Love After All Read online

  Moments later, Samantha pulled to a smooth stop at the traffic light beneath a bright overhead streetlamp and picked up the small notebook on the seat beside her. She plucked the pencil from the side holder and jotted down a note to herself. Stray memories, thoughts and ideas often came to her like that. From out of nowhere, an idea would come and she’d write it down for another time. But she found lately she had a dwindling amount of time. And as the hours advanced she could only watch and wait.

  The light turned green.

  She glanced up momentarily into the rearview mirror at the shadowed face of the man behind her. He looked away quickly. He’d been staring at her again. He’d been staring at her since he got in. She steadied her eyes on his face, studying the angles as he now kept council with his own reflection in the darkened side window.

  Assessing her exposure, she sensed no immediate threat. Returning her gaze to the front, she pulled off.

  Misting now, it had rained earlier so tiny droplets of water remained on the windshield, sparkling like diamonds each time they passed beneath a light. She waited until the next streetlamp approached. Looking back again, she took in his features to assess his standing in the food chain. He didn’t look predatory, but he was certainly not too respectable to be out after midnight.

  She had picked him up at the bus station. He’d caught her eye immediately. Tall, medium build, he stood with a silver-tipped cane at his side. At first he seemed to be looking for someone. She watched as he waited, discounting the cabs in front of her as they piled up and took fares. As soon as it was her turn he stepped up and got into her cab.

  He was a plain man with plain features, a moderate nose with full lips reminiscent of his distant African roots; he had a dimpled chin, a cleft, and wore a dark suit that gave him a distinguished air of dignity like that of a funeral director on call.

  He was broad and most likely had been a handsome man in his time. He had a generous sprinkle of salt to his pepper hair and carried himself with an air of possibility. A businessman perhaps, but legitimacy was always up for grabs. After all, it was well after midnight and as Daddy always said, trouble.

  Samantha nodded to herself absently, knowingly.

  “Take a right at the next traffic light,” he said.

  Samantha looked up in the rearview mirror again and connected with his dark eyes. “Excuse me?”

  “Take a right at the next traffic light,” he repeated, knowing that he’d obviously interrupted her thoughts again.

  She did, easing gently to the corner, looking for oncoming traffic, then turned the corner and slowly accelerated down the one-way street.

  “Make a left here and get into the right lane,” he said. She did as instructed. “Now pull over right there,” she pointed to a darkened office building. “Yes, this is good, right here.”

  Samantha looked out after her windshield wiper made a quick pass. The murky darkness left a haze of uneasiness as she stopped the cab and shifted to park, leaving the engine running.

  “What’s the damage?” he asked, leaning forward.

  Samantha reached over and released the meter. “Forty-one dollars even.” She picked up her log, looked outside again and jotted down the nearest intersection. She grabbed her dispatch scanner and reported in. Something she rarely did but for some reason felt compelled to do now.

  “Thank you,” the man said as he opened the cab’s rear door. He shifted his cane and handed her a one-hundred-dollar bill over the front seat.

  Samantha took the money, examining it on instinct. She’d learned the feel of counterfeit paper before she could write her name. The feel was right; the bill was legit. “Do you have anything smaller?” she asked.

  “No,” he said as he exited. “Keep the change.”

  A five-dollar tip would have sufficed, a twenty-dollar tip was curious. But a fifty-nine-dollar tip was troublesome. Her gut instinct nudged her cynicism. “Thanks,” she said slowly, cautiously. “Do you need a receipt?” she asked just as the door closed soundly.

  Slightly hunched over, his cane supporting his weight, he walked with steady even strides. She sat for a while in the darkness and watched as he eventually disappeared across the street, away from the building she’d stopped in front of.

  “Hey, you there?” The crackling static broke her focused concentration and ended her line of vision when she reached down and picked up the small wired radio.

  “Yes, I’m here,” she said in her smooth, deeply feminine voice. She glanced over at the building again. No lights came on—he seemed to have been swallowed by the night. “What do you have for me?” she asked.

