Parker Security Complete Series

by Camilla Blake

  “You never know.” Though, considering the crowd he ran with, he was probably right about never getting into an actual fight. Which was strange for me to think about, because I’d been getting into fights since about six years of age, starting with elementary school and the older kids who wanted to try to take my lunch money. Fighting just seemed like something that happened, like the post office delivering mail every day but Sunday. Though I knew for many people the opposite was true—they’d never been in a fight before and had no intentions of ever doing so.

  ***

  On Wednesday night, we took the four-wheel-drive GMC, and Holden sat in the front, his three Stooges in the back. They were amped; they’d obviously snorted a couple of lines before getting into the car. The sheer amount of raw energy they had, they didn’t need a driver—they could probably run from here to Manhattan if they had to.

  “We are going to kick this guy’s ass!” one of them yelled. At this point, they had all started to sound the same to me, and they were, basically, variations on a theme, that theme being a wannabe thug/hitman.

  “He’ll think twice before ever trying to encroach on someone’s turf!”

  I raised an eyebrow and nodded, though none of them caught the gesture. Encroached. I was surprised that whoever said it would even have such a word in his vocabulary.

  The guy’s place was on Coffey Lane, at the end of a rather steep hill. I reversed halfway down the long driveway, lights off. The bros jumped out and moved stealthily along; I assumed they had cased the place, though with the four of them, you never knew.

  I drummed my fingers on the side of the steering wheel, kept watch in the rearview mirror and periodically checked the side-view mirror. Really, though, what I needed to do was listen—it was so dark that I couldn’t really see much, unless I turned the headlights on.

  Time slowed down, as it always does with these things. I only knew what the actual time was because I kept looking at the clock. Two minutes. Then three.

  Ten years ago, I would’ve been right there with Holden, beating the crap out of whoever dared look at us the wrong way. We were Parkingtons, after all. No one messed with us. Those who did wouldn’t be standing for long.

  But I had realized soon enough how messed up that way of life was, how it wasn’t really for me at all. I knew my dad and my uncles had killed people; I didn’t want to know the details. I didn’t want to think that members of my own family, people I was related to, were capable of such things, but deep down I knew they were. And I knew they were righteous about it, knew that, in their minds, they had done nothing wrong.

  Four minutes.

  I leaned my head out the open window, listening, straining. I heard an owl, and, in the far distance, the engine of some hot rod revving. I didn’t want to be a part of this, but I still couldn’t help but wonder what was going on. And then I heard the sound of commotion, movement getting closer.

  “Holy shit—go, go, go!” I couldn’t tell whose voice it was—it wasn’t Holden’s—but I sure as hell knew what I heard immediately after whoever shouted: dogs. And by the sound of it, big ones. Abe reached the car first, flinging himself in headlong, followed by Junior, both out of breath, eyes wild.

  “Asshole let his dogs out!” Junior gasped. “Where’s Holden?”

  I didn’t need to answer, because we heard heavy footsteps and then Holden was right there. I put my foot on the brake and started to put the car in drive, so I’d be ready to take off the second Holden jumped in, but he didn’t get in; he stayed right where he was.

  “What are you doing? Hurry up and get in the car!” I yelled. Suddenly, I heard a rap song, that really obnoxious one by that YouTube star who had been to prison a bunch. Holden’s ringtone, naturally. He ignored it, so, along with the barking dogs, that song was also playing at full blast.

  “Let’s go!” I shouted. “Don’t be an idiot!”

  “I can take them!” Holden hit the side of the car with his fist. “Those bitches don’t got nothing on me!”

  “Get in the car, asshole!”

  But he wasn’t going to listen. He squared his stance, fists raised, and I knew I only had a few seconds to get his dumb ass into the car before he ended up some pit bull’s dinner.

  I threw the driver’s side door open and jumped out, hurled my full body weight into Holden, knocking him off balance. I shoved him into the back seat and slammed the door, right as the first of the dogs reached us.

  “Back off!” I roared, right as the thing jumped up and sank its teeth into my left forearm. Goddammit, that hurt. But I was used to pain, and I balled my right fist up and smashed it square on the dog’s nose. It let out a yelp and let go, and I spun around and jumped back into the car, slamming the door right as the second dog reached us. It hurled itself against the door, but by that point, I had my foot smashed on the accelerator and the tires spun out and then we were racing off.

  They were all losing it, congratulating each other, giving each other high fives, saying how the guy had no idea what hit him. They would’ve set the place on fire but someone hadn’t brought a lighter. Didn’t have time to look around the guy’s house because he’d let his dogs out at that point. What a bunch of clowns.

  I gritted my teeth as I drove. I had a long-sleeve T-shirt on and I could feel that it was damp—whether that was from the dog’s saliva or blood or both, I didn’t know. What I did know, though, was that this sort of injury meant there was no way in hell I’d be able to fight in a couple of days. I opened and closed my fingers, felt the pain in my forearm. When we got back to the main road, I gingerly pushed my sleeve up to take inventory. There were two shallow puncture wounds, about two inches from my elbow, and they slowly oozed blood. Great. It was nothing serious, I probably wouldn’t even need stitches, but the fact that it wouldn’t have happened if Holden had just gotten into the car pissed me off. I slammed my fist against the steering wheel.

