Breathe in… breathe out…
“Compho’ing.”
B-B-B-B-Br-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rinngggggg…
Breathe in… breathe out…
“Compho’ing.”
B-B-B-B-Br-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rinngggggg…
Breathe in… breathe out…
“Compho’ing.”
B-B-B-B-Br-r-r-r—
“Hey there,” Jace’s voice sang out, and I loosed a noise that perched between a sobbing cry and a barking laugh.
“Jace, oh thank go—”
“I can’t get to the phone right now. You know what to do.”
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEP
In my mind—a mind haunted by a vast, dark forest occupied by a monster named Depression and, somewhere beyond its seemingly infinite depths, a well-read and even college-educated catalogue of knowledge and deductive prowess—I thought of a myriad of things to say to Jace’s voicemail. In my mind I was clever and witty. In my mind I hadn’t even let it get this far.
My mind was somewhere far from me now.
I said “Compho’ing” one more time.
Then a floorboard creaked in the other room, and I was screaming.
Lightning caught the scene like a snapshot—I imagined something from a horror movie; perhaps one of the vampire flicks I loved so much, this time starring me as the unsuspecting damsel about to be beset upon by a bloodthirsty monster—and the clap of thunder roared down at the very same instant.
And the lights, all the lights—the lights that I’d come to see as a sense of security; the lights that kept that safe, secluded condo from near total blackness—went out.
The storm’s right on top of me, I thought, and a numb part of me from beyond that dark forest told the rest of me I wasn’t talking about the weather.
The next creak was much closer this time, and I made a mousy sound.
Numb fingers piloted by blind eyes worked to get my phone back on. Suddenly that too-bright screen seemed like a miraculous thing to me.
Creak.
I felt hot wetness running down my cheeks, but I refused to believe I was crying.
Get it together, Mia, I chastised myself. This is in your head. It’s only in your head. It’s always in your head. Just in your head! Your stupid, worthless, broken head! Just get it together, get your damn phone working, and you’ll see—YOU’LL SEE!—that it’s all… in… your…
My phone’s screen bit threw the darkness like something a divine being willed. Nothing had ever been so bright and so beautiful.
Mack, only two feet in front of me now, was smiling his awful smile.
“I told you it’d be this way, sis, but you’ve always had a bit of a listening problem,” he said as he jabbed me with something long…
and sharp…
and…
sleepy…
FOURTEEN
~JACE~
I stood, frozen, only a few steps into my condo. I didn’t need to go much farther to know the truth.
Mia was gone.
It was dark. It was, I realized after some time of confusion, darker than it should have been. Even with all my lights off—even totally blacked-out—there was still the constant, albeit incredibly limited, sources of light one always took for granted. The digital clock on the coffee maker. The standby lights on the entertainment system. The inviting glow of a power-strips “on” light illuminating a wall from behind a carefully placed desk. Our daily lives were never truly cast in darkness, I thought; not so long as there was the potential for any number of electronics to serve us.
Not so long, I realized, as a place had electricity passing through it.
I glanced dumbly back at the elevator—stared like an idiot at the bright, telling fluorescents that cut through the darkness of the open sliding doors—and embarrassed myself by not connecting the dots fast enough.
“There’s electricity there,” I said to myself.
Yes. Yes, Logic chimed back at me, goading me on like an impatient tutor. And?
“And…” I looked back at the interior of my condo, “And there’s none in here.”
And what does that tell us? I asked myself.
Rage caught on before the rest of me, and I was back in the elevator and riding it down before I fully comprehended what was going on.
As the elevator door’s closed on my nearly pitch-black condo, I caught sight of two things partially illuminated by the elevator’s lights:
Mia’s cell phone…
And a spent syringe.
My eyes saw this, but I was already too angry to cope with them beyond identifying what they were.
But something was burning back there… I worried meekly.
“Electric stove,” I answered myself, actually laughing.
Oh boy… was I ever crazy.
