No Loose Ends

By Ramsey F. Venner

Travis Smith has tough choices to make when money, emotions, and loyalties pull him in different directions. Operating in the shadows of Renos flashing lights brings sizzling encounters with exotic sex workers, bundles of dirty money, and unavoidable brushups with local bad guys. He thought quick wits and an air tight hustle were all he needed, but when push comes to shove, the real test begins. When his world is disrupted and the chaos of a casino town start closing in, he finds peace in the slow-growing passion of an outsider, but it may be too late to cash out . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493174935

Ramsey F. Venner

Ramsey F. Venner’s work comes from a love of knowledge and understanding of human nature and the funky drumbeat that his life travels to. Born to a nurturing mother and a Colombian father, he experienced a unique childhood which shaped and broadened his worldview. Youngest of a blended family, father of one, and consummate competitor, this combination has yielded triumphant successes and crushing defeats, but unyielding optimism urges him forward. The pain and punch lines from those experiences are contained in his stories as his feet search for solid footing in real life. His first novel, No Loose Ends, is just the beginning.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

As I look out this tempered glass rectangle across a dayroom that kind of looks like the main play area from the day care my mom used to drop me off at, I see steel-blue doors with big white numbers and little glass rectangles and a bunch of confused, distraught, uncertain, miserable faces behind tempered glass in those rectangles looking back at me. Maybe they are thinking about the same things as I am and not looking at me at all. Besides wishing the door would open and I could get to that phone, or better yet, that that lanky sheriff with the glasses and squeaky boots would come back and tell me it’s time to go home, I doubt I and the other faces pressed in the tempered glass rectangles are thinking the same things.

You ever come to a point or just stop in the middle of life and wonder if what you’re doing is the right thing? I mean, just look around you and wonder if the place you are in life is really where you want to be. Like me right now, I’m breathing stale air. I’m starting to smell myself from standing still and pacing, sitting down on that hard metal bunk over there, only to pop up and come back to stand at this window, before pacing around this tiny square and ending up here looking out the window again. Futile. I wish I had eaten more of those peanut butter sandwiches downstairs or had a couple of the oranges from that big tub, but I was disgusted to be back in this situation again. Plus they were peanut-butter-only sandwiches, no jelly, not even syrup. It’s cold in here. The walls, the floor, everything but the metal bunk, metal toilet, and metal sink is concrete. I was happy when the air started pushing through the wads of toilet paper over the vent holes because with the air swirling around, it didn’t smell so bad in here. It’s gotta be that toilet. Fuck, it’s nasty. I can’t believe people just… Anyway, I was happy the air started blowing until it started bringing in smells from the other cells. And now that it’s been pushing and swirling all the foul air around me, I’m damn near shivering and wanting to climb up there and plug up the holes with some more toilet paper wads.

They took my limited edition Nikes, my Evisou jeans, my Louis wallet, my Range keys, even my fresh white tee. Well, I guess they had to. My T-shirt and jeans were hella bloody, but they took all my fly shit and gave me these ill-fitting rags. These pants are too big, the boxer shorts are too small, and these socks are so busted they’ve managed to slide down my shins and gather at my ankles, which is kinda cool because the extra play lets me pull them off some so my feet don’t feel the cold concrete through the holes in the heels. I’m just thinking to myself here, but if they took half of the elastic out of these boxer shorts that are leaving rib lines around my waist, the socks would stay on my ankles, and I wouldn’t be holding these pants up at the hip. Wait a minute… that gives me a new idea.

So this scene right here right now is not player at all. There’s a little square of shiny metal over the sink where a mirror would be. But it’s been scratched, bashed in, and smudged by the previous occupiers of this cell. I guess somewhere along the way, someone was pissed or displeased with the reflection and took it out on the mirror stand-in. I’d like to tell you how truly not player I look wearing an orange V-neck smock and matching crocs, but all I can make out in the mangled mirror are obscure orange dots.

