“That’s all it’s worth to you? I would’ve thought demons would be more materialistic.”
“It’s a fair comparison. I prefer a life of luxury, but I can do without it freely. Not every one of my victims has been someone of wealth and power. I have taken many a turn in the guise of a poor peasant. Money is merely a means to an end, and I have power, age and experience that mortals do not. I can always acquire more.”
“I just don’t want it to go to my head. I’m already being spoiled beyond anything rational as it is just with sex. You want to add money to that, too? I’ll go nuts.”
“If greed was one of your driving motivations, I think we would be having a very different conversation, Alex. Perhaps over a dead man’s bank accounts.”
“Who says I won’t become greedy over time?”
“Anything’s possible, but again, I rather doubt it. You do not strike me as the materialistic type. Many people want only enough money to provide general security and some small measure of amusement, and are satisfied with that. They simply don’t get talked about. You live in a city where the wealthy generally don’t flaunt their fortune. Seattle has more than its share of millionaires, yet this is not a city of ostentation.”
Alex thought about it and shrugged. “You said I wouldn’t object to your money. Is it legal?”
“More or less,” Lorelei nodded. “I don’t exactly have a birth certificate or social security number. A government accountant might find some discrepancies in my taxes. The actual money comes from legitimate business…more or less. Again, nothing you would object to, or I would confess it right now. Leave this matter to me as another secret?” she asked, again very sweetly. She kissed his neck.
He swallowed. “How many secrets do you want to keep?”
He felt her smile against his neck. “Only the harmless and entertaining sort.”
Alex couldn’t object to that. “Alright. But where are we going, anyway? You said downtown, but not where.”
Lorelei leaned back thoughtfully. “I would suggest a few boutiques, but they may take more time than we want to spend. We also haven’t decided how to present our relationship to others. Pacific Place should be fine for now.”
* * *
“Oooooh, shit, man! Look! Shit!”
“Fuck-what? What?” J’Von grimaced. The jostling hand on his shoulder made him squeeze his Big Mac too hard, spurting goop out one side. He quickly checked his saggy pants or his Air Jordans for special sauce.
“That bitch right there!” Tony continued, pointing at the convertible waiting at the light. J’Von and Mike both looked over across the street and the car.
“Damn, now that’s a piece of ass,” Mike observed sagely.
“Yeah, but you gotta go grabbin’ me like that?” J’Von said, his expression still pointedly disapproving. The last thing he wanted was a stain running down his pants all night. It annoyed J’Von that Tony didn’t see his intimidating stare, too.
“That’s the bitch who fucked Damon to death last year!” Tony said.
J’Von’s scowl only deepened. “What?” he said in a high-pitched, skeptical tone. But Tony was running off already, headed up the block to watch the car as it made a left turn and headed around the block. “Crazy fuckin’ cracker,” he muttered. J’Von sometimes took a lot of heat from other friends for keeping a white boy like Tony around, but he stood his ground on it. He and Tony had been tight since they’d been thrown out of middle school together. J’Von was bigger than all that racial bullshit.
Only sometimes his friend would go acting like a crazy white boy in front of other people. J’Von knew it wasn’t because Tony was white; he knew crazy black folks, too. But that didn’t make it any easier to defend Tony when he ran off after cars claiming that one of the occupants had killed a homey with her snatch.
“Your boy’s trippin’, man,” Mike chuckled, shaking his head.
“Yeah, don’t I know,” J’Von muttered, and then called out, “Tony! Man, get back here!” He got a good bite out of his Big Mac as Tony jogged back. Settling whatever was up Tony’s ass might take until his burger cooled, and that would irritate J’Von further.
“They just went into the mall. That’s her, I’m sure of it.”
“What the fuck are you talkin’ about?” Mike asked.
“Last year? Like, at that New Year’s party, right? It was just after Tyrel got popped by the cops for bustin’ a cap in-”
“We know,” J’Von said firmly. He also knew it was really Damon who’d been the shooter. Tyrel was nowhere near it and would never have shot anyone in his life. But there was no telling the cops that without ratting out Damon, and nobody wanted to be a snitch-even if it meant Tyrel went to prison. Everyone had pressured Damon to come clean, all to no avail. Then Damon turned up dead a few days later. “What about it?”
“Look, I know you was in lock-up at the time, but at the party there was this fine ass girl. She hooked up with Damon-told his girl, Kimesha to sit down and shut up and she did, man, his girl shut right the fuck up-and then they just went upstairs to Damon’s apartment and they started goin’ at it, man. Fuckin’ screamin’, bed makin’ all kinda noise, like, ‘Oh! Oh! Fuck me, Damon! Oh shit!’”
“Tony!” J’Von frowned, “Don’t make me slap you.”
Tony waved off the threat, but he calmed down. “Right, so they were up there the rest of the night, right? Only I had left my phone up in Damon’s apartment before the party. So I had to go back there. I hear ‘em still bangin’ away the next damn day, man. I didn’t wanna interrupt, ‘cuz that’s not cool, so I left.
“But Kimesha? She interrupted, man. Like a lot. Or tried to, anyway. She went shoutin’ and knockin’ at that door like three different times that day and the next, she said, and she kept hearing the same shit, too. More poundin’, more fuckin’. She’s all yellin’ at them through the door an’ neither one of ‘em stop for nothin’.”
Mike seemed to find it amusing. J’Von’s poor, neglected Big Mac made it hard for him to enjoy the story. Instead, he just stared at Tony. He’d heard something of this before, but not in detail. All he knew was that Damon hooked up with some porn star type bitch at New Year’s and then turned up dead in his apartment a few days later.
“An’ then the next day, it’s like day three now, I go by his apartment again ‘cause he ain’t answerin’ his phone, an’ I still hear fuckin’, but I don’t hear Damon no more. Not like I did before. Just a bit of wheezing or something.”
Mike laughed and made a mimicking motion and wheezing noise to give his impression of an elderly man giving it to a woman from behind. He smacked an imaginary ass with a shaking, arthritic hand.
“And then the next day Kimesha went by again and smelled somethin’ awful in his apartment, and got the landlord… and Damon was stone cold dead, motherfucker.”
J’Von sighed. “So?”
“So, man, that bitch fucked him to death.” Mike burst out laughing again, but Tony was serious. “And nobody saw Damon’s stash or any of the money he’d been sitting on after that, remember?”
J’Von nodded. He remembered that part. He didn’t know about this story of Damon’s death, though, because nobody knew much. Nobody had asked Kimesha for her side of things, because nobody liked that angry bitch anyway. The one silver lining in Damon’s death was that Kimesha didn’t come around anymore.
“Wait, what money?” Mike asked, his laughter fading.
“Damon was movin’ a lotta coke when he died,” J’Von said quietly. “Movin’, or maybe had already moved it. But nobody knows if the cops got the money an’ just didn’t say nothin’, or if someone else grabbed it.”
J’Von looked at Mike and waited for the wheels to turn in his head. Neither J’Von nor Mike believed that Damon had died from too much pussy. That was just stupid. But the notion that a woman as hot as that one was in his apartment looking less for sex and more for cash was believable.