Airbag Scars

by Jim Heskett

  He hadn’t shot revolvers much at the gun range. But back when Micah was part of El Lobo’s crew, a revolver was what he’d sometimes carried in the glove box of his car. He knew them well. No safety, and a trigger that you had to squeeze to fire. No shell casings to clean up. Hard to accidentally shoot one of those. And they never jammed, but reloading was a bitch.

  “Yes. Revolver will be fine.”

  Anthony lifted a gun from the garment bag. “This is what you want. Smith & Wesson 986, fires 9mm rounds.”

  Anthony tilted the gun and the light bounced off its clean and shiny contours.

  “No bodies?” Micah said.

  “It’s brand new. I just got it in from a reliable guy, so you got not a thing to worry about, my man. Titanium cylinder, adjustable rear sight. Doesn’t get much better than this.”

  Micah didn’t care much about the aesthetics. He needed it to do something awful. Something not in the program of rigorous honesty.

  “I’ll take it.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  DRIVING HOME from his blonde one night stand's house was a challenge, because the amount of alcohol in Donovan’s system meant he had to take only neighborhood roads and he got lost a few times after taking wrong turns. Twice, he had to pull over to dry-heave out the window.

  As he finally turned onto his street, Hayden’s car was backing into a parking spot in their lot. Saliva welled at the back of his throat at the thought of stripping her naked. Of slamming her from behind, making her beg for more. She’d still been avoiding him, and he was going to put a stop to that.

  Tonight.

  She’d apparently grabbed the last available parking spot, so he had to parallel park on the street, which took some effort. When he got out of his car, he stumbled, smacking his hip against the unforgiving concrete. Tomorrow it would hurt, but now it was only one more thing to add to the list of shit pissing him off.

  He set off two different alarms when he bumped into cars on his path to the apartment building’s door. The first made him angry, but the second one was funny. Stupid car alarms are so sensitive.

  Then came the decision between going straight to Hayden’s door or going back to his apartment for a drink first. He was horny, but he always had room for more liquor. It was a tough choice. When the motion of the elevator hurtling through space made him nauseous all over again, he decided against the drink. He could barely hold himself upright.

  It was time for love. He didn’t need to be upright for that.

  Off the elevator, he staggered toward Hayden’s apartment. He checked his breath against his hand, and smelled no stink of vomit. Then he laughed, because he realized something he already knew: you can’t smell your own breath. All you smell is hand. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this drunk.

  He raised a fist to knock, and reminded himself to be charming. He could talk her into this, with a little careful planning.

  Bang bang bang.

  From the other side of the door: “What the hell?”

  He placed a hand against the doorframe to keep himself from collapsing in the hallway. “Hayden, it’s me.”

  A pause. “Donovan?”

  “Yeah, it’s me. Open up please, we need to talk.”

  The chain slid off and the door opened. She stood there, arms crossed and hip thrust to the side, tapping her foot against the carpet. She looked tired and haggard, like she’d been crying for hours. But she was also scowling, in that fierce and sexy way that made him hungry.

  “Why the hell are you trying to break down my door?”

  “Sorry,” he said, “I wanted to make sure you heard me.” He burped and covered his mouth, but removing his hand from the doorframe shifted his center of gravity. Whipping his arms through the air like windmills, he barely managed not to fall. This was funny and so he laughed.

  She frowned. “You’re hammered.”

  “Ding ding ding! I’d tell you what you’ve won but I don’t have any prizes on me.” He showed her his empty hands to prove it.

  “What do you want?”

  He leaned his head in, checking for any obvious sign that she had company. “Can I come in? You don’t have anybody in there, do you?”

  “Now’s really not a good time,” she said.

  “That’s what you always say. If there was a good time for everything, do you think Rome would have ever been built? Do you think the Constitution waited for a good time to be signed?”

  She barked a laugh, but it was dark and empty. “You should go to your apartment and get some sleep. You’re not making any sense and I’ve had a shitty day.”

