by Mary Monroe
“Shit! I’m going to stay on this phone. You let your boss know that!”
“Who I say is calling?”
“Just tell him this concerns his wife and her whereabouts and her safety,” Wade answered with a smug look on his face. “You tell him that I’d like to make him an offer he can’t refuse. For the right price, he can have his wife back.”
There was some mumbling on my husband’s end and, suddenly, a sharp, shrill yell. I couldn’t tell if it was coming from Kim Loo or Jesse Ray. But the next voice I heard belonged to my husband. “This is Jesse Ray Thurman,” my husband said, sounding more serious now. “Who are you, and what is this all about?”
“You alone? And you better tell me the truth, motherfucker, because I ain’t playing,” Wade said in a firm and threatening manner. He no longer bothered to disguise his voice.
“Uh, something like that,” Jesse Ray replied.
“What the fuck does that mean? Are you alone or not?”
“Uh, my assistant manager is here … and a few customers,” Jesse Ray muttered.
“Get rid of them motherfuckers. Every last one of them! That chink heifer assistant manager, too!” Wade demanded.
“Please hold on—”
“Hell, no! Hold my ass! This shit has gone on long enough! You put me on hold again, and you won’t never see your wife again. It’s time to get down to business! Do you understand me, asshole?”
“Yes, I … I do understand,” Jesse Ray said in a hollow voice. He paused, and I heard Kim Loo mumbling in the background as Jesse Ray dismissed her.
“You get rid of your brother on that other line, too?”
“Yes, I did,” Jesse Ray said, then sighed.
“What about them few customers?”
“My assistant is taking care of them,” Jesse Ray said sharply, sucking in his breath. “Now who is this, and what is this all about?”
“This is about you getting your wife back and me getting paid.”
“Listen, whoever the hell you are. I don’t know what kind of scam you are trying to pull, but it won’t work on me. Now, whoever the hell this is, if you call here again, I’m going to call the police. I don’t have time to play games. Is that clear?”
“Motherfucker! You stop talking crazy! This is for real! We got your wife, and if you want her back, you’ll do what I say!”
Jesse Ray let out an exasperated sigh. “My wife is at the beauty parlor. I dropped her off there myself a couple of hours ago.”
I sat as still and stiff as a statue, looking from the telephone to Wade. At this point, Wade looked at me and pointed at me, then at the telephone.
“You know what to say,” he whispered, shaking a fist and giving me a threatening look.
I cleared my throat and closed my eyes as I spoke. “J.R … honey, it’s me,” I whimpered. “I’ve been kidnapped, baby, and I’m … I’m so scared.”
CHAPTER 3
“What the hell? Christine? Baby, what is this?” my husband asked in a low, steely voice. “Honey, where are you?” Jesse Ray was yelling now, and he sounded terrified. “Are you all right? Have you been harmed?” His voice was trembling so hard, I could almost feel it vibrating through the telephone.
“I’m fine … for now. Please do what they tell you to do,” I pleaded, with a sob. “If you don’t … they … they are going to kill me.”
“Shit!” Jesse Ray roared.
“Baby, go into your office so you can have some privacy. I don’t want Kim Loo to know what’s going on.” I didn’t plan on it, but I let out a sharp sob and a loud sniff. My tongue felt like it had doubled in size, and it was flopping up and down in my mouth so hard, I could barely talk. “Baby, I’m so scared,” I managed.
A few excruciating moments of silence passed, and I kept my eyes closed until I heard my husband’s voice again.
“I’m in my office now,” Jesse Ray said, breathing hard. He yelled for Kim Loo to hang up the other phone. Then I heard a door slam and a glass crash to the floor. “Baby, talk to me,” he bleated.
“J.R., don’t let anybody hear anything you say,” I warned, scraping my tongue with my teeth.
“They won’t. I’m alone in my office, with the door closed,” Jesse Ray said in a guarded tone of voice. “Don’t you worry about a thing, honey,” he told me, his voice sounding tired and raspy now. I could imagine how hard he was sweating. Jesse Ray was the kind of man who got nervous real quick.
