Deliver Me From Evil by Mary Monroe Read Free Book Online Page A

happy I was to be among them. It saddened me that it had come to this.
    I had to rub my nose because there was a foul smell in the air, and it was so potent, I couldn’t tell where or what it was coming from. Last week they found a woman who’d been dead for three days under the bed in one of these motels. The bed that I was standing next to sagged in the middle, but I was not about to look up under it. When I sat down on it, with my hands tied and my eyes covered, I sank into what felt like a deep valley. I gritted my teeth as Jason snapped several Polaroids of me, which he was going to deliver to Jesse Ray after the second telephone call.
    â€œThat’s right. That’s right,” Wade said in a breathy voice, rubbing my leg as he squatted on the floor by the bed like a director. “Get one more of her face from the side. Baby, poke your lips out,” he ordered, pinching my thigh. “That shit looks real dramatic,” he said, clapping his hands.
    â€œAll right. This is as much as I can stand of this,” I snarled. “Take this shit off me.” I had already started wiggling the ropes from around my wrists.
    I was disappointed when the blindfold came off because Jason was the one who had removed it. He stood there grinning, with that one tooth he had left at the top of his mouth hanging from his gums like an icicle. When he touched me, with hands that looked like paws, my flesh crawled.
    Wade was standing over me, looking at the pictures I’d posed for. I refused to look at them as I snatched my clothes up off the floor and got dressed. I didn’t even have to look at Jason to know that he was enjoying every inch of my naked skin that he could see with his beady eyes.
    It had been a long day, and it was going to be a long night. Around eight, Wade drove Jason back to wherever it was he lived these days. I didn’t want to know any more about that man than I needed to know. And I knew more than I wanted to know already. I was glad that he didn’t even know about my bogus plan to flee to Hawaii after we’d collected the money from Jesse Ray. I had warned Wade not to tell him. Especially now that the plan had been initiated.
    I knew I would have trouble sleeping. For one thing, I had to wonder how Jesse Ray had explained my absence to his mama and the rest of his family. Since they all lived with us, and were so used to me being there to fix dinner for them and clean up behind their sorry asses, they would get nosy and impatient right off the bat.
    After I watched television for a while, I glanced at my watch, surprised to see that it was a few minutes past nine o’clock. Adele, my bitch-on-wheels sister-in-law, sat around with rum and Coke and waited for me to braid her hair every night around nine. I knew that by now she was mad as hell. The fact that I had not been there to prepare dinner and bathe my invalid mother-in-law would have already set her off. These were just a few of the rituals that I’d endured every night for almost a year. That’s how long my sister-in-law and her family had been living with us. To them, that’s what “a little while, until we get back up on our feet” meant.
    I pretended to be asleep when Wade returned to the motel room a couple of hours later, cursing as he tripped over the empty pizza box that Jason had left behind on the floor. He took a quick shower, then crawled into the weak bed with me, naked and rubbing on my butt with both hands and his throbbing dick.
    Despite the fact that I had arranged my own kidnapping to get money from my husband so that I could start life over as a single woman, I still had feelings for Jesse Ray. My history with him had not been all bad, and no matter what happened and where I ended up, even if it meant jail, I’d always be grateful to Jesse Ray for all the good he had done for me.
    I didn’t love Wade the way I had always wanted to. He was not the kind of man that I would