Welcome To Hell.A.

by Stephens, L.

  †Cream, get the money, dollar, dollar bill, y’all!†

  She learned pretty quickly good-looking guys more often than not were broke, or if they were rich, they definitely weren’t sharing their money or luxurious lifestyle. There were a few unicorns out there that were good looking and flew you to Vegas in their private jets, but unless you really sold them that you were just along for the ride, willing to have threesomes and fuck their friends, they would disappear for weeks on end or never give you a call back. At any rate, being a hot rich guy’s fuck slave was a waste of time, it yielded nothing but heartbreak and shitty sex.

  The target she had in her sights was not ugly but was by no means good-looking, either. Jill was nicer to these guys. They didn’t gross her out, and they were generally extra grateful when a hot girl paid attention to them.

  † I know, I know, generalizing, but you disagreeing with me, doesn’t make it any less true. †

  Jill had been at the bar ordering a soda water on the rocks when she saw her first target. Just like rent, she really didn’t like to pay for drinks, and getting some schlub to buy her a drink was always a date rape waiting to happen. She drank soda water on the rocks, because it looked like there was alcohol in the glass and it was generally free if you were hot enough. He was standing at the edge of the V.I.P. section. A bevy of micro-skirted hussies had just brought over three large bottles of Grey Goose vodka, each with a roman candle sparkler attached to them. His friends high-fived while the V.I.P. waitress pulled him aside to pay for the tab. Jill had eagle eyes. She saw the onyx of the American Express black card from across the club. It was like a black hole, sucking her celestial mass into its vortex.

  Her hand was cold from holding the soda water, and she covertly used her fingers to make her nipples hard. It was an old trick movie stars used when they were getting photos taken by paparazzi. They knew a photo with their erect nipples pointing through their blouse would get published. She strutted over in her best supermodel on the runway strut. The stilettos she was wearing made her legs look like she had just got off the tennis court, and her breasts bounced to the rhythm of the music. He saw her coming and looked away, hiding his shyness, but as she got closer he looked to her and established eye contact. His toothy grin displayed a good row of top teeth and a snaggletooth set of bottom ones. Bad teeth weren’t a deal breaker. Teeth were fixable. Most human flaws were fixable, if you had money.

  “Hey!” Jill said, smiling her most approachable smile.

  The target had an odd look on his face, something between “nice to meet you” and “please call 911, I’m about to have a heart attack.”

  “Miss, are you a guest of this section?” a stern voice from behind demanded.

  “Yeah I’m fine,” Jill said, quickly turning to the large security guard that had materialized behind her.

  By the time Jill had turned back to the target, he had taken a couple steps away from her and returned to his friends. Meanwhile the security guard moved to stand next to Jill, blocking any more attempts at talking to the guy.

  “Miss, can you come with me, please?” the security guard said, more of a statement than a question.

  Jill ignored him and turned to walk away. Another giant security guard stood holding the velvet rope separating the V.I.P. section from the common folk.

  “This way, Miss,” the second security guard said, ushering her to Common Folktown, USA.

  As she left the V.I.P. area, she was a five-foot-six pillar of embarrassment. She entered the city limits of Common Folktown and that’s when she saw them: four young and beautiful girls, all in modest skirts with tasteful makeup, standing to the side on the empty dance floor with their arms folded, glaring at her. On top of the embarrassment, Jill felt like an idiot. She hadn’t seen the party poopers that were waiting in the wings.

  “Miss, this section is for guests with tables,” the security guard said, trying and failing to not sound condescending.

  Jill ignored him and kept walking.

  “That’s right, bitch!” one of the girlfriends yelled as Jill headed for the exit.

  She hadn’t accounted for the girlfriends, the wives or the significant others, but they had smelled Jill for the skank she was. She gave them credit. They had successfully fended off her type for the length of their relationships slash investments and were still going strong. The guys were doomed. They couldn’t go to a nightclub without them, and they probably only had one bar they could even enter without a chaperone, but these girls weren’t in Jill’s league. They were good looking, sure, but they were not hot.

