“I didn’t say anything about up and walking away.”
“So what do you have in mind?”
Marcus leaned closer to Nydia, so close that he could smell the Herbal Essence shampoo in her hair. Whispering softly in her ear, he said, “I say we get rid of her—permanently.”
Nydia pushed him away. “Are you fucking crazy?”
“Keep your voice down!” Marcus hissed.
In a lower voice, Nydia said, “Are you out of your mind? We’re not killers. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m no killer.”
“Nydia, then tell me how else we can get her off of our backs. If we disappear, find the others, and get the ticket, we’ll still have Sheila to deal with, because you can be sure she’s going to come looking for her share. And believe me, she’ll probably come with a lawyer.”
“So, it’s not like she can prove anything.”
“It doesn’t matter. The minute she brings a lawyer into the equation, our money will be held up until the matter is resolved. And you can better believe she’ll fight us tooth and nail. Do you really want to go through the drama and stress of trying to prove she didn’t put any money in?”
“I am not a damn killer, Marcus!”
“Don’t worry, you won’t be. I’ll take care of Sheila. All you have to do is distract her. Confront her about something, I’ll do the rest.”
Nydia shook her head. She’d had enough killing with the death of her husband. She wanted no part of Marcus’s plan. But she also needed that money.
“Look,” Marcus said, grabbing her by her shoulders. “I don’t know what you need the money for, but whatever it is, wouldn’t you like to have ninety million instead of thirty? All we have to do is get rid of Sheila and get that ticket.”
“And what do we do about the others? Just like Sheila, they’re not going to go down without a fight, either.”
“We’ll take care of them if and when we have to. Ninety million dollars, Nydia. Are you with me?” Marcus locked eyes with her, refusing to let her look away.
Nydia got an image of Sheila, dead and cold. Could she live with her blood on her hands? But then she got another image of her own lifeless body, courtesy of the Gianacottis. She shook her head as tears leaked from her eyes. Marcus watched her.
“Come on, Nydia,” he said evenly. “We’re losing time.”
Nydia shook her head again, and then bowed her head. She didn’t want to die. “Okay. What do you want me to do?”
“Sheila, what the hell is your problem?” Nydia said harshly as she walked back into the apartment. She and Marcus had devised a short but simple scheme to get rid of her. Nydia would walk in and yell at her about something, while Marcus followed inside, closed the door, and did the rest. She didn’t know what he was going to do, and she didn’t want to know.
“What do you mean, what am I doing? You and Marcus told me to wait here in case the others came back. Isn’t that what you said, Marcus?”
Marcus nodded as he stepped inside and closed and locked the door.
“Yeah, we said wait, not sit on your ass,” Nydia countered. She was losing strength in her voice as nervousness and guilt began to set in.
“So what else did you expect me to do?” Sheila asked.
“I don’t know. Anything. Just not sit there. Did you even look out the window to see if you spotted them anywhere?”
As Nydia did her part to keep Sheila distracted, Marcus walked around the couch slowly and found what he had been looking for. Lying on the ground was a metal paperweight of a hand holding a globe. It was a gift given to DeVante by Lisa. It was supposed to signify that the world was his to do with as he desired. Marcus picked it up discreetly, and while Nydia carried on, he walked behind Sheila.
He didn’t think about anything as he lifted his arm above his head. Before his arm came down, Nydia began to scream. As she did, Sheila spun around. “What?” was all she could get out before Marcus brought the weight down on her skull, causing it to split open.
Sheila rocked back and forth as her world faded in and out. She tried to scream for help, but found herself unable to do so. She turned slowly to face Nydia, who had dropped to the ground with tears falling from her eyes. With Marcus’s blow, she couldn’t help but think about the blows her own husband had sustained before his death.
Sheila wobbled towards her, but before she could reach Nydia, the weight came down on her head once again. Like a tree freshly chopped at its base, Sheila fell forward. She was dead before she hit the ground.
