Dr. Perfect: A Contemporary Romance Bundle

by Oliver, J. P.

  The sixth shop was the one closest to Fred’s house, just outside the city proper where the land began to roll into expensive houses and dry hills. It turns out I didn’t need to bother with the seventh shop; it only took flashing the knife and asking who had ordered it for the clerk to recognize it.

  “We mark them all with a special number,” she explained, pointing to a miniscule homemade serial number on the base of the blade. “Yeah, that’s how we knows it’s one of ours. This one got bought, shit, just a day or two ago I’m thinkin’.”

  “Do you remember the guy who bought it?”

  She wasn’t an old woman, but she was tough. She looked like she didn’t give much of a shit about the people who wandered into her shop, so long as they bought something. “Yeah. Fuckin’ weirdo. Kept talking about how he was gonna teach his kids to fight when the apocalypse came in. Scruffy-lookin’. Smelled like he hadn’t had a real fuckin’ shower in weeks—”

  “Did he leave any information behind?”

  She pursed her lips at me.

  “Uh, like an address or phone number or something.” Anything would help, I wanted to tell her.

  “Normally, we aren’t supposed to give out customer info. Shit’s confidential.”

  I huffed. “It’s for an investigation.”

  She looked me up and down. “You a cop or something?”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  I didn’t know if it was too vague an answer. I didn’t want to get kicked out without getting what I came for. Eventually she hoped off her stool to fish around in the register. She pulled out a slip of paper from under the till, slapping it on the glass counter. Maybe this knife was lucky after all.

  “You’re lucky he was such a creep. I’m usually pretty relaxed when it comes to custom shit, since it racks up such a pretty penny, but this fella looked suspicious. Figured someone might be comin’ through my door someday, lookin’ to see where he got his shit.” She paused a minute. “He do something to someone?”

  I couldn’t compromise anything. I took the slip of paper. “Not yet,” I told her, and she was apparently content with that.

  “What is this?” I asked. It was just a series of numbers that made little sense.

  “Asked him for his address.”

  “This isn’t an address.”

  “Nope.” She pointed to the numbers, one at a time. “This one’s a latitude. This one’s a longitude. They’re coordinates to—wherever the fuck he lives. Weird shit.”

  Coordinates. It was very much like Henry: cryptic and vague, always trying to keep himself a secret. Still the information was too easily obtained. I thanked her anyway, slid her a twenty, and went on my way, slip of paper in hand.

  Twenty minutes from the mansion, my phone rang.

  I didn’t bother to look and see who was calling. I flipped the phone open and tucked it against my ear as I took a turn. “Meierz.”

  “Hassan.”

  The wheel jerked in my hand, surprise flickering through my chest like a bullet. This time there was nothing to obscure or distort the voice. This time it was clear who it was on the other end. “Henry.” I thought of the phone in my hand, just a burner phone, nothing fancy or hackable. “How’d you get this—”

  “Your number?” I could hear the self-satisfied smile in his voice. “I’ve got my ways, Hassan. You should know by now I never reveal my sources.”

  “Why’re you calling now?” My nerves felt on edge. If I was at the office, I thought, I could trace the call. I lowered my foot onto the gas pedal with a little more liberty, the car picking up speed. He wouldn’t stay on the phone for twenty minutes; I had to speed up and stall.

  Henry made a thoughtful sound on the other end; his voice was ragged. Worn. What had he been doing to himself all this time? “I wanna know—Hassan—why you’re interfering with my happiness. We didn’t work out, but….” He sighed. “But, that doesn’t give you the right to be jealous and try to sabotage my relationship with my soul mate, Hassan.”

  “He isn’t your soul mate,” I said. He wasn’t jealous, he was irate. There was a difference.

  Henry clicked his tongue. “I would know. You know? It’s just a feeling you get, Hassan. When you’re looking at someone through their open window at night, and you just… when I see him, I know.”

  Okay. I could play this to my advantage. I tried to keep calm. Even. Channel Fred’s boundless sympathy. “Where do you watch him from?” I asked carefully. “Where does he look the best from?”

