The Man in 3B (25 page)

“Uh, yes. It’s new on the market. Are you interested in buying?” She was already reaching for her business cards. I decided to stop her before she tried to waste my time with a long-winded sales pitch.

“Actually, I know the owner, and I had no idea they were selling,” I said bluntly.

She tucked the card back in her purse, not bothering to hide the disappointment on her face. “Oh, yeah, well, Mrs. Melinsky wanted it on the market as soon as possible.”

“Mrs. Melinsky?” Who the hell was Mrs. Melinsky? “I’m talking about Cain, the guy that lives here.”

“Oh, you mean the gentleman who was leasing the home. He’s not here.”

“Leasing?” That was news to me, and it wasn’t good news. I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. “He didn’t own this place?”

“Oh no.” She shooed her hand at me. “He was just leasing the house. He was a good tenant, though. Unfortunately, he had to leave town. Something about his job. Paid up his lease three days ago and moved out.”

“Moved out?” I almost lost my lunch. This couldn’t be happening. Cain wouldn’t do this to me. We were kindred spirits, right? I was still trying hard to convince myself that everything was going to be okay.

“Yes, that’s what Mrs. Melinsky said. He moved out, and he didn’t leave a forwarding address.”

Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!
I had to get into that house.

“You know what? I think I am interested in this property.” Without any real plan in my head, I started walking toward the front door, my heart beating ninety miles per hour. “Anyway, can I see the inside?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” the woman shouted, following me. I couldn’t see her face, but she probably had a big-ass grin.

She opened the door and then stepped aside, allowing me to enter. My heart dropped into my stomach when I walked in and saw my worst nightmare come true. The house was completely empty, not even a piece of paper left behind on the floor.

“Now, this is five bedrooms, four baths…”

Ignoring the woman, I raced straight to the study, where I felt some relief when I saw one picture still hanging on the wall. Rushing over to it, I pushed the painting aside and entered the combination to the safe.

“Shit!” I roared after finding the safe as empty as the house. “It’s gone. Goddammit, it’s gone.”

“What exactly were you expecting to find?” I was startled to hear the woman behind me. I’d almost forgotten she was there.

I shook my head and said quietly, “Nothing. Nothing at all.” I brushed by her, leaving the safe wide open.

“Does this mean you’re not interested in the house?” she called out as I left.

I dialed Cain’s number as soon as I got outside.

“Hello,” Cain answered.

I let out a sigh of relief. “Cain, thank God. Where are you? I’m at the house. They say it’s not yours.”

“Well, Avery my boy, technically it isn’t. It was a lease to own, but I decided I didn’t want to own it anymore.”

“Okay, fine, I can live with that,” I said calmly. Cain always seemed to have that effect on me. I was sure he had some plan to fix this that he hadn’t told me about yet. “Where are you?”

“I’m with the girls. We’re headed out of the country to a place where there aren’t any extradition laws to the United States. I suggest you do the same. The police are taking this whole thing a little more seriously than I would have thought. It seems they feel holding someone against their will and locking them in a broom closet is kidnapping.”

I was a little bothered that he had left without telling me and now he wasn’t inviting me to join them, but whatever. I was a grown man, and I wasn’t about to start whining about it. “No problem, Cain. I’ll get out of town. All I need is my share of the money.”

His answer shocked me. “You’ve already gotten everything that’s coming to you, man.”

“What?” I yelled into the phone.

“If you recall, you were the one who insisted we had to rob your former employer. I told you it was a bad idea, but no, you had to get revenge on them.”

I said nothing because he was speaking the truth, but I had an idea where he was going with this.

“Well, it seems your insistence that we rob your former employer has brought the heat down on us, forcing me to leave the country. And that, my friend, is going to cost you your share of the money,” he said, his voice no longer sounding calm, but rather seething with anger.

“Are you crazy? We’re talking about damn near a half a million dollars. I earned that money. I want what’s mine.”

I heard him laugh. “If it was yours, you’d have it and I wouldn’t. Now, like I was saying, I’m heading out of the country, and if you were smart, you’d do the same.”

