by Stephens, L.
Sarah turned to look at David. He had stopped feverishly pumping his meat and now just held a limp sausage that was oozing out cum, looking like a kid who had been caught jerking it to a picture of his sister. David averted his eyes from hers and put away his cock before slowly trudging away towards the stairs. He had not uttered a word since they left the restaurant, and it seemed he didn’t plan on rectifying that. Sarah slipped out of her dress and immediately set to using soda water and paper towels to dab the cum off it. She found herself sobbing at the complete bodies-lying-everywhere train wreck her life had become.
By the time she had made the slow death march up the stairs to the bedroom, he was already sleeping. Of course he was. That’s what he did. He fed off her energy and nourished what was left of his soul, before returning to start it all again the next day. This time, there would be no next day for him. It was over. She would not tolerate him anymore. She would not tolerate anyone anymore. This was a new chapter where Sarah Dale would get exactly what she felt she was owed and at that moment, that was everything.
CHAPTER 38: WAKEY WAKEY
Daryl felt like he was dead: his body felt buried under earth and debris while vivid thoughts ran through his mind on an infinite loop. Visions of his mother haunted him. He could feel her disappointment. Her life had been so focused on making a better world for him, and his incarceration had been like a betrayal. She had tried to visit him when he was in prison, but she hadn’t been able to get past the parking lot. He had seen her from his cell. She had just sat in the car watching the wives, friends and families coming towards the visiting rooms excited to see their loved ones, only to return, destitute.
Daryl was not big time, not even close. He moved a couple ounces a week, maybe more during the summer. He had just visited his supplier and was still holding when he had gone to the neighborhood taco joint to get some food. Instead of getting it to-go like normal, he had decided to eat it there. It was one of those “if I just hadn’t done this” moments that he still played back in his head once or twice a week.
He had seen her as soon as he entered the tiny taqueria: she was beautiful and the range of her beauty changed depending on his mood. If she was ugly, he was depressed and vice versa. She had just picked up her food as he approached the register to order. Their eyes met for a moment and she had smiled. That moment ruined his life. She had sat down by herself at the communal table that ran along the side of the restaurant. Even though she was the only other customer, she had chosen to sit at the one place where Daryl could sit with her and make his move. He had no idea if that was actually her intention, but two years thinking about a twenty second moment gave birth to a lot of details. All he had ordered was a couple of tacos but one thing was for sure, he was going to eat it there—he just prayed she wasn’t a fast eater.
“To go?” the chef, come waiter, come busboy had said.
“Here, man, here,” Daryl had stumbled, barely making sense.
She’d had her back to him but he saw move her head trying to see over her shoulder at him.
“Ah, si, cabron!” the chef, come waiter, come busboy had said, looking in the girl’s direction then back to Daryl and giving him a sly wink.
If you had asked him her eye color, if her hair was straight or wavy, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you for sure. He only saw her face for that moment, and she had become an amalgamation of every girl he had every taken a fancy to. When the tacos came, Daryl had thought about sitting right next to her, but he thought he’d play it cool, so he’d placed the plate a few stools down from her, conveniently out of reach of the hot sauce, but close enough so he could ask her to slide it down his way. He was about to sit when his phone had started vibrating, and he’d reached into the pockets of his shorts and immediately felt the two ounces of coke sitting underneath his phone.
To this day, he never found out who had called him. He had woken up three days later in a hospital, cuffed to the bed with his mother asleep in the chair next to him. The officer at the door had been his first sign he was in trouble. The handcuffs had been the clincher. As he had answered the phone, he had turned sharply to head outside to continue the call and had clashed heads with someone entering, knocking him out cold in the taqueria.
From the police report, the ambulance had come and the medics had looked through his pockets and found his secret shame, and when the police arrived it was all over. While in his mini coma the cops had gotten a warrant to search his apartment, where they found money, scales and baggies—it was an open and shut case. His court-appointed lawyer told him just to stay in jail, just get it over and done with as soon as he could, so he took the plea deal and spent the next sixteen months in prison, followed by six months in a halfway house. Luckily, Jake had been out of town, partying in Vegas, and he wasn’t on the lease anyway, so he didn’t even get mentioned. Typical Jake.
He went back to the taco joint after he got out of jail but it had become a Starbucks, a faceless corporation replacing the place he had seen the faceless girl. It was all pointless. He was relying on her recognizing him, and he was unrecognizable from the skinny kid she had shared a moment with. Anyway, he assumed she would have laughed at the pathetic guy unconscious on the floor with a couple bags of coke falling out of his pocket, rather than fall in love with him, like he did with her.
His finger twitched and the debris that was weighing down on him felt like it had turned to a heavy sludge. His mind continued to race, a GIF played on loop, cycling over and over again, and he still couldn’t escape it. The truck, the fucking truck, Jake, the faceless girl, Ray, Max, his mother, the truck, Jake, the faceless girl, Ray, Max, his mother, the fucking truck, Jake, the faceless girl, Ray, Max, his mother. It was a never-ending freight train running over his head and crushing his will to live, but it had awoken his mind, and the lights were beginning to turn on.
Boom. Boom. Boom!