  “Listen,” and he chuckled, though it devolved into a cough. Something on the other line made a clattering sound. “I’m not gonna sit here and divulge all the private things I do with my soul mate, Hassan. C’mon. That’d be rude and unfair to Frederic, you know that.”

  We both paused. Something in Henry’s voice changed when he spoke next. There was a darkness to it, an anger I had never heard in him before. “If you’d just stay the fuck away from us and let us be—fucking—it doesn’t need to be this difficult, Hassan—why are you making it this difficult for us—”

  “I’m only doing my job, Henry.”

  He barked an ugly laugh. “Bullshit. Bull. Shit. You’re keeping us apart, Hassan.”

  “Henry.” My voice was firm, but I wasn’t yelling. Yet. “Henry you need to stop this. Fred isn’t your soulmate. You know that, I know you can feel it—

  “He fucking is!”

  “Henry.”

  “God—you’re an idiot trying to keep us apart, you know that—”

  “Henry. It’s only going to get you into more trouble. You can’t keep letting this go on.” I glanced at my speedometer—twenty miles over the speed limit—and I silently prayed there weren’t any cop cars hiding around any bends. “Fred doesn’t want this to continue with you. He wants to get you help—”

  “You’re lying!” The desperation in his voice was piercing. Faintly, my heart did hurt for him. The voice belonged to the only other man I had ever felt something for aside from Fred, but the mind, the person I had once known, was warped beyond recognition. He was babbling, stringing words together that created only half-understandable phrases. Things about how I was evil, how I was going to kill Fred by keeping him away, how Fred would never want things to end, how I was the only thing keeping them apart.

  “I want to meet with you.” It came out quick, a last ditch effort. It quieted Henry. “Can we meet?”

  “Why would you want to…?” he sounded skeptical; a wary animal refusing help.

  “In the name of our past relationship.” The words came out quickly, and for the first time in a long time, true discomfort flickered in my stomach. Our relationships wasn’t something I liked to remember, but maybe Fred was right. Maybe he deserved a chance to change, to get help. “I want to just talk.”

  Henry was quiet so long, I began to think he had hung up.

  “You there?” I asked.

  His voice was slow, contemplative. “I’m here….”

  “We can meet,” I proposed again. “I won’t try anything. You won’t try anything. Just… just talking.”

  “No tricks.”

  I nodded. “No tricks. My word is my bond. You know that better than anyone else.”

  Another long stretch of silence, though I could hear his breathing. Finally his voice came, resolute and on-edge. “Fine. Tomorrow. There’s a bar across the street from the place I got the knife.” He paused before asking, “You did find it, didn’t you?”

  Was it better to lie, or not? “I did.” I didn’t know though, if saying so was the right move.

  Henry sounded amused. “Hassan. Always so clever.”

  “What time?”

  “Noon.”

  I opened my mouth to confirm, but before I could say any more, he hung up and the line went dead.

  15

  Hassan

  I didn’t disclose to the others that I had found the source of the knife or that I had spoken to Henry.

  It felt wrong to continue lying to m
y team—to Fred. I hadn’t thought of it as lying, but rather, avoiding the truth. To Fred, at least I knew they were one in the same. But, he didn’t need to know. Not yet. He wouldn’t approve of a meeting and getting him involved personally before I had a change to sort things out could get messy.

  I’d had a good night’s sleep after returning home. Lorna had made me a pot of coffee before I left. I told the others that I was continuing my search at the final store.

  This was going to end, I thought. Today.

  It was the last thing I thought before my car flipped on its side, metal grinding against metal as a car rammed into my side at full-speed.

  My muscles ached with the impact, and as the car slammed once against the pavement, and then twice, I could hear my car compacting and folding into itself. Tires somewhere squealed as cars stopped to avoid whatever accident had happened. I smelled burned rubber and tasted blood in my mouth, coppery and like salt, before losing slipping into a black and dreamless sleep.

  When I woke up, it felt like I had only slept for fifteen minutes.