My face is distorted as I move to find an angle that’ll give me a glimpse, but all I can see is the flash of something recognizable, and then the mockingly insensitive fun-house distortion of a six-foot hunchback comes into view, and my anguish sends a fresh reminder of its presence. No, sir, this scene is not player at all. The painkillers are even starting to wear off. Fuck, how bad can it get? I’m dressed like a bum. I’m hungry, cold, shot, and wrapped in gauze, bandages, and packing tape and getting woozy from the assault on my olfactory senses.

I’m making a declaration, a decree, a pronouncement. Looking at this spotted concrete floor and that biohazard they have posing for a toilet, I’m tempted to go farther than a pronouncement. What the hell? I’m at a crossroads. That’s it. I have, in fact, reached a crossroads, a turning point in this life of mine. Here I sit on a concrete floor that is covered with dust bunnies from the gray and blue wool lumberjack-stripped blanket I was issued, a blanket too short to cover my entire body all at once, a blanket that has made me choose between blocking out the twenty-four-hour light and having warm feet. I’m surrounded by dilapidated walls where numerous attempts at concealing profanity have given way to peeled enamels of beige and bone, disinfectant, food splattering, and more graffiti still. There are globs of hardened toothpaste in clusters on the wall, evidence of art that was ripped down at one point or another. Probably nude shots of curvaceous centerfolds and Penthouse Pets of the month, which either offended some female guard or tempted a reborn Christian or threatened to give the appearance of lewdness toleration during preparation for one of the warden’s tours.

Two thoughts come to mind as I sit here. You ever think about how many girls, how many women, have been in porn? Crazy, right? And by that same measure, how many lives have traveled through these cells? How many sad, disappointed, unbelieving eyes have looked at these peeling, cold, toothpaste-smeared walls?

I keep telling myself I’m here by mistake, and I even nod my head in agreement as if I were listening to a preacher while in the front pew during Sunday service. For me to be right here right now on this gray-stained floor, listening to the sound of various wrappers and envelopes connected to yards of string and rope fabricated out of torn bedsheets and underwear elastic, slide across that dayroom like an army of delivery mice with long tails, coming from beneath one door and disappearing under the next. (I’m sure the real mice will take their places when we’ve all gone to bed.) To be right here listening to the rise and fall of voices as convicts exchange war stories, legal advice, gossip, threats, and deals on everything from shots of coffee to phone numbers and names of connects and informants. I feel more compelled to shake my head in agreement. This can’t be happening again. There has been some gigantic goddamned mistake. My declaration is this: if I make it outta here, I must never ever come back!

It started out as a regular night in Reno, Nevada. I was all set to make my move on one of the two girls I was dancing with, both, if I could pull it off. It was Saturday… well, Sunday morning technically, and I was at Club Sin downtown on Fourth Street. I liked this spot on Saturdays because as the five clubs in Reno went, this was the one place that you’d occasionally see new faces. Sin was closest to the university and allowed eighteen-year-olds to mingle with the twenty-one crowd. It was always so funny to me to see Reno’s version of Big City nightlife. Like, cowgirls wearing short skirts and UGG boots when it was twenty degrees outside and dirty clumps of muddy snow were on the ground. Or the college kids that were trying urban or thug swagger out by sporting oversized tees, do-rags, fake rapper chains, and fitted hats. I mean, it’s 2013 already. C’mon, man! But in the midst of the pretenders, my dogs and I set the pace. J Dub was kind of a pretty boy on the outside. Born Jasper Dubois to creole parents, he had a vicious undercurrent that bubbled out at the first hint of a misunderstanding.

Chris Iron Fists Connoley was my white homie from Boston, real laid-back in a white tee and a fighting Irish letterman jacket, always down for criminal behavior. I hadn’t been to Boston before I met him, but from his descriptions, it sounded like it wasn’t much different from any hood in America. The way he spoke about back home, it was like breaking the law was the norm. He got in the game as a lookout for dope boys back East but ended up functioning with blacks because the dope boys were all brothas. He must have been quite a sight, a skinny, pale redhead running around with a bunch of Bey Bey’s kids. We met at a UNR party about a year ago, both outta place among the aspiring scholastics and focused on the single reason for our attendance: contributing to young coed debauchery. It was crazy. We were both working on the one hot sista at the party, which I guess to this day is some kind of strictly enforced rule on their campus. If two bad sistas come to a party by decree or city ordinance or some weird ancient Reno cowboy rule, I think one of them is escorted to another function at least ten miles away.

