Dangerous Consequences

by Lisa Renee Johnson

  As Joi pulled onto Martin Luther King Jr. Way, she glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It had taken her thirty-five minutes door to door. She double-checked the address on the crumpled piece of paper and gazed around. She eyed two misfits loitering on the corner next to Eli’s Mile High Club, a seedy-looking bar. She scanned the block for Tyrese’s truck and tried to keep an open mind, but her instinct told her a woman was the only type of business her husband could have in this part of Oakland.

  She parked her SUV two blocks away and hurried back toward the sound of B. B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone.” The stench of too many folks living on a small land mass seeped from the apartment buildings and made it hard for her to remain focused.

  What was she going to do? She didn’t have a plan and there were so many unknowns to consider. She felt like a naïve young girl instead of the grown married woman she was. She’d tried to be a good wife and worked hard at doing all the things she was sure she needed to do to keep her husband happy. She cooked, cleaned, took care of the children, and paid extra attention to her appearance. And she willingly gave him sex whenever he initiated the act. She cringed now at the memory of his face twisted in disgust when he’d refused to partake in oral sex with her the day before. From the videos she’d watched, his response just didn’t make sense. She’d rented and rerented the educational videos until she felt comfortable that she’d perfected the art of the blow job and was eager to test her new skills on her husband. When she had coffee with the moms from the boys’ playgroup she always listened carefully when the conversations drifted to sex. At first she’d been embarrassed about discussing the topic but later had realized she didn’t have to share with the other mothers that she’d never given her husband head. She’d learned to smile, nod, and give um-hums at the right intervals and they were none the wiser. It was because of them that she’d gotten up the nerve to venture into Good Vibrations in the first place.

  She was so caught up in these thoughts that she almost walked on by the truck. She brushed her hand over the lukewarm hood and felt her pulse kick into high gear. She looked toward the entrance of the apartment complex, but she had no idea who she was looking for. Maybe if she pressed a few names someone would buzz her in. When she heard her husband’s familiar voice from the other side of the gate she almost fainted. With her breath caught in her chest, she moved into the darkness and squatted down behind a parked car. What the hell was she going to do now? Her first instinct was to confront the lying, cheating son of a bitch, but the voice of Chase Morgan stilled her: Catching Tyrese exiting an apartment complex with a woman wasn’t enough to secure the future of her children. At this point it would be his word against hers; like Mr. Morgan had said, she needed concrete proof.

  Joi’s eyes followed the two shadows as they exited the secured gate and strolled past her hiding place. They walked in the direction of the bar and once they turned the corner, Joi waited a beat, then followed.

  Inside Eli’s, Joi made a beeline for an empty booth in the back of the dark club that gave her a perfect view and a perfect hideaway. She hadn’t seen him leave the house, but even with his back to her, she could tell Tyrese was dressed to kill in his charcoal-gray Armani suit, his sky-blue shirt peeking over his collar. She’d bet money he had on the charcoal tie with the light blue pinstripes, a combination that accentuated his piercing gray eyes—impeccable, if she had to say so herself. The girl brought to mind a two-dollar whore you could pick up off West MacArthur Boulevard back in the day, and she couldn’t seem to keep her hands off Tyrese. Her fuchsia wrap dress was too tight, revealing an unsightly panty line that cut into her skin. The girl sat perched on his lap, cooing in his face and caressing his bald head; her shoulder-length weave was matted and begging for a comb.

  Joi’s face felt flushed and she cast her eyes downward before drinking a gulp of her water. He was definitely fucking her, she mused, fuming at the thought. Maybe it had been a mistake to follow them; she didn’t know if she could stomach this. She’d only been there a few minutes and had already grown tired of the inappropriate touching. She was ready to pounce on that bitch like a cat. When the woman excused herself and headed in the direction of the ladies’ room, Joi followed to get a closer look. She eased into the restroom and ducked into the adjacent stall, where she could hear the woman talking on the phone.

  “Girl, I got his trick ass over here at Eli’s right now and he’s about to give me twelve hundred dollars for that Louis Vuitton bag I put on hold at the Union Square store today.”

