by Naomi West
“Come in.”
Peter’s office is large, clippings of the sister paper’s biggest headlines framed on the walls, screen captures of the station’s biggest hits right next to them. Peter sits in a large executive’s chair, his hands resting on the armrests, looking far too young for a chair that important. Brittany has told me he’s around thirty, but he looks around mid-twenties, with pale red hair and pale gray eyes. He is always well-kept in his blue business suit, his hair clipped short, his face cleanshaven and not unhandsome. He steeples his fingers and watches me closely. His gray eyes roam more than is necessary. I ignore it.
“Take a seat,” he says.
I sit in the chair opposite him, placing my dossier on the desk.
“And what’s this? A story?”
I don’t like the way he says that. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but his tone of voice is like the tone of an indulgent parent. I remember once, before the hell that scarred my life happened, going into the living room with a bad painting of a tree held in my hand, jumping up and down for Mom to pay attention to me. “And what’s this? A painting?” She sounded exactly like Peter sounds now.
“Yes, a story.” Brittany said to smile, but I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Smiling would give the wrong impression. I need to be professional. I sit up straight and smooth down my sweater. “It’s been an open secret for a long time that stringers—you know, the men and women who listen to police scanners and chase down stories for news footage—”
His smile is small and somewhat condescending. “I know what stringers are, Willa.”
“Well, okay … it’s been an open secret for a long time that they can be unethical, running red lights, getting in the way of the emergency personnel, taking unnecessary risks—”
“I’m going to need to stop you there, Willa.” He leans on his elbows, squinting at me. “I like you. You’re a clever young woman. You’ll make an excellent reporter.” He waves at the dossier. “You clearly are an excellent reporter. I am sure if I opened this I would find well-documented accounts and flawless notes. But here’s the thing. We can’t use this story. Just think about it.”
“I’m sorry, Peter, but when you tell me to just think about it, I want to scream.” I say this under my breath, far too quiet for him to hear. He’s about to ask what I said. I speak up. “Why not?” I ask.
“You did all this work on your own time,” he says. “This wasn’t work we asked you to do.”
“Correct.”
“That was your first mistake. You should’ve come to me with the idea, or gone to one of your coworkers. They would’ve told you what I’m about to tell you now.”
“Which is?”
“We can’t run an exposé on stringers in LA. We’re a news station in LA. Where do you think the video footage of our reports comes from? The only people who’d be happy with this exposé are the folks over at accounting.”
I sigh. He’s right. It was a silly mistake. But at the same time, I’m pissed off. Weeks of work turned to dust just like that. “What about the viewers? Wouldn’t they be interested? Or the readers?”
When he looks at me, he’s Mom again, only this time he’s Mom when she realized the painting was bad and didn’t want to hurt my feelings. “More than shootings and car crashes?”
“Yeah, fine. I get your point.”
I jump to my feet.
He waves at the dossier. “Don’t you want your notes?”
“What’s the point? I’ll get back to writing copy now.” I tip an imaginary Stetson hat. “Sir.”
He winces when I say “sir.” Maybe it is cruel. Peter isn’t my enemy.
“If I ran this story upstairs, they’d laugh at me,” he says, his voice trailing me to the door.
“I know. I know.”
For the rest of the day I sit at my desk, writing mind-numbing copy and listening to the reporters around me gossip about the biker gang problem. Apparently a gang by the name of the Skull Riders has been setting fire to buildings as a way to screw over their rival gangs. I can tell that Brittany is less than horrified by the way her cheeks flush and she gushes, throwing her hands in the air and proclaiming for all the office to hear, “They could start a fire for me any day of the week. I saw one once, in a bar. He came striding in wearing his leather jacket. On the back he had a skeleton sitting on the back of a motorcycle, and he looked hot.”
I ignore her and tap, tap, tap away, the copy so mind-numbing that soon I’m not even sitting in the office. I’m a kid again and Dad’s illness—which I later learned was cancer, but at the time seemed like some kind of witch’s spell—is chewing through him. I watch as the big strong man I loved becomes a stick-thin husk.
“Are you okay?” Brittany asks me. She’s standing over my desk. The office is almost empty. I’ve been sitting here for five or so minutes just staring at my blank computer screen, lost in the past.
“Yeah.” I push my chair back and stand up. “I’m fine. Better than fine.”
Brittany looks closely at me. “We’re good work friends, you know that.” She smiles. “You can talk to me.”
Work friends … that’s a very Brittany thing to say, a very Brittany distinction to make.
“I’m fine,” I say sternly.
“Well, okay, then. I was just trying to help.”
