Pike: The Pawn Duet, Book One

by Frazier, T. M.

  He slams the door shut.

  I don’t know if it’s the sudden movement or the long walk that has me swaying on my feet.

  The young man glances over my shoulder into the dark, then back at me before repeating the process again. His facial features now resemble a close-up image of a fly I once studied. Large and nonsensical. Too many eyes.

  He scratches his head in confusion.

  I growl in frustration and spin around to point my family out to him, but the movement continues even as my body stops. Everything spins. My family. The truck. The stranger. The moon above me. Faster and faster like an out of control carnival ride.

  I catch one last glimpse of my family as I fall.

  The last words I hear before I hit the ground are deep and garbled.

  “There ain’t nobody behind you.”

  Pike

  The night starts like almost every night: with two girls in my bed. I grow bored easily and find it hard to focus on just one at a time. My friend, Nine, calls it sexual ADD.

  He isn’t wrong.

  Also, I’m a twenty-two-year-old man with a huge sexual appetite.

  So, there’s that.

  After the girls leave, I quickly shower and head out to do what I do best. Sling dope. I deliver an astronomical amount of molly and blow to a bunch of rich kids throwing a rave on the boujee side of the causeway in Logan’s Beach.

  Once I cross back over onto my side of town I breathe a sigh of relief. The more distance I can put between me and the fucking entitled rich brats, and their determined quests for parental disappointment, the better. The twats have so few problems in life that they have to create them while the rest of the world living on this side of the causeway, the land of sand and ruin, wanders through a literal hell on earth.

  Hell, or not, I fucking love this town. Saltwater and sand run through my fucking veins.

  Logan’s Beach is where I want to be. Right now, I live in Coral Pines with Nine but I’ve got my eye on a shitty little antique store on Main Street with an apartment on the second floor that I hope to make into my very own shitty little pawn shop as soon as I can scrape up enough cash.

  Bass is still beating in my ears. I make myself yawn and tug on my earlobe to pop my ears. What happened to real music? Johnny Cash. Bush. Sam Hunt. The rave music they listen to is worse than most forms of fucking torture, but I’m guessing that’s where the drugs come into play. You have to be high to dance to that shit. I’m the same age as most of those ‘kids’ but hating on their music and my lack of privilege makes me feel a lot older. Sweet relief comes in the form of Johnny Cash. I turn up the radio. “That’s more fucking like it,” I say to myself, tapping my fingers against the steering wheel as the first verse of Cocaine Blues drowns out the bass in my ears.

  I pass the Welcome to Logan’s Beach sign and spot a figure moving in the shadows. It’s not unusual to see a bear, boar, deer, or gator crossing at this time of night. What is unusual is for a girl to be limping barefoot down the side of the fucking road looking like one of those girls from a horror movie, slowly trudging down the road, long wet hair hanging in her face.

  Curiosity gets the best of me. I slow the truck to a stop beside her, surprised as all fuck when she approaches the truck. She spews some nonsense about people being behind her when there ain’t no one there but the fucking crickets and other critters. She’s younger than me by a few years. Skinny, all elbows and knees. There’s a wildness in her big grey eyes, reminding me of a deranged doll. She keeps glancing behind her, clearly seeing something that I’m missing. She sways on her feet.

  I jump out and catch her as she passes out.

  Now, she’s in my passenger seat, dripping mud and water onto the leather. “Yo…girl,” I say, lightly slapping her cheeks in an attempt to bring her back into consciousness. “Hey, kid. Wake the fuck up.”

  Her wet, stringy hair is the color of dark whiskey, long with a crinkly wave. She has a small gap between her otherwise perfect front teeth and a mole on her left cheek above pale cracked lips. There’s a cut above her eye and scrapes on her feet and hands.

  She blinks a few times before finally opening her eyes, she looks around at the interior of the truck before her eyes fall on mine. “Oh, hey,” she says with a rough voice, and then she smiles brightly as if she hadn’t just spouted nonsense about being surrounded by people before fainting in my arms.

