by Gabi Moore
That question, ‘Why?’ was the strongest thing in my mind as I fell from the top of an ocean cliff into the Tyrrhenian Sea. My moment of reflection and confusion passed, as the car recovered its speed, and screeched away along the outer edge of the cliff. I fell at such a fast rate that I didn’t even see the next car coming behind Tyler. I heard the next car, though. I heard them screech past, hot in pursuit of their prey. Then a wall of water hit me in the back, forcing all of the oxygen from my body.
Falling off of a cliff into the ocean is not an easy thing to do. I could have died easily. In fact, when my back hit the water, and I lost all of my breath, I thought I was going to die. My body sank into the ocean, and when I was down near the bottom, my eyes opened, and a spark of life came to me. The spark was the smallest, most subtle suggestion at first.
“Air?” it asked; almost politely like it was going to give me a moment to collect my bearings and realize that I wasn’t exactly finished. “Air please.”
I moved one limb at first, and the another, and then I realized that though I felt a sharp, stinging pain throughout my entire back — I could still move. My next state of awareness centered on the fact that my lungs ached, and were completely vacant. Looking up from below the surface of the water, the whole world seemed to be one expansive aquatic illusion.
“Air,” it said, more firmly.
The question was gone from the tone of the voice. My survival instinct was becoming more urgent. I felt the panic rise inside of me and began to swim upward from the bottom of the Tyrrhenian Coast. With an explosion of light and a long drink of beautiful, incredible oxygen, I realized that I was alone.
“Bag,” the voice said, and I looked instinctively to my left to see the bag was partially floating on the surface of the water, about four meters to the left.
I swam over to recover the bag and then made my way to a shallow cavern hidden beneath the cliffs above.
In spite of the fall, I still retained all of my ability to move. The rocks were not far away, and there was a bit of difficulty in dealing with the waves as they splashed into the small cavern. Looking up at the face of the cliff, I was terrified and surprised that I had been able to survive the fall. I count myself to be relatively brave, in terms of dealing with situations that others most typically prefer to avoid, but this cliff face was a bit too much to manage.
Had I been on the top of the cliff, I’m not sure I would have been able to jump, even if my life had been threatened. Quite literally, I had to be thrown off a cliff by a man who for some reason believed that whatever fate waited for me at the bottom was preferable to whatever fate he was looking forward to at the end of the car chase.
He must have been desperate, I thought.
I would have blamed him entirely, and pinned him as a sociopath, but sociopaths don’t offer you a bag full of everything needed to start a new life when they throw you off of a cliff — they just get the deed over with and move on to the next empathetically void course of behavior that they are compelled toward.
The rocks were hard on my ass, and I had a few scrapes from where the tide pushed me toward the rocks, and then pulled me back down into the water. The edges of the lower cliffs were mossy and slick, so it was a bit difficult for me to find a place to relax, but the alcove was deep enough to offer a small place to sit, and just high enough to where the tide didn’t splash inside.
Sitting on hard ground after being in the ocean was a pleasing sensation for me. Just the knowledge that the word was over, and that I was sad, if only for a moment — that was good enough.
I thought about my circumstance some more and began to feel an increasing sense of relief. In fact, I had been so bogged down by problems before, that I had not even noticed the increasing weight of the anxiety I had been carrying around. The way that things had been going, just getting laid, and finding solutions to immediate, urgent problems had been exciting pieces of joy. Now that I was here I took an inventory of whatever was going on outside of my current situation.
The two motorcyclists were gone, and Tyler had led the final car away from the edge of the cliff. Even if they found Tyler at the end, and he wasn’t able to get away, they wouldn’t have any idea where I had been abandoned. By the time they figured out to look, I’d be long gone. Their trail would have gone cold.
I didn’t need to visit Antonio any longer.
I opened the bag and found that everything had been quick, though effectively wrapped in plastic, and was mostly airtight. The passports were there, both mine and Tyler’s. Not taking him into consideration, I had all of the paperwork necessary to go basically wherever I wanted. I knew from working with Antonio before that his passports were basically as good as gold. He was the best in the industry. What made things even better was that I didn’t have to worry about whether or not my escape would be predicated on meeting up with anyone else that I knew from my time with Maurice.
Of course, there were the drugs.
I know. I haven’t explicitly mentioned them before now — but that’s what’s been in the bag if you haven’t pieced that together already. Without going into the details I can tell you that I’m not proud to have been involved, but I’m not too proud to find a quick distributor and get the fuck out of Italy. That was where things got a bit hairy.
My previous calculations would have been wrong then. I would have to go with someone I knew from Maurice’s syndicate.
Fuck, I can’t fucking escape — every little thing pulls me back.
I considered whether or not to just ditch the drugs altogether.
Yea, I could just beg, or be a stowaway. That might be a bit easier to do than risk another run-in with Maurice.
I paused my reflections for a moment, and allowed myself to feel a sense of relief — to really just sit in it, and breathe. Sure I was soaking wet, but I had everything I needed to go somewhere new. Somewhere far, far away.
