Never Trust a Stranger

by Mary Monroe

  “Uh-oh. What’s wrong with him?” Mama wanted to know. “Lola has never had much luck with men, and that’s why she’s still single. If this truck driver is serious about her, he must not have much going for him.” Mama stopped talking and frowned at her baby brother as he entered the kitchen, yawning. Uncle Billy was fifty, recently divorced, and between jobs. He’d moved in last month and had promised Mama and Elmo that he’d be on his own within six months. “Only God knows where the good men are hiding these days,” Mama added, still looking at my uncle. His wife had dumped him because he was lazy and couldn’t hold a job longer than a few months. He wasn’t the first relative to end up on our doorstep with a tale of woe. Mama and Elmo didn’t know how to say no when somebody in the family needed help. And, despite the fact that they thought so highly of Reed, I knew that if I wanted to come back home, they’d welcome me with open arms. But as long as Reed held me hostage with his suicide threats, I was not moving back home or anywhere else.

  Chapter 12

  Calvin

  I GOT UP SUNDAY MORNING AROUND NINE SO I COULD GO TO THE market and pick up a few groceries. I planned to spend the rest of the weekend kicking back and having a few drinks. Right after I took a quick shower and got dressed, I turned on my laptop and checked my e-mail messages. I was not surprised to see one from Lola. I rolled my eyes, let out a sigh of disgust, and read it.

  Hello Calvin. I hope you are having a good day. I just wanted to say hello and tell you again how much I enjoyed meeting you. I REALLY enjoyed your company! Lola . . .

  I had her pegged right. She sounded like a giddy schoolgirl who hadn’t been fucked in years. I was almost afraid to imagine what she’d be like between the sheets. As frisky as she was, she’d probably fuck me off the bed. The thought of me tumbling to the floor in the middle of an orgasm made me chuckle.

  I wanted to see her again and get a “relationship” going so I could pursue the mission I was determined to complete. The way she’d gazed at me and after hearing some of the corny shit she’d said when we were having coffee, I could tell she couldn’t wait to get me into bed. And I was looking forward to it. She had a luscious little body, and it would be a damn shame to kill her before I fucked her and let all that pussy go to waste. But since the mission I had arranged was so elaborate, I had to stick to my original plan and take my time getting to know her before the big day—Lola’s last day—arrived.

  Although the rest of my plan was set, I wasn’t sure how I was going to do the bitch in. I didn’t want to shoot her. That would be too quick. But I could picture the look of terror in her eyes if she saw the barrel of my Glock aimed at her face. No matter what method I used, I wanted her to suffer. I didn’t want to beat or stab her to death. That would be too messy. I had strangled all the others, but since Lola was so special, I wanted her to die in a unique way. Pushing her off a cliff after I’d beaten the dog shit out of her sounded like fun until I realized I’d have a hard time retrieving her body so I could stuff her into the freezer. If I did decide to strangle her, I’d make it as painful and slow as possible. With my hands around her throat and my eyes looking into hers as she gasped for breath, the process would be up close and personal. Picturing that excited me.

  I scratched my chin and pursed my lips. One thing was for sure: Somewhere along the way I’d let Lola know why she’d been chosen. So many murder victims die and never know why. I’d even show her a picture of Glinda. It was the least I could do, because under different circumstances I might have fallen in love with Lola and maybe even married her!

  I told myself that she had it coming. She had put herself in danger by being such a slut, hopping in and out of bed with Internet strangers. Was the woman insane too? Had I not taken on the role of executioner, some other Internet dude probably would have eventually killed her anyway. And she’d only have herself to blame for it. For one thing, nuts were everywhere, especially on social media. For all I knew, she could already be on another killer’s hit list! She would not be hard to find. Right next to her picture, her online profile on the club’s website listed her full name and her place of employment. She had posted the same information on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram! And if that wasn’t enough to make her a sitting duck, her name, telephone number, and home address were even listed in the damn telephone book! It was unlikely that another killer would do her in before I could do the deed, so I put that notion aside.

