Man Enough For Me

by Rhonda Bowen

  “Fellas, relax. This is my girl, Renee,” Germaine said calmly, the lie slipping easily off his lips. “She ain’t nobody.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Jules saw Number One turn to look at Number Two, while keeping his grip on Jules’s arm, which was burning from where he held it in a vice. She was beginning to lose feeling in her fingers.

  Number Two said nothing but kept his eyes glued to Germaine, as if trying to figure out if he was lying.

  “I said you ain’t gotta worry about her,” Germaine repeated testily. His eyes had hardened, and he was looking purposefully at Number Two.

  After what seemed like forever, Number Two broke into a wide smile.

  “Why didn’t you just say so, man.”

  He nodded at Number One, who in turn released his grip on Jules’s arm. Jules felt all sorts of relief flood through her as she stumbled over to Germaine.

  “Baby, haven’t I told you to call before you come see me,” Germaine said, casually slipping an arm possessively around Jules’s waist and pulling her close to him. If someone had told her yesterday that Germaine’s side would feel like the safest place on earth, she would have laughed them to scorn. What a difference a day makes.

  With his guests still watching in thinly disguised suspicion, Germaine placed a lingering kiss on her temple.

  “Be easy,” he murmured against her skin, in a voice only she could hear. She nodded slightly against his shoulder and avoided looking at the others in the room.

  “I’m not trying to be up in your business,” Number Two said, nodding toward Jules. “But I don’t like strangers crashing my party, you feel me?”

  “I got you,” Germaine assured them, without the slightest trace of unease. “Have I ever done you wrong?”

  “Nah,” Number Two said, chuckling. “You sure haven’t.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Jules glimpsed something shiny and metal sticking out of the waist of Number Two. Her body began to shake involuntarily, and she felt Germaine’s grip tighten around her waist. Her chest was so tight she could barely breathe.

  “Good,” Germaine said. “We cool then?”

  “Yeah,” Number Two said with a slight nod, as he slipped on his shades. “We’ll be in touch.”

  Number One leered at Jules, a slow, greasy smile sliding across his face.

  Jules shuddered as she watched him and his boss leave the office. As soon as the door closed, she felt Germaine’s body tense, and his arm drop from around her. Her body was still trembling, and she felt weak all over.

  “You okay?” Germaine asked quietly. Jules shook her head violently.

  She heard him sigh heavily, before helping her into the chair by his desk. Moments later he was on the phone talking to someone, his voice so low, Jules could barely hear bits of what he was saying. Even if she could have heard more, she was too dazed from what had just happened to focus on anything.

  She heard keys jingling and the desk drawer opening, and looked up just in time to see Germaine pull a small gray handgun from a locked metal box in his bottom drawer. Jules’s eyes grew wide, and she stumbled as she tried to rise out of the chair in an effort to get away from him.

  “Hey, easy,” Germaine said, shoving the gun into the back of his waistband under his shirt, and stretching out a hand as a sign for her to calm down. Jules watched him watch her carefully, as if she was a skittish animal.

  With his eyes never leaving her, he moved quickly back to the phone.

  “Tina, I’m gonna be out for a while. Keep an eye on things till I get back, okay?”

  Seconds later he was pulling Jules out of the office, down the passageway, and to his car outside the back entrance.

  “No,” Jules said, trying to resist his efforts to get her into the car. She pushed at him hard and tried to pull her arm out of his grasp. Even though he was taller and much stronger, she still struggled for freedom. She wanted to get away from this place, from him, as fast as she could.

  “Jules, get in the car,” Germaine said firmly.

  “No!”

  “Jules,” Germaine said, grabbing both her shoulders and forcing her to look into his eyes.

  She stopped struggling, and for some reason unknown to her, got into the car.

  As the car sped east on the highway, Jules curled herself into the corner, as far away from Germaine as she could get without falling through the window.

  A few minutes later Germaine pulled up in front of Jules’s building and parked.

  As soon as she stepped inside he locked all three locks on her front door. Then he turned to Jules, and all the restraint he had held thus far seemed to evaporate.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” he asked, his eyes shooting fire at her.

  Jules stepped back, floored by his intensity, and felt her calves hit the sofa. Involuntarily, she sat hard into the cushions, her wide eyes still glued to him.

  “What were you doing eavesdropping outside my office? Trying to get yourself killed? Do you know what those guys could do to you?”

  He rubbed his hand nervously across his face and began to pace the room. Jules caught a glance at the bulge in the back of his waist and suddenly remembered what was there.

  “So I was right all along,” she said hoarsely as she found her voice. “You were working with those drug dealers.”

  “Yes.”

  He had stopped pacing and was standing in front of her.

  “So you lied to me.”

  This time he didn’t answer. But Jules could see his jaw tense as her statement hung in the air.

  “Why, Germaine?” she asked in confusion. “Why would you do something like this?”

  He rubbed his hands over his face tiredly.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “So un-complicate it for me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Try.”

