Deliver Me From Evil

by Mary Monroe

  I nodded, lying back down, one hand reaching for Wade’s dick. He parted his thighs, with a smile and a wink, looking sexier than ever.

  “From what you done told me about the brother, he ain’t a stupid man,” Wade added. “Even though he looks like one. He wore them boxy, horn-rimmed glasses when we were in school, and he looked like the geek from hell. All the other kids used to call him Clark Kent behind his back.”

  Clark Kent. I laughed to myself. Clark Kent was a clumsy, timid geek, but he was also Superman in disguise. I had been lucky to end up with a black Clark Kent. Wade was a sexy beast by every standard, and women, especially lovesick women like me, let him know that. However, some would have argued that my husband had Wade beat by a country mile. Any woman with a practical mind would never have chosen Wade over Jesse Ray. Wade represented a good time, and that was all. Jesse Ray had so much more to offer, especially security. And, to a lot of women, that would have been enough. And, it had been for me for a while.

  Wade went on. “Didn’t you hear how scared he sounded? I’d be willing to bet my share of the money that he ain’t going to call no cops. Shit. You didn’t marry no fool, after all.”

  “Well, from now on, we call him from a pay phone,” I insisted.

  Wade nodded and smiled as he climbed on top of me. “You are the one paying the cost to be the boss, so whatever you say is fine with me. As long as I get paid, I ain’t complaining.”

  Wade’s body was magnificent. Even though he drank everything but shoe polish and lived on junk food, he was all muscle. Just the thought of making love with him was enough to get me off. And thinking about Wade was the only way I could get off when my husband made love to me lately. It had not always been that way.

  Sex with my husband was good during the first few years of our relationship. But that was because Jesse Ray had done his best to impress me. Once we got comfortable, he made love to me on the run, often glancing at the clock on our bedside stand and slurping on my titties at the same time. He flipped and flopped around on top of me, sweating and squealing like a banshee, his long, thin body propped up on his bony arms like a brown grasshopper.

  Compared to Wade, my husband seemed like a mute in bed. Wade was the noisiest lover I’d ever been with. The way he carried on when he was having sex, you would have thought that somebody was killing him, or at least beating the dog shit out of him. Even though we were the only ones in the big, shabby house in South Berkeley that his mama rented, I covered his big mouth with my hand to keep his mama’s neighbors from hearing things they didn’t need to hear. It was bad enough that every time Wade brought me to the house, the neighbors on both sides peeped out of their windows.

  He was rough, too. He flopped up and down on me like he was riding a bull. The reason the mattress was on the floor now was because we’d finally broken the slats on the cheap bed frame that he’d been sleeping on since he was in junior high.

  I removed my hand as soon as he came and rolled off of me, panting, wheezing, and moaning like some creature caught in a trap. He was breathing so hard that the hot air streaming out of his mouth irritated my eyes. The sweat that had dripped from his body had saturated the thin sheet, which had almost slid off the mattress.

  “Oh, baby, that was the best yet. Seems like the older you get, the better you get. Ain’t a young girl in this state that can snap, crackle, and pop her pussy the way you can! Shit. Even you couldn’t do all this when you were a young girl yourself,” he told me, slapping my backside. This was one of the few things that I didn’t like about having sex with Wade. He slapped me on my rump the way I’d seen the jockeys at Bay Meadows slap their horses’ asses.

  Wade sat up and looked down at me, wiping his face with the tail of the sheet. I was still on my back, looking up at the cracked ceiling. I had so many thoughts swimming around in my head, I couldn’t tell where one ended and another began. One was, I didn’t like it when Wade, or any other man for that matter, reminded me that I was no longer a young girl. I had a house full of mirrors, so I knew that. I was vain, so how I looked to other people concerned me. Despite Wade’s choice of words, I still enjoyed his company. He did the one thing that my husband now did only every once in a while: he made me feel desirable. I could look and smell like a pile of shit and Wade would still cover me with kisses. The last time I approached my husband, smelling like a rose and wearing my sexiest negligee, he rolled his eyes at me and told me to go put on some clothes before I caught a cold.

