Page 55 of Mr. Blackwood

We enjoyed ourselves in the sun and the water for a couple of hours before we headed back to the bungalow to enjoy our hour and a half deep-tissue massages on the beach. I fell asleep during the massage, and Jabari carried me to the bed and held me while I rested.

***

“Were you and your brother ever close?” I asked, venturing into something I had wondered about since learning what happened to their family.

He sighed and pulled his fingers through his beard.

We had just finished our dinner of Caribbean-Mediterranean fusion food in the garden of the private estate we were on. The estate sommelier selected rare vintage wines for us to enjoy with our meals, and we were finishing off the last of the wine we had been given.

“We were at one point. By the time we were teenagers, that all changed. He was three years older than me, and he fell in with the wrong crowd early on. He gave my parents hell for years. His best friend was shot and killed by the cops when they were seventeen, and nothing was ever the same for Malik after that. He’d been there and seen the entire event. Before we knew it, he was on drugs. He said it was the only way he could cope with the pain of what happened. My parents tried everything to get him off it, but he didn’t want any help.

“He stole from them, lied to them, jumped on my dad a couple of times, and tried that shit with my mom. That’s when I got involved, and he accused me of turning on him. After that, we weren’t ever close again. I tried, but he always found ways to push me away. My dad used to tell me that I was my brother’s keeper, so I tried to keep him close. Tried to be there for him when he didn’t want me to.”

“And the last act was his final act of pushing you away, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you, Jabari.”

“I’ve had to live with the regrets of my decision ever since. I watched my mother die of a broken heart, and my dad try to drown his sorrows in the bottom of a bottle. One day, I’d had enough. I’d had enough of the hood life, enough of selling dope, enough of hurting people, and I decided I wanted something different.”

“How so?”

“I had always been good at stacking my money. After I killed those boys, some people wanted answers. Their people were trying to start a street war, and I knew we didn’t need that. So, I met up with the lieutenant for my area and gave him a rundown on what went down. He respected what I’d done, but he said it wouldn’t be so easy to walk away from that, but he had a plan. He was in the midst of dealing with some issues with his parents. His dad was the kingpin who I sold for.

“There were few people my lieutenant trusted, but he’d known me long enough to know that I was loyal if nothing else. He’d come across information that his dad was planning to leave his mom, and that his dad had another family out there. His dad had a legitimate company, too, but he was greedy, so he continued to run things in the street. When I say this man was a major boss in the A, he was major.

“I agreed to help the lieutenant set his dad up. It was the only way that he could protect his mama and ensure she kept what was rightfully hers. That woman had sacrificed everything to help that man get to where he was, including her own family. She had no one but him, and he thought he was about to walk away with a younger woman he’d been messing with. She had three kids; only one of them was his.

“All I had to do was drop off a package at a particular location. In the end, I walked away with a cool couple of million. I bought a couple of properties near the hospital that used to be Georgia Medical that were about to be taken by the bank and turned them into sober living homes that I could rent out by the room. The people I took them off were losing them because of drug addictions anyway. I purchased two more properties that were in foreclosure near the hospital, and I turned those into travel nursing and corporate housing so that travel nurses and medical professionals could use them while in town.

“My final investment was with the lieutenant that I mentioned before. He and I invested with two other guys; one of them was a trust fund baby, and we bought an old apartment complex that addicts had taken over. The owner wanted out of the deal, so he was desperate to unload it, and we got a sweet deal on it. We hired some guys, including my dad, to do a complete makeover on it. When my dad is sober, he’s a beast at what he does. That gave him some focus time to keep his mind off losing my brother. We turned it from rundown apartments into upscale condos.”

“Bell Falls?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s where your dad lives.”

“Exactly. I wanted to offer him a percentage of ownership, but his drinking prevented that. Instead, I used what would be his ownership to pay his bills and make sure he has everything he needs, even if something happened to me.”

“Even now?”

“Even now.”

“Why does he have to work then?”

“A man needs something to do, Camilla, otherwise he’ll go insane or become depressed. I love my dad, no matter how much he hates me. He was set for a comfortable life, but his world continued to crash around him.”

“How?”

“No sooner than they finished the project, my mom died.”

“I’m sorry, Jabari,” I replied softly.

He was quiet for a while before he spoke up again. “The next three years, I was on a grind. I hustled and stacked. I stacked money from the streets and money from the investment properties. I lived off two hundred a week and nothing more. I didn’t buy myself any new clothes, drove an old run-down hooptie, and cut my own hair.

“At the end of the three years, I walked away from everything related to Jamal Bell and became Jabari Blackwood. I was ready to buy my first commercial property, a 6,000 square-foot retail strip over on Fulton Industrial.”