I wonder if I’d be so angry if it weren’t a woman. If Knox had brought home a man would my hands be this tight around the steering wheel of my Audi? Or is it the fact that she’s a lover and that she means so much to him? I take the Lord’s name in vain, shouting it into the wind in the hopes that he’ll give me answers. He always has until recently and I’m reminded that all fathers at some point abandon their children.
I pull up at Cactus, our favorite bar because it was our first, and slide into the spot I’ve used in the back since I first took over management some fifteen years ago. I was sixteen and bar manager, and by eighteen I owned it. Since then I’ve – we’ve – built up the streets surrounding it to a six block oasis for residents and out-of-towners and college kids as far as three cities over.
I throw open the back door and the few staff that recognize me, greet me. Most of the newer faces in the kitchen and behind the bar look confused as I pass, but I don’t stop to introduce myself. My brothers and I like to keep a low profile, stick to ourselves, do good work and run our businesses right – at least we did until Knox lost his mind and handed his testicles over to a whore named after a flower.
The sight of any woman right now brings up an image of her face in my mind, so when the waitress comes to my corner booth, I tell her to send the guy over. She probably thinks I’m gay, but I don’t care. I can’t stand the sight of a soft face and a pair of tits right now, even if Mer’s face was less than feminine for all the damage that had been done to it. I wonder what sort of mess she got my brother into. If it will kill him. If it will destroy us.
The tables are slightly sticky and I’m staring down at my black reflection against the black, shiny surface when I hear the waiter approach. “I heard you’re looking for me? What can I do you for?”
“A coke and a fifth of whiskey. Top shelf. Neat.”
“Wow, you celebrating something?” He asks with a laugh, hoping to elicit one out of me.
“No,” I sneer, “I’m in mourning.”
“Oh,” the waiter pauses, fumbling awkwardly with more than just his speech. He drops his pen underneath the table and I see that it’s badly chewed. I kick it back to him across the carpet and fold my hands over the sticky gloss, ignoring the low drums beating out some Dance Hall and the sight of ugly women swaying to it just a few feet away on the dance floor. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Yeah me too. Why I could use a drink.” I lift my gaze to the waiter’s and recognition flits across his face.
“Oh shit. Sorry. I didn’t realize…I’ll be right back with your drinks. On the house, of course.” His rubicund cheeks quiver as he speaks.
“I have a tab,” I grunt. The small town celebrity bit got old when I was twenty one.
The kid nods again and leaves me in a much-needed silence, one that isn’t broken by his return. Alone, I drink – not in peace, but in the sort of hazy rapture I’m used to, one shot after the other after the other. The night’s still young by the time I stumble out of Cactus and onto the busy street.
People pass me but I don’t see faces, only shapes and outlines, a multicolored sea that reeks of vomit and smoke and cheap perfume. It’s the latter scent that intensifies when I make my way from the brightly lit streets studded by red velvet rope clubs and throngs of college kids loitering outside of them, hoping to get in and starting fights when they’re denied entry. We got standards at my clubs. Standards that I can’t meet at the moment.
I pass by the door to Camelot as it swings open and a bachelor party staggers out. The bachelor – at least I assume he is by the way he hangs between two others with his fly down and his belt open – throws up on the street inches from me, chunks of blue and pink spewing from his mouth and onto my tan boots. I see the right one sail up into flesh as if not my own or under my control and the bachelor goes down, the two guys on his arms with him.
One of the bouncers steps from the shadows underneath Camelot’s broad, black awning and it takes me a moment to recognize him as Marcel through the haze of the liquor. He looks surprised to see me here and like this and pushes the college kids down the street away from me. He makes an effort to speak to me, but I’m wasted and crippled by shame and the simultaneous desire to burn everything I spent so long creating to the ground.
