Crazy Summer (30 page)

“Listen at this,” Red Bone said with enthusiasm and quickly took a seat.

Five minutes later, a tall, elegant, attractive female approached the booth where the guy was sitting.

While standing over him wearing a short leather dress, she leaned on the table and whispered, “Put your hand under my dress. Make sure you touch my pussy.”  That was a command.

She caught him off guard at first. Then he thought about the “no touching the dancer” rule. With dark anxious eyes, he slid his hand underneath her dress and felt a fat silky piece of meat. He even inserted his finger inside of her vagina. He wouldn’t have ever thought he’d experience something like this. Suddenly, she slapped him across his face.

“You got me fucked up!” she shouted.

Then, out of nowhere, two huge security guards who stood well over six feet tall approached the table, and the guy stood up.

“What’s the problem?” he asked, starting to sweat as his eyes darted from one to the other.

“Come with us,” one of them said.

He went without a problem. They took him through a door that had the word
Private
on the front. Inside the small room was a wooden desk with a chair behind it. The walls were made of wood paneling. One of the security guards pressed a small button located on the edge of the desk, and a third of the wall rose, revealing a hidden door. The stranger stood back with an impressed look on his face. The door opened from the other side, and Bookie stood there dressed in a black turtleneck, black jeans, and a pair of expensive dress shoes. By his appearance and demeanor, he looked like money and wasn’t nothing to be dealt with. He looked the guy up and down.

“I got it from here,” he told the security guards. Bookie then looked to the guy again. “Give me a name.” It was more of a demand, and he had better answered truthfully.

He held his hands up. “Look, partna, all I wanna do is get up out of here.”

“Who you runnin’ from?” Bookie asked.

He shifted around on his left foot and out of nowhere a handgun appeared in his hand. The guy’s eyes fell to the gun.

“Bounty hunters lookin’ fo’ me. My aunt stays here in Augusta.”

Bookie aimed the gun at his stomach. “Where you from?” He never raised his voice. Not one time.

A knock came from the door. Bookie shifted his eyes toward it and stepped out of the doorway. “Go through there,” he said. “Red will be waitin’ on the other side.”

He walked through, fading away within seconds. Bookie closed the door and went to the desk. He found the button and pressed it. The wall panel came down, and Bookie sat in the chair behind the desk.

He placed his gun in his lap and hollered, “Come in!” 

The door opened and two guys entered. They didn’t appear to be bounty hunters. Bookie examined them; they looked more like characters to him.

“How can I help the two of you?” he asked in a professional tone.

“The dude Terry Pate jus’ came in here,” the shorter of the two said, with his eyes staring coldly at Bookie.

“Whatcha lookin’ for him for?”

“Personal business.”

Bookie kept a straight face and pulled out a cigarette. “Well, it’s personal about his whereabouts.” He lit it and blew out a thin stream of smoke.

The taller of the two said, “He sold an associate of ours ten keys of flex cocaine. We were paid to handle business.”

“And your business consists of getting your money back or is it a price on his head?” Bookie asked these questions even though he didn’t know the guy, but he felt he could get something out of it. Besides, he knew Summer would approve his behavior.

“He got thirty thousand on his head. My uncle in Atlanta wants his ass.” 

Bookie smiled a little, his platinum teeth peeping from behind his lips.

“Is he worth a quarter million to y’all?”

“Look, playa,” the short guy said, “you’re really startin’ to ask too many damn questions.”

Bookie pulled his gun from his lap. A red dot danced around on the short guy’s chest as he aimed. “If I shoot you…” he said and then pointed the gun toward the other guy, “…I’ll have to shoot you, too.”

The cigarette was wagging between his lips, and his eyes were squinted to fight the secondhand smoke. He finally stood and removed the cigarette from his mouth.

“So, a quarter million?” Bookie asked.

“We ain’t got it like that, bruh.”

Bookie looked at his Rolex. He didn’t appear to be agitated nor in any hurry.

“I got a motto, and I’m sho’ y’all two are familiar with it,” he said, never lowering his gun.

“And what’s that?” the taller guy asked.

“Real recognize real, and a killer would never pull his gun if he wasn’t gonna use it.”

He pumped three bullets in each of them and sat down behind the desk to finish his cigarette. The bodies would lie there on the carpet until the club closed and then be taken out and dumped in the swamp somewhere in South Carolina before the sun came up.

Inside Summer’s office, Terry Pate and Red Bone were sitting next to one another on a leather sofa that sat in the left corner. Summer had her elbows resting on the desk with the tips of her fingers pressed together. She stared directly at Terry Pate, hoping she could see a gain in him instead of a loss. But, with her, everything was a gain. Nine months ago, Susan had found a rundown motel for sale over on Molly Pond Road. Summer had given her nine hundred thousand cash, and Susan handled the rest. Summer was an entrepreneur as well as a hustler.