  I was no longer in a car, but rather in a hospital bed. The sheets were starchy underneath me and I could smell the antibacterial cleaner they used to sanitize the room. There was the telltale beep beep beep of my heart on the monitor.

  “He’s awake,” a voice said, but it was unfamiliar. A doctor stepped into my line of view, her voice gentle. “Mr. Meierz. Hassan, can you hear me?”

  I nodded, though there was a dull throbbing in the back of my head. I suspected they gave me some kind of pain medication and that without it, my headache would be way worse. Slowly, I noticed other people in the room: a nurse, it seemed, and two cops, chatting with one another in the doorway.

  “Yeah,” I said slowly. “I can hear you.”

  I raised my arm, the muscles there tight. I hissed at the pain it brought to my shoulder.

  “Don’t move too much,” hummed the doctor. She took out a pen light and tested one eye, then the other. “Do you remember what happened to you?”

  The cops drifted closer. The lemon-pine cleaner was too strong of a smell. It made me feel sick. “There was….” I thought a moment. “A car accident. Someone hit my car.”

  “Good.” She checked my monitor. “It’s a bit of a miracle. You don’t seem to have fractured anything, Hassan—”

  “How long have I been out?” I asked, feeling a bit of my strength returning, slowly but surely.

  “A few hours. You’re void of any serious bodily harm—”

  “Thank God for seatbelts,” said the heftier of the two officers.

  The doctor laughed kindly. “It really is a miracle. But we want to keep you overnight at least and monitor just to be sure there aren’t any underlying issues. You know. Any kind of major internal problem that might arise, or a concussion.”

  “That’s….” I shook my head slowly. “That’s not necessary.”

  “Eh, hold on, son,” said the other cop. “We got a few questions for you about the accident ourselves.”

  “...Okay.”

  “Do you remember what you were doing when you were hit?”

  I searched my memory, some of it fuzzy. “I was, uh… I was driving. Going to meet someone at a bar downtown.”

  “Right. Had you been drinking at all?”

  “No.”

  “Any drugs?”

  The doctor interrupted. “We didn’t find any kind of toxin in his system.”

  The cops looked at one another, then at me. “Did you happen to see what kind of car it was that hit you?”

  I shook my head. “No. No, I didn’t see. I think I had the right of way, so I didn’t pay attention to who was coming through the intersection, uh….”

  “There are witnesses that we’ve spoken to who said the same,” said one officer. “And, you didn’t get a good look at maybe who was driving?”

  “No.” It dawned on me slowly. “They weren’t at the scene? When you got there?”

  “Their car was there.”

  “But whoever was driving… wasn’t.”

  The other continued. “We’re just trying to get any information we can from anyone who was there—see if we can compile some sort of profile for this guy….”

  They kept talking, but I stopped listening. As my thoughts and memories came back to me, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who was potentially responsible. Every man had enemies, but the one I had was singular. He had a face and a name and a reason to want me gone.

  Henry.

  My invite—the single chance I was giving to him—had been turned into another trap set to kill me. The small bit of hope that I had had for him vanished, the small flame on a candlewick snuffed out.

  The cops left eventually and so did the doctor, needing to tend to other patients. She promised a nurse would come by with my next round of painkillers and when she did—she was a meek thing, thankfully, and shy too—I took the pills graciously and began unclipping myself from all their monitors and machines.

  She squeaked in protest, insisting that I was being irrational and needed to get back into the bed, that they were still running tests but I wouldn’t have it. I was fine. It was nothing some sleep and a hot shower couldn’t fix.

  She almost laughed when I told her as much, but darted out of the room the moment I pulled my hospital gown off, instead slipping back into my somewhat ripped civilian clothes.

  It only took a few minutes to limp down the hallway—damn, my leg did hurt for real now, after a bomb and a car accident—and check myself out. They couldn’t hold me here and I had other places I needed to be.

  FRED

  The day had been going smoothly. Too smoothly, some might say.

