by Mary Monroe
“I don’t know, but I don’t want to take that chance,” I said, shaking my head. “Detectives are way too smart these days. My DNA is all over my shit.” I frowned as I eased my feet into the moccasins.
Wade gave me a thoughtful look; then he looked nervous again. It was ironic that two people who got as nervous as Wade and I did would even be involved in any type of crime together, especially a scheme as elaborate as kidnapping. “So you do think that your old man might go to the cops?”
“I didn’t say that,” I wailed, rising from the mattress. The moccasins were so flimsy and thin, my feet felt like they were bare.
“Then what the hell are you talking about detectives for? If you don’t think that your old man’s going to the cops, why would you be worried about detectives going to Goodwill and finding your shit?”
“I just don’t want to take that chance. I know enough to know that a lot of people have been destroyed because of DNA. Not only is my DNA on my clothes and shoes, but yours is, too. If, and I do mean if, something happens and the cops do get involved, how would we explain both our DNA on my clothes? It could be that one slipup that ruins everything. The ransom money will be more than enough,” I said.
Wade sighed and shrugged. Then he snatched another plastic grocery bag up off the floor and slid the sandals in it. I followed him outside to the backyard to make sure he put the shoes in the trash, where he’d already buried the rest of my things under a pile of filth in a can with two lids.
“Happy?” he asked, marching me back into the house, goosing my ass all the way.
“I just don’t want you to get greedy, Wade,” I said, turning to face him once we made it back to his bedroom.
“Greedy? Girl, I ain’t half as greedy as some of the folks I know,” he told me, with a strange look on his face. That gave me something else to worry about because I didn’t know what it meant.
CHAPTER 6
Like most of the houses in this neighborhood in the southern part of Berkeley, the house that Wade shared with his mama was on a corner, across the street from a liquor store. Winos and stray dogs patrolled the area more than the cops. The outside of the old house was pretty grim. It hadn’t been painted in so long, it was hard to tell the original color. The wraparound porch in the front of the house looked like it was slowly sinking into the ground. With another strong earthquake, it would. Cheap plastic curtains covered the windows downstairs.
But the motel that Wade took me to in his mama’s old car was even more depressing than the house we’d left behind. Fast-food containers, empty beer cans, whiskey bottles, used condoms, and women’s underwear practically covered the ground that surrounded the cheap motel.
Jason Mack, one of Wade’s many shady friends who would do anything for money, was in the room, sitting on the squeaky bed, with a large pizza box on his lap. There was a battered shopping bag on the bed, next to him. His run-down shoes sat on the floor, next to his long, sour-smelling bare feet. “So did you make the call?” he asked, looking at Wade.
Wade had added Jason to the mix without my knowledge or consent. I couldn’t do anything about that now. But just knowing that somebody other than Wade and me were in on this bogus kidnapping scam made me very nervous. Especially somebody like Jason Mack.
I didn’t like Jason, and he knew it. For one thing, I didn’t trust him. Who could trust, or like, a thirty-three-year-old unemployed man who bragged about the five children he had with five different women? He supported them all, which was a major surprise to me. But it was with money that he made as a burglar, and any other shady way he could come up with. He’d even done time for robbing the Bank of America where my husband stored his money. But that was just one of the many crimes that he’d done time for. With a prison record as long as a mop handle, it was no wonder I didn’t trust him.
Jason and I had associated with some of the same rough crowds back in the day, but we’d never been friends. We had both come a long way. At one time he’d been one of the best-looking black boys on the block, with his golden brown skin and thick, straight hair. His features were so delicate, a lot of people thought he was gay until he started getting women pregnant left and right. But his skin now looked like sandpaper, covered with scabs, scars, sores, and a mysterious walnut-size knot on his lower jaw. He had fewer than a dozen teeth left. All were at the bottom of his mouth, except for one.
“I made the call,” Wade said, looking around the room, with one hand on his hip. His other hand was rubbing his nose. “Man, this place is a dump!” he exclaimed, gazing at me with a tortured look on his face. I didn’t comment on the motel room, because it didn’t look any worse than Wade’s bedroom. As a matter of fact, it was cleaner and more organized than Wade’s room had ever been during my visits.
