Page 61 of Elijah's Hope
“Do I have your attention?”
I nodded.
“You’re an idiot.”
“Thanks. Can we be done now?”
“No. I want to let you know what you had with her, it doesn’t come around all that often. Look at Zeke,” she said, pointing over her shoulder. “He had to wait forty-five years until he found me. So when that someone comes along, and you throw her away for no good reason—”
“She lied,” I barked at Eve. Zeke took a step forward, but Eve held up her hand to stop him. I lowered my voice. “She lied about everything. Who she was. What she did for a living. Fuck, she lied about having brothers. What was even the point of that?”
“You’re an idiot.”
“You said that already.”
“Did she lie about having a smile so wide it made you smile just to see it? Did she lie when she held my baby and he lit up like a Christmas tree because he could sense her innate goodness? Did she lie when she looked at you like you were some heavenly creature sent down to earth just for her? Her very own Angel.”
I clenched my jaw. Those things didn’t matter, I told myself. Because they couldn’t have been real. Because she wasn’t fucking real.
“She had a story,” Eve continued. “One she wanted to tell you, but you were too much of a dumbass to listen.”
I rubbed my face with both hands. “Look, Eve, I appreciate you sticking up for her, but how could you know anything she said to you was the truth?”
She smirked. “Because I had Zeke confirm it. Baby?”
Zeke pulled a hand-held electronic device out of the baby satchel and set it on the table in front of me. It looked like a cross between an iPad and an iPhone, although there was no branding on the thing. I didn’t question it. I wasn’t about to question anything Zeke did.
“Watch,” Eve directed, then tapped the screen.
“Shit, Jimmy. I don’t know. I think she’s going to be madder than a swatted hornet when she realizes what we’ve done.”
It was a man’s voice behind the camera. Not that high quality of an image. Probably just using the video feature on his phone. On the screen, I watched a man dump an unconscious Shelby onto a small bed.
“Rip, you agreed. This is free money. And it’s not like I haven’t fucked her before. She’s got nothing to be mad at.”
This said by the man who was now taking off her shirt while she lay there completely blacked out.
“Then we should have just told her instead giving her that roofie.”
Again, from the man behind the camera. Although he was now moving around the bed. Presumably to get a better angle.
“I told you. She’d get all uppity and shit. This is easier. Besides if you clean her up, she might not even realize what we done. Here, let’s get her head off the bed.”
The man who was kneeling on the bed positioned her so that her head fell off the edge of the bed, her hair spread out to the floor, her eyes closed, her mouth open.
I watched as the man reached for the buckle on his belt.
“I’m telling you, we can sell this shit for a couple hundred bucks. Fucking real money and all I have to do is jack off on her.”
“Stop,” I said quietly. “I’ve seen the rest.”
Eve took pity on me and hit the screen so it went black.
I closed my eyes and was grateful for the moment of silence. When I opened them again, I looked at Eve. “How did you get this?” I croaked out.
She just nudged her chin in Zeke’s direction like that made perfect sense.
“Her name is Shelby Whitmore,” she said. “She’s from a little backwater town near Shreveport. Her momma died in a car accident when she was twelve years old. That piece of shit you heard on the other side of the camera is her only living relative and appointed guardian. When she was a teenager, he used her to run some cons and she ended up getting busted for extortion, but the judge went easy on her on account of everyone in the county knew her uncle was behind it. Her uncle’s computer isn’t very secure as you can see. Neither were the local county computers.”