  “Was it good for you?” Wade asked, once again squeezing my breasts so hard that I pushed him away.

  “It was good for me,” I told him. Though my mouth said one thing, my mind said another. Like if it bothers me now when people mention my age and I’m only thirty-one, what is it going to be like when I’m fifty-one? Would I still have enough of the ransom money left over to get a face-lift then?

  I needed to keep my mind on the current situation. I couldn’t afford to let myself get too distracted.

  “Why do you still have that worried look on your face, girl? Didn’t I tell you that I got everything covered?” Wade asked, looking worried himself.

  “Have you ever done something like this before?” I replied, trying to at least look like my mind was focused on the right things.

  Wade gave me a puzzled look before he responded. “Kidnapped somebody?” For a moment he looked like he wanted to laugh. “Hell, no, I ain’t never kidnapped nobody.”

  “Then how do you know you’ve got everything under control?”

  “Look, this was your idea,” he snapped, with one hand up in the air like he wanted to slap my face. He screwed his face into a frown and patted his stomach. Then he let out a stream of belches, which rolled out of his mouth like thunder. “I shouldn’t have ate them day-old sardines and oysters this morning.” He belched again, shaking his head and patting his stomach some more. “I wasn’t that crazy about doing this shit with you in the first place. Kidnapping is a serious crime! Now, if you was going to back out, you should have done that before I called up your old man and got this ball rolling. But, it still ain’t too late. You can go on back home and pick up where you left off, but you better come up with one hell of a story to tell your old man about how you got loose. And, no matter what you tell him, it better not include my name,” he warned, shaking a fist in my face.

  “I am not going to back out now, Wade. I know it’s too late. And I need that money. I need to get up out of this city,” I whimpered in a voice that was cracking with each word. “I love Berkeley, and I thought I’d spend the rest of my life here. But I know I can’t do that now. Jesse Ray’s crazy if he thinks I am going to spend the rest of my life cooking and cleaning and taking care of his family and putting up with their bullshit by myself. And in my own house at that! I am tired of trying to talk some sense into that man’s hard head. Now all I want is to get as far away from him and my crazy in-laws as possible.” I snarled. I was surprised at how strong and determined my voice sounded when I got angry.

  “Then quit worrying. You making me nervous,” Wade insisted, giving me an exasperated look. “I know what I’m doing. My mama didn’t raise no fool. Shit.”

  “I’m not worried,” I said, with a pout. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind these days. I just hope that everything works out all right.” I sat up again and gave Wade a concerned look. “Maybe you should call Jesse Ray again tonight. Just so he knows you mean business. He can be pretty stubborn and exasperating. You saw that by the way he dragged you around on the telephone.” The insides of my thighs and my crotch were still throbbing. I started massaging myself with both hands, but that didn’t help. If anything, it made me ache even more.

  “I told him I’d call him again tomorrow. Now if you want this thing to work, we got to follow our own rules, too.”

  Wade pushed my hands away and started massaging me. That didn’t stop the aching in my private area, but his hands felt a lot better to me than mine did.

  “I don’t trust J.R. I k
now he said he wouldn’t call the cops or tell anybody, but what if he does?”

  “Look, if he calls the cops and we find out about it in time, we split,” Wade answered, pulling his hands away from my crotch. “I got a Mexican buddy down in Mexico City that owes me some favors. We could hole up with him from now on if it comes to that. The law ain’t too fond of him, so we wouldn’t never have to worry about him blabbing. Mexico is full of folks running away from something, so we’ll feel right at home. And if it comes to that, Jesse Ray will get to keep his money, but he won’t have you no more. As long as you don’t slip up, he won’t never find you or find out what happened to you. For all he’ll ever know, you laying dead somewhere in the mountains. Now do you think that the man you married would want to spend the rest of his life with that on his mind? Do you think he’d let something happen to you that he could have prevented?”

  “My husband loves me,” I insisted. But I had to wonder just how much Jesse Ray loved me after the way he’d hemmed and hawed when Wade called him up. I wasn’t so sure anymore.