She clicks her tongue and clicks her heels, leaving me to watch her go. I ride the bus home, since my intern’s wages can’t pay for a car. I don’t want to go home to my apartment, to the creaking doors and the broken cupboards, to the shower which half the time doesn’t turn on, and the other half turns on ultra-hot. I don’t want to sit there listening to the couple screaming at each other through the walls. But an intern’s wages can’t pay for endless nights out, either, so I’m stuck. People tell me I’m lucky enough to be getting a pittance as an intern, that most people have to rely on money from their parents. But then again, most people have parents.
I think about the Skull Riders. There’s a story the station would take seriously. If stringers stray into uncomfortable territory for the big bosses, rogue bikers stray into the most comfortable territory. Violence, gangs, but not gangs doing what they usually do, gangs becoming arsonists. Fire is good for ratings, since flames are so attractive on screen.
And it’s thoughts like that which make me question if I should even be in this business. I’m thinking of fire as if it’s a moneymaker. I’m thinking of fire as if I’m just as cold and calculating as the rest of them. I think about the novel I was going to write. In my first year of college, I was going to write it. In my second year, I was still going to write it, but there were other concerns. Third and fourth came along and the novel seemed like an object growing smaller in the rearview mirror, except that simile doesn’t work for me because I don’t have a car—
Stop, I tell myself, as I thank the driver and step from the bus. No pity parties.
I’m about to head into my apartment building when I see him. He’s massively tall, around six-foot-three or four, with the wind- and sun-tanned skin of a biker. His hair is jet-black and wavy wild. From where he’s leaning across the street, reclining in the setting spring sun, I can see his jacket hanging from the handlebar of his bike. He’s a Skull Rider. His jacket matches Brittany’s description perfectly. His dark, shielded eyes are aimed directly at my apartment building.
I pretend not to be watching him as I unlock the main door to the apartment building. Once I’m past the broken elevator and in the first floor hallway, I run to the window, looking down at him. He’s shouldering on his jacket, glancing back to the building every so often. He smokes two cigarettes, flicking the stubs into the drain, and then pushes his bike into an alleyway.
I don’t think. I just run, run down the stairs and into the street, and then follow him, being as inconspicuous as I can. Even though I’m not completely sure that the road I’m on in life is the right road for me, I can’t deny that there’s a thrill here.
I follow him for ten minut
es until he walks into a bar with a carved half-naked lady leaning above the door, the words “The Princess” outlined in blood-red letters.
As I walk across the street, I feel like I don’t have a choice.
Whatever this is, it’s a story.
Chapter Two
Diesel
I’ve been to this place before. I remember coming here back in the days before the police picked me up and made me spend years of my life in the goddamn slammer. I remember coming here with the other guys and drinking whisky and hitting on women. I get a whisky now and go to the corner of the room, taking a booth and resting my feet on the table. The place is dead apart from a few alcoholics with their knees pressed right to the bar and three middle-aged women in the other corner, giggling every now and then. I watch the door, sipping my whisky, waiting for her to walk in.
She thought she was being so slick, walking all casual on the other side of the street, like I didn’t just watch her try and hide the fact that she was spying on me as she unlocked the door and went up the stairs. When she finally walks in, she couldn’t look more out of place if she tried. The women in the corner are the type who put on skintight leggings and hit on twenty-year-olds even when they push sixty. The drunks at the bar are drunks. The barman is gruff and old, a relic. The lights are low and the place is dingy. But this girl is something else.
She’s young, maybe twenty, maybe a couple of years older, with dark blonde hair done up like a Viking shieldmaiden’s, all intricate along the sides, more braids than I can count. Thin, but not skinny, she’s wearing a fashionable get-up I’ve never seen in any of the club women. Her top is some kind of red weave over two matching layers, her bottom dark red jeans, her boots the color of a sunset. She looks classy, cool, not the type of girl who should be in here at all. I watch her without watching her—I learned how to do that a long time ago—as she sits at a table across from me and tries to watch me without watching me. I’m much better at it than she is.
I walk over to her quickly, not giving her a chance to react. Just then a bunch of assholes come barging in, frat types, and trailing right after them what seems like all of LA, filling up the tables. Looking around, I can see that three separate parties have come in at the same time, dumb luck, making the place loud and boisterous.
“You didn’t order a drink,” I say, looking down at her.
“Excuse me?” She smiles tightly. I can tell she’s thinking: He’s onto me. Which is damn funny, because I’ve been onto her all along.
I gesture at the empty table in front of her. “You didn’t buy a drink. Why’d you come into a bar like this and not buy a drink? That’s the only reason a woman like you would come into a bar like this, I reckon. I’ve been doing this for a while now. I know when someone’s following me.”
She stands up, holding her hands up, shaking her head. I can’t help but smile. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she says.
“Right. So you didn’t see me standing outside your apartment building, and you didn’t follow me down the street, and the sky ain’t blue in summer, and we get one hundred days of snow a year. Come on, let me buy you a drink.”