  “You okay? You never check in after a pickup and drop-off,” the dispatcher said through heavy static.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, dismissing him but realizing he was right. She never followed the proper procedures. It was mandatory that all night drivers check in as soon as they reached their fare’s final destination. She seldom did.

  “You sure? You’ve got your auntie Em a little nervous over here.” A new voice chimed into the conversation as her aunt Emily picked up.

  “I’m fine,” she reiterated. “What do you have for me?”

  “I have you off duty. Your shift’s over, so click your heels twice, it’s time to come on home now, Dorothy.”

  “On my way, Auntie Em.”

  Samantha released the side button and tossed the radio on the seat beside her. Samantha’s being the only woman on night shift made the dispatcher nervous. Plus, she’d been nearly robbed twice and both times had managed to not only retrieve her cash bag but also drop the perpetrators off at the police precinct across the street from the small cab company.

  Each time, the office staff had panicked. But out of twenty-seven cabs on the night shift, she was the only woman and had a perfect record of zero assaults and zero cash loss. But the men she worked with still found it necessary to go out of their way to be almost condescendingly protective.

  She shifted gears and pulled away from the curb, then turned off her on-duty light and headed back to the garage.

  She let the washers wipe the windshield one last time before turning them off, then rolled down the window and let the fresh sweet clean air into the stuffy cab. She inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with moisture. The smell was exhilarating. Born at midnight, the night held her in perfect safety.

  After a quick stop at an all-night diner uptown, she took the expressway back to the garage, a major taboo without a passenger. But she didn’t care. If she’d been stopped she’d have done what she always did. Talk her way out of it.

  Twenty minutes later she pulled into the cab company depot and rounded the employee lot, seeing that her car was still where she’d parked it. She looked up at the sign as she drove into the garage. Osborn’s Cab and Limo Service was painted on a huge white billboard and floodlights made it visible from a mile away.

  Clemet Osborn, no longer alive, had owned the small auto garage and was the kind of man everyone came to for a ride. So he made it official and opened the cab company. In the days of the Old West, Clemet Osborn’s Cab and Limo Service would have been considered a hole in the wall, a place where anyone, especially of questionable references, could go and rest before moving on. And that’s exactly what Samantha was doing now.

  She parked her vehicle in the service garage, following standard procedure. She grabbed her cash bag, log, small backpack, brown paper bag, then put on her father’s old lucky leather jacket, which she was never without. The night was over as far as she was concerned.

  “Well, now, if it isn’t Miss Lee returning from the big bad world,” Darnell said, looking her up and down when she got out of the car, as if she were the last sip of water in the Sahara Desert. Her formfitting jeans and oversize sweatshirt made him smile and his mouth salivate. He itched to see what was underneath the bulk she insisted on wearing all the time.

  Darnell Griggs, a fellow cabdriver, suffered from a Napoleon complex and was just barely tall enough to
reach the steering wheel. He asked her out routinely, and just as routinely she turned him down. Brash and rude, he was a pathetic excuse for a human being, who happened to be married with three kids, living in his mother-in-law’s house because he was too lazy to take responsibility and support his family on his own.

  He was African-American, the color of bleached paste, who had married a Tootsie Roll-complexioned sister and thought from then on that every woman of paper-bag complexion or darker was fair game. He was so wrong.

  Samantha didn’t turn around, knowing exactly who it was; she ignored him. He continued as usual. “You look particularly fine this evening. Why don’t you let me take you out.”

  She didn’t respond, knowing better. With no makeup, her hair pinned beneath a cap and cheap large Afro wig and her dowdy posture, she knew she was a mess. But it suited her purpose well. Rough and ragged, she avoided attention and did her best to suppress the slightest hint of attractiveness. But apparently Darnell didn’t care.

  “How about I buy you breakfast?” he said. “I was on my way out, but don’t mind hanging around to wait for you,” he casually leaned back on the side of her cab.