“What did you expect for what you wanted to pay?” Jason sneered, still ignoring me. “And, for a man about to come into a half million bucks, you don’t need to be so tight. Shit! After this Friday, we’ll be living like kings.” The thick, beautiful black hair that used to cover Jason’s head was a lot thinner now and had more strands of gray than black.
Wade gave me a quick glance. I didn’t know what all Wade had told Jason. I just assumed that we were all on the same page. Apparently, Jason didn’t know all of the facts, but he did know that half a million dollars were on the table, and that disturbed me. The fact that Wade had been stupid enough to reveal that information to an ex-con like Jason was just one more reason why I had to break off my relationship with him once and for all as soon as I could. Wade and I had gone over our plan at least half a dozen times. Wade was to get fifty thousand for his role. And out of that, he was supposed to break Jason off with ten thousand. The rest was mine.
Once Jesse Ray paid the ransom, I’d be “returned” to him unharmed. After a week or two, I’d still be “traumatized, frightened, and depressed,” so I would “leave” Jesse Ray and eventually divorce him. With my share of the ransom money, I could move away from Berkeley. Hawaii seemed like a good place for me to reinvent myself, and that’s what I had told Wade. But I had other plans. Plans that I didn’t plan on sharing with Wade or anybody else I knew.
I was not going to go anywhere near Hawaii, or any other place where I thought Wade would eventually come looking for me. I had never lived anywhere but California, and I didn’t want to give it up. I liked Sacramento, and nobody would think of looking for me there. But I still didn’t plan to take any chances. Once I made the move to Sacramento, I planned to change my hair and make a few other alterations to my appearance. By the time I got done with my makeover, my own mother wouldn’t recognize me. As far as Mama and Daddy were concerned, I planned to tell them the same story that I planned to tell Jesse Ray and everybody else: I was moving to Hawaii. I even had a story ready for the people who’d ask me how I could afford to move to Hawaii. And that story was that I’d borrowed the money from a friend. It would be a friend that didn’t exist, of course, so that was one more lie I didn’t have to worry about being exposed.
It saddened me to know that my life had come to this. I had not been happy for years, and my marriage had become a joke. But Jesse Ray wasn’t the only man I needed to remove from my life. My relationship with Wade was, and had been, a dead-end situation for years. As much as I hated to admit it, the sex was the main reason I was still involved with Wade. Yes, it was just that good. He could make me come just by rubbing the side of my arm.
Wade interrupted my thoughts by snapping his fingers in my face. “Take off that jacket,” he told me, removing the baseball cap from my head and tossing it to the floor. I took off the sunglasses myself. “Jason, get busy,” Wade hollered over his shoulder. “Do your thing, brother.”
I looked past Wade. Jason removed a grocery-store brown paper bag from the shopping bag on the bed and started walking toward me. I was surprised to see that he now walked with a limp. He ignored me and handed the bag to Wade.
“What’s all that?” I wanted to know. I was no angel and never had
been. But I did not make a good criminal. Not only was I too nervous for my own good, but I felt that my role as the “mastermind” had been compromised. It seemed like Wade was calling all the shots now. I was still pissed off with him for involving Jason in our plan. And, now it looked like he and Jason had cooked up another part to my scheme without my knowledge or consent.
“We have to make this look real good,” Wade said, talking out the side of his mouth. He removed several pieces of rope and a piece of black cloth from the bag. “Where is the camera?” he asked, turning to Jason. Without a word, Jason plucked a Polaroid camera from the shopping bag.
“What’s all this for?” I asked, looking from one item to another. “You’ve already called J.R., and he knows the deal. We don’t need to overdo anything,” I protested, holding up my hand.
“You got any black make-up or a black eyebrow pencil?” Wade asked me. “A black eye would add a nice touch.”
