“Hold the fries,” I said and Shameka went for the food. Tasheka brought back the food and another glass of lemonade and sat down. While I ate, she told me all the reasons why she hated working there and needed to be gone.
“You got a pen?” I asked when I was finished eating. Tasheka went a got a pen and I wrote down the number for the finance company that Wanda had been dying for me to run. I handed it to her. “Call this number on Monday, but not until Monday. You ask for April Dancer, she’ll be expecting your call,” I said and got up.
Before I knew it, Tasheka had jumped up, hugged, and kissed me. “Thank you.”
“Just don’t disappoint me,” I said, and could hear her scream for joy as I left the restaurant.
Now that I knew for sure that Miles was Nice N. Slow, the married man that Zakiya was seeing before her death, the question now was, what the fuck was I gonna do about?
I had no idea.
When I got to JR’s it was still early, too early for the club to be open. I went around back and knocked on the door. A short time later a woman came to the door.
“I’m looking for Miles Robinson. Is he here?”
The woman took a closer look at me. “You were here with Rain yesterday, weren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“No, he’s not,” she said. “He won’t be back until Monday.”
“Thanks.”
I went back around to the front of the building, thinking that now I had some time to decide what I was going to do about Miles. I was about to get in my car, when Rain pulled up in her BMW.
“Lookin’ for me?” Rain asked as she pulled up alongside of me.
“No.”
“Liar.”
“No, I was looking for your brother, Miles.”
“He ain’t here.”
“Yeah, I know. Some woman just told me that at the back door; said he won’t be back until Monday.”
“He dropped the kids off and took his wife out of town for the weekend, which ain’t a bad idea. Why don’t we go to AC for the weekend?”
“Not happenin’, not this weekend, anyway.” But it did sound good.
Rain put the car in park. “Since Miles ain’t here, why don’t you come ride with me for a minute?”
“Where you goin’?”
“Just ridin’.”
I walked around to the other side of her car and got in. We drove around goin’ nowhere fast, talkin’ about nothing in particular. “There is something I always wanted to know,” Rain said.
“What’s that?”
“Did you and Freeze really set a nigga on fire?”
“What?”
“I heard that you and Freeze burned some nigga to death.”
“We didn’t burn him to death.”