“Ten-grand?” she scoffed, sounding disbelieving. “You’re shittin’ me, right?”
I told her what Jace and I had been drinking less than twelve hours earlier.
The phone went quiet.
Then she screamed.
“Bitch! I am coming over. Like, right now! I mean, no, we ain’t hittin’ that boy’s top-shelf—he’d probably gut me and drain me just to get it back—but I’m thinking somewhere in the middle.”
I laughed again, decided I liked the idea of not being alone, and agreed.
“Alright, cool!” she said. “Gimme, like, an hour-or-so, kay? Bus schedule’s shit—I’m sure you can remember from way-back-when—an’ it ain’t like I got a pretty biker boy to drive me everywhere. Don’t even got Danny here. Seriously, I been reduced to a fag-hag, and I ain’t even got a fag to hag? Can you believe that?”
“The struggle is real,” I offered with another chuckle.
“Tellin’ me,” she grumbled. “Anyway, I’ll be there soon… ish. Just have a movie and a bottle ready.”
“Kay,” I said, grinning at how easily the word came to me when I was talking to her.
And then the phone was silent.
Smiling, feeling refreshed, I went back to planning out a nice dinner for Jace. Starting to decide on a meal, I realized a few things were missing and pulled out my phone again, typing a message to Jace:
Hey! Could you pick
up some salad mix and
Italian bread pls?
I want to make something
special for you tonight.
Love you :-*
Finished, I set the phone on the sideboard next to me as I went about getting things set up. Outside it had started raining, and the sound, distant and muted through the walls of the condo, was a soft hum that faded off and was easily forgotten. The only real hint of the storm was the lack of natural lighting that I was used to around this time of day. This, however, was what electricity and indoor lighting was made for. Turning on a few more lights and reveling in the sudden safety that a few extra bulbs seemed to provide, I went about working on a sauce for the spaghetti I planned to make.
A moment later, my phone buzzed. I smiled, thinking of how lucky I was that, even with all his work, Jace was so quick to respond to such an unimportant message.
Then I frowned, staring for far longer than the two-word message deserved:
FROM: UNKNOWN NUMBER
knock knock
I was looking around the room before I realized I had no reason to do so. My breathing was coming in jagged bursts, and I worked to get that under control.
Calm down, Mia. Rationalize this!
It was a threat, sure, and I didn’t need to be a genius to figure out who it was. But there was nothing Mack could do over the phone—Just the phone! Just the phone! That’s all he has: just the phone!—and nothing he could do so long as I was here in Jace’s…
Lightning clapped outside, making me jump and scream.
Then, certain I’d feel better if I said this one thing—Just this one thing!—I began typing:
I told you to leave
me alone!
The response came before I’d even had a chance to steady my breathing again:
Shuldv cum wen I sed.
Warned U, dint I?
I was shaking. I was afraid. I was furious for those first two facts. My fingers flew across the digital keyboard of my phone:
Text me again and
I’ll call the cops!
I mean it!!
I pounded the “SEND” key and threw my phone down on the couch. Four rounds of pacing back-and-forth through the living room had my head somewhere in the right place. In the time it had taken me to do that, there’d been no more buzzing; no more messages. I was beginning to feel like the threat might have gotten through to my brother. As I thought this, it was followed by the through that, whenever anybody in books or movies thought such a thing, it was always at that moment that the phone buzzed again or…
Or worse.
A full minute passed in silence, save for the dull-yet-constant hum of the rain outside.
But still nothing happened.
Two minutes.
Three.
Or had it all only been a few seconds?
Time moved slowly when you were holding your breath.
But still nothing happened.
Thunder bubbled outside; every now and again the already brightly-lit condo was made white and blinding with the flash of lightning.
But still nothing…
I decided that I should call Jace.
This, of course, was only a half-truth—one told to myself for the sake of my sanity more than out of hope—as I just as much needed to hear his voice at that moment. Masking it as the right thing to do, the honest thing to do, made me feel a little less pathetic for the effort; it lent a sense of input over the dire need to be looked after.
I started for the couch, for my phone, and turned the little mental mantras into a haphazard muttering of, “Calm down, just a phone, one thing; calm down just a phone one thing…”
I scooped up the phone. It looked like such a simple, trivial thing in that instant. So unbefitting of so much worry.
“Calm… a phone… thing,” I muttered, not even thinking about the words coming out of my mouth anymore. “Calm… phone… thing…”
It took a few tries to get the power button to work right. I blamed the phone, but secretly knew my fingers weren’t working right; they didn’t have the strength or dexterity I’d come to expect from them.
“Calm, phone, thing,” I whimpered.
The glare of the awakening phone was blinding, and I wondered if it had always been that bright. A nightmarish thought that, while my back had been turned, somebody—Mack—had been in here—in this very room with me—and altered the settings just to…
“Calm phone thing,” I muttered, finding peace in the strange noise I’d begun making. “Camphon’ing.”
The pad of my thumb, shaky but mine, worked with trembling awkwardness to the tauntingly calm icon of an old-timey phone set against a green square. The white silhouette of a rotary phone seemed to mock me with all that it promised.
“Compho’ing,” I whispered, and, as though I were perched on a rotting ledge and had but one chance to leap to safety, I threw everything I had into pressing the spot on a screen that light and faith told me was a button—a bridge to Jace’s voice.
The contacts list came to replace the screen I’d come to loathe so much, and I heard myself cry out and was instantly embarrassed by it.
Mack…
My son-of-a-bitch brother had me so terrified I was working my brain into a lather over…
Over a fucking phone call?
“M-M-M…” I stammered.
I’d meant to say “Mia, you twit, get a hold of yourself and make the damn call!”
But then a clap of thunder crashed down, earning another scream—this one stifled to some degree—and all I managed was another “Compho’ing.”
Miraculously, I found Jace’s number—easy enough; it rested atop all the others in the “RECENTLY DIALED” list—and, with another hopeful press to an imaginary button, I was soon rewarded with the beautiful chime of ringing…
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-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 needed 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 ru
n 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?”
Riding On Fumes_Bad Boy Motorcycle Club Romance Page 24