“No. Black eye, my ass. I don’t want to upset my husband that much. Taking his money will be bad enough. And you didn’t answer my question,” I snapped. “I want to know what all of this shit is for?” I asked, pointing at the items that Jason had just produced. “This wasn’t part of our plan. And if we, or you and your boy, start making up things as we go along, we are going to slip up and fuck up.”
“We just want to sweeten the pot,” Wade told me, wrapping one of the pieces of rope around my wrists. “We’ve come this far. We might as well go all the way,” he said, looking from me to Jason. Wade stripped me down to my underwear. And, for the first time, Jason smiled at me, his eyes stretched open wide as he stared from my crotch to my chest.
Jason snorted and gave me a thoughtful look. Like he didn’t know what to say next. But then he started talking like he didn’t want to stop. “Shit, shit, shit! The brother is right,” that snaggletoothed sucker said, grinning. “It might take more than a phone call to make this thing work. A few good pictures will sew this thing up tight as a virgin’s honeypot.” Jason snapped his lips shut as his eyes roamed up and down my body some more.
I sighed and tilted my head back for Jason to tie the blindfold around my eyes. Now at least I wouldn’t have to look at his leering face for a few minutes.
CHAPTER 7
All kinds of prostitutes, from elderly women to teenage boys, worked day and night, seven days a week, rain or shine, along San Pablo Avenue, a gritty street that ran from Oakland to Berkeley and way beyond. They did their business between parked cars, stretched out on the ground, with a homeless person as the lookout; in the backseats of their tricks’ cars; or backed up against walls in back alleys.
But the ones who really meant business did theirs in some of the cheap motels up and down San Pablo Avenue and some of the nearby streets. With rooms that they rented out by the hour, some of the motel owners had the nerve to offer cable TV. It had been a long time since I had been inside a motel as tacky as the one I was in now. If Jesse Ray hadn’t given me a job and fallen in love with me, I would probably be on my back in bed with some stranger in motels like this one on a regular basis by now. I had not been a bad youth, just confused and impulsive. Back then it seemed so cool to be like that. I had wanted people to like me so I’d eagerly become part of the wildest crowds. Not only had I fucked my brains out, I had done just about everything else, including drugs and thefts. It would have been easy for me to slide into prostitution. But by marrying me, J.R. had saved me from a life of despair. Well, almost. The attention and the respect that he had once given to me had made me feel better than I had in a long time. I had worked hard to reinvent myself and for a while it had worked. The housewives in my posh neighborhood had no idea how happy I was to be among them. It saddened me that it had come to this.
I had to rub my nose because there was a foul smell in the air, and it was so potent, I couldn’t tell where or what it was coming from. Last week they found a woman who’d been dead for three days under the bed in one of these motels. The bed that I was standing next to sagged in the middle, but I was not about to look up under it. When I sat down on it, with my hands tied and my eyes covered, I sank into what felt like a deep valley. I gritted my teeth as Jason snapped several Polaroids of me, which he was going to deliver to Jesse Ray after the second telephone call.
“That’s right. That’s right,” Wade said in a breathy voice, rubbing my leg as he squatted on the floor by the bed like a director. “Get one more of her face from the side. Baby, poke your lips out,” he ordered, pinching my thigh. “That shit looks real dramatic,” he said, clapping his hands.
“All right. This is as much as I can stand of this,” I snarled. “Take this shit off me.” I had already started wiggling the ropes from around my wrists.
I was disappointed when the blindfold came off because Jason was the one who had removed it. He stood there grinning, with that one tooth he had left at the top of his mouth hanging from his gums like an icicle. When he touched me, with hands that looked like paws, my flesh crawled.
Wade was standing over me, looking at the pictures I’d posed for. I refused to look at them as I snatched my clothes up off the floor and got dressed. I didn’t even have to look at Jason to know that he was enjoying every inch of my naked skin that he could see with his beady eyes.
It had been a long day, and it was going to be a long night. Around eight, Wade drove Jason back to wherever it was he lived these days. I didn’t want to know any more about that man than I needed to know. And I knew more than I wanted to know already. I was glad that he didn’t even know about my bogus plan to flee to Hawaii after we’d collected the money from Jesse Ray. I had warned Wade not to tell him. Especially now that the plan had been initiated.