  In fact, Hank did say that after we had only needed one take to shoot what we had expected to be a problematic scene. To our surprise and the relief of everyone present, the actors had nailed it in one go and we were ready to move onto the next scene. The day felt good. Things felt possible.

  Until my phone rang.

  Like I said, too smoothly.

  “Hello?”

  “Mr. Reyes?” the woman on the other end butchered the pronunciation, but she sounded nice. I didn’t bother correcting her, I was in too good a mood.

  “Speaking.”

  “I’m calling from Good Samaritan Hospital.” My stomach twisted into itself instantly, a number of things running through my head. Something had happened—was it at the house? Was it the children? Lorna? She took my silence as a sign to continue. “I’m sorry for calling, but we we have a patient here by the name of Hassan Meierz and he doesn’t have any emergency contacts listed. This was the first of… four numbers saved to his phone.”

  “That’s….” Hassan. I cleared my throat. “That’s all right, um… what’s happened?”

  Hank tried to get my attention. The crew was just about done setting up the next scene. Everyone was ready. I held up a finger.

  “There’s been a car accident.”

  Hassan. Hassan who seemed so untouchable, unbreakable…. “Is he alright?”

  “Yes, but he will need someone to come pick him up when he is discharged and—”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Hank’s face turned sour next to me. I didn’t care.

  I had somewhere I needed to be.

  In the legendarily horrible Los Angeles traffic, it took me far too long to get to the hospital. I had over an hour to myself, stuck with the thoughts of what could have happened—was I going to lose him? Was he even awake? Thoughts spilled into nightmarish scenarios. I couldn’t drive fast enough.

  When I arrived however, barreling through the front doors of the hospital (which were slow and took far too long to open, in my opinion), I was treated to the sight of Hassan standing at the check-out desk, arguing with a well-intentioned doctor.

  “Sir, you can’t just leave, we haven’t had you properly discharged—”

  “It’s a free country, I can leave whenever I damn well want to—�
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  It was kind of comical. I would have laughed or let them continue if I wasn’t so eager to talk to Hassan. “Excuse me?” My voice cut through their conversation easily, Hassan’s head turning to me the moment he heard it. He winced a little and I set a hand on his back. “Don’t give yourself whiplash.”

  “Whatever.”

  I extended a hand to the exasperated doctor. “Hi,” I laughed, putting on my nicest movie star smile. “I’m sorry my friend’s been giving you trouble. I’m—

  “Frederic Reyes,” she hummed. “I thought the name was familiar.”

  “Why are you here?” Hassan asked, voice gruff.

  I clicked my tongue. “Why’re you so grumpy?”

  The doctor interjected. “Mr. Reyes was the closest thing you had to an emergency contact. We called him to pick you up.”

  Hassan frowned, confused. Maybe he does have a concussion. “Why?”

  Some kind of self-satisfaction swept over the doctor. “Well, it isn’t like you could drive yourself home. Your car was totaled. Remember?”

  Hassan thought a moment, before merely saying, “Oh.”

  “If it’s any consolation, doctor,” I interjected, “he’s going to be under fantastic care at home. We have a doctor on-call—”

  “We do?” Hassan asked, and I swear, if he hadn’t just been in an accident, I could have slapped him.

  “Yes. Remember Doc?”

  The name rang a bell. “Right, right. Sorry.”

  “We’ve got staff in the house at all times for whenever I won’t be there with him. He’ll be cared for.”

  “I don’t need to be looked after—” he began to insist, but I silenced him with a light pinch over his shoulder blade. He could argue with me later. Right now, I was just trying to help him get out of the hospital. He shut up, thankfully.

  The doctor seemed skeptical. “We won’t be held liable if anything happens….”

  “Of course not. It’ll be our responsibility at home.”

  She didn’t seem swayed. I knew that if I left Hassan here, he would put up a fight and that would only lead to more trouble. Maybe the police would be called. It didn’t seem like a great way to spend the rest of the day. Plus, if I was being a little selfish, I wanted to be able to stay with him and visiting hours were restricted.