“Gracias,” she said, and paid the cashier.
She carried her tray to a booth near the window and took off her sunglasses. She dug a recent issue of Psychology Today out of her purse and placed it on the table beside her tray, intending to skim it while she lunched. Although the magazine contained mostly pop-psychology geared toward nonprofessionals, she liked to stay abreast of the articles because many of her clients read them, usually in an earnest but misguided attempt to diagnose themselves or others.
Suddenly, she had that sense of being watched again. She looked around.
The man watching her stood just inside the doorway, hands buried in his pockets. He wore wraparound mirror shades and paint-soiled denim overalls. He had a lion’s mane of a black beard streaked with gray, and his hair was woven into dreadlocks that swept down to his shoulders.
Corey’s friend, she thought with a spark of recognition. The one from the gas station this morning. Leon.
For some reason, Corey had been reluctant to talk about his friendship with this man, and had rebuked Jada for asking questions. Simone had found his reaction strange, but clearly Corey and this Leon had not left off their friendship on the best of terms. You didn’t have to be a licensed psychologist to read Corey.
As if by psychic osmosis with her husband, Simone felt tension twisting like a corkscrew in her own stomach, too. What was this guy doing there?
Leon smiled at her, showing a wide gap in his front teeth. He sauntered to her table.
Without asking permission, he took the seat across from her.
“I’m Leon,” he said in a surprisingly soft falsetto. He extended his hand across the table. “Your hubby C-Note and I were thick as thieves back in the day.”
She didn’t want to shake his hand-something about him looked dirty-but she didn’t want to be rude, either. She briefly shook his hand. His touch was damp and hot, as if he were cooking inside his own flesh.
And what was that C-Note nickname all about?
She cleared her throat. “I saw you outside the gas station this morning. Corey told me he knew you back in Detroit.”
“We go back like rockin’ chairs,” Leon said. He slid a salt shaker toward him and batted it like a hockey puck between his hands across the table. “It damn near blew my cerebellum to run into him this morning. Like, whoa, my main man! All grown up now with the wife and kid, a captain of his industry, I’m so proud of him, ’cause where we came from, no one expected us to amount to shit. We were given the old heave-ho into the streets like malnourished puppies from a mutt’s litter, every man for himself, look out for number one and don’t step in number two, and now Corey’s living the life of Riley. It gives me hope, it does, it’s marvelous, beautiful, a stupendously beautiful thing.”
Snickering, he rocked back in the seat, juggling the salt shaker.
Simone stared at him. She had met some colorful characters in her day, but was this guy for real?
As a long-standing rule, she resisted putting on her therapist’s hat outside of her counseling practice, but Leon was so unusual that she inadvertently found herself doing an assessment of him. He was definitely hyperactive. She noted the hands in ceaseless motion. The lightning-swift, jittery speech pattern. Did he display poor impulse control and dramatic mood swings, too?
She wished he would remove those sunglasses so she could get a good look at his eyes. They would help her formulate a clearer read on him.
Stop it, she cautioned herself.
But it startled her that Corey had been friends with this man. Best friends, he’d admitted. Corey was solid and stable as the proverbial rock. If Leon had always behaved like this, she couldn’t imagine him and Corey as anything more than casual acquaintances.
Why hadn’t Corey ever told her about this unusual guy? Why was he so reluctant to talk about him?
She was intrigued. . but Leon showing up in this restaurant, at this time, troubled her above all else.
“Do you eat here often?” she asked.
He bobbed his head, dreadlocks swaying. “Oh, yeah, yeah, uh-huh, I rip through this little restaurante all the time, daily. See Julio, the pint-sized wetback working the counter? Mi amigo hooks me up nice with the burritos.”
She frowned. “Well, he’s very friendly, but I don’t think he’d appreciate being referred to by the word you used. It’s not exactly a politically correct term.”