  “No, thanks,” Samantha said coolly as she checked the rear seat of the car. She found a gum wrapper, an ink pen, an empty juice bottle and a manila envelope, which she picked up and tucked under her arm while trashing the rest.

  “What do you mean, no, thanks? Where you gonna get a better offer? Oh, I see, you waiting on some Prince Charming to come in here and sweep you off your feet. Well, let me tell you something, sweetheart. He ain’t coming down here, so you better take what you can get.”

  Samantha rolled her eyes to the ceiling and shook her head. This was the last thing she needed after just putting in eight hours on the road. With added restraint, she exhaled and walked away.

  “Hey, you hear me talking to you?” Darnell said nastily, then grabbed her arm to halt her retreat.

  She stopped and looked down at her arm. His fingers, pale and clenched, were wrapped tightly around the arm of her leather jacket. She looked him in the eye. He let go and backed off instantly, looking around quickly, knowing that there were any number of men in the garage ready and willing to step to anyone who harassed her.

  “You still think you too good for me, huh?” Darnell said, sneering nastily as he always did when he didn’t get his way, which was more often than he wanted to admit.

  “Yeah, something like that,” she answered plainly, barely focusing on his comments as she continued to walk away. Ignoring Darnell was the only thing known to deflate his oversized ego.

  “You know it’s because of me that you even got this gig. One word from me and you’re gone,” he threatened openly. Being Clemet Osborn’s son-in-law gave him a false sense of power.

  “That’s fine with me,” Samantha said easily.

  “What, you think I wouldn’t fire you?”

  “Give it your best shot,” she said, calling his bluff, knowing that he didn’t have any power to hire or fire anyone.

  “You’re gonna see me in a different light one of these days, Miss Samantha Lee,” he hissed. “You’re gonna come to me begging me to take you out.”

  Sexual harassment on the job was tolerable at times, although if Darnell ever became a real threat she knew she had options. There were plenty of men who saw her as either a hardworking, no-nonsense coworker, or had placed her in the younger-sister category and become instantly protective. But she had always preferred to handle her own business her own way. She hadn’t reached that point yet with Darnell, but he was sure ’nough getting close.

  She continued walking through the garage tossing her arm up, waving at cabbies as they entered and left. Then she stopped by Deacon Payne’s alley briefly to get a quick rundown on the day.

  Deacon was an ex-con who had been rehabilitated and been living on the straight and narrow for over ten years. He had been a gambler with a temper who’d served three years for assault and another three for seriously chastising another inmate for being a stool pigeon to a guard.

  The moment Samantha met him four months ago, she felt an instant kindred spirit. Of the men who worked at Osborn’s Cab and Limo Service—most on their second chance—he was her favorite. He reminded her of her father and her hope that one day he would have settled down and ended his long career on the other side of the law.

  “Hey, Sammy,” Deacon said as he looked up on seeing her approach. She was typically rumpled and disheveled; her appearance, truly streetworthy, made a very pronounced do not approach statement, but he knew that she was a diamond beneath the tattered clothes, Negro League baseball cap and ill-fitting oversize jacket.

  Samantha smiled brightly as soon as she saw him. Few men were given latitude to call her Sammy; Deacon was the only one she could remember in a long time. Covered in a fine sheet of oil and grease, he was bent over an open hood, arm deep in the belly of a cab’s engine carriage.

  “Little man giving you trouble?” he asked, spying Darnell glaring at her from across the garage.

  Samantha looked over to where Darnell had retreated to lick his wounds and solicit one of the women from the front office. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  “I’d be happy to tap his brakes or slam a hood down on his hands for you.”

  Samantha chuckled, humored by the extreme nature of Deacon’s idea of handling a problem. “No, thanks. I appreciate the offer, but he’s all wind, no substance.”

  “Yeah, I got that, but if you need…” He shrugged and chuckled to himself. She joined in the private joke. “So what’s up? I heard you had a little problem out there.”