“With what?” I asked, no longer yelling, because I knew it would do me no good. He wasn’t going to change his mind. It was definitely every man for himself at this point. “Cain, man, I’m broke. I gave all my cash to my ex so she’d sign the divorce papers.” I beat my hand on the steering wheel. “You have all the rest of my money.” The stress was so bad that I was on the verge of tears.

“Well, Avery,” he said in this cool, detached voice, “I guess you only have three choices: You can turn yourself into the cops, leave the country like me, or take your black ass back to that bridge and jump. Whatever you choose, it was nice knowing you.”

“Nice knowing me?” I repeated. Did he really think I’d let him get away with this? If I was going down, I was damn sure gonna take him with me.

At least that’s what I was about to threaten him with before he said, “Oh, and for the record, my real name isn’t Cain, and you won’t find one fingerprint in that house.” With that, he disconnected the call.

“Cain!” I yelled, still holding the phone to my ear.

Son of a bitch!
I threw the phone down on the seat next to me.

What the hell was I supposed to do now? If Cain had skipped town, then things must be really fucked up. What if he knew more than he was telling me? What if the cops were closing in even as I sat in front of Cain’s house?

I looked up and noticed the real estate agent standing in front of her car. She was staring at my car and talking on her phone. That scared the shit out of me. For all I knew, she was calling the cops. I threw the car into drive and got away from that house as fast as I could. I didn’t know where I was going, but one thing was for sure—I had to find a way to get some money in a hurry and get the hell out of New York.

I’d been tossing and turning all night, unable to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time before I woke up again, mostly from sexual frustration. It was even harder knowing that Daryl was across the hall with the prescription I needed to calm me down and put me to sleep. It would have been so easy to get up, knock on his door, follow him to his room, and lay down in his bed, but I couldn’t do that. Unbeknownst to Daryl, I’d placed him on pussy punishment for not telling me the entire truth about his relationship with Krystal. Don’t get me wrong. He did come clean, and technically he really didn’t lie. He just omitted the truth, but he also had to be taught a lesson if we were going to move forward. The problem was that I was suffering too.

Four days seemed like a reasonable amount of time to punish him, and we were at the end of the third already. I was thinking about granting him—or perhaps myself—an early parole. By three o’clock in the morning, I’d fully committed to his release. I slipped into my robe and snatched my keys off the nightstand, then headed out of the bedroom.

I almost jumped out of my skin when I heard a rustling and saw a shadow move near the living room sofa. The shadow rose, and I grabbed the lamp off the nearby coffee table to protect myself. I just prayed that whoever had broken into my apartment didn’t have a gun.

“You better get the hell out of my apartment. I’ve already called the police,” I lied threateningly, hoping that would be enough to scare away the intruder.

“Connie, please. It’s just me, Avery.”

It took me a minute to get myself together and make sense of what was going on: my estranged husband was hiding out in the dark in my living room. I flipped on the light switch.

“What the hell are you doing here? And how’d you get into my house?” I shouted. I could have killed him for scaring me like that. “I changed the locks.”

“I lived here for almost four years,” he said. “You think I don’t know how to break into my own house?” He looked in the direction of a window that faced the back of the building. “How many times have I told you to lock that window? All I had to do was climb the fire escape.”

He had yelled at me about that at least a thousand times during our marriage, but that still didn’t make it right for him to come through the window in the middle of the night. This was
my
home now, not his. “So you broke into my apartment for what, to prove a point?” I lifted the lamp like a bat.

“No, no,” he said, holding up his hands in a defensive posture. “I needed to talk to you, and with everything that’s going on with the cops, I didn’t wanna take a chance and walk through the front door.” His eyes kept shooting around the room, as if he half expected the cops to jump out of their hiding place at any minute. “I was trying to keep the heat off of you. But I also didn’t want to scare you, so I thought I’d just crash on the couch until morning when you woke up.”

“And you didn’t think waking up to you sleeping on my couch would scare me? What if I had company? Daryl could have been here.”