  The volume of the phone was so loud that Joi could hear the person on the other end squawk her response. “Bitch, his ass isn’t going to give you twelve hundred dollars.”

  “Like hell he ain’t,” the fuchsia girl snapped. The jingles from her bangle bracelets mingled with the sound of the flushing toilet.

  “My mama didn’t raise no fool, and if he knows what’s good for him and that good-paying job of his, he better give me my money tonight,” she said. “Besides, they don’t call me the head doctor for nothing.” She giggled.

  Joi’s ears began to ring. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Did that whore just say Tyrese was going to give her twelve hundred dollars? If Joi asked Tyrese for that much money, she would have to go through a full-press interrogation as to why she needed that much cash and sign her full name in blood, yet he was willing to freely hand over that much money to some skanky, classless bitch. This was un-fucking-believable.

  She swallowed back a rush of bile and silently peeked through the crack in the door, watching the fuchsia girl as she stumbled out of the stall with the cell phone still perched between her shoulder and her ear. She adjusted her breasts and gave herself a once-over before exiting the restroom.

  Joi took slow breaths in and out to control her emotions. She didn’t know how or when, but his ass was going to pay for this, she thought, as she perused a framed plaque that paid tribute to Eli Thornton, the original owner of the club. According to the plaque, he had been shot to death by his jealous mistress, a blues singer. Joi studied the seventies photograph immortalizing Eli and wondered what he’d done to make his mistress take his life, but his charismatic smile told her all she needed to know: he had been a cheating bastard, just like Tyrese.

  She eased back into her booth just in time to see a gangly man with skin the texture of dried leather hand Tyrese a business card and head in her direction, passing the fuchsia girl as she returned to Tyrese’s table. Joi studied him closely as he entered the narrow hallway and bumped into a woman exiting the ladies’ room.

  “Excuse me,” he croaked.

  Joi’s eyes opened wide with recognition. It was Curtis Holsey, the private investigator she’d hired a few days earlier. Oh my God! She didn’t want him to see her. She glanced toward her husband again and saw the fuchsia girl coyly bent over at the waist with the fabric of her dress riding up so high it exposed the cheeks of her bare ass, backed up right in Tyrese’s face. Joi turned away and tried not to think about how much she wanted to slap the shit out of her husband, whose attention hadn’t wavered from what the girl was showing him. Fuchsia girl swayed her body to the upbeat blues tempo and pulled a reluctant Tyrese to the tiny dance floor.

  Joi had seen enough. This was the moment to make her exit. She adjusted the bib of her cap to hide her face. As she hurried down the hallway, she grabbed a dirty steak knife off the busboy’s station next to the kitchen. She slipped it into her tote bag as she hurried out the back door.

  Outside the club, she moved hastily up the street. Aside from her, the same two misfits she’d seen earlier were the only ones standing across the street.

  They called to her. “Can I take you home tonight, Mami?”

  Joi ignored them as she made her way to her husband’s truck. She removed the steak knife from her bag and stooped low. Like a stealth plane, she hovered around the truck, jabbed all four of his tires, and left behind the consistent sound of synchronized hissing in her wake.

  She r
eturned the knife to her tote and glided the few remaining blocks to her car.

  “Damn, that felt good,” she said out loud as she eased into the driver’s seat of her SUV. “Now let’s see how his smart ass gets out of this one.”

  Thirty minutes later Joi was back in the confines of her community, where she stopped at the local Safeway. With a single ear bud pressed in her ear, she made her way to the beverage aisle.

  “How is it going up there?” Joi asked her sister-in-law, Gina. She could hear her boys in the background, asking to speak to her and their father.

  “Everything is fine, sis. The kids just finished roasting marshmallows and we’re about to put them down for the night. I promised they could call you and Tyrese so you could tell them good night.”

