Rayqelle's Revenge ---Book 1--- Special Holiday Edition (Ratchet)

by Shon Cole Black

  I was still half wasted and starting to come down off the heroin that I snorted earlier. I really didn’t feel like faking any smiles or small talk as they passed me. Then the door opened. I could see from my peripheral vision that it was dark inside and a large white man walked out. From a quick glance I saw that he was carrying what looked like an ice bucket.

  I thought it was a bit peculiar that he had left the door standing wide open but white people do some weird shit. I had enough problems of my own to worry about.

  “Maybe he left it open on purpose,” I thought as he passed behind my back still turned to avoid all eye contact. Then… as I reached out again to press the down button, I noticed that the man’s footsteps had stopped almost right behind me. Before I could turn around, I felt a great jolt against my back and then I heard a crackling sound, like electricity. This mutha’fucka was tasing me!

  I was stunned! Then a strong hairy arm clamped itself down around my neck, almost crushing my windpipe and choking the life out of me! He dragged me backward into the room that sat next to the elevator. Once inside, someone standing behind the door quickly slammed it shut and the room went pitch black. “Ain’t this a bitch?” I thought, hearing the ding from the elevator open as it had finally arrived ten seconds too late!

  I felt myself losing consciousness. I hadn’t had any air in over thirty seconds. It may not sound like a long time, but try doing it while you’re kicking and fighting for your life! I managed to get in one quick, precious breath as the man repositioned his grip around my neck. I couldn’t see, but I heard footsteps getting closer and then something hit me in the face! It felt like a hammer with skin around it, but I guess it was the fist of the other man in the room.

  I could tell it was a man, because I heard him grunt as he was kicking and beating me over and over and over again. The man from the hallway held me. “It’s my turn” he said as he pushed me to the floor. He then stood on top of me until the other man could get his arms around me from behind and pick me up. Then the beating started again.

  The second guy punched me in my stomach, knocking the wind out of me until I almost passed out. Then I heard what sounded like a third person moving toward me from the opposite side of the room. His footsteps grew closer until he stood right in front of me; so close that I smell his funky breath along with the cologne he wore that was sort of familiar. I was so terrified that I just couldn’t place it.

  My body trembled as the room went dead silent. He then whispered into my ear, “Told you I was gonna have this pussy.” He then reached between my legs and jammed his fingers inside me. It was over for me! I must have passed out.

  When I woke up I was in the hospital. I could only see a little light peeking through small cracks that use to be my eyes. I struggled to get to my feet but two nurses held me down, and restrained me. My eyes were swollen shut from the severe beating I had endured.

  Letah and Chance stood on both sides of the bed holding my hands saying, “It’s alright calm down. You’re safe now and everything is ok,” but I didn’t know where my attackers were and since I had no idea who they were I was in a panic!

  “Chance!” I called to him.

  “Oh my God!” Chance gasped after seeing my bruised and swollen face when the nurse shined the bright light on to me. “I’m gon’ kill that jealous bitch!” He said, with intense hatred.

  “Chance, I’m so sorry! Please let me explain!” I pleaded, reaching into the air to touch him.

  “I already learned more than I ever wanted to know... But one thing is for sure; Iesha has gotta pay for everything she did to you, and to us!” Chance shouted and stormed out of the room. I called to him over and over but he wouldn’t answer. I could hear his footsteps grow fainter as he hurried away.

  “He’s gone Rayqelle,” Letah said taking hold of my hand to comfort me.

  Chance stormed out of the hospital, jumped into his car and sped off. He was heated, and he had only one thing on his mind, and that was finding Iesha. He looked at the crumpled note on the napkin and grew more and more angry. Beads of sweat dripped from his head. He didn’t know what he was gonna do when he got there, but he knew that he wanted to make her pay for what she had done.

  The wheels of the car came to a screeching halt inside the underground garage of the hotel. Chance looked at the crumpled piece of paper on his lap and it had Iesha’s room number and phone extension. Chance grabbed his cell phone and angrily mashed Iesha’s number. He then waited as it rang over and over again.