Nydia scrambled away from Sheila’s body as blood oozed from her open skull to the gray carpeting. “You killed her, you killed her, you killed her,” she said over and over, tears flowing, body trembling. “You killed her, you killed her.”
Marcus wiped off the paperweight with his sleeve, and then easily stepped over Sheila’s lifeless body and bent down in front of Nydia. He lifted her chin with his index finger and thumb, and in a very calm but callous voice said, “No, we killed her. Now let’s go and get our money.”
10
I was on my third shot of Jack Daniels and had been watching the door when Joe and Lisa walked in. I could tell by the look on Lisa’s pretty face that the décor and atmosphere of Jimmy G’s was a shock to her. Granted, had I come up the way Lisa did, the place—the dim lighting; the marijuana-laced air; the prostitute giving head to a customer while her pimp watched from the side; the man, drunk and passed out in his own dribble of spit; the small group snorting cocaine openly against the far wall—might have fucked with me, too. But I didn’t come up like she did, so this was nothing to me. I’ve been an orphan since my sixth birthday. My parents died from AIDS and drugs. My father caught AIDS from needle sharing. My mom died of an overdose shortly after his death. With nowhere to turn, I made my way to the city and became a child of the streets, and started hustling by the time I was ten. Because I had the necessary street smarts and was cool under pressure, the street dealers allowed me to become a player in their game; I became a lookout on the corners and eventually sold drugs to friends who came by and gave secret signals when the cops came around. I was arrested only once and thrown in a juvenile detention center. I found a way to escape that, though, and headed back to my street family.
I started using coke out of curiosity. I was sixteen and wanted to know what it was about the magical powder that made people give up their souls. But more importantly, I wanted to know what it was about it that made my parents give up their lives. I never planned on getting hooked, but the high I was on after snorting my first line was so damned powerful, that when I came back down to reality, I had to take another trip. I lost all respect from my “family” soon after that, and when I couldn’t give up the white angel, I found myself once again without a home. I was on the verge of death when the cops picked me up. I wanted to die, and had the judge not given me the ultimatum, I would have died and never met Joe, who is now the only family I claim.
“I’m glad you got my meaning,” I said as Joe and Lisa approached me.
“Yeah, I got it,” Joe said.
I looked at Joe as he watched me. I could see the subtle anger in his glare. I couldn’t blame him. “I tried, but I couldn’t betray our friendship,” I said evenly.
“Glad to know you couldn’t.”
Joe sat down on the stool beside me and ordered a shot of gin for himself, and nothing for Lisa. He must have been thinking that out of the three of us to be sober, it should be her. I looked at Lisa. She watched me with angry eyes full of hurt. I had betrayed her. “I’m sorry,” I started, but she put up her hand for me to be quiet.
“I know the odds are probably slim, but is there anywhere in this dump that we can go to have a private conversation?”
Jimmy looked up after her comment, and by the disgruntled look on his face, it was obvious that he’d taken offense to her description of his establishment. I reluctantly turned to him. “Jimmy…is the back room occupied?”
Jimmy looked from Lisa to me, and then
back to Lisa again, no doubt wondering if he should indulge me. Finally, with his gaze still fixed on her, he slid a key down the bar toward me. “It is now.”
When I closed and bolted the door, I turned around and was met by a heavy slap from Lisa’s palm. I didn’t react, although it stung like hell. Lisa tried to slap me again, but I stopped her in midswing. “You asshole,” she snapped. “I can’t believe you were going to cheat me, too. I could understand Marcus, Nydia, and Sheila, but me? I’m the mother of your child, damn it!”
“I’m sorry,” I tried again, but like the last time, she wouldn’t let me get any further.
