Jack Strong: A Story of Life After Life by Walter Mosley Read Free Book Online Page B

Rosetta Jeanette Lawson in the guise of a man.
    Rosetta and I picked up her car parked down the block from Tyson’s pub and drove to Phoenix the very next morning. We got a room in a hotel down the street from Phoenix National Trust.
    There was love in the room, great quantities of it. That passion wasn’t between us but inside each of us. We could have been entire galaxies passing through each other without touching but still luxuriating in the bath of gravities.
    When the landline in the hotel rang, I was on my back feeling as if I was just a solitary man who had just made love for the first time in the history of my race.
    “Hello?”
    “They just landed at the airport,” Anna said in my ear.
    I was looking out of the window at the black van parked across the street.
    “Let’s hit it.”
    Phoenix National Trust was housed in a large commercial office building, on the first floor. There were two doors through which you could enter, or exit the bank. Lance Richards had chosen this configuration on purpose—always wanting a back-door chance.
    There was also a fancy safe-deposit box system. When applying for admission to your box, you were brought first to a room where you sat and waited while the officer in charge checked your papers. So when Rosetta came in as Lana Santini, I knew that she would be cosseted away, hidden from general sight.
    She went in at two fifteen, and I waited in a coffee shop inside the office building, across the entrance hall from the bank.
    At two fifty, Rosetta’s cell phone vibrated in my pocket. The text message: two blocks away.
    Anna had contacted the LVPD and got them to have one of their snitches call Siggy Petron’s lawyer and tell him that I had surfaced in Phoenix at the National Trust. The snitch said that I had promised to pay off some old debts and pay my way out of the country with money I took from that bank.
    I left the coffee shop and took a walk around the block so that when I walked into the front doorway of the bank, Siggy and three of his trusted lieutenants were watching me from a blue Olds across the street.
    I walked up to the safe-deposit desk and said to the lovely and stern Miss Andrews, who was seated there, “My partner, Ms. Santini, is already here I believe.”
    “Mr. Richards?” she asked.
    “The same.”
    I had altered my license also, and Miss Andrews, with her copper hair and slightly upturned nose, studied the forged document perfunctorily.
    “You haven’t been to the bank in some years,” she said.
    “Out of the country on business.”
    “That’s what Ms. Santini told us. I hope we’ll be seeing more of you in the future.”
    “Most definitely.”
    Rosetta/Lana and I were shown to our box where we used our keys to unlock the metal rod holding the long metallic unit in place. We were then ushered to a private room that had a gray metal table and white wood chairs. I opened the long lid of the tray to reveal sixty bundles of hundred-dollar bills, each of which represented ten thousand dollars.
    “Oh my God,” Rosetta said. “That’s a lot more than fifty thousand.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “You take ten stacks and put ’em in your purse.”
    “Then what?”
    “Go out to your car and drive back home.”
    “What about you?”
    “I don’t think you’ll be seeing me again, Rose.”
    The look of pain on her face sent a tremor of emotion through the souls that comprised me. I felt everything from empathy to disgust. But none of that mattered.
    “Make something of your life out of that money and think about me when your kid is laughing,” I said.
    Rosetta was about to complain or maybe express love, but she’d lived long enough to take what she could and leave the rest. She moved an inch toward me then took her part of the loot, put it in her purse, and walked out quickly.
    I was able to get eight bundles in my pockets without them bulging too much. Then I put the rest in an empty satchel I’d brought. Along with the loot Lance had