by Julie Kriss
I drove the Datsun until it wouldn’t go anymore, and then I got an ancient Chevy that looked like it had been junked from a 90’s TV show. I could drive that car over LA’s freeways better than just about any new car, and I never got tired of doing it. It was the only talent I had. While other guys my age were going to college and learning to be bankers and doctors and lawyers, I was becoming what you’d call a skilled driver. It was a profitable skill, if you knew who to sell it to.
Dad left when I was two. Mom died when I was sixteen. My brother Cavan, who was eighteen when Mom died, took off instead of looking after me. I didn’t blame him, but that left me. Alone. And, as always, dirty.
This morning, I was tired. I’d been up late last night, fixing my neighbor’s car. It was a pretty simple fix with just a few parts. But her shocks were going, she needed brake pads—I could go on and on. I’d patched the car up the best I could so she wouldn’t have to stand at a bus stop in the rain again, then slid the key through the mail slot on her door, imagining her on the other side somewhere, lying in bed. Maybe naked.
It was a really nice image. I pictured it instead of the car I was working on right now, my hands moving automatically as a movie played in my head. Olivia, my neighbor, with her hair down. Those dark curls around her face and her shoulders. That slender body naked, riding me. Her head thrown back, her eyes closed, her tits thrust forward as she came.
I hadn’t fixed her car to fuck her. But there was no rule against picturing it. In detail.
When I heard my name, I put the wrench I was holding on my chest and rolled out from beneath the car. It was Charlie Jensen, owner of Jensen’s Garage and my boss, who preferred, inexplicably, to be called Chaz.
Chaz was standing in the dirty concrete garage bay, looking down at me from his hard, fat face. “Devon Wilder,” he said. “My brother wants to see you.”
I squinted up at him. “Right now?”
“No, when the Queen takes tea,” Chaz said. “Of course right fucking now.”
I rolled myself up and tossed the wrench into a nearby toolbox. Chaz was a dick, and he had a stupid nickname, but he was sweetness and light compared to his brother. Gray Jensen—that was his actual name, Gray, not a nickname—was mean and cold and not quite stupid. He was the kind of guy I would normally avoid, but unfortunately I couldn’t. I had my reasons.
I walked to one of the garage lockers, unzipping my coverall. “I take it this means I’m done my shift,” I said, pulling the coverall off and wadding it up.
“Ha ha,” Chaz said. “Funny guy.” It was a bluff, and we both knew it. Chaz was scared of his brother. If Gray wanted to see me, there wasn’t a single thing Chaz would say about it.
I was wearing jeans, work boots, and a long-sleeved gray thermal. I had grease on my hands, but Gray wouldn’t care. He cared more about promptness than cleanliness. I pulled on a black nylon jacket and zipped it up to my chin.
“See you tomorrow, boss,” I said to Chaz.
“Hurry up,” Chaz barked as I walked to the door. “He’s in a shitty mood today.”
It was cold and foggy out—basically a textbook day for San Francisco. I’d grown up in LA, but after my mother’s death I’d had to move around to escape the foster system. I’d ended up here. It seemed weird that I’d like a city full of hipsters and would-be internet millionaires, but I did. Besides, the hipsters and millionaires never ventured this far south from downtown. This area was populated with warehouses and industrial units instead of Victorian mansions and trolley cars. That was fine with me. I just wanted to do my work and drive.
And it wasn’t LA. I had bad memories of LA—very, very bad memories. The kind I never talked about.
I did occasional runs down to the Mexican border, or up to the Oregon one. Hours alone on the road, watching for cops, with nothing but a stack of neatly wrapped drugs for company. But mostly I did other driving gigs. Stolen goods, guys who needed to get to the state line, guys who needed to be picked up at the state line. I’d driven at least ten loads of medicinal weed, complete with permits, which the cops couldn’t take me for. As long as I didn’t get taken down by hijackers and get my head blown off, I made money and drove in a pleasantly fragrant van. Easy work. I had a reputation as a trustworthy guy who could avoid the cops when needed and never dipped into the product.