  Wade rotated his neck and brought his lips together with such a quick move, they snapped shut like a coin purse. With his eyes on my face—and with a look on his face so lifeless, you’d have thought that he was watching this year’s most boring movie—he slid his tongue out and moistened his lips before he spoke again. “Your husband loves you? Uh-huh,” he muttered, nodding. “And is that why you are trying to cheat him out of half a million dollars?” Wade laughed.

  CHAPTER 5

  “I don’t like it when people laugh at me, Wade.” I pushed his hands away and gave him the dirtiest look I could manage, but that didn’t even seem to faze him. He kept laughing. “I wish you’d stop that!” I snarled, pinching the side of his arm. The two pillows that had been on the mattress were now on the floor, too flat and flimsy to be of any use, anyhow, so it didn’t matter where they were. I propped my head up on my arm, with my cheek pressed against my elbow, breathing out of the side of my mouth. Wade had eaten the day-old sardines and oysters, but there was such a foul taste in my mouth, it seemed like I’d eaten some, too.

  “Then stop humoring me,” he said, looking serious now.

  “I signed a prenup,” I said in a low, hollow voice, holding back a belch of my own.

  “You did what?”

  One of the few things that I didn’t like about this man was that I often had to tell him the same thing more than once. I couldn’t remember how many times I had already told Wade that I’d signed a prenuptial agreement. But I told him again, anyway.

  “I signed a prenuptial agreement. If I divorce Jesse Ray, I get next to nothing. I’ve already told you that.” For some mysterious reason, I had a feeling that this would be the last time I’d have to tell him this. I gave Wade a pleading look. “I can’t stay on with him the way things are.” I cleared my throat, but it was still hard for me to continue speaking. “Jesse Ray has changed. His work, his family, they all come before me now. It wasn’t always like that,” I said hoarsely.

  “Christine, will you get mad if I say something I probably shouldn’t say?”

  “You are too late for that, so you can say whatever you want to say now,” I said firmly, giving him a guarded look. “I’m listening.”

  Wade took a deep breath and then let it out. He held his hands out toward me, palms up, like he was about to do something I’d like. He was one of the few men I knew who was good with his hands. But he didn’t use them to do anything erotic this time. He covered my hand with his. “Baby, I know that what I’m about to say is going to sound crazy coming from me, especially at this point in time. But if you couldn’t stand living with your husband no more, couldn’t you have just moved in with a girlfriend or back home with your mama or something? Faking something as risky as a kidnapping is pretty extreme.”

  I didn’t like the tone of Wade’s voice. He sounded too serious and more than a little frightened.

  I gave Wade an exasperated look and snatched my hand out of his. “If you don’t want to go through with this, you need to decide now,” I said sharply, panic rising in me like a kite on a windy day. “The more time we let pass, the harder it’s going to be for me to talk my way out of this if we back out.”

  “If this is what you really want, I’m still in, baby,” Wade told me. “As long as I’m getting paid, I’m going to stay in.”

  I shook my head. “I just want to get this over with as soon as possible, that’s all.”

  Wade’s cell phone rang. But with the room being such a mess, it was hard to tell where the phone was. After six rings, he located it on the floor, tangled up in a jockstrap under a mountain of dirty clothes. “Yeah,” he replied, holding up his hand in my face. “Cool. We are on our way.” He tossed the phone on top of the same mess and sucked in so much air, he had to cough.

  There was a familiar look on his face. Satisfaction was too mild a description. It was more like the look of rapture, because it was a haunting look. His face darkened, his eyes and lips trembled, and his nostrils flared. It was the same look that I always saw on his face right after his dick erupted in me like a volcano. “That was Jason,” Wade announced. The way his lips quivered I was surprised that he could even talk. But the words came tumbling out of his mouth like rocks down the side of a mountain. “My homeboy, he got us a motel room in his name down on San Pablo Avenue!”

