Deliver Me From Evil (3 page)

U
nlike 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 exhaled and gave me a guarded look. “You ain't got to worry about my mama. You need to stay focused on this … uh … thing we started,” he replied, stretching his naked body out on the mattress, lying on his back. “Come on over here,” he ordered, with a grin. “And get that worried look off your face. I got everything under control.”

“We don't know that for sure, Wade,” I insisted, flopping down next to him on the mattress. “What if J.R. calls the cops? What if he doesn't pay the ransom? I won't be able to go back home,” I wailed. It was hard for me to talk because Wade was covering my face and mouth with hot, hungry little kisses. His tongue slid across my lips like a paintbrush. At the same time, he was pulling off the rest of my clothes. He didn't speak again until I was just as naked as he was.

“You ain't going back to him one way or the other, anyway. When we get our hands on that money, you take yours and split. Get you a place in Hawaii like you've been dreaming about. Me, I go on back to L.A. and resume my career. If we
don't
get the money, I go on back to L.A., anyway, and you come with me. We've talked about this umpteen times. It's way too late for you to be getting cold feet.” Wade was squeezing my breasts so hard, it hurt. He frowned when I pushed his hands away. “What's your problem, woman? We've done this a million times.”

“Wade, what if J.R. calls the cops and has them trace the call you just made? Shit! This thing is falling apart before it even gets started,” I exclaimed, sitting up.

“Woman, it ain't that easy to trace a call. And, even if they did, I could say I'd called his number to check on some videos I wanted to rent. You told me yourself that the phone in the store rings off the hook all day long. Remember how long the line was busy before we finally got through?”

I nodded, lying back down, one hand reaching for Wade's dick. He parted his thighs, with a smile and a wink, looking sexier than ever.

“From what you done told me about the brother, he ain't a stupid man,” Wade added. “Even though he looks like one. He wore them boxy, horn-rimmed glasses when we were in school, and he looked like the geek from hell. All the other kids used to call him Clark Kent behind his back.”

Clark Kent.
I laughed to myself. Clark Kent was a clumsy, timid geek, but he was also Superman in disguise. I had been lucky to end up with a black Clark Kent. Wade was a sexy beast by every standard, and women, especially lovesick women like me, let him know that. However, some would have argued that my husband had Wade beat by a country mile. Any woman with a practical mind would never have chosen Wade over Jesse Ray. Wade represented a good time, and that was all. Jesse Ray had so much more to offer, especially security. And, to a lot of women, that would have been enough. And, it had been for me for a while.

Wade went on. “Didn't you hear how scared he sounded? I'd be willing to bet my share of the money that he ain't going to call no cops. Shit. You didn't marry no fool, after all.”

“Well, from now on, we call him from a pay phone,” I insisted.

Wade nodded and smiled as he climbed on top of me. “You are the one paying the cost to be the boss, so whatever you say is fine with me. As long as I get paid, I ain't complaining.”

Wade's body was magnificent. Even though he drank everything but shoe polish and lived on junk food, he was all muscle. Just the thought of making love with him was enough to get me off. And thinking about Wade was the only way I could get off when my husband made love to me lately. It had not always been that way.

Sex with my husband was good during the first few years of our relationship. But that was because Jesse Ray had done his best to impress me. Once we got comfortable, he made love to me on the run, often glancing at the clock on our bedside stand and slurping on my titties at the same time. He flipped and flopped around on top of me, sweating and squealing like a banshee, his long, thin body propped up on his bony arms like a brown grasshopper.

Compared to Wade, my husband seemed like a mute in bed. Wade was the noisiest lover I'd ever been with. The way he carried on when he was having sex, you would have thought that somebody was killing him, or at least beating the dog shit out of him. Even though we were the only ones in the big, shabby house in South Berkeley that his mama rented, I covered his big mouth with my hand to keep his mama's neighbors from hearing things they didn't need to hear. It was bad enough that every time Wade brought me to the house, the neighbors on both sides peeped out of their windows.

He was rough, too. He flopped up and down on me like he was riding a bull. The reason the mattress was on the floor now was because we'd finally broken the slats on the cheap bed frame that he'd been sleeping on since he was in junior high.

I removed my hand as soon as he came and rolled off of me, panting, wheezing, and moaning like some creature caught in a trap. He was breathing so hard that the hot air streaming out of his mouth irritated my eyes. The sweat that had dripped from his body had saturated the thin sheet, which had almost slid off the mattress.

“Oh, baby, that was the best yet. Seems like the older you get, the better you get. Ain't a young girl in this state that can snap, crackle, and pop her pussy the way you can! Shit. Even you couldn't do all this when you were a young girl yourself,” he told me, slapping my backside. This was one of the few things that I didn't like about having sex with Wade. He slapped me on my rump the way I'd seen the jockeys at Bay Meadows slap their horses' asses.