The sun was beginning to set as I pulled up in front of Pure Gold and parked. Pure Gold was the strip club where Gray Jensen liked to conduct business. He didn’t own the place, but he practically lived there. He said it was because the noise in the club prevented anyone from catching his conversations on a wire. That sounded smart, but we all knew it was because he hoped one of the girls would finally fuck him.
It was barely seven o’clock, so there wasn’t much action in the strip club yet. The stage was still dark, but there were a few customers at the tables, and a couple of girls were circulating, looking for early-evening lap dances and tips. Gray usually worked from one of the VIP booths, so I nodded to the bartender, Henry, and started to walk on past.
A woman stepped in front of me, blocking my way. It was Amy, one of the strippers. She was wearing a naughty schoolgirl’s costume, consisting of a black push-up bra and a scrap of plaid skirt that barely covered her ass. Her blond hair was pulled into pigtails. She gave me a smile. “Come have a drink with me, sexy,” she said.
“Hey, Amy,” I said. “I have to go see Gray, but—”
She reached out a hand and put it on my waist beneath my jacket, curling her fingers around me and moving close. Her eyes stared into mine. “Have a drink with me, sexy,” she said again.
She was giving me signals that she had something to tell me. I wasn’t happy about it, but I followed her to the bar, where Henry poured a shot of vodka and pushed it toward me. “What is it?” I asked Amy.
She moved close to me again, her hips nearly brushing my jeans, and looked up at me with a smile that was meant to fool anyone watching us. “There’s something going on,” she said.
“Oh yeah?” I picked up my shot. “What?”
“I don’t know.” She licked her lips and continued to gaze up at me. She was a very good actress. “People have been coming and going. People we usually don’t see.”
“People like who?” I asked.
She shrugged, licked her lips again, pouted a little. “People like Craig Bastien.”
Fuck. Gray was unpleasant, but he was basically a petty criminal, hitting the easy money. Craig Bastien was into drugs, and hard. I wafted my shot under my nose, then downed it. “Okay,” I said.
“I think whatever job is going down is one of Bastien’s,” Amy said. “Gray is looking a little scared.”
“Got it.” I put down my glass. I’d have to think of a strategy. I could drive a few packets here and there, but big-money drugs weren’t my thing. “Thanks for the warning.”
“Don’t do it, Dev,” Amy said, still looking flirtatiously at me. “Whatever it is.”
“I may not have much of a choice.” I patted her arm, disengaging it from around my waist. “Thanks again. Now, I need to go see him. He’s waiting.”
“I get it.” But she moved closer still, running her fingers down my chest and my stomach. “You know, I keep forgetting how hot you are. God, all these muscles. You should take me back to the dressing room sometime.”
I frowned. I’d never fucked Amy, or any of the other girls in Pure Gold. I had nothing against strippers—some of them liked a good hard fuck, just like other women—but I hadn’t had any woman in a while, by choice. “Maybe sometime,” I hedged.
Her fingers dropped to my belt buckle and toyed with it. “I haven’t had a cock in weeks,” she complained.
She was starting to make my dick hard, I admit it. I’m a man, and we’re wired to respond to hot strippers in schoolgirl outfits coming on to us. But I’d been unenthused about mindless, quick-fuck sex for a while, though I couldn’t explain it. I told myself it was just my mood, but I’d never done this self-imposed
celibacy before. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, and I didn’t want to think about it.
Besides, Gray was waiting, and—maddeningly, unaccountably—my neighbor’s image came into my mind again. The dip of her clavicle, the line of her mouth, her graceful hands. Shit, she was cockblocking me, and she wasn’t even in the room. Still. “I’m sure you can find one anytime, a sexy girl like you,” I said to Amy, and then I walked away. “Thanks for the drink,” I called over my shoulder.
Gray had another of the girls, Irene, in the VIP room with him. She was sitting in his lap, wearing a bikini, while he talked on the phone. When I walked in, he dismissed Irene and hung up in short order. “Wilder,” he said.
