Fifteen

It was another long bus ride for Cristal into North Carolina on the Greyhound. It would be another three hours before the bus reached the city of Charlotte. Cristal had some things on her mind, and she simply wanted to get away for a while. She sat in the rear of the bus, in a window seat. Next to her sat an elderly Hispanic male in his late seventies. Like her, he mostly slept during the trip, and chatter between them was thin.

The sun was gradually breaking open the sky, the dawn’s light burning the darkness away. She gazed out the bus window and watched as the large glowing sphere rose slowly into the dull morning sky. The sun dispersed its beams in every direction, illuminating the small town they were passing through.

She thought about The Bishop and his words. She left his place feeling like a better and more resourceful woman. She’d spent two days with him then left with some peace of mind, if she could call it that. The Bishop had survived this long and was living a content life, so she wanted to follow his every footstep.

She took in everything he’d said to her. His words were rooted into her mind. Find your niche in life, outside of killing. Assassins could never retire; they just become more-difficult-to-kill targets. Maintain a balance of work and life.

Cristal felt she had found that balance in her life in Charlotte, North Carolina. His name was Daniel Roberts. They’d been dating for six months now. He was a medical student at Johnson C. Smith University, in his fourth year and on a partial scholarship. So with a few student loans that needed to be paid off, he had to work two jobs and attend school full-time.

Daniel was from New Orleans, and had survived Katrina and poverty before that. He was a nerd, and Cristal fell in love with him, though not right away.

...

They met while she was doing a hit in Raleigh, North Carolina, the Benson Okeke contract. Benson was a foreign diplomat from Western Africa—a warlord and brutal savage who’d murdered millions of his own people in civil warfare.

She’d executed that contract, assassinating him in a crowded restaurant while he was seated in the VIP area with his armed goons. She narrowly escaped them, ditching her disguise and immediately changing her look as they were dead on her heels.

She ran into the busy street and into a nearby bar. Knowing the bodyguards were looking for a single black woman, she purposely took a seat next to Daniel on the barstool as he was watching a sports event on the mounted TV. She quickly started a conversation with him, making it look like they’d known each other for a while and were two people having a drink, enjoying each other’s company.

He was caught off guard, but went with the flow.

It worked, and she eluded the bodyguards.

She lingered at the bar for a moment, conversing with Daniel, and surprisingly, they were having an intellectual conversation. Though they came from different worlds, they found themselves talking about sports, food, and movies.

Then it was Cristal who was surprisingly caught off guard. He actually was making her laugh and smile.

Daniel was in Raleigh for a book signing. Harriet A. Washington, the author of the book Medical Apartheid, was in town. As a medical student and a devotee of black history and medicine, he thought the book about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment was a must-read. He couldn’t miss the opportunity to meet the Black American writer, winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.

Cristal was intrigued by his knowledge, his humor, and warm attitude toward a stranger he had just met. And he didn’t seem to mind the minor scars on her face. Daniel gazed at her like she was the queen of Egypt, and he wasn’t shy in telling her so.

Cristal remained vague about her life, while knowing everything about him. She wouldn’t give him her heart so easily. Despite his easygoing and jovial way of thinking, it was still hard for her to trust anyone. When he tried to make plans for the future, she was always hesitant to commit, knowing his world and hers could clash. So he learned to live spontaneously with her.

Cristal was unable to love after Tamar took everything from her. Her best friend had betrayed her, leading to months of isolation and fear. She didn’t believe in tomorrow, but The Bishop and especially Daniel allowed her to open her heart again, making her think that maybe she could have a tomorrow.

...

The sky had been a postcard-perfect day. The bus was an hour from Charlotte, and like her mood, the weather above began to change. She peered out the window. The sky was now tar-black, and the large clouds were moving over the vast region. She sighed. She didn’t have an umbrella on her.

Half an hour away from the city, Cristal heard tapping on the window, and then it became a pitter-patter. It started to downpour. She stared at the bad weather as the Greyhound bus made its way closer to the bus station. She could hear the murmuring of the rain through the window. On the highway, the roofs of the cars danced with spray from the rainstorm.

