Relentless

by Mike McCrary

“I’d say.”

  “I’m sorry.” He stops, then starts again, pointing to the ice cream. “How do you know about—”

  “Tilley told me.” She gives him an eyebrow raise. “Told me all about you, lover boy.” Then she turns, disappearing down another aisle as quickly as she appeared.

  Once he’s sure she’s gone, Davis leans forward on the cart, letting his head rest on his arm as if he were just released from a crippling chokehold. His head starts spinning. He has no memory of ever meeting that woman, not even the vaguest memory of the green-eyed beauty. And he certainly doesn’t remember telling Tilley anything about anything. His heart thumps like a jackhammer. He can feel sweat beading on his forehead as he runs through a new set of terrifying questions.

  Was she in LA too?

  She part of Justin’s business?

  Did he really tell Tilley about Hattie’s after-sex ice cream? He’s not sure he’s told anybody about that. Ever. Why would he?

  Why the hell would I tell Tilley?

  He must have, though. How else would the green-eyed beauty know?

  What else did I tell them?

  He wants to throw up, but fights to hold it back best he can. All he wants to do is get the hell out of this store and get home. To crawl back in bed with his wife. He wants to hit reset and make this all go away. Start over. Somehow land in a place in time before LA.

  Davis fumbles through his remaining cash at the register, his hands vibrating as he gives the cash over in a wad of bills. He doesn’t even bother counting them out. The checkout guy looks at him sideways, not sure what his problem is, but also not caring enough to get involved.

  Davis breathes in and out, gripping the two ice cream pints in his hands as he cuts through the parking lot, moving toward his car. The checkout guy offered a bag, but Davis ignored him, grabbing the ice-cold containers with his bare hands without a consideration.

  The pints are beginning to drip, melting ice down his fingers. He sets the chocolate pint down on the roof of his car. He places his hand on the door handle, about to pull it open.

  “Hey, Big Fun.”

  Part III

  14

  Davis spins around hard, almost tripping over his own feet.

  That voice.

  There’s no mistaking that voice.

  It’s calm, cool and drenched in thick, syrupy confidence. Justin stands in front of him dressed in a sharp suit and tie. Everything about him sculpted. Perfect. Looks just as slick and cool as he did in LA when they first met.

  Justin holds his hands out as if looking for a hug.

  The green-eyed beauty waves at Davis as she walks up behind Justin and gives him a spank.

  “Ooooh,” Justin purrs. “Thank you, darling.”

  The green-eyed beauty blows him a kiss, then cracks open a forty-ounce malt liquor bottle as she keeps slinking down the parking lot toward the street. She tilts the beer back while walking away, never looking back.

  Justin snickers, watching her leave, then leans against Davis’s car.

  Davis’s eyes bounce. His heart skips a row of beats. He’s frozen. Waiting for Justin’s move.

  “Hey, man, good to see you.” He snaps his fingers, flashes a smile. “You’ve been ducking my calls.”

  Davis doesn’t know what to say. His tongue is glued to the bottom of his mouth. His breathing has become hard to manage.

  “Good job.” Justin points to the ice cream. “The mixing thing. Smart move.”

  Davis’s mind is mush, not able to process what’s happened in the last few minutes.

  How did they know I was here? Are they watching me?

  The awkward silence between them mounts, but Justin never breaks eye contact. Cars come and go behind him, pulling in and out of parking places. Justin simply leans against the car, acting as if he’s in the company of an old college buddy. People shuffle to and from the store. Justin pushes himself off the car, standing straight up with a bounce.

  “Nothing?” Justin asks with a flicker of crazy dancing behind his eyes. “You got nothing for me?”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Shopping. Saying hello. So… hello.”

  “Are you following me?”

  “I come here all the time. Not really, that’s a lie.”

  “You charged a lot of money on my cards. What the hell is that all about?”

  “Yeah, didn’t want to go that way, but you really didn’t leave me with many great options there, did ya?” Justin slips on his sunglasses. “Like I said, you keep ducking my communications.”

  “I don’t remember anything—”

  “It happens. I, however, remember quite a bit.”

  “What did you do to me?”

  “I didn’t come here to make a scene, Big Fun. Facts are facts, and the fact is you ran up a bit of tab. Big tab. Those charges? Those don’t cover it all, not even close.”

  Davis’s stomach balls up tight.

  “See, that five thousand—just to pick one—that was, oh, let’s call it a first installment.”

  “Installment?”

  “Yes, yes, sir.”

  “How much?”

  “Pardon?”

  “How much to end this?”

  “Did you not have a good time?”

  “Jesus.”

  “Did you?”

  “Come on, Justin.”

  “Did you have the time of your life?”

  “How much?” Davis barks hard.

  “Easy, Big Fun.” Justin holds out his hand like a stop sign. He pauses, then puts up a finger acting like he’s doing math on an imaginary chalkboard. “Looks like, maybe…” He carries the one. “Ten grand more.”

  Davis wants to break down in the middle of the parking lot.