  He grinned. “I want to come into your apartment and get some sleep.”

  “Goodnight, Donovan.” She put her hand on the edge of the door, but before she could shut it, he wedged his foot to keep it open. Lurched forward into her apartment.

  She took a step back. “I’m not in the mood to deal with you being an asshole tonight. If you had any idea what I’ve been through in the last couple days, you’d leave me the fuck alone.”

  “Maybe I can help,” he said, advancing.

  “If you really want to see me, let’s have lunch again. I can do something early next week.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve heard that bullshit before. You’re not going to put me off this time. I see you don’t have any pepper spray on you, so there’s a good starting point.”

  She kept backing up, her hands raised in front. The fear on her face made him see this wasn’t going as well as he’d hoped.

  “Hey now,” he said. “There’s nothing to be anxious about. There’s no reason to be scared, if you’ll give me a minute to explain myself. I can do things for you that he can’t do. I’ll make you feel better than you’ve ever felt in your entire life.”

  Sometimes, the chase was the best part, especially with women like this who had such an untapped wealth of passion below the surface.

  His forward progress suddenly halted, and he looked down to see his toe wedged underneath the leg of a coffee table.

  A sharp stinging caught him across the face and forced his head to the side. He looked up, and Hayden had shoved something in her pocket. She’d cut him, but he couldn’t tell what she’d used. Like the slash of a sharpened fingernail. The side of his face tingled as endorphins rushed to cool the pain.

  “Get out of here,” she said. Her chest heaved and anger darkened her face, but he could see terror there too.

  He wanted to fuck her, but he wanted her to want it. It wasn’t supposed to be against her will, because that would spoil the fun. “Look, I don’t know what you think was–”

  “Get the hell out of here,” she said through clenched teeth. “I’m having the most awful week of my life, and you're only making it worse.”

  She shoved him, and it caught him so off guard that he stumbled back into the wall. Several race medals came off their thumbtacks, showering him and the nearby carpet.

  “Alright, alright. Damn, you’re such a frigid bitch.”

  She stood with her feet shoulder-width apart, her hands made into claws. Lips trembling, but her eyes were cold and resolute. He knew he could still force her to fuck him, but that would defeat the point.

  He waved a dismissive hand, turned and stumbled out of her apartment. Took him five tries to get his key into his door, and then he made it as far as the couch before passing out.

  In the morning, light filtered through a slim break in the curtains. Donovan’s hip throbbed, but he didn’t know why.

  Hayden spurning him burned at Donovan. Burned so much that he had terrible dreams of falling, and he would wake up every couple hours in a deep sweat. Patton, on the couch next to him, lifted his head every time, and Donovan would check the clock on the wall and then roll over.

  But in the morning, he’d had enough of all this half-assed bullshit. It was time to put everything in motion and bring about an end to all these complications. He stumbled into the bathroom to piss, and he got a good look at hi
s face in the mirror. He had a vague memory of her swiping at him with something while standing in Hayden's apartment, and now he could see a gash across his cheek. The bitch had cut him.

  He’d been both cut and pepper sprayed by two women in the last week. Women could be cruel.

  Hayden didn’t want to fuck him? Fine. But there was a price to be paid for embarrassing him like that. He’d let the blonde get away with it, but this was too much. No one draws blood on Donovan Nardell without payback.

  With bleary eyes and an aching head, he drove out to the warehouse in Commerce City and set everything up, then came back home to get inside Hayden’s apartment to wait. He followed the exact same procedure as last time, credit card in the door jamb, but when he opened the door, he got a shock.

  Instead of an empty apartment, he found Hayden sitting on the couch in a bathrobe, a laptop computer on the coffee table and a pint of ice cream on the sofa next to her.

  The robe was open, exposing her stomach. In one hand, she was holding a razor blade, and three bloody parallel lines marked her belly. Donovan could see several rows of scars above and below the fresh blood. Some were shapes like X’s and O’s, some were straight gashes an inch or two long. She had thirty or forty scars in all across her pale flesh, extending from under her bra all the way down to her purple panties.