Gray was one of those guys whose face is just a little off, and you can’t pinpoint where. He was in his thirties, with salt-and-pepper hair and the beginnings of a gut. He was wearing a warmup suit, as if he thought he was Rocky, though if Gray ever warmed up for any exercise in his life I’d eat my jacket. The VIP room was dim and dingy and smelled like spilled beer and old come. I wanted to get out of there as fast as fucking possible.
“Listen,” Gray said. “There’s a thing happening. I need you in.”
I stayed standing, since I didn’t want to touch the velvet seats. I may be dirty, but even I draw a line somewhere. “When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“I’ll check my schedule.”
“You’ll free up your fucking schedule,” he growled, looking at me with his flat dead eyes. “Or I pay your friend a visit.”
I felt my jaw clench, my muscles tighten, like they did every time he did this. I stared back into his eyes. “You know, one of these days I’m going to call your bluff.”
“Try it, shitsack,” Gray returned. “I dare you.”
I held his gaze for a second, but that was the problem with Gray. I didn’t really know what he would do. And Max was too important to risk.
I’d only ever had one person in my life I could call a friend, and Max Reilly was it. Born on the same streets as me and my brother. Living some of that same life. He’d helped me through the worst time in my life—the time that was the reason I hated LA and would never go back—and I owed him for it. Instead of taking the path I took, or taking off like Cavan did, Max had enlisted. He’d been deployed for three years, most of them in Afghanistan. He’d come home bearded and haunted, his right leg gone below the knee from an IED, trying to pay for his pain meds and PTSD therapy from his veteran’s pay. He was living in LA, cleaning out his dad’s apartment, since his dad had just died. I was working on getting Max an apartment in Shady Oaks so he could come to San Francisco.
Max was the reason I took jobs with crazy assholes like Gray. I could live alone on my mechanic’s pay—Shady Oaks was cheap, and who the hell cared if I wore the same jeans every day? But I needed extra money to help Max. And the worst day of my life was the day that Gray had, somehow in his devious network of rats, discovered it.
If I turned down work for Gray, I not only lost out on the money that would help Max. I also put my shit on Max’s doorstep, because in a certain mood, Gray would like nothing better than to make my friend pay for my disobedience. And Max had enough problems.
“Fine,” I said to Gray now. “What is this thing?”
“TV’s,” Gray said. “Flat screens and such. Place called Mickey’s in West Oakland.”
I nodded. I’d heard of it only vaguely, since I didn’t own a TV.
“I have good intel,” Gray said. “The guy who owns it is close to retiring. His eyesight isn’t so good and neither is his memory. Sometimes he doesn’t arm the alarm properly.”
“Sometimes?” I asked.
“He won’t arm it properly tomorrow, when my inside guy messes with the code,” Gray said. “That’s all you need to know. I’ve got good guys on this. Danny, Westerberg, Jam.”
Those were experienced heist guys to bring in to take down an old man’s TV store. “So you want me to drive?” I said.
Gray looked at me and gave a short, humorless laugh. I realized that beneath the bravado he was scared, just like Amy had said. What the hell was he scared of? “Of course I want you to fucking drive,” he said. “You think I want you for your pretty face?”
I ignored that, satisfying myself with the mental picture of me punching his teeth in. “What am I driving?”
“Panel van. Automatic.”
Fine. “Where do I show up?”
“Behind Natty’s Grill in West Oakland at eight. Your cut of the take should be about a thousand.”
A thousand bucks for an evening’s work. “I want half in advance.”
“Fuck you, Wilder. You get a hundred.”
I shook my head. “I’m not showing up for a hundred measly bucks. You can stuff that in Irene’s bikini.”
Gray’s nasty, blank eyes looked calculating for a minute, and then he said, “Fine. Go get it from Henry at the bar.”
I turned and walked out, swallowing my surprise. Gray never gave in that quickly. Instead of feeling triumph, all I could feel was dread.
Amy had been right. This was some kind of big score. The kind that made five hundred bucks look like nothing.
And Gray wanted me there. Bad enough to give in. That meant he not only needed a driver, he needed the best getaway driver there was. Which—I had no illusions about it—was me.
For TV’s? I didn’t think so.