A knock came from the door, and everybody’s head shifted in that direction just as Bookie walked in. He moved across the room and sat down on the edge of Summer’s desk, staring at Terry Pate.

“The first question I’ma ask you, I want the truth. If you lie to me, you die just like them lying muthafuckas back there.”

Terry Pate’s eyes widened a little and an incredulous expression cover over his face. “They’re dead?”

Bookie didn’t nod; he’d already answered that question. Summer and Red Bone didn’t say a word, but they knew the conversation was about to get heated.

“You sold them niggas ten keys of flex dope, correct?” he asked suspiciously.

Terry Pate nodded anxiously, but the pressure didn’t make him lose his cool. Bookie stood up, walked around the desk, and leaned over next to Summer to whisper in her ear.

“I want you to go home and get some rest. Let me take care of this.”

She looked up at him. She didn’t like when he spoke to her like she was his little sister. As she stood from her seat, he kissed her forehead. Summer was more than beautiful to him. The word extraordinarily would have to be placed in front.

“I got a lot of work.”

“Well, you be careful,” she said soothingly and hugged him briefly.

When Summer left, Red Bone did, too. In the office, Bookie sat behind Summer’s desk, and for the next thirty minutes, he asked Terry Pate more questions than a homicide detective. Terry Pate told Bookie everything, including where he was from, which was Albany, Georgia. However, he’d been in Atlanta for the last thirteen years, and that’s exactly what Bookie needed to hear.

The following day, Summer met with the owner of the construction company that was going to remodel the motel. Basically, the only thing the old Ramada Inn needed was a minor makeover. Maybe new walls inside a few of the rooms. Paint was needed everywhere, and she wanted flat-screen televisions in every room. She’d thought about building an extra floor for master suites, but Susan told her it wouldn’t be a good idea. When she stepped out of her Mercedes Benz SUV, she noticed the front of the building was boarded up. She shook hands with a clean-shaven white guy who looked to be somewhere between his late fifties and early sixties. He was dressed casually, but wore a white hard hat that didn’t have a scratch on it.

“How’s it going, Miss McKey?”

She smiled. “I’m fine. How are you?”

“Great,” he replied while unrolling a wide lineless piece of paper over the hood of her SUV. It was a blueprint of how the hotel would look in the next seven months. This was basically the face of the hotel, the exterior, and everything looked perfectly in place. Summer nodded her head slowly, approving without a doubt. She examined the layout again and exchanged a serious look with the owner.

“In one of these rooms, I’ll need you to build me a wall vault from the ceiling to the floor. I want it hidden, and I don’t want anybody to know about it except you. I know you’ll probably need some help, but once it’s in, I want the room numbers changed. Of course, this is under the table, and I’ll throw in an extra fifty thousand for your time.”

The guy smiled, and his tanned face blushed. “That wouldn’t be a problem at all, ma’am.”

They shook hands, and before Summer left, he gave her a tour of the inside of the hotel. She was impressed and told him that she wanted the walls a certain color. New carpet had to be put down, and her main concern was how she wanted the lobby. When she said she wanted a waterfall with palm trees, he told her it would probably cost another two hundred thousand.

Her response was, “No problem.”

*****

On the other side of town, there was a huge warehouse-style garage on Lumpkin Road. The property was private, and there was a huge twelve-foot chain link fence that made sure no outsiders could get in. Inside the garage were several cars and SUV’s. Basically, everything looked brand new. There were three Lincoln Navigators lined up next to one another. Doors were being removed from two of them, and several other guys were busy either painting or stripping the cars. This local chop shop was generating a lot of money, nearly one hundred thousand dollars a week, and that was good money for brothers who knew what they were doing.

Inside their small office, one of the brothers named Bo sat on a plaid loveseat splitting a blunt and dumping the tobacco in the trashcan. He was the oldest out of the three and basically the brains behind the whole operation. He moistened the leaf with his mouth and filled it with two lime green buds of exotic marijuana. He wrapped it quickly, but before he could fire it up, his cell phone rang, playing a song from T.I.’s album. Bo picked it up from the table and pressed the send button.

“Yeah,” he said. He heard loud music bumping in the background.

“Whazzup, nigga? Dis Big Freaky. Boy, I jus’ got somethin’ you been lookin’ fo’.”

Bo’s facial expression didn’t change. He knew Big Freaky was heavy into carjacking, but he would always bring in some bullshit. Bo lit his blunt and took a light puff. He knew the dro was potent and didn’t feel like coughing.

Exhaling, he responded, “I’m at the spot. Jus’ come see me.”