by Rob Hart
There are spots of blood in the kitchen, on the counter, around the first-aid kit. There are big smears around where I climbed in through the hatch. Plus white dust and dirt everywhere. I grab a hand towel and go to work wiping it all up, and ask, “So how are things?”
“Good. Quiet. How about you? How’s the bar you’re working at?”
“It’s good. I’m making some money. Meeting nice people.”
“And are you still looking at the colleges around there?”
“Kinda. Here or something else, I’m going to go and finish my degree and get a grown-up job. Make you proud.”
“I’m always proud of you.”
The towel is getting heavy with blood so I walk to the sink, turn the faucet, and wet it a bit. The water is searing hot right off and the red blood goes pink.
“Are you still thinking about leaving?” she asks. “Last time we spoke you were thinking about going somewhere else.”
I’m about to answer when the words get caught in my throat. I don’t exactly know how to answer that one. Sure, a couple of weeks ago, it was simple. On to the next thing. Now I feel a tug.
“I’m not sure,” I tell her. “Figuring things out.”
“Oh, I see. You met a girl.”
“Ma…”
“Oh, come on. I have to ask.”
“There’s a girl.”
“What’s her name?”
“Crystal.”
“That’s a stripper name.”
“Ma!”
She laughs. “Kidding. Is she nice?”
“She’s terrible and ugly and she treats me like dirt.”
“Good boy. One day I’m going to have a conversation with you where you take me seriously.”
I kneel on the floor to get the blood around the hatch. I bled a lot. I’m also feeling a little faint, but that might have more to do with not eating any food or drinking any water or getting much sleep since sometime yesterday.
“I always take you seriously,” I tell her.
“Of course. I want to know you’re happy, is all.”
I lean back and sit on the floor, toss the towel up into the sink. “I am. I’m good. For the first time in a long time, and despite a lot of extenuating circumstances… I’m feeling okay.”
“I’m so happy to hear that, dear. Sometimes a change of scenery is exactly what you need to reset. Why do you think I didn’t put up a fight when you left?”
“As always, Ma, you were right. Listen, I do have to go. I love you, okay?”
“I love you too. And it would be nice if you were the one who called me sometime.”
Click.
I survey the kitchen, and it seems I got all the blood and dirt. There’s still a mess down in the basement but I need to live with that. No way am I going back down there right now. I pick up the towel, which is now varying shades of red and black and brown. I wring it out, run the water in the sink for a bit, and fold up the towel. Probably best to dispose of it someplace else since it’s coated in my DNA. I step to the front and into a restaurant with heavy wooden chairs and tables. Farmhouse-chic. Gray light sneaks in through a curtained window at the front.
There’s a group of people smoking cigarettes across the street, so I don’t want to go out that way. I go back through the kitchen and find a back door, check around the frame. It’s wired for an alarm. This makes me nervous, so I go back through the restaurant to see if there are any security cameras, and mercifully, there are not.
So I guess I am going for a jog.
There’s only so much you can do sometimes.
I go back to the door in the rear, kick it open, and a shrill alarm screams at me. I run down the alleyway to the street and cut a hard right. The smokers will see me but only from behind, so hopefully it won’t be enough to identify me.
Once I’m a couple of blocks away I slow down a little, cut down another alley, and stand behind a garbage bin, where I dump the towel. I take out my phone and text Crystal: Where are you?
No answer. She’s probably sleeping.
Wait.
Chicken Man said “go back and kill the girl.”
Not go kill her. Go back and kill her.
I am suddenly not comfortable with his choice of words.
I scope out the front of Naturals for a couple of minutes. I need to make sure the place is locked up before I leave. The car Chicken Man had crammed me into isn’t there. The street is nearly entirely devoid of cars. No people, either.
What I do end up seeing is Tommi’s black pickup truck coast to the curb outside the club. She hops out and heads for the door and fuck, what if he actually is still inside? I tear down the street after her and manage to get into the door as she’s made it to the middle of the room, a look of fury on her face.
“Ash,” she says. “What the fuck happened here? Why aren’t you in the bar?”
“One second.”
I push past her, check both bathrooms and they’re clear, then head for the kitchen and find the grate is still up. I get on the floor and hang my head down, which as I’m doing it I realize is massively stupid, but the basement is empty. There’s dust on the rungs of the ladder. The same dust that I was covered in after I came out of the tunnels. So it’s safe to assume Chicken Man climbed back out.
Safe, but not a guarantee. I close the grate and drag the corner of the prep table over it so it can’t be opened from underneath and Tommi is standing over me. She grabs me by the collar of the shirt and pulls me all the way up onto my feet. “Tell me what the fuck happened, right now.”
My head spins.
“Can I sit? Please?” I ask.
She throws me up against the doorjamb. “No. You can’t. Tell me what’s happening.”
“I was getting chased through the tunnels by a guy in a chicken mask who was trying to kill me.”
Tommi’s face scrunches up. She takes a step back, looks down, picks up my left hand and frowns. There’s an uneven splotch of red in the middle of the bandage. She puts my hand down and shakes her head. “The fuck is going on?” she asks.