  “Were you in a cage fight with a chicken or something? ‘Cause it looks like you were. And lost.”

  She sits up and shakes her head. “Not that I’m aware of.” She looks down at her clothes. “What happened?” She touches the cut above her eye and hisses.

  “I’m not sure. Found you this way.”

  She thinks for a moment. “Swimming. I must have swam out too far. Mama always warns me about going past the rocks, but I never listen. I think it was raining. We were kayaking?” She presses her eyes shut, biting her bottom lip and struggling to remember. “It’s all...I can’t remember.”

  Typical tourist mistake. Countless numbers of them have drowned thinking they can swim past the rocks and the clear as fuck sign that reads DO NOT SWIM PAST THE ROCKS. I sigh. No wonder the girl thought she was with her family. She’s almost drowned and probably swallowed a lot of water. “Hospital or home?” I ask. I’m a shit guy but even shit guys don’t leave young innocent looking drowned rats on the side of the fucking road at night.

  “Home,” she answers, resting her head against the headrest.

  I round the truck and get back in, throwing it in drive. I glance over to her. Her eyes are shut. The skin of her eyelids are a purple color, and I can’t tell if it’s a shadow, dirt, or bruising. “And where might that be, darlin’?”

  She opens her eyes and sits up with a grimace. “We live in Ocala, but we summer here on the beach. One-twelve-four-four Sycamore Drive. That’s the address of the timeshare.”

  At least, she knows her address. That’s something. “You sure you don’t need a hospital?”

  She takes a deep breath and plasters a smile on her face. “I’m sure. I just need to get cleaned up. My parents are going to be so pissed. They’re probably out looking for me.”

  I nod. “I can get you home quick. I know where the road is. It ain’t far from where I just came from.” As I drive, I feel her stare on my cheek burning a hole in my face.

  Finally, she speaks, “Thank you. I mean, for the ride.” Her pale sunken cheeks gain some color as she blushes. She bites her bottom lip and hisses, raising her fingers to the cut on her lip she’d forgotten about.

  I haven’t done a lot of things in my twenty-two years that deserve thanks, and I sure as shit haven’t done anything recently to deserve it either. It feels wrong for her to be thanking me and even more wrong that I have no idea how to respond to simple gratitude.

  We’re silent for the rest of the drive. The only sounds are the occasional passing cars and the echo of croaking frogs from the neighboring preserves.

  I turn down a broken shell driveway lined with a crooked orange stained fence and broken shell plant beds housing the kind of tall skinny palm trees that sway in a slight breeze as if they’re in a hurricane. Funny enough, those fuckers are the ones who survive most hurricanes when everything around them turns to rubble because they bend like rubber bands and always snap back.

  “This is it,” she says on an exhale, her face brightens.

  The house itself is a sunny yellow color, sitting high on pilings with two parking spaces underneath separated by an unpainted concrete block wall. Purple shutters surround the two windows. Hanging underneath each window is a large rusty metal sun with house numbers. There’s a small outbuilding off to the side that matches the paint scheme of the house. It’s a duplex. One of hundreds just like it lining the beachfront. Like the others, I assume the wooden stair cases on both the left and right lead up to a deck on the beachside of the house where the front door is located because that’s how all of these things are laid out and there are hundre
ds of them lining the beach. Who knows, I could have been here before, either for business or because spring break tends to bring out wild girls with daddy issues who love nothing more than to slum it with the locals on spring break.

  The kind of girls who don’t mind that they won’t be the only girl in my bed.

  The girl opens the door and hops down, stumbling on the shell driveway.

  “Shit,” I swear, jumping down and racing over to hold her upright. “Maybe a hospital would have been a better idea.”

  “No. I’m good. I’m always good when I’m here,” she says, her eyes sparkling as she looks up at the little beach house like it’s a mansion covered in diamonds. Again, I’m not seeing what she sees.

  “Which side?” I ask.

  “The stairs on the right,” she replies.

  I wrap an arm around her waist and place her arm around my shoulder, guiding her over to the stairs.