Wade sat up and looked down at me, wiping his face with the tail of the sheet. I was still on my back, looking up at the cracked ceiling. I had so many thoughts swimming around in my head, I couldn't tell where one ended and another began. One was, I didn't like it when Wade, or any other man for that matter, reminded me that I was no longer a young girl. I had a house full of mirrors, so I knew that. I was vain, so how I looked to other people concerned me. Despite Wade's choice of words, I still enjoyed his company. He did the one thing that my husband now did only every once in a while: he made me feel desirable. I could look and smell like a pile of shit and Wade would still cover me with kisses. The last time I approached my husband, smelling like a rose and wearing my sexiest negligee, he rolled his eyes at me and told me to go put on some clothes before I caught a cold.

“Was it good for you?” Wade asked, once again squeezing my breasts so hard that I pushed him away.

“It was good for me,” I told him. Though my mouth said one thing, my mind said another. Like if it bothers me now when people mention my age and I'm only thirty-one, what is it going to be like when I'm fifty-one? Would I still have enough of the ransom money left over to get a face-lift then?

I needed to keep my mind on the current situation. I couldn't afford to let myself get too distracted.

“Why do you still have that worried look on your face, girl? Didn't I tell you that I got everything covered?” Wade asked, looking worried himself.

“Have you ever done something like this before?” I replied, trying to at least look like my mind was focused on the right things.

Wade gave me a puzzled look before he responded. “Kidnapped somebody?” For a moment he looked like he wanted to laugh. “Hell, no, I ain't never kidnapped nobody.”

“Then how do you know you've got everything under control?”

“Look, this was your idea,” he snapped, with one hand up in the air like he wanted to slap my face. He screwed his face into a frown and patted his stomach. Then he let out a stream of belches, which rolled out of his mouth like thunder. “I shouldn't have ate them day-old sardines and oysters this morning.” He belched again, shaking his head and patting his stomach some more. “I wasn't that crazy about doing this shit with you in the first place. Kidnapping is a serious crime! Now, if you was going to back out, you should have done that before I called up your old man and got this ball rolling. But, it still ain't too late. You can go on back home and pick up where you left off, but you better come up with one hell of a story to tell your old man about how you got loose. And, no matter what you tell him, it better not include my name,” he warned, shaking a fist in my face.

“I am not going to back out now, Wade. I know it's too late. And I need that money. I need to get up out of this city,” I whimpered in a voice that was cracking with each word. “I love Berkeley, and I thought I'd spend the rest of my life here. But I know I can't do that now. Jesse Ray's crazy if he thinks I am going to spend the rest of my life cooking and cleaning and taking care of his family and putting up with their bullshit by myself. And in my own house at that! I am tired of trying to talk some sense into that man's hard head. Now all I want is to get as far away from him and my crazy in-laws as possible.” I snarled. I was surprised at how strong and determined my voice sounded when I got angry.

“Then quit worrying. You making me nervous,” Wade insisted, giving me an exasperated look. “I know what I'm doing. My mama didn't raise no fool. Shit.”

“I'm not worried,” I said, with a pout. “I've just got a lot on my mind these days. I just hope that everything works out all right.” I sat up again and gave Wade a concerned look. “Maybe you should call Jesse Ray again tonight. Just so he knows you mean business. He can be pretty stubborn and exasperating. You saw that by the way he dragged you around on the telephone.” The insides of my thighs and my crotch were still throbbing. I started massaging myself with both hands, but that didn't help. If anything, it made me ache even more.

“I told him I'd call him again tomorrow. Now if you want this thing to work, we got to follow our own rules, too.”

Wade pushed my hands away and started massaging me. That didn't stop the aching in my private area, but his hands felt a lot better to me than mine did.

“I don't trust J.R. I know he said he wouldn't call the cops or tell anybody, but what if he does?”

“Look, if he calls the cops and we find out about it in time, we split,” Wade answered, pulling his hands away from my crotch. “I got a Mexican buddy down in Mexico City that owes me some favors. We could hole up with him from now on if it comes to that. The law ain't too fond of him, so we wouldn't never have to worry about him blabbing. Mexico is full of folks running away from something, so we'll feel right at home. And if it comes to that, Jesse Ray will get to keep his money, but he won't have you no more. As long as you don't slip up, he won't never find you or find out what happened to you. For all he'll ever know, you laying dead somewhere in the mountains. Now do you think that the man you married would want to spend the rest of his life with that on his mind? Do you think he'd let something happen to you that he could have prevented?”