  Just as I was about to reply to Lola’s corny e-mail message, my cell phone vibrated in my pants pocket. I was not one to spend much time yakking on the telephone, especially on a Saturday morning. I was tempted to let the call go to voice mail, but I’m glad I didn’t. It was my uncle Ed calling from Chicago. He was my mother’s only living brother and the only family member who had not objected to my marrying Glinda, even though the institution of marriage brought up some painful memories for him. At the age of thirty-five Uncle Ed had married a young woman; she died suddenly in the third month of her first pregnancy. My uncle had always been a good-looking dude, so there had never been a shortage of women in his life. But he didn’t meet another one he cared enough about to marry until he was sixty-four, more than twenty years ago. She was in her fifties, had four grown children, and had already been married three times. Everything was going well until that bitch jilted him on their wedding day. He was so devastated, he never proposed to another woman. The day he saw the woman who had jilted him on the arm of another man, he quit his job, sold his house, and a week later he moved to Chicago.

  I was always very close to Uncle Ed. I called him up fairly often, and I wrote to him at least once a month. His letters to me were so sad and full of emotion, sometimes I cried while reading one. When I realized how lonesome he was, I begged my mother to let me go live with him for a while, and she reluctantly agreed to do so. I was seventeen at the time. As much as I loved my uncle, I missed California and the rest of my family, so I moved back to San Jose when I was twenty.

  I plopped down onto the side of my bed and quickly answered my phone. “Uncle Ed, my man! It’s so good to hear from you. I was going to call you in a day or so,” I exclaimed. My uncle was so old school, he made telephone calls only when he had to, so I knew he was not calling me up just to say hello. My chest tightened. Like most men his age who drank too much and ate everything he shouldn’t, he had a laundry list of health issues. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’ve had better days.” Uncle Ed paused and belched a few times. “Excuse me. I just had another pain in my bosom. If it ain’t my prostate condition sending me back and forth to the doctor, problems with my diabetes, or my arthritis, it’s something else.”

  “Oh? Things are that bad?”

  “Uh-huh. Well, this time it’s something else and it’s real serious, so I won’t waste your time or mine beating around the bush.”

  “Oh?” I said again as I held my breath.

  “Remember that pain my daddy had in his gut?”

  “Yeah,” I said in a low voice. My grandfather had died of stomach cancer twenty-five years ago.

  “I’m having that same pain in my gut. I swallowed some barley soup yesterday evening, and this morning it came back out of me from both ends.”

  “I see. Have you been to a doctor lately?”

  “Lately? Pffft! I been going to see a doctor almost every week since last year. And for what? Most of them quacks spend more time playing golf than healing folks! That jackass I used to go to told me I had gas. That’s what I believed for months even though all he did was give me a prescription. The more of them nasty-tasting horse pills I swallowed, the worse I felt. I finally went to a new doctor a couple of weeks ago. Three days after my first visit to his office, he took it upon hisself to call me at home at night to tell me the real deal: I got one of the most aggressive cases of stomach cancer he’s ever seen. Just hearing that, I got so weak and confused I got off the phone and took to my bed and cried like a baby. I had to get sloppy drunk just so I could get some sleep.

&
nbsp; “Then, as if Dr. Goldstein hadn’t already gone beyond the call of duty for me, the next morning he called and told me to come see him immediately. He was rescheduling somebody else’s appointment just so he could tend to me. I was too sick to get out the bed, so he sent his nurse to pick me up and bring me to his office. That’s when I seen the X-rays and whatnot. He sent me straight to the hospital that same day. Had I been going to Dr. Goldstein all along, I probably wouldn’t be in the mess I’m in now.”

  I responded with hesitation, practically whispering, “What mess is that?”

  “It don’t look like I’m going to be around long. Dr. Goldstein said that if I had come to him from the get-go instead of that play doctor I been going to for years, I’d have another few years to live. Instead, I might be around only a few more weeks now, months if I’m lucky. I wanted to see you again real soon in case my mind goes before the rest of my body.”

