Drive Me Crazy Read Online Free Page B

“Looks like you’re a long way from here.”
    I blinked those memories away. “Look, I’m not trying to revisit the Gray Goose.”
    That was prison speak. A language she understood. The Gray Goose was the wonderful bus that drove you to the free motel, chaperoned by sheriffs with shotguns, handcuffs on your wrists, chains on your ankles and between your legs, while the man next to you either cried for his momma, or puked his brains out from the fear of getting his sphincter supersized.
    “Relax.” Her words remained gentle. “Just having a conversation, being hypothetical.”
    “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter. Are you a police officer?”
    “No.”
    “Working for law enforcement?”
    “No. Relax. No one’s trying to trap you. Guy I used to ... date ... learned a lot watching him scam. He used to pull thirty large just like ...” She snapped her fingers. “He was good.”
    The word was echoed. I asked, “Where is he now?”
    Her grin remained strong, but sadness erupted in her eyes. The absence of crow’s feet and presence of grief told me all I needed to know. He was either in jail or dead. Or had died in jail. If he was living and had left her for another woman she would’ve said that with bitterness in her tone, no smile on her face. Women always dogged a man out when they were dumped.
    She never answered about her friend. I didn’t expect her to.
    She said, “It’s all about reading people. Finding out what they need.”
    “What do I need?”
    “I don’t know what you need. But I know what you want.”
    I should’ve walked away from her then. If I was a smart man, maybe a smarter man, that would’ve been my cue to exit stage left, get in my car, and drive home.
    But I had a buzz, looked at her soft skin, skin that I had never touched or tasted, and found myself anchored by my own desires. Found myself being a man in need of a new sin.
    We ended that conversation when Pedro came back to check on us. He cut me a sly stare like I was a man named Humbert trying to seduce a nymphet named Lolita.
    Arizona bought the next round, ordered in perfect Spanish; her accent had turned as authentic as Pedro’s. That made me look at her a different way, try to dissect her features, see if she had some Jennifer Lopez in her bloodline. I couldn’t tell. America was so amalgamated, the racial lines so blurred that anybody who looked any way could be anything.
    Pedro smiled and talked to her while he made our poison, kept talking in Spanish, while he glanced at her cleavage. Then he was gone.
    I asked Arizona, “You’re part Mexican?”
    “Filipina and black. Not necessarily in that order.”
    “Filipinas speak Tagalog, not Spanish.”
    “I speak five languages. English. Spanish. Tagalog. French. Ebonics.”
    She was curvy but small. The Jack she’d sipped had her light-headed. It showed in her tone, in how her eyes went in and out of focus. I asked her how far she had to travel to get back home. She said she was crashing somewhere on the other side of Hollywood.
    I said, “Would hate for you to get a DUI.”
    “I can handle my liquor.”
    I told her she was more than welcome to crash at my apartment. It was a lot closer.
    She looked at me, knowing.
    A man bought a woman a drink in a bar as an investment of things yet to come. A woman bought a man a drink to cancel those things, to keep it on the fair exchange level.
    I didn’t know where we stood.
    She said, “Can’t you recruit you a bed-warmer up in here?”
    “These scallywags are all after the ballers. Black woman don’t think about you until you walk into a place looking like you’re rich or have a white woman. And you better not have both.”
    She laughed at that. She didn’t agree, but she laughed.
    She said, “I was supposed to go hook up with someone when I left here.”
    That was the game. Truth begets truth. I lowered my wall, she lowered hers. I admitted I wasn’t a virgin, then she admitted she wasn’t Little Red Riding Hood on her