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She was yelling behind me, but I kept moving.

“Tahari, I said he is not here!”

I heard her… I just didn’t believe her. And that shit bothered me because this was Ms. Gia. There had been a time when I would’ve taken anything that woman told me as the truth without questioning a word of it. But this was her son. Her only son, and I had seen him in that fucking car.

I checked the first room and found it empty before moving farther down the hallway.

“Tahari!”

Ms. Gia’s voice followed me, but all I could hear in my head were those gunshots. My grip tightened around the gun. I reached Ghost’s bedroom and pushed the door open wider before stepping inside. Empty. My eyes swept over every part of the room before I finally lowered the gun. The bedroom looked just as bad as the rest of the apartment. Drawers had been pulled completely out of the dresser. Clothes and papers were scattered across the floor. The closet had been torn apart, and the mattress sat crooked on the frame like somebody had lifted it and dropped it back down without giving a damn where it landed.

Ghost wasn’t there. When I turned around, Ms. Gia was standing in the doorway. The sight of her stopped me. Tears filled her eyes as she stared at me, and for the first time since walking into the apartment, some of the anger clouding my head cleared enough for me to realize what I had just done. I had walked into this woman’s home with a gun and searched her rooms after she told me her son wasn’t there. I slid the gun back into my waistband.

“Look, I’m sorry.” I dragged a hand over my face. “I ain’t mean to disrespect your house like that.”

Ms. Gia didn’t say anything.

Her eyes moved over me before dropping toward the floor, and the disappointment on her face made me feel worse than if she had cussed me out. I looked around Ghost’s bedroom again.

Now that I wasn’t searching for him, I actually paid attention to what I was seeing. This wasn’t regular mess. Somebody had gone through everything. The dresser. The closet. The bed. Whatever they had been looking for, they hadn’t cared what they destroyed trying to find it.

“What happened here?” I finally asked.

Ms. Gia wiped underneath one of her eyes.

“The FBI.”

I looked at her.

“The FBI?”

She nodded slowly.

“An agent showed up here looking for Giovanni. He said he had a warrant and everything.” Her voice trembled as she looked around her son’s destroyed bedroom. “He went through this whole house looking for him.”

I stared at her for a second before looking around the room again. The FBI. This had to have been the agent that Ghost was talking about. I had come there ready to end him over what happened to Mali and Mr. Browne. Now the fucking federal government was looking for him too. The strangest part of it all is that Ms. Gia only mentioned one agent; this mess looked like a full-on raid. The stranger part is that if he claimed to have had a warrant, where the fuck was his team of people? It was weird. The whole shit.

“What the fuck did you get yourself into, Ghost?” I mumbled.

I guess I was loud enough for Ms. Gia to hear because she came with a quick response.

“I don’t know what he’s into, but that white man was pissed.”

She reached into the pocket of her robe and handed me a card.

“I kept asking to see the warrant, but he wouldn’t hand it to me. Instead, he gave me this card.”

I took the card from her and examined it. This looked identical to the card that Ghost had shown me a couple of months ago. This muthafucka had it in bad for him.

I patted the card into the palm of my hand while in deep thought. Ghost was a man with his back against the wall. Going to the feds and delivering Mr. Browne up on a platter would have been nothing. I had to find him, and I had to do it quick. More importantly, I had to put Mr. Browne and everybody else up on game. Ghost was already a threat lingering over all of us, but now… now the FBI was the bigger one.

GHOST

I should’ve picked a better motel. That thought had crossed my mind at least five times since I checked in, but every time it did, I reminded myself that comfort wasn’t what I needed right now. The room was fucked up. There was a cigarette burn in the comforter, a stain on the carpet I refused to inspect too closely, and the air conditioner sounded like it was fighting for its life every time it kicked on. I hadn’t bothered taking anything out of the backpack I’d dropped near the dresser, and the duffle full of money stayed on the floor beside the bed where I could reach it if I needed to move quickly.

Nobody knew I was here. At least that was what I kept telling myself. I had ditched my phone before I ever made it to the motel. The last thing I needed was to carry around something that could lead Ryan, the police, or anybody else straight to me. Getting rid of it had made sense at the time, but sitting alone in this room made me realize there was a downside to cutting myself off from everybody. I didn’t know who had been taken to the hospital, whether anybody had gotten a good look at the Camry, or how much the police already knew.

Most of all, I still didn’t know if Maliah was dead. I leaned forward and rubbed my hands together, staring at the carpet between my feet as frustration worked its way through me again. That was the only answer I wanted. I had left that complex knowing exactly what I had done. I wanted Maliah gone, and even now, I wasn’t about to sit here pretending otherwise just because everything afterward had turned into a fucking mess. What I hadn’t counted on was not knowing whether I’d actually hit her. I had so much to fucking worry about already, and now I was adding to the list. Out of everything that I was now facing, I knew that Trigga was the biggest problem. I knew he’d seen me. There wasn’t any point lying to myself about that either.