  There was no answer so he tried once more. Still no answer. Then he decided to dial her room directly since he had the extension number right in front of him. Dialing the hotel main number, he asked to be connected to ext. 1100. The phone rang but there was no answer. His frustration grew.

  CHAPTER 24

  Chance was sick of waiting! So, he decided to get out of the car and make his way up to Iesha’s suite. His heart pumped and he could feel the blood course through his veins. He looked around the ground floor of the parking garage to make sure that there was no one around; then walked quickly and steadily toward the elevator, but he thought to himself that he should take the stairs to be on the safe side. He quietly opened the door to the stairwell, holding the handle so that it wouldn’t slam shut behind him. Then he carefully pounced up 11 flights of stairs, taking two to three steps at a time. Exhausted and gasping for air, he reached the floor and opened the door to the hallway, and discreetly entered! Chance had in mind what he wanted to do and witnesses was not an option..

  Chance moved swiftly down the long hall with a blood focus on the double oak doors trimmed in gold that lay directly ahead. The closer he got the more his blood boiled! He had never been so angry, so disrespected or so violated. “Nobody is about to destroy my life and get away with it,” he said to himself. All his thoughts came to a head as he approached the suite and banged on the door. He knocked repeatedly. “Iesha, open the mutha’fuckin’ door! I’m about to teach yo’ stank ass a serious lesson! You should ‘a never fucked wit’ what was mine!” Chance shouted and slammed his fist against the hard wood. He wrapped his hand around the doorknob and shook the door as hard as he could. With one firm twist of the handle, the door inched open. Chance stood at the crack of the opening peering in. “Iesha!” Chance called aloud. “Bitch! I know you hear me!” Chance pushed the door open cautiously looking around the huge living room from outside the door.

  He stepped inside and continued yelling for Iesha. No response. The big screen television blared loudly and music thumped from behind the bedroom door. Something was wrong, something just didn’t feel right. Chance was mad as hell! He stormed over to the door and shouted one more time; “Bitch, come out here! I’m about to fuck you up!” When there was no answer Chance turned the handle and flung open the door and rushed inside the dark room.

  He slipped and fell, “Damn, what the fuck?” he said, “What’s this shit all over the floor?” thinking maybe someone had spilled juice or champagne. He got up even more pissed off now after falling and getting his clothes all wet. He walked back over to the doorway and felt along wall for a light switch and flipped it on. Chance began shaking as a cold chill ran down his spine. Standing frozen in horror, he looked around the room and gasped.

  It was like a seen out of Friday the 13th! There was blood everywhere. It was splattered all across the walls and ceiling. Where he thought he had slipped and fallen on some spilled juice or champagne, it was really a puddle of blood with Iesha laid in the middle. She was cut wide open, from her neck down to her pelvis. All of her insides were exposed. She was wearing a white satin negligee that had been stained the color of crimson. Chance trembled! Everything was covered in blood, even himself from where he had fallen! This was a macabre mess. Chance was immediately seized by panic! He began scrambling quickly out of the room but fell again in the slick pool of blood. He tracked through the living room, up to the foyer and out of the front door. Not realizing he was stamping bloody footprints all along
the shiny marble floor behind him. Quickly he ran back into the hallway, out of the door and down the stairwell. He made his way down the eleven flights in half the time it took to him get up.

  Chance dashed down the last flight of stairs in the hotel with intense fear. The front of his clothes was covered with blood. He began noticing that he left crimson handprints smeared all along the wall and banister behind him. As he reached the bottom of the dimly lit stairwell, he quickly headed toward the back entrance and scrambled out of the huge rusty steel door marked emergency exit. Chance could hardly catch his breath; so he stopped a moment and kneeled forward with sweat pouring from his face. He struggled to figure out what to do, where to go, who to call and how he got caught up in such a helluva’ mess! As the sound of approaching sirens grew closer, Chance dipped back to the car and pulled out of the dark parking garage. In complete shock Chance sped down a dark back alley, disappearing completely into the night.