Anyway, Chris had mellowed out recently. He had brought his high-school sweetheart Deborah out from Boston, and he was hitting the gym and training regularly because he wanted to box for a living. I’d never seen him box in a ring before, but he had hands for his size and weight anytime we mixed it up with dudes in the streets. I encouraged him to work on his skills, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about promoting him. But I doubted he’d pursue it seriously. We were getting money already, and he mostly only fought with his girlfriend in their funny Massachusetts garble.

My name is Travis, Travis Smith. But for the last few years in this city since I got out of prison, people have been calling me Contraband. I went to prison at twenty years old and served all of a two-year sentence. I would have gotten out earlier, but I kept getting caught up for shit inside. You see, I ain’t been rich yet, but I’ve always had a taste for nice things. I was at UC Davis on a football scholarship, and one weekend, my older cousin Winky came out to watch me play. Winky had basically been like a big-brother/father figure to me back in Oakland. He used to give me money to buy shoes and clothes so I didn’t get involved with the dope game even though he was knee deep in it himself. We were at my apartment after the game, and he pulled out a tightly packed ziplock of plump green buds and a grape-flavored blunt wrapper and began rolling.

Damn, Trav, I came out there to see your black ass run some touchdowns, he said without looking up. You could have come and sat next to me in the stands, nigga. We started laughing. I was a redshirt freshman and was running a lot in practice, but come game day, it was all about Erick Jackson, the senior. As far as coach was concerned, I was in the watch-and-learn stage.

Naw, coach trying to get the boy to the league so he’ll give him thirty carries no matter what, I said.

Well, look like you gotta step that thang up, Lil Cousin, and take your spot. He put the weed-filled cigar up to his lips and flicked a red BIC lighter at the end of it until the sparks formed a flame. The tightly twisted brown leaf turned orange, and blue smoke escaped from the end as the aroma of Northern California’s best hydroponically grown kush filled the air. Winky inhaled deep, and I was in a bit of a trance, remembering the days we used to smoke on the back porch at my grandmother’s house.

I was barely ten years old the first time I smoked. I played Pop Warner football for the Oakland Dynamites. We had just beaten some team from the Oakland Hills, a bunch of rich white kids; and while they jumped in SUVs and carpools with their parents, a bunch of us grabbed our gear and caught the bus back home to East Oakland. Some of the kids on my team had parents at the games to support them and take them for ice cream. But for those of us who didn’t, we stuck together and had our own victory party on the back of the bus, the 40L to deep East Oakland. One by one, my partners got off; and finally, it was my stop.

I was walking up Cherry Avenue and three houses down from Grandma’s house when I heard footsteps behind me. I turned and saw my big cousin Winky in a full sprint like the Robinson’s Rottweiler had gotten loose again. I started running too. But my bag with all of my football pads was bulky, and I tripped and fell forward. I turned and looked back, and Winky was barely a house away. He was fast. As he pumped his arms like a track star, his bald head was beaded with sweat, and his face lit up when he saw me in a confused pile on the sidewalk, wrapped up in my gym bag and football pads.

Trav, hide this in the house! he yelled as an Oakland PD cruiser turned the corner. I barely understood what he said, but I saw him pull something out of his shirt pocket.

Winky never broke his stride and dropped a bundle of stones wrapped in plastic right on top of my bag as he ran by. He passed Grandma’s house and jumped the fence into the yard of the Stanleys. The cruiser flew by me and turned hard at the corner. I got up and ran inside and did like he told me.

Later that evening, I was sitting on the porch, wondering if he’d made it. About thirty minutes later, there were footsteps in the dark on the side of the house, and he came out of the shadows. He looked around cautiously and then took a seat next to me.

Dang, I thought they got you! I said.

Naw, not me, Lil Cousin. I ducked in Mr. Stanley’s yard then cut through the Parker’s yard and hid in Ms. Parker’s minivan. Grandma still up?

