by Reid, Ruby
Thinking of love as Marco led her down the street felt odd. She noticed that as they had started down the sidewalk, he had pocketed his gun. She wondered if it would even be worth the effort to try running. But then she thought about how easily he had apparently killed a mailman and come into her house. And there was also a depth of craziness in his eyes that made her think that he would have no problem at all with putting a bullet in the base of her skull in broad daylight if she tried to run.
The streets around her were all familiar, as she had been living in this neighborhood for twelve years, but as Marco led her down the sidewalk, she felt like she was stranded on some alien planet. She wanted to cry, and she wanted to scream—but she was afraid of what the madman at her back might do if she were to do either one of those things.
Two blocks down, they came to a very basic black car. Marco grabbed the tail of her shirt to stop her. “Get inside,” he said. “And just so I know you won’t get squirrely and try to get out, you’ll be driving. They keys are under the floor mat.”
She didn’t know if she would be able to drive in her condition, but she also didn’t want to argue with this man. She felt that she had to do anything that he asked of her. She got into the car, and when she was behind the wheel, he closed the door behind her. He then raced around the car and got in on the passenger side.
“Start the car,” he said.
Fighting back the urge to cry, Amanda reached under the mat and got the keys. To keep the tears at bay, she kept repeating a single phrase: He killed Stephen, he killed Stephen…
She found the keys, put them in the ignition, and started the car. She gripped the wheel tightly, trying to suppress the sobs that she felt trying to come out of her throat. She was visibly shuddering as she fought the tears and emotion away. She noticed that there was an almost polite sort of quiet in the car as Marco let her take a moment to get herself together.
“Go down about two miles and take a right on Helmsdale Street. Go the speed limit. Be a good driver. Cautious. Pretend this is Driver’s Ed. Understood?”
“Yes,” she said, still repeating He killed Stephen over and over in her head.
When she started driving forward, Marco reached under his seat. He pulled a cellphone out, thought about something for a moment, and then scrolled through his contacts. He finally selected one and pressed CALL.
“Keep quiet,” he whispered to her as his phone started to ring.
Marco waited and waited and after several seconds, ended the call. “Voice mail,” he said. He grinned and then added, “I saw Alex earlier. As did the knife I showed you moments ago. Maybe he was hurt worse than I thought. Maybe he bled to death and all of this is really all for nothing. If I were you, I’d hope he was dead. If he’s dead, then my job is over, and you can go free.”
Amanda sensed that Marco was trying to get her to bite, to make her explode in some way and lose her cool. But she kept quiet, keeping her eyes on the road. Beside her, Marco waited several moments and tried the call again—Alex’s phone, Amanda assumed.
“Interesting,” Marco said after the second failed call. He looked to be deep in thought about something and then gave a wan little smile. He then looked ahead and pointed. “Here’s your turn.”
Amanda took it as Marco sat quietly in the passenger seat, his silence somehow as bad as his anger.
She took the turn and led the car onto the interstate. She felt tears coming and once again had to fight off the urge to lose control. That would be one hell of a note—to become an emotional wreck that resulted in crashing the car. What truly alarmed her was that this idea didn’t strike her as too terrible. At least then it would all be over.
But she got control of herself once again and kept the car straight and true. The car was filled with tense silence again as Amanda drove towards whatever destination Marco had in mind.
CHAPTER 5
It took forever to be seen, but Alex had been expecting that. In the end, things had not been nearly as bad as he had thought. He’d come clean with the doctors about what had happened, but he kept the names out of it, claiming he never got a good clear view of his attackers. The doctor looked him over with some minor fuss and seemed to eye him with suspicion every chance he got. Alex knew that he had gotten off incredibly lucky in the fight and assumed the doctor was wondering how the other party had come out.
The cut in his stomach had been minor, but had still required fourteen stitches. In terms of his left hand, the damage there had been less than Alex had expected. The hand itself was fine with the exception of some bruising. The pinky and ring finger had been broken, though, and had required a splint. As for the blow to his upper back, he had gotten lucky there, too. There were no injuries, and it had been cared for with an icepack as Alex was given the splint and the stitches.
Watching the doctor put the stitches in took his mind back to a time that he thought of often, but never revealed to anyone. It was the one big secret he had been keeping for all of these years. It was the secret he had nearly told Amanda about although he barely knew her. Not even Jameson or Slim knew about it, and they knew just about everything about him that there was to know.
At the age of eleven, Alex had spent a lot of nights in bed with his head buried under a pillow. It had started before this, but he had never really been sure what he was hearing from the other end of the hallway until he was eleven. At eleven, he knew the sound for what it was: his father beating his mother. And as he got older, it had gotten worse.
