Bittersweet Chronicles: Pax

by Selena Laurence

  “Pax! What the hell, man? God, where have you two been? Did they hurt you?” He takes Carly’s arms and holds her still so he can inspect her. “I’ve been on the phone with my buddy at the Portland P.D., trying to decide what to do. I didn’t call the local police because you was so opposed to getting them involved, but if you hadn’t shown up in the next hour, I was heading straight to the downtown station.”

  I flop down on the sofa, exhausted, the last of the adrenaline draining out of my body so quickly that I feel a little faint. Carly looks pale and like she might vomit.

  “Carly?” I ask in a gentle tone. “Why don’t you go climb in bed and rest? Everything’s fine now.”

  Vaughn looks at her, then at me. He nods like he sees where I’m going with everything.

  “Yeah. Go ahead, Carly. You’re home safe now. Pax can fill me in, and you and I can talk later. There’s no rush.”

  I watch as she considers it. I know she doesn’t want to admit she’s tapped out, but she’s so tired that her stubborn side finally gives up the fight.

  “Okay. But no matter what Pax says, that stupid agreement he made with Lagazo will never work. And, Vaughn?”

  “Yeah, sweetheart?”

  “You can’t let him do it.”

  Vaughn looks at me, his expression serious. “Pax.” He shakes his head. “What did you go and do this time?”

  “Nothing, man.” I press my lips together, refusing to discuss this any further while Carly is standing here.

  Vaughn sighs, and Carly shakes her head.

  “I’ll see you in a while,” she mumbles before she wanders off toward the back bedroom.

  Once she’s gone, I lean my head back against the sofa. I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired in my life.

  “Dude,” Vaughn says, sitting down on the adjacent armchair. “What happened?”

  I tell him the basic facts, including the one hundred twenty thousand dollars I need to get Lagazo in the next twenty-four hours.

  “Holy hell,” he mutters.

  Then I get to the part where I agreed to work for Lagazo.

  “You what?” Vaughn’s voice is quiet, and that tells me that his reaction is worse than I expected. “You didn’t. God, Pax, tell me you didn’t agree to that.”

  I nod my head. “It was that or he was going to put her to work in the strip club. You know he could do it. Keep her locked up except to work. I can tell you the guy’s the real deal. He has no qualms with kidnapping, extortion, murder, whatever. And Carly’s right—going to the cops wouldn’t have stopped him. He has a whole warehouse full of stuff that I’m sure is illegal, Vaughn. Guns and drugs I’d guess judging by the crates. He must have police on his payroll.”

  “Which is why you can’t do this, Pax.” Vaughn’s voice is approaching desperate. “My God, your old man will never forgive my family for getting you mixed up in this.” He puts his head in his hands and yanks at his hair. “This can’t be happening.” Then he looks up at me, and I feel terrible. His eyes are tortured, and his face is tense. “Does he know who you are?” he asks in a quiet tone, his eyes darting toward the back of the house where Carly is resting.

  “No,” I reply. “He knows I come from money but has no idea who I really am. I changed my name legally and the records are sealed. This house is in my new name and my dad paid cash. There shouldn’t be any way to trace me.”

  “Do you know what kind of risk you’re taking here?” he hisses. “You get arrested doing some illegal thing for this guy and it could ruin your life, Pax. Not to mention your dad and the band.” The muscles in his jaw flex as he grinds his teeth. “This is your whole future you’re putting on the line. You just can’t do it.”

  I take a deep breath, pushing aside the part of me that’s afraid of just what he’s describing. I think of Carly’s pretty lips, her perfect ass and big eyes, her tragic childhood and her hopes for the future. I think of Lagazo’s hard, cruel face and the gun his guy dug into my rib cage. I think of how easy it was for them to get to Carly and me—breaking down the door to my house like it was cardboard and taking us without so much as a squeak from the neighbors or even from Vaughn, who was sleeping twenty feet away.

  “Look, I appreciate it, Vaughn. I do. But this is the only way. Lagazo doesn’t know who I am. He’s not going to find out. And whatever he has me doing, I’m not going to get caught. If guys as stupid as the ones working for him can do that stuff without getting caught, I can for sure. I’m smarter than the average gangster, dude.” I grin at Vaughn, who rolls his eyes.

