“They got a balcony?”

“Yeah, they got a nice place,” he said. “Anyway, they out there talking about me and this gray chick is asking Joni if she really digs me and Joni starts going on like that’s the biggest joke in the world. She says she just hangs with me sometime because she sees it as a chance to understand ghetto people.”

“You should have busted her nose for her,” I said. “And then busted that gray chick’s nose, too. Nothing them la-di-da niggers hate worse than you putting them down in front of their ace whiteys.”

“Yeah, maybe. But that’s not how I felt. I felt like I wanted to prove something, you know. Like I was okay for her to like maybe. Hey, if a black chick who’s into something don’t dig me, and I’m trying to get away from a certain kind of thing … I don’t know. So I start taking her out more and buying her things. I didn’t have no dust, so I took some checks from the mailbox in that building over the bank.”

“Welfare people live in that building.”

“Yeah, some,” Paul said. “A friend told me. He delivers mail in that building, and he told me that some people there get welfare even though it’s supposed to be a high-rent place. I was over there one time and I saw that they hadn’t put the mailbox in right and everybody was supposed to be going to the post office for their mail. Even when they started putting the mail in the boxes, the boxes would open if you hit against them.”

“So you ripped off the checks and took them to Ugly’s,” I said.

“How you know that?”

“Because Ugly told me,” I said. “I was over there and he asked me if I had seen you and I asked why and he said ’cause he could use some more digits.”

“Yeah,” Paul said. “Only Tyrone found out about it and said that a friend of his who’s a postal inspector was on to the whole thing and they were waiting for me to cop some more checks before they picked me up. He said they knew who I was and everything because somebody had spotted me. So he got the checks from Ugly, and he burned them up so they wouldn’t have any evidence.”

“He burned them?”

“Yeah, that way the only way they can bust me is to catch me copping some more checks, and there’s no way I’m going to do that.” Paul straightened his legs in front of him and rubbed his left knee. If he hurt it when we were fighting, I hoped it hurt like hell because my face was beginning to pound like I had a toothache.

“So he did you a favor and now you beating up women for him?” I said.

“Not because he did me a favor,” Paul said. “He had to buy the checks from Ugly, and I’m doing this to pay him back. He said I’m even now.”