“I know we weren’t anything official, but DeVante, whether you like it or not, the sex meant something to me. I had feelings for you. It didn’t matter what your job was. I didn’t care about your demons of the past and I was willing to help you with the demons you have now. Yes, as much as people wouldn’t agree, I was falling for your ass. I thought you cared about me, too. I didn’t think I was the only one whose feelings were being flipped upside down. But it’s obvious now that all I ever was to you was nothing more than just another fuck!”
Before she could say another word, I pulled her into me and planted my mouth on hers. As our lips parted, I slid my tongue to meet hers, and while we kissed I ran my hands down the curves of her back and cupped her behind, squeezing it lightly. When we parted, Lisa looked at me and said, “You were going to cheat me.”
I caressed her cheek. “I know,” I said.
She took my hand and placed it on her stomach. “This child is yours.”
“I know,” I said slowly.
Lisa grabbed my crotch and squeezed in a not so loving way. “I should hate you for what you were going to do to me, to our baby.”
I grimaced. “I know.”
She mercifully let me go and kissed me again. “No matter what happens with us, I want my share of the money.”
“I know,” I said, running my finger along the front of her crotch.
She took my hand and guided it down her pants for my fingers to toy with her. “I want you.”
“I know,” I said, playing with her wet pool.
We slowly dropped to the floor and removed our clothing. I ran my tongue from her neck to her vagina as she lay back on the linoleum tiles. With her legs spread wide for me, I dove into her pool headfirst and nibbled, licked, sucked, and pulled every inch of her. Lisa gasped as I took her to the point of explosion. After she released, she laid me back and returned the favor by doing her own version of nibbling, sucking, and biting, stopping just before I exploded. “I want you inside of me,” she said, sitting atop of me.
When she eased down on me, I said, “I know.”
As she rode me fiercely, making sure to punish me for my crime, I took her breasts in my hand and ran my tongue around her erect nipples. Lisa moaned while she reprimanded me, and she didn’t stop until she was satisfied I had learned my lesson and exploded. Breathing heavily, she looked down at me. “We need to talk to Joe.”
“I know,” I said.
After dressing, we rejoined Joe at the bar. He’d already downed two shots of gin and was sipping a Heineken when we appeared from the back.
“Only because you’d have to pass me to escape did I not worry,” he said.
“I told you, you don’t have to worry about me betraying you,” I said, sitting beside him.
He looked at me. “You had thoughts before. That’s enough for me.”
I didn’t say anything, because he was right. As Lisa sat down beside me, Joe asked, “Are we all straight?”
Lisa nodded her head. “We straight,” I said.
“Good,” Joe said, smiling. “Because we got three people who we ain’t straight with and by now they must be realizing that, if they haven’t already.”
“What are we going to do about them?” Lisa asked.
“Only one thing we can do,” Joe said.
“Avoid them at all costs,” I finished for him.
11
After Nydia finished throwing up in the toilet bowl, she and Marcus made a quick escape from DeVante’s apartment, leaving Sheila’s body on the floor to eventually be discovered. Marcus had never committed a murder before, but he now understood the thrill behind the act. It was a powerful feeling to take a life, an ultimate high. It was almost equivalent to the high he got from snorting cocaine.
After Nydia vomited, Marcus went into the bathroom, closed the door, and snorted a few lines of the cocaine he still had. The high from murder was good, but he still needed the fix. With blood on his hands and coke in his system, he was ready to find his money.
“What are we going to do now?” Nydia asked. She couldn’t believe how her life had changed over a matter of a few hours as she went from being desperate for money to save her own life, to being an accomplice to murder. She couldn’t get away from the sight of Sheila’s head being split open, her blood spilling to the carpet, her body becoming still and lifeless. She wanted desperately to take a shower to wash off the blood that she felt all over her, yet wasn’t. “Marcus, what are we going to do?”
Marcus stopped walking and turned and faced her. Since leaving DeVante’s place, she’d been getting on his nerves with her sobbing, her moaning, her constant questions. “We’re going to find the others.”
“But how? We don’t know where they went.”
