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this place is a dump!” he exclaimed, gazing at me with a tortured look on his face. I didn’t comment on the motel room, because it didn’t look any worse than Wade’s bedroom. As a matter of fact, it was cleaner and more organized than Wade’s room had ever been during my visits.
    â€œWhat did you expect for what you wanted to pay?” Jason sneered, still ignoring me. “And, for a man about to come into a half million bucks, you don’t need to be so tight. Shit! After this Friday, we’ll be living like kings.” The thick, beautiful black hair that used to cover Jason’s head was a lot thinner now and had more strands of gray than black.
    Wade gave me a quick glance. I didn’t know what all Wade had told Jason. I just assumed that we were all on the same page. Apparently, Jason didn’t know all of the facts, but he did know that half a million dollars were on the table, and that disturbed me. The fact that Wade had been stupid enough to reveal that information to an ex-con like Jason was just one more reason why I had to break off my relationship with him once and for all as soon as I could. Wade and I had gone over our plan at least half a dozen times. Wade was to get fifty thousand for his role. And out of that, he was supposed to break Jason off with ten thousand. The rest was mine.
    Once Jesse Ray paid the ransom, I’d be “returned” to him unharmed. After a week or two, I’d still be “traumatized, frightened, and depressed,” so I would “leave” Jesse Ray and eventually divorce him. With my share of the ransom money, I could move away from Berkeley. Hawaii seemed like a good place for me to reinvent myself, and that’s what I had told Wade. But I had other plans. Plans that I didn’t plan on sharing with Wade or anybody else I knew.
    I was not going to go anywhere near Hawaii, or any other place where I thought Wade would eventually come looking for me. I had never lived anywhere but California, and I didn’t want to give it up. I liked Sacramento, and nobody would think of looking for me there. But I still didn’t plan to take any chances. Once I made the move to Sacramento, I planned to change my hair and make a few other alterations to my appearance. By the time I got done with my makeover, my own mother wouldn’t recognize me. As far as Mama and Daddy were concerned, I planned to tell them the same story that I planned to tell Jesse Ray and everybody else: I was moving to Hawaii. I even had a story ready for the people who’d ask me how I could afford to move to Hawaii. And that story was that I’d borrowed the money from a friend. It would be a friend that didn’t exist, of course, so that was one more lie I didn’t have to worry about being exposed.
    It saddened me to know that my life had come to this. I had not been happy for years, and my marriage had become a joke. But Jesse Ray wasn’t the only man I needed to remove from my life. My relationship with Wade was, and had been, a dead-end situation for years. As much as I hated to admit it, the sex was the main reason I was still involved with Wade. Yes, it was just that good. He could make me come just by rubbing the side of my arm.
    Wade interrupted my thoughts by snapping his fingers in my face. “Take off that jacket,” he told me, removing the baseball cap from my head and tossing it to the floor. I took off the sunglasses myself. “Jason, get busy,” Wade hollered over his shoulder. “Do your thing, brother.”
    I looked past Wade. Jason removed a grocery-store brown paper bag from the shopping bag on the bed and started walking toward me. I was surprised to see that he now walked with a limp. He ignored me and handed the bag to Wade.
    â€œWhat’s all that?” I wanted to know. I was no angel and never had been. But I did not make a good criminal. Not only was I too nervous for my own good, but I