Page 89 of Forced Into Your Arms
“You expect me to believe you were sleeping beside the nigga and never asked any questions?”
“Of course I asked.” Mace’s frustration rose with every word. “He kept saying he needed proof before he brought it to you. I told him to leave it alone until he knew what he was getting into.”
The warning on Sam’s phone came back to me.
You need to leave this alone.
Sam hadn’t listened to Mace. He hadn’t listened to whoever sent that message either.
“Did he mention my father?” Mace hesitated and that was enough to make me sit up straighter. “What?”
“He asked me whether you ever had me to try to find him.”
“When?”
“About a week before he got shot.”
“And what you tell him?”
“The truth. That you have but I didn’t know anything more than you did.”
I stared at him. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Sam made me promise not to say anything until he knew for sure.”
“He dead now, Mace.”
His face hardened.
“You think I don’t know that?” The anger in his voice filled the office, but underneath it was something heavier. Guilt. “I could’ve followed him that night.”
“You didn’t know where he was going.”
“I knew he was meeting somebody.”
That was new and it pissed me clean the fuck off that he hadn’t said that sooner.
“Man, why the fuck—” I stopped myself from going off. “Who was he going to meet?”
“He didn’t say.
“So, you let him go meet somebody after he got threatened?”
“I ain’t know about the message.” Mace’s voice got loud before he caught himself. “He told me he had to talk to somebody and would call me when he was done. That was it.”
“Well, did he call?”
Mace looked away, shaking his head as he whispered, “No.”
The room got quiet again.
I understood the weight of that unanswered call now. Mace had probably spent every day since Sam died wondering whether following him, pushing harder or refusing to let him leave could’ve changed anything.
I don’t think it would have.
The people who killed Sam had already decided he knew too much. So, whether it happened that day or another day, I think his time was coming.
“I need everything you remember,” I said. “Every question he asked, every place he went, every name he mentioned.”