  To reach the dresser, where he’d left his watch, Wade had to hop across the floor to avoid stepping on dirty plates. He was still naked, and it was a sight to watch his long, thick dick swing back and forth like a pendulum. “Go in my closet and pick out some of my shit to wear,” he ordered, waving me to the closet in the corner, by the door. He paused and looked around the room. “And don’t forget to put on that cap. Make sure to hide all your hair,” he told me, sliding his watch onto his wrist, muttering under his breath about how cheap the watch was and how he was going to get himself a Rolex with part of his ransom money.

  “Put on my sunglasses and one of my jackets,” he added. “A loose one so your titties won’t show. If we run into anybody I know, don’t you open your mouth unless you have to. If somebody tries to make you talk, act like you from Brazil or Nigeria or some other fucking foreign country and you don’t speak English. With the cap and them sunglasses, they might just think you just another dude. Or just some dowdy bitch that they don’t want to know, no way, no how.”

  Even though Wade was obviously impatient, I took my time getting dressed. He stuffed the two-hundred-dollar skirt and the ninety-dollar blouse that I’d worn to his house into a plastic grocery bag and took them out to the trash. By the time he returned, I had slid into a pair of his baggy, tacky jeans and a plaid flannel shirt with sleeves so long, I had to roll them up to my elbows. Both items still had the Goodwill price tags attached. It broke my heart to know that this was the best he could do. And, it also broke my heart to know that he was going to splurge on a Rolex when there were so many other things he needed. Like a decent wardrobe and a car. When I didn’t feel like driving us around in my Lexus and when his mama’s old jalopy wasn’t available, we traveled from one hotel to another in cabs and buses.

  I had the sunglasses in my hand, just staring at them. As the wife of a millionaire, it had been a long time since I’d worn something so cheap looking.

  “Woman, you better get a move on. Stop standing there looking at them shades like they’re something good to eat. We gotta get up out of here before my mama comes home!” Wade barked.

  My hands were shaking as I fumbled with the glasses. I dropped them twice before I got them to stay on my face. Wade slapped one of his baseball caps onto my head and pulled it down over my ears, hiding all of my hair. Just a few hours earlier, I’d spent over a hundred dollars on a press and curl at Thelma’s House of Beauty. If I had really thought everything through the way I should have, I would have brought a wig with me to hide my hair.

  But if I had thought everything through the way I should have, I wouldn’t
have concocted such a clumsy and desperate plan in the first place. And that was what a little voice had been trying to tell me. But my head was too hard for me to let that little voice penetrate my brain.

  “You all right?” Wade asked, with a forced smile.

  “I’m fine,” I said, adjusting the cap and the glasses. I was still nervous and apprehensive about my role in this crime. But since I was the mastermind and the one who was going to profit the most, I had no intentions of turning back now.

  “Aw shit!” Wade hollered, clapping his hands together like a seal. There was a wild-eyed look on his face.

  Everything on my body froze except my eyes and mouth. I looked at him, with my eyes stretched open as wide as they could go. “What’s wrong?” I asked, with a gasp, looking toward the door, then each window.

  “Them shoes!” Wade yelled, pointing at my three-hundred-dollar Italian sandals. Before I could respond, he shot out of the room like a ball of fire. A few minutes later he returned with a pair of limp, brown moccasins. “Put these on. Mama don’t wear these no more,” he said, tossing the tacky shoes onto the mattress.

  Without hesitation, I eased down on the mattress and kicked off my sandals. “Next time you go to Goodwill, take those shoes,” I said, with a sigh, nodding toward my sandals. “I spent three hundred dollars on these puppies, and I’ve only worn them twice.” Wade’s eyes got as big as teacups.

  “Goodwill my ass. I can get a pretty penny for these bad boys at one of them consignment shops. I just wish you had told me how much you spend on your shit before I threw that skirt and blouse you had on in the trash. Now I got to dig that shit out and get—”

  Then something hit me like a thunderbolt. “Wade, I just thought of something! You can’t donate any of my stuff to Goodwill, and you can’t sell it,” I gasped. “That’s a chance we can’t take.”

  “Who is going to find out and how?”