He had come to know the different sounds of the beatings. When it was with only his hands, the sounds were dull and reminded him of what it sounded like when his mom would tenderize the steaks before throwing them on the grill. When he used the belt, they were sharp sounds that were almost like electricity. They’d fill the house with almost cartoon-like snapping sounds.
On the mornings after, his mom would be walking funny or favor a certain arm when she went about her work in the kitchen while making Alex’s lunch for school. He’d come to know what these conditions were from, mainly from the distance that existed between his parents in the days in between. But then a time would come when everything seemed to be fine. He’d actually see his parents kissing quickly when they thought he wasn’t looking or holding hands while watching TV.
But then he’d hear the sounds again, and he’d have to stick his head under his pillow, muffling the sounds of his mother’s cries of pain. When he did this, he imagined what the lives of his friends might be like. He only had two close friends in school, and he knew that at least one of them, Paul, had a very happy family. His parents were always together, and on the few times that Alex had gone to Paul’s house, his mom and dad were always happy. He’d even seen them holding hands while sitting on the couch, laughing with each other as if they were the best of friends.
Alex wondered that that must be like. The concept had seemed foreign to him at the time, and he wondered if there was maybe something wrong with Paul’s folks. But when he hid his head under the pillow to drown out the sounds coming from the other end of the hallway, he became certain that it was his parents that were different.
Thinking about this as an eleven year old, he tried to figure out why his father treated his mom that way. Did she say things when Alex wasn’t around that made his father think that she deserved it? Alex didn’t think so; in fact, he didn’t see what any woman could ever say that would cause her to deserve being beaten. It just didn’t seem right.
All there was to do was hide his head and wait for sleep to come.
One night, though, he was done hiding his head. It was a hot June night, and for some reason or another, he had neglected to close his bedroom door all the way, something he or his parents had done for his entire childhood. His mother’s cries of pain were louder through that small crack in his door, and the snapping of the belt was like a gunshot.
For the first time in his life, he felt true anger take hold of him. He loved his parents equally, but he also knew that
striking a woman was wrong. It was nothing his father had ever told him, but something he had figured out on his own. It was this anger that stirred him out of bed and started him towards his bedroom door.
As he walked down the small hallway that connected their rooms, the noises from their bedroom mingled with the darkness of the hallway, and it all felt like something out of one of the horror movies that he sometimes watched with Paul. Of course, they weren’t supposed to watch those movies, but it was one of their favorite pastimes once they knew that Paul’s folks had gone to bed.
He thought of those movies then and found that it was easy to hear the noises his mom was making and assume that she was being mauled by a maniac in a hockey mask. It was almost enough to make Alex stop, turn back around, and retreat to his pillow again. But there was steel inside of him that most eleven year old boys didn’t possess. It was supported by the new anger that was cascading through him, and as he reached his parents’ bedroom door, he took hold of it and let it consume him.
He’d quietly opened his parents’ bedroom door and saw his father on top of his mother, pinning her down to the bed. He knew it wasn’t a sex thing; he had seen a few magazines to know that there was nothing sexy or intimate about what was happening. His father was wearing his boxers, and his mom was wearing the flannel pajamas she wore almost every night.
Alex saw the belt come up into the air over his father’s shoulder and then come down in a whipping arc. It made its horrible snapping sound, and then his mother cried out. Up close, the noise was too real. It broke Alex’s heart and pulled him into the room.
He came up behind his father at the foot of the bed and said, simply, “Dad.”
When his father turned around, Alex punched him hard in the chest. More surprised than anything, his father lost his balance and fell to the floor with a yelp of surprise. Before he could even try getting to his feet, Alex was at his side. He kicked his father hard in the face and then reached down to grab the belt. The surprise and shock of it all had his father reeling, so taking the belt from him was not hard.
Alex delivered two more kicks, the second crushing his father’s nose. From the bed, his mother said, “Alex…,” but she seemed too horrified to move.
Alex drove a knee into his father’s chest and wrapped the belt around his neck. He wrapped it tightly and then pulled. When Alex sensed his father’s anger flaring and a fight rising up in him, he punched his father in the nose where he was already bleeding. He did so with no remorse, but something eerily like duty. He punched him again and again and again until all of the fight was gone from his body and his eyes. It was an amazing feeling to know that he had this sort of control and power of an adult. While he knew that what he was doing was wrong, there was an allure to it that not a single nerve in his body could resist.
It was a moment he looked back on thousands of times in his life, and not once would he have gone so far as to say that he had enjoyed doing it. But there had been a sense of accomplishment in it. It was a moment that had defined him for most of the rest of his life. He assumed it was what a great artist felt when they looked back over their lives and recalled the first picture they had ever sketched or painted.