  “Really, where’d you hear that?” she asked, leaning her back against the front grille as he continued to work on the engine, knowing of course that gossip flowed through the garage quicker and thicker than engine oil. She knew he had a way of getting information that rivaled most intelligence agencies.

  Deacon laughed and shrugged with an innocent look, which was difficult since he was the size of a grizzly bear and oftentimes thought to be just as mean.

  Samantha shook her head and waggled her finger at him, chastising him as she would a child. “You know better than to listen to these hyenas when they start chattering.”

  He smiled, showing every one of his big, white, straight teeth. “Sometimes even a chattering hyena can get it right. You okay?” he asked, nodding then standing up straight. At six foot seven, he instantly dwarfed her average-size frame.

  “Don’t I look all right?” she asked, then placed the envelope intended for the lost-and-found bin on the car’s front fender along with the brown paper bag. She opened her arms wide and dropped her backpack from her shoulder to her hand.

  “Yeah, you look just fine. Make sure you keep it that way.” He reached up and touched her nose in a manner that reminded her of her father again.

  “Before I forget, I picked this up for you,” she said, handing him the brown paper bag.

  “What’s this?” he asked, then took the bag and opened it. He stuck his nose in as soon as he smelled the sweet aroma wafting out. “Oh, man, this is perfect, I was just thinking about stopping by and picking up a couple of these.” He dipped his face deeper into the bag, then glanced up at her. The look on his face, a smile as bright and wide as sunshine, was pure heavenly delight. “You read my mind.”

  “There’re four in there, so pace yourself,” she joked.

  Deacon laughed, as they both knew that he would devour all four sticky buns as soon as he had the opportunity. “Thanks, Sammy,” he said, hugging her dearly.

  “You’re very welcome, anytime.”

  “I’m a save this for my next break,” he added after taking one last quick whiff.

  “Good idea. So what’s going on around here?” she asked casually, looking around the garage. A friendly card game was going on across the room, and several drivers a few feet in the opposite direction were standing around laughing and talking as a third driver vacuumed out the backseat
of his cab.

  “Nothing much,” Deacon said, taking one last look, then putting his brown paper bag on the high counter behind him.

  Samantha, still looking around, spotted a man she didn’t recognize standing off by himself across the room, reading a newspaper. New faces always caught her attention. He was dark, medium height with a scruffy beard and had a cigarette tucked behind his ear. His eyes were hooded and the newspaper was positioned over his face, yet she could tell that he was staring in their direction.

  “Quiet, huh?” she asked.

  “Yep, quiet just the way I like it,” Deacon said, smiling and wiping his hands on the already soiled rag in his pocket.

  She glanced back at the man with the cigarette. Her gut instinct warned her off instantly. “You sure?” she asked, nodding to the man watching them.

  Deacon picked up a hubcap and glanced in its reflection. The man with the cigarette behind his ear immediately caught his attention. He knew that was who Samantha meant. “Name’s Kareem. He just got out. He did a nickel and a few for a B and E contract.”

  “Five years for breaking and entering sounds pretty lenient.”

  “He knows people.”

  “Apparently,” she muttered, turning her back to him.

  “Word is he was also up for a deuce and a tre on the back end of the nickel, something about breaking a couple of noses and a few ribs in a fight with two other inmates.”

  “Sounds like he doesn’t play well with others.”

  “Self-control issues. I can relate.”

  The lingo they spoke was a mixture of street and prison yard made up of codes and ciphered cryptograms. But they understood. “Lesson learned?” she asked.

  “The line thinks so.”

  She snickered, shaking her head knowingly with part pity, part annoyance. “The parole board would let the devil go free in heaven.”

  “True that, but second chances and all, I guess he’s straight for the time being. He’s got to do the check-in thing. Why, you worried about something?” Deacon asked, sparing another glace across the room.

  “Nah, just being thorough, that’s all,” she said easily while leaning back to stretch her stiff muscles from the long shift. “I like to know who I’m working with, you know that.”