Riker's Calling - Episode 4

Riker Wednesdays

I’VE NEVER BEEN INTO THE CLUB SCENE. The loud music, the crowds… I’ve just always seen it as making one’s self unnecessarily vulnerable. But for this particular night such chaos could possibly work in my favor, if something were to go down and I needed to blend in. I arrived at Dragonfly around midnight, staking a small side table when it became available and flagging down one of the waitresses soon thereafter. From what I could spot there were six working the floor, two of which were black, making the odds fifty-fifty that I’d find the mystery girl right off the bat and soon be on my way.

“What can I get you?”

“An orange juice.”

“With? Vodka? Tequila?”

“Just the o.j.”

“O-o-h, k.”

She started to walk away.

“Can I ask you something though?”

Now she looked at me as if I were one of the many guys trying to hit on her.

“What?”

“I’m looking for someone.”

“I bet you are.”

“No, I mean a guy who came in here last night. White. Maybe giving a waitress a big tip for helping him make a phone call?”  

“What are you, a cop?”

I turned to the side to show her my curved back. “The police don’t let a Quasimodo like me work with ‘em.”

She didn’t know how to respond.

“Look,” I said, the expression on her face telling me she was now listening, even if just for a minute. “My friend Lamar got fucked up earlier today. I’m just trying to find the guy who’s responsible for it. I know you girls didn’t really know what was goin’ on, but if you could just tell me about the guy.”

“Hang on.”

I then watched as she went to the bar for my orange juice before making her way over to her colleague. The two looked my way, then the one who had taken my order handed off my drink to the other and headed for another table.

So much for the fifty-fifty odds. This is why I wasn’t a gambling man.

Mystery girl looked real nervous as she approached.

“Hey man, I don’t know anything about nothin’.

“The guy offered me a Benjamin to leave one stupid little message and that was it.”

She put down my orange juice.

“I know,” I assured her, “you had no idea what was really goin’ on. The cops aren’t here asking you questions, right? It’s just me. I just need to know what you remember about the guy, that’s all.”

“He said he was just lookin’ to punk his friend. Wrote what he wanted me to say on a napkin and told me to sing a little somethin’ sexy at the end. A c-note for just a few seconds of bullshit. It takes like at least a couple of nights to earn that much, you know?”

“I completely understand. If I were I would have done the same thing.”

Giving her a sense of relatability helped calm her down.

“So he wanted me to go outside with him to make the call, ‘cause he had one of those new portable cellular phones, you know? But I was like, ‘hell no! I don’t know you! We’re makin’ the call up in here!’ Anyway, he couldn’t get the damn thing to work. The phone. Somethin’ about a signal, so we used the pay phone over by the bathrooms.”

“What did he look like? Anything stand out?”

“He moved like some uppity white boy, no offense.”

I smiled. “It’s cool.”

“And kinda weird lookin’. Like he was clean cut, but at the same time had this 70’s porn star look goin’ on. You know, with a mustache and curly hair, like it didn’t really go with the rest of him.”

Obvious disguise.

“How old do you think he might have been?”

“Twenties, maybe.”

“Then what?”

“He gave me the hundred, and an extra fifty, with this.”

She pulled a white envelope out from her half apron and handed it to me.

“Told me another white boy would be comin’ by in a day or two, and to make sure he got it. Then he just left.”

I opened the envelope. The only thing inside was a picture. A polaroid of three black faces, one of an older woman I’d never seen before, one of Officer Williams, a campus cop who had harassed me back in high school, the number 187 scratched onto the photo, over his chest. The last face was of the woman who was standing before me right now.

My thought process was clashing like never before, trying to comprehend, trying to…

“WHAT THE FUCK?!” the waitress suddenly screamed. “WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU GET THAT?! “ She grabbed it out of my hand.

Realizing the absurdity of the question, that she had just given it to me, she struggled with what to say next. People were now beginning to stare. A security guard was making his way over. I stood up, my free hand now on the metal napkin dispenser at my table.