This is a sneak peek from my novel, Slim Thick, released November 2017.
Chapter 1
I jumped up out of my sleep in a panic. It was eleven forty-five at night and my body was programmed to wake up at ten-thirty every evening. I had been working the graveyard shift seven days a week and this was my first off day in six months at the Nike Warehouse. Rolling over, I snuggled beneath Curtis, my husband of seven years. He wrapped his arms around me, and I attempted to fall back asleep, but to no avail. After laying there for an hour, I finally decided to get up to avoid waking my husband.
I quietly busied myself in the kitchen making a sandwich while a can of Campbell’s Vegetable Soup heated up in the microwave. Curtis had to be at work at five-thirty at the Hershey plant, so I didn’t want to wake him from the sleep I knew he needed for his twelve hour shift. As I sat down on the living room sofa, I thought about the seven long years Curtis and I had been married and the demanding schedules we had been working. I couldn’t figure out how we had made it work for so long, but I guess it’s just like they say: Nothing is perfect, but love makes it worth it.
Curtis and I had lived a quiet life our entire marriage. We both were college graduates, but neither of us had found jobs utilizing our degrees in Memphis’ strained job market. We didn’t have any children- not because we didn’t want any, but I believed it was because my stress level, lack of sleep, and poor eating habits had prevented me from conceiving. Whatever the biological reason, Curtis had been more than understanding, and he and I both believed that God would bless us with our own bundle of joy when the time was right.
I loved that man. I loved that man with everything in me- every breath, every bone, every drop of blood, every string in my heart. I had my head so far up that man’s ass, I couldn’t see down the street without him telling me to look. But it was mutual, and to me, that’s what life and love was all about: loving someone who loved you back.
Curtis wasn’t like other men from our hood. He was a thug-gone-good. He had been involved in all kinds of criminal activity when he was younger, but he said I changed him. He said I made him want to do better and I gave him a reason to. He had enrolled in college a year after I had; traded in his baggy jeans, white t-shirts, and Timbs and Forces for Ralph Lauren Polo shirts, button-downs, khakis, and loafers; and refocused his energy and attention to living the family life. I thanked God for him, his maturity, and his mindset every day. Lord knows I had seen too many of my friends being taken down through there by the men they loved.
Suddenly, there was a loud boom at our kitchen door and items that had been on our kitchen counter were sent flying across the floor. I jumped up as three masked men pointed a sawed-off and two handguns at my forehead.
“Bitch, where the fuck Curt at?” the one with the sawed-off yelled at me, but my husband was already coming down the hallway. Educated or not, I was still from the hood. I knew not to tell their asses shit. The taller of the two with the handguns turned and pointed his gun at Curtis.
“Where the money and shit at?” he yelled. I looked at Curtis and frowned. I knew my husband like the back of my hand. The look on his face told me that despite my ignorance, he knew exactly what they were talking about and wasn’t about to tell them shit. I saw the two black pistols in his hands and the look in his eyes as he stared into mine from down the hall. He blinked…just one second too long. The signal. I dropped to the floor.
Just a millisecond after the top of my head had cleared the barrel of the shot gun, Mr. Sawed-Off was lying on the floor next to me, the nerves in his body still jumping as he bled out from the hole in the side of his head. I screamed at the sight as Curtis continued firing shots at the two remaining intruders who were dodging his bullets. The one who was closest to me snatched me up off of the floor and put the barrel of his pistol to my temple. Time stood still as I stared pleading into my husband’s eyes.
“Mother fucker, I’mma ask you one more time where the mother fucking guns, money, and drugs at before I blow this bitch’s noodles all over this mother fucking wall.”
“I love that woman more than I love myself and she knows it,” he said to them as he stared back at me.
“Love…” I whispered, and he raised his gun at the man standing closest to him and was shot square between his eyes.
I don’t remember hearing myself scream as I watched the life leave out of my husband’s eyes. I remember the momentary chaos between the two goons…and then I blacked out.
~ * ~ * ~
When I finally came to, I found myself lying on a naked mattress on the concrete floor of an abandoned warehouse with my mouth covered and ankles and wrists bound by zebra print duct tape. I quickly surveyed my surroundings without moving my head to avoid giving any indication that I was conscious. I was in an empty room with concrete floors, ceilings, and walls, but I could see that outside of the room morning sunlight was pouring in through high windows, dozens of stacks of wooden pallets were piled almost to the ceiling and there was an area separated by a chain-link fence with tables inside of it. Male voices unmuffled by masks echoed in the emptiness as they discussed my lack of consciousness with impatience.
Suddenly, one peeked his head around the corner of the door and I hurriedly closed my eyes again. This went on for hours as they discussed what they could and would do to get information out of me. I busied myself attempting to wet the duct tape with my lips and tongue until I could unpeel it from my mouth.