With a huge breath, Daryl woke up. He sat upright, gathering his thoughts. The pain hit him almost instantly, and he reached for the back of his head. He could feel the swollen knot under his rolled-up ski mask and the blood that had pooled and dried in the middle of it.
“Are you fucking serious?” Daryl said as he gently rubbed his head.
Daryl immediately reached for his gun, and to his relief it was still there, secreted in the waistband at the back of his pants. He switched off the safety as he brought the gun to the front of his chest and looked around for someone to use it on. Ray’s money was gone. He didn’t even have to check. He could feel the envelope was no longer there.
“Mother fucker!” Daryl whispered. He wasn’t sure if that was directed at Ray or himself. Most likely both.
Police sirens wailed in a nearby street and Daryl jumped to his feet. Blood rushed through his head. It was too much, too soon, and he fell to his knees, vomiting the quick meal he had eaten before he left. The siren grew louder, and Daryl clutched his skull fearing it would burst. In that moment he prayed to be caught, to be cuffed to a gurney in an ambulance on the way to his doom, but the sirens faded and the police cars didn’t even slow down as they passed the parking lot.
Daryl closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind. The throbbing eased and he was able to get to his feet without a herd of buffalo running through his cerebral cortex. He swiveled around, looking all over the parking lot for someone to rain hellfire on, and that’s when he saw the river of blood in front of him. Daryl took a few steps sideways so he could see around the corner of the truck where the blood was coming from. He raised his gun and pressed his finger to the trigger as he carefully poked his head around until he saw the lifeless, blood-soaked lump of meat that used to be Ray.
“Ray?” Daryl whispered. “What the fuck you doing down there?”
Ray’s body was covered in blood, but thanks to his jeans and leather jacket plus the dog pile that cut short the feast he wasn’t in too bad shape. Well, bad shape for someone who had been crushed to death. His shotgun lay a few feet away with a couple spent
shotgun shells scattered close by. It looked like he had been beaten to death by someone.
“I told you, nothing good was going to come of opening that truck,” Daryl said bending over to inspect Ray up close. “You should have believed me, you dumb mother fucker!”
Daryl looked into the back of the truck and saw it was empty with the doors wide open.
“Goddamnit!” Daryl said, putting his gun back into his waistband. “Fucking set up!”
Every impulse was telling him to get the fuck out of the parking lot and to safety, but he needed to finish the job. Daryl found the envelope Ray had taken from him and practically threw Ray’s body into the hold. He grabbed the shotgun from the ground, put it in the back of the van and finally got the lighter that he had left on the dash earlier.
“See you in hell, Ray!” Daryl said in his worst Cockney accent as he lit the truck on fire. “Pip, pip, cheerio!”
The truck went up quickly, and Daryl hurried back to the van, putting the jerry can in the back with the shotgun. He was about to close the door when he heard a loud bang and swung around. The truck was still on fire, but the back doors had swung open and smashed into the side of the truck.
“Huh?” Daryl said, walking slowly towards the inferno.
He saw movement. Something was on fire, and it was moving towards him. He realized pretty quickly that something was Ray, and he was howling like some sort of B horror movie ghost. It didn’t take more than a second before Daryl had pulled his gun from his waistband and pulled the trigger, unloading round after round into Ray’s chest. But Ray wasn’t halted by the bullets. He just kept on coming at Daryl.
“What the fuck?” Daryl said shooting more bullets into Ray’s chest. “Die damn it!”
With Ray only a few yards away and almost about to pounce, Daryl swiftly sidestepped him, letting Ray, still on fire, hurtle into the back of the van. Ray hit the jerry can, knocking it over, and there was an explosion, the force of which knocked Daryl back ten feet onto the ground.
“Holy shit!” Daryl said as he picked himself up.
The van was a fireball, the truck was a fireball, and Ray definitely wasn’t moving this time. Daryl was done. He was not going to wait around for anything more to happen, and with the cash he had securely left at home and Ray’s cut, he was happy to let this job be a distant memory.
“Fuck this shit!” Daryl said, running to the exit of the lot.
CHAPTER 39: FUCKING STRANGERS
Jake was horny—sooooo fucking horny. The farther he got from the strip club the hornier he got, and he thought about running back to its open arms, naked girls, booze and blow but he had left its loving embrace, and he knew its arms weren’t open anymore. If he returned he would be persona non grata—a feeling he did not like at all. It was 11PM, so it felt relatively early—bars close at 2am in L.A., so the clock was ticking, but there was still a lot of time to find some girl that might want to smash or at the very least make him think he was going to smash. He found himself stumbling a bit as he walked to one of his old haunts. The blow was starting to fade, and the shots were starting to kick in, so he slipped down an alleyway. Pissing didn’t help as much as he hoped, so he jammed his fingers down his throat and threw up the meager contents of his stomach onto the ground. It wasn’t much more than a mouthful of clear liquid, but it instantly made him feel better, his endorphins kicking in as a light breeze cooled him down.