Camelot’s one of the last bars on the Seventh Street strip and as I leave it behind, sound begins to fade. I can’t tell if it’s because I really am so far off the main road or if it’s because I have begun to fade myself. Half a block later, the buildings are already rundown, my face is on fire and I realize I left my jacket somewhere – maybe I didn’t bring one at all. The wind is thick with chill, and I can sense that it is cold, but I don’t feel it against my flesh. Like the whole world is just on the other side of a thin sheet of glass.
Someone calls my name, but when I glance around, there is no one. Just the darkness of an alleyway, a cab crawling up the street. A group of college kids sit crammed in the back, garbage music wafting out on the breeze, and as a voice shouts my name again one of the blonde sluts in the back seat turns and looks at me.
“You Dixon?” Two white men with vibrant red hair emerge from the dark side of the street, looking like comic book characters or buffoons; one is taller than I am and meaty in the chest though the other is short and lanky. Together, they make a ballerina and a bear and I laugh for no reason I can think of.
“Dixon,” the bear says to the ballerina amidst a sequence of other words I can’t replicate. I’m not even sure that they’re English.
I reach out for the nearest wall and lean against it. Brick and grout crumble beneath my fingers, the consistency dry and rough like sand but twice as hard. “Mr. Cleary,” I choke, “only friends call me Dixon and you ain’t no friend of mine.” Song lyrics dance through my muddled thoughts. They’re old and I can’t complete them.
The two men share a glance and more hushed words. Then the bear looks at me with a hooded gaze that reveals very little and states, “You never know. We may be.”
“What do you want?”
“Looking for our brother.”
“No Weasleys around here,” I drawl.
The shorter one glances to the taller, passing him a look of misunderstanding which is not reciprocated. The bear’s eyes never leave mine even as the ballerina says, “We look for Spade.” His voice is thick with an accent I can’t place.
They’re closing in on me and the heat behind their requests is starting to wear me thin. I feel myself take in a deep breath and clench my teeth. When I straighten up, I take a handful of brick from the building’s dilapidated siding with me. “I don’t know a Spade. Now you need to get off my block.”
“Our brother missed a meeting tonight. A meeting with a group of Mexicans…”
And there it is. Heat ravages me, shooting up the backs of my thighs and into my chest like splinters or needles. “Mexicans aren’t my concern…”
“But you know where they are, yes?” The bear says and he watches me with a knowing that makes me feel as if I’ve just betrayed my own brother though I haven’t said anything at all. He knows me, this man. And I know nothing. I am lost.
“Lots of Mexicans in this town…”
“You know the ones we’re looking for.”
I do. And I incinerate from the inside out with self-loathing. I can’t give her to them because she’s in my house. The woman is in my house. With my brother. My brother did this – no, she did this. She lured him in and stripped him of his sanity and I’ll take my revenge for what she’s done like I will against anything that tries to hurt my family. “You guys have three seconds to get out of here.”
“Or what?” The bear eyes me up and down. “You cannot even stand.”
“Are you challenging me?”
The bear steps forward, but his shorter comrade holds out his arm. “No. No challenge. We telling you to lead us to the Mexicans who have our brother or we’ll tear your town apart.”
&n
bsp; It’s the last word that leaves his lips, but not the last that leaves mine. “You dare threaten my family?”
My fist finds his throat, but I don’t punch, I grab. I throw him face first into the building and hear his nose and at least a few of his front teeth shatter. He crumbles to the ground, coughing and spitting up blood while his taller brother comes at me. He hits me in the cheek and the stomach several times with enough force to maim, but not kill me. I can’t even feel the pain through the glass wall of the alcohol, though I know he’ll leave behind some damage for tomorrow.
I stagger backwards, foot slipping off of the edge of the curb. Unsteadily, I throw myself forward. I grab the tall guy around the waist and my legs give out. We fall together into garbage cans and I hear a thunderous banging sound, shouting that is neither his nor mine, and a cry of pain. Hands grab at my shoulder, wrenching me around and I kick the shorter man when he tries to reach past me for his brother. His head cracks against the brick wall and he slumps down, motionless, while I drunkenly roll back to face the bear.