As the bus rolled toward the bus station on Tryon Street, she could see Daniel waiting for her by his car, an aged Honda Civic. He was a sweetheart, standing by his car in the rain under an umbrella.

Seeing him, her smile came naturally. He wore glasses and had a small, curly Afro. He was slim with a peanut-butter complexion, no facial hair at all, and handsome. She couldn’t help but to think of him as the black Bill Gates. He was very intelligent and wanted to become a brain surgeon.

As the bus pulled into the station, the rain began to let up. The sun came out again, casting slanted beams of light across the city.

Cristal never took her eyes off her man. With just one small duffel bag, she got off the bus and hurried toward him, smiling. He started her way, and she went into his open arms where he hugged her lovingly and didn’t hesitate to say, “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” she said.

They hugged each other strongly, and then they kissed. She had been away from him for two months.

Looking into her face, he asked, “So, how was Africa, Beatrice?”

“It was an experience,” she replied. “I can’t wait to tell you all about it.”

“I can’t wait to hear about it,” he said, looking at her with enthusiasm. He hugged her again, reluctant to let her go.

Cristal was trained to conjure up false identities to make her fraudulent life believable to anyone. She had told him her name was Beatrice Thompson, Bee for short. He also thought she worked for the Peace Corps, which allowed her to travel to different countries around the world to aid others in need. It was a life-defining experience. She wanted to contribute to improving the lives of others. It was the perfect cover story. It allowed her to be gone for long periods of time and off grid without him able to keep in contact with her all the time.

When Daniel had asked about her minor scars when they’d first met, she said, “I got them while I was in Uganda, in a small town called Gulu. I was helping with the medical supplies for the children in an IDP camp, where there was an ebola outbreak.

“I was getting to know the Acholi people very well. We became a family. But the hostility between the UPDF and the LRA was growing. One night, there was an explosion, then heavy gunfire. I tried to hurry the children onto the buses for escape and was wounded from the gunfire.”

Daniel believed every word of it. He’d never met a woman her age so knowledgeable on so many topics. For him, it was love at first sight.

She did feel a slight twinge of guilt around Daniel. He was a nice guy, truthful and always loving, no matter if it was a sunny day or a cloudy day. Daniel had the type of attitude that could strengthen a feather to lift a ton of stone up a hill like the stone was light as feather itself.

“Let me take this,” he offered, taking the duffel bag from her hands.

She walked behind him, taking a deep breath then exhaling. She planned on being Beatrice for the next week or two. It felt good to become somebody different. She didn’t want to think about New York or the Syndicate. She just wanted to escape.

She climbed into the passenger seat of his Civic, and Daniel started the ignition and drove off. While driving, he took her left hand into his and glanced at her with a warm smile. “I have missed you so much,” he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you since you’ve been gone. I’m glad you came back to me safe and sound.”

Cristal smiled. His voice was sweet and velvety, like chocolate. She could listen to him talk all day, especially about his field in medicine and the brain and how it works.

...

Daniel had wanted to become a neurologist since he was twelve years old. When he was eleven, his father died from brain cancer. He was close to his father, who’d had a large primary brain tumor. Daniel felt helpless that he couldn’t prevent his father’s death. It changed him. He wanted to save lives, so he studied everything he knew about the brain. He wanted to be trained in the diagnosis and treatment of nervous system disorders, including diseases of the brain, spinal cord, nerves, and muscles.

Through him, Cristal was also learning about the mind and medicine. He was educating her.

He asked her one time, “Did you know that fruit flies have been extensively studied to gain insight into the role of genes in brain development?”

Cristal shook her head.

“Also, the brain is an organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals, and guess what?”

“What?” Cristal smiled, loving his mind and passion for the brain, and how he could go on and on to talk about it in a way that even made her interested in it.

“There are only a few invertebrates such as sponges, jellyfish, adult sea squirts, and starfish that do not have a brain, even if diffuse neural tissue is present,” he explained.

She did not know that either.

Their first week dating, he talked about how the brain was the most complex organ in a vertebrate’s body.