Jake gave his cheeks three sharp slaps and pushed the light sweat from his forehead to his hair. It was game time. If he was going to fuck he needed to have his wits about him and to not be the drunken slob he felt like three minutes earlier. He wasn’t quite ready to ruin some girl’s night. Max’s call was still eating at him, so he pulled out his phone and tried calling Daryl again. When Daryl didn’t pick up, he called Max, but the phone barely made it two rings before going straight to voicemail.
Getting her to want to fuck him wasn’t as hard as he thought it was going to be. He was walking through the door when he saw her. He had seen her before once or twice but not in a long time. She was walking forward but looking back into the bar, doing that old movie star, red carpet shtick: turning your head back over your shoulder, being alluring, being sexy and hiding the fact you had no tits. The light hit her craning neck just right, and he felt something sexual. He wasn’t a sucker for necks, and it sure as fuck wasn’t love at first sight, but it felt almost primal.
† Dudes like to say that, right? †
Jake decided what to do in an instant. He turned his head, mirroring her, but instead he was looking back out into the street. As luck would have it, a police car with sirens blaring sped past just as he turned, giving him the perfect alibi. Despite the scenario he concocted, he was also a gentleman. He cushioned the hit, swinging around right at the last second, making it all chest to chest, and he even slowed her fall as she fell backwards, catching her half a foot off the ground before slowly releasing her to the floor. To the casual observer it looked worse than it was, but he didn’t want her to be knocked out. What fun would that be? Jake discretely looked around the bar for a knight in shining armor that may come to help the fair maiden. There was no doubt he was the jerk, and he knew some guy might just be drunk enough to throw a punch. The bouncer was helping some sack of potatoes get into a cab outside, so he wasn’t an issue, but Jake was still relieved this bar was in severe lack of a hero tonight.
The girl was pissed. She furiously gathered her shit together, and Jake could tell she wasn’t used to being on the wrong end of the stick. He had to play it right, give her a line that would make her change her face, become self-conscious, maybe even giggle. The wrinkles line he threw at her was clunky, and he hated himself for it, but they all couldn’t be winners. Her face didn’t change. If anything, it got worse. Jake offered his hand but she ignored it and clumsily got to her feet. As they stood eye-to-eye she seemed to soften. She pretended she wasn’t looking him up and down. He had asked her if she was alright. She wanted an apology, but apologies were worth a bag of dicks to Jake, and there was no way he was throwing out one to this girl.
Jake could see she was weighing up her options, and against his better judgment he begrudgingly gave it one last shot. It wasn’t much of a shot to be fair, but more than he usually would offer, and a mea culpa cocktail served up in the hope of letting bygones be bygones was at least something they both could enjoy. Alas, she still didn’t want to drink to fallen foes, so he offered her one last chance to sip the nectar of the gods as he walked to the bar, but his delivery of the invitation was as icy as the drink he was offering, and he made sure to be on his way to the bar before she could give an answer. Jake took a spot at the bar with the most vacant stools next to it, and the bartender made his way over, nodding his head in recognition.
“Vodka rocks with a splash of seven,” Jake said evenly.
The bartender nodded again and went about his work. Jake may have started with whisky and then moved to tequila, but he knew he was going to finish with vodka. Bad moves were coming to mind, and the Holy Trinity of Booze was the only thing that would get him to his final destination.
“That sounds good,” the girl said cheerfully over his shoulder. “I’ll get one of those too.”
The bartender stopped what he was doing and looked to Jake to get his consent. Jake nodded but didn’t acknowledge the girl’s arrival at the bar, even though she had parked herself right next to him.
“You having fun, yet?” Jake asked, still not looking in her direction.
“Of course,” the girl said, leaning on the bar and trying her best to get eye contact from Jake through the mirror behind the bartender. “I always have fun with my friends.”
The bartender served up the drinks, and Jake peeled a twenty off his billfold and pushed it towards the bartender. He noticed in the mirror how her eyes sharply darted to check out his wad of cash, and he had a pretty good idea of what type of girl he was dealing with.
“Up the bum, no babies!” Jake said, cl
inking his glass with hers.
He waited a second to see her reaction.
“Up the bum, no babies!” she gushed before taking a big sip of her drink.
Jake followed suit, taking a gulp to rival hers.
“I’m Danni, by the way,” the girl said before taking another sip.
“Why does it say Jill on your necklace, then?” Jake asked with a smile.
Her eyes widened, and her hand rushed to cover the four tiny balls that spelled out JILL. He didn’t really care what the story was with the necklace. It just provided him a deflecting line of conversation so he didn’t have to provide his own name or make up one.
They only had one more drink before Jake guided her to the employee restroom. It wasn’t much of a restroom in truth. It used to be, sure, but now it was just a storage room with a broken toilet and the grim smell of shit. Jake had used the restroom slash storage room slash fuck palace before. The bartender usually hooked him up with the key for a hundred bucks, but tonight he seemed a little uncooperative and made him pay double. He wasn’t super into the girl. She was pretty and had everything Jake looked for in a sex partner, that is a pulse and a vagina, but there was something missing. Everything with her was too easy. She wass too agreeable, even when he said his usual asshole shit to try and get a rise. It was like he was some fucking loser virgin, and his friends had paid some hooker behind his back to fuck him.