“What was your father like?”
He shifted to face her. He tapped a cigarette out of a pack, lit it. He offered one to her, and she declined.
He blew out a wisp of smoke, gazed at the ceiling. “Daddy was a small-time hustler, he sold whatever was hot-jewelry, TVs, phones, whatever-bounced around from the joint to our crib or some other woman’s crib, whoever he was messing around on her with at the time. Didn’t help her with me or my little sister. He was a real positive role model. You know I’m named after him?”
“Is that so? I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, they left that out of my profile. Sort of pisses me off, but I don’t know why it does, ’cause my old man’s been dead for ten years, and when he was alive I hardly ever talked to him anyway.”
“What profile are you referring to, Leon?”
“Damn, C-Note’s really kept you in the woods, hasn’t he?” He squinted at her through the haze of smoke. “I’m on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. Got featured on the TV show, post offices, the whole nine. You’re looking at a celebrity, baby girl.”
Her heartbeat skipped. She wondered if he was lying, but the pride in his voice led her to believe that he was probably telling the truth.
Jesus. Had Corey known this earlier and not said anything to her? Why would he have kept it secret?
“You’ve overheard some of my chats with your hubby,” Leon said. “You’ve gotta know by now that he’s got some skeletons buried twenty thousand leagues deep. You aren’t that stupid.”
She had come to that conclusion, but she didn’t see the point of discussing it with Leon. Later, when the time was right, she would have a very frank conversation with Corey about his past with this man.
“You said your father is deceased,” she said. “How about your mother?”
“She’s dead,” he said flatly. “She OD’d twenty-some years ago, she was a heroin addict, used some bad shit that got her sent to Sheol for good. There won’t be any kissing and making up in this lifetime.”
“Growing up with an abusive parent can be difficult on a child,” she said. “So often, the child questions what he did to deserve such treatment. He worries that it’s his fault.”
“What if it is?” He stared at her. “Maybe he isn’t worth shit, like she told him every day. Maybe he was born bad.”
“Children aren’t born bad, Leon.”
“No?” He smiled. “I was six when I stole something for the first time. There was this mom-and-pop store on the corner where my mama would always send me to get her smokes. This one day, I got it in my head that I was going to steal a pack of Twinkies. You remember Twinkies?”
“I remember them. I used to love them until I found out how quickly they can add on the pounds.”
He gave her a small smile. “So I put like three packs of them under my shirt, right? I go up to the register to get my mama’s cigarettes, and they fall out of my shirt, right in front of the Pakistani guy who owned the place. He tossed me out of there on my ear and told my old man what I did-this was one of those times when my dad was living with us.”
“How did your dad respond?”
“Daddy wore my ass out with a clothes hanger. Told me, ‘The next time you try to steal something, Junior, your black ass better not get caught!’”
Leon laughed so hard that tears squirted from his eyes. Simone offered a thin smile.
“That’s quite a story,” she said.
“I’ve got a million of them.” He took a scrap of paper out of his pocket, folded it into a tiny bowl, and tapped ashes into it. “You’re a good listener. I dig that.”
“It’s easy to listen to someone who has so many interesting things to say.”
The moment the words left her mouth, she feared might have gone over the line and come across as insincere, but he winked at her.
“Flattery will get you everywhere with an important man like me. I’ve got a lot of charm, a ton of smarts, to have been born bad, don’t you think?”
“For the record, I don’t believe you were born bad,” she said. “I believe your environment played a major factor in the choices you’ve made. If a child is constantly told that he’s a bad seed, and punished for it, it’s often inevitable that he’ll grow to make decisions that reflect those low expectations. Children are like blank tablets-we can write anything on them that we wish.”
Leon was nodding. “Like blank tablets, huh? So I had the misfortune to have some fucked up shit written on me, then?”
“But those words that were written so long ago can sometimes be revised, if you will.”
“Revised? We’re sort of like works in progress, I take it. Like the novel I’ve been working on for the past ten years.”
“All of us are like that, yes,” she said, convinced that she had actually gotten through to him on a meaningful level. “None of us are irredeemable, with the possible exception of those suffering from severe mental illness, and even they can be assisted to some degree with proper therapy and perhaps medication.”
“Like my partner, Billy.” He tapped ash into the paper tray and snickered. “Let me tell you, that dude needs serious therapy and meds.”
At the thought of his pervert accomplice in the bedroom with Jada, Simone’s jaw tightened.
Leon blinked at her distress. “Oh, hey, sorry about that. Your little munchkin’s fine. I’m serious, Billy won’t touch her, he won’t dare cross me.”
“I thought Corey was going to pay you the money and we’d go free. Why are we still here?”
Anger twitched across his face, and she regretted that she’d asked the question.
“Why don’t we ask Corey?” Leon said. He checked his watch, and flipped out his cell phone. “It’s about time I tell him the rules have changed.”
42
With a new vehicle and a wallet of cash, Corey was back on the road.
His first priority was to eat. He’d eaten nothing all day, and though Otis had offered him dinner, he’d thought himself too nervous to hold anything down; besides, he didn’t want to loiter too long at Otis’s place and risk bringing the cops to his door.
But he had to eat something, unsettled stomach or not. If he didn’t get food in him soon, he was going to spin off the wave of adrenaline that had been keeping him going since that morning, and he’d be useless when the next development-and something was going to happen soon, of that he had no doubt-came down the pike.
He found a Chick-fil-A restaurant on Camp Creek Parkway, not far from Otis’s place. Staring at the drive-through menu, he thought wistfully about what Simone and Jada had liked to order on those rare occasions when they dined there. Emotion clogged his throat.
It’s not as if they’re dead, he reminded himself.
He bought two chicken sandwiches, a large order of waffle fries, and the biggest Coke they had. He didn’t know when he might have the willingness or chance to eat again.
He parked in the corner of the lot farthest from the building, front end angled toward the nearby exit, in case a cop got too curious and he had to peel out of there. Although the FBI might not have forwarded his description to every police department in metro Atlanta, he saw no reason to take risks. At a time like this, a healthy dose of paranoia was necessary.
The interior of Otis’s truck was as scrupulously clean as his house. Corey opened the bag of food and began to eat, taking extra care not to spill anything on the seats or floor.
The cell phone rang, and at the almost same time, his BlackBerry hummed. Startled, he dropped a handful of fries onto the floor. He swore softly and went for the cell phone.
“Yeah?” he said.
“You’ve got quite a lady here,” Leon said. He spoke slower, softer, and Corey figured that he was in a temporary down phase. Back when they would hang together, Leon’s hyperactivity often would be followed by prolonged periods when he would do little more than sleep and lounge around aimlessly, as if he were a kid crashing from a sugar rush. “We’ve been having ourselves a nice little chitchat.”