Five days after that night with Juliet, I was plotting. You hear me? I was trying to figure out how to murk this nigga and get away with it clean.
This was back in 2019, before these stupid-ass AI-powered surveillance cameras were all over the place, so I spent my free time mapping out the city, finding the blind spots where the lenses couldn’t reach.
I did all forms of research. And when I say all forms, I mean that shit. Now, of course, I never typed “how to get away with murder” into a search bar. A: that’s dumb as fuck. B: you have to make your search history look subtle, like you’re just looking things up out of random curiosity.
So, I made sure my YouTube history looked completely accidental. I watched videos about caseless ammunition and subsonic bullets that barely leave a sonic crack. I even looked into how people build homemade suppressors.
Now, I lived in the semi-South—Florida, to be exact. Getting a regular gun down here isn’t exactly hard, and since my record was completely clean, I could legally walk into a shop and buy a pistol. But buying anything bigger than a handgun was going to be a bitch and a half, and it would put the kind of eyes on me that I absolutely did not need.
Two weeks went by, and I was still sitting in my room with zero motion.
Bruh, what the fuck are we doing?!
the voice in my head started screaming.
Nathan is over here living his best life, and we’re sitting on our asses doing absolutely nothing. Get up and do something!
“Bro, I want to,” I muttered. “But I can’t just crash out sideways. If I don’t play this smart, I’m going right back to a cell. And I am never going back to the cage.”
Fuck it! Just crash out and kill him!
“Then I’ll be locked up with a bunch of dudes for the rest of my life,” I said. “No bitches, no future. I don’t want to spend my life behind bars, but this nigga cannot go unpunished either.”
My nigga, we’re in Florida!
the voice said.
“So?”
There are no laws against ghost guns here, my nigga!
I sat up in my chair so fast I almost knocked it over. Of course. Florida had zero state-level restrictions on building your own firearms back then.
And unlike other states, you don’t need a serial number or a background check to buy the individual components,
the voice whispered, getting excited.
You just buy the parts! Hell, we can just find one of those nerdy engineering kids at school who has a 3D printer and get the frame printed out. Fuck it!
Oh, yeah. It was on now. Once I got this set up, I was gonna smoke his pack so damn hard.
But there was still one major problem: who the fuck could I ask to 3D print a gun frame for me?
I was going to have to do some serious scouting at school.
And then... I did the first major fuck-up you can make when you’re planning a murder. I said it out loud.
“That’s why I need you to help me make a 3D gun,” I said, leaning closer. “I want to kill him.”
I was expecting Harvey to look shocked. I was waiting for him to try and talk me out of it, or even threaten to report me to the cops if I didn’t stop.
Instead, he just looked at me with cold, calculating eyes.
“As much as I’d love to help you get rid of that asshole—because he’s been a dick to me, too—I actually have a better idea.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
“Tomorrow night, he’s hosting a party at his house,” Harvey said, tapping his finger on his desk. “And there’s going to be a lot of fighting there with gloves. He does this backyard match-up every single year, and I think that would be the perfect place for you to embarrass his ass.”
I stared at him. “I know you’re not asking me to fight him, bro. He’s a trained MMA fighter. He’ll beat the shit out of me regardless of whether I’m slightly bigger than him.”
“You don’t have to win,” Harvey explained, leaning forward. “You just have to hurt his ego. Since you’re on the football team, you’re a big, high-profile target. He’ll want to fight you just to feel superior. I thought about fighting him myself, but I’m not any good at it. But I do know some of his weaknesses, and I have tips you can employ.”
“You really think I’ll be good enough to do this?” I asked. “Hell, what even makes you want to help me embarrass him instead of trying to get him locked up? I thought you’d say some shit like, 'just trust the system, the cops will put his ass away.'”
Harvey let out a dry, bitter laugh. “I’ll start trusting the system when the system is legally obligated to protect us. Until then, the system can go fuck itself.”
“What do you mean?” I frowned. “Don’t they have a duty to protect us?”
“Rico, look at the landmark Supreme Court case
Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales
,” Harvey hissed, his face tight with anger. “Where were the cops when her three daughters were murdered by her ex-husband, huh? They minded their own damn business. They only intervened when the ex came out guns blazing trying to shoot at
them
. They let those little girls die! The state brainwashed us to believe they have a duty to protect us, but they don’t have to do shit because of police discretion!”
I ended up researching that court case later that night, and goddamn... he was right. Just like that Michael Jackson song:
All I wanna say is that they don’t really care about us.
Black or white, this system truly doesn’t give a shit about us. And I fucking hate it.
Miss Gomez was a prime example. I got my ass beat by a grown-ass man in high school, and she tried to put me behind bars for it. But that’s the same exact bitch who refused to press charges on the officer who gunned a man down for holding a machete. And that nigga didn’t even have legs! Make that make sense, y’all. He didn’t have a gun. All he had was a big-ass knife. Y’all are so pussy you couldn’t just take him from the back and the front at the same time? Dog shit.
But after talking to Harvey and getting a game plan together for this party, I finally made up my mind.
Death is easy. Once you die, it’s pretty much over. But the best way to make somebody suffer is to humiliate them. They have to live with that shit every single day. Harvey was a smart man for giving me that idea, because I sure was about to throw my whole life away.