“I told you I think I know.”
“You think you know? Marcus, we just murdered Sheila. In a few hours, someone is going to find her body, and when they do…”
“When they do, they will be looking for DeVante. That’s why we left her body there and got rid of the evidence, remember?”
“But if the police start looking for him, that’ll make it harder for us.”
“Listen, Nydia, you need to stop asking me all of these damn questions. By the time anyone finds Sheila’s body, we’ll have found DeVante and the ticket. All we need to concern ourselves with is getting that ticket, getting our money, and then disappearing ourselves. Don’t worry about the police or anyone linking us to Sheila.”
“But—”
“But nothing!” Marcus yelled viciously. “No more goddamned buts! Just keep your mouth shut and follow me if you want your share of the money. Because frankly, I’m getting sick of all of your damned questions.”
“What are you trying to say, Marcus? That you’ll kill me, too?”
Marcus stared at Nydia, and in that brief moment, he wished he hadn’t thrown the paperweight away. “Look, Nydia, I’m not talking about killing you, okay. I just want my money. Now it’s after two in the morning and there’s only one place I can think of where DeVante and the others could be. Can we please just go there and get what belongs to us?”
“I don’t want anyone else’s blood on my hands,” Nydia said.
Marcus nodded. “I want that ticket, Nydia, and I want that money.”
He turned around and walked away without another word, while Nydia followed with the feeling that more blood would be spilled before the sun came up. As she contemplated that real and frightening possibility, Marcus mulled over what she had asked him: would he kill her, too? He looked up toward the pale moon glowing in the black, starless sky, and looked for the man in the moon, but all he saw was his own reflection smiling sinisterly down at him. He shook his head to get the vision away and focus on the matter at hand. Jimmy G’s—that’s where he figured DeVante, Joe and Lisa would be. It was the only place for someone to go at this time to hide, get drugs, get drunk, or get laid. He had no doubt in his mind that he would find them there.
12
“Joe, Marcus is an addict. We need to get out of here, because I have a feeling he’s gonna show up.” I had been thinking about that and a bunch of other things while we sat in silence. Heavy on my mind was Lisa and her pregnancy.
Like her, I didn’t know what was going to happen with us, either. I did know that I was falling in love with her and that scared me. Falling in love was something I’d trie
d to avoid all my life because to fall in love meant that I had to change. And I never wanted to do that. Of course, I never really had a reason to until now. I was going to be a father. My life was no longer my own to waste away. That’s why I stopped downing the shots of vodka. I was going to be a father and I had to start sometime. May as well be now.
I looked at Lisa from time to time. She was lost in her own thoughts, but I’m sure we were thinking along the same lines. Joe, too, was silent. Although I never told him, I envy him. I envy the strength with which he was able to get off the drugs and not go running to another. I envy the way he turned his life around, got married, and had kids. Those were all things I never thought I would be able to do. I guess I saw myself as a drunken janitor for the rest of my life, and I never saw an end to the cycle of sweeping, scraping, cleaning, mopping, and then drowning my sorrows away until I passed out, only to begin the process again when I awoke.
But with Lisa sitting beside me, for the first time the possibility of change seemed tangible. Maybe my turn had come to be happy and free from my demons. Maybe I could turn out just like Joe. Maybe with sixty million dollars I would no longer need the alcohol and I could move on. Move on in a positive direction with my life; move on without hassles; maybe even move on with Lisa and our child.
“We need to get out of here now,” I said again.
“And go where?” Joe asked.
“What about your place?” Lisa suggested.
“My place? Why not yours?”
“Because,” Lisa said, “everyone’s car is still by me, so we can’t go there.”
I agreed. “She’s right, man. Your place is the best option.”
“The best option? How you figure that? I got a wife and two boys at home. How’s it gonna look with you and Lisa rolling in there with me past two in the morning? How do I explain that to Shantal?”
A Dollar and A Dream Page 17