Naw, she ate, watched some Martin reruns, and went to sleep.

Good! You got my bundle? he asked.

What you got for me? I shot back, and Winky cracked up, laughing.

Now you’re learning. It’s a price to pay for everything in this game. Don’t forget that, he said.

I won’t, I said.

Well, since you’re so grown, Lil Cousin, how ’bout I let you hit this blunt with me? I watched as he flicked the lighter and turned the sparks into a flame. I was entranced then, much like I was right now. Winky choked a little on the potent smoke, and my thoughts were plunged back to the present.

You act like you wanna hit this shit, nigga, he said and exhaled a huge plume. At that moment, with no one around to tell my coach and with the frustrations I had been feeling about not playing and not really feeling school, but doing it because I didn’t wanna let Grandma down, I wanted to smoke more than I ever had in my life. But I knew better. Winky is a good big cousin, but being the consummate agitator, he tested my will further.

I said, Naw, and tried to laugh it off.

Okay, schoolboy, tell ya what. And he inhaled. I’m goin’ to the bathroom. And he inhaled again. And I’m leaving this blunt… right here. He held in the smoke as he got up. Now if anyone else wanna smoke, he inhaled, it’s gon be, he inhaled, right here, and he exhaled, starting a coughing fit as he headed down the hallway toward the restroom. The smoke in the room and my frustrations almost got the better of me. I saw my hand seem to drift to the coffee table and toward the blunt. I can remember my mouth watering and licking my lips, then feeling a slight tremble and seeing the weed smoke swirl around my fingers. I could close my eyes, inhale deeply, and take a step out on a haze cloud. I could let all the stress of this school and lack of playing time leave my body in an exhale and my spirit ride the waves of a Willie Nelson vibe, but instead, my fingers curled and wrapped around the key ring and shiny Cadillac emblem that sat not an inch away from the ashtray and smoldering blunt. Winky had pulled up in an Escalade pickup truck, and I wanted more than anything to be seen in that. Plus I needed to go to the liquor store and grab drinks for the honeys we had coming over later.

I was out the door and hittin’ the auto start in a second. I had the beat up and turned off my street just as the image of my big cousin standin’ at the curb, wavin’ at me, appeared in the rearview mirror. I threw him two fingers and a B out the window and punched the gas as I made it onto the boulevard.

Nigga tried to tempt me with the tree. Ha ha, I said to myself, happy I’d overcome temptation.

At the store, I was an instant hit. I mean, football players got action, but I was on a whole other level with the big truck. I got hugs and high fives and two more girls that were ready to kick it that night. Both looked like Britney Spears, but one had bigger chichis than the other. They stood and waved as I drove out of the parking lot, saying in unison, See you later, Travis. White girls! While I was watching my new fans wave bye, I didn’t notice the nosey-ass campus PD who made a lane change and got behind me. I fumbled to turn the music down, but it was too late. His red and blue lights were flashing, and he was signaling me to pull over. I did, still leaning in a player’s demeanor. I guess I thought the truck put me above the law. I was ready to get this inconvenience over with and move on to the rest of the evening. I watched in the rearview mirror as the cop approached like John Wayne expecting a shootout.

You had that music up awful loud back there, son. Must be awful hard to concentrate on the road. License and registration please.

Is that really necessary, officer? I’ll keep it down. I’m only going three more blocks, I said, coolly hoping to get a pass.

The cop, chubby in the face and perfectly fulfilling every redneck good ole boy stereotype right down to the drill sergeant brimmed hat and freckles, peered into the car and through his aviators at me.

You go to school here, son? he asked.

Uh, yes, sir. I’m Travis Smith. I play football. I extended my hand, but he didn’t seem to care or notice.

Smith, hunh? he said as he took a step back and surveyed the chrome 26s and gleam on the midnight-black truck.

You’re the kid from the Bay Area! Oakland, ain’t it?

Yes, sir. Running back, number 24, I said, smiling, feeling like it was about time this pig recognized.

He smiled, but it wasn’t the usual locals’ smile we get when we run into boosters or supporters of the program. It was darker, more sinister.