  Joi paused. How was she going to explain this mess to her children? They were too young to understand and her heart ached for them. She bit her bottom lip, worrying about her husband’s waywardness. They were boys and they needed their daddy. It became crystal clear that telling her sons their father wasn’t going to say good night to them was something she had no plans on getting used to doing. She grabbed a six-pack of ginger ale, Tyrese’s favorite, then made her way to the pharmacy to get what she needed.

  “Go ahead and put them on speakerphone, Gina. I’m out at the store, so I’ll just send them off to Mr. Sandman myself.”

  Joi stood in the checkout line with the ginger ale in one hand and a tiny brown bottle of syrup of ipecac in the other. She kissed her boys good night through the phone and reassured them that she and Tyrese would see them in a few days. She had no plans to raise her children in a single-parent home in the middle of the ghetto. She would have to use what she had to keep what belonged to her.

  CHAPTER 24

  The Superior Courthouse was located on Civic Drive in Pittsburg. The empty, well-manicured lots that in recent years had replaced the row of blighted properties once lining Railroad Avenue was the first thing Payton saw when she entered the city, jarring memories from her childhood.

  One of the lots used to be home to JD’s Barber Shop, a Pittsburg institution where Payton’s grandfather, father, and uncles all went to get their hair cut and the wisdom of barbershop conversation. That was a pleasant memory. Mostly what Payton remembered about growing up in Pittsburg was tragedy and disappointment. Her father, Sonny, had been murdered over a dice game gone wrong in the back of Mac Lewis’s record shop when she was ten. One day her mother, Lois, who coped with the death of her husband by self-medicating, failed to pick up Payton from the Brenden movie theater after she’d dropped her off to hang out with her friends. Payton was thirteen years old at the time; she knew right away that her mother was never coming back for her, though her grandmother wasn’t convinced. Even after a year, when her mother still hadn’t shown up, her grandmother clung tightly to her idea. Payton was sure her grandmother had gone to her grave not accepting that Lois had abandoned her.

  She entered the courthouse, passed through the metal detectors, and walked directly to the room that handled civil matters. She had lived in Pittsburg most of her life, but this was her first time here. She stood in line, studying the notepad with all the legal advice she had obtained regarding this matter. She had spoken to several attorneys over the past few days and they’d all said the same thing: She had to evict Sonja Mitchell as if she were a tenant.

  Payton approached the available window, and removed the thirty-day notice she’d obtained from the internet and the additional copies she’d been instructed to bring along for filing. She handed the clerk her paperwork and he scanned them for completion.

  “That will be three hundred dollars, ma’am,” he said, readying the filing stamp.

  She fished her wallet from her handbag and extracted three crisp hundred-dollar bills, handed them to the clerk, and made a mental note to add this to the estate expenses. The clerk stamped the thirty-day notice form and four copies with a case number, making them official.

  “You have to have someone over the age of eighteen serve these papers to the tenant,” he said. “Then the server has to sign here, saying they did so, and return the form to the court. That way if the tenant fails to move and you have to file an eviction lawsuit, all the paperwork will be in order.”

  “I’ve been having a problem with the tenant not being home when I go to the property.”

  “All the person who’s serving this notice has to do is post this on the front door of the property in a visible place and then mail one of these copies to the tenant at the address. Then they have to check the appropriate boxes and mail or bring the signed copy back to us for the record.”

  Twenty minutes later Payton emerged from the courthouse, knowing there was no way she could wait thirty-plus days to evict Sonja the legal way. Instead, she imagined offering her five hundred dollars in cash in small bills. If need be, she would go up to a thousand. There was no way a crackhead was going to turn down that much cash. Then Payton would pack up all Sonja’s belongings and take her to a notary to sign a statement that she had moved out of the property and relinquished all her tenant rights. Once she signed, Payton would give her the cash and take her wherever she wanted to go and be done with it.

  As she approached her car, she could see a tall, slender figure leaning leisurely against her car, holding a bicycle. As she moved closer she could see the figure was her uncle, Sheldon.

  “What you doing here, Niecy?”

  He was dressed in a red sweatshirt three sizes too large, heavily soiled jeans, and a pair of Chuck Taylor All Stars without socks. He attempted to hug her, but the disgusting odor that emanated from his body placed a sneer on her face that told him to back off.