By the time the sunlight shining into the windows began showed signs that it was mid-afternoon, the two watchmen had grown impatient and I knew I was in trouble. The shooter who had killed my husband came into the room and marched straight over to me. Snatching me up by my hair, he slapped the shit out of me. With that first lick, I tasted blood and I already knew what was about to happen. He ripped the tape from my mouth with one solid swipe and I spit out a mouthful of the blood and saliva mixture.
“Bitch, I’mma give you one chance to tell me where the fuck Curt got the money and shit stashed. Don’t feed me no bullshit about you don’t know where the shit at cuz I know you know. Tell me where the shit at and you can go home and bury your nigga and piece your life back together. The longer you stand here and bullshit me, the longer you gone be here. You take too long, you ain’t gone leave this mother fucker alive. You feel me?”
“I don’t know about any drugs,” I told him, “and that’s the honest to God truth.”
From that moment on, they didn’t ask me anything else. Every hour they would come into the room and proceed to beat the shit out of me as if it was going to suddenly jog my memory. The problem is that not only did I not know where the “money and shit” were, I had absolutely no knowledge of the criminal ass shit my husband had been doing behind my back.
This went on for seven straight days. Between the beatings, I would watch the sunlight change in the windows outside of the room to count the passing days. Twice a day they fed me half-done ramen noodles on a plate so they wouldn’t have to untie my wrists. Twice I tried to scream out for help, but my nose was met by the toe of an over-worn Nike Air Force One. It didn’t matter. My nose had been broken since the first day I got there and I doubted it would ever look the same again. My eyes were both blacked and had started to heal. My lips felt like they were permanently swollen. I had almost become immune to pain, having been hit in the same spots over and over again. I had knots on top of knots, bruised bruises, wounded wounds.
Over the course of the week, I had heard them call each other by the names “Lil Don” and “Glenn”. The first few nights they had taken turns spending the night inside of the warehouse to guard me and make sure I didn’t break out and get away. But Glenn had already been kicked in the balls twice for thinking he was going to creep up on me in the middle of the night and dip into my cookie jar. I was defenseless when it came to them attacking me, but in the near blackness of the night warehouse, he was the one with the disadvantage. I couldn’t move my hands, but he couldn’t see my feet coming either.
I had also pieced together that Curtis had been living his secret life while I was at work. Because I worked overnight, I was unaware that my husband had been spending the majority of his nights conducting very large drug transactions. Apparently he had started out running money for different drug dealers until he had come up with enough money to buy his way into the business. I knew my husband: Curtis was a math and business genius. So it was of no surprise to me to find out that from that point, Curtis’ drug business had grown steadily. When Glenn, Lil Don, and their deceased accomplice, Rakeem, had come bursting into my kitchen door, they had expected to find at least several kilos of Coke and pounds of weed stashed in our house. That said enough to me.
None of that bothered me as much as I once thought it would. I was beyond disappointed that my husband would hide something so important and potentially deadly from me, but I also knew my husband’s heart. He was doing what he felt he had to do to provide for the two of us, and if I knew him like I thought I did, I knew that he was trying to save up money so that I could stop working and go back to school again and to build a nest egg for the baby he and I were hoping to one day birth. I had noticed the pained look on his face every time I got dressed for work, but even worse was the look when he realized my monthly had returned yet again every month on schedule. We had had many conversations about my long hours and absence of days off, and we both wondered if the stress from my job was the culprit for my lack of conception.
On the eighth day the two men stormed into the warehouse at the moment the sun was high enough to peek into the windows. The look on Lil Don’s face told me something had changed.
“Get up, bitch!” he yelled as he entered the room. I had heard the familiar sound of the heavy metal door slamming as they entered the building, but I could barely keep my eyes open. Already paranoid because of my circumstances, I hadn’t gotten much sleep at all during the night due to the tears of loneliness and loss as thoughts and memories of my husband flooded my mind and pierced my heart.
“My husband! They took my husband from me! Oh, Curtis, baby!” I had cried out in the middle of the night. But there were no ears nearby to hear.
Glenn snatched me up by my hair, drug me out of the room, and tossed me into a metal folding chair that was set up between two stacks of pallets on the warehouse floor. Until this point, I had only been beaten and starved. Lil Don picked up a hot curling iron and approached me with it. I forced myself up, trying to get away from him, but tripped over my own two bound feet and fell flat on my face. The curling iron sizzled on the back of my sweaty neck, and I screamed in agony.
Over and over again, I was burned with the curling iron, sliced with a large butcher knife, and shocked with a corner store quality taser. I just knew I would bleed out or lose consciousness from the pain as they continued to torture me over the next week, but somehow, I managed to maintain.
