F*ckboy Psychos

by Stunich, C. M.

  Considering he can drop fifty grand like it’s nothing, I’m sure he doesn’t care much about the vase or the trust fund.

  “Celebrating something?” he asks, and when I glance his way, he has absolutely zero emotion on his face. Just a blank slate. Empty. He shifts his dark eyes to mine, and I stare right back at him.

  “If I were, would I tell ya?” I ask, and then I gesture the girl behind the counter over. “Give me that yellow cake with the pink flowers. Can you write something on it for me?”

  “It’s an additional twenty dollars, is that okay?” she asks, almost sheepishly. I give her a look.

  “Twenty bucks to write something with frosting? Shit, I just found me a new job. Alright, honey cakes, get on it then. I have places to go.” The girl blushes wildly as I smile at her. I have sway with girls. Can’t say why exactly. I think it’s because I’m that sort of ‘handsome’ pretty, like put me in a suit, tie my hair up, and drop a top hat on me, and girls get all swoony.

  I enjoy it, too, teasing them and petting their hair and having them fawn all over me. I’m a safe crush, too, since I don’t have a dick. Everybody knows that’s both the reward at the end of the rainbow as well as patient zero for the plague: cock. One of those love-hate sort of relationships.

  “You’re quite the heartbreaker, aren’t you?” Aspen asks, studying me as I sigh and turn to look at him. I’m about to tell him to get lost when my phone rings, and I glance down at it to see my girl Juana’s face and number splashed across my screen.

  “Talk to me,” I say, balancing the phone between my ear and shoulder as I squat down and dig through the various small containers in the bottom portion of the bakery counter. I hate lemon cake, so I’ll just grab myself a single slice of—

  “He shot her!” Juana is wailing, and I go completely cold. Goose bumps break out across my skin as I drop the cake slice and rise to my feet. “He fucking shot her, Scar! He shot her!”

  “Calm the fuck down,” I growl out, and Juana goes completely silent but for a quiet, hiccupping sob and the sound of the other girls shouting in the background. “Who shot who?” I lower my voice so that my fellow bourgeois Market of Cost shoppers won’t hear me talking about gunshots in their quiet organic, fair-trade, ethically sourced sanctuary.

  “Evelyn,” she sobs, sniffling. “The guy in the Cobra, he shot Evelyn. She’s dead, Scar. She’s lying here dead. He smashed right through our blockade and took off.”

  I’m just standing there with my mouth hanging open, my blood chilled, my heart thundering wildly.

  Fuck.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  “I’ll be right there,” I say as cake lady moves tentatively up to the counter. I hang up my phone and turn, spotting Aspen and feeling that cold blood of mine turn white-hot. I grit my teeth. “Where is your Cobra right now?” I ask him, and he cocks his head slightly to one side.

  “Pardon?”

  “I said where the fuck is the Shelby Cobra.” I don’t bother to keep my voice lowered, not this time. I take the lives and welfare of my girls very seriously. The thought of Evelyn being dead … I can’t let myself process the emotions right now. Emotions are luxury items best keep for sleepless nights and long showers.

  Right now, I have a crew to lead.

  “Miss?” Cake Lady asks, and I whip a glare over at her that has her stumbling back like I’ve slapped her face. I turn back to Aspen only to find him with a dark frown carved into his pouty mouth.

  “The Cobra …” he starts, and then he licks the corner of his mouth and affixes me with a disturbing stare. “What does it matter where it is?”

  “Because somebody in a ‘63 Cobra just shot and killed one of my girls,” I hiss out, getting so close to him that I can smell that fresh-air-after-a-rainstorm scent of his. It’s strong enough to compete with the bright scents of sugar and chocolate wafting from the open-air bakery. “So, I’m going to ask you one more time: where is your Cobra?”

  Aspen’s gone a little pale, and the way his eyes shift to one side tells me he knows something.

  “I don’t know,” is how he answers that question. Like, he doesn’t know where his half a million plus dollar car is right now?

  “You don’t know?” I growl back at him, and his face goes blank and cold. He leans in, so close that I can practically taste him.

  “You have no right to ask me anything nor am I obligated to answer. As you can see, I’m standing right here. I didn’t shoot your girl nor do I know who did.”

  “Who has access to that car?” I ask him, breathless, needing answers and knowing that as fast as I have to get to the scene, I also have to know these things, too. Because whoever did this, I’m going to bury them.

  As I said before, it’s not my preferred method of dealing with pond scum. For some reason, our society gets upset when rapists, pedophiles, and murderers die. It makes no sense to me. Personally, I feel like we should hold public celebrations for that sort of thing. I mean, assuming the evidence is there. Like, for example, the rich boy who plowed into my mother’s minivan while plastered at two in the afternoon. There was no doubt that he was the perpetrator.