He shrugged and scooped up the pepper shaker, too. Juggling them both, he said, “How do you make your pesos, baby girl? The way you’re dressed, the snazzy pantsuit, the understated jewelry, the French manicure, the makeup tight and just right, I know you’re not holding down a minimum wage gig greeting welfare moms and their broods of Bebe kids at Wal-Mart. You’re involved in a high falutin’ profession that requires a spiffy edumucation, what is it that you do, huh, do tell, darling.”
“I’m a psychologist,” she said. Out of habit, she braced for a shrink joke.
“A psychologist, no shit, uh-huh, that’s cool. Can I have some Ritalin?” He giggled.
“A psychologist isn’t licensed to prescribe medication. Psychiatrists do that. They have medical degrees. My background is clinical psychology.”
“Do you deliver a diagnosis from your high and mighty shrink throne, append a certifiable label on a hapless patient, and summon the men in the white coats to haul him off to the funny farm to live the rest of his pathetic little Walter Mitty life in a rubber room strapped in a straitjacket and sucking applesauce through a straw?”
She blinked at his torrent of words. “No, no. I’ve never had to commit anyone, thank goodness.”
He dropped the shakers onto the table and leaned forward, thick veins rising to the surface of his tattooed forearms.
“So you sit around on that lovely, bodacious ass of yours gabbing to half-wits all day, is that right? Listening and nodding uh-huh, uh-huh, asking asinine open-ended questions to fill the allotted time, nail the poor suckers between their dumb bovine eyes with an inflated bill when the buzzer goes off, usher them into the great outdoors with a Coke and a smile?”
Her jaw clenched. “Excuse me?”
“If you were my lady, I wouldn’t let you leave mi casa. You’re too traffic-stopping fine to lift a finger.” He adjusted the sunglasses on his nose, then whistled and pantomimed a voluptuous shape with his hands. “Brick house all day and night, it’s hard for me to peep the package in that high-priced chic suit you’re wearing, but I’ll hazard a guess, you’ve gotta be thirty-six C, twenty-four, thirty-six, perfect pole dancer coordinates, no doubt provoking wet dreams and blue balls and sweaty palms every time you strut your sexy chocolate ass into a room. Corey’s a lucky, lucky dog, I tell you that, take that check to a bank and cash it ’cause it’s good.”
She blushed, speechless.
His wraparound mirror shades offered a distorted reflection of only her own bewildered face, but she could feel his lecherous gaze crawling all over her.
Hands clenched into fists, she crossed her arms over her chest, covering her cleavage.
“Quiet now, huh?” His voice had lowered several octaves, and a predatory smile danced across his lips. “Are you quiet like that in the sack, too, or are you a screamer, a lady in the streets but a freak in the sheets?”
Her face burned. Enough. She’d had enough of this nonsense.
Trembling, she gathered her things, grabbed the edges of the tray, and slid out of the booth.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I have to get back to work. I’ll. . I’ll tell Corey I ran into you.”
“You do that, senorita bonita, yeah, you make sure you tell him. Shalom.”
He blew a kiss at her, and laughed in his strange, giggly manner.
She hadn’t touched her food, but she dumped the entire meal into the wastebasket near the exit. She no longer had an appetite.
Without looking back, she hurried across the parking lot and to her car, feeling watched all the way.
7
Corey spent the r
est of the day at the office, determined to stay focused on business.
He returned all of the messages that he’d received earlier. Sat in on a conference call with a current customer, a local electronics store, about installing enhancements to their surveillance system. Interviewed a candidate for a new sales rep position. Had a meeting with a vendor who wanted Corey to upgrade to the latest and greatest customer relations management software.
It was, all in all, shaping up to be a busy weekday, for which he was grateful. It allowed him to delay making a decision about his Leon problem. He promised himself he would think about this issue later, when his mind was uncluttered.
He knew, of course, that procrastinating was only a dishonest tack to keep from confronting the dilemma head on. . but he just couldn’t let himself think about it too much.
