A Gangsta's Son Read Free

the four duffle bags to my bedroom.

~Chapter 5~
    Three hundred seventy-eight thousand five hundred forty-two dollars is what the loot amounted to and Pops and I split it down the middle.
    It was a quarter past eleven when we finished counting the money on my bedroom floor. By then Momma was in the kitchen seasoning the meat for our Independence Day barbecue and Treecy was in the living room smoking weed with her friends.
    Pops sat on my unmade bed and stared down at the piles of cash. I leaned back against the bedroom door and did the same thing.
    “A little over a hundred and eighty-nine thousand apiece,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. He dug into a pocket of the jeans he’d changed into and pulled out a pack of Newports. “Listen to me, Junior. You can’t tell a soul about this money. And don’t spend too much at once. Go over to Kisha’s house and put this money up. I don’t want nothin’ here.” He paused to light his cigarette. “Just in case the law get onto us, you know? Proper preparation prevents poor performance.”
    I nodded and took out my own pack of Newports. A million questions were bunched together in my mind like sardines in a can. Could my girlfriend, Lakisha Sanford, be trusted with so much money? And how could I have so much cash put up without spending it? I was already considering getting rims for the Chevy, maybe even another Chevy—an old-school Donk like the one Mone had driven.
    The most daunting question of all surfaced as I put fire to the end of my cigarette and sucked in a mouthful of cancerous smoke:
    Would Pops and I even get away with what we’d done?
    “You dripped blood from that bedroom to the car,” I said, watching him toss his portion of the cash into one of the duffle bags. “You know they can trace that shit, Pops. Saw it on The First 48 . It’ll only take ‘em a few days.”
    “Well, you need to take care of that. Pay some niggas to burn the house down later on tonight. Give ‘em a pound of that Kush.”
    “You know it’s too late for that, Pops. Detectives probably got that whole house taped off right now.” I shook my head and sighed. Pops had to leave Chicago; he knew it like I knew it.
    Picking up his bag of money, Pops looked at me with the hardest expression I’d ever seen on his face. I assumed he was trying his best to conceal the pain he felt for having involved me in a murder. Or maybe he was worried about the possibility of us spending the rest of our lives in prison. I wasn’t sure.
    “Let’s just celebrate this Fourth of July holiday. Don’t spend no more than a rack or two. I want you to drive me down to your brother’s house first thing in the morning,” Pops said, sounding defeated. He stared me in the eye for a brief moment. “You ask God for forgiveness?”
    I nodded my head yes. “Did right before we gave him those head shots.” I went to the rest of the money and started loading it into an empty duffle bag.
    “When you get a chance,” Pops said, walking to the door, “open your Bible to Job, chapter seven, verse one. If my memory serves me correctly, it reads , “The life of man upon earth is a warfare.” Don’t ever forget that.”
    “I won’t,” I promised.

~Chapter 6~
    By noontime I had changed into a white Armani Exchange t-shirt, black Armani Exchange jeans, and a fresh pair of black and red Jordan sneakers. I put on a black White Sox hat and banged it to the left, a testament to my undying love for the branch of Vice Lords I represented: the TVLs.
    I cleaned and organized my bedroom. Then I unplugged my phone from its charger and checked the missed calls. Kisha had called twice and my ex-girlfriend, Alycia, had called once. I peeled twenty-five hundred dollars off a bundle of hundreds and dropped it in my pocket with the phone, grabbed my Glock 33 from the drawer in my nightstand, tucked it under my shirt, and picked up the three duffle bags.
    Someone knocked on the bedroom door just as I was opening it and