“Odell, I ain’t going to let it turn into my problem.” I couldn’t stand to listen to this crybaby no longer. I stood up, anxious to get away from all the negative energy he was putting out. “If I don’t come back tomorrow, I’ll see you on Wednesday. You better have my money then, including my weekly payment.”

I didn’t wait around to hear nothing else he had to say.

CHAPTER 31 - ODELL

CHAPTER 31

ODELL

AFTER MILTON LEFT, I STAYED IN MY OFFICE WITH THE DOOR SHUT so I could organize my thoughts and come up with a better plan to get rid of him and Yvonne. I never knew that planning to murder somebody could be so much trouble. I went to school with a guy who shot and killed three people—in separate unrelated incidents—while he was still in his teens. He would have got away with all three murders if he hadn’t got drunk at Aunt Mattie’s place one night and bragged about it to one of her girls. When she tattled on him, he got arrested right away and ended up getting a death sentence. One thing I knew for sure was that I’d never run my mouth about no crime I’d committed. Another thing was, I didn’t believe in using guns except for hunting. I didn’t believe in knives neither. If I had stuck to my plan to burn down Yvonne and Milton’s house, I would have made it look like a accident. The law wouldn’t have thoroughly investigated the cause of the fire in a colored neighborhood, so they’d never have known it had been deliberately set with kerosene. Besides, this was the time of year a lot of folks lighted certain rooms in their houses with kerosene lamps and left them burning all night. Last year, a house on the lower south side caught fire in the middle of the night because the family cat knocked over a kerosene lamp in the living room. That family was lucky enough to get out alive. If I changed my mind and decided to burn up Yvonne and Milton anyway, it could mean trouble. That nosy-ass Buddy had seen me taking all that kerosene. He didn’t have no reason to suspect I was going to do something devilish with it. But he could still run his mouth to the wrong person, and they’d make something out of it. Then it hit me, something I should have thought of before I got that flimsy house-burning idea: rat poison. We always kept some in stock. Poisoning Yvonne and Milton would be a lot more humane than burning them up. I felt much better now.