Page 39 of Cash

TEN - Cash

It had beena week and a half since I’d seen Kimberly. Each passing day had been filled with thoughts of her – but my fear of becoming dependent on a woman prevented me from acting on my desires.

Aggravated that I couldn’t simply get a blowjob without being drawn into the eye of a life altering hurricane, I sat in Baker’s upstairs office at the far side of his desk, drinking a yogurt smoothie.

Amazed at the flavor of the low-cal chocolate beverage, I lifted the plastic bottle and studied it. “Ever try one of these fuckers?” I asked. “I’m thinking they’re going to be my new go-to breakfast. They’re cheap, easy, and taste good as a motherfucker. Might be able to get back down to two hundred if I stick to drinking ‘em for a month or so.”

“I don’t drink anything that uses aspartame as a sweetener. You might get down to two hundred, but you’ll be dead by the time your fifty.”

I studied the ingredients and found aspartame as being one of them. Puzzled as to why they’d use it if it wasn’t healthy, I cocked my head to the side and narrowed my eyes. “Why do you always have to piss on my parade?”

“Aspartame is arguably the most dangerous substance added to foods today,” Tito said from behind me. “It’s been linked to headaches, dizziness, problems with one’s digestive system, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, attention deficit disorders, Parkinson disease, and lupus.”

I turned around. “Quit sneaking up behind me, you little midget. I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to Baker.”

“I agree with everything he said,” Baker said. “Aspartame is terrible shit.”

Puzzled, I looked at the half-full bottle, and then met Baker’s gaze. “Why would they put it in here?”

“Because if they didn’t, it’d taste like shit,” he responded.

“I don’t believe it causes all those fucking problems,” I said. “They couldn’t sell it if it did.”

Tito sat down beside me and placed his computer on the edge of Baker’s desk. “If you want to be an overweight diabetic who can’t seem to focus and has trouble remembering where your bike is parked, keep drinking them.”

It aggravated me that Tito was as intelligent as he was. There were some things I simply wished I didn’t know. Stumbling through life ignorant of the horrors associated with chocolate yogurt smoothies wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I glared at Tito for ruining my new breakfast plan. If I had simply met him on the street, I would guess his age at no more than twenty-one. He hadn’t aged since high school, and although he was muscular and had a sleeve of tattoos, he seemed harmless to most who met him.

At five feet ten, he was the shortest member of the club. Nevertheless, women found him irresistible. They often approached him in the bar under the belief he wasn’t with the five “thugs” that surrounded him. His repeated successes at bagging women had been a matter of contention with me since we were kids. Although he was a lifelong friend and club brother, he spent a good period of his time irritating the fuck out of me.

I always walked away prior to our arguments becoming physical. If there was one man in the club that could come close to whipping me in a fight, it was Tito. He’d been raised by parents who owned martial arts training facilities and had studied Jiu-Jitsu since he could walk.

Knowing so didn’t keep me from antagonizing him.

“What about that fucking berry-flavored water you always drink?” I snapped back. “That shit probably has something in it that’ll make you shit like a goose and grow hairy moles on your nut sack.”

“It’s water with the essence of fruit added. It’s healthy.”

I gave him a crazy-eyed look. “What the fuck is ‘essence of fruit’?”

“When fruit is cooked to make juice, the vapor that evaporates is captured. It condenses, forming water droplets that have a highly concentrated flavor of the fruit. Those droplets are the ‘essence of fruit’. A few drops of that concentrate are added to water, giving it the flavor of the fruit. It’s chemical and sweetener free.”

“Well, la-tee-da,” I said mockingly.

Baker chuckled. “Good comeback, Cash.”

Reluctantly, I screwed the lid on the yogurt bottle and waved my hand in Tito’s direction. “Fuck this little know-it-all. I’ll drink these fuckers if I want to.”

Baker looked at Tito and raised his eyebrows. “What did you find out?”

Tito reached for his opened his fancy little laptop, traced his finger across the screen, and then looked up. “He’s got a smart home system that connects to wi-fi and can be controlled by Alexa, Google Home, or Siri. He can watch any of the twenty or so cameras on his cell phone in real time from wherever he might be at any time of the night or day. Open and close garage doors remotely, that kind of stuff.”

I let out a laugh. “You can recite the dangers of aspartame without looking at a book, but you had to look at your fancy little laptop to tell us that?”

He turned the laptop to face me. A hand-drawn sketch of the drug dealer’s compound, complete with dimensions of the walls, locations of cameras, bushes, trees, and anything else that could be imagined was on the screen. It appeared that an architect had drafted it.

“I don’t need this ‘fancy little computer’ to explain his security system, no,” he said in a shitty tone. “But I thought it might come in useful to show what we’d be dealing with.”