Page 35 of On You 2

“I would go with you, but I have to get back home to my little brother before my mama get off work.”

“Damn nigga, you still babysitting? We're supposed to be out here making money,” He laughed before shaking his head.

“But alright, I’ll handle the shit myself because I’m definitely trying to get this money today.”

He glanced down the street before looking back at me.

“Can you at least walk me over there, though? I can grab a strap and walk myself back, but I’m not trying to fade these corners without one.”

“I got you. That’s on my way home anyway.”

We started down the sidewalk toward the stash house a couple of blocks over while cars rolled slowly past us blasting music with too much bass. The smell of weed floated through the air from somewhere nearby, mixing with the scent of hot concrete and fried food coming from one of the apartments.

Harold stayed close beside me the whole walk. Too close, honestly. But I already knew why.

Harold felt safer around me because I always had a gun tucked into my back pocket. This gun was the one my mama thought she had hidden under her bed years ago.

Back then, she used to keep it in the house because she was scared living around our neighborhood, being the only adult in the house at the time. She’d even shown me where the bullets were one night because she said that if anything ever happened to her, I needed to protect my little brother.

Funny thing was, after a while, she stopped worrying so much and got comfortable with where we were living now. She probably started trusting the neighborhood more once she thought the shootings had slowed down and a lot of crime had moved farther down the street.

But me, I would never trust this neighborhood. Especially with what I would see, running the blocks with the niggas I ran with. The crime didn’t slow down or the shooting. Niggas just got better at hiding crime, and using silencers instead of smoking niggas out loud.

Harold and I hit the back alleyway and then cut through another one to shorten the walk to the stash spot a couple of blocks over. Harold kept looking over his shoulder now and then while we walked, paranoid about every car creeping past us and every nigga standing outside watching us move through the neighborhood. I stayed calm. I’d walked these same alleys so many times growing up that I knew damn near every shortcut in the area by memory.

We passed behind a row of apartments with kids still playing outside, even though the streetlights were getting ready to come on soon. The closer we got to the projects, the more crowded the sidewalks became.

We finally got to the old apartment building that mostly housed single mothers living in housing that rented their spots to drug dealers while they shacked up with other families. I’d heard about niggas doing shit like that my whole life. Even big drug lords like Hov supposedly had stash spots set up just like this one a while back.

Honestly, it was smart. Police expected trap houses to look abandoned or full of niggas standing around with guns. They usually overlooked apartments where they thought kids lived or women stayed.

Still, I don’t think I could ever trust somebody around my money like that. Niggas get desperate too fast when cash is involved. Personally, I’d probably sleep on the couch in my own stash spot before leaving my work around anybody else.

Once we walked up to the door, Harold started to knock on it.

“Yo, it’s Harold, open the door.” Harold beat on the apartment door a few times while we waited for somebody to answer from inside.

“Yo, it’s Harold, open up niggas!” He continued to beat on the door, but no one answered. Harold then grabbed the door handle, twisting it only to rush in when he saw that the door was actually unlocked and creaked open.

“What the hell,” Harold pushed the door wider and stepped inside slow as fuck now. All that rushing from earlier was suddenly gone.

I stayed right on his trail, trying to figure out what the fuck was going on because something instantly felt off. The apartment was too quiet, and now the only noise coming through the apartment was the TV playing low in the background.

Harold looked around carefully while we moved further inside. I could tell he was getting nervous by how stiff his shoulders looked. My hand slid toward the pistol in my pocket automatically once we turned the first corner.

That’s when I stopped in my tracks because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing in front of me.

“Yo, what the fuck?”

Harold reacted to the several bodies spread across the floor.

There was not one. Not two, but at least five people laid sprawled around the apartment in puddles of blood.

“What the fuck happened here?”

“I don’t know, bruh.” He and I whispered like the killer could still be inside.

“Yo, hell nah!”