“I saw the pretty boy staring out his window like he’d lost his best friend, so I knew he wasn’t over here. And if he had been—well, I have something for his ass.” The smirk on his face was eerie.

I stood there staring at Avery. It was like looking at a stranger. Long gone was the man I fell in love with and married. The man sitting across from me was like a piece of steel, cold and hardened.

“Avery Mack, what have you gotten yourself into?” I was still holding the lamp, but I lowered it to my side.

“Over my head, Connie. I’ve gotten in over my head, and now I’m just trying to keep my head above water. Did the cops really have a search warrant?” he asked, walking over and standing close to me like he thought he might get some sympathy. Not a chance.

“Sure did,” I said flatly. “And they tore my place apart when they executed it.”

He lowered his head. “I’m sorry. I really am. I’m sorry about everything, Connie.”

I rolled my eyes. Of course he was sorry—now that he was in trouble. He was probably just looking for a place to hide. The sad thing was, the old me would have taken him back, no questions asked. The new me, however, was demanding an explanation.

“Is it true what the cops are saying about you, Avery?”

He took a long breath and hesitated. I wasn’t about to let him off the hook, though.

I put my hand on my hip and said, “You can either answer me or you can leave now.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “What exactly did they tell you?”

I looked up at his dead eyes and shook my head. It was obvious Avery was fishing to see how much the police knew. He had no intention of telling me the truth if I didn’t already know it.

“They said you robbed Cheap Sam’s Furniture and you’ve been involved in other armed robberies. They’ve got a task force just for you.”

“Shit!” He turned away from me as if he needed a moment to himself.

“Avery?” I walked around so that I could be face-to-face with him. “It’s true, isn’t it? What they said is true.” His silence was his answer, but I wanted him to say it. “Answer me, dammit.”

“Connie, please don’t ask me questions unless you’re ready to deal with the answers. The less you know the better.”

Now it was my turn to go silent for a minute. When I finally spoke up, I told him, “You gotta turn yourself in or they’re gonna kill you.”

“You can’t kill someone who’s already dead.” I wanted to ask
what that meant, but he continued, saying, “I’m leaving the country anyway. Gonna get a fresh start, and I want you to come with me.” He took a step closer. “I need you to come with me.”

“Huh?” He was talking crazy.

“We’ll go to Jamaica. You know how you’re always talking about Montego Bay and how much you love it there. We’ll go stay for a month, then check out Barbados. We can island-hop until the heat cools down. It’ll be fun. You’ll see.” His voice was becoming more animated, but he still had that dead look in his eyes. I couldn’t tell if he was serious about taking me out of the country, but it didn’t matter anyway. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t do it. It was way too late for our relationship to be rekindled.

“Avery, I’m not going to leave the country with you.” I paced over to the window, turning my back to him. “I’m not going to be a fugitive, and I’m not gonna live like one.”

“Connie, it’s a woman’s place to be with her husband.” He walked over and started rubbing my shoulder.

“You seem to be forgetting that we’re in the process of a divorce,” I snapped. I didn’t know where his head was at, but he was acting as if he hadn’t broken my heart, and it was really starting to irritate me.

“We’re not divorced. Not yet anyway. The paperwork isn’t filed. Right now you are my wife…’til death do us part. I still love you, Connie. Let me prove it to you.”

I spun around and looked at his face, which showed no emotion. “You don’t love me, Avery. You’re saying it, but you don’t feel it.”

“Yes, I do.”

He looked so pitiful. I truly felt sorry for him. I gently placed my hands on his cheeks. “Right now, you’re just scared and you don’t know what to do. You’re looking for a safe place, but I’m not it. Not anymore.”

He moved my hands off his face not so gently. “Don’t let that nigga get between us, Connie. Come with me.”

“Avery, I wish you the best, and I pray to God you get out of this mess, but I’m not going to leave the country with you.” There really wasn’t much else to say. Avery and I were definitely not on the same
page. I loved him once, but he’d gotten himself into something that I couldn’t save him from—and I wasn’t willing to risk my own freedom for him. “I think you better get going. The last thing we need is for the cops to come back around and find you here.”