“I don’t know for sure. I’m thinking it might be tied to Crystal.”
“How so?”
“How much do you know about what I’m doing for her?”
“Barely anything. I know she needed a hand with her asshole ex, so I hooked her up with your Pollyanna ass.”
“Okay, well, things have gotten complicated.”
“How can I help?”
“You don’t want to get involved in this. You’re already in the crosshairs as it is.”
She goes rigid. “Listen to me carefully. No one fucks with my girls. So I’m in this now. What do you need?”
“Get me to my apartment. Crystal is there, and I’m worried the asshole with the gun knows that.”
Tommi has barely stopped the pickup truck when I jump out of the passenger door and bound up the stairs to my apartment.
The door is ajar.
It would be smarter to go in quiet but I’m not in smart mode right now, so I dive in with my shoulder and the door crashes against the wall. I nearly stumble over my own feet but catch myself on the counter.
The tray table I use as an island is kicked over, the window to the roof wide open. There’s a coffee cup smashed on the floor. In the middle of the kitchen is my one chair, thrown onto the side, broken at the joints. There are piles of white rope lying on the floor. Someone was tied up.
There’s no place to hide in the apartment, so after a quick glance toward the bed I check the bathroom and it’s clear. Hoist myself up out the window, and the roof looks clear too.
As I’m looking around the kitchen for a note, a clue, anything, something on the counter lights up.
Crystal’s cell, notifying her that she has a missed text message.
The one I sent her.
Where are you?
I half-walk half-stumble down the stairs, trying to keep my feet moving right, but I’m dizzy from this. There was no blood as far as I could
see, but other than that, I couldn’t even make a guess at where Crystal is.
No trail, nothing.
I tried to protect her. Tried to do the right thing. Tried to keep it bloodless. I should have killed that motherfucker in the chicken mask in the parking lot when we first met.
Instead I let Crystal down.
Like I let Chell down.
Like I let everyone down, ultimately.
All because I thought I could be something I’m not.
The haze of morning has mostly burned off and the sun peeks through a mess of clouds. Disappearing and reappearing like it’s sticking its tongue out at us.
I climb into Tommi’s truck and shut the door and the dome light goes off. Sink into the seat. Feels like someone reached a hand up my ass, gripped the first thing that felt solid, and yanked.
“She’s gone,” I tell her.
Tommi doesn’t move, just stares forward, her hands gripped on the wheel.
“Where do you think she went?” she asks.
I hold up her cell phone.
“What do you think…?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
Tommi pulls out her own phone. “Time to call the cops.”
“Fair enough,” I tell her.
She’s right. Time to stop playing at this.
Before Tommi can finish dialing there’s a smacking sound on my window and for a second I think what I’m seeing can’t be true, but it’s Crystal. Alive, eyes wide, pressed up against the glass, smiling, like we’re not sitting there thinking the worst. Like she went around the corner to the market and came back to a funeral.
She jumps back as I throw open the door and slide down to the pavement, my throat seized up. Crystal crouches besides me, in a pair of flip-flops and basketball shorts and one of my too-big T-shirts. I grab her and pull her close, pulling in that scent of citrus, like I was empty without it.
After a second she squeaks. “You’re hurting me.”
I back off the hug a little. “Sorry.”
Tommi is standing over us, not sure what to do. Crystal jumps up and wraps her arms around Tommi, who lifts Crystal clean off the ground. “You had us worried there, kiddo. What the hell happened?”
I climb to my feet, light a cigarette with shaking hands, something to calm me down and settle my stomach, as Crystal tells the story.
Chicken Man was standing in the kitchen when she opened the door.
He was all tough-guy bluster, waving the gun around, demanding to know where I was. She told him to fuck off, so he tied her to a chair. He had brought his own rope, so clearly he had some semblance of a plan.
Then he set into interrogating her. He wanted to know where I was, what we knew, where we were getting our information, why we didn’t take the money and go. The whole time, she said, he was stalking the room like an animal. Furious that I wasn’t there. Crystal kept telling him to fuck off, until Chicken Man got in her face and said he’d kill Rose if she didn’t cooperate.
Again, she apologizes to me profusely, but she couldn’t take the risk that he would.
I tell her I don’t blame her and that she should keep going.
She told Chicken Man that we’ve been following crumbs—the cartel garage, the DXM house. He asked how we knew to go to the train station. She told him it was a guess, and he said something like: That asshole is smarter than I thought.
I guess he means me. Aw.
So Chicken Man wanted to know where I was and Crystal offered to call me, to tell me to come over, figuring she would tip me off somehow. She would think of something clever to say so I would know she was in trouble.
Which isn’t that original a plan, apparently.
You’ll tip him off somehow, Chicken Man said.
That makes him smarter than I thought.
She didn’t want to give up my location. She really didn’t. She swears. But she had to weigh that against the safety of her daughter, and the weight of the gun sitting inches from her face.
And, truly, I don’t blame her for telling him I was at the club.
My life versus a kid? I would have picked the kid too.