“You see, in a typical human, the cerebral cortex, which is the largest part, is estimated to contain fifteen to thirty-three billion neurons, and each connected by synapses to several thousand other neurons.”

An intelligent and motivated man is so sexy.

Coming from New Orleans, Daniel grew up in poverty and in the ghetto. His father was a janitor and a voracious reader, and his mother was a housewife, and they both provided Daniel with love and care.

After his father’s death, he and his mother moved in with his mother’s sister. During Katrina, he worked with FEMA to help bring his community back to life and help others those trapped or wounded. His warm heart and generosity were inherited from his parents. He brought back a piece of Cristal that she thought had been lost forever.

...

Daniel pulled up to his one-bedroom apartment in Belmont, a small suburban city in Gaston County, North Carolina, fifteen miles west of uptown Charlotte and nine miles east of Gastonia. Looking like Mayberry with its small population, it was the perfect place for Cristal to hide and experience the love and romance from her man.

Daniel carried her bag to his place on the first floor. It wasn’t anything fancy, but mostly modest and affordable on his salary. Some would call his place a shotgun house: a narrow rectangular domestic residence, twelve feet wide, with rooms arranged one behind the other and doors at each end of the apartment.

Cristal went from staying at the Waldorf in New York City, to a cozy cottage in Martha’s Vineyard, to an apartment looking like it came straight from “Good Times meets a backwoods family in the South.”

“Welcome to my castle,” Daniel joked.

Cristal laughed. “It’s always perfect.”

“Especially when you’re in it with me,” he said.

She smiled at his flattering comment. He was always praising her in different ways. His soothing words took her out of the harsh reality of killing and into a blissful certainty while with him.

Though she had the means for them to live really well, she rather enjoyed the life she’d created with him. They enjoyed cheap takeout from different places, or at times they’d have a home-cooked meal. His furniture was secondhand, the rickety floorboards were a little dusty, the apartment needed a paint job, and it was common to see a mouse or a roach now and again, but it was his home. A place where she felt wanted and safe.

The minute she stepped into his apartment, she plopped down on the old brown couch near the kitchen and propped her feet on the end of it. She closed her eyes and wanted to dream.

Daniel soon joined her on the couch, removed her shoes, and started to massage her feet. His fingers strummed her toes, making her smile and chuckle.

He then worked his way up her shins, the back of her thighs, and was now giving her a much-needed shoulder massage as she sat on the floor between his legs with her back against the couch.

Cristal cooed from his gentle touch. It was a great way to help her relax. “Oh, I so needed this.”

“I know you did, baby, I know you did.”

Through her shirt, she could feel his concentrated touch. He did her neck and upper back.

She removed her shirt, clad in her bra, and with that Daniel applied a small amount of oil. He started using sweeping strokes of his palms over her upper back and shoulders. He worked from her center and up. He plucked the tops of her shoulders from near the neck to her deltoids, holding the top of her shoulder between his thumb and index finger, supporting with the other three fingers, and then he gently pulled up and away.

“Daniel, you’re the best.”

He smiled. It was fun pleasing his woman.

He continued massaging her into an idyllic state, resting his fingers on the tops of her shoulder, making circular movements with his thumbs on either side of the spine, again working up and out. Subsequently, he supported her forehead with one palm and put his index finger and thumb around the back of her neck, pulling toward the back of her neck fairly gently, doing it up and down her neck.

Cristal found herself drifting away from his tender touch. One pleasant move was followed up by another, this time with Daniel’s hands in the same position, trying to find her occipital ridge on the back of her skull, using the same index finger and thumb, one on each side of the center. He worked around her ridges doing tiny circles. He knew the complete anatomy of her body, where to put pressure and how to massage it. His hands against her felt like platinum.

For almost an hour, he continued to satisfy Cristal with his hands, doing a bit more plucking on the shoulders, a few more circles with his thumbs on her back, and then he finished his massage with some effleurage, leading up to the tops of her shoulders, then firmly down her arms and off the elbows.

By the time he was done, Cristal was fast asleep on the floor.