Because frankly, it scared him.
Around three o’clock that afternoon, a long-time friend, Rev. Otis Trice, paid him a visit. Otis was a stout, dark-skinned man in his midsixties, with a round, bald head, wire-rim glasses, and a neatly trimmed snow-white beard. He entered the office looking as impeccably dressed as usual: polished black oxfords, gray wool slacks, white dress shirt, burgundy silk tie. Corey could not recall ever seeing him wear anything more casual than a pair of Dockers, and he doubted the man had anything denim in his entire wardrobe.
Corey shook his hand and invited him to have a seat.
“It is good seeing you, Brother Webb, indeed it is,” Otis said, easing into the chair. He smiled, revealing a gold-capped front tooth, a relic from his youth in his native Detroit, and dabbed at his shiny pate with a handkerchief. “We are certainly experiencing a sultry day today, are we not?”
Otis spoke with crisp, elegant diction that had earned him the moniker “The Great Enunciator” among his friends and family. An admitted hell-raiser in his youth who’d gotten drafted for Vietnam, Otis confessed that he’d found God when he’d miraculously avoided detonating a land mine that claimed the lives of two members of his platoon not ten seconds after he’d passed over it. Upon his return to the States, he earned a doctorate in theology and founded a small, nondenominational church in East Point, using his ministry to stimulate positive change in the community.
“It’s a hot one out there for sure,” Corey said. “Can I get you some water?”
“That would be excellent, thank you.”
Corey fetched him a bottle of water from the mini-refrigerator nestled underneath his desk. Otis accepted it gratefully.
Sixteen years ago, when Corey had found himself homeless after Grandma Louise had died, Otis, a family friend, had offered to bring Corey to Atlanta and let him live with him and his wife. The offer had changed the course of Corey’s life-and, almost assuredly, had saved it.
Leon had gone to prison barely a month before Grandma Louise’s death, and with his grandmother’s passing, the two major figures of Corey’s young life were gone. He had been in a fragile state, as liable to go down for a felony as he was to win gainful employment. Soon after bringing him to Atlanta, Otis had helped him land a job as an alarm installation technician.
The rest was history.
Otis crossed his legs. “How is the Webb family?” “They’re great,” Corey said. He glanced at the photos on the edge of the desk, felt a familiar rush of pride and love. “You’ll have to come over for dinner sometime soon. I know they’d love to see you.”
“We must do that soon, yes,” Otis said. He sipped water, his face growing troubled. “Unfortunately, I’m afraid that I’m not here to pay a social call, Brother Webb. It appears that I must enlist the services of your company for my church.”
“Did something happen?” Corey asked.
“Someone broke in this past weekend,” he said. “We believe it occurred late Saturday evening. These thieves helped themselves to our audiovisual system-it wasn’t much, mind you, about five thousand dollars’ worth of refurbished equipment, according to our insurance estimates. Certainly, a pale echo of the impressive systems that many churches lay claim to these days. But it was, alas, all that we had.”
“I’m so sorry,” Corey said. “The cops have any suspects?”
“We suspect neighborhood youth.” Otis shook his head sadly. “The very children that we strive so hard to impact with our ministry. We completed a police report, but the officer himself admitted that there’s only a slim chance that our equipment will be recovered.”
Even as Corey commiserated with his friend, he was thinking about those “neighborhood youth” who had almost definitely perpetrated the theft. Young Leon Sharpes-and young Corey Webbs, too.
It made him sick.
“Our insurance company has threatened to cancel our coverage unless we install a burglar alarm system,” Otis said, “a measure that, as you are well aware, I’ve long resisted, perhaps out of a naive belief that if you perform righteous works in your community and genuinely seek to serve those in need, you generate goodwill that others will respect and honor.”
“I wish things worked like that,” Corey said. “Unfortunately, your story is becoming all too common these days. If I had a dime for each call we get from nonprofits and small churches who’ve been burglarized, I could buy both of us a nice steak dinner.”