  “It’s that serious?” I croaked. A huge lump formed in my throat, and I could feel the bile wreaking havoc on my insides.

  “Uh-huh. I never did get along with your siblings or too many of the other idiots in our family. You always knew that. But you and me always had something special. I hope you can come see me right away. I would hate to leave without seeing you one more time.”

  “It’s that serious?” I asked again, my voice cracking this time.

  “Yup,” Uncle Ed chirped. I couldn’t understand why he was not in a more somber mood.

  “I . . . I am so sorry,” I fumbled. “Life has been so unfair to you.”

  “Sure enough. But if you think I’m still pissed off about that heifer leaving me at the altar, I ain’t. I had a lot of fun with other ladies. Shit. I had me some of the best nookie in the world. And I’ve had a real good and long life.” My uncle paused and released a mighty belch. “I’m sitting here right now guzzling my sixth beer in the last two hours. And before that, I gobbled up a box of Cracker Jacks, some hog head cheese, a baloney sandwich slathered in mayonnaise and mustard, and I done smoked three whole packs of Marlboros since last night—all the things I had stopped doing for my health. Well, a lot of good denying myself a few pleasures done for me!”

  I remained silent because I was trying to come up with something to say that didn’t sound patronizing or insincere. Before I could find the right words, Uncle Ed continued.

  “Calvin, I’m eighty-seven years old. I should have been dead a long time ago.” My uncle surprised me with a hearty laugh, and I was glad that he was still able to do so. I hoped that I would be as “jovial” when I got close to the end of the line. But at the moment, laughing was one thing I didn’t know when I’d be able to do again.

  “I . . . I’m glad you’re still alive and kicking,” I said.

  “Still alive, yeah. Kicking? I ain’t done that in a long time. Now listen to me, boy; I don’t have much, but I want you to have everything I leave behind. There’s twenty-two thousand bucks in my bank and a few stocks and bonds worth another eight thousand. Do something nice for yourself with it. Pay off your bills, treat yourself to a nice car, and if you have enough left over, take a real long vacation to one of them countries where the local pussy is real good and real cheap—say a place like Asia or one of them islands in the Caribbean. Don’t be a fool like I was and let the money sit in the bank for a rainy day. People don’t realize it, but every day is a “rainy day,” so they need to enjoy whatever they got while they still can. I took out an insurance policy years ago to cover my funeral and burial, but I don’t want none of that. I don’t want a bunch of hypocrites gazing at my dead body, saying shit they don’t mean. I done been to enough funerals to know that most people hate the whole procedure anyway. Cremation is what I want. I’m planning my “going-away party,” so to speak, and I want you to come help me get everything in order. I never ask you for anything, but this is the one thing I hope you can do for me.”

  “Uncle Ed, nothing in this world is going to keep me from coming to be with you. I’ll make my travel plans as soon as I get off the telephone. Other than me, who else knows you’re . . . ?”

  Uncle Ed cut me off. “Just Dr. Goldstein, my sweet nurse, a few of my neighbors, and that lawyer I hired to make out my will. Oh! And I told your bow-legged cousin, Catherine, just before she took off to go live in France with that Frenchman she met in college. I called her up day before yesterday. She wanted to come, but she’s about to have a baby any day, so I told her to stay put. Anyway, that’s all the family I want to know. Because I stood by you when you married that hoochie-coochie woman, the rest of the family treated me like shit, so to hell with them.”

  My uncle rambled on for twenty more minutes about all the good times he and I had shared. By the time we ended our conversation, I was crying so hard you would have thought that I was dying too.

  Chapter 13

  Calvin

  AFTER I COMPOSED MYSELF, I WENT ONLINE AND MADE MY TRAVEL arrangements.

  Then I dialed my boss’s cell phone number. Monty Sims was one of the coolest dudes I knew. Some of my coworkers, the Hispanics and other African Americans, called him a racist behind his back because he spent more time socializing with other white truckers. But Monty had always treated me with respect, and we got along just fine. I spent a weekend in his house last year when his daughter got married.

