by Harley Fox
She fishes her keys out and tosses them to me. I almost don’t catch them.
“Thanks,” I say again, but Trista doesn’t respond. She just nods, taking another sip of her coffee.
So I turn and leave the apartment, going down the stairs to the outside. It’s beautiful out, and it honestly feels so good to leave that apartment. I felt trapped up there. I suppose it is Trista’s space and I am encroaching on it, but still.
I walk over to her bike and straddle it. My belly almost reaches the handlebars. Putting the key in the ignition I start it up, feeling the familiar-yet-different rumble of a different bike’s engine in between my legs. Bringing up the kickstand I pull out into the street and start off, not taking long to get used to the handling.
I ride through the streets, heading in the direction of PharmaChem where the bakery Lindsay suggested sits close by. People on the sidewalks watch me as I ride past them. I know it’s dangerous for a pregnant woman to ride a bike, but ever since I bought one—and Jake fixed it up for me—it’s been my preferred way to get places. I just feel so comfortable on one. And more free. Definitely more free.
The mammoth obelisk that is PharmaChem practically takes over the skyline. The memories I have of working there seem like they belong to somebody else. It’s hard to match them up to who I am now. I would never work there again. Never under the thumb of Will. Even with Lindsay, I feel like our relationship is somewhat strained. My fault, entirely. I drifted away. Moved on to something else. A different life. One that didn’t go out to clubs anymore, or like to gossip about who was doing what in the office. That’s not to say anything critical about Lindsay, it’s just … I don’t relate to that side of her anymore.
I skirt around PharmaChem, watching it swing past me like a giant island. The bakery comes up and I pull into the lot, parking Trista’s bike, getting off it and feeling that familiar funny ghost vibration still moving down my legs.
When I walk into the bakery I don’t see Lindsay anywhere, so I go up to the counter and order a jelly donut and a coffee, for here. The bored-looking girl puts the donut on a plate for me and then turns to get my coffee. As I’m waiting the bell above the door jingles and Lindsay walks in. She sees me at the counter and her face breaks out into a smile.
“Merryn!”
I smile back as she comes over, giving me a big hug, bending herself forward so she doesn’t push up too hard against my belly.
“Oh my God, it’s so good to see you,” she says.
“Well, I saw you yesterday,” I point out.
“I know, but when I said we should catch up I didn’t think it was going to happen so soon.” The girl behind the counter hands me my coffee and I take it, thanking her. “Oh,” says Lindsay, turning from me to her. “I’ll have a coffee too. Cream and sugar.”
The girl tells her the total and Lindsay fishes some money out of her purse to pay. Then the girl turns to fix another coffee and Lindsay looks at me again.
“Well,” she says. “So what’ve you been up to? Oh, how did your meeting with Will go yesterday?”
“Ah …” I start, but the girl reappears with Lindsay’s coffee, so we both take our things over to a table and sit down. “The meeting was all right,” I decide to lie. Lindsay knows so little—nothing, really—about my current life. I don’t want it to start with “he ended up holding a gun to my head.”
“What did you have to catch up with him on?” she asks, taking the lid off her coffee to let it cool. “I mean, what have you been up to since you left? I feel like I don’t know anything about you!”
Suddenly I feel trapped. Why am I so hesitant to tell Lindsay anything?
Maybe it’s because things are so shit right now, another voice answers. Or maybe it’s because you don’t even know this person, and the only reason you wanted to see her was to feel less lonely.
Lindsay is looking at me, curious, friendly. I can feel the heat building under my clothes, rising up my neck and cheeks. Finally I blurt out, “I’m pregnant!”
She raises her eyebrows.
“I can tell,” she says with a sort of laugh.
“And I have a Social Assistance practice.”
Now her eyebrows really raise up.
“What? Oh my God, Merryn, that’s amazing! I remember you talking about that pretty much on the first day we met!”
“Really?” I ask. I don’t remember that.
Lindsay nods. “I thought it was so cool of you, to want to do something just to help other people. Not a lot of people do that. They’re always looking out for themselves.”