  CHAPTER 28: SHAME SPIRAL

  Jake could feel the blow running riot through his system, and the absolute stillness and tranquility in his living room made him restless. He needed to go out. He needed some ass in his face, he needed more drinks and he needed to get so destroyed he’d end up at her place at 2AM with a street hot dog in one hand and a rose in the other. Jake pressed the display of his phone and navigated to the Uber app. He wasn’t quite sure where he wanted to go, but he had a strange urge to go further east and get out of his local neighborhood. Venice and the west side were at the forefront of his mind, but he wanted to get a little more aggressive than usual and trying to fuck Julie was probably a bad idea in that state. After he keyed in the destination that he felt would serve him best, he saw that Artak in his Kia Sorento would be at his place in eight minutes to pick his ass up. Eight minutes was uncommon for a pickup in Hollywood. Usually it would be two minutes at the worst, but Jake was happy. He had a little more time to get the party started.

  Jake’s living room was much like his bedroom—bare essentials only: a TV, couch, coffee table and a four-foot wide by four-foot high bar that stood in the corner. It wasn’t functional as a bar at all. There were no stools, and no one really came over to hang out there, so it was mostly a place to put a boatload of alcohol. He decided he would skip the formalities and proceed straight to the obliteration of his memory. He shot up from the couch, headed to the bar and grabbed the handle of Cutty Sark he had left sitting on the top for easy access.

  When he first started getting on the blotch, Jake had been like an asshole connoisseur, imbibing with only the finest of blow and single malt scotch. After a while, he found he was spending a hundred bucks every few days on single malt scotch, preferably Lagavulin 16, and that he really wasn’t enjoying the aged whisky as much as he should. He dropped his penchant for high-priced scotch, going from single malt to a blend. His choice in blend wasn’t fancy either. There were some good blends out there, but with Cutty Sark, he could get twice as much whiskey for a third of the price. Cutty Sark is a whisky blend from the mean streets of Glasgow. It was cheap as water and much more delicious. On special occasions, he returned to his blotch roots and threw a nice single malt scotch into the equation. He wasn’t a complete philistine.

  By requesting the Uber before he had even started, Jake had set a deadline and decided he wasn’t going to take his time tonight. He was going to stack up the whisky then rack up the blow. There would be no sipping or small lines, just balls to the wall blotching.

  “Let the shit show, commence,” Jake announced to the room, using the handle of Cutty Sark like a megaphone.

  He took a couple big mouthfuls and swallowed quickly, only just managing not to throw up on to his shoes.

  “Fuck me,” he winced, his lips making a rectangular shape.

  He was by no means a lightweight, but he wasn’t The Waco kid who threw back big swallows of whiskey on the reg, so anything more than a mouthful was pretty fucking foreign to him. The swig he took this time was far less aggressive, but it still made him dry heave. He held it back like a champ and walked it off, doing a couple laps around the living room before heading straight over to the pile of coke he had left on the coffee table. He used his razor blade pendant to rack up a few more slugs. This time they were thicker and longer, about the size of the Deilephila Elpenor caterpillar. There was no half-assing it—Operation Obliteratio
n was in full ass effect.

  “Hey Siri,” Jake said as he looked toward the gray speaker that was sitting on the ground. An array of colored lights swirled on the top of his HomePod.

  “Play, Wild Wild Life,” Jake commanded.

  “Okay,” came the voice of Siri from the HomePod speaker. “Playing Wild Wild Life by Talking Heads.”

  Jake began snorting as the music began. He usually wasn’t this aggressive before he went out. Usually, he would only do a line or two as he got ready, then he’d take a gram out with him to provide sustenance over the course of the night. Tonight however, he was feeling impulsive. He was feeling like he wanted to be different, he wanted to be aggressive. With the blow well and truly cocooned in his chest, he pulled the chain over his head and popped the coke-covered razor blade pendant into his mouth. His mouth instantly went numb as he sucked all the residue off it, before he let the pendant fall out and onto his chest. Jake was feeling pretty good. His metamorphosis from sad loser guy to wasted loser guy was almost complete. He was ready to emerge from the chrysalis, spread his wings and go try and drink, snort and fuck all his troubles away. The song finished, and Jake knew it was time to flee this miserable scene. He didn’t take any blow with him. He knew that would be a bad idea. He wanted to get stumbling down the street drunk, and coke would only slow that objective down.