  All that night the doctors came in and out checking on my condition. A police detective showed up asking a bunch of questions that I wasn’t ready or able to answer. I just could not get my mind off Chance. It had been over three hours and we still hadn’t heard a word from him.

  I was worried sick. I spent a major part of that night answering questions from the police and there wasn’t a while lot I could tell ‘em except that I was snatched into a room where I got beat the fuck up by two white guys. I was in pretty bad shape. I had a concussion, two broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder and a bruised kidney. But through it all there was only one thing on my mind, and that was Chance!

  CHAPTER 25

  While being questioned by the police, a special all points bulletin came over the radio. It was in regard to a murder at the Omni Hotel, “the victim was a 27 year old African American female, with a California driver’s license DJ01478L registered to an Iesha Ellis of Los Angeles.” It went on to say that the victim had been badly mutilated and a suspect was wanted for questioning in connection with the murder. Twenty-five year old Evan Chance of Chicago, Illinois. The suspect was described as an African American male, about 6’1” in height, 185 pounds, dark brown skin, bald head with no facial hair, and a slim to muscular. Approach with caution!”

  The detective turned his eyes slowly toward me. “Miss Davis, didn’t you say that your boyfriends name was Chance? Evan Chance?” He asked.

  My heart began to pound against my chest like a sledgehammer as sweat poured from my brow. “Yes! But he is not a murderer! He could never do anything like this! You need to be out there lookin’ for the mutha’fuckas that did this to me! You find them and I bet you’ll find Iesha’s killer. Chance did not do this!” I exclaimed through my loose teeth and swollen upper lip.

  “Where is he?” The detective asked calmly.

  Letah and I both looked and each other remaining quiet. The silence in the room was thick enough to cut with a knife! And then …

  “Don’t play with me! This is not a fuckin’ game! Your boyfriend is out there with a warrant for his arrest and an approach with caution advisory over his head. That means if he even so much as sneezes, some nervous ass rookie cop is probably gonna blow his mutha’fuckin head off his shoulders! Is that what you want? Now, tell me where he is!” The detectives’ voice broke through the dead silence like a brick through a glass window and I fell to pieces.

  “I don’t know I swear! He’ll be back here to see about me. He won’t stay away with me here! Please don’t hurt him!”

  The detective grabbed his cell phone, punching the life out of the buttons! “This is detective Rick Connor. I’m at the Sharp Memorial working the Davis assault case. Hey listen. I just got a possible lead on the Iesha Ellis murder case.” I was sick to my stomach as he spoke coldly to whoever was on the other end. He talked about Chance like he was talking about an animal they were hunting!

  Unknown to all of us, Chance had gone back to the house to get some clean clothes and to talk to Lynn. He wanted to try and explain everything that happened. Still in the car, he sat in the driveway and leaned back in the seat to catch his breath for a moment.

  The first thing that he wondered was, who could have done this to Iesha, secondly he thought, how badly he wanted to hurt her for what she had done to us, and his intentions were to go over there and fuck her up. Somewhere deep down inside he was glad that he didn’t, but he wasn’t the least bit sorry for her. After all, if she had been anywhere near as foul to anybody else as she had been to me, she had it coming. He just hated that fact that he had to be the one to walk smack dab into the middle of the shit. Literally!

  Chance was so tired physically, mentally and in every other way you could image from all the shit I had taken him through over the past two months. He put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. Just then he heard a click as he opened his eyes to find the end of a nine-millimeter handgun pressed up against the side of his head. It was a deputy from the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department. “Evan Chance, you are under arrest for suspicion of murder. Put your hands on the steering wheel and don’t move!