  “You know, I’ve spent every summer here since I was eight,” she begins. She turns her head as she notices the empty parking bay. “The van. It’s not here. Maybe they aren’t back yet. Probably still out looking for me. I’m going to get an ear full from Papa for sure.”

  Her eyes glaze over, reverting to the look she had when I found her.

  I tighten my grip around her waist when I feel her swaying. “You okay?”

  “I…I don’t know.” Rounded wide-set eyes stare up at me with confusion. “I don’t know what’s happening.” She stumbles back, and I pull her in close, anchoring her to my chest. “The rain. The sounds. The glass. Where did they all go?”

  I’ve met some crazy bitches in my life, but this one might be even crazier than the girl who slashed my tires or the one who tried to set my apartment on fire. “You know,” I say. “You remind me of my sixth grade English teacher.” I rest my chin on her wet head as she burrows her face into my shirt, seeking comfort from a stranger. From me of all people. “‘Cause I didn’t understand a fucking thing she said either.”

  What the hell am I supposed to do with her? She’s not the kind of crazy that leads to being naked and making questionable decisions to piss off her daddy, but the kind that ends in strait-jackets and a memoir about her life growing up in the looney-bin. I took her home; do I just leave her here? She isn’t my problem. Yet, as she wraps her arms around my waist like she’s holding on to a tree in a storm I feel obligated. This need to protect her from whatever it is that’s going on in her brain that has her shaking against me.

  “I don’t know what to do here,” I tell her with a laugh. I don’t know the first thing about comforting anyone.

  “I don’t know either,” she sighs. “You’re a good distraction.” She pulls away just enough to crane her neck, looking up at me. “Distractions are nice.”

  Distraction? Now, that I can do.

  I wrap my hand around her neck, lace my fingers through her hair, and press my lips to hers.

  She makes a noise in my mouth, and at first, I think it’s a moan, so I push further, pressing my tongue between her lips.

  She pushes against my chest. Nope. It wasn’t a moan.

  I release her, taking a step back.

  “What are you doing?” she shouts, chest heaving. Her eyes look clearer. Angry as all fuck, but clearer. “Besides ruining a moment.” There’s something else behind the anger and confusion. Heat. Longing.

  My cock thickens in my jeans. Good. I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels it.

  She sits on the bottom step. I lean against the railing, light a smoke and shrug. “I didn’t know what else to do. You were going a bit off the rails. Had to pull you back in before you fucking crashed. I’m not good at comforting. Never done it before. You said you wanted a distraction.”

  I could distract you even more.

  Obviously, the girl isn’t in her right mind, and it’s somehow contagious because there’s no way I actually want to kiss her again. I’ve never wanted to kiss a girl in my entire life. Fuck? Yes. Kiss? Never. Not my style. Women aren’t to be trusted or kissed. I’d take that belief all the way to the bank.

  If I believed in banks.

  Which I don’t.

  She cocks her head to the side and squints. “You didn’t know what to do, so you kissed me?” Like she can’t believe that out of all the things I could have done in the moment, that’s the one I chose.

  That makes two of us, kid.

  “Don’t go making more of it than what it is. You look like you’ve got enough on your plate. You’re a sexy girl. I’m…well, me. I kissed you. It’s not a thing,” I offer, casually, taking a deep drag.

  She touches her lips with her fingertips, and this time, I know it’s not to test her injury, but to remember how my lips felt on hers. She is making more of it than what it is.

  I revert to my usual asshole self. “You don’t gotta worry. I’m not going to force myself on you. Crazy, emotional, and too skinny ain’t exactly my type. I prefer crazy and willing to experiment with questionable positions and questionable men. Like myself.”

  Most girls would snap back with some equally offensive comment, or at least call me an asshole, but this chick just stares up at me like I’m some sort of creature she’s never seen before and is trying to classify. She wraps her arms around her chest as if her scrawny arms could protect her from the likes of me. “What’s your name?”

