Deliver Me From Evil. Mary Monroe

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СКАЧАТЬ gasped myself because I knew Jesse Ray was lying! We had over two million dollars in the bank. Or I should say, Jesse Ray had over two million dollars in the bank. And that was just the money that I knew about. For a man who worshipped money the way he did, there was no doubt in my mind that he had another fortune stashed away somewhere. For one thing, he had made more than one mysterious trip to the Cayman Islands in the last couple of years. I knew that a lot of Americans hid money from Uncle Sam in island banks.

      But I honestly didn’t know what my husband was worth. In addition to the money that the video stores brought in, he had invested wisely over the years. He owned an apartment building in San Francisco, and he had made a lot of wise investments in the stock market over the years. These were just the things that I knew about. I was surprised and hurt that Jesse Ray would deny his wealth, knowing now that I was in such an ominous position.

      “Well, if you ain’t got it, you better get it. If you want to see your wife again. And just to show you I ain’t all bad, I will give you till Friday to get me my money. Today is Monday, so you got enough time to do your thing. I will check in with you on … say, tomorrow morning, this same time, this same number. Don’t you do nothing stupid, like call the cops. Or tell that big-mouthed sister of yours. What’s her name? Yeah, Adele. She got a couple of cute kids, so we just might snatch one of them next if we have to.”

      “Don’t you go near my family!” Jesse Ray shouted.

      “Then you better do what I say,” Wade warned, snorting like a bull. “Don’t get your phone tapped, and don’t have nobody up in that damn shop with you when I call you tomorrow. You can afford to close up shop for an hour or two. You understand me, motherfucker?”

      The silence on Jesse Ray’s end was disturbing. It was so complete, it seemed like he had left the telephone. I held my breath until he responded, which was a few more seconds later.

      “I … I understand,” Jesse Ray stammered.

      “Like I said, if you call the cops, your bitch is dead. And … so is your mama. Bye.” Wade unplugged the telephone and looked at his watch. “I can’t believe it took all this time to get that stingy motherfucker you married to take me serious. I don’t know what this world is coming to!” Wade said, with an incredulous look on his face. “You sure know how to pick ’em!”

      “You didn’t have to say that about his mama,” I said, folding my arms. “Miss Rosetta is the sweetest woman I know. You didn’t even have to drag her into this mess. You got me, and that ought to be enough,” I insisted.

      “Baby, I want this thing to work, don’t you? If we want to make sure it works, we got to use every trick in the book.”

      “I hope it does work,” I admitted. I moved the telephone from the wobbly chair, and then I flopped down into it. “I don’t know what else to do.”

      “Look, there ain’t nothing else for us to do! If he don’t pay, you can’t go back to him and pick up where you left off. You’d be a fool to go back to that stingy punk. Bottom line is, he’d better come through. You and me both are fucked in the asshole if he don’t.”

      “But what if he doesn’t?” I asked, wringing my hands, rotating my wedding ring.

      “Then we go to Plan B,” Wade said, with a heavy sigh. “I go on back to L.A., and you go with me, if you want to. Somehow we’ll make it,” he said, with a shrug and a tired look. “Being broke ain’t the worst thing in the world.”

      “Oh,” I muttered, looking around the cluttered room. “Wade, do you really love me? Do you love me enough to take me back to L.A. with you and take care of me?”

      The tired look immediately disappeared from his face, and he replaced it with a smile, his tongue licking his lips. It was hard to believe that he was the same man who had looked and sounded so mean and angry a few moments ago. “Why don’t we trot back upstairs to my bedroom and let me show you.”

      CHAPTER 4

      Unlike the neat living room in Wade Eddie Fisher’s mama’s house, where Wade had just called my husband from, his bedroom was a mess. From the room’s condition and smell, nobody would have believed that Wade was a mature man of thirty-three, and not some musty teenager who expected his mama to clean up behind his lazy ass.

      All four of the walls and the low ceiling in the room were covered with posters of half-naked video vixens and various entertainers. Some I’d never even heard of. Like Eddie Fisher, the singer that Wade’s mama had named him after. Madonna stared from a dog-eared album cover that had been tacked to the back of the only chair in the room.

      Empty beer bottles and Pepsi cans were everywhere I looked, even on the windowsills. One window had a dingy pillowcase tacked across it. The other windows had curtains so thin, you could see through them. Clothes, jockstraps, and smelly socks were strewn all over the floor. Empty fast-food containers littered the top of his scarred, wobbly dresser. The bed, which was just a mattress in the middle of the floor, was unmade. Plates and saucers with half-eaten sandwiches sat on the windowsill.

      Pork-chop bones, cookie crumbs, a fuzzy white ball that had once been an orange, and an apple core with a swarm of gnats rolled to the floor as soon as we flopped down onto the mattress. The only thing in the room that was remotely organized was a bookcase in a corner. All four shelves contained shabby paperback copies of urban fiction books with covers just as lurid as the posters of the video vixens on the walls.

      “What time did you say your mama was coming back?” I asked, looking at my watch as I wiggled out of my panties and kicked off my shoes. Everything else except my blouse and bra were already on the floor. Wade had already slid off his jeans and wife-beater T-shirt. He looked downright comical standing in front of me, wearing nothing but a smile and his battered running shoes with mismatched shoelaces. I looked away. I didn’t want to laugh, because I felt so sorry for him.

      Life had not been kind to this man. He hadn’t worked in three months and had lost his last job as a busboy in a Greek restaurant to his boss’s teenage nephew. He was a failure everywhere except in the bedroom. But despite his good looks and a long, thick dick that looked like a sword when he got a hard-on, none of his dreams and hard work had paid off. Some of the women he’d counted on over the years had eventually moved on.

      I didn’t like it when Wade told me that he’d be with me even if I didn’t have a rich husband, whose money had financed some of the best times that Wade and I had shared. I knew that that was a barefaced lie! Things would have been a lot different had I been as broke as Wade. He probably would not have been with me in the first place. It bothered me, and made me sad, when I thought about Wade’s economic status. But I had to think about it, whether I wanted to or not. I was one of the few friends he had left that he could count on. And he was one of the few friends I had that I could count on. Therefore, we needed each other. For different reasons, of course. No matter how people interpreted life, when you looked at it closely enough, two of the most important things in life were good sex and big money.

      With a grunt, Wade kicked off his shoes, stumbling so hard, he fell to the floor. But he was as agile as a panther, so he was back up on his feet in no time, his eyes on my moist and hairless crotch. He shaved me himself on a regular basis, telling me that it was the only way for a man to get “pure pussy.” I had had some concerns about how I was going to explain that to my husband the first time Wade shaved me. But the next time Jesse Ray slowed down from his busy schedule to make love to me after my first shaving, he hadn’t even noticed anything different. All he’d said was the same thing he always said after we made love, “Mmmm, baby, that was good.”

      Wade СКАЧАТЬ