Tell me, Mr. Smith. Why is it that you, a redshirt freshman with zero starts, is driving a $65,000 truck, transporting alcohol you are clearly too young to purchase, and making the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention with the smell of marijuana that’s emanating out of the driver’s side window of this vehicle? he said all in one breath.

I had completely forgotten about the weed smoke, and all the happiness I had felt from driving this dumbass truck was gone, along with the player swag I had, when I was stuntin’ for those snow bunnies. I sat bolt upright in the seat and used my best humble-student-athlete speak.

I’m sorry for the misunderstanding, sir. I just…

License and registration please! He said please, but what he really meant was now.

The situation was bad but got infinitely worse quickly. I reached in my wallet and handed him my license and then opened the glove compartment to get the registration, and a loaded 9 mm tumbled out and hit the floor with a thunk. The cop panicked and drew down on me.

Put your hands on the steering wheel and don’t move! he ordered.

He was on his walkie-talkie in a heartbeat and radioing for backup. The gun was only the beginning. As backup arrived, he put me in the back of a patrol car and began searching. In a duffel bag in the bed of the Escalade pickup, they found a couple pounds of that perfectly illegal pro-hydroponically grown Northern California purple kush.

I knew it was Winky’s, and he’d cop to it, but it would probably be his last strike and he’d be gone forever. And considering our pasts and all he’d done for me, plus the fact that I didn’t have a criminal record, I took the case for him. He promised to take care of me through whatever time I had to do and it would be all good when I got back. And he did, too good in fact.

While inside, I had money, CDs and CD players from the street, and alcohol, and Winky even somehow got me sent to medical, where the nurse that everyone made a play for but never got action at locked the exam door behind me and played doctor with me, but the grown-up version. Winky’s stature in the streets had grown immensely since jumping fences and hiding in minivans.

The fact that I was so taken care of in prison made me the object of much attention. People that heard my story were cool, and some watched out for me, but I mostly got haters envious of the things I had. I kept gettin’ told on and shook down and caught with shit I wasn’t supposed to have: porn mags, street clothes, bubble gum. You know, the things a man is deprived of in prison. It started off with this one sergeant that used to shake my cell down all the time, but eventually, it spread to the inmates that knew me or knew of me. Before long, when people yelled for me, joking or not, they started calling me Contraband. I fought it at first, but after a while, it stuck.

CHAPTER 2

Now that we’re all caught up, back to the night in Reno. So usually, I keep my wits about me. I never stopped working out, and of late, I rarely drank in excess. But on this night, I was celebrating. It was J Dub’s birthday. I had been killin’ ’em with the trees from Winky since I got back, and I was done with parole since that Monday. I had beaten ’em. I beat the odds, and I was feeling festive in every sense of the word.

Club Sin was a big industrial warehouse which was converted into a nightclub. As you entered the front doors, you were on hardwood floors and forced to make your way around the huge square main bar. It’s where most of the watchers staked their claim. The decor of this place cracked me up too. There were these huge black drapes that hung from the walls all around the room, like the grim reaper’s minions come to collect, with red and purple lights cast on them to give the feeling of being in hell, I guess. But my favorite part was after you made it around the bar, the drapes from the walls collected in the middle of the room and left this gap of a throughway and then opened back up to reveal a room crowded with gyrating bodies packed on a dance floor. It was really dramatic. Reno isn’t Los Angeles or New York, and even though they’re in the same state, it was a far cry from Vegas when it comes to nightlife. But let’s face it. Five hundred people in a room are five hundred people in a room. Club Sin packed them in, and my crew was always perfectly positioned to watch the whole soirée from our VIP booth on the wall by the DJ. We were like hawks looking down at a field of wild rabbits. One would only have to swoop down with a cosmo or appletini and steal away with a deliciously sweet treat.