Otis offered a broken smile. “Can you help me?”
“Of course I can.” Corey slid open a desk drawer and retrieved a preformatted form that they used to create profiles of prospective customers. “And with this one, installation’s on the house, and I’ll see if I can cut you a nice discount on the monthly monitoring fee. That’s the least I can do.”
Otis shook his head. “No, I can’t allow you to do that, Brother Webb. Absolutely not. You have a business to run, expenses of your own-”
“If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have a business.” Corey smiled. “Don’t argue with me. Isn’t there something in the Bible about not blocking your blessings?”
“I believe you’re referring to the idiom, ‘don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’”
“Yeah, whatever, don’t do that. Let me do this for you, Reverend, please. It’s my honor.”
“As you wish,” Otis said. “God bless you, son. Your grandmother would be so proud of you.”
Two hours later, he had scheduled Otis’s church to receive an emergency installation of one of their deluxe alarm and monitoring packages. He was tidying up a few more loose ends before leaving for the day when he called home. Jada answered.
“This is the Webb residence,” she said in a polite, careful tone. She pronounced “residence” as “res’dence.”
“Hey, Pumpkin. How ya doing?”
“Daddy!” she cried with glee.
Corey grinned. He never tired of hearing the excitement in his daughter’s voice when he talked to her. Once she reached her teen years, she would probably enter a sullen, rebellious phase and avoid speaking to him as much as possible. He wanted to bask in her adulation while it lasted.
“When are you coming home?” Jada asked.
“I’ll be home soon, sweetie,” he said. “Can I speak to your mother, please?”
“ ’Kay, Daddy,” Jada said. “Here she is.”
Simone came on the line. “Hey, baby. We’re having beef stroganoff for dinner.”
Corey laughed. “Okay, you beat me to the punch.”
“After all this time, I think I’ve figured you out.”
Leon’s face surfaced in Corey’s thoughts. Actually, you haven’t figured me out at all, babe. How I wish you had.
“You need me to pick up anything on the way home?” he asked.
“We’re good. I stopped by the store earlier.”
“Then I’ll be there soon.”
“There was one thing I wanted to mention,” she said. “I was going to wait until dinner, but. .”
He tensed, in anticipation of more questions about Leon. Or-horrors-that Simone had actually taken it upon herself to look up Leon on Google.
He cracked a knuckle, ph
one wedged between his shoulder and ear. “Go ahead.”
“I ran in to your friend Leon at lunch today.”
He almost shot out of his chair. “What?”
“You know the Chipotle on Roswell Road, near my office?”
“He was there?”
“I went there around one-thirty, and there he was.”
“Did he speak to you?”
“Did he speak to me?” She paused. “Umm, yeah, that would be a bit of an understatement. He sat at my table and started running off at the mouth like a carnival barker. You know I prefer not to do assessments outside of the office. . but he seems rather hyperactive.”
“Like an Energizer bunny on amphetamine.”
“Exactly! Has he always behaved like that?”
“For as long as I’ve known him, yeah.” Corey popped another knuckle. He was afraid to ask his next question. “So what did he say?”
“Nothing important,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “I was surprised to see him there, but he said he frequents the place so, whatever. Coincidence, I guess.”
Coincidence, my ass.
But Simone didn’t sound suspicious. He saw no reason to worry her and no reason to delve into more info about Leon, either.
“Well, stranger things have happened,” Corey said. “I’ll be home in a bit, babe.”
“C-Note?”
He stammered, convinced he had heard incorrectly. “Excuse me?”
“Leon used that nickname for you. C-Note. What’s the story behind that?”
“It was only a stupid nickname he made up for me. As you saw for yourself, he says a lot of nonsense.”
“Hmph. No disagreement there.”
“I’ll see you guys soon,” he said.
It required all of his self-control to keep from slamming the phone onto the cradle.
What the hell was Leon up to?
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