  “What the fuck?” she said.

  He was too stunned to think for a few seconds. “What… what are you doing? Why are you home?”

  She raced to close her bathrobe and tossed the bloody razor blade on the coffee table. “I quit my job. What the hell are you doing here?”

  He came to his senses, and instead of answering the question, he snatched the syringe from his back pocket. Her eyes shot wide when she saw this, then he thumbed the cap off and lunged across the room toward her.

  She tried to grasp at the razor blade, but knocked it off the coffee table instead. So she abandoned that and barreled over the side of the couch to flee into the kitchen.

  He clenched the syringe between his teeth and went after her. He slipped on a stray plate, which sent him crashing into the wall. He wasn’t drunk anymore, but he was definitely slower after chugging back so many last night.

  But she’d allowed herself to be cornered in the kitchen, so he wasn’t worried. He approached slowly, his arms out wide for when she tried to rush past him.

  She backed up against the fridge, her eyes darting around. There were no knives or frying pans in sight for her to defend herself. She took a chance and tried to sidestep him, but he grabbed a handful of her hair as she attempted to duck under his extended arm.

  He gripped her hair and pushed her forward, then slammed her into the couch, bending her over it.

  She screamed and writhed under him, but he pressed her face down into the couch to keep her still. He took the syringe from between his teeth and depressed the stopper a fraction to clear out some air bubbles. Against her wails, he jammed the needle into her butt cheek, then pushed the stopper in all the way. Her cries immediately hushed, then in a few seconds, she was out cold.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  AS MICAH left the bridge with a revolver in his glove box, the memory of his old life threatened to overwhelm him. He’d survived the two years since the trial by telling himself that he was no longer that person, but now, here he was, involved in a bunch of gangster shit all over again.

  And the shoe. Had he hit someone? Had that actually happened?

  He found his car hurtling down the street toward the liquor store. Streetlights and other cars blurred into a mix of colors as the world spiraled. The pain needed to go away, and the faster, the better.

  Again, as it had done more than once in the last few weeks, his turn signal came on and he slowed to enter the liquor store’s parking lot. Except this time, there was no conversation with Boba Fett to persuade him drive on.

  There was no thought at all… he was entirely on autopilot.

  He turned into the parking lot and shut off his engine. He exited his car, and did not think about the one month sobriety AA chip in his pocket or the meeting he had planned to attend that evening. Only one thought prevailed, and that was the desire to blast away all the feelings that had been churning in his gut since he’d woken up against that airbag and his life had shifted completely upside down.

  Micah went into the liquor store and selected a pint of Evan Williams bourbon. Standing in line, he hummed to drown out the buzzing of the fluorescent lights.

  “Pretty chilly out there today, eh partner?” the cashier said. “We could use a bit of sun, I think.”

  Micah said nothing as he took out his wallet. He passed a twenty dollar bill across the counter. The cashier made change and slipped the bottle into a paper bag.

  “No bag,” Micah said. He took his bottle and walked out the front entrance. The bells attached to the front door jingled in his head as he returned to his car. He got in and locked the door, his mind nearly empty.

  He opened the glove box and gripped the revolver. Flashes of his car’s dome light reflected off the shiny metal surfaces. Couldn’t believe he was going to have to use it. At least he didn’t have to do it sober.

  After putting the gun back, he uncapped the bottle and set the little black cap on the dashboard. Instantly, his nose filled with the sweet and sour odor of the bourbon, and his stomach lurched. He raised the bottle, and the sensation of cold glass against his lips brought him back to so many hundreds of drunken nights over the last ten years.

  The grave sense he was doing something terrible flashed in his head. He thought of Boba Fett, hiding deep in his pocket, nestled against the AA chip.