“J.R., don’t call the cops. Don’t tell anybody about this,” I said, sounding as hysterical as one might expect a kidnapped woman to sound. “Please get me out of this mess. I … I want to come home—” Wade pushed me roughly to the side as he leaned toward the telephone.
“Satisfied? You believe me now? This sound like a game to you now?” Wade asked, screaming toward the phone so hard, spit flew out of both sides of his mouth.
“Yes, I … I believe you,” Jesse Ray stuttered.
“And by the way, this juicy butt, big-legged woman of yours looks mighty delicious to me … yum-yum. If there’s a bitch better than this one sitting in front of me now, God kept her for himself. I will do my best and try to be a good boy. Uh, I’ll try to keep my hands to myself, but I am a man.”
“Shit! Don’t you touch my wife!” Jesse Ray shouted.
“Then you better get me my money on time before I lose control. And I know, you know what I mean.”
“Don’t hurt my wife …. Please don’t hurt my wife,” Jesse Ray said, this time in a weak, pleading voice.
“That’s up to you. You do what I tell you to do, and everything will be all right.”
“What do you want?” Jesse Ray asked, his voice trembling. “I’m not a rich man ….”
“Bullshit! And Santa Claus ain’t got nothing to do with Christmas,” Wade said, then laughed. “Brother, you rich enough for me! I got friends in all the right places, so I know just as much about your business as you do. I know what your black ass is worth!”
“How … much do you want?” my husband asked.
“Do you love your wife, my man?”
Jesse Ray hesitated before he answered. And that gave me something else to worry about. “Yes. I love my wife very much,” he said finally. “I have always loved my wife, and I always will. She means the world to me.” I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Then you’d be willing to pay to get her back.” I couldn’t tell if the sentence was a statement or a question, because Wade winked at me when he said it.
“I just told you, I am not a rich man. I don’t care what you heard about me. I’m a working man,” Jesse Ray said, raising his voice again. “I don’t know why you decided to grab my wife of all people. Especially since the Bay Area is full of men with a lot more money than I’ll ever have—and the women they love. Sean Penn’s wife, Mick Jagger’s daughter. Why my woman?”
“Well, I know about all them rich folks, but I ain’t that greedy,” Wade said, with a sinister chuckle. “And I don’t want to put myself in no position that might attract a lot of attention. I ain’t fool enough to snatch no famous person’s woman.”
“But you are fool enough to snatch mine?”
“Don’t you get cute with me, motherfucker! I’m the one in charge here! And I just told you, I know what you worth. I done my homework. You want your wife back. I want my money. It’s as simple as that. Do you understand me, motherfucker?”
“I understand,” Jesse Ray mumbled.
“Good! Now just to show you that I ain’t one of them greedy bastards you read about in the newspaper, all I want is half a million dollars.” Wade was as cool as a block of ice. He could not have sounded more casual if he’d been ordering a glass of wine.
Jesse Ray gasped and started coughing. It took him almost a minute to compose himself. “A half a million dollars? Mister, you must be out of your goddamn mind! Who the hell do you think you are?”
“I’m the man with the gun and your wife. You’ll get me my money, or you won’t never see your wife alive
again.”
“I don’t know who the fuck this is, but whoever you are, you are talking like you’re crazy as hell!”
“No, brother. You are the one talking crazy.”
“Look, be reasonable. This is not P. Diddy or Donald Trump or Bill Gates you’re talking to!” Jesse Ray shouted. “I told you, I am just a working man. I live from payday to payday. I buy my suits from Penney’s. I buy just about everything else from Wal-Mart. I don’t have the kind of money you’re talking about!”
I gasped myself because I knew Jesse Ray was lying! We had over two million dollars in the bank. Or I should say, Jesse Ray had over two million dollars in the bank. And that was just the money that I knew about. For a man who worshipped money the way he did, there was no doubt in my mind that he had another fortune stashed away somewhere. For one thing, he had made more than one mysterious trip to the Cayman Islands in the last couple of years. I knew that a lot of Americans hid money from Uncle Sam in island banks.
