Always Unique (12 page)

Unique watched his lips as the words rolled off his tongue “My name is Kennard,” he said in a way that she would have bet her last piece of cash or ass that “Swagger” was his middle name.

Maybe it was the alcohol but she liked the way his New York accent snapped off each syllable and that voice of his made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

She said, “Don’t worry about it, hon!” The realness of the matter was that she would let a brother that fine dump a bucket of water on her, and as hot as he was, she would need every drop to cool down.

Those eyes that sparkled like chocolate diamonds looked directly into hers. “At least let me have your dress cleaned. You are wearing it so well I would hate to be responsible for the destruction of such a masterpiece.” He shook his head and looked her over. “I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.”

She shrugged her shoulders and acted like she had a closet full of designer dresses. “It’s nothing.” She gave him her sexy voice and best smile. “As long as what’s in the dress is okay.” She looked up into his glistening eyes. “That’s all that matters.”

Unique could tell that he was used to women flirting but he seemed to enjoy the sport and most of all, the prelude to what might be.

His stare was hungry, like a lion that hadn’t eaten in a week staring at its prey. “From my vantage point,
what’s in the dress
is a whole lot better than okay, but I won’t take no for an answer.”

Looking in his eyes, never showing that she was the least bit confused by what he meant, she asked, “No to what?”

“Dinner? Breakfast? Lunch? New dress?” He turned his hands up toward the stars. “The sky’s the limit and I’m not hard to get along with, I just want to get to know you better.”

Unique wasn’t looking for a quick fuck and was reluctant to accept what he was offering. Those days for her were over. She’d had enough of those to last her a couple of lifetimes. Although Kennard looked like he could really work it, she turned to Tyeedah.

Tyeedah nodded and gave a look that translated to:
Bitch, you better go with him.

Unique did, and from that moment on, she and Kennard never left each other’s side. Nine months later, their love for each other seemed to grow deeper and deeper every day.

And if anybody had ever doubted Kennard’s love for Unique, this day was the proof. Together, Tyeedah and Kennard waited in the room designated for family and friends. After about an hour of Kennard pacing the floor, two men in cheap suits and soft bottom, lace-up shoes walked in and approached him.

The taller of the two offered Kennard his hand. “I’m Detective Jones,” he said with deference in his tone. “This is my partner, Detective McGeary. Sorry to have to meet like this, Mr. DuVall.” The empathy in his voice implied that he didn’t want to be there any more than Kennard did. “But we have a few questions that need to be asked.”

Kennard’s red eyes held Detective Jones’s stare.

Forging forward, Detective Jones pulled out a small pad. He checked his personal notes and said, “So you were the one that found Ms. Bryant in the bathroom?”

Kennard nodded.

Detective Jones waited a few beats to be sure Kennard didn’t want to elaborate further. Sometimes witnesses and suspects alike would run off at the mouth a mile a minute, unprompted, and sometimes they had to be coerced. “In your own words, can you tell me what happened, from the beginning?”

Like most young black males that grew up in the hood, Kennard wasn’t a big fan of the police.

“Do we have to do this now?” Tyeedah interjected.

“Look, sir,” Detective Jones said, never acknowledging Tyeedah, “I know this is hard for you.”

Detective Jones flipped his hands palms up in a gesture indicating that it didn’t matter to him either way, but said, “The quicker we get the information that we need, the quicker we can catch the perp.” Jones was a fourteen-year vet with the NYPD and knew how to handle these types of situations. “However,” he added, “based on my experience, it’s usually best to get this stuff out of the way as soon as possible. While the events are still fresh on the mind.”

Kennard sucked in a deep, restorative breath, squared his shoulders, then exhaled. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s just get this over with. What is it that you need to know?”

“Like I said,” said Jones, “I just need to hear your version of what took place.”