  Too late. He tilted his head back and his mouth filled with bourbon. At that moment, he understood everything that Frank had tried so hard to explain to him since he’d become Micah’s sponsor: that he had no willpower over alcohol; he had no mental defense against it. Micah had experienced a series of shitty events, and now here he was, about to throw it all away–all his weeks of meetings and everything good in his life–and have to start over again.

  Another compulsion came to him, as strong as the one that had commanded him to drink. Get rid of it.

  He spat the contents of his mouth. Bourbon sprayed his hands, his steering wheel, his dashboard. He opened his mouth to yell and stray droplets fell from his bottom lip onto his shirt. Chest heaving, his hand found the button and he rolled down the window. As he heaved the bottle into an open trash can near the store, he started his car, tires squealing as he fled the liquor store parking lot.

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  He drove straight to Frank’s house, coughing and wheezing the whole way there. The sting of liquor remained on his lips, and he spat onto the floor of the car once every few minutes.

  At Frank’s, he stumbled into his driveway, still in the haze of fright. The world shook. He bounded up the steps in front of the house so fast he nearly fell, and then banged on the door. Five seconds passed with no answer, then he rapped his knuckles harder on the wood.

  Frank opened the door, wiping his hands on a dishrag. “Micah, what’s going on out here? You look like you’re having a panic attack.”

  Micah, panting, placed his hands on the doorframe and leaned in. “I need you. I’m losing my shit. I drank. Or, I almost did. I had it in my mouth, then I spit it out, so I don’t know what you’d call it. I’m not sure what happened but I know it’s not good.”

  Frank sniffed and made a face, which was inevitable because Micah was soaked in bourbon. “Your timing is perfect. I finished dinner not ten minutes ago, and my dishwasher is busted, so we have to wash everything by hand. Would you rather scrub or dry?”

  Micah shook his head. “I don’t really feel like doing dishes right now.”

  “That’s exactly why you should. Some activity will help you focus. Come on in, you’re letting all my damn heat out.”

  Frank escorted Micah inside the one-bedroom house and into the kitchen. A collec
tion of lasagna-stained plates and bowls rested in a sink full of soapy water. Frank picked up a scrub brush and offered Micah a clean dishrag.

  “It was like it used to be, before I moved here and got sober,” Micah said. “I tell myself I'm not going to drink. I don’t have any intention or plan to drink, then the next thing I know, I'm at the liquor store.”

  “Kid, I get it. I can’t tell you how many times I planned not to drink at all, or only to have one drink, and found myself slamming my fist into the bar hours later with an empty wallet, know what I mean? Believe me, I get it.” Frank lifted a dripping plate from the soapy water before handing it to Micah to dry.

  “Well, I don’t get it. I didn’t. Before, I mean. But I think maybe now I do. I thought I was doing better. I thought that all my days of white-knuckling… I thought I was done with all that.” Micah wiped the plate until all the water had been absorbed, then set it on a towel on the counter.

  “And now?” Frank said.

  Micah struggled to understand why this had happened now. There wasn’t a clear answer.

  He caught a skewed glimpse of his reflection on a black plate. “When I was in detox, there was this guy… he was huddled in the corner, shaking, sweating all the alcohol out through his pores. Rougher shape than anyone I’ve seen walking into a meeting. I got him a blanket from my room, and he looked so pitiful.”

  “That was nice of you. I’m sure it meant a lot to him.”

  “I felt sorry for him. I was looking at him, thinking how easy it could be for me to turn into that guy. I mean, he didn’t seem all that much older than me.”

  “It’s an insidious disease,” Frank said. “Sneaks up on you.”

  “If I’m making progress and everything is going to snap into place, when is that going to happen?”

  The wash side of the sink now empty, Frank pulled the plug and the water drained, swirling as it went. “Maybe it’s time you told me how you ended up in witness protection. Let out some more of those demons.”

  A bolt of panic seized Micah by the throat. He knew he’d have to tell Frank about this someday, but he hadn’t realized today would be that day.