One day in the middle of the second week, Lil Don came through the door complaining to Glenn that his girlfriend was becoming suspicious about him being away from home, had accused him of cheating on her, and had refused to have sex with him the night before. Glenn attempted to reassure Lil Don that all of his time away from his girlfriend would soon pay off when they got the information they were seeking out of me, but Lil Don warned Glenn that he had better hope so because his lies were no longer keeping his girlfriend at bay.
Two days later, I looked at them both as they rounded the corner into my little empty-ass cold-ass room. I had never really looked at them, examined them. Glenn looked like he liked bright skinned prissy bitches with long Peruvian (that was probably actually Yaki) and eye lash extensions big enough to pick them up and fly away with them if they batted them too hard. The bitches that pretended to be Red Lobster and Dom Perignon material, but really weren’t worth more than a pack of Ramen noodles and a bottle of store brand purified water- not even the Ozarka natural spring water.
Lil Don looked like he liked nothing but hood rats. Hoes that pretended to be wifey material but really would spread their legs for the whole hood. Ugly bitches that transform like Optimus Prime after an hour long session in the mirror talking to Mac and Lancome. Hell, if I had to guess, I was willing to bet good money that his girlfriend was one of those bitches that even make-up couldn’t help. One of the ones that still wore black lipstick and black lip liner and was shaped like Spongebob Squarepants. One of those bitches that her boyfriend knows she’s ugly, but doesn’t have the heart to be honest with her, so he always says shit like, “Beauty is only skin deep” and “she has a heart of gold” and “looks ain’t everything.” Looks may not be everything, but, damn, I at least need to be able to hold my food down while you’re on top of me. But, hey, that shit was none of my business.
I fought back my laughter as that thought ran through my head as Lil Don was complaining again about the lack of sexual activity at his place of residence as they entered the room. He caught the last bit of it that I was attempting to swallow.
“Bitch, what the fuck you laughing at?” He snatched me up by my hair. “You think this shit is funny? I’mma fuck you up!”
My thoughts had turned completely cynical and sarcastic at this point. I guess it was my own way of keeping myself sane. I wonder what else he could possibly do to me. Rape me? I was sure Glenn had warned him about my almost perfect aim with my feet.
“A whole nother night,” he said as he dragged me with my knotted, matted curls between his fingers. “A whole nother night with no pussy ‘cause your weak ass still ain’t told me where your nigga’s weed and shit at. Bitch, I’m gone beat you to death. You know that, right? You gone die trying to protect this dead ass nigga that can’t do shit to help you.”
He threw me into the same chair he had tossed my small beaten and bloody frame into before. I had barely landed in the seat of the chair when he slapped me back out of it. It felt like he slapped an entirely different state of mind into me at that moment. I tasted my own blood in my mouth again and something just snapped in my head. When he lifted me back into the chair, I just kept my eyes closed and tried to zone out with thoughts of my deceased husband as Lil Don beat me relentlessly until he dislocated his knuckles in his right hand.
“Aaaggghhhh!” he screamed out. “You stupid bitch!” He kicked me in my stomach so hard that the chair fell backwards with me in it. “If Glenn wasn’t here, I’d fuck you in every hole you got, put a bullet in your skull, and dump your ass in the river!”
I just laid there. I didn’t respond and didn’t even bother trying to open my eyes. They were swollen shut…again.
“Don, mane, c’mon, man,” Glenn said. “Let’s just go ahead and leave for the day. You’ve already fucked your hand up. Let’s just gone and go, man.”
“Man, put the bitch in the room before I kill her funky ass,” he told him, and with that, Glenn gathered me up in the most gentle way he had handled me the entire time and sat me back down on the flat mattress in the cold little room and the two of them left.
I decided right then and there that I couldn’t and wouldn’t take it any longer. I was going to figure out a way to escape that night, and I didn’t care if I died trying. I hadn’t tried to open the door of the room in over a week because every time I shimmied over to the door and attempted to open it, it was always locked. I decided to give it another try.
I allowed myself to doze off for a few hours, deciding that my best chance to get away would come after night fall. When it finally came, the swelling in my eyes had gone down enough that I could partially see through them, so I felt my way to the door and tried the knob. I gasped as it opened. It was still daylight outside and the sun was still shining through the high warehouse windows. I frantically looked around, spotted the exit door, and ran to it. It was locked.
As I stood there in a panic, I looked around for anything that could pry or wedge the door open, but there was nothing. I was ready to go. I had already been in that hell hole for two weeks, been tortured, starved, and treated like an animal, and beaten into an unrecognizable pulp. I couldn’t stand the thought of being held there one moment longer, and yet, it was a fact I was forced to accept.