But I honestly didn’t know what my husband was worth. In addition to the money that the video stores brought in, he had invested wisely over the years. He owned an apartment building in San Francisco, and he had made a lot of wise investments in the stock market over the years. These were just the things that I knew about. I was surprised and hurt that Jesse Ray would deny his wealth, knowing now that I was in such an ominous position.
“Well, if you ain’t got it, you better get it. If you want to see your wife again. And just to show you I ain’t all bad, I will give you till Friday to get me my money. Today is Monday, so you got enough time to do your thing. I will check in with you on … say, tomorrow morning, this same time, this same number. Don’t you do nothing stupid, like call the cops. Or tell that big-mouthed sister of yours. What’s her name? Yeah, Adele. She got a couple of cute kids, so we just might snatch one of them next if we have to.”
“Don’t you go near my family!” Jesse Ray shouted.
“Then you better do what I say,” Wade warned, snorting like a bull. “Don’t get your phone tapped, and don’t have nobody up in that damn shop with you when I call you tomorrow. You can afford to close up shop for an hour or two. You understand me, motherfucker?”
The silence on Jesse Ray’s end was disturbing. It was so complete, it seemed like he had left the telephone. I held my breath until he responded, which was a few more seconds later.
“I … I understand,” Jesse Ray stammered.
“Like I said, if you call the cops, your bitch is dead. And … so is your mama. Bye.” Wade unplugged the telephone and looked at his watch. “I can’t believe it took all this time to get that stingy motherfucker you married to take me serious. I don’t know what this world is coming to!” Wade said, with an incredulous look on his face. “You sure know how to pick ’em!”
“You didn’t have to say that about his mama,” I said, folding my arms. “Miss Rosetta is the sweetest woman I know. You didn’t even have to drag her into this mess. You got me, and that ought to be enough,” I insisted.
“Baby, I want this thing to work, don’t you? If we want to make sure it works, we got to use every trick in the book.”
“I hope it does work,” I admitted. I moved the telephone from the wobbly chair, and then I flopped down into it. “I don’t know what else to do.”
“Look, there ain’t nothing else for us to do! If he don’t pay, you can’t go back to him and pick up where you left off. You’d be a fool to go back to that stingy punk. Bottom line is, he’d better come through. You and me both are fucked in the asshole if he don’t.”
“But what if he doesn’t?” I asked, wringing my hands, rotating my wedding ring.
“Then we go to Plan B,” Wade said, with a heavy sigh. “I go on back to L.A., and you go with me, if you want to. Somehow we’ll make it,” he said, with a shrug and a tired look. “Being broke ain’t the worst thing in the world.”
“Oh,” I muttered, looking around the cluttered room. “Wade, do you really love me? Do you love me enough to take me back to L.A. with you and take care of me?”
The tired look immediately disappeared from his face, and he replaced it with a smile, his tongue licking his lips. It was hard to believe that he was the same man who had looked and sounded so mean and angry a few moments ago. “Why don’t we trot back upstairs to my bedroom and let me show you.”
CHAPTER 4
Unlike the neat living room in Wade Eddie Fisher’s mama’s house, where Wade had just called my husband from, his bedroom was a mess. From the room’s condition and smell, nobody would have believed that Wade was a mature man of thirty-three, and not some musty teenager who expected his mama to clean up behind his lazy ass.
All four of the walls and the low ceiling in the room were covered with posters of half-naked video vixens and various entertainers. Some I’d never even heard of. Like Eddie Fisher, the singer that Wade’s mama had named him after. Madonna stared from a dog-eared album cover that had been tacked to the back of the only chair in the room.
Empty beer bottles and Pepsi cans were everywhere I looked, even on the windowsills. One window had a dingy pillowcase tacked across it. The other windows had curtains so thin, you could see through them. Clothes, jockstraps, and smelly socks were strewn all over the floor. Empty fast-food containers littered the top of his scarred, wobbly dresser. The bed, which was just a mattress in the middle of the floor, was unmade. Plates and saucers with half-eaten sandwiches sat on the windowsill.