I’d been feeling the pull on my mind since the street corner. Standing there under a torrential downpour, anger and hate all-but evaporating the water as it assaulted my burning skin, and thinking of all the things I wanted to do to Mack. Then, worse yet, a creeping awareness. He wasn’t going to show. And where did that leave me? I mean, out in the rain on a street corner I’d never be able to pass without feeling my teeth clench in my skull, sure, but in the grand scheme of things. And, considering who I was dealing with, “scheme” seemed the best word for it. Then, tearing through the rain-soaked streets like a bat heading not out of Hell, but screaming and roaring straight into the sulfur-laced underbelly of the place; not running from a devil, but outright aiming myself and my bike at one—aiming to pierce its heart like a living bullet.
Mack had gone and done the dumbest thing of his life. And, from the sounds of things, he’d practically handed the steering wheel of that life over to the physical embodiment of “stupid”—all stupid could ever hope to be and more—and said, “take us wherever you wanna go; I’m gonna rest my eyes for a bit.”
He’d tossed Mia to the wolves to save his own ass.
He’d stuck around when the wolves dragged him out of his cave to hunt her down.
He’d gotten his jollies by fucking around with my head; nearly destroying the first good thing to happen to me in a long-ass fucking time.
And then—oh, boy; get ready for this one, boys and girls—that motherfucker had gone and lured me out into the rain so he could break into my home and kidnap my girlfriend.
Tell him what he’s won, Bob!
I’d gotten back, already pretty pissed off, and then I’d seen that I had a voicemail from Mia. It was short, muffled, and, most of all, unsettlingly maddening.
It opened to Mia’s voice, shaky and broken. She was breathing, practically panting, sounding as though she’d just spent the entire morning running. Then I heard her say a word—it sounded like “comforting,” but that didn’t seem right (and she sounded far from comfortable)—followed by a sharp gasp and a long, terrible silence. I’d had to check my phone’s screen then just to be sure the recording hadn’t ended, and just as I pulled it away from my ear I was thankful for it; Mia screamed into the receiver at that moment. It sounded loud enough to have blasted my eardrum out of my asshole if I’d been holding it to my ear still. Then…
“I told you it’d be this way, sis, but you’ve always had a bit of a listening problem.”
Hearing that voice, Mack’s voice, was enough to take me over the edge. I was vaulting off my bike and sprinting through the garage in an instant. As I passed the security booth, the guard inside gave me a look—something that I registered in that instant as either guilt or fear—and it occurred to me I’d be having a very unkind conversation with him in a short moment.
But, before that, I’d had to be sure…
Then, after the longest elevator ride of my life, the doors had opened to my empty, powerless condo.
Now, recapping what had brought me to this most epic and—Dare I say it?—biblical peaks of insanity, I decided that the security guard and I were long, long, long overdue for that unkind conversation.
If nothing else I neede
d to vent some of this madness now before I took to the roads again.
It wasn’t safe to let a madman roam the streets on a motorcycle in this weather, after all.
****
The guard’s first big blunder—in the moment I’d reemerged from the elevator and approached his booth, of course—was the very telling flinch that tugged at not just his face but his entire body. It might have been construed as a full-body tremor if—and this was the “if” that defined how the rest of his life would go—it hadn’t been a full-body move away from me.
In that instant, I’d watch him actually consider trying to run from me.
In that instant, the predator in me wanted him to run from me.
He did not run from me. Instead, already starting to shake, he moved to slam the door to the booth closed. I’m sure he was aiming to lock it, too, but didn’t get the chance. My steel-toed boot found its way between the sliding door and its cradle before it come latch home. The guard whimpered, sounding like a kitten in that instant. His eyes regarded me as though my head had just exploded into over a dozen hissing, writhing snakes. With how I was feeling, this would not have surprised me. Beside him, on the table where a small monitor, a pack of cigarettes, and a heavily dog-eared paperback, was a stack of cash that had no earthly business being there. I mentally calculated how much was likely there, decided it wasn’t nearly what I personally tipped him in a given month for this sort of shit not to happen, and felt a growl trudge up my throat that felt like boiling-hot granite.