  Artak didn’t offer a hello or even a side eye. He just waited for Jake to close the door after jumping into the back seat.

  “Belt,” Artak said, keeping his gaze forward.

  “Huh?” Jake said as he tried to pull his phone out of his pocket. He had to practically lay down to get it out of his tight-fitting jeans.

  “Belt, belt,” Artak spat out quickly.

  “Ah,” Jake said as he pulled out the phone and sat up, finally putting the seatbelt on. “Safety first, my man!”

  The car started moving, and Artak took the nearby entrance onto the 101 Freeway, heading south to downtown. Jake tapped his foot to a non-existent beat. The car zoomed along the freeway before hitting the usual slowdown crawl at Silver Lake Blvd. He had forgotten about the bottleneck that made a quick ten-minute drive from Hollywood to downtown into a thirty-minute ordeal, and anxiety started to rise in his chest. He looked to his phone for a respite, but it was a blur of colors and lights, and he immediately turned it off. There was no distraction coming from the device, only car-sickness.

  “How’s your night been?” Jake said as the reality of being stuck in the backseat of a Kia Sorento started to sink in. “Busy?”

  “Eh,” Artak mumbled, not offering any hope of conversation.

  Jake looked out the window as his leg went into overdrive, his foot tapping even more aggressively. He was a little claustrophobic at the best of times, but the blow amplified that feeling of being trapped with nowhere to go. He found himself rubbing his chest for a few moments. The soothing sensation calmed him. Even though he knew the blow had brought a little panic to the party, he was starting to wish he hadn’t left it at home. Making a game of trying to do a bump or two on the sly without alerting Artak and possibly impacting his already lowish Uber rating of four-point-four would have been a lot of fun.

  They started moving faster as they passed the Alvarado exit, and Artak merged onto the 110 Freeway south. They were getting close to the destination, and Jake could feel the anxiety fade away and his wings start to unfurl. After hitting the loop to the 10 Freeway east and exiting onto 18th Street, Jake could see the end goal approaching and swiped the sweat that had accumulated from his brow and pushed it to his hair, gathering any loose strands and molding them into the body of the beast atop of his head.

  “Just pull up on the side here,” Jake said, leaning forward to the front.

  Artak pulled over and turned back to Jake as if he wanted a tip or something, Jake gave a nod of his head and pulled on the door handle but the door didn’t open.

  “Five stars,” Artak snapped. “Five stars!”

  Jake looked at him and laughed.

  “Alright, my dude,” he said with a smile. “Five stars.”

  Artak nodded his head and unlocked Jake’s door and sent him free into the world.

  “Look, Artak, before I leave you in the swamp to die, just know I didn’t want your life story. Just a casual convo,” Jake said before he slammed the door shut.

  † Yes, yes, it’s Artax not Artak. Atreyuuuuuu! †

  The tires of the Kia Sorrento squealed as they sped off down the street.

  “You’re only getting one star, dingus!” Jake called after the car as he raised a high middle finger salute, hoping it filled Artak’s rear view mirror.

  Jake smiled. He hadn’t given any driver regardless of quality of service less than five stars, ever, and he wasn’t about to start now. He pulled out his phone and gave Artak his precious five stars plus a five-dollar tip.

  The huge neon sign above Jake reflected in the screen of his iPhone as he put it to sleep. Violet had made him horny, so horny that even after jerking off, he needed even more tits in his face and ass on his crotch. Jake fucking hated strip clubs. He liked doing business or partying there but that didn’t change the fact he still he fucking hated them. They represented everything his ego was firmly against—paying a girl to touch him—but here he was. He had thought about calling up one of the girls in his squad to come over and put all his urges to bed, but then he’d have to deal with her. He preferred them to come over during the week. Friday and Saturday were primetime hunting season. Not to mention it was a lot harder to get a call back from the girls in his squad on those nights. As he started walking towards the entrance, he knew this was only a minor distraction. There was only one ass he wanted bouncing on his crotch; there was only one set of tits he wanted jiggling in his face, and at that point he knew he had sobered up.