I had the sinking feeling I was fucked. But there was nothing I could do. Because if I bailed on Gray, it would be Max who paid for it.
Just get in the van and drive. Point A to Point B. Just get it done and walk away.
I got my money and headed home to Shady Oaks, wishing I could believe it.
Four
Olivia
My sister, Gwen, was waiting for me when I got home from work. She was sitting in the open corridor outside my apartment door, texting, wearing cowboy boots, a checked shirt tied beneath her breasts, and a tiny denim skirt, cowgirl style.
She looked up at me and stood when I approached, tossing back her blonde hair. Gwen and I looked like polar opposites—she had our mother’s blonde hair and blue eyes, while I had our dad’s dark looks. No one who saw us together ever thought we were sisters, even when Gwen wasn’t dressed for work.
“God, I’m so hungry,” she said by way of greeting. She was twenty-four, a year younger than me, but she looked about nineteen, which was perfect for her line of work. “Do you have any food?”
“I think so,” I said, letting her in to my place. “Help yourself.”
She walked past me into my kitchen. I pulled off my blouse and skirt, walking into my bedroom to find something else to wear. I always felt like a frump around Gwen—just the sight of her made me want to change my clothes. I found a clingy, comfortable jersey skirt and a t-shirt and put them on, sighing with relief to get out of my work clothes.
I came back out of the bedroom to see she’d popped the top of a can of Pringles and was digging in. “Mom called me,” she said.
“Yeah? What did she want?”
Gwen rolled her eyes. “To convince me to come back to LA, of course. She thinks I’m wasting my talent. She says she can hook me up with Billy, her agent.”
I dug some Pringles out of the can she was holding and opened the fridge, searching for something to drink. “I know she means well, but do I have to tell you that’s a terrible idea? Mom’s a little out of touch, and Billy is a hundred years old.”
“You don’t have to tell me.” Gwen crunched a chip. “I like what I do. And I like it here. LA sucks.”
We were in a position to know, since we were born there. Both of our parents were actors—Mom in a sitcom that had a run of success in the late eighties and early nineties, and Dad as a bit player in a couple of big costume epics. Dad died in a car accident when I was two, and Mom still missed him. She never acted again after her sitcom run, and instead had lived off the residuals and the money left by Dad. She was a good mom, kind, well-intentioned, not a
Hollywood hot mess at all, but she’d lived in la-la-land so long that both of her daughters took her career advice with a grain of salt.
Though, glancing at Gwen, I couldn’t really say that either of us had set the world on fire, career-wise. I was a junior graphic designer—of which there were approximately ten million in San Francisco—and she was a strip-o-gram girl, going from birthday party to bachelor party, doing cheesy acts and taking her clothes off. Gwen had always loved to perform—she was a showoff, singing and dancing from an early age. But she’d never had the ambition to make it big. She claimed that being a strip-o-gram girl was actually fun. I could see why our mother was at least trying to get her to do something else, though acting in LA wasn’t it.
“So, what’s up?” she asked, digging in the Pringles can. “You didn’t come from the bus stop. I thought your car was busted?”
Leave it to Gwen to zero in on the one thing that left me tongue-tied. I’d woken up this morning, wondering if that ride with my hot neighbor—Devon, his name was Devon—was a dream, only to find my car key on the floor in front of my mail slot. My car had started up just fine. He must have stayed up late to fix it. In the rain. For nothing. For me.
I didn’t know what to make of that.
“It was. But now, it’s, um…” Oh, hell. She’d get it out of me anyway. “My neighbor fixed it.”
Gwen’s eyes went wide. “Your hot neighbor?”
I winced, regretting the day I’d actually told her about him. “Yeah, that one. His name is Devon. He gave me a ride home from class last night.”
Gwen put down the chip can, taking this in. “You met him?”
I shrugged, trying to make it look casual instead of giving away how hyped-up I was just thinking about last night. I grabbed another chip before she could finish them. “It was just a ride, that’s all.” I realized how that would sound in my sister’s dirty mind, and glared at her before she could say anything. “In his car.”