  I open my mouth to answer, but my voice is drowned out by the sound of gunfire. The driveway explodes in several little bursts, shell shrapnel catches me in the face and covers the girl’s hair in white dust. “Shit!” I grab her hand and tug her around the house to the beach side, pulling her behind the trunk of a thick palm tree just as another bullet pierces the trunk right above the girl’s head, adding bark to the shell dust in her hair.

  “What…what’s going on?” she asks, sounding more than panicked, her small hand trembling in mine.

  I drop her hand and reach for my gun, checking the clip. “Those are called bullets. The who I’m not fucking sure of.” I slowly peek around the tree. There are several armed men dressed in black signaling to one another from either side of the driveway as they slowly approach. Another bullet grazes the bark. I pull back, crouching low with my back to the tree.

  “Why do you have a gun?” she whispers, covering her mouth with her hands as she eyes the weapon in my hands.

  “Really?” I whisper back. “Now is not the fucking time.”

  “We’re here for the girl. Send her out, and we’ll be on our way,” a masculine voice shouts from nearby.

  “Me?” she whispers, pointing to her chest. “What could they want with me?”

  I raise an eyebrow. “You’re telling me that there’s a team of armed men here because of you, and you have no fucking idea why?” I hiss. She really is fucking crazy.

  She shakes her head, and a tear spills down her face. Suddenly, her entire body goes stiff. Her eyes widen, and just like that, I know she’s remembering something, and from the looks of it, that something isn’t fucking good.

  I growl and risk another glance beyond the safety of the tree. Their faces are shadowed, but I can make out their positions. By my count, there are six of them. I’ve got six bullets. “I’ve been in worse situations,” I explain, watching as they gain further and further ground. I wait for the man by the stairs to step foot onto the sand. He’s the one I’ll take out first. “We’ll get out—”

  “I’m here,” she announces loudly.

  I spin around to find the girl with her hands raised in the air in clear view of the men. “I’ll come with you! Don’t shoot!”

  She’s surrendering?

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I grate through my teeth. The girl already almost died once today. Is she so determined to follow through with actually dying? I don’t even know her, but I’m pissed as hell that she’s giving up so soon.

  She looks at me with sad eyes and takes a step forward toward the men, putting more distance between us. “I can’t let you die for me. You don
’t even know me.”

  I hear the men’s boots kicking up the sand as they rush to approach. A tear runs down her cheek. “Thanks for the ride.”

  The men surround her, grab her by the shoulders and begin dragging her through the sand toward the driveway. She doesn’t even try to fight them off. Who doesn’t even try?

  “This is bullshit,” I mutter.

  Whether I know her or not doesn’t fucking matter. When someone shoots at you, you fucking fight. It might not be human nature, but it’s my nature.

  With my gun raised and aimed, I step out from behind the tree. I take one single step to follow the group before something hard smashes into my head from behind.

  I drop under the tree like a useless fucking coconut into the sand.

  Chapter Two

  Pike

  Present Day

  Torture.

  By definition, torture is the act of inflicting excruciating pain, as punishment or revenge, as a means of getting a confession or information, or for sheer cruelty.

  My life has been nothing but torture, both giving and receiving.

  Of course, I prefer to be on the giving end, but right now, I’m dealing with a new kind of torture, which involves retrieving my shipment. A shipment that is currently in the form of liquid shit. Unfortunately, liquid shit isn’t code for something else.

  “Why are you doing this yourself? Don’t you have people for this?” Nine asks.

  We’re standing in front of a large septic truck parked behind my pawn shop. The street lights and the bugs are already buzzing, and the sun’s only been down a few minutes. Unfortunately, the smell of grass after the afternoon rain isn’t pungent enough to cancel out a truck full of human sewage.

  I stub out my cigarette and shove my arms into the shit brown coveralls, zipping it up over my clothes. Nine does the same.

  “Because I got a hell of a deal. It’s a huge investment on my part, and I’m not about to let anyone else handle it. I need to be there.” I look to my friend. “You, on the other hand, don’t need to fucking be here. In fact, I told you not to fucking be here. What did you tell Poe you were doing, anyway?”