  “You ain’t down here snitching on me, are you?” he asked, flapping his arms up and down, fanning his funk.

  “Sheldon, you need to take a bath.”

  “If you give me fifty dollars I could go get a room at the Mar-Ray Motel, get cleaned up and get me something to eat.”

  Payton looked her uncle up and down, knowing if she gave him fifty dollars the last thing he was going to do was get a room or food.

  “Uncle Sheldon, have you given any more thought to my offer? If you go to rehab, I’ll pay your rent for six months after you get out, giving you some time to get yourself together. And I won’t take this money out of your share from the sale of the house.”

  “Girl, I don’ told you that I’m not going to no damn rehab.”

  “I bet my granddaddy Jones is turning over in his grave, seeing two of his sons acting like homeless—”

  “If you hadn’t kicked me out of my house, I wouldn’t be homeless,” he said, closing the distance between them.

  Payton coughed. “If I hadn’t kicked you out, the city would have red-tagged it and kicked you out for me. Then we all would have been screwed. The place was a mess. All that trash and exposed wiring—I had to pay the contractors a lot of money to get that house back to a sellable condition. The best thing for everybody is to sell it, take the money, and run.”

  “You don’t have a right to sell a damn thing. That’s my mama and daddy’s house,” he said, slurring his words. Sheldon was so drunk, his eyes were bloodshot and spittle was flying everywhere.

  Payton fired a nasty look in his direction. “Right? In case you forgot, you lost your right when you started using dope, which is why Granddaddy gave me the right in the first place. While you chose to stand on the corner and get high, I was the one who has been paying the taxes, insurance, and maintenance for years, so that alone has earned me the right to do just what I’m going to do—and that’s sell it.”

  She unlocked the car door with a chirp and dashed around him. “Grown-ass men thinking they can live somewhere for free,” she mumbled. As far as she was concerned, this little impromptu conversation was over. It was one thing to have a conversation with rational people, but she had learned over the years that the entitlement her uncle Sheldon felt clouded his judgment, and she’d be damned if she was going to
stand there and continue a conversation with a fifty-year-old man on a bicycle.

  He yelled at her as she started her engine and backed out of the parking space.

  “You need to stop acting like you all high and mighty. I told yo’ mama when she started coming back around here, looking for you, that your uppity ass wouldn’t give her the time of day. You ain’t better than me. Whether you know it or not, we cut from the same fucking cloth.”

  Payton came to a head-jerking halt; her uncle’s words involuntarily willed her leg to press on the brakes. She put the car in Park. Did she just hear him say her mother had been looking for her? She leaped out of the car and watched her uncle look back at her before he crossed Civic Drive.

  “Wait! What did you just say?”

  “Make sure you come to that corner and find me when you got my damn money,” he said. “I’ll wait then.” His voice faded over his retreating back as he peddled vigorously and disappeared out of her sight into the city park.

  Payton’s heart began to beat erratically. It had been twenty-five years since she’d seen her mother. She could pass her on the street and not even know who she was. Why fucking now? Payton cringed. The bitch wanted something, and Payton wanted no part of that. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” she yelled, her eyes drifting upward.

  “I cannot deal with this shit right now,” she screamed as she got back in her car, started the engine, and headed toward 10th Street.

  With her thoughts still stuck on her uncle Sheldon’s comments about her mother, Payton sat outside the Golden Star Market, her cell phone glued to the right side of her face. She made a call to Officer McGrady to let him know she was on her way to serve Sonja with eviction papers, and then she listened to her voice-mail messages. The first was from the real estate investor who had phoned to let her know he was prepared to close on the property next week and the second was from the contractor, who wanted to start the final work on the basement on Saturday. She sighed heavily. She desperately needed her plan to work. Otherwise this deal would fall through, and with the real estate market changing by the day, she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to find another buyer willing to pay this price. The house should bring a lot more, but considering the condition it was in and for her peace of mind, the price was fair enough.