A small ghost of a smile drifted across her face as she remembered Sarah, but she wasn’t done talking so I said nothing, just kept waiting patiently for the information that I knew was going to make my blood boil. I knew we should get moving, that I should tell her the plan we had come up with, but I couldn’t interrupt her. Not when she was finally getting it out.
“I went out for a couple of drinks with Sarah, and we stayed out a bit late. I wasn’t paying attention to my phone and I didn’t answer his calls or texts. Thirty-seven of them in a four-hour period to be exact. When I got home from the bar he was waiting for me as soon as I opened the door. I didn’t even get a chance to say anything before he had me.”
What the fuck does “had me” mean?
“My hair is naturally curly, I spend a lot of money on product to keep it this straight,” Jeannette patted her messy ponytail and let it slide through her fingers and over one shoulder. “But it was curly then, and I remember when he grabbed the hair at the back of my neck his fingers were instantly tangled. When he threw me down to the floor his hand stayed caught in my hair because of the curls and it ripped a chunk out. Hurt worse than when he split my lip, and he hadn’t even meant to do it.”
There must have been something in my eyes then, something that gave away what I felt because Jeanette pinned me with a look. “We haven’t even gotten to the bad parts yet, Dino, so calm down. You wanted information so I’m going to tell you, but you have to keep your shit together.”
The irony of Jeanette, who was on the run and one step away from a complete breakdown telling me to keep my shit together was not lost on me, but I just nodded and let her keep going.
“He dragged me up the stairs to our bedroom where he made me strip and then proceeded to give me a full search, all cavities included, to make sure I hadn’t been cheating on him. Then, while I cried and begged him to stop, he held my face down on the mattress and smacked my ass with his belt. A hit for every five minutes I had been gone. It would have been only forty-eight slaps with the belt, but I got away from him and he added a few more on for extra punishment.”
Her voice caught on the word punishment, and the sob was building in her throat, I could hear it. I wanted nothing more than to pull her across the couch into my arms, but I couldn’t. I had ruined that part of her that would have allowed me to do it, so I stayed on my side of the couch and listened some more.
“I was too embarrassed and degraded to have had my ass spanked until it was bloody by my own fiancé that I almost didn’t say anything. But my friend Sarah, she and I had gotten close, so I confided in her. I cried in my car on our lunch break and she sat in the passenger seat of the vehicle in shock. Then when I was done telling the story she proceeded to call me a liar and explain that she had gone to school with David her entire life, and she couldn’t understand why I would say such shocking things about him. Whatever was going on with me, she said, it wouldn’t get better by wrecking his reputation. That was when I first realized my problem was bigger than David. Bigger than just leaving him. Because that was the thing. Everyone in that town was a Sarah. They all knew David, just knew he couldn’t be capable of such things. So I ran. I didn’t get far at all before he found me and dragged me back home. To be honest I wasn’t very smart about it. I had used my credit card, the only one I had that I was normally too scared to use and registered the room in my own name. He left a lot of marks on me that night. So I tried to go to the police station and file charges. Do you know what it’s like to try to file charges on a police officer in a small town? It was a joke. David played a good part too, stating that I had mental issues and was committing self-harm.”
Jeanette barked out a laugh, “I found myself admitted to the eighth floor of the county hospital. The one where they put the crazies on suicide watch. And when they finally let me go, I was released to David, who took me home after being thanked profusely by the hospital staff for being such a kind and caring man to put up with and stay with a woman like myself who had so many emotional problems. Not a single fucking soul believed me. I was trapped, being held prisoner, and no one could see what was going on. No one wanted to.”
“What happened the fourth time?” I asked softly. She’d said he’d raised his hand to her four times. That was three, and if there was one more time, I knew she was referring to when Gabe found her, and I couldn’t imagine what she could have done that would cause someone to beat another person so badly.