India perhaps. I might be able to go to India and start a small business. At least the exchange rate would be favorable. I could probably leave out of Barcelona.
And so my thoughts went, weaving together theoretical scenarios about my many possible futures. All in all, I had been gifted a fresh start. I was sick to death of the area anyway.
“That's it for me,” I told myself, leaning back against the rocks, and listening to the rhythmic crash of the waves. “No way I’m going back to that life.”
I made solemn promises to myself so that I would be able to move forward and know that I would never stoop down to the level of working with someone like Maurice ever again. A lot of times, people who got caught up in bad business ended up staying there — not because they loved it, but because they had grown used to it, and didn’t have another way out.
Sure, there were other ways out; there were always options. Anyone who told themselves they didn’t have any options was either a fool or someone who had problems with being honest with themselves. The worst part about someone who isn’t honest with themselves is that usually they are the last person to be aware of that fact. Information has to practically reach out and smack a person in the face for them to realize what they are doing, and what needs to change. In spite of the fact that people have the capacity to be incredibly dense, the clues which lead up to that moment of transformation are plentiful, and subtle.
I was almost sure of my course of action until my hands inevitably found their way back toward Tyler’s passport picture. The name was fake, but the picture was real. He looked so handsome and strong. I thought about everything that he and I had gone through, and I actually began to cry. One tear lead into another, until the salt from my face was mixing in with the incoming tide of the sea. I thought about Tyler, and I thought about my dad. I thought about the life that I had worked so hard to build for myself in Venice, and I thought about how difficult it would be to start over from scratch.
All of the momentum from my glorious moment of bravado washed away, and I sat there feeling sorry for myself. In my mind’s eye, I
amounted to little more than a half-drowned rat who had been thrown off from the top of a cliff, only to be forgotten and pushed away by whatever shitty little social constructs managed to designate themselves as a society.
A rat can fall from an airplane and hit the ground without dying. The terminal velocity of their bodies is too low to actually crush them. For entertainment’s sake, or perhaps for empathy, think about how it might feel to be a rat who has been thrown out of an airplane. You’d have a hell of a time finding anyone that you could trust again after that. Not to mention that it would hurt like nothing else you might ever experience in life.
So what if you stayed alive.
Being alive is only useful if you have someone you can share the time with, and if you have some place constructive to devote your energies. I had pissed away my previous opportunities to devote my energies in a more positive direction. The fruits of those decisions were demonstrated all around me.
As for having someone to spend my time with — the only person I had spent any time with recently who hadn’t fucked me over somehow, was Angela.
Excluding double entendre.
Angela, I thought to myself, feeling a sudden surge of inspiration.
I thrust Tyler’s passport back into the plastic bag and rooted around until I found the object I was looking for. Within another closed bag, was a small, pre-pay, cellphone — a gift from Angela, because she knew that I would be headed into some trouble, and I never have a phone on me.
“Next time you can be a fucking gentleman, and call me before you come over,” she had said when she handed me the phone; offering me a wink and a nod.
I opened up the phone and turned it on. For one terrible moment, I thought that the battery might have been fucked up somehow in the water, but the bag had done its work, and the phone was alive. It buzzed, and shook in the palm of my hand as the phone activated and connected to its network.
I watched as the phone connected, wondering what I was expecting to happen. I realized at that moment that more than anything else, I just wanted someone to talk to. I wanted a familiar voice to give a shit about who I was as a person, and take care of me, even if it was just to listen, and talk to me about what was happening in their lives.
Angela was that person for me — there was no question about it.
The phone found its service, and I dialed in the number Angela had set aside for emergency contact. She knew her way around the phone system, and as such, she knew exactly how vulnerable it was to have a phone hooked up to the regular phone system. She had managed to set up a private line, which she maintained was, “As secure as the president’s own emergency phone.”
Naturally, I didn’t believe her, but if this was the number she wanted me to call, that was fine with me.
The phone rang and rang again. I let out a long sigh, imagining that I would sit here on this rock face all day while Angela took her sweet time answering the phone. Then, my bitterness was promptly truncated.
"Piper?" a voice came through on the other end of the line."
How did you know it was me," I asked.
"I told you this was a private line," she replied. "That's pretty selfish of you, Piper. I blow your mind with three orgasms in a row after you come over to my house uninvited. Then you’re off to get yourself into all kinds of trouble which you expect me to help you out with, and then you don't even take it seriously when I tell you that the gift that I gave you the private line. Do you have any idea how long I’ve been up working on this shit on your behalf?“
"Gosh," I said, "I guess I should apologize.”
"Well, seems like you have a lot of time to apologize since I don't hear any police cars around you."
"What are you talking about? How did you know about the police cars?"
"Well, it's not like I'm psychic or anything, but I have been spying on you pretty hard-core since you left. Nobody rocks my world like that and then gets a free pass. I've basically diverted all efforts towards stalking you until you figured out what the fuck you're gonna do about your boss."
