Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 139147 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139147 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
“You got it, sister.”
“Jesus,” Cap said under his breath.
“I like your mom’s Afro,” I told him.
He stared down at me and he did this a long time.
When the elevator doors opened, he murmured, “Christ, you’re something.”
“Is that good?”
“Absolutely.”
I smiled.
Cap walked us to Luna’s car.
TWELVE
SIDE EYE
“Okay, this is all kinds of skeevy. How do men do this?” Luna asked, a shudder in her voice I felt in my crawling flesh at what we were currently occupied in doing.
“Because there are a ton of men who are skeevy,” I answered.
We were in a nondescript, silver Honda Accord. It had a few years on it, but not many miles. The interior was neat as a pin. And we’d found a note in the glove box that said there were stun guns and Tasers under the two front seats.
We’d checked this out, and it was true, and the stun gun was a much better model than mine.
By the by, the Mercedes was pimp.
A black, fully loaded S-Class with tan leather interior.
The. Total. Shit.
I was coming to realize the “we” Clarice had noted meant there was an actual “we” behind all Clarice was offering.
She was an attorney, but this was seriously bankrolled. No rinky-dink, bargain-basement stun guns, no A-Class Mercedes. Even our flip-style burner phones had color screens. I knew nothing about burner phones, but I suspected that was a cut above.
Cap had eventually texted me and told me he was taking Shirleen out to dinner that night after their team meeting, so we had time to look for Divinity.
Therefore, that was what we were doing.
I wasn’t sure if I wasn’t invited to this dinner because Shirleen wanted to have a few words with her son in private after she met the lunatic he was dating, or if he was protecting me from further emotionally extreme hits coming at me so soon after the weekend we shared, and before I was going to see my father.
I’d ask him when he got to my place that night.
Luna and I had spent some time at a table in the back of SC after our shift ended going through the envelope Clarice had given us.
In it was an info sheet, which included the number Clarice had mentioned to text if we needed anything, the numbers to our two burners, plus a secure email address we were to use to send anything we discovered.
Also, a bunch of 8x10 pictures of men clipped to reports that included their names, ages, addresses, places of business, and no other way to put it, rap sheets.
Because they all had them.
Bar none.
Just by memory, I could match some of them to the descriptions I’d jotted down of guys I’d been watching that I put on my wall. I’d never taken pictures because I was too much of a scaredy-cat. I didn’t want to get caught doing it. Before we got their dossiers, one thing I knew for certain about all of them, none of them were men who wanted a strange woman in a bright-yellow Juke snapping photos of them.
And he was among them.
The one that gave me the super-bad feeling was named Cyrus Gibbons.
He’d done two stints in prison, one for pimping the women (not of their volition) that worked at his strip club in Nebraska. One for extorting money and sex from some women who worked at the same kind of establishment in Denver, though he didn’t own that club.
This wasn’t good, and it made me suspect him all the more of being involved somehow, because the dude obviously had some screw loose and thus carried zero respect for the fairer sex. He used them however he wanted in order to get whatever he wanted from them. The end.
But the Denver angle gave me an even worse feeling.
The US of A was a pretty vast space with lots of cities in it.
This guy having been caught committing a heinous crime in Cap’s hometown was a coincidence I didn’t like.
Luna and I discussed this, and since the US of A was indeed a vast space with hundreds of millions of people living in it, it was highly likely it actually was a coincidence. Not to mention, Gibbons had gone down for that Denver stuff thirteen years ago, when Cap was seventeen. So he probably didn’t know anything about it. Further, we weren’t going out to try to find Cyrus Gibbons.
Therefore, we decided to go forth with our plan to talk to Divinity, and then maybe, when I told Cap about all this, I’d mention it to him.
And that was what we were doing.
Cruising Roosevelt, looking for Divinity.
And it felt skeevy.
We’d stopped a couple of times to talk to a few ladies of the evening, but we learned really quickly not to show her mugshot to them. They were friendly enough on approach, but they got hinky when you showed a mugshot.