“I made him so mad, Dino. Oh I did something he would never have let me do. I opened a bank account in my own name, without him. He found the fucking checks when he was going through my purse one night after I went to bed. I was trying to get enough money to get away you see. I was going to buy a car outright with cash and I was going to drive until I couldn’t drive anymore. I was going to get as far away from David as I could, to a place where he had no access to me at all. I almost got away too, but he found that fucking checkbook just a few days early, man.”
A few days early? That didn’t make sense. It almost sounded like she wanted him to find it.
“That checking account was a red herring.” Jeanette leaned in like she was about to tell me a fascinating secret, like the whole time she had been talking hadn’t been like something out of a made for TV movie.
“The money in it was real, I planted a chunk in there too, enough to make him think I’d been squirreling it away for a little bit. I had too, but in a way that he would have never known about. He thought he had me pegged, and I thought I had outsmarted him.” I was having trouble following this part of her story. The money, a fake checking account, how she had accumulated enough money to leave, but I was brought up short by what she told me next.
“I hadn’t counted on him finding the pregnancy test.”
Oh God. I couldn’t even ask. I didn’t have to though, because she kept talking, strangely without emotion for dropping a bomb like that.
“I hid that fucker at the bottom of the kitchen garbage too, and I was going to take the trash out the very next morning. If it had been nine hours later it would have been on the back of the truck and on the way to the dump, but David was so damn thorough in his checks. He’s a fucking psychopath.”
I agreed silently.
“David never wanted to have kids, and after he started showing his true colors I made sure that I took my birth control pill like clockwork. I didn’t even want to sleep with him but, well, we know how much control over my own body I had in that relationship.”
Not fucking funny.
“Ninety-nine-point-nine percent effective against accidental pregnancy. There was no way for me to convince him that I was the point one percent. I hadn’t a single chance to convince him that I wasn’t sleeping around, pregnant with another man’s child just so I could leave him. That some other man was going to take care of me. Better than he could? No way. He made sure that would not happen. He beat me so badly I couldn’t move, just lay on the bed bleeding as he handcuffed me to the bed frame while he left for work. I remember him kissing me on the forehead and whistling as he went down the stairs. He beat me to near death and left, making sure I couldn’t go anywhere while he was gone. I knew that if I didn’t get out of there right then, he would kill me as soon as he got home. Or maybe he thought I would die while he was gone and he would figure out what to do with my body after that, I don’t know.”
I wanted to ask her how she got out, how she was able to get out of that situation, but I didn’t have to. She kept right on talking. I have no idea how long we had been sitting there talking, and I knew that we probably needed to get a move on soon, but I couldn’t move from my spot on the couch.
“As smart and as calculating as David was, he didn’t remember that he kept a spare handcuff key in the nightstand drawer. It would have been a cleaner getaway, but I was so fucked up with injuries that I broke my arm when I stumbled and fell down the stairs. I would have been happy then, if I would have died there but I didn’t, and since I didn’t I had to
keep moving. I had to implement the plan that I had meant to move on previously, just a little bit earlier than I had meant to. I had tons of money at my disposal, none of it traceable by David, but I just couldn’t liquidate it fast enough.
“Where did you get that kind of money?” I asked. And I did want to know the answer, because according to Gabe, Jeanette did have her own money. She did have enough finances to fund a new life once she got away, she just couldn’t liquidate it fast enough, and that was why she was trying to buy a new identity on the black market, through a sketchy pirating website.
“Bitcoin,” she said simply, and my mouth opened in shock. “Yeah, cryptocurrency, Dino, I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Well, not just bitcoin, although in the beginning that was what I had the computers at the office set up to mine but then there was feathercoin, lightcoin and a couple of others. I even thought about Hobo Nickles but there wasn’t much going on there…”
Hobo nickels? What the fuck was she talking about?
“Jeanette, you are really fucking smart aren’t you?” I hadn’t meant for her to think that I had thought she was stupid, but I was certainly seeing a different level of nerd coming out in Jeanette as she rattled on about building mining computers to digitally mine cryptocurrency as an experiment early on before her relationship went sour.