  I mean, the asshole stumbled out of his totaled car and vomited right next to me while I stared down at my shattered leg and then turned my head to see my dead family members comatose and dressed in blood.

  He did it. His parents knew he did it. Yet, he got let off with a hundred hours of community service. Isn’t that cute? Rich boys can get drunk and kill three kids under age ten and walk scot-free.

  Anyway, I digress.

  I don’t let perpetrators walk.

  I will avenge my girl.

  “Race me for it,” I snap out when Aspen hesitates too long. “Race me. If I win, I want to see the car in person. And I want a list of everyone who had access to it, who could’ve possibly been driving it.”

  I throw that out in a rush, already lifting my phone back up and tapping out a message to Bohnes.

  I need your help with something.

  Shit. Fuck. Guess it’s a good thing he unblocked his number, huh? I mean, I would’ve done it eventually, but I’m glad he came and got it done himself. Intent is sexy.

  He responds almost immediately.

  Where are you?

  I text him the location of the heist before looking back up at Aspen Kelly.

  “Well?” I ask, knowing before we even get to this portion of the conversation what I’m going to have to offer up in order to get him to help me. The only thing this piece of shit wants that money cannot and never will be able to buy. Me. Fucking me.

  “What do I get if I win?” he asks, as expected, an imperious look on his handsome face.

  “If you win, I’ll let you fuck me. We can do it right on the hood of your Fastback. Waddaya say, shithead? Race me again. Friday night, first thing.”

  He just stares at me, but then he nods, and I’m taking off out the side doors and sprinting across the parking lot to my car.

  Aspen doesn’t follow me.

  “Oh, Scar, this is so bad,” Basti is wailing as one of the other girls drives off in Evelyn’s car. She’ll take it straight to the lumberyard and we’ll store it there for the time being. “This is so fucking bad.”

  I ignore him, too busy helping Bohnes lift Evelyn’s body into the trunk of his Chevelle.

  We’re on a fairly secluded pullout on McKenzie View Drive, but that doesn’t mean cars don’t pass by every now and again, their headlights sweeping over us as the autumn sky dims to indigo shadows. We’ve just rolled Evelyn into a tarp and duct taped it nice and tight to prevent the blood from leaking into Bohnes’ car.

  I haven’t even asked him what he’s going to charge me for this shit.

  I’m sure that I don’t want to know.

  “Oh fuck,” Bastian says, putting his face in his hands. “What am I supposed to tell her abuela, huh? You know the rest of her cousins are useless. Who’s going to take care of the old woman now?”

  “Not my problem,
Basti,” I say, but it is. I know that it is. I have a feeling a good chunk of that check I was saving for my buy-in is going to end up in the Moreno family’s hands. Bohnes grabs a huge plastic jug from the right front corner of the trunk, opening the lid and pouring it out over the bloodstains on the ground.

  They fizzle strangely, leaving an odd chemical smell in their wake. When he’s finished, he puts the cap back on, replaces the jug, and removes another. This one’s filled with water.

  Nisha pulls up next, practically stumbling as she gets out of the car and makes her way over to us. She stares at the wet spot on the road before looking up at me.

  “Scar,” Nisha breathes, looking into the back of the trunk as Bohnes strips off his gloves and drops them into a Ziploc bag. I do the same with mine. He takes that bag and puts it in the trunk beside Evelyn’s tarp-covered form. Nisha’s gaze slides over to Bohnes but, despite his current status as my fuckboy, she knows he keeps his mouth shut and gets things done. “What do we do about Evelyn’s family?”

  “You say nothing,” I tell her, looking over at Bastian next. “You hear me? Nothing at all. We don’t know where Evelyn is. The last time we saw her was at school today. That’s it. Kids go missing from Prescott all the time. Far as we know, she’s just another runaway.”

  I reach out and slam Bohnes’ trunk down, making both Nisha and Bastian jump. We’re the only ones left; I sent all of the other girls home to decompress, but not before hearing their sides of the story.

  Since Evelyn was working point, she’s the only one who got a good look at the fucker in the Cobra, but now? I have a license plate. Because my girls are that good. Juana, who saw the gun go off and witnessed the pink spray as the projectile tore through Evelyn’s skull, noted the license plate on her phone as soon as she realized what was happening.

  So. A black ‘63 Shelby Cobra. A single male driver. Young. Dark hair. A license plate that I can match up to Aspen Kelly’s. If I hadn’t literally been standing next to him during this whole nightmare, I might think he was the one who did it.

