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