by Greg Barth
“You did okay, you know? Back there?”
He shook his head. “You know where we can get some coke around here?”
“I do.”
He put his hand on my thigh. I covered it with my own.
“Something I’ve been thinking about,” he said. “That guy? Bennie? If he was a good person like you, then I probably should feel sorry for killing him.”
“Henry,” I said. “His name was Henry. And thank you.”
***
When we crossed the line into Tennessee, Ragus stopped at a McDonalds and bought me an ice cream cone. Vanilla. He went to a Walmart to get an unregistered cell phone.
I didn’t go inside with him. I stood leaning against the car, catching the sun on my face while I waited for him. I pulled my hair back and put it in a ponytail. I licked the vanilla ice cream. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten ice cream. It had been years.
For the first time in my life I felt free from my past. I’d suffered for my sins, but I didn’t fear going back to prison if that was going to be my fate. I felt something akin to peace—either that or the coke was really good. And I’m pretty sure the coke was really good.
A woman should feel bad about killing her uncle for something that had happened so long ago.
A woman should feel remorse about a man she was with killing her father.
But the coke was good, I liked the melting ice cream, I liked my man, and I felt neither guilt nor remorse.
Ragus came back out and stood next to me. He opened the phone, turned it on, and punched in some numbers.
“Val,” he said. “Yeah. It’s me. Took longer than I thought it would. Need to talk to the boss.” A long pause. “What? You’re fucking kidding me. When? I had no idea. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll call when I get in town. No. I’ll call. Okay.” He flipped the phone closed and tossed it to the ground.
He looked at me. “Fuck,” he said.
“What?” I said. I bit into the cone.
“Pete Malucci,” he said. “He’s been arrested. Harding’s got an indictment.”
“Let me guess. That leaves you in charge?”
He shook his head. “Us,” he said. “We’re in charge.”
I studied his face. He didn’t look concerned. He didn’t look like he had just gone through some serious hell. Ragus Breed was all man. He was tough. He could be rough. He didn’t know how to treat a lady, but he made me feel like the kind of woman that I enjoyed feeling like.
I wasn’t in love with him. Not even close. But I wanted him.
I looked down and studied the ice cream. It was melting and running down the side of the cone. I licked at it, but it dripped on my fingers before my tongue could get it. Now I’d be sticky.
“That was good coke,” I said. I was suddenly horny. I felt a slickness in my underwear when I shifted my weight from one leg to the other. I wanted to be fucked in the worst way. “You want to go somewhere? Pull off someplace private? Or get a room maybe? I mean, if you’re not ready yet, I understand. But I really need you right now. If you can.”
Ragus took me in his strong arms. He held me in his firm grip. He leaned down and kissed me on the lips. I closed my eyes. The ice cream cone fell from my hand and crunched against the pavement. He pressed himself to me. I could feel him stiffening against my belly. I opened my mouth to him and greeted his tongue with my own. His hands slipped up my sides, caressed my petite frame with his thick fingers. Parts of my body stiffened too.
I didn’t know what was in store for us in the days to come, but I was certain of one thing—the devil himself was going to be busy.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Craig T. McNeely and Mark Miller for providing valuable feedback during the creation of this story.
If you loved Diesel Therapy, Selena will be back in the third book in the series, Suicide Lounge, due out in summer 2016 from All Due Respect Books.
Below is an excerpt from another of our recent releases William E. Wallace’s Dead Heat with the Reaper. Check out all of our crime fiction titles at our website, allduerespectbooks.com
LEGACY
(from Dead Heat with the Reaper)
BY WILLIAM E. WALLACE
FRANK TRASK NEVER guessed he had a drinking problem. “I drink; I get drunk; I pass out—no problem,” he’d say when people asked him about the large amount of booze he consumed.
At least that was what he said until the Monday he passed out before he’d had his first drink. He walked out of his West Oakland hotel to buy a package of razor blades, turned right, and took four steps before everything went black.
He woke up in Highland, the hospital for indigents, illegals, and the uninsured run by Alameda County. He could tell it was the county pill mill because the staff had stenciled its name on everything to keep patients from walking out with it.
The news crawl on the idiot box hanging from the ceiling above his bed told him it was already Thursday. Trask groaned. He was supposed to spend Tuesday at Pete’s, his local bar, celebrating his 67th birthday with the closest thing to a family he had, his three buddies from the old steel mill.
Instead he’d spent his birthday passed out in a no-hoper hospital with a bunch of losers who didn’t know where their next meal—or anything else—was coming from.
He could have worked up a pretty good case of feeling sorry for himself if he’d had half a heat on, but ordering a drink in a county hospital was out of the question.
Now THAT, he thought, is a drinking problem: not being able to get hold of booze when you really need it.
A nurse who looked something like Dorothy, the big sardonic woman on “The Golden Girls,” seemed surprised to find Trask awake.
“Well, welcome back,” she said, reviewing the readings on the machine next to his bed. “You’ve been out quite a while. How do you feel?”
Trask eyed her. He’d never had much use for the medical profession. “I feel like home-made shit,” he said.
“Ah!” she said, smiling. “A Village Fugs fan. Tuli Kupferberg rocks!”
Her name tag said “Kennedy” in white letters on black plastic. Trask thought of asking her whether she was single and would like a husband; he hadn’t met a woman who’d heard of the Village Fugs or Kupferberg since 1967.
“What’s wrong with me?” he asked. “Why am I in county?”
She gave him a long look. “I’d rather your doctor talked to you about that, Mr. Trask.”
“So where is he, at the driving range or something? How many times a month does he drop by?”
She glanced at her watch and smiled. “You’re in luck,” she said. “Her tee-time isn’t until five p.m. today, so she should be by in about ten minutes.”
He thought about that. So his doc was a woman; he wondered if she knew about the Village Fugs, too.
The nurse finished recording information from the machine and took his temperature.
“Looks like you’re semi-normal,” she said. “That’s a little like a miracle considering when you came in here, you were at death’s door. Please listen to what the doctor tells you and follow her instructions. You may just live to see your next birthday.”
Trask laughed bitterly. “I wish I had seen the last one. It’s a hell of a thing to spend your birthday on your back in a hospital.”
She put his chart back in the rack at the foot of the bed. “I can think of worse ways to spend it,” she said as she started for the door.
“Yeah?” he said. “Like what?”
She turned and said, “You could have spent it on your back in the morgue.”
She left, humming the Fugs’ tune “Wet Dream.”
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