  “If anything happens to you, your dad is going to have my ass,” he says matter-of-factly.

  “You’re right, but nothing’s going to happen to me, so no worries. Now, I need to call my dad so we can get this under way. It’s just a month. And then we’ll be in the clear.”

  “What are you going to tell him?”

  “As close to the truth as I can get without making him too worried. I got this, Vaughn.”

  I see his expression waver. He wants to accept it, but he knows there’s so much that could go wrong. I need him to believe in me though. It’ll help me convince myself.

  Finally, he gives a sharp nod. “Okay. You got this, and I got your back. I’ll call Portland and arrange for someone else to take over my jobs for the next month. I’ll stay here to make sure you’re okay. And I’ll get Carly settled. Help her set up something more normal than she’s used to. I got your back, Pax.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it. Now toss me my phone.”

  **

  It’s ten a.m. in Portland when I reach my dad. I can picture him sitting in his office, where he starts most days, reading the industry news, drinking a cup of espresso my mom made him, and maybe eating a chocolate chip scone from Portland’s best bakery, The Flour House.

  “Pax?” he answers, his voice upbeat and sounding wide awake.

  “Hey, Dad. How are you?” I ask, trying to sound as normal as possible.

  “I’m doing fine, son. Did you have a gig last night?”

  I take a deep breath, pushing away the urge to spill the truth about the sordid mess Vaughn, Carly, and I are in. But I’m twenty-two years old. I need to handle my stuff, and I chose to make this mine.

  “Nah. I have a couple of nights off this week.”

  “But the bookings are still steady?” he asks, trying to sound casual but not quite pulling it off.

  “Yeah, they’re very steady. No worries, Dad.”

  “Good,” he answers, not questioning about my work further because he knows how much I hate to have him involved. “What else is happening? You have a girlfriend yet?” He chuckles.

  My mom has been after me to get serious about someone for the last couple of years. I’ve tried explaining to her that people my age don’t get serious, but since she met and started dating my dad at fourteen, she just can’t grasp the concept. For some reason, she thinks that, if I get a serious girlfriend, it’ll improve the odds that I’ll come home sooner.

  “Well, actually, I have met a girl,” I begin.

  “Wait. Let me get your mom on the speakerphone. Otherwise, she’s going to grill me about the whole damn thing and you know I’ll forget some detail that she and Mel think is crucial.”

  “Hey, Dad, it’s not like that. Can you wait just a minute? I’ll talk to Mom later, but I need you first.”

  “Okaay…”

  I hear the concern in his voice. He probably thinks I’ve gotten someone pregnant.

  “I met this girl, Carly, at the beach a couple of weeks ago, and it turns out—you’ll never believe this—but she’s Vaughn’s cousin.”

  “No kidding? Vaughn told me he had a cousin down there when he asked for your new number last month, but you met her before he got there?”

  “Yeah. Imagine that, huh?” I laugh, hoping it sounds normal. I feel anything but normal. “She’s great and everything, but that’s not why I’m calling. See, her dad died a few weeks ago. That’s why Vaughn is down here—to help her
out. She doesn’t have a mother or anything either, and she’s just eighteen.”

  My dad is quiet for a moment before his voice comes through the airwaves. “Poor kid. She got a bad deal, huh?”

  Dad is a softy, always has been. He’s the happy-go-lucky guy in the band, the tenderhearted one. A girl just a year older than my sister with no parents pushes his buttons, and as crappy as it makes me feel to manipulate him, I need those buttons pushed all the way before I drop the one-hundred-twenty-thousand-dollar bomb on him.

  “It gets worse. I guess her old man was a real lowlife. Gambling and stuff. He died owing the local loan shark over a hundred grand.”

  “Holy hell.”

  “Yeah. He, uh… He used Carly as collateral.”

  There’s a longer pause this time. Then my dad’s voice comes back at me, low and rough. “What?”

  “If he defaulted on the loan, the loan shark was supposed to get Carly. He owns strip clubs—you can imagine the scenario from there.”