  Germaine sat down in the seat across from Jules and rubbed his hand over his face again. He was tired. She could see it. The exhaustion was oozing out of him. How had she not noticed this before? He was always tired, even when he had been with her. Maybe the burden of lying to everyone around him had taken its toll on him. Jules wondered if he even knew who he was anymore.

  He opened his mouth to say something, but his cell phone rang. He looked at the screen briefly before stepping into the kitchen to answer it. Jules strained to hear what he was saying but dared not move from the couch. She would rather not be caught eavesdropping again.

  Moments later he reappeared. He looked less agitated than before, but still wasn’t completely at ease.

  “What’s going on, Germaine?” she asked before he could say another word.

  “Jules, I can’t—”

  “Fine. Then I’m calling the police,” Jules said, whipping out her own cell phone from her back pocket. She wouldn’t really do it. But he couldn’t know that, and she was hoping her bluff would work.

  “Jules, don’t,” Germaine said nervously as he watched her. She ignored him and began depressing numbers on the keypad.

  “Jules …”

  She placed the phone to her ear.

  “Jules!”

  Grabbing the phone from her, Germaine snapped it shut.

  Jules folded her arms across her chest defiantly and stared at him expectantly. Seeing that he was beaten, Germaine sighed heavily.

  “Okay,” he said tiredly, sinking into the armchair across from her and resting his elbows on his knees.

  He took another deep breath and then began. “You were right. I am working with those guys,” he admitted. “But I am not a drug dealer,” he added quickly.

  “Then why—”

  Germaine put up a hand to stop her.

  “All I do is let them ship their stuff from Montreal to Toronto with my supplies.”

  Jules looked at him in confusion. “I don’t understand.”

  “All the music for the store gets shipped from the US through Montreal. They ship their drugs with my packages ‘cause we almost
never get searched. In any case, they have someone at that end who will look the other way. When it gets here, they pick it up, and pay me for the service.”

  “How often is that?”

  “Every week.”

  “For how long?”

  “Since I bought the store.”

  Jules sat back hard.

  “How … how did this happen?”

  “It just did,” Germaine said, grimacing.

  Jules opened and closed her mouth several times. She didn’t know what to say. She had known all along that he was involved with this thing in some way, but hearing him admit the whole truth made it so much more real.

  As she watched him struggle with himself, she didn’t know whether to despise him or feel sorry for him. Maybe she was feeling a little bit of both.

  “Don’t you think of all the people who are getting hurt because of what you are doing?” Jules asked. “How can you do this?”

  Jules saw the guilt wash over him. Without his even saying a word, she knew he had thought about it many times.

  “You have to stop this, Germaine.”

  “I know. I will.”

  “When? You’ve had the store for almost a year!”

  He shook his head

  “It’s not that easy, Jules. I just need … time.”

  “Time? Time for what?” Jules asked angrily. “Time for more people to get hooked? Time to get caught or have drug dealers shoot up the store? Time to get Truuth or someone else you care about killed? Will it be time enough then?”

  “Jules, it’s not like that,” Germaine said, looking up at her for the first time.

  Something about the look in his eyes seemed to sedate Jules’s anger for a moment. He really was tortured and remorseful about what he was doing. But obviously not remorseful enough, because he kept letting it happen.

  Jules shook her head and stared at him for a moment longer.

  “You are so not who I thought you were,” she said quietly.

  “You’re wrong. I am,” he said, moving to kneel in front of her. “You know me, Jules. The real me. This … thing … this is not who I am. You know that.”

  Jules shook her head and scooted away from him. She didn’t even want him touching her. “The man I thought I knew would never do anything like this,” she said quietly. “The man I knew cared about the lives of others. He had principles. He had God.”

  “I am that person, Jules,” Germaine said honestly. “I just got into some bad stuff for a while.”

  He turned her cell phone over and over in his hands for a quiet moment.

  “Things aren’t always what they seem, Jules.”

  He sighed, and handed the phone back to her. “I have to go.”

  “Where?”

  “Back to work.”

  He got up and began walking toward the door, then suddenly stopped and turned back toward her.

  “Jules, you can’t tell anyone about this,” Germaine said seriously. “I mean no one.”

  “No,” Jules said, shaking her head. “I can’t lie to my friends. I didn’t say anything before because I wasn’t sure. But now …’ Germaine sighed. “Jules, I told you. It will be over soon.”

  Jules shook her head. “If something happened to Truuth, or Maxine …”

  Or you.

  “I couldn’t live with myself.”

  Germaine rubbed his hand over his jaw and paced the living room for a moment.

  “All right,” he said after a moment. “Give me a couple weeks.”

  “What?”

  “Two weeks to clear this up,” Germaine said, sighing. “By then it will be over.”

  Jules narrowed her eyes at him.

  “How are you gonna do that?”

  “I just will.”

  “In two weeks?”

  “Yes,” Germaine affirmed. “I promise you it will all be over by then.”

  Jules cocked her head to the side and peered at him to see if he was bluffing. But he was dead serious.

  “Why should I believe you?” Jules asked. “How do I know you won’t bounce before then?”

  “Where would I go?” Germaine asked. “Everything important to me is right here.”