Your version.
Kennard didn’t appreciate the words Detective Jones chose to use or the tone in which he said them—as if there was more than one version. Kennard’s antenna instantly went up. He knew, from experience, that when something happened to a girlfriend or a spouse, the first person the police looked at was the man in the relationship. Nine years ago, when his baby mother was kidnapped and eventually killed, Kennard had been the main “person of interest” until he provided a plane ticket that put him on a flight back from Vegas at the time in question. Since physics dictated that it was impossible to be in two places at the same time, the police finally backed off.

Not wanting his experiences then to affect the way he interacted with the police now, Kennard swallowed his disdain toward the NYPD’s prejudices and for the first time in his life, he shared with the detectives what little he did know. He started with the time he left the hotel room that morning, provided names of most of the people he met with, and how he ended up with some extra time and decided to spend it with his fiancée. “And that’s the way I found her,” he said, ending his account.

Detective Jones wrote something down in his pad. “Was there anything—that you know of—missing from the room?”

“I can’t say. I wasn’t thinking about that type of shit. I’d just found my fiancée lying on the fucking floor in a pool of fucking blood. Didn’t think to see if my tie pin was still where I left it.”

Ignoring the sarcasm, Jones said he understood. “But can you tell me if there was anything of value in the room? Something someone would want to take?”

The country was in a recession. What Bernie Madoff didn’t steal, people were spending on gas money and food. Of course there were things in the room that someone would steal. But Kennard didn’t think there was anything worth beating a woman and leaving her for dead over.

He put his fist over his eyes, trying to knock the image of Unique’s battered body from the front of his mind so he could better cope. He said, “Maybe a couple of pieces of jewelry. Nothing serious enough to kill over.”

Jones raised a brow as if he was a savant of criminal behavior. “You’d be surprised what people will kill for,” he said. “But that’s neither here nor there.” He seamlessly changed gears.

“What makes you think the perp wanted her dead?” Jones obviously didn’t want an answer to that question because he went right on to the next. “Do you know of anyone that may have wanted to do Ms. Bryant harm?”

“If I did,” Kennard said straight on, and without reservation, “I’d be already at their asses, not here wasting my time with you.” He was getting tired of the Q&A.

“How about you, miss?”

“You speaking to me?” Tyeedah said, surprised that Detective Jones had directed his line of questioning to her. Up until now he had acted as if she were invisible and not even in the room, which had been fine with her.

“Yeah,” Jones said. “Do you know of anyone that may have wanted to hurt Ms. Bryant? Anybody at all?”

Tyeedah thought about the question. She only knew of one person that fit the bill: Fat Tee. He had not only blackmailed and threatened Unique, he had raped her.

“No, I don’t,” Tyeedah said to the detective.

To link Fat Tee with the crime against Unique meant that Tyeedah would have to give some type of motive. To do so would implicate her and Unique’s involvement in a recent diamond heist. There was a time and place for everything, she believed, and
here
and
now
was neither.

Detective Jones eyed his partner, who hadn’t said a word since they entered the room. Then he snapped his notepad closed and said, “We’ll be in touch.”

Neither Kennard nor Tyeedah was sure to whom the detective was referring.

COMA

The next thirty-six hours were torturous for Kennard. That day and a half at the hospital felt more like thirty-six years in a prison cell awaiting execution.

Kennard never left Unique’s side and had to be pried away from her before she was taken into surgery. He hated the fact that his actions might have been considered bitch-assness, but Unique was a part of his soul. He didn’t give a fuck what it looked like.

The fight at Madison Square Garden took place as scheduled. But he didn’t really care about that bout; he and Unique were smack-dab in the middle of their own fight, one with a significantly larger purse: her life.

Unique was now hooked up to a team of lifesaving machines. She was in a coma, and the doctor wasn’t sure when or if she would ever wake up. The doctor said that Unique was lucky that Kennard had found her when he did and that the EMT guys had gotten her to the hospital as soon as they did, or she would have died for certain.

With all due respect to the doctor’s expertise, Kennard begged to differ. As he looked at his woman lying on a hospital bed, unable to move, Unique didn’t appear to be rolling in four-leaf clovers to him. Luck was relative.