  “Holy hell.”

  “So, the way I met her was because she was being hassled by one of the loan shark’s soldiers.”

  “I hope you’ve been to the cops, son. This isn’t stuff to mess with.”

  “Here’s the thing. Apparently, the dude has connections with the cops. We’re kind of thinking the cops might not be the best idea.”

  “Pax—” he says with a tone of warning in his voice.

  “But Vaughn and I have a plan. We just need a little help from you.”

  He sighs, and even a few thousand miles away, I hear the exasperation.

  “Pax, you can’t save everyone.”

  “I know that, but it’s Vaughn’s cousin, and…” I hesitate, wondering how much of what I’m about to say is true and how much is more manipulation. To be honest, I don’t even know at this point. “She’s special, Dad. I mean, there’s something about her.”

  “And the plan is?”

  I take a deep breath. “You loan Vaughn and me the hundred and twenty grand, we pay off the loan shark, and then we’ll pay you back over the next five years.”

  “Jesus, Pax.”

  I know that, if I were Skyping with him right now instead of just calling, I’d see him running his hand through his mess of brown hair before rubbing the stubble on his jaw. I tend to frustrate him these days—I’ve become very familiar with the reactions.

  “We’ll sign a loan agreement, interest, monthly payments—the whole deal.”

  “Aw, son. I don’t think you realize what you’re doing here.”

  “Dad. We do. You know Vaughn. He’s a standup guy. We’re both good for it, and we’ve already talked to the bastard who’s after Carly. He’ll back off if we just give him the money. That’s all he wants. He was only going to put her to work in his strip clubs to take her earnings. He wants money. He doesn’t care about anything else.” My lie is heavy in my gut, making me feel like the world’s worst son and a generally reprehensible person.

  “Look,” he tells me with the ‘I’m about to lecture the bejeezus out of you’ tone in his voice. “I know that you realize a hundred and twenty K isn’t a big deal to me. But I want you to also realize that it’s a big deal to most people, and it’s an amount of money that needs to be respected, not treated like pocket change.”

  I grit my teeth. “I know that. I do. It’s enough money to buy a house or several cars or feed a family of four for years. It’s also one thousand, eight hundred forty-one dollars and sixty-five cents a month at a rate of four percent for five years, which means nine hundred twenty dollars and eighty-two cents each for Vaughn and me.”

  My dad huffs out a bitter laugh. “Where the hell are you going to get that much money every month? For that matter, where is Vaughn? His old man’s a good friend of mine. I know what he earns.”

  I realize that, in the scramble to fix Carly’s life, I neglected to consider the details of how I was going to make the loan payments. Genius. I struggle to come up with an answer.

  “I’m going to get a roommate. That should cover at least half of it. Then I’ll take on some more guitar lessons and maybe start commuting up to Birmingham to play some bigger venues there. Blake, who owns The Taphouse bar, has been trying to get me to do that for a while now. He’s worried I’ll get too comfortable here, where the market just isn’t big enough.”

  “Glad to know you’re willing to take career advice from a two-bit bar owner,” my dad grits out unable to cover the bitter.

  We’ve worked hard to maintain an uneasy peace over my refusal to let him help with my career. Hearing that I talk to other people about it never sits well with him. While this normally might be the point at which the tentative peace is disrupted, I bite my tongue to keep the focus on that money.

  “So, what do you say? Can we borrow the money?”

  “You’re sure he doesn’t know who you are?” he asks, cutting to something that is always a concern for all of us for various reasons. “He gets a clue and this could turn on you in a second. I don’t care how great the girl is—I won’t lose you to a kidnapping for her sake.” His voice is hard, brooking no argument.

  He never really got over what happened in that game arcade all those years ago. I know he works hard not to be too protective, but if he thinks Lyric or I might be at risk, there’s no reasoning with him.

  “If the paparazzi haven’t figured out I’m here by now, this guy won’t. He’s a sleazeball in a tiny town who gets his highs off of exploiting women and trying to beat up teenage girls. He’s not smart enough to figure out who I am, Dad.” God, let’s hope I’m right about that.