  Jules felt her face flush.

  “I don’t know, Germaine.”

  “Before, back at the store, when I told you to get in the car, you trusted me. Why?”

  Jules shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Germaine looked at her knowingly. “Yes, you do. All I need is a week and a half, Jules, two weeks max. Promise me you won’t say anything until then.”

  Jules watched him watch her. There was that feeling again, that inexplicable feeling that she should trust him, even though it didn’t make sense.

  “Promise, Jules.”

  A lot could happen in two weeks.

  “Jules …”

  “Okay,” she said finally.

  He gave her one last look before slipping through her front door.

  “Two weeks.”

  Chapter 15

  “I got here as fast as I could. What’s going on?”

  It was near four o’clock in the morning, and Jules was following her boss into the elevator, and down to the ground floor of Toronto Grace. After her talk with Germaine, Jules had barely been able to fall asleep. Somewhere around midnight she had managed to catch a break. However, less than three hours later Penny had called saying there had been some kind of emergency that required Jules to be at the hospital immediately. Jules’s stomach tightened nervously as she wondered what exactly the crisis was.

  “There was an incident in the ER,” Penny said. From the tension in Penny’s voice, and the way she said the word “incident” Jules knew that something major had happened.

  “I’m not sure of the details, but we’re meeting with the head nurse on duty, and she should be able to fill us in.”

  Moments later Jules and Penny were crowded into a small windowless meeting room on the hospital’s ground floor with the head of emergency, the chief of medical staff, the chief nursing executive, and a nurse Jules wasn’t familiar with.

  “Thank you, everyone, for getting here so fast,” Penny said. “The president is on his way, but we need to get started because already the media is lining up at the hospital entrance. Susan, you want to tell us what happened?” Penny asked, directing her question toward the unfamiliar nurse.

  The middle-aged nurse glanced around nervously at the several pairs of eyes watching her, and began to fiddle with the edges of her uniform.

  “A man came into the ER a little bit after 2 a.m with stab wounds to his abdomen,” she began. “We were just dealing with a gunshot wound, so we put him aside to wait, while one of the orderlies got a gurney for him.”

  She sighed heavily before she continued, and Jules could tell that she was still shaken up from whatever had happened.

  “Before the gurney came, another man came into the ER and started waving a knife and attacked the first guy. Everyone went into a panic. I never saw what happened. All I know is the first guy ended up using one of the nurses as a shield against his attacker, and she was stabbed.”

  “Oh, Lord,” murmured Dr. Carlos Grant, the chief of staff.

  “That’s not all,” said Susan. “One of the male orderlies eventually tackled the man with the knife and managed to get it away from him, but he got stabbed in the arm in the process. The attacker ran out of the ER after that. We don’t know where he went.”

  “What about the patient with the knife wound?”

  “He lost a lot of blood on the ER floor. We were going to prep him for surgery, but we ran tests and found high levels of cocaine in his blood and urine, and traces in his hair.”

  “So he was a user.”

  Jules’s heart began to beat faster.

  “Yeah. And he had too much cocaine in his system for us to operate.”

  Jules felt a cold chill run through her, and she had to force herself to focus.

  “Were any other patients hurt?” />
  “No, but they were very shaken up,” Susan said, visibly upset. “So were the nurses.”

  “I knew this would happen,” said Kerry White, the chief nursing executive. “There’s not enough security in that ER. And we’ve said it over and over. I guess somebody has to almost die before something happens.”

  “I understand, Kerry, but you know the hospital can’t afford the extra security,” said Dr. Grant.

  “That’s not good enough,” said Dr. Wang. “Our emergency staff is at serious risk, especially at this time of morning.”

  Dr. David Wang took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. For the past four years he had been head of Emergency, and Jules had never seen him angry. But this time he was really upset, and he was well within his right.

  Slowly but surely all sense of order began to break down, as the three hospital executives in the room began to talk over each other. Jules looked over at Penny, who looked about as helpless as Jules felt.

  “Penny, do something,” Jules hissed in her boss’s ear. “If you don’t calm this down, things are going to get real ugly, real fast.”

  She nodded. “You’re right.”

  Penny clapped her hands loudly. “Okay, everyone, you all have some valid points. But now is not the time to argue them. Right now, we need to make sure that our staff and patients are okay, and that means stemming the panic and getting things back in order as soon as possible.”

  When everyone seemed to agree, Penny continued. “David and Kerry, can you talk to the nurses and emergency staff and try to get things back on pace? If we look like we have things under control, it will put the patients at ease and make all our jobs a lot easier.”

  “What am I supposed to tell them?” David Wang asked. “How can I send them back to the same unsafe environment and tell them to be calm when nothing has changed?”

  “You can tell them that both you and Kerry will be meeting with the hospital executive team tomorrow, including the president, to try to come to some kind of agreement about what needs to be done.”

  Seemingly pacified by that response, both David and Kerry moved toward the exit.

  “Ask them not to talk to the media,” Jules whispered to Penny.

  “And can you ask your staff not to give any comment to the media, but to direct all inquires to Public Relations?”