  He doesn’t have it. Not sure where he could even pull that together. Still not sure he did anything wrong. The image of Tilley this morning doesn’t help reassure him. His thoughts race. The debts he already owes. Todd. The business. Hattie. The money problems from the past. The girls. Air becomes hard to find as his chest tightens. His vision blurs.

  “Big-time business man like you, solving the world’s literary problems and such, ten grand should be in your damn couch cushions.”

  “Not that simple—”

  “Could be. Could be simple, or get a little complicated.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Mean you could fucking pay me or things can get real weird real damn fast.”

  Justin’s words are never spoken in more than a conversational tone. His inflections aren’t threatening. He never raises his voice. He simply opens his coat, revealing a brown leather shoulder holster.

  Only there’s no gun inside the holster.

  Justin pulls out a phone instead.

  Justin didn’t make a show of it but it there’s no doubt that he wanted Davis to see.

  Does he want me to know there’s gun that he usually carries?

  Does he want me to know that’s what’s next?

  “Or…” Justin taps his phone, “We can keep kicking each other in the balls via texts.” He turns his phone over and over in his hands, letting his fingers glide over the glass. “These things are amazing, right? Phones today. The things they can pick up. The moments they can record.” He lets his eyes meet Davis’s. “Moments that can be shared.”

  His breathing all but stops.

  Davis can only look at the phone, wondering what’s on there.

  Is the phone the real weapon he wants me to see?

  “You really don’t remember anything, do you?” Justin asks.

  Davis shakes his head, voicing a “No” barely above a whisper.

  “Wow. That must be frustrating.” Justin slips the phone back into his shoulder holster. “Guess it’ll be fun for you to see what happened that night. For everybody, I guess.”

  Davis has no intention of playing this game anymore. He has no idea what Justin has. He could be bluffing or maybe he’s not. If all he wants is money, t
hen Davis wants to end this, even if he knows money is the one thing he doesn’t have.

  “I can get you some of it,” Davis spits out, trying to convince himself, hating himself for caving in like this, like he always does. “Half. I’ll get you half.”

  “Half?”

  Davis nods. The sweat is starting up again.

  “As in, not all of it?”

  “I’ll get you five thousand—”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll get me five thousand by tomorrow.” Justin holds his eyes.

  “I’ll try, but you have to stop texting me.”

  Justin taps his chin, considers Davis’s words. Then he turns, possibly thinking about his own before saying them. He lets his silence linger, creating a void in their conversation. Justin’s way of letting Davis’s imagination run wild with the possibilities of how Justin will respond, wanting Davis to start thinking about everything. Everything that could go wrong.

  “Five grand tomorrow then,” Justin finally says, then turns, about to leave. He stops, turns back to Davis as if he forgot something. “You, man, you were a crazy one.”

  “What?”

  “That night. You know, in LA?”

  “Please.” Davis now brought to begging. “Tell me what happened.”

  “The shit you did. Good God, man.” Justin starts to laugh. “I’ve seen some wild stuff in this business of mine, but you? You surprised even me.”

  Davis feels his chest tighten even more. His throat closing.

  Justin slows his laughing, studies Davis’s expression with a squint. “Amazing. You truly don’t remember a damn thing, do you?”

  “No,” Davis says harder, much more than a whisper this time.

  Justin’s face goes to stone in the blink of an eye. “Tilley? She’s a good one. She knew the risks, but damn, bro.”

  “What?” Davis fumbles over his tongue. “What are you talking about?” His mind bends, trying to remember. He works to force-feed information back into his brain, desperate to recall the recent image of Tilley. Tries hard to make sense of what Justin just said to him.

  “Is she okay?” he asks, struggling to control the shaking in his voice.

  Justin places his finger to Davis’s lips, shushing him like a child. “Fire the wire to these instructions.” Justin hands him a slip of paper with banking instructions listed. “Do it fast, now.”

  Justin walks away.

  “Your ice cream is melting, Big Fun.”

  15

  Davis stumbles into his home.

  “Hello,” he calls out for Hattie.

  Nothing.

  He rushes upstairs, checking each room. His face and back are still slick with sweat from his encounter with Justin in the parking lot.

  “Hello?”

  The house is empty.

  He looks to his phone; he has a recent missed call and a text from Hattie. He holds his breath, worried that Justin did something. Anything is possible now. Checking Hattie’s text, he exhales, letting the weight of the universes leave him. For the moment at least.

  sorry. had to run to the office. ice cream later?

  Davis holds onto the railing of the stairs for balance as he makes his way downstairs. He puts the nearly-melted ice cream into the freezer and leans on the counter, letting his palms support him. His sight slides out of focus as he stares into the granite pattern of countertop. He breathes in slow and deep. In through is mouth and out through his nose. A technique he learned from a baseball coach years ago. Davis used to get so damned nervous before heading up to the plate. He always saw himself striking out before he even got there. As he works his breathing his brain begins to unspool, letting everything Justin told him data dump into his head at the speed of light.

  Tilley.

  What was Justin talking about?

  What happened? Is he just screwing with my head?

  Trying to get the money out of me?

  More money.