“Oh,” I say, feeling the heat start to diminish. “Yeah, I guess they do.”
“You guess?” Lindsay laughs, and it sounds familiar, friendly. I remember that laugh. “Hon, you are a saint, I swear.”
Now I can feel myself smiling.
“It’s a pretty great practice,” I tell her. “I actually … I used to severance money that Will gave me when I quit. Well, when I ‘quit’.” I do air-quotes. That makes Lindsay laugh again. “Now I’ve got three employees and a couple dozen clients. I’ve been wondering lately if I’ll need to open up a second location.”
Lindsay is shaking her head, looking at me admiringly. “Wow Merryn, that is amazing. Congratulations.”
“What about you?” I ask, picking up my donut. “What’ve you been up to?”
Lindsay rolls her eyes. “Um … nothing? Yeah, pretty much nothing.”
I shake my head, trying to quickly chew my mouthful of donut.
“Mmf,” I get out before swallowing. “I’m sure that’s not true.”
But she shrugs, a cute little thing, looking up and to the side as she does. “Nah, it’s true. I don’t know. I get out sometimes, go dancing. Some of the women in the office started doing yoga so I tried that for a bit, but never really got into it. Mm … I binge-watched, like, all of Orange Is The New Black on Netflix.” She laughs. “But no, not really anything.”
“Maybe you’ve just found your groove,” I suggest. “You’ve found what works for you, so there’s no real impetus to change.”
Lindsay nods. “Yeah, maybe. Ooh, something exciting did happen this morning, at work, actually. Well, I mean, I guess it was exciting. Will Silver just came storming through our office, talking loudly about something, some building we had that burned down last night.”
I raise an eyebrow. “A building burned down?”
“Yeah. Some place in that old textile district. You know, the one that’s all just homeless people and run-down buildings now? I didn’t know we had a building there, but I guess we do. Or did. Anyway, it burned down last night.”
“Do they know what caused it?”
She shakes her head. “Faulty wiring, maybe. But Will was going on about the cops, for some reason. Saying they should have been doing their job. Like they were supposed to know when a building’s wiring is about to set it on fire. Isn’t that a job for the fire department?” She shrugs, then takes another sip of her coffee.
We continue talking, and I finish my donut, Lindsay taking a bite of it after I offer it to her. But soon enough she tilts her cup of coffee up and finishes the last of it. I’ve still got some left in my cup.
“All right,” she says, planting both hands on the armrests of the chair. “I should probably get back.”
Our chairs scrape against the floor as we stand up, and then Lindsay comes around the table and gives me a hug.
“It was so good to see you, Merryn,” she says in my ear. We let go of each other. “We should hang out again.”
I nod, smiling. “Yeah, definitely.”
She turns to walk away, lifting her hand and giving me one last wave. I wave back, then sit back down as I watch her go, the bell above the door jingling as she departs.
I finish the rest of my coffee on my own. That wasn’t that bad of a visit. I guess I don’t feel as close with Lindsay as I did when we worked together—and I never ended up telling her about my life in a gang—but that’s not
the end of the world. We can still be acquaintances. Besides, an evil voice whispers in my ear, I may not be in a gang anymore.
Nope. Nope. Stop that. I’m not going to think about that. I pick up my coffee and focus on sipping the cooled-down liquid, on the other customers in the bakery. When I’m finally finished I stand up, taking my garbage to the garbage can and giving the plate back to the bored-looking girl behind the counter, who accepts it from me without a word. Then I go into the bathroom, relieve myself, and leave the bakery.
I climb back onto Trista’s bike, turning it on. I don’t have anywhere else to go, so I start riding back to Trista’s apartment. I take my time, though, going down side streets, detouring here and there. It’s about half an hour before I finally arrive back. I put down the kickstand and get off the bike, then let myself back into the apartment and go upstairs.
I find Trista in her bedroom, grabbing some clothes from the closet. She turns her head when I come in, a guilty look on her face.
