Chapter Eight — Big Junes Warning
Big June had been running Velvet for eighteen years, which was long enough to develop a sixth sense for the particular danger of a good man who wasn't telling the whole truth, and long enough to know that sixth sense didn't always translate into permission to say something about it.
She said something anyway, one slow Thursday, catching Kamiko in the hallway between the dressing room and the floor.
"That logistics man," June said, arms crossed over her ample chest, reading glasses pushed up into locs going silver at the roots. "The one been texting you all shift instead of working."
"His name's Zaire, June."
"I know his name. I also know his kind, baby, and I've watched enough of y'all fall for a nice suit and good manners to know the nice suit usually means something underneath it that the manners are working real hard to cover."
"He's different."
"They always different," June said, not unkindly. "Right up until they ain't. I'm not telling you to run. I'm telling you to keep one eye open while you fall. A man that careful about what he doesn't say is a man with something he's protecting. Might be you he's protecting. Might not be."
Kamiko turned that over on her drive home, the same way she turned over every piece of evidence she wasn't ready yet to add up — the silenced phone, the cash, the redirected meeting spots, and now June's warning stacked on top of it, another brick she filed away instead of building into a wall.
She told herself June didn't know Zaire.
She told herself the same thing that whole autumn, every time some new small inconsistency surfaced, and every time, she believed it a little less and wanted to believe it a little more, until the wanting and the believing had gotten so tangled together she couldn't have separated them if she'd tried.