Pork-chop bones, cookie crumbs, a fuzzy white ball that had once been an orange, and an apple core with a swarm of gnats rolled to the floor as soon as we flopped down onto the mattress. The only thing in the room that was remotely organized was a bookcase in a corner. All four shelves contained shabby paperback copies of urban fiction books with covers just as lurid as the posters of the video vixens on the walls.
“What time did you say your mama was coming back?” I asked, looking at my watch as I wiggled out of my panties and kicked off my shoes. Everything else except my blouse and bra were already on the floor. Wade had already slid off his jeans and wife-beater T-shirt. He looked downright comical standing in front of me, wearing nothing but a smile and his battered running shoes with mismatched shoelaces. I looked away. I didn’t want to laugh, because I felt so sorry for him.
Life had not been kind to this man. He hadn’t worked in three months and had lost his last job as a busboy in a Greek restaurant to his boss’s teenage nephew. He was a failure everywhere except in the bedroom. But despite his good looks and a long, thick dick that looked like a sword when he got a hard-on, none of his dreams and hard work had paid off. Some of the women he’d counted on over the years had eventually moved on.
I didn’t like it when Wade told me that he’d be with me even if I didn’t have a rich husband, whose money had financed some of the best times that Wade and I had shared. I knew that that was a barefaced lie! Things would have been a lot different had I been as broke as Wade. He probably would not have been with me in the first place. It bothered me, and made me sad, when I thought about Wade’s economic status. But I had to think about it, whether I wanted to or not. I was one of the few friends he had left that he could count on. And he was one of the few friends I had that I could count on. Therefore, we needed each other. For different reasons, of course. No matter how people interpreted life, when you looked at it closely enough, two of the most important things in life were good sex and big money.
With a grunt, Wade kicked off his shoes, stumbling so hard, he fell to the floor. But he was as agile as a panther, so he was back up on his feet in no time, his eyes on my moist and hairless crotch. He shaved me himself on a regular basis, telling me that it was the only way for a man to get “pure pussy.” I had had some concerns about how I was going to explain that to my husband the first time Wade shaved me. But the next time Jesse Ray slowed down from his busy schedule to make love to me after my first shaving, he hadn’t even noticed anything different. All he’d said was the
same thing he always said after we made love, “Mmmm, baby, that was good.”
Wade exhaled and gave me a guarded look. “You ain’t got to worry about my mama. You need to stay focused on this … uh … thing we started,” he replied, stretching his naked body out on the mattress, lying on his back. “Come on over here,” he ordered, with a grin. “And get that worried look off your face. I got everything under control.”
“We don’t know that for sure, Wade,” I insisted, flopping down next to him on the mattress. “What if J.R. calls the cops? What if he doesn’t pay the ransom? I won’t be able to go back home,” I wailed. It was hard for me to talk because Wade was covering my face and mouth with hot, hungry little kisses. His tongue slid across my lips like a paintbrush. At the same time, he was pulling off the rest of my clothes. He didn’t speak again until I was just as naked as he was.
“You ain’t going back to him one way or the other, anyway. When we get our hands on that money, you take yours and split. Get you a place in Hawaii like you’ve been dreaming about. Me, I go on back to L.A. and resume my career. If we don’t get the money, I go on back to L.A., anyway, and you come with me. We’ve talked about this umpteen times. It’s way too late for you to be getting cold feet.” Wade was squeezing my breasts so hard, it hurt. He frowned when I pushed his hands away. “What’s your problem, woman? We’ve done this a million times.”
“Wade, what if J.R. calls the cops and has them trace the call you just made? Shit! This thing is falling apart before it even gets started,” I exclaimed, sitting up.
“Woman, it ain’t that easy to trace a call. And, even if they did, I could say I’d called his number to check on some videos I wanted to rent. You told me yourself that the phone in the store rings off the hook all day long. Remember how long the line was busy before we finally got through?”