“Of course I don’t mine it anymore,” she continued like she hadn’t heard me ask the question, “but I’ve been trading and investing it for the last probably ten years I think? Since it first started. I’m really glad David tuned me out when I started talking about it all those years ago, Bitcoin saved my life.”
Bitcoin saved her life? I didn’t know much about it, but I could fucking read just like the next blue-collar asshole. Bitcoin was worth a lot of money, and if you were one of those people who invested early on, that shit could make you richer than Jesus. Bitcoin made Billionaires.
“Are you a rich girl, Jeanette?” I asked cautiously. It didn’t really matter to me if she had money or not, it wasn’t the issue, but I was just learning so much about her personality that I was curious.
“I mean, I don’t have as much money as Gabe does, but I could afford to be on the same golf course as him if I wanted.”
Whatever the hell that meant. I wanted to ask a billion other questions, but my phone dinged in my pocket.
“All right, time to put this plan into action.”
“What plan?” Jeanette asked, instantly suspicious.
“Plan hide and seek,” I said, and I leaned over to her side of the couch before she could move out of the way and I kissed her square on the mouth.
11
Jeanette
I had no choice but to trust Dino as he hustled me out of the condo with nothing but my purse, not even my car keys, and into strangely enough, Angel’s muddy as fuck Jeep.
“What are we doing?” I asked, because Dino had just rocked my world, scared the shit out of me, and then listened to me tell him the story of my whole sordid past, then kissed me and shuffled me out the door like it was lazy Sunday.
“I said plan hide and seek. We hide you, David tries to seek while I lead him on a wild goose chase and convince him that you are not Gabriella Hensley, but Jeanette Clary, who, incidentally does not have a David tattoo on her inner wrist like he claims.”
“Laser removal. And I didn’t want to have it done, he pressured me saying it was a perfect way to show our commitment to each other. He doesn’t have one though, ironically.”
“Why would he?” Dino asked, eyes narrowing in what looked like disgust. “The owner doesn’t wear a collar, the pet does.” Well didn’t that just hit the nail right on the head? I should have been upset by the revelation, but I wasn’t. I had realized the type of twisted relationship I had with David a long time ago for what it was, and I could only find a sense of relief that someone else saw it too. If only I could have met someone like Dino all those years ago, would I still be me?
My condo was on the South end of town, closer to the city of Maumee and the quiet suburbs but as I sat in the strange silence of the Jeep Dino drove us towards the downtown area. I winced as the Jeep hit a rough patch in the road and I bounced around in the passenger seat. Dino barely jiggled and he gave me that little half smirk I always loved/hated when he saw me rubbing my butt.
“Don’t drive the Anthony Wayne Trail much do you?”
“Not if I can help it,” I muttered. “This has to be the worst maintained stretch of road I have ever driven on.”
“No way, they try every year to patch the holes, but every winter the ice and salt tear it up. In the spring it’s the worst, holy shit, but this late in the fall it usually isn’t so bad since they spend the whole summer doing patch work.”
“That sounds like a lot of road work for the summer.”
Dino laughed, a real laugh, and I felt a twinge in my chest at the realization that I had never actually seen his real full smile before. What was he hiding that he was never able to show himself to anyone? I felt like I saw a unicorn, and that smile was infectious. I had no reason to smile at all, but somehow seeing the sides of Dino’s eyes crinkle up with mirth made me want to do the same. I didn’t even know what was funny, but it didn’t matter.
“Girl, in Toledo we only have three seasons. Almost winter, winter, and construction.”
“You said we, Dino. Are you from this area? You seem awfully familiar.”
If I could have eaten the question and never let it out of my mouth I would have, the smile disappeared from his face like it had never been there to begin with. Dino dropped his head and focused on the road.