I kneel on the man’s chest, and watch him painfully drag in air. Something stabbed him in the back and there’s blood on his hands and mine and a tear in his shirt and his eyes have rolled back into his skull but I drive my fist forward anyways. I crack his eye socket and then his jaw.
“Hey!”
My fist slows, as if weighted down and driving through water. Fingers tug at the back of my shirt, choking my collar. I swing my arms around, intending to drag whoever it is to me and suffocate them to death, but my hands close around her shoulders. It’s a her and I’m hit with both a soft guilt and a limitless hatred.
I curse to myself, ready to throw the woman out of here and threaten the hell out of her to keep her slutty mouth shut. It’s the whore from the taxi. She’s white with blonde hair, wearing a white corset and black jeans. Her stilettos are black lace and I have no idea what she’s doing here so close to me with her tiny face contorted in fear. Another woman where she doesn’t belong.
“Get out of here,” I growl, pushing her to the side.
She falls to the concrete with an “oomph,” reaches back and catches herself with her hands. Shaking her head, she pushes her hair out of her face. If she’s surprised at the blood on her palms she doesn’t show it, but instead looks towards the man on the ground who was defeated not by me, but by a garbage can. It takes me to that moment to notice the jagged, rusted pipe-end protruding from the front of the bear’s shoulder.
“No. You get out of here,” she says, claiming my attention away from the bloodied man and for a moment it’s as if she’s also speaking a foreign language.
“What did you say to me?” I rise up onto my haunches so that I’m only half standing. Even then, I still tower over her. The dim light from the street is at my back and with as black as my skin is, I imagine that to this little white over-privileged college brat, I look monstrous.
Her gaze flashes over my shoulder and abruptly she shouts, “Don’t!” I turn to see a fat woman duck behind the brick wall and drunkenly, I lurch towards her. “Hey!” The blonde’s voice turns my head around. Her jaw has set. She inhales once and exhales slowly. “You need to leave now if you don’t want to get arrested.”
“Can’t get arrested,” I slur. And it’s true. I know too many people, own too many secrets. Half the cops have been to Camelot where they’ve received more than just lap dances they don’t want their wives to know about. By their infidelities and their addictions, I am protected.
“You will get arrested if one of these guys dies and one or both of them will die if you don’t let me get to them. I’m a med student and a paramedic and he needs to be rotated onto his side.”
Confusion and adrenaline and booze, the sin of all sins, compete in my blood stream and I feel oddly out of control as she crawls around me to reach the body. She rolls him onto his side and unbuckles her belt, rips it free, then begins to slide it around his back. She whispers small, near inaudible words under her breath that sound either like curses or prayers, working diligently despite the blood on her hands and on her white chest.
Lifting her phone to her ear, she trembles as she shouts into it. “Paul? Hey Paul, I need the bus just off of Seventh street. There was a fight between two guys. They nearly killed each other.” Her gaze flashes to me and I notice, as she lies like all women do, that it is very blue. Like the sky I used to stare up at as a kid on very clear days. Knox liked doing that too. He used to say that this was what forever and nothing and everything looked like. I told him that blue was just a color but he didn’t care what I said, even then.
I watch the muscles in her throat contract as she swallows hard and shifts a little further away from me. Then she inhales once and turns her attention back to the body. “Yeah I’ve got at least a concussion on one of them and I think this guy here has a punctured lung. He fell and was impaled by a rusted pipe. Probably will get sepsis and he’s having trouble breathing and I don’t have any equipment to drain his lungs short of the pointy end of my shoe…exactly…”
She doesn’t look again at me and I back away from her towards the mouth of the alley, then stumble out onto Seventh.
Knox
Fuck yes. I come awake with a panic that fades quickly to warmth. It swaddles me like a womb and I am an infant again. Loved without understanding. It is the first emotion a child experiences. If only for an instant. That love of being born. And it may be the drugs or the adrenaline or the endorphins that produce such a feeling in me now, but I yield to it with no resistance.