On that night, as his mother sat frozen on the bed behind him, Alex continued to pull on the belt and after a while, the fight left his father.
When it was done, Alex slowly removed himself. He knew what he had done and knew that there should be regret in his heart. There was none. He stood over his father and looked down at him as if the motionless shape was nothing more than a rug.
But you know this is wrong, some other part of him had said.
Is it? came a response from a more primal part of his brain. He thought that the sounds of his mother being beaten at least twice a month was somehow much worse than the sight of the dead man at his feet.
Over time, that’s how Alex had come to think of him—not as his father, but the dead man that he had saved his mother from.
By the time his mom had managed to pry herself away from the bed, it was too late. His father had been motionless, blood caking the lower half of his face. When his mother pulled him away, Alex saw the dead glaze in his father’s eyes. It was a dead stare that would follow him into every single fight he would ever be in over the course of his life.
Through a series of events Alex still did not understand; neither he nor his mother were charged with the death of his father. He always assumed his mom had made some sort of story about an accident. Honestly, he didn’t care. She died five years later when she had been driving home drunk from the bar she frequented in the hopes of finding a miserable replacement for her husband.
These thoughts looped through his head as the doctor threaded the cut along the top of his stomach. If you could only see me now, dad… you miserable asshole.
All told, his time at the hospital had taken six and a half hours of his time. When he was cleared to leave (with several packages of gauge to place over the stitches when it needed swapping out), he walked through the waiting room and was surprised to see Karla sitting among those waiting.
“Karla,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“Jameson asked me to stay. He’s on the road right now with some of the Unknowns, headed for Chicago. He wanted me to stay behind for a while after he heard you had been admitted.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” he said.
“I know. But he insisted. And he wanted me to give you these.”
She held out a set of keys. The keychain on it was unmistakable. They were the keys to Jameson’s bike.
“What is he driving?”
“Someone else’s bike. He says this is for you until you finish your business. But he expects to have it back in one piece.”
Hesitantly, Alex reached out and took the keys. “How are you getting to Chicago?” He asked.
“I’m flying. Truth be told, I’ve just about had it with all of this motorcycle bullshit.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “I’m just about there, too.”
She nodded and then handed him a large plastic bag. “Your things are in here. I told the docs that I was with you. It’s your jacket, another shirt I got from the dollar store down the street, and your cell phone—which, by the way, has been blowing up for the last two hours or so.”
Alex took the bag, still in disbelief that Jameson had gone to such lengths to help him. Jameson never let anyone drive his bike. It was overwhelming and a little difficult to see Jameson making such a gesture despite the fact that Alex had, on occasion viewed Jameson as a father figure of sorts.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” Alex asked.
“Yes, actually,” Karla said. “You can make sure you end this nasty business with Marco O’Brien. I’ve never seen Jameson so worried. But that stays between you and I. Got it?”
“Yeah, I understand.”
“How are you feeling?” She asked.
“A little sore,” he said, holding up his left hand and showing her the splint. The stitches are itching. Other than that, I’m good. You?”
She shrugged. “I’m fine. Well, look. Jameson booked me a room at a motel down the road. Care to give me a lift?”
“Of course,” Alex said.
They walked out together, and when they entered the parking garage, Alex’s defenses instantly went up. Karla led him to the far end of the garage where, she told him, one of the Unknowns had been tasked with parking the bike after retrieving it from the restaurant’s parking lot. Thinking of the events in the parking lot where he had found Jameson on the pavement, it was hard for Alex to realize that it had only been two nights ago. It felt like a lifetime… both physically and emotionally.
Alex and Karla boarded the bike, and when Alex kicked it into life, he couldn’t help but smile. Jameson cared for his bike better than he had ever cared for his own health. It showed in the roar of the engine and the almost non-existent vibrations underneath Alex’s body.
“Sexy-ass bike, huh?”
Karla said.
“It is,” Alex said.
He pulled them out of the lot and headed into town, taking Karla’s directions to the hotel that Jameson had booked her. As he did so, he never thought of the bag he had stored in the storage compartment at the back of the bike or how Karla had commented that his phone had been blowing up over the last several hours.
In fact, with everything else on his mind, his phone was the furthest thing from Alex’s mind.
***
He walked into the hotel office with Karla to make sure the room had already been paid for (it was) and to see if Karla needed help with anything else. She didn’t, and when she invited him back to the room, he declined. He’d heard rumors throughout the Unknowns that Karla would hit on guys at Jameson’s request to see how loyal they were to him. Even if Jameson hadn’t been in the picture—or Amanda, for that matter—Alex would not have been interested. There was simply too much on his mind, and there had always been something about Karla that had rubbed him the wrong way.