not 5-0,” Tempest hissed at him.
“Don’t get bitchy with me,” was his only reply. He reached up and scraped something off his gold tooth with the nail of his pinky finger—the nail bamas always keep long so they can pick their noses.
Tempest wanted to curse him out but opted for the polite approach. She scanned the other faces in the group. All babies, she concluded. None of them looked a day over twenty-one. Two of them were twins.
“Look, guys,” Tempest began, trying to sound as pleasant as possible. “I have a young sistah in the back of my car about to have a baby.”
“Oh, shit!” one of them exclaimed.
“Word? Fa real?” another one shouted.
“So what you want us to do?” Gold Tooth asked, making his way over to Tempest’s car to take a look-see. He glanced back at his friends. “Damn, she’s not lyin’ homies.”
“I know one of you has got to have a phone,” Tempest pleaded. She knew good and damn well drug dealers didn’t bother with pay phones anymore.
Miraculously, every last one of them pulled out a wireless phone. Tempest clasped her hands together and looked up at the sky. “Thank you, Lord!” She looked at Gold Tooth, since he seemed to be the leader. “Can you call 911, please? We need an ambulance.”
“Sure,” he quickly agreed. “But if you think they’re going to send an ambulance out here anytime soon, you can forget it.”
They all chuckled.
The statement confused Tempest. “What do you mean?”
“Take a look around you, sistah,” one of the other ones stated. “This is Dodge City, not Georgetown.”
Tempest did take a quick look around. They were standing in one of the roughest parts of D.C. If rumors were true, the response time on 911 calls was pathetic.
“Well, call anyway,” she insisted.
Gold Tooth sucked his teeth and started dialing. “Okay, as you wish.”
The other one continued his soliloquy on emergency services while Kensington let out another scream from the car. “If this were Georgetown, you could open your front door and find the police and fire department standing there,” he stated avidly, following Tempest back to her car. “Around here, you have to wait damn near an hour for them to show.”