“Sorry,” she says. “I was going to have a shower and wanted a change of clothes.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I tell her. “It’s your bedroom. I’m the one taking up space.”
She nods, hesitates, then goes back to rummaging through the clothes. I sit down on her bed.
“How’s your friend?” she asks.
“She’s good,” I tell her. “Her name’s Lindsay. We just caught up, basically.”
“And you knew her from PharmaChem?”
I nod, even though Trista isn’t looking at me. “Yeah. She was my best friend when I was there. But now that we’re not working together … I don’t know. We’ve drifted apart, I guess.”
“Yeah,” Trista says. She pulls down an outfit and turns around, looking at me.
I nod again. “Yeah. Oh, she said something weird happened at work this morning. Will was angry about something.”
Trista’s expression doesn’t change, but her gaze somehow intensifies.
“Angry? About what?”
“Lindsay said he was yelling about some building that burned down that apparently PharmaChem was using. Faulty wiring or something. It burned down last night.”
“Faulty wiring?”
“Yeah,” I give her a look. “That sounds fake, right?” Trista nods. “And get this: the building was over in that abandoned textile district, the one with all those failed dry cleaners and stuff. Isn’t that weird?”
But Trista’s looking at me with a different sort of intensity now.
“In the old textile district?” she asks, and I nod.
“Yeah. That’s what Lindsay said.”
“We gutted one of the buildings to make a manufacturing facility there.”
“What?”
“The Bullets,” Trista explains. “Maddox ordered us to gut a bunch of buildings. For Will to start making drugs. Manufacturing facilities.”
Whoa. “Lindsay also said he was yelling about the cops and how they weren’t doing their jobs.”
Trista nods, her eyes wide. “That must be it. Those places were secure. They had alarms and shit. The Bullets, and I guess the people who work there, are the only ones who know they exist. And it wouldn’t have been the wiring that made it burn down. Will brought in specialist electricians to rig everything up, and Maddox paid them double their wages to keep them quiet.” She shakes her head. “It sounds like somebody torched it.”
I blink. Then I look at Trista. She’s looking back at me.
“You don’t think …” I say, not sure if I should finish the sentence. Trista’s expression doesn’t change.
“What?” she asks, and I give her a sympathetic look.
“It could be,” I say, “that the person who burned it down … was Flynn.”
Flynn
I’m standing on the roof of my apartment. The city sprawls out before me, stretching far, countless streets, houses, condos, stores. Down below people walk along the sidewalks, alongside cars in the street. They travel through alleys, from their car in the parking lot to a store and back again. And beyond that: the rest of the world. Yet it doesn’t feel like there’s any more world out there than the one I live in. It doesn’t feel like there’s anything outside the walls of Santa Espera.
I didn’t sleep last night. My body is exhausted, but my mind keeps racing. Reliving the events of last night over and over in my mind.
When the facility went up in flames, I felt part of me go up with it. The Bullets part. The part that was stuck in the past, stuck wanting only to goof off, joke around—stay put right where I felt the most comfortable, which was no place at all.
But last night I made a decision. I’m getting rid of that part of me. It sloughed off me like a skin, and afterward I felt so … free. So alive.
The police came. Firefighters too. I guess somebody called the inferno in. I rode away when I heard sirens approaching. Saw their flashing lights coming up from down the street. I slid back into the shadows, took the circuitous paths around them. Didn’t want to let anybody know I was there. The police cruisers and fire engines passed me by. When I was on the outskirts I stopped, listened to the men and women yelling at one another, the loud fwoosh! of the fire hose, trying to put out the flames.
My heart was pounding like mad. I zoomed out of there, sped around, feeling more alive and exhilarated than I have in a long time. And within all of that was the thought of Trista. Trista! The one for whom I did all this. I decided that this will be my penance. This will be my gift to her: the destruction and dissolution of Will Silver’s plans and investments. All done in the dark, on the down-low. If I can’t assist in taking out his life, then I can take out his livelihood instead.