  Monty was very understanding when I informed him that I had to go out of town right away and the reason. “I promise I will work double time when I return.”

  “Cal, don’t you worry about a thing. Just go on to Chicago and do what you have to do,” Monty told me. “And take as much time off as you need.”

  After I hung up, I gave Sylvia a call and told her everything Uncle Ed had told me.

  “I wish I could go with you,” she sobbed. “I’m sorry I never got to meet your uncle. Let me know if you need me to do anything while you’re gone. With all the recent burglaries in your neighborhood, maybe it’d be a good idea for somebody to be on the premises at night. I can stay at your house and keep an eye on things for you, or I can get one of my brothers to do it.”

  “Oh, that won’t be necessary,” I said quickly. There was no way in the world I was going to have somebody roaming around in my house when I couldn’t be there to keep an eye on them. The possibility that they would get nosy enough to snoop around in my garage and come across the freezer with the three corpses sent a shiver up my spine. I recently decided that after I took care of Lola and put her in the freezer, I’d find a more permanent location for the makeshift casket. The strongest possibility was that I’d haul it down to the border and bribe some Mexican thugs to take it to the desert and either torch it or bury it. There were so many other bodies buried in the Mexican desert, a few more wouldn’t matter.

  “If you change your mind, just let me know,” Sylva told me between more sobs. She was the kind of woman who boo-hooed at the drop of a hat, so I could understand her being so upset about a man she’d never even met. “Do you want me to at least collect and hold your mail? And it’s not a good idea to let your newspapers pile up in front of your house. That’s a dead giveaway to burglars that a resident is not home.”

  “Don’t worry about any of that either. I can go online and have the post office hold my mail, and I’ll have the newspaper delivery temporarily stopped too.”

  “Calvin, I love you. I am so pleased and impressed to know that you care so much about people that you are not wasting any time going to be with your uncle. That Glinda woman you married, she didn’t know what a good man she had, did she?”

  “I guess she didn’t,” I said gruffly. “But I’m so much better off without her. And, as long as I have you in my corner, I’m happy. Now if you don’t mind, I need to get off this phone and start packing.”

  I didn’t realize it was raining like hell until I heard some thunder. I parted the drapes in my bedroom just in time to see the flash of lightning that followed. When I was a young boy I used to love nasty weather like this, especially if it happened
at night and I was in bed. The sound of rain on the window and roof was soothing to me. I hated bad weather now because it made my job dangerous and even more tedious. This unexpected break in my routine was going to do wonders for my morale.

  After I packed my suitcase, I sat down at the desk in the corner of my living room where I kept my desktop computer. I read Lola’s e-mail again and then I proceeded to check the rest of my messages, which included a bunch of outlandish ads and requests from other female club members who wanted to hook up with me. I was not a vain dude, but most of the women who browsed my profile on the Discreet Encounters website wanted to be with me. I accommodated as many as I could, but only if they were worthy of my attention.

  My newest admirers included a middle-aged blonde who lived in Baltimore, a buck-toothed redhead in the L.A. area who sounded like a washed-up Valley girl, and a female executive in Dallas. They all had top-notch, high-tech jobs and would be traveling to nearby Silicon Valley soon to attend meetings and other events. They all wanted to “have some fun” with me. I got turned off when non-black women went on and on about how curious they were about black men in the bedroom. I usually didn’t respond to the ones who broke it down like that. Tonight, all three of the women who had notified me were curious to see what it was like to fuck a black man. I sent replies to each one. I explained that I had a personal matter I needed to resolve, so I needed to take a rain check. Just as I expected, less than five minutes later the blonde in Baltimore fired off another message to me. She informed me that if she didn’t hear from me by the end of the month, I’d hear from her again.

  As much as I loved my dear uncle, his bad news could not have come at a better time. It was the perfect excuse for me not to have contacted Lola since our coffee shop date. Otherwise, I would have to have come up with a good lie to tell her that would explain my two weeks of silence. This way, I only had to tell part of a lie.