  He can’t believe he gave in to Justin like that. Todd would have told him to go fuck himself or fought him right there in the parking lot. But what was Davis supposed to do? They could have slugged it out in front of the minivans, but what would that do? Real good chance Justin might have a gun. He doesn’t seem the type, probably keeps a gun as a scare tactic, but Davis would rather not test it. There’s no upside in any of that. Davis knows he had no play to make, but still hates what happened.

  He knows this is all his fault anyway.

  Davis tells himself he made a mistake. Convinces himself that he’ll have to pay for it. That’s how this all works. It’s what he was always taught as a child: you screw up, you pay the price. Own your shit, his old man always told him. His old man also drank himself to death and had no less than three marriages.

  He owned it all right. Right into the ground.

  Davis reviews his finances in his head. It’s creative financing, to be sure, but it can be done. Hattie will see it eventually, but right now he needs to manufacture time. He grabs his phone, swipes and taps, pulling up his bank account app. His eyes scan down the page, his lips moving as he works through the numbers.

  It’s not good. He’s dry.

  Davis has poured everything he has into the company. He financed part of the company by drawing cash from his personal credit cards, maxing out two of the three, then opening a couple more. He can still maybe scrape together around three thousand after the month’s upcoming expenses, maybe, so he’ll have to borrow the remaining two thousand from another card that Davis keeps hidden away from emergencies to cover Justin’s money by tomorrow. He knows it’s only a matter of time before the emails and calls about charging over his limit start rolling in. It’s a damn miracle Justin was able to get the charges through in the first place.

  He remembers his daughters’ dance lessons are due in a week.

  Hattie’s car needs work.

  The fence needs work. The numbers begin to spin again.

  “Shit,” he mutters to himself.

  He doesn’t know what to do. He can barely come up with the payment for tomorrow, if at all. How the hell is he going to pay the rest of it? A fear-tremor rattles him to the core.

  Not long ago he poured everything into a company he cares for and deeply believes in. He didn’t have any savings, but he didn’t have any debt, and he had a lot of prospects in LA lined up. Things piled up. Unexpected startup costs popped up, as they always do, and Davis took some of it on with cards. Todd took on the rest, using his family nest egg. Now, it looks like Davis is going to owe a mountain of debt so he can pay a crazy person, and the business prospects are drying up left and right.

  Hattie is going to kill him. This will be crushing to her. He’s doing it again, something he promised he’d never do. The money spiral is gaining speed and he’s dragging her deeper and deeper into it. Again.

  How can he possibly hide all of this?

  He taps and moves some money around, then sends a money wire out to the instructions Justin gave him. Davis’s stomach drops to the floor as the confirmation comes up. He can almost actually see the money fly away. He can see Hattie leaving with the girls.

  He knows what he has to do. He hates it, but he has no other real options. Picking up his phone, he makes the call. One he should have made in the beginning.

  “Todd?”

  16

  Davis stares into his swirling caramel-colored coffee as he speaks.

  He avoids all eye contact as he tells Todd about LA. About what happened. About Justin. All of it, at least what he can remember.

  Todd is pissed, oddly quiet at times, but he manages to be surprisingly compassionate. He doesn’t yell or slam the table or litter the air with profanity or name-calling. He listens, face red as hell, but he listens to what Davis has to say and doesn’t interrupt. Lets his friend and business partner unload his burden.

  Davis finishes, ending the story with how Justin and the green-eyed beauty blindsided him at the grocery store
.

  Todd takes a sip of his coffee. Thinks. Considers. Picks through everything his friend has told him.

  “Thoughts?” Davis asks with a crack in his voice. “Never seen you so damn quiet.”

  “Look, you fucked up. Not gonna lie to you. That much is certain,” Todd says. “It happens. We can’t undo any of that, so we need to focus on what we can control.” He pauses, letting his ideas swirl. “So, the question really is what the hell do we do going forward?”

  “I don’t know. Just the money part of it has me scrambling. I’m tapped out. You know that. I put it all into the business.”

  Todd nods.

  “I don’t have a safety net like you. No family money. It’s just me and Hattie, that’s it.”

  Todd takes another sip of his coffee, listening, letting Davis unload.

  “I don’t know,” Davis says, talking more to himself than Todd. “When we started this business all I wanted to do was build something, ya know? You and I were working at that shitty corporate hell, sitting in cubes, running spreadsheets and creating reports that nobody looked at. It was us making shit we didn’t care about for people who didn’t give a shit about seeing it.” Todd snickers. “Remember training class?”

  “Damn.” Davis allows a smile to crack, remembering that’s how they met in the first place. He hadn’t thought about that in some time. “We came up with a product—”

  “You. You came up with a product.” Todd waves his hand. “I’m not smart enough for any of that genius crap.”

  “Whatever. We did it. We put together a product that could solve a problem and, yeah, make some money. Left that dump and started out on our own to do something, something new. Something we could be proud of, and in the process give corporate America the finger.”

  “Damn right.”

  “Now?” Davis leans back, looking out the window. “Now it’s all going to hell, isn’t it? Poof.”

  “No, the hell with that nonsense,” Todd says. “We ain’t done. Not by a long shot.”

  Todd leans in. Davis does too. This is the Todd he knows. The Todd he called. This is the Todd who solves problems. The Todd he needs.