  “Goddammit!” I said. “Holden, what’s your problem? Why the hell didn’t you get in the car? You think you’re going to be able to take on a bunch of dogs?”

  “I’m not scared of any goddamn dogs. Shit, bro, did one of them get you?”

  He stuck his head between the driver and passenger seats.

  “Yeah, actually. And like I said, I’ve got a fight this weekend.” I shook my head. “I should rephrase that: I had a fight this weekend.” There was that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that eclipsed any physical injuries I had—I had screwed up, again. Whether or not anyone from the UFC was at the fight this Saturday now didn’t matter, because I wasn’t going to be fighting. I could be angry at Holden—well, I was—but I was angrier at myself. I should’ve just let him get Jordy to be the driver, even if that meant Holden would’ve ended up as dog chow. “And why don’t you change your goddamn ringtone? That song sucks.”

  “I love that song. And what do you mean?” Holden asked now. “You’re not going to go through with the fight?”

  “There’s no way Kurt will let me.” The pain throbbed dully in my arm.

  Holden guffawed. “What does that guy know?”

  “Uh… a lot? He is my trainer.”

  “Bro, you don’t need a trainer. You get your training from the school of hard knocks. Real life. You know how to throw down.”

  I tried not to roll my eyes. I tried to ignore the urge to punch him right in the face. Sometimes, what my brother didn’t know astounded me.

  But if I was honest with myself, the fact that I kept going along with his messed-up plans astounded me even more.

  Chapter 3

  Lena

  The thing about getting into a relationship was I had gotten so used to my life as a single person that I seriously wondered if I would be able to make room for someone else. I mean, I liked my life. I really did. It might not be the most exciting or fast-paced existence, but I was (mostly) pretty content with the way things were. Things in my life were orderly, predictable. That might sound completely boring to some, but knowing w
hat to expect gave me a peace of mind that a more erratic existence could not.

  I had worked at Parker Security Services for over a decade now. My older brother, Mason, had been good friends, growing up, with Parker’s founder, Drew Parker, and I’d sometimes tag along on their shenanigans, going skateboarding or sneaking out to punk-rock shows. Mason had always been a tolerant older brother, and Drew never seemed to mind having me around, either.

  I had graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in liberal arts and no real plan of what I wanted to do. I had assumed that a career would occur organically—perhaps that was just me having spent far too much time in granola-crunchy Berkeley. I thought my path in life would appear, out of the ether, and I would just know exactly what it was that I was supposed to do.

  That, unfortunately, did not happen.

  After I graduated, I worked a couple of temp jobs, did a year at a coffee shop, and was thinking of maybe trying to go teach English abroad or something, when I happened to run into Drew. It was totally random; we were both at Superior Coffee—I was coming in, he was going out. He backtracked, though, and we sat at one of the tables and caught up for almost an hour, and then he asked if I wanted to come work for him, which caught me totally off guard, but also seemed a bit like that organic career path appearing as I had imagined it once might.

  And so I’d been here ever since.

  While I wouldn’t have initially thought that a job at a security firm would be a fulfilling life path, it actually was. We did so many different events, and had so many different clients that it was hard to get bored. One of our newer contracts was with this mixed martial arts promoter, George Stevens. He was kind of a meathead, but he was all right. He was trying to do monthly amateur MMA fights once or twice a month, and I guess that one of the guys had recently signed with the UFC. As a child growing up, my dad had always watched boxing, which I’d watch with him sometimes. I could intuit that these were athletes I was watching, and that what they were doing wasn’t easy, but there also seemed to be something gentlemanly about it, something sort of refined that didn’t seem quite right. I could remember asking my dad: Why doesn’t he kick him? Or tackle him? To which Dad had replied, That’s not how it works in boxing.

  I wasn’t actually supposed to work many of the fight nights, but my co-worker, Jason, was out on parental leave. He and his wife, Emmy, had welcomed a baby girl a few weeks ago, and seeing as she was his first child, he was taking an extended period of time off. Which meant I was filling in for him for the time being, and though I had gone into it expecting not to really be that interested, it turns out that MMA was actually everything that boxing was not. The fighters could kick; they could take people down. Sure, there were some things they couldn’t do either—no elbows straight down to the back of the head, no eye pokes or groin kicks—but there were far fewer rules than in boxing and that gentlemanly feeling was certainly not present. While there was a part of me that did feel a little strange willingly watching two people beat the crap out of each other, there was a part of me that found it intriguing. It was, after all, the ultimate test. It was primitive, almost, even though I knew that the fighters were dedicated and spent a lot of time training and working out.

  The fights George promoted were usually held at Scanlon Conference Center, and there were fifteen fights on the card that night. There was a flyer that listed the fighters’ names and stats, as well as their record. I glanced at the flyer, not recognizing anyone’s names. Everyone was doing their best to look as intimidating as possible in their picture.

  “I like this guy,” Cole said, pointing at someone named Iago Santos. “If I were a betting man, I think I’d wager on him. This guy looks pretty good, too—oh, he scratched. That’s too bad.”