  At the same time Lynn was also placed under arrest for Davis’s murder. They carefully placed her inside an ambulance and escorted her to the infirmary at the Justice Center, where she gave a full confession. It turns out that she had been slowly poisoning my stepfather with arsenic, because of all the medications he was on, it was difficult to distinguish the difference between possible drug interaction and him actually being poisoned until an autopsy was performed. The detective asked why she did it and here it what she said.

  Lynn was at home with Ladybird the day that she died. They had been playing hide and go seek when Davis came home for lunch, that’s when him and Ladybird started to argue. Lynn said that she heard Ladybird tell Davis that she knew what he had been doing to Letah, and that she was gonna go to the police. Lynn said that Davis told Ladybird that he would kill her first. Then he put his hands around her neck, and strangled her to death. Davis then picked Ladybird up and took her into my room, placed a rope around her neck and hung her from the wood beam in the ceiling. Lynn was behind the door hiding the whole time, he never even noticed her.

  I was laying in that hospital bed bruised and battered, with that fuckin’ cop getting on my nerves, askin’ all those damn questions. And I was going out of my mind with worry about Chance. On top of all that, now I was starting to go into withdrawals again. It had been close to 12 hours now since my last fix, so the cramps and fatigue were kicking back in. It felt like I was itching inside and I couldn’t keep still! The only thing that was really saving me from going completely nuts was the morphine drip they had me on for the pain. But I still needed a hit. My body craved it!

  And in a short while I knew I would be crying for it! So, I begged Letah to go out to the car and get the stash that I had bought earlier last night. She didn’t want to, but I insisted, so she finally gave in, only after I promised on LadyBird’s grave that this would be the last time.

  While I waited on her to get back, I figured I would turn on the TV to pass time. I clicked the remote control until I landed on channel 8. Then, I just about swallowed my tongue! There was a picture of Chance being broadcast in connection Iesha’s murder.

  The reporter was saying something about investigators finding Chance’s fingerprints at the scene, and surveillance video from the hotel at the time of the murder showing him entering and leaving her suite. They also said that this was a particularly gruesome crime, and something about the murderer having removed Iesha’s heart from her chest.

  They also said that chance was being held at the San Diego County Detention Center with a one million cash dollar bond. They were also saying some crazy shit about this being the second time he had been charged with murder. They said the first time that the case was thrown out due to a hung jury or something.

  He supposedly beat some guy to death in 2001, a football player from N.K.U at a college party. I was in a complete state of shock!

  What they wer
e saying just could not have been true. Chance and I had been together for over three years and he never even so much as raised a hand to me, and now I’m supposed to believe that he killed somebody six years ago and never mentioned anything about it.

  Letah stood at the entrance to the door where she had been standing for about the past five minutes, but I hadn’t even notice. She walked over to me slowly. I began to cry, “If I had only told Chance the truth about my past when we met none of this would be happening. It’s all my fault!” I said.

  “Looks like you both had some skeletons in the closet.” Letah said as she reluctantly handed me the small baggy of heroin and nervously stood watch while I quickly snorted the “real” pain medicine. And like magic, the ache left me as I eased back onto the bed and prepared to take flight for one last time. You see, I promise Letah that I was gonna tell my doctor that was hooked on dope, so that I could start some kind of treatment right away. I had too much to live for to go out like this! And then …

  About twenty minutes later I went into heart failure and slip into comma due to a bad interaction from the mixture of heroin and morphine. The doctors worked on me for the next two hours, but it was no use. I was pronounced dead at 8:47pm. The toxicology report showed high amounts of heroin in my bloodstream, cause of death was rule an overdose, enough to kill a horse they said.

  Even with all of his family’s money and influence behind him, Chance spent the next two weeks in police custody. The district attorney managed to convince the judge that he was a flight risk, and an extreme threat to the community. So a bond was denied. But, shortly after that, some new evidence was introduced that proved Chance’s innocence and cleared him on all charges. He was finally released. With his life shattered and his heart broken into a thousand pieces, he returned to Chicago, placed his house up for sale and disappeared. My fear and my lies destroyed the only man I ever loved!