I rode the streets up and down. I had nowhere else to go. My work wasn’t done yet—it wouldn’t make sense to call Trista and tell her all about it. Besides, it was the middle of the night. And she’d find out soon enough, one way or another.
As I drove my bike I saw things differently. The streets, the buildings, all the people in Santa Espera. Things could be different. Better. We can clean this place up. People slept on bus stop benches, beat each other up in alleys. Drug addicts killing one another, robbing innocents. It could be better for them. They’re just trying to survive in this fucked up city that Will Silver has made.
After about an hour of riding I realized how hungry I was. I hadn’t eaten anything since that late lunch in the Thirsty Sister with Katie! So I found an all-night diner and went in, getting a club sandwiched with fries and a coffee. The coffee was probably a bad idea, but I knew I didn’t feel like sleeping anyway. My brain was working overtime!
As I sat at one of the tables, dipping my fries in ketchup and drinking my coffee, I watched as people came in and out of the diner, walked down the sidewalks. I thought about their lives. What it was like being them in this city. How did they get by? These, the types of people who would be out wandering the streets in the middle of the night on a weekday. Did they have actual jobs? Did they do part-time work, or freelance their time? Maybe they gambled or just did gigs to make ends meet. I recognized some of the passers-by as druggies who’ve purchased product from the Slingers.
I wondered how they would have felt if they knew what I was planning. Wondered, if I told them, if they would even know what I was talking about. I mean, everybody in this city is aware of PharmaChem. It’s impossible not to be. But how many people know who Will Silver is, by name? How many people know that their boss’s boss might report back to Will? Or that it’s their boss’s boss’s boss? Almost everybody, every business, in this city is connected to Will Silver in one way or another. He runs this town. Like a puppet master, he engineered this city to be exactly what he wanted it to be. And now he’s going too far. Now he’s bitten off more than he can chew, and he has to pay for it.
Eventually I got bored, so I paid for my meal and got back on my bike, riding away again. The coffee pumped its caffeine through my veins, and the wind in my hair combined to make me feel like I was flying.
&n
bsp; The sun was starting to come up. People were opening up their shops, getting in their cars to drive to work and start the day. I didn’t want to be around these people—and so many of them!—so I headed back to my apartment. I didn’t really want to go there, but I didn’t have anywhere else to go.
When I got here I walked up to my place, but just as I was about to put the key in the lock I stopped. Inside there were memories of Trista. Her essence, her influence, everywhere. I didn’t want that right then. So instead I turned and walked away, down the hall. I got to the stairwell doors, went in, and started climbing up instead of going down. I arrived at the rooftop doorway and pushed it open, to be greeted by the brilliant streams of colorful sunshine, just starting to say Good Morning to the day.
And that’s where I stayed. I don’t know how long I’ve been up here. It’s got to have been hours. The sun is far past the horizon already. Nobody has come up to join me. I’m all right with that. Thankful, even. The solitude is good. It’s good to get my head clear. I’m coming down from the coffee high. I can feel my muscles getting weak. Wobbly. And my thoughts are dragging a little. But I can still think.
Trista. She’s never far from my thoughts. I’ve got to keep going. Got to continue the work that I started last night. Those drugs … they can’t be made anymore. Will has to be stopped. I’ve got to stop him. Trista will thank me. She’ll know what I did. And when she does, I hope she wants to be with me again. I look out to the east, towards the desert. The place where I helped save Trista’s life last night. The place where she was almost raped and killed. The place where her attempted rapist is buried, dead and gone.
Ahh … I feel dizzy.
The sun is beating down on me. I blink, my mouth feeling like cotton. It’s only now that I realize how hot it is. I’m still wearing my leather jacket. I pull it off and it sticks to me. Have I been sweating this entire time? What time is it?
I pull my cell phone out and open the display to see. It’s just before noon. Fuck. My body feels weak … shaky. My head is swimming. I should go inside. I turn and head for the rooftop door, opening it up, stepping inside. It feels cool, relative to the outside. I have to grip the handrail as I make my way downstairs to my floor. Open the door to the hall I walk through, finally unlocking my own door and stepping in.