Jules studies receipt after receipt. “Dude, this guy loved him some Popeye’s and drive-through daiquiris. He ordered the same damn thing every time.”
“Which locations?” Moses asks, reaching for a pocketknife on the pile. “Could be near where he lives.”
Jules squints at the fading print on the paper. “They’re from a couple different ones. I’ll sort them out and see if there’s a pattern.” He moves to the other side of the table to start individual piles.
I stand beside Moses as he flips open the pocketknife. The handle is silver and set with what looks like wood or bone. Immediately, my brain flashes back to that asshole Ricardo coming toward me in the elevator with the knife that sliced me open.
This whole situation is beginning to wear on me more than I thought.
Moses must feel me tense beside him, because he looks at me. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Just . . . remembering.”
He follows my gaze down to the knife. “He ain’t ever gonna hurt you again, mama. He’s long dead now, and whoever the fuck is out there? I won’t let him get you either. Not even over my dead body.”
I shake my head. “Don’t say that.”
His stare narrows. “Say what?”
“Over your dead body. That’s not happening, and we’re not talking about it.”
The corners of his mouth curl up with the easy, soft smile that Moses gives me every so often. The smile I love seeing on his face, because it makes him feel like . . . mine.
“All right, mama. I won’t say shit like that if it bothers you.”
“Thank you.” I gesture to the weapon. “That’s a pretty fancy-looking knife.”
Moses raises it between us, testing the balance of it in his hand. “Definitely decorative, but still lethal.” He pauses and flips it over to the other side. “And it was a fucking gift. That’s good.”
“What do you mean?” I lean closer, and he taps the blade under his thumb.
“It’s engraved.”
I lean in closer to read the barely legible markings.
Ricky, Always be sharp. Tony
“Who is Tony?” I wonder out loud.
“No idea, but Trey’ll find out for us.” Moses turns to his friend, who is messing with the phone at the end of the table. “Won’t you, T?”
“Yeah. Give me a few minutes to break into this phone. It uses one of those patterns to unlock it. I gotta run a program that’ll give it to me.”
“A few minutes?” Jules asks with a huff. “Losing your touch, man?”
“Shut up, asshole. I’d like to see you do this.”
Jules shuffles through more loose scraps of paper. “I’d draw all the easy patterns first because I don’t think this dude was a mental giant. He literally stopped for Popeye’s every damn day for a week—and never bothered to throw away a single receipt.”
Moses returns the knife to the table. “When you get it open,” he says, ignoring Jules’s commentary, “look for a Tony. I’m guessing it’s a father or a brother. Or maybe . . . fuck, I don’t know. But it’s gotta be someone he was close to. Men don’t go through the trouble of engraving shit for people unless there’s a damn good reason.”
I spot a yellow Post-it note that’s crumpled into a ball, and I smooth it out on the table. Written sloppily in blue pen is my address. Well, my former address, including my condo number.
Holding it up for Moses, I say, “In case we needed confirmation he was coming for me specifically . . . here it is.”
“Dumbass didn’t even bother to memorize it. Jules is right, definitely no mental giant there.”
“And I’m in!” Trey says with a fist pump from the end of the table. “Okay, you said look for a Tony? I’m browsing his contacts.”
“Check his texts and recently called numbers. Search history too. Anything you can think of.”
Trey’s fingers dance across the keyboard before he picks up the phone again and starts tapping around. Moses moves to the end of the table to stand behind him, while I pick up another piece of paper from the pile. This one is sticky and gross, and I toss it aside before I realize it has a phone number written on it.
“There’s one with a phone number. No name. Just digits.”
Moses holds out a hand. “Let’s see if he called it.”
“What would that tell us?” I ask as I pick it back up and hand it over, quickly wiping my fingers off on my dress.
“Either he didn’t call it at all, or he called it from another phone,” Trey says.
“Like a disposable?”
Moses’s handsome head bobs. “Yeah. There are certain things you don’t want attached to your account, and that could be one of them.”
“Our boy Ricky didn’t have too many friends,” Trey says, seeming unimpressed. “He’s got a dozen numbers saved. Only five text conversations. No one named Tony.”
“Any names catch your eye?”
“Fuck no. Homeboy didn’t like to use real names—or he didn’t know them. We’ve got Popeyes Ho, Bar Bitch, Landlord, Pizza Face, and White Christmas.”
“Search the landlord’s number,” Moses says, frustration written all over his face. “Figure out where he lives. We could find more there.”
“On it.”
Hearing Trey didn’t find a Tony seems like another dead end, and it’s weighing on me. If nothing comes of this whole thing tonight, I haven’t the slightest idea of what to do next.
Moses comes back to me, wraps an arm around my shoulders, and pulls me against his side. “We’ll find him. We’re just getting started on this stuff. It’ll be okay, mama. I won’t stop until it’s done.”
I sigh, feeling some comfort, but I’m frustrated as hell. I want all this shit over so I can figure out what the fuck is going to happen with my life now that Moses is back in it. But as long as this guy is out there, I’m living in limbo, and I don’t like it one bit.
Instead of stewing on it, I dig into the pile of garbage on the table, helping Jules sort more of the Popeye’s receipts by location and tossing the losing scratch-off lottery tickets aside.
I grab the vehicle registration slip and check the address. I don’t know where it is, and I usually pride myself on knowing New Orleans pretty well. Picking up my phone, I type the address in to see if I can determine where it is. The map on my phone brings up an industrial area.
“This address can’t be right. It looks like a factory or something over there.”
Moses glances up from the phone in Trey’s hand. “Address must be bogus, just like on his license. Too bad the DMV doesn’t check shit like that.”
I slump forward, defeated again. “How are we going to find out where he lives then?”
“I’ve got his phone. One second,” Trey says, tapping the screen a few times. “Which means I have his GPS location history. I’ll see if he used his home address to get directions to anywhere . . .”
A few minutes later, Trey grins. “And . . . bingo. The most-used starting address in his GPS history is an apartment complex about five miles away.”