bank!”
“I believe you, baby. And I’m just as frustrated as you are with that … that scalawagging cocksucker myself! Now I wish I had snatched up Mick Jagger’s half-black daughter. You know where she live?” Wade snorted and cussed some more under his breath. “Never mind. Knowing that uptown heifer, she won’t be that easy to grab, no how. We’ll just have to make this here thing with you work. You just might have to chat with your old man again. Sound real bad; cry; beg; do whatever.”
“If I have to, I will. I just hoped that we’d be able to get this over with as soon as possible with just a couple of phone calls,” I said, with a heavy sigh.
It was a good thing that this was not a real kidnapping. A real kidnapper would not have put up with the shit from Jesse Ray that Wade was putting up with. I would have been dead by now.
“Baby, I don’t know what he’s up to. That’s why I think you might have to put another bug in his ear,” Wade told me in a gruff voice.
“I just spoke to him yesterday. You told him he had until Friday to get the money to you.” I sniffed. If this plan failed, my life was over. I had run out of options. “I’m … uh, in a world of trouble. What is it going to take to get him to realize that?” I didn’t even try to hide the desperation in my voice.
“Calm down, baby,” Wade hollered. “You just hold on there and calm yourself down. We can’t afford to have you falling apart when we so close to the prize.”
“Look, I just want this to be over with so I can get up out of this dump,” I said, with a heavy sigh, looking around the gloomy room. “I’m nervous and … and I’m scared.”
“I can understand you being nervous, but you ain’t got nothing to be scared about. I got your back.”
“Then what do we do now?” I asked, rubbing my nose. “I … shit! Somebody’s at the door!” I whispered, gripping the telephone with both hands.
“Don’t you open that door!” Wade ordered, shouting so loud, it sounded like he was in the same room with me.
I held my breath and stood stock-still, covering my naked body with the thin bedspread.
“Housekeeping,” the person on the other side of the door yelled, jiggling the door handle.
“It’s just the maid,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. “Let me get rid of her.” I didn’t wait for Wade to respond. I laid the phone on the bed and put on the sunglasses and the cap. Then I cracked open the door and peered into the tired moon face of a woman who reminded me of my beloved late godmother. I had to blink back a tear that was threatening to slide out. My godmother had not been dead that long, but I got emotional every time I thought about her or saw somebody who resembled her. I smiled as I looked over the maid’s shoulder.
“Housekeeping,” the woman said again, nodding toward the room, trying to look over my shoulder. She could glimpse just enough of me to see that I was wrapped up in the bedspread. From the smirk on her face, something told me that she assumed I was one of the hookers.
“Um, I don’t need any service today,” I said quickly. She seemed relieved to hear that. “As a matter of fact, I won’t be needing any housekeeping services any other day, either. I’ll be checking out on Friday,” I said hopefully.
“No towels, toilet paper?” the maid asked, still trying to look over my shoulder.
“No,” I said, shaking my head and trying to shut the door. “I have enough toilet paper, towels, and everything else. I brought my own soap, so you don’t even have to worry about that, either.” The maid had a puzzled look on her face as I shut and locked the door, securing it with the dead bolt and the chain. I stood with my back against the door until I heard her knock on the door of the room next to mine.
“I’m back,” I said, picking up the phone. “I got rid of her.”
“Don’t you open that door no more,” Wade hollered.
“It was just the maid,” I hollered back. “If I hadn’t opened the door, she would have entered the room. What was I supposed to do? I got rid of her for the rest of the week.”
“Just don’t open that door no more. Do you hear me? I ain’t going to jail for you or nobody else.”
CHAPTER 12
Jail was the last place I wanted to be. I tried not to even think along those lines. And, it made me angry when Wade brought it up.
“Can we get down to business? I’m naked and smelling like hell, and I want to take a shower. Now what is the deal with Jesse Ray?” I barked. I wanted to make sure that Wade knew I was angry and impatient.
“I told him I’d call him again so I could prove that you are still alive. In the meantime, Jason’s going to make sure he sees them pictures we took first.”
I didn’t like to think about the pictures I’d posed for. I had been hoping that we would not have to show them to my husband. As strange as it seemed, even to me, I wanted to make this monkey business as painless as possible for Jesse Ray. But I knew it was going to hurt him like hell to part with half a million dollars. That part couldn’t be helped. Besides, I was in a lot of pain myself and had been for a long time. And, the money from Jesse Ray was the only thing I knew of that could ease my pain.
And, speaking of pictures, yesterday was not the only time that I’d posed for pictures for Wade. One night a few months ago, in a room at the Marriott—paid for with one of my credit cards at that—I’d allowed Wade to take some Polaroids of me. Not a few head shots of me grinning into the camera like a drunken fool, but shots that were so sexually explicit that I could only stand to look at them that one time. Even though I looked much younger in each picture, and in a couple, I didn’t even look like myself.
That same night Wade made a video of us making love. I had protested and tried to get out of doing that, too, but after he’d plied me with about a gallon of wine, I became putty in his hands. He’d whined and pouted so much about needing something to help him “get through the days and nights” that I couldn’t be with him that I’d agreed to do it just to shut him up. Since he had promised me that it would be a one-time thing, and that the video would not end up on the Internet, I’d put on the performance of a lifetime.
I didn’t like what I’d done, and the next time I saw Wade, I made him give me the pictures and the tape. As soon as I got home that day, I fed the pictures into my shredder, and I ripped the video apart, disposing of the pieces in four different Dumpsters in Oakland.
When, and if, we got the money from Jesse Ray and I made it to Sacramento to start my new life, one thing that I was sure I’d never do again was let somebody photograph me, naked or any other way. The world had become too small, so I didn’t want any new pictures of me floating around that might end up in the hands of somebody who knew me. My break from Jesse Ray had to be complete in every way.
“How?” I asked Wade.
“How what?”
“How is Jason going to show my husband those pictures? He can’t go up to him in person! And, if he mails them, it could take a day or two before Jesse Ray receives them. Who knows who else might see them first.” I rose from the bed, rubbing my stomach with one hand and clutching the telephone in my other hand so hard, my fingers tingled. “And what if they find Jason’s and your fingerprints on those pictures? With all this DNA shit going on these days, a serious criminal doesn’t have a chance anymore. All they need is a drop of sweat, a strand of hair so tiny that a naked eye can’t see it, or a piece of lint off—”
“Listen up! DNA, BNA, triple A, or any other kind of A. Fuck it all. Look, baby.” Wade paused and let out a deep breath. “In the first place, I got enough sense to wipe them pictures off real good before we do anything with them. In the second place, I doubt very seriously that our boy is going to call the cops. Fingerprints is the last thing we need to worry about. We need to focus on getting that