I might as well have some fun with her before sending her on her way. I wouldn’t normally be so friendly with someone who’s following me, but the people who usually follow me don’t look like her. She walks ahead of me to the bar, looking confused as she glances back. All I can look at is her lithe body, her legs tight as hell in those jeans. She’s definitely one worth toying with.
“What’ll you have?” I ask. I have to raise my voice now because the jukebox is blaring. Across the room, men chant and stamp their feet. “Drink! Drink! Drink!”
“I shouldn’t have anything.” She glances to me and then at her feet, and then back to me. I just stare at her. Sometimes silence does all the work for me in my business. “Okay, I’ll have a vodka and coke.”
I order another whisky for myself and a drink for the follower.
“What’s your name?”
“Willa. And yours?”
I tell her.
“What kind of name is Diesel? What’s your real name?”
“Diesel, ma’am. I changed it legally a while back.”
“Oh.”
When we get back to our table, it turns out that three frat fucks have decided they want it for themselves. Willa makes as if to return to the bar—there are no other seats—but I walk to the edge of the table and point down at her handbag, which has been kicked to the floor. “This yours?”
She gasps. “I must’ve left it. Oh, excuse me.”
The head frat fuck—they always have leaders, these assholes—is flat-faced and looks at Willa in a way that makes me angry, because even if we just met, I’m with her. “You knocked my friend’s bag to the floor. This is our table.”
Flat Face laughs. “Move on, buddy.”
His two friends are more sober than him. They look at each other awkwardly, sizing me up. “Mark …”
“What?” flat-faced Mark snaps. “The fuck’s the matter with you?”
“We’re sitting here,” I say.
“Don’t make me stand up, pal—”
I lift him by his neck, holding him so his feet kick an inch from the floor. He looks down the length of my arm with wide, shocked eyes. His friends back away, retreating to the edge of the table. When he’s scared enough, I put him down. “Don’t do anything stupid now.”
He looks like he might, but then thinks better of it and scuttles away.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Willa says, collecting her things and returning to her seat. Her eyes are blue with a fleck of brown, and they’re full of excitement. So she enjoyed that, then. Interesting.
I sit opposite her. “I know I didn’t.” I take a matchstick from my pocket and put it in my mouth, chewing the wooden end. Maybe this is a bad habit I need to stop, but judging by the look Willa gives me, I’m not going to be stopping anytime soon. She looks excited again, as though she’s hungry for danger. “You need to stop looking at me like that.”
She sips her vodka. I reckon it’s so she doesn’t have to answer right away. “Like what?” she says.
“Like you want me to bend you over this table …” I trail off, laughing. “I almost forgot that I was a gentleman then.”
She smiles, and then wipes the smile off her face. It’s like she doesn’t want to be smiling but can’t help it. “Diesel,” she says. She takes another sip. Then she looks down at her glass, which is empty. “Oh.”
“Diesel … oh?” I laugh again. She’s cute as hell. There’s no denying that. “Are you all right?”
“I’m going to get another drink,” she says, standing up.
“Hang on. Protect the table.”
I go to the bar and return with a vodka and coke.
“Thank you.” She smiles at me as she takes it. “I wasn’t following you, by the way.”
“Right.”
“I wasn’t. I was just … I was just curious. Sue me.”
“Maybe I will.”
She squints at me. “Something tells me suing isn’t your style.”
Looking at her gets me thinking on a topic that hounded me night and day in prison. I’d lie there at night smoothing over the scars on my chest, my arms, feeling the newer ones from the prison fighting and the older ones from the old man, remembering my childhood and wondering what it’d be like to do it all over. A second chance ain’t gonna happen for me. I’m too deep into the life. But a kid, I thought … a kid would be the chance I want. A kid would be my opportunity to do my life all over again. A kid, I could treat well, not like my old man. A kid, I could protect.
“What do you think about children?” I say, dropping it casually. I don’t care about her answer, I tell myself. But if that’s really the case then I shouldn’t be leaning forward like this, or watching her lips so closely, or remembering every evil thing my proud policeman father ever did to me.
“What do you mean?” she asks. �
�Children are nice, I guess. Do you mean do I ever want them?”
I nod, trying to make sure I don’t seem eager. A man like me has to always seem laidback, like nothing can get to me.
“It’s funny you say that.” She giggles, takes a sip, giggles again. It’s mesmerizing. “I’ve been thinking about having kids lately. I don’t know if it’s because I never had much of a family, you know? My dad died of cancer when I was ten and my mom died a year later in a car accident and—oh my god.” She shoots dagger-eyes at her vodka. “I don’t drink very often, and now look at me. I don’t even know you. Oh my god. What am I doing? I should just get up and walk out of here. I shouldn’t overshare like that.”