So she told Chicken Man and he left. She planned to get out of the chair and call me to warn me, but she was tied up pretty good. First she tried to tip the chair over, but she didn’t have enough leverage. Then she scooted over to the counter to find something sharp. Maybe she could knock a knife down into her hand or something, like in a movie, but there was nothing within reach.
For a little while she screamed her head off, but the apartment across the floor is vacant, and the soundproofing between my apartment and the apartments below me is pretty spectacular. And that early, there’s no one in the restaurant or the yoga studio. So that didn’t work either.
She was finally able get a foot free enough that she could kick the chair onto its side. She collapsed into a heap and bruised herself up a bit, but the chair broke enough that she was able to get free. The problem was, the ordeal of getting free took so long that by the time she did, she heard footsteps out in the hallway, and afraid it might be Chicken Man, ducked out the window before she could grab her phone.
And she was right. Chicken Man came in, walked around, picked up a mug, and smashed it on the floor. She ran to the other end of the roof and hid behind a vent. Luckily he didn’t think to explore the roof. The window had been open anyway, since it gets pretty warm in here, so it being open wasn’t suspicious.
After a few minutes she heard something down on the street and peeked over the side of the roof, and watched Chicken Man get in his car and drive away. He had the mask off, clutching it in his hand, but she couldn’t get a good look at his face, which was blocked by a tree. Just a flash of golden blond hair.
A few minutes later we pulled up.
She went down the fire escape on the other side of the building, not realizing I was going to bolt and tear ass up to the apartment. And she got jammed up trying to get the ladder down.
And here we stand.
Me shaking, Crystal smiling, Tommi wondering what the fuck she got herself into.
Tommi holds out a hand and looks down at my packs of cigarettes. I light two—one for her and a new one for me. Crystal looks at her and says, “I thought you weren’t a smoker, Miss High and Mighty.”
“It’s been a long week. We’re all falling into bad habits.”
“Five minutes,” Crystal says. “Let me put on some clothes and we’ll lock up and get out of here.”
We both head upstairs, me ahead of her, and we get inside the apartment and I shut the door and push her against it and kiss her hard on the mouth. She kisses me back and says it again: “I’m sorry.”
“Just… I thought I let you down.”
“I didn’t mean to dredge that up.”
We untangle from each other and she heads toward the bed, picking her clothes up off the floor and changing out of my clothes. I pick up the blue plastic broom and dustpan and go to work on the coffee mug shattered across the kitchen floor. It was a plain white mug but I liked it a lot. Chicken Man is an asshole.
He needs to learn about controlling his anger before it controls him.
Crystal stops at the counter and puts her hand over her phone. She looks at the text message and stuffs the phone into her pocket, struggling to get it to fit against the tight pull of her jeans.
“Do we need to talk about… before?” I ask. “At the club?”
She shakes her head, like I asked if she wanted some yogurt. “Nope.”
“Because…”
Crystal flashes those blue-green tempered glass eyes. “Ash. We fucked. I think we both needed a little release. Let’s focus. We shouldn’t linger here.”
“Okay.”
She smiles as she moves toward me, and places her face close to mine.
“I will say this. You have pretty eyes,” she says, and she presses her lips softly to mine. “And you’re a pretty good lay, too.”
I want to say something clever to that
, but I’ve got nothing.
Tommi is sitting in the truck with the engine running. We climb in and she pulls away and says, “You two can come to my place. Figure that’s the safest thing. Then we’ll call the cops.”
“We can’t,” I tell Tommi.
“That seems pretty fucking stupid,” she says. “In fact, I still don’t know why you didn’t go to them already.”
Crystal holds up her hand, one finger extended. “One, what if they give me shit about being a dancer and decide because of that I’m not a fit mom.” She sticks up a second finger. “We were explicitly told by the kidnappers or whoever to not go to the cops.” Third. “I don’t trust them.”
Tommi nods her head at me. “And you trust this jackoff?”
“Hey,” I tell her.
Crystal pauses for a moment. I hold my breath.
She says, “Yes. I do.”
“You have people to back you up, you know,” Tommi says. “Just because you’re a stripper doesn’t mean you’re a bad mom.”
“Think about me, and child protective services, and this whole fucking mess,” Crystal says. “And please tell me you believe they’ll give me my daughter and go? At the very least they’re going to make me get a new job, and what then? I make good money dancing.”
“What’s your degree in?” Tommi asks.
“Medieval English literature.”
“Jesus,” Tommi says. “What were you thinking?”
“I love Chaucer. And Rose is safe. Dirk says it and I believe him. I know it sounds ridiculous, but he’d never let her get hurt. For all the bad shit he’s done, for as much as I hate him, I know that. It’s a matter of finding her.”
Tommi throws a glance at me. “What do you think of this?”
“There are good cops and bad cops,” I tell her. “It’s luck of the draw. Wrong cops responds, some asshole with a chip on his shoulder, and you’re fucked. And it’ll always be a stripper’s word against a cop’s. There’s no winning that fight. Plus we still don’t know if this guy in the mask has hooks in the cops. If he does, that’s a big problem. I think Crystal is Rose’s mom and I’ll follow her lead.”
“What about the cops who responded the other night? They seemed okay.”