“That’s all it took then?” I demanded, kicking open the door with surprising ease. It clattered on its rollers, shook the small booth’s entire frame, and started to slide closed again. I stopped it with a casual-yet-shaky palm. “That,” I repeated, hawking what I considered to be an award-deserving loogie and letting it fly with perfect aim to coat the stack of bills like a frosting of phlegm on a cake of corruption, “was all it took for you to let him into my home?”
The guard, shaking, said, “H-h-he sa-said he’d k-k-ki-kill me!”
“Motherfucker, I will kill you!” I growled as I grabbed him by his button-up collared shirt and lifted him to his feet with enough force to tear half of it open. “I’ll just do it better, and, believe me, I’ll fucking enjoy it!”
The guard shook, whimpered, and began to wet himself.
I threw him back down, but not before putting a second helping of frosting between his eyes.
“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen now,” I said, seething, as I moved to straddle him and squat down enough to keep him pinned on the floor of the security booth. “Because of you, I’ve got some business to handle right now. Very ugly business. And while I would just love for you to be the first course of this business—and, god damn,” I felt a giggle roll forward at that moment and let it out, “it is gonna be U-G-L-fucking-Y kinda business, buddy—I just don’t have the time to work on you the way I want to. So…” I cleared my throat for clarity’s sake, “You’re going to get gone, aren’t you? And I mean, like, gone-gone; like, ‘you’d better empty your life savings into any and all tickets that hold the promise of taking you into another time-zone’-kinda gone. You hearing me?”
He nodded.
The entire booth was starting to stink like piss, and, angered by this, I kicked him in the ribs. I wanted it to hurt. I heard something crack; he cried out around it. I was not disappointed.
“You’re going to be so gone by tomorrow,” I went on, “that I won’t even remember to come looking for you. Because you don’t want me to remember to come looking for you, do you?”
Tears were rolling down his face; he was biting his lip to keep from making any noise. He shook his head.
“Good. That’s very good. Because if I do remember to come looking for you—and if I do find you—then it’s going to be with a bunch of my friends. We’re gonna load up on some very heavy, very hard things. I’m sure you can think of a few things like that; smart guy like you. Nothing sharp, though, and nothing that goes ‘bang,’ either. No, no, buddy,” I leaned as close as I could stomach to lean, which, surprisingly enough, was nearly close enough to kiss him. “‘Cause if and when I find you, my boys and I are gonna do you ugly. We’re gonna drag you back by your dick to the Medieval times and show those savages how shit gets done, you hear me? I will start at your back and not stop digging with my teeth—my fucking teeth, asshole!—until I’m taking meat from the back of your ribcage!”
Though I wasn’t about to go checking, I think he messed himself further at that moment. He was sobbing, and his face had shifted to something almost childish in its fear.
Scoffing at the display, I stood to my full height and shook my head. Then, deciding there was still a lesson to be learned, I took the cash—leaving the phlegm-coated fifty face-down on his paperback—and started to leave.
“H-hey!” he began to protest, seeing me make off with almost all of his ill begotten earnings. Obviously he’d thought the threat was the worst of it; that he’d get to run off with the wad of cash and actually enjoy it.
I didn’t bother to turn around as I threw my leather-clad elbow back and into his face.
I was sure he’d be skipping town with a broken nose and missing teeth, but I didn’t care to look.
“Shoulda stuck to the devil you knew, kid,” I muttered, heading back to my chopper.
Don’t worry, Mia. I’m coming. Just wait for me.
****
Despite the rain, I was back at the shop in record time.
My mind was still a blur, hardly remembering even leaving the apartment. All I could remember was the sight of my empty apartment, the syringe, and Mia’s phone.
Oh, and scaring the shit out of the guard.