“I have some family out this way.” And that was all he said for the rest of the drive.
It was an uncomfortable silence that Dino tried to fill with music, but he turned the radio on and some distorted guitar noises and the crashing of drums filled the Jeep. I pushed a couple of buttons to try to change the station, but all the presets had the same storm of music, where all the instruments and the vocals seemed to be vying for attention at the same time.
“Holy crap, Angel listens to a lot of screamo,” I said as I turned the radio off. I would rather have uncomfortable silence than listen to that headache in the making but it succeeded in breaking whatever gloom had fallen over Dino for the last fifteen minutes of the car ride, and for that I was grateful. I had plenty of things to be depressed about, but for some reason I didn’t like to see Dino like that. It made my chest ache.
We pulled up to a small brick apartment building on a corner, only two floors high and I couldn’t see how far it went in the back, but couldn’t have been very big though. The parking lot had enough room for about fifteen cars tops and there were only three in the parking lot including the Jeep we were in. One was Gabe’s Lexus, and the other was Dino’s. The sign sticking out of the grass in front of the building had said “Washington Arms,” and I had never actually been here before myself, but I had heard of it.
“Why are we at Angel’s apartment building?”
“Hide and seek,” was all Dino said, but he was smiling again and damn if it didn’t feel like the sun had peeked out around the clouds. He was so confident, I felt a little kernel of hope in my chest unfurl into a tiny bud. It was an unfamiliar feeling, and I rubbed the spot over my heart with the heel of my hand to see if it would go away. It didn’t.
“Okay so Angel said to go in the door and up the stairs, first door to the right, and whatever we do, don’t make eye contact.” Dino rattled off the instructions as he walked to the entrance and I had no choice but to follow him or stand dumbfounded in the parking lot.
“No eye contact? What the hell does that mean?” It was too late anyway because as I walked to the front door I met the eyes of a grizzled old man staring straight at me from his bottom floor apartment window. The yellow curtain was flung open wide and he was standing in front of the glass like it was a door and he was going to walk right through it. But he wasn’t walking, he was standing still. Just standing the
re with his arms crossed over the chest of his dingy white t-shirt and a disgruntled frown on his deeply wrinkled face.
“No idea, but let’s go.” Dino pulled my arm gently to steer me into the building, effectively extracting me from the impromptu staring contest. The old man made no other movement aside from inclining his head slightly in what I assumed was a greeting. Weird.
The instructions weren’t necessary because as soon as we walked through the door I heard two familiar voices arguing up the stairs. They sounded really close, and even though the apartment complex was pretty small they had to have a door open somewhere. We followed the bickering up the stairs and found Angel and Gabe standing in a small apartment. Gabe had on a hoodie and a pair of basketball shorts, a far cry from his normal three-piece suits and his brown hair was sticking up in all different directions like he had been running his hands through it. He was holding a garbage bag in one hand, and a stack of shot glasses in another.
“No you may not throw those away. Those are from my collection,” Angel said, hands on her hips and a mutinous expression on her face.
“It’s not a collection, it’s clutter.” Gabe held the stack high over Angel’s head as she reached to swipe them out of his hand.
“That’s my Glass City Rollers shot glass, it’s precious. And besides, I use these when the girls come over for story time.”
“You can keep the Glass City Rollers one, because it’s got a derby girl on it, and roller derby is cool. But if you want to keep the rest of these you need to find a better way to store them than all over the countertops,” Gabe thundered, his voice echoing off the walls of the tiny room that was one-half kitchen and the other half living room. “And in case you hadn’t noticed,” he added, “you haven’t had story time in a while, and we are trying to make room for a guest at the moment.”
“Fine!” Angel huffed, making one last leap and swiping the shot glasses out of his hands, narrowly missing sending them flying to the floor. “You’ve got plenty of room, I’ll just take them over to your house since I’m pretty much moving in anyway.”
Dino (Glass City Hearts Book 2) Page 11