  “Do you really know anything about MMA?” I asked. There was probably a good chance that Cole knew more about it than I did, but I liked to give him a hard time. It just seemed to be my default mode around him.

  “I know a little,” he said. “Enough to know that I wouldn’t last two seconds in the cage. You, though… I’d give you at least the first round. I wouldn’t mess with ya!”

  He laughed and dropped the paper down on the folding card table with the rest of the stack. People were filing in; the atmosphere was buzzing. The biggest problem we’d had in the past at events like these were with the rival crews. It had never gotten too out of control—most of them had a far worse bark than bite—but anytime you got this many people in a room together to watch other people fight, well… you were kind of asking for some sort of trouble.

  But George was trying to be proactive about minimizing any sort of craziness, and hiring us had been a big part of that. I watched as people came in and took their seats surrounding the octagonal cage in the middle of the arena.

  Once the fights started, I stayed near the back, so I was able to keep an eye on things from behind. I didn’t want to be too close to the actual fights anyway—watching from this distance was plenty for me. Of course I could see Cole down there, front row and center, eyes wide as he watched the first fight of the night.

  “You think Cole’s about to jump into the ring and try to do a pile driver?” This was Ben, in my earpiece.

  “That guy would kick Cole’s ass into next Tuesday,” I said.

  “Hey, I heard that!” came Cole’s indignant reply.

  We bantered back and forth a little more, but then stopped. I walked around, watched as people cheered and shouted. The guys were beating the shit out of each other. I knew there was technique involved, but it really just looked like brawling to me.

  About an hour into it, I went to use the bathroom. While I was in the stall, I listened to the conversation two girls were having as they stood in front of the mirror, probably re-applying their makeup or something.

  “I can’t believe that he’s not fighting,” one of them said. “That was, like, the highlight of the evening! I hate coming to these stupid fights. That was the only thing I had to look forward to.”

  “Why don’t you just break up with him?” the other girl asked. “If you broke up with him, maybe you could go for Shep!”

  “Ha! Like I have a chance with him. Me and every other girl under the sun. No, things with Jeremy are good; a girl can fantasize, though—right?”

  “I wouldn’t kick him out of bed, that’s for sure.”

  They both laughed, though stopped when I came out of the bathroom. They were young, probably early twenties, cute, but with too much makeup and clothes that left very little to the imagination. Still, if I was young and had a body like that, maybe I wouldn’t have any qualms wearing shirts that exposed my cleavage and accentuated my rear end. Actually, no, I would never be the sort of person who would feel okay doing that, no matter how good my physical assets might be.

  As I came out of the bathroom, some commotion caught my eye to my right; there was something of a skirmish happening, though it didn’t seem like anything too serious. Not yet, anyway.

  “Hey,” I said. The two guys tussling with each other completely ignored me; their friends glanced in my direction but didn’t say anything. “Hey,” I said again, more loudly this time. “You guys need to knock it off. Or take this outside. But not in here. The only people fighting in here tonight are the ones in the cage.”

  “You can’t tell us what to do,” one of them said. It was hard to tell exactly how old this group was, but probably early twenties. I could smell the alcohol on them.

  “Actually, I can, at least while you’re here inside the venue.” I tapped my badge. “So you can either settle down and take your seats or you can take this outside, ideally around the block.”

  Two of the kids kept shoving each other. “All right—that’s enough!” I shouted. I leaned into the door and pushed it open. “Out.” Despite the fact I wasn’t a mother, I gave them my most severe parental glare, which had always worked wonders on my nieces and nephews. “Let’s go. Now.” I was supposed to get backup, have one of the guys help me enforce t
he situation, but I knew these kids didn’t present any real danger. I could see Cole near the other exit, not close enough to hear what I was saying to the kids, but close enough that he could be here in a few seconds if I shouted.

  But my look seemed to work—the kids shoved each other out the door. “Keep going,” I said, following them out. I didn’t know what they were fighting about, but it sounded like it had something to do with a girl, and one of them sitting too close to or looking for too long at someone’s girlfriend.

  “Yo, Ramon’s on his way right now, boy, and he’s gonna kick your ass,” one of the guys yelled.

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” I said, hoping they’d take this across the street or somewhere far enough away that I wouldn’t have to hear it. They started to move off, but I stepped off the curb and stood there for a minute to make sure they didn’t try to do anything foolish like double back and come back inside.

  “Look out!” No sooner had I heard the person shout than I felt an incredible force slam into me, knocking me off my feet. Good thing, though, because a car zoomed by, right where I had just been standing. I could feel the whoosh of air as it went by. It screeched to a halt a few feet ahead and two of the kids jumped in, leaving the rest to chase after the car.

  “Are you okay?”

  The guy who had knocked me over was standing up, then offered me his hand, which I didn’t take. He had a bandage on his left forearm. I got up on my own, brushing my hands off on my pants. I had a scrape on my wrist, but other than that there didn’t seem to be any damage.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Except for the fact that someone just tried to run me over. Who was that?”

  The guy shook his head. “Don’t get in the middle of that shit,” he said. “Bunch of hooligans, those kids.”