That had helped some.
But nothing would be right until I had Mia back. My mind kept tugging back to the last time I’d been riding around while the fate of my lover was in the hands of another, but I fought to tug it back again and again.
This time would be different. I wouldn’t let it not be.
Slipping off my chopper, I made my way towards Danny. I’d gotten hold of him on the road—putting the already risky process of riding through the rain to the ultimate test by doing it one-handed while using my phone—and gotten him caught-up to what had happened. He was waiting, rain-drenched and looking pissed, outside the shop even before I’d pulled in. Now, giving me a professional nod, I saw that he was on his phone. As I approached, he barked a few curt words into the receiver, pounded a thick, sausage-link finger against the screen, and moved to hold the door open for me.
“Any leads?” I asked, stepping through.
“Nothin’ yet,” he answered.
We’d both slipped into business-mode. There was no sad-eyes, no sympathetic looks, and no hugs. Not now. We slipped into the office like an oil spill, both of us moving towards the weapons closet.
“I want every possible man on this,” I said, knowing it was probably already the case. “If they got a pulse wear our colors, I want them out there and hunting.”
“What do ya think I’ve been doin’?” Danny challenged, already pocketing ammo.
Perks of having such big fucking pants, I thought, watching. Then I gave him an appreciative nod and started to fill an empty duffle bag that was waiting nearby with anything that would fit.
“Don’t suppose ya scoped the security footage before ya sodomized the guard, did ya?” Danny asked.
I gave him a look. “Didn’t have time to sodomize him, Mercury,” I clarified, doing nothing to disregard the thought. “And I’d say it’s safe to say that there is no footage, wouldn’t you? Either the guard or Mack, himself, would’ve thought to kill the feed before all that went down.”
“I’m lookin’ more and more forward to gettin’ my hands on this Mack,” Danny told me.
I shook my head. “He’s mine,” I said flatly. Then, groaning, I added, “I am so stupid!”
“Ya have the capacity, but I’d say ya aren’t exactly on the l
ine fer this one. How the fuck could ya have known?” Danny asked.
“I should have known,” I growled, slamming the contents of the duffle bag in an effort to buy a little more room, “because it’s what happened before!”
“Not yet, it ain’t,” Danny said gruffly.
I nodded at this and, managing to get one last forty-five in with the rest of the death-gear, zipped up the bag, tossed it over my shoulder, and started for the door.
“An’ where do ya think ye’re goin’?” Danny demanded.
“Out there,” I said matter-of-factly, as if the words actually meant something.
“An’ do what?” Danny called after. “Ride ‘round in the rain, burning fuel an’ time, all while totin’ a bag full o’ guns? How well ya see that plan runnin’ its course?”
“What would you have me do?” I asked, running my hand across my face.
“Candy,” Danny said.
“What? What the fuck, Merc?” I growled, narrowing my eyes. “This ain’t the fuckin’ time for dirty jokes.”
“I ain’t sayin’ ya should fuck Candy, ya twit!” Danny said, rolling his eyes. “I’m sayin’ ya should get her on the line—tell her what’s happened—an’ maybe she can help narrow down the search.”
I frowned at that. “How would she know any better than us?” I asked.
I winced as he lifted his hand, swatting my across the head. “Dumbass!” he accused, “‘Cuz she worked for the motherfuckers who likely got Mia! Who better to ask for Crew hidin’ places than a former Crew whore?”
I scowled, moved my hand to my head where he’d smacked me, and glared at him. I couldn’t argue with the logic, but it didn’t change that a swat from the man hurt like hell.
“Don’t fucking hit me,” I grumbled at him.
“Don’t be a fuckin’ dumbass, an’ I won’t have to hit ya,” he countered.
I muttered a halfhearted “Fuck you” to him, but was already in the process of dialing Candy’s cell.
She answered on the first ring.
“Jace?” she answered, sounding frantic. “I think something’s wrong.”
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