On this night, while I found myself betwixt two equally scrumptious-looking cottontails, trouble was brewing under the breath of a jealous boyfriend between sips of Red Bull and vodka and glances at the big black dude giving his girl a full-body pat down the TSA administration would be on the phone with lawyers about. Meanwhile, I was torn, dividing my attention between the Latina who was in front of me doing the Reno version of the forbidden dance, more forbidden if you got a jealous boyfriend in the club with you that thinks he’s a gangster and has insecurity listed as one of the reasons he seeks the company of women he probably should avoid, and the sista who, in all of her voluptuous splendor, was dancing behind me with her hand on my chest, pressing her breasts right up against my back. I reached back and fully palmed her butt cheek to make sure she knew I was aware and thirsty for the juicy apple bottom I was now squeezing. I was pretty impressed with my current situation because though I hadn’t spent much time learning these girls’ pedigrees or political affiliations or if they enjoyed long walks into the oncoming traffic or seeing grown men fight like wild hyena over scraps of meat, what I had noticed was both of their bodies fit into my one-night-romp ratio. As a matter of habit, I have honed my in-the-club hunting skills to a Tai Chi smooth progression of face, body type, and basic aptitude test, which is a girl’s ability when pressed on a critical issue of Would you like to dance? to say yes. All three criteria being met by my current pair of Rockettes, we started turning heads and moving from the corner of the dance floor to a prominently visible spot in the center. It’s easier to give two women your attention when they are both able to stay on the dance floor, and at six feet plus, having two dance partners and a tank full of Bacardi, some room to maneuver is a must.

The girls were doing circles around me while I did my version of the two-step. Sweatin’ it out in the club is definitely not player. Maybe I was enjoying the attention, maybe the rum and Cokes were making me lazy, and maybe I reasoned why I should work to break a sweat when I had stripper auditions happening right where I stood and all I had to do to be the judge was to post up and also be the pole. I think that’s what I was thinking.

As Flo Rida and that high-energy crap rap of his came to an end, it was time to press closer to making a good night an even better morning. I started tugging them toward the falcon’s nest, and they started pulling me toward the peasant bar. It wasn’t really a peasant bar, but we had bottle service and a dedicated cocktail waitress in VIP. So standing around and waiting on drinks was a process I learned to hate participating in. Plus we were celebrating, and I didn’t want to subject my suit to fruit juice and lip-gloss smears. What’s the point in balling if in the end you’re gonna stand in line and wait your turn?

With the mock tug-o-war being waged between me and these girls who apparently work out, I scanned the room for J Dub or Chris for some assistance with wranglin’ in this bunny bounty. I didn’t see them right away, but what I did see were some hard looks and one nasty stare coming from the direction their girls were pulling me toward. Ah, yes! I thought. This possibility hadn’t crossed my mind because my inflated ego had reached Goodyear proportions. But it shared the fate of that other airship when I realized these girls were a part of a darker plot. My ego crashed like the Hindenburg as I realized it was a setup!

"Aw, come on, Papi, buy us some drinks. You know you were feeling all up on this Boriqua bomb-ass booty," she said and did an almost-forced booty shake. Her voice was like Rosie Perez’s, it made the booty shake less appealing.

Yeah, I know the bartender. He’ll hook us up, little Kelly Rowland said.

My earlier anticipation of reaching one of my ménage milestones was replaced by curiosity and utter indignation. Who would send these birds at me and the nerve of them for thinking it’d work. Maybe the well-dressed Mexicat at the bar with the staring problem was just a hater and was wondering where I got my suit from. And the bigger white guy with the bandana around his bald head that looked in my direction when something was whispered in his ear and then just as quickly looked away with that fake-ass head nod was just admiring the black drapes and really feeling this techno version of Neyo’s Let Me Love You that synced up so well with his Lean like a Cholo head nod.

Another scan of the room brought great relief. I saw J in the isle behind the bandana dude, exchanging numbers with one of UNR’s future somethin’ or another. She must have been on one of the sports teams, a tall gangly blonde with a cute face. Her excess altitude made the skirt deficiency that much better. I needed to get his attention just in case things went left, but if by chance I really had action at a butter pecan Rican chocolate sundae with me on top, I wasn’t gonna let my paranoia blow it.

But, girls, I pleaded, "I already got bottles in VIP, and it’s the homeboy’s birthday.