I knew I would have trouble sleeping. For one thing, I had to wonder how Jesse Ray had explained my absence to his mama and the rest of his family. Since they all lived with us, and were so used to me being there to fix dinner for them and clean up behind their sorry asses, they would get nosy and impatient right off the bat.
After I watched television for a while, I glanced at my watch, surprised to see that it was a few minutes past nine o’clock. Adele, my bitch-on-wheels sister-in-law, sat around with rum and Coke and waited for me to braid her hair every night around nine. I knew that by now she was mad as hell. The fact that I had not been there to prepare dinner and bathe my invalid mother-in-law would have already set her off. These were just a few of the rituals that I’d endured every night for almost a year. That’s how long my sister-in-law and her family had been living with us. To them, that’s what “a little while, until we get back up on our feet” meant.
I pretended to be asleep when Wade returned to the motel room a couple of hours later, cursing as he tripped over the empty pizza box that Jason had left behind on the floor. He took a quick shower, then crawled into the weak bed with me, naked and rubbing on my butt with both hands and his throbbing dick.
Despite the fact that I had arranged my own kidnapping to get money from my husband so that I could start life over as a single woman, I still had feelings for Jesse Ray. My history with him had not been all bad, and no matter what happened and where I ended up, even if it meant jail, I’d always be grateful to Jesse Ray for all the good he had done for me.
I didn’t love Wade the way I had always wanted to. He was not the kind of man that I would marry and have babies with. He was more like a real-life fantasy. And, in the real world, no woman in her right mind married a fantasy. But he’d been my first love and my steady lover for the past several months. I cared enough about him for that. How could I not? The fact that he had been a “maintenance man” in a lot of other women’s lives (and probably still was) over the years didn’t bother me. He still made me feel special.
Especially when he agreed to help me commit a crime that could ruin us both for life if we got caught.
CHAPTER 8
As much as Wade turned me on, I still ignored him rubbing and patting my crotch. I had had enough sex for one day. He wouldn’
t let me off that easily, though. He slid my panties off and fucked me, anyway, all the while thinking I was asleep. For the next hour, he rode me like a mule before he slumped over to his side of the bed like a boneless corpse.
I had had some very long nights in my turbulent life, but this was the longest night that I’d ever had to get through. But the ruckus that the hookers made running in and out the rooms on both sides of us, and fussing, fighting, and fucking their tricks, would have been enough to keep me from getting to sleep, anyway. And, even though this was not a family-friendly motel, somebody outside had a baby and a dog that were crying and howling so much, I could barely tell one from the other. I couldn’t have slept if I had wanted to. I knew that I wouldn’t really sleep well again until after Jesse Ray had paid the ransom money for my return.
If he did.
I was still wide awake when Jason returned to the motel around ten the next morning. Grinning as usual, of course. I was annoyed and angry to see that Wade had given that punk a key to the room. I didn’t have a key. Not that I was going to be out taking a morning stroll or anything, but to me, it would have made more sense for me to have a key than Jason.
“I figured y’all would be hungry,” Jason said, stumbling into the room, holding a brown paper bag. “These bear claws is a day old and the coffee is kind of weak, but I went to the cheapest and closest place I could find.” He took out one of the bear claws and bit into it with that one tooth, his whole face twisting from left to right as he chewed. Then he set the bag down on the dresser, looking me up and down. I was still naked, thanks to Wade. But I had the covers pulled up to my chin, so it didn’t do Jason any good to roll his eyes up and down my body, hoping to see my crack through a crack in the covers.
“Thanks, man,” Wade said as he fished the two cups of coffee out of the bag. He took a quick sip, making gurgling sounds in his throat. “Baby, you need to eat something,” he said, handing me one of the bear claws, which looked like somebody had been playing with it. I shook my head. “Uh, listen, me and Jason, we decided to go call my man from a pay phone today, like you suggested.”
