arrived at his stop and he disappeared. Do you think you could tell me who drew it for him?”
Sam shook his head violently, trying to clear his head. “Hold up. Let me see if I understand your quandary. You spotted a slammin’ tat, and you expect me, even though I’ve never seen it, to picture it in my mind and tell you who did it? That’s some challenge, dude.”
“But can you do it?” Payne demanded.
It took thirty seconds for Sam to reply, but he finally shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t see why not. But it’ll cost ya twenty bucks.” Payne handed him the money, and Sam quickly stuffed the bill into his multicolored boxers, which could be seen above the waistline of his shorts. “What did this Picasso look like?”
“It was in the shape of the letter P. The straight part of the P was a dagger, and—”
“Whoa!” Sam gasped, sounding like Keanu Reeves. “Was there, like, blood dripping from the dagger?”
Payne stared at the guy—he couldn’t have been older than twenty-two—and nodded. “So, you’re familiar with it?”
Sam walked over to his counter and flipped through a picture album of some of his most impressive designs. When he reached the page he was looking for, he handed the book to Payne. “The tat you’re looking for is one of mine. How cool is that? Kind of a small globe, eh?”
“Yeah,” Jones grunted, who suddenly didn’t like the precision of Terrell Murray’s off-the-cuff recommendation. “Way too small for my taste.”
Payne picked up on Jones’s tone and instinctively touched the gun that he’d concealed under the flap of his shirt. “What can you tell me about its design?”
Sam scratched his bright orange beard for a moment, pondering his position, then shook his head from side to side. “It just ain’t worth it, dude.” He reached into his boxer shorts and withdrew Payne’s twenty dollars. “You can take your money back. I’ve got nothing for ya.”
Payne looked at the money with disapproval. He wasn’t willing to touch something that had been stored in Sam’s underwear. Nor was he about to let him off the hook that easily. “A deal’s a deal. You accepted the cash, now it’s time to give me some info.”
“Sorry, dude, but I just can’t do that!” Sam laid the money on the counter and slowly backed away. “I made a previous deal with a group of brothers that requested my work for that particular job. I told them my lips were el sealed-o if anyone asked me about that tat.”
“How many people were in the group?” Jones asked.
Sam shrugged, then let out a weaselly little laugh. “Sorry, bro. I don’t remember getting any money from you, so I don’t owe you any info. You dig?”
Payne grinned at Sam and waited for the orange-haired freak to return his smile. When he did, Payne pulled his firearm into view and nestled it under the artist’s hairy chin. “First, you referred to a bunch of black men as ‘brothers,’ and then you referred to my friend as your ‘bro.’ Now you’re going to test my patience even further by refusing to answer a simple question? Sorry, bro, that’s not the way my friends and I operate.”
“Wait a second,” Sam gulped, as the color drained from his face. “Did you guys come in together? Oh, dude, I didn’t know that! If I had known that, I wouldn’t have been so shady!”
Payne nodded, but refused to lower his gun. “Tell us about this group, Sam, before my finger gets a twitch and I add some red to your obnoxious shirt.”
“Well, a bunch of brothers . . . uh, I mean, Africans came here a couple weeks ago—”
Jones quickly corrected him. “The appropriate term is African Americans.”
“No, dude, not in this case. These dudes were African.”
Payne raised an eyebrow. “Continue.”
“Anyways,” Sam stuttered, “they were looking for a Holotat. They told me the name of their gang and what they were looking for, then left the rest up to me. They gave me some cash and told me to have a tat design by the next day.” Sam pointed to the picture in the album. “This is what I came up with, dude. Honest!”
“What was the name of the gang?” Payne demanded.
“Dude, I can’t tell ya that. I just can’t.”
Payne pushed the barrel of his gun even harder against Sam’s throat, and as he did, he noticed Sam start to tremble with fear. “Sammy? I have a policy that prevents me from killing the mentally challenged,