  @KillingJake hey @MayorGarcetti how bout fixing the fucking 101 south at downtown. #ShitShow #ArtaxInTheSwampOfSadness #BlotchTheNightAway #BonScotting

  CHAPTER 29: THIEVES LIKE US

  The moon shone a thin fingernail of light over the city. There were no stars in the sky, but Mars and Venus were lurking dimly like a forty-year old guy at a college bar. Daryl’s phone wasn’t new enough to have a fancy flashlight built into it, so he had to use an old-fashioned penlight to read the book in his hands. It was one of those handbooks for dummies. He considered himself a scooch above that, but he was finding it increasingly difficult to understand what the fuck the first chapter meant. Herbology for Dummies had seemed like a safe bet, but now he was Googling books with the title How To Grow Weed If You Can Barely Tie Your Shoelaces. He had buckets of street smarts, prison smarts and sex smarts, but learning via books was foreign to him. He was a student of trial and error, and you didn’t need no damn books for that shit.

  Daryl had parked a stolen black Ford Transit 350 van on a dark and lonely street on the edge of downtown. He hadn’t stolen it, in actual fact, it wasn’t even technically stolen. He just knew a guy, who knew a guy, who knew a guy who owned a van, who didn’t use it over the weekend and routinely left the keys around for anyone to find them. To complete the ruse of just another van parked on a dark street, he had used his aforementioned street smarts by keeping the engine running and turning the lights off. The dim glow created by the penlight was the only hint that something was amiss. He looked through the windshield down the empty street. Some areas of downtown were vibrant and full of people going to bars and sporting events, but there were definitely some places rarely visited after sunset, and this was one of them. It wasn’t exactly a no-go zone. There just wasn’t anything open or any people around, which meant no witnesses, which meant danger.

  After Jake had dropped him off in a cloud of smoke, Daryl went about the task of getting ready for a job he had little to no time to organize. He traded in his formal wardrobe for a blue T-shirt, dark green cargo pants and big black work boots. He had also added a ski mask to his head, rolled up to look like a beanie and cover his shiny bald head. The ensem
ble he had worn to Max’s had been on his body for a grand total of two hours, and he didn’t think he would need it again, so he had folded it up and put it back in the Amazon box it came in, ready for return. There was no point keeping it, even if Max did want to use him for further jobs. He wasn’t going to pander to his rich fat ass. The loafers, however, were Prada, and they were four years old and barely got a shot at the big leagues unless there was a wedding or a date, so they were just put back in their box, ready for the next call up.

  The short timing of the job was brutal. It didn’t make any sense. Daryl and Jake had known about the meeting for over twenty-four hours, so why the fuck did they meet so late in the afternoon? They could have easily met in the morning. Then Daryl wouldn’t be behind the eight ball in planning and hiring someone he trusted. Every way he looked at it, it required two people. The truck was the wildcard. He didn’t know what the driver brought to the table. Luckily, it didn’t take him long to find a partner for the job. The money on offer, even with Daryl getting a sizeable chunk of it, was still really good, so the first person he called had jumped at the chance to heist a truck and burn it.

  He had decided to be fairly generous to his new partner in crime. He paid him ten grand for what should only be one or two hours of work at most. The idea behind this was to pay him so much he did the job right and obeyed Daryl’s commands. It was almost like an insurance policy. The other twenty grand he stacked away with the rest of his ill-gotten stacks. His rainy-day fund was about to hit peak monsoon, and he knew exactly what he was going to do it with it, especially when the fifty grand final payment came in. He was also saving a bunch of money “renting” the van instead of actually stealing it. If they did get caught by police with it, sure, it would be technically stealing, but borrowing it for a small fee of five hundred bucks was a lot easier than stealing one himself, which he had absolutely no idea how to do, or paying some other asshole big bucks to do it.