Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 139147 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139147 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
I was feeling the need to Tito this sitch by putting on my sunglasses when Betsy tardily asked, “Are you girls with the police?”
“No, ma’am,” Luna answered. “We’re with a kind of…underground organization that looks into women’s issues that we feel aren’t getting the proper attention.”
She planted her hands on her ample hips and snapped, “Well, I’ll say. They don’t even think my Christina is missing.” She tipped her head to the side. “You’re here to talk about my Christina, right?”
“Yes, we are,” I told her.
“Please, sit down,” she bid.
Luna took a bright-orange armchair. I sat in the dandelion-yellow one. Betsy sat on the couch.
I started it.
“We were told by an informant last night that Christina wasn’t engaged in her, erm, occupation for very long.”
“You mean, she wasn’t a hooker for very long,” Betsy stated bluntly.
“I believe they prefer the term ‘sex worker’ now,” Luna corrected.
Betsy flapped out a hand. “Whatever. She just did that to irk me. Christina was good at finding ways to irk me. She was running out of ideas. So she became a hooker. And that Jazz she was seeing thought it was great. Now tell me, what man thinks his woman getting paid to have sex with other men is great? Hmm?”
I briefly entertained the idea of Cap in this same scenario.
My mind rumbled with an impending catastrophic earthquake, so I stopped entertaining that idea and again wondered how I’d blown it with our convo that morning so badly.
Luna was right. He was that guy.
He might not try to cave in someone’s face for having a crush on me because of my pudding, like Lucia’s husband would if he knew Byron had a crush on her (Lucia’s husband, Mario, was very sweet, but that was because he liked me and I didn’t have a crush on his wife, otherwise, he was a total caveman).
But I sensed Cap didn’t reside in a zone too far from that.
In my defense, this happened when I’d just woken up.
And I was going to stick to that defense when I spoke to him about it.
“Jazz, her boyfriend. Do you know his real name?” Luna asked, taking me out of where my mind had gone six thousand, nine hundred and seventy-two times that day.
To Cap.
“No clue. He was a waste of space. I told her to scrape him off, but did she?” Betsy leaned toward us and answered her own question. “No.”
I got my head in the game, and in doing so stopped myself from noting it might not have been a good idea to tell a twenty-year-old girl you often had conflict with to scrape off her boyfriend.
I mean, I wasn’t a mom, so even though that didn’t seem like a smart idea, what did I know?
Especially considering I knew one thing about this Jazz dude, that he was okay with his woman being a sex worker, and as such, he sounded like an asshole any mother worth her salt would tell her daughter to scrape off.
“We’ll look into him, but when was the last time you spoke with her?” I asked.
“She called me every day, my girl did. You see, people don’t get it. So she could work my last nerve. I worked my mother’s last nerve too. Girls do that. Amiright?”
I would have no idea, so I looked to Luna.
Clearly thinking of Dream, she replied, “Yes, you’re right.”
“It doesn’t mean we aren’t close,” Betsy continued. “So, sure, we could end our phone calls yelling at each other. But who cares? I’m still her mother, and she loves me. And she’s still my daughter, and I love her.”
I hoped her use of the present tense was apropos.
“We were also told by our informant that you asked around about her,” I remarked.
She nodded. “Yup. Sure did. I knew the first day when I didn’t hear from her something was up. I called her again and again, no answer. Went by her place, she wasn’t there. Called the hospitals, the police stations. Nothing. That’s when I went in and talked to the cops. They didn’t believe me. More days went by, no call, she was not at her place. Nada. I talked to the cops again. They told me that a lot of times girls like her,” she snarled that last bit, and I didn’t blame her, “turn up after a while. I should just be patient. Then, she didn’t show to do her laundry that first Sunday, and I knew something was up. My Christina always comes by on Sunday to do her laundry. I went back to the cops. They said they’d look into it. As far as I could tell, they didn’t look too far. So I was on the streets, up and down, looking for her my damned self and talking to anybody I could find to see if they might have seen her.”