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“I don’t have time to get sucked into your relationship drama. Shorty gone have to wait until later. It’s tax season and the money not gone collect itself.” Nodding, I got up and threw on my shoes. I was already in a black Amiri jogging suit, so I was ready to head out. Key left his car and we climbed in my custom midnight blue Tesla Cybertruck. This was always the chosen ride on Tax day or when I was trying to protect anonymity. One would assume I ran a drug organization, but that would be wrong. I ran them all, and it didn’t stop there.

I was the best and worst thing to happen to someone’s business. People thought running an organization was about money, but that wasn’t true. It was about patterns, and money made the patterns easier to see, and that’s what I was good at. I saw the things people missed because they only looked at one issue at a time. I was always able to see everything at once. Give me enough information I could tell you that money is leaking, and whose pockets it was leaking into. If one crew kept losing product or one kept getting hit, I could figure out why. Political campaign fund is compromised; I’m the guy you call.

Money moved, but so did people, and the changing of their patterns was what I could see. I read everything from numbers to character shifts. I could see who supplied who, who secretly owed who, who was loyal because they wanted to be, and who was loyal because they couldn’t afford not to be. I could find the nigga fucking somebody’s woman, and the nigga quietly planning to take somebody’s spot, but most importantly, I could see vulnerability.

Key got me through the locked door, but what I did once I got inside was the reason people paid. In the beginning, they came to me to fix shit. I found the problem, and they paid me for the solution. Somebody was stealing, I found them. Money disappearing, I found the hole. Product getting lost, I figured out where, why, and who. Then they’d call me again with another problem, another fee, and another piece of their operation handed directly to me. The more problems I fixed, the more their operations were exposed to me. That was their mistake. Every problem they brought me taught me another part of their machine. After enough time, I knew who owed what, supplied that, moved this, where they were strong, and exactly where they would break.

Eventually, I knew these niggas’ organizations better than they did. That’s when I realized knowing how to build something back up meant I knew exactly how to tear that mufucka down. I didn’t need territory, crews, drugs, business or anything else they had built. I owned the one thing none of them could afford for me to have. The fucking blueprint to it all. So, I stopped waiting on them to have a problem, and that’s when the fee became a monthly tax. They weren’t paying me to fix a problem anymore; they were paying me because I could become one. I didn’t have to inherit an empire or build one from the ground up. I learned everyone else’s machine so thoroughly that eventually, they couldn’t operate without me. Once that happened, EVERYBODY PAID TAX!

“Nigga, one of these days this truck gone drive you off the road. How do you trust this mufucka to drive for you?” Shrugging my shoulders, I sat back with a smirk on my face.

“I don’t trust niggas to be my driver, so it’s either the car or you.”

“Yeah aight, Ms. Daisy. I wish the fuck I would.” Laughing, I shrugged my shoulders.

“If you not gone be the solution, you just running your mouth for nothing. We getting to the location just the same.”

“I’m starting to realize why you can’t keep a bitch. You the problem. You difficult as fuck.” I looked over at him confused.

“I’m the problem because I know what I want? Listen, I’m a self made millionaire, in my prime, and can have any bitch I want. Why the fuck would I settle for some shit that I don’t want?”

“And crazy is what a nigga of your stature wants? I ain’t never seen a prima donna in the hood.”

“Fuck you, nigga. You acting like you settled and married. You going through these bitches more than me.”

“The difference in me and you is I’m not taking bitches through crash courses and dumping they ass when they fail the pop quiz.”

“They say you can’t get to the testimony without the test. Ain’t no bitch retiring off me that don’t put in the work.”

“You wasn’t with me shooting in the gymmmm!” We both yelled out at the same time while laughing. Back in the day this was Key’s favorite line when a chick would ask him for some money. Seeing we were turning up the road leading to the drop point, we got serious. Hitting the button on the hidden compartment, we grabbed our guns and got ready. You could never be too sure, and I wasn’t in the business of getting caught lacking. Coming up on what appeared to be a dead end since a brick wall cut off the street, I pushed a button causing the wall to lift. Once we passed through, I watched the wall drop behind us in my rearview mirror. The road declined causing us to go deeper underground before eventually leading to a garage.

Getting out the car, we headed over to the wall, and I put my hand on the palm scanner, and once I was verified, the wall opened to a room with tracks inside. Pushing the button, I heard the faint hum of the rail system kicking in. A few seconds later, an oversized cart made its way towards us. To anyone on the other end, they simply dropped their bag into a mailbox outside a normal house. They could wait there for hours hoping I arrived to pick it up, but they would never see me. They would never know the bottom opened to a hidden delivery system that carried the bread directly to me. It seemed like a lot to go through, but when you were a nigga like me, it was necessary. Every nigga in a high position wanted to find Tax.

“I hope one of these niggas didn’t decide to not pay this month,” Key said as he began grabbing the bags.

“I’m kind of hoping they did.” He looked up at me and shook his head. I often wondered if he feared me as well, but my nigga aint have shit to worry about.

See, I wasn’t just a collector of money. I collected on unpaid debts as well. I was one of the most feared niggas alive, so these precautions were needed. The funny thing is I didn’t name myself Tax. The street did. Before there were names, there were stories. Somebody would steal from an organization and end up dead. Beside their body would be a receipt.

DEBT 0.00

PAID IN FULL

Another nigga decided he wasn’t paying what he owed, same thing. His ass got dead and a receipt. Another debt paid. After a while, niggas started connecting it together, but nobody knew who was doing the collecting. Nobody had a face to put with the bodies, they just knew someone was keeping count, and whoever he was, his ass always collected. That’s when somebody started calling him Tax. The name spread faster than a cold in Pre-K. Everybody pays Tax. Keep playing, Tax season coming. Niggas started passing those sayings around like warnings. Then came the stories. Tax wasn’t one man, he was a group of killers, or he was someone high up in the government. He had cops on his payroll, the nigga in the Cartel, or he was a kingpin trying to take out the competition. Some niggas swore they had met him, but that shit was a lie.

Nobody had seen Tax and lived long enough to know that they had. Business was handled through voices, messages, and blind drop offs. Nobody has ever had a meeting or sat down with Tax. It wasn’t a nigga alive who knew who I was except Key. He was the only person that knew Anton and Tax was one in the same. He was the exception. Everyone else had stories. Some were so ridiculous I didn’t know how mufuckas told them with a straight face. However, I never corrected one. The truth had limits, fear didn’t! So, I let Tax become whatever they needed him to be. A killer, ghost, whole organizations, or a nigga standing behind them every time money came up short. It didn’t matter because niggas only had one time to fuck up and they would find out exactly what Tax looked like. By then, knowing my face wasn’t information they would live long enough to share. I didn’t need to scream, make threats, or convince anybody who I was. When they heard “It’s tax time, nigga” their fate had already been sealed, and death was at their door. When I was gone, only one thing left behind to explain what happened.

DEBT 0.00

PAID IN FULL

“Everything all there?” I asked kind of hoping we were short.

“We all good, let’s get up out of here.” Grabbing all the bags, we went out the exact way we came in. Just in case someone ever figured out how to access the underground, I never left any money here. We filled the backseat with the bags before pulling off. Another successful month.

“Everybody pays Tax.” We laughed at Key as we drove out the garage.

Simone “Bubbles” Stanton