“Knox?” Fingers trace the line of my spine and I want to touch the hand, but I can’t move. “Knox?”
“Love?” The voice whispers back and I realize only seconds later that it was mine. I feel embarrassment as light laughter washes over me like a veil. She’s watching me when I open my eyes.
“I told them they gave you too much morphine.” Plumeria’s voice reaches me clearly but the sight of her mottled black-and-blue face slips too quickly from my grip, like trying to catch smoke.
“Where are you? Why can’t I see you?” The words lumber off of my lips laboriously and miles seem to span between each of them.
“I’m right here,” she says, mouth finding the lobe of my left ear. She kisses me, her heat sidles up next to mine and she uses herself like a blanket to line my side. “We’re both alive and clean and okay.” She kisses the side of my head and I feel overwhelmed by the gesture. My cock is already hard. My right hand crosses my body to find her waist, as if guided there, and I roughly drag her to me.
She curses. “Christ, Knox, are you even alive?”
“You just said I was.” My lips reach towards hers and find them. I pull her to me, wrapping my hand around the back of her head and then from there, seek her breasts. I squeeze and she shudders and suddenly I’m positioned between her thighs. “I love you,” I groan as I enter her sweet, sacred flesh. And it’s mine because I fought for her and because she yields to me and because I’m a beggar for it and because I hope that she cares for me back.
We are limbs and lubricant and latex for some indeterminate period of time, and then asleep for some time after that. When I next blink my eyes open, everything is in slightly better focus even under the gaze of the low, orange lights. My hand rests in the dip of her lower back. Her hair is wildly strewn across the pillow like I’d dreamt it so many times. Her eyes are closed and her breath is light. She’s asleep and, not wanting to wake her, I twist to face her underneath the sheets, careful as I move because of the pain that ripples across my rib cage suggesting that at least one – but probably more – ribs are broken. And the sex definitely didn’t help.
Her left, good cheek is down against the pillow which means that for now I can only see her right. It’s swollen, bruised, and discolored and makes my stomach ache in a way that’s unfamiliar. This feeling of hatred, of shame, of loss. Of failure. I failed her. For nine days, I failed her, and it was all because of my pri
de. I should have followed her ass home. I should have stood out on her porch and begged her to take me. I shake my head, unable to picture how things should have gone, but didn’t. I didn’t even have the balls to pick up the phone and call to check in on her. By the time I did, it was almost too late.
Thoughts of Spade twist my vision to red, so I close my eyes, lay back on the mattress and inhale in long even breaths that match the length of each exhalation. I look at her again only when I’ve mastered that. Someone’s removed the collar from around her neck, though the bruises that linger are like a cruel flashback.
She’s got cuts on her hands, a deep laceration across her palm, and her sides are a deep brown color that I’m sure spans her full stomach. She’s got broken ribs too. Keeping my breath as even as possible, I lift the covers just a little to inspect the rest of her. She’s got minor bruising on her lower back and on her legs, but I’m more troubled by the white gauze lining her right leg from her pelvic bone, halfway down her thigh.
Carefully, I lift one corner where the fresh tape seems to be loosest, and pull back the top half of the bandage. Seeing the wound, I slide it back into place and get out of bed. My feet hit the floor and are unsteady, but I make it to the door and then into the hallway, down the hallway and into the living room. Red has claimed my vision and I can’t see through it. A voice says my name and my hands find the top of a table and I swipe everything off of it onto the floor.
“Fuck!” I roar. Arms come around me and I’m too weak to fight against them. My legs are slipping out from under me and there’s a pain in my chest that I can no longer ignore. I feel the couch come up around me.
“Easy now.” I open my eyes. Clifton stands in front of me with his arms crossed. He knows. I can see it in his grey eyes that carry just a hint of sadness.
The Hunting Town (Brothers Book 1) Page 9