“Don’t call him that," I said, feeling more than a little bit unnerved by the fact that I used to call that man my boss. "If I had a chance, I'd kill that man."
"Well, I can provide you with that opportunity. At this very moment, I’m working on how to find him, though I'm sure you probably have a more than a few ideas in your head about what that might be. What I suppose you don't know, is how you can take him out, and get away with it."
"Angela," I said, feeling a bit startled. "I had no idea how dark you were."
"It's not so much an issue of darkness, as it is the efficiency of justice. I did a bit of digging, and I only have one question for you. Is your father still alive?"
"No," I replied, joking about the word. "How did you know?"
"Simple process of elimination, and putting my nose where it didn't belong. Are you comfortable enough getting close to your previous boss?"
"Close enough to kill him?"
"Yes," she said with simplicity in her voice. “You'll have to be close enough to kill him in order to do what you need to do."
"And what is it that I need to do?" I asked, willing to hear her thoughts on the matter.
"You need to elicit a confession. As for the details of how you're going to go about doing that, that's going to be up to you."
I paused in our conversation for a moment to think about the consequences of this course of action. On a certain level, it resonated with me, because not only did I want justice for my father's death, but I was certain that if Tyler was alive, and still in the area, he would know that that was where I would go.
He would know that I would know that I would be drawn to take revenge for my father. The pressures which were moving toward this manifestation of behavior were at the base of my psyche — I knew that much was certain. However, there is only so much time that I could spend fooling myself into thinking that I could just walk away from all of this and feel alright about my behavior. When it comes right down to it, I'm a fighter.
"Are you in?" she asked.
I nodded. "I'm in.”
“Good, just hold off for a bit and I'll text you the location. Your holiday in the Tyrrhenian Sea is over. Besides, I thought you told me that your dad never liked that place much anyways.”
“I can’t believe you remembered,” I laughed, “Yea. ‘If my soul is in Laguna Veneta, then Tyrrhenia must be hell’ was what he always used to say.”
“Good man. I’ve always been partial to this area anyways. And don’t go fooling yourself, thinking that I’ve been too busy to pay attention to you all of these years. I haven’t exactly been stalking you as hardcore as I have been lately, but I think you’ll agree that there have been some extenuating circumstances which have validated that course of behavior.”
I laughed again, not able to control myself. It felt wonderful to laugh, and I was pleased to be talking to a friend again. A warmth lit up my insides, and I prayed that it would stay there long enough to do what needed to be done.
“I’ve enjoyed spending time with you ever since we first met,” she continued, sensing that this banter was putting me at ease. “Sure, I’ve been preoccupied with some experiments, and sure you’ve made some bad decisions…”
“Hey!” I interjected, even though I knew she was right.
“What!?” she said, in mock amazement. “How many times did you let that fucker stick his cock inside of you, only to have him murder your fucking father?”
That one hit home hard.
I was silent for a moment, allowing the question to sink in a bit deeper. My father used to tell me that the things which make us give pause, or the things that we are most easily offended by are the things we need to pay the most attention to. Only by paying attention to that which we would prefer to shun away, do we experience anything that could be called growth.
“You OK?” Angela replied. “Did that one go too far?”
“No,” I sniffed, “It�
�s alright. I know what I have to do now, thanks.”
“Love you, hun,” she said, after a brief pause of her own. “Let’s go on a trip when this is all over. I’ll make you cum all over the sand on some private beach. Sound nice?”
I laughed once more.
“Yea, I’ll see you there,” I said, and then hung up the phone.
Chapter 22 - Tyler
I have to admit that I felt a twinge of doubt when I threw her out of the car.
Things were happening really fast, and I had planned on dong something like that since the start if the chase got dicey. I knew that it was just a matter of time before the car behind us was firing on us with the same fervor as they had fired on the police.
We were no longer dealing with minor thugs, there was a problem that was getting larger — evidence obvious because Maurice was allocating more resources to securing what was he felt he needed.
I didn’t have time to think about what that might be. In any case, it would only be speculation at best. In the moment, I was barreling down the highway, inches from launching a car over the cliff into the coastal waters below. I fucking had to pray that she didn’t hit any rocks. I took a look at the coast during the dip and saw that there was no sand. The cliffs looked like prime jumping locations, and I figured a risky drop was worth a hundred missed bullets. I suppose when you’re choosing priorities for people, you don’t want to be too presumptive.
To tell you the truth, I didn’t choose that for her exclusively. I had my own reasons as well. I knew where this was headed, and I had made a promise to myself. I was going to honor the time-worn prohibition on murder. I had killed enough in my life, and I didn’t want to start again.
Not for anything.
As I regained control of the vehicle, a flash of fear passed through my vision. I saw Piper’s body hitting the rocks below the cliff. I thought about the terrible consequences of my behavior.
“Possible consequences,” I reminded myself.
It was also possible that I had taken the only course of action which ensured that she would not be caught within this fight; a fight that I was intentionally going to throw.