Kennard had cleared over eighty million dollars from the fight Saturday night and would have paid every dime of it to be able to change this particular predicament. But it didn’t work like that. Shit—life didn’t work that way. Money could buy him the best doctors but not time travel or a pass to keep his girlfriend from the gates of heaven or hell for that matter. Regardless of what Disney World wanted people to believe, fantasies didn’t accept credit cards.

Kennard had to wrap his head around the reality Unique might never wake up.

The doctor had said that the longer Unique remained with no progress, the more her chances of pulling through decreased.

Kennard wanted to—he so badly needed to—take his anger out on someone, mainly the person or people behind not only this brutal crime to his woman but also of the violation and disrespect to him. Besides wanting Unique to pull through, he wanted to make these horrible people feel her pain and their loved ones to feel his.

He couldn’t believe that fate would have it that he had been in a situation similar to this one, almost a decade ago regarding Kyra, who was then his girlfriend and who, just like Unique, happened to be pregnant with his baby when she was kidnapped and held for ransom.

It didn’t matter who did this or how long it would take him to find the people responsible. It had taken him two years of keeping his ear to the streets to find out who had killed Kyra. The murderers turned out to be three cats from Queens, who were delivered to him on a silver platter.

The murderous secret eventually proved to be like water, too hard for them to hold. One of them, a kid name Righteous, started bragging to some homies and it didn’t take long for the word to get back to Harlem and straight to Kennard.

Righteous had no problem killing, it seemed—that was easy for him—but he was less keen on pain being inflicted upon him.

A couple of fingers cut off with a reciprocating saw and Kennard and his team weren’t able to shut him up. Righteous tried to confess to every abject thing he’d ever done in his miserable life. He would have done anything to stop the pain. Anything to stay alive. He was a real sucker, and he took the coward’s way out.

He hadn’t given a damn about the pain that had been inflicted upon Kyra or the hurt Kennard had felt every day afterward.

Kennard only wanted to know two things from Righteous: who were his accomplices and why did they do it?

In return, Kennard promised Righteous that he would not kill him slow …

Righteous did not hesitate. He quickly gave up his two cohorts, their names, addresses, birthdays, and shoe sizes. He held back nothing.

When he finished, Kennard thanked him, then shot him in the forehead.

If nothing else, Kennard was a man of his word. As for how Righteous’s partners paid for what they had done, that’s a whole other story.

Since then he never thought that he would ever love again or find anybody else that he would give his heart to—that was, until the day he innocently bumped into Unique at a party in the Hamptons.

FRESH AND CLEAN

Kennard was brought out of his thoughts of the past by someone calling his name.

“Kennard,” the voice was soft. “Wake up.”

He jumped, startled. His first thought was that Unique had come out of the deep sleep and had gotten enough strength to speak while he had fallen asleep. He snatched his eyes open so fast the wind from his fanning lashes almost blew a cup off the table.

“You should go down the hall and shower and clean up,” the voice said. “Change clothes.”

It was Tyeedah. She looked genuinely concerned, both for him and Unique.

Besides his parents, no one had been by his and Unique’s side during this crisis like Tyeedah. Kennard didn’t really know Tyeedah all that well before this whole ordeal, except that Unique had moved to New York to stay with Tyeedah and that they were aces, but now he knew that it was more than that. Their friendship trumped most others.

Kennard’s mother, Ms. Katie, interrupted, “I brought him some nice clean clothes and asked him to go change, but he wouldn’t. He has his mind set on being by her side. And if you know anything about my Kennard, you know that once his mind is set, there’s no turning back.”

Tyeedah took into consideration what his mother said but still tried to convince him. “Look, I can respect you wanting to be here, but trust me: Unique would appreciate it more if you go hit the shower. Blood is not a fresh smell, my brother.”

He didn’t speak, but he heard her.

“Unique’s gonna pull through this sooner rather than later and when she does, you need to have your shit together. And can I have at least thirty minutes to say that I was by her side, please?” She gave him a slight smile. “It don’t make no sense how you hogging her bedside from other people who love her, too.”