“Hurry up!” Sasha hissed, as if I didn’t understand how serious this was. I flipped her the bird at the same time I slid the key into a lock and the light turned green.
“Junior! It’s me, Paris,” I called into the room before entering so that my brother wouldn’t greet me with a gun in his hand. We Duncans had been known to shoot first and ask questions later—or at least some of us had. As I stepped into the room, however, I realized that there had been no reason for me to announce myself. The room was empty except for a couple of suitcases.
“Dammit!” I stuck my head out of the room and called down the hall to Sasha. “Yo, push all the buttons to the top floor and then get down here.”
When she got into the room, I gave her instructions. “I need you to go find the surveillance room and destroy the video of what just happened in that elevator—along with the one of us entering the elevator and the lobby.” I didn’t need to explain to her how bad things would be for our whole family if we were identified. It wasn’t like we were in L.A. or Miami, where nobody knew us. This was New York. We lived here.
“You better pray to God that there is a man guarding those tapes. I’ll meet you at the car.” She took off, leaving me in the hotel room alone.
I opened the first suitcase to discover that it was completely empty, devoid of clothes, so it was no surprise when I found the second one held only a pair of Junior’s jeans and a sweatshirt. A woman’s outfit that must have been Sonya’s was draped over a chair. I turned around and spotted two cell phones on the bed. Things were going from bad to worse. Ditching cell phones was the first thing someone did when they were getting ready to go off the grid.
With no valuable information to be found, it was time for me to get the hell out of there. By now someone could have spotted the bodies, and it wouldn’t be long before I was hearing sirens. Grabbing the phones on my way out, I headed for the stairwell. Less than three minutes later, I was in the car, feeling jittery as I waited for Sasha.
She slid into the car a few minutes later. “Mission accomplished,” she said proudly, always ready to brag about her skill for getting whatever she wanted out of a man. “But our handiwork has been discovered. Five-O should be here any minute.”
Just as I drove away from the parking lot, two NYPD cruisers arrived in front of the hotel.
“Any clue where Junior and Sonya are?” Sasha asked as we headed down Ditmars to the entrance of the Van Wyck Expressway.
“No fucking idea. Probably in the wind.” I showed her their phones. “They left these behind.”
She shook her head. “Damn. This is bad, cuz.”
“No shit.”
I picked up my phone and dialed Orlando’s number. “Hey, O, it’s me. Tell Daddy that it looks like Junior and ol’ girl have gone ghost for good.”
“Are you sure?” Orlando asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure. We had to take out three of X’s men to protect an empty hotel room. Only thing we found was their cell phones,” I told him.
Orlando let out a frustrated sigh. “Well, he’s a big boy. He can take care of himself. Right now I want you two to get outta there and go to one of our safe houses,” he barked into the phone. “I got a feeling it’s about to get real hot once X finds out about his three dead soldiers.”
Brother X
19
I was feeding Lenny and Squiggy while I waited for word from our men at the Marriott. Those rats were the only thing that kept me from punching holes in the walls as I paced the room. Samuel and his men had been over by the hotel for almost two hours, so I was expecting that no-good heifer I called a wife and her punk-ass lover to be groveling at my feet at any minute. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on both of those adulterous infidels.