  “And what makes you think this guy will lay off if you pay him off?” Dad questions. “He’s a criminal, Pax. He belongs in jail, not waltzing around with a hundred twenty thousand of my hard-earned dollars.”

  I tug on my hair and take a deep breath. I knew this was going to be hard, but I think I underestimated my dad’s parental tendencies.

  “This is important to me,” I tell him. “I need to be able to help her. I don’t know how to explain why, but I can’t stand the idea of these guys after her, and I don’t want to just turn it over to the cops, especially if they might not be on the up-and-up. I want to be the one. I want her to know that a guy like me can make her problems go away.”

  “Oh, kid,” he says, chuckling all of a sudden. It’s like I can feel the energy shift. I’ve broken through his rational ‘Dad’ barriers. I wish I knew how I’d done it. “You have it bad, huh?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He chuckles again. “Did I ever tell you about the time I jumped off a stage in the middle of a performance to punch a guy who was hassling your mom?”

  I roll my eyes. “I don’t think so, no.”

  “It was when I was living with Ronny and Leanne, working at the ranch in Texas…”

  Thirty minutes, a secret vow not to tell my mother, and a couple of stories later, I have the money transferred right into my bank account, courtesy of Walsh Clark, the rock star.

  **

  The exchange with Lagazo is surprisingly civil. I hand him a cashier’s check and he hands me the loan papers Carly’s dad signed.

  Yeah, there is actual paperwork.

  Then his guy Nicky, who I’ve come to hate after our various tussles, gives me my first assignment. I need to go to an amusement park a few miles outside of town, collect an envelope from the accounting department, and then deliver it to Lagazo at one of his strip clubs. Sounds simple enough, and I have until the next night to do it.

  When Vaughn and I get back to the condo, Carly is a wreck, pacing the floor of the living room like a caged cat.

  “Oh my God,” she cries as we open the front door. “Are you okay?” She looks over both of us like she expects to see blood gushing or limbs missing.

  I preen a bit, thinking that she might care if I got maimed.

  “We’re fine,” Vaughn tells her indulgently. “We had money for the dude. He wasn’t going to complain about that
.” He throws himself down on the sofa and rubs his hand over his face. “Beer me, will you, Carly?” he says, tossing a grin her way.

  She rolls her eyes and heads to the fridge.

  I sit down in the armchair across from Vaughn. “So, the first job sounds simple enough.”

  Vaughn smiles at Carly as she hands him a bottle of beer.

  She sits next to him then looks at me with worry. “What do you have to do?” she asks.

  “Just pick up an envelope at Fields of Play Amusement Park then deliver it to Lagazo tomorrow night.”

  “What’s in the envelope?” she asks, her eyes darting between Vaughn and me.

  “Don’t know. Don’t care,” I answer, kicking my booted feet up on the coffee table. I made it in shop class in eighth grade, so I get to treat it however I want.

  “What if it’s explosives…or drugs…or national security secrets for some foreign dictator?” she asks, her face covered in panic.

  “It’s not,” Vaughn answers with some snark before I can respond. “I’m sure it’s cash he’s skimming from the amusement park or paperwork of some sort. He’s not involved in international espionage, Carls.”

  Carly sticks her tongue out at him, and I relish the way her cute little nose crinkles up as she does it. I can also envision some better uses for her tongue, but I bite mine to keep from suggesting them.

  “So listen,” Vaughn interrupts my very inappropriate thoughts. “When I checked in with work to have them reassign my clients, they said they want me to do some last-pass stuff. Clean up on things that have already been edited. There’s a sound studio in Birmingham that they’ve reserved for me tomorrow and a few other days this month.” He looks at me from under the blond bangs that hang down on his forehead. “This’ll be worth it. It’ll keep the money coming in so that, when the month is up, I won’t be strapped for cash.”

  I nod, knowing he’s wondering how the hell we’re going to pay my old man back too.

  “Well, if you can go back to work, then I can go back to school,” Carly announces.

  Vaughn and I have a secret conversation with just our eyes. Finally, he gives me a slight nod and turns to Carly.