“Fuck, Ty, it takes twenty minutes just to drive to your place.”
“Then you better drive fast.”
Then Ty flipped his phone shut, tossed it on the bed and turned back to the dresser.
Tate Jackson drove fast.
* * * * *
Seventeen hours later…
“Do you get me?” Walker asked and Shift, prone on the floor in front of him spit out a mouthful of blood.
“Yeah,” he grunted.
“Just to be sure,” Walker went on. “You lose her number, you lose her f**kin’ memory, you don’t, your next visit will be from Julius Champion. Now, let’s confirm. Do you get me?”
“Yeah!” Shift snapped, sliding angry eyes up high to Walker.
“Good,” Walker muttered, his eyes moved to Tate who was staring with distaste at the floor.
Tate felt his gaze; he looked to Walker, tipped up his chin and followed Walker out, both of them stepping over one of the two prone enforcers that Walker laid out before he turned to Shift.
* * * * *
An hour later…
The door to the tidy but tiny house opened the minute Walker and Jackson hit the end of the front walk. The screen door opened after it. The house door closed instantly and the screen door banged behind Ella Rodriguez who stood on her front stoop, arms crossed on her chest, eyes glaring down at the advancing men.
“You are not here,” she announced when they were four feet away.
Walker kept moving and stopped at the bottom of the two steps of her stoop.
“She’s in there, Ella, I advise you let me by,” Walker said quietly.
“She’s gone.”
“She was with Shift not twenty-four hours ago,” Walker returned.
“She was, Bessie got her; they’re gone.”
“Where?”
Her eyebrows shot to her hairline and her voice pitched four octaves higher when she asked, “Boy, you think I’m gonna tell you that?”
“I need to talk to her.”
“Yeah,” she nodded her head once. “I see that. But what you really needed to do was take her Momma’s advice those weeks ago when she laid it all out for you.”
“Ella –”
Her eyes narrowed, her face twisted, she leaned forward and the shutters flew up on her eyes, exposing her pain.
“Told you,” she said quietly, her voice trembling, “you had her in your hands and I told you, you weren’t careful, you’d destroy her. I’m not wrong often and again, I… was… not… wrong.”
There it was again. That thing piercing his chest. More pain. More damage.
Ty Walker stood at the bottom of a stoop of a tiny, tidy house in a not great, not bad area of Dallas and engaged in a stare down with a protective, loyal, loving black woman, a stare down he had no hope in f**k of winning.