  Question is: who the fuck has access to his car? His father? His brother? One of their family’s nameless hired goons? A friend? A cousin? A housekeeper?

  I want to scream.

  I have to win that race on Friday. No ifs, ands, or buts about that. Not just to protect my own body and my own dignity, but for Evelyn. Because she deserves that. She deserves justice.

  “Go home,” I tell my best friends, looking first at Bastian and then over at Nisha.

  “I’m not leaving you with—” she starts, but the look I level on her clearly says that I’m not in the mood for arguments. Basti and Nisha back me up but, at the end of the day, I’m the boss. “Fuck, Scarlett,” she grinds out, but then she turns on her heel and heads for her car and Basti does the same.

  I look over at Bohnes.

  “You’re not coming with me,” he says, crossing his arms and leaning his hip against the side of his car. He offers me up a smile that turns grotesque under the lights of a passing car.

  The driver continues on his or her merry way, and I look back over at Bohnes.

  “This isn’t just a job. This is my girl, my crew.”

  He’s already shaking his head and pushing up from the side of his car to come over and stand beside me. We both make sure to keep well away from the wet spot where the bloodstain was before he poured whatever chemical concoction over the top.

  “I can’t give you all my secrets, Scarlett Force,” he says, reaching out to tease some of my hair with his fingers. He drops it without sniffing it which is nice, but …

  “What is this going to cost me?” I ask, and that makes him laugh.

  “I already have a body in my trunk, and you want to know the price now?” he queries, looking up at the faint kiss of a silver moon through the trees. “Maybe you should’ve asked that before I rushed all the way out here?”

  “I’m asking now in case I need to lift that body out of your trunk, put it in my car, and figure out what to do with it.”

  “Mm.” Bohnes reaches out to grab my wrists, pulling me close enough to him that I can feel his body heat through my clothes. “How about this? You let me take you on a proper date, and fuck you in a proper bed, and we’ll call it even?”

  I glare at him, even as my heart leaps into my throat, and I feel like I might choke on the utter ridiculousness of his proposition.

  “A date?” I say with a caustic laugh. “You want to take me on a date in exchange for disposing of a body? Don’t be stupid.”

  “Stupid?” he asks, gritting his teeth and tightening his fingers where they wrap around my wrists. “What part of that is stupid, Scarlett? Go on a date with me or pony up fifty grand.”

  “Fifty grand?!” I choke out, sneering at him in frustration. “You charged me fifteen hundred—”

  “You were sixteen and in pain,” he says, snapping his fingers. “I charge tiered rates. The higher up you are, the more you pay. And Scarlett, you are the queen of Prescott High. The queen pays big. A date and sex that doesn’t involve pine needles or dirty bathrooms.”

  I purse my lips.

  It sounds like an easy trade. It sounds like a good deal. And, in the scope of things, it really is. But I’m suspicious. Nothing in Prescott is free. Everything comes with a fat ass price tag.

  “Fine. But I want to come with you. Evelyn deserves that, at least. To have me help with her burial.”

  Bohnes releases me and shakes his head, turning and opening the driver’s side door of the Chevelle. It gleams black under the silver light of the moon, looking more like a hearse than a track-worthy antique. Guess it really is a death mobile right now, isn’t it?

  “No. Get some sleep, Scarlett Force. I choose the day, time, and location for our date. Don’t forget that.” He slams his car door and starts the engine, easing forward and then hooking a sharp left to get back onto the road.

  I watch as he heads along the curving length of one of the wealthiest ‘streets’ in the city of Springfield. Technically, we’re about ten minutes outside of the city, on a country road full of million-dollar estates. Even the founder of Nike shoes lives here, that’s how ritzy it is.

  Wherever Bohnes is going, he’s likely going to drive in a roundabout sort of way to make certain that I can’t follow him. He’s the only person I’ve ever met who might actually be able to pull that stunt on me.

  Though it kills me, I climb back into my own car and make the long drive home.

  Soon as I get there, I’m going to jack some of my sister’s sleeping pills, a fat blunt, and then I’m going to make myself pass out so that I can race hard and win on Friday.

  Aspen Kelly is not an easy man to beat, but I’ll be damned if my girl dies in vain.

  A. Kelly

  I know who shot Scarlett’s friend. I know it as soon as I get home and see the Shelby Cobra with the front caved in on two sides, the deep gouges that stretch from hood to trunk. I stand there for several long minutes, just staring at the mess he’s made of such a beautiful car and hating him even more for taking the life of one of Scarlett’s girls.

  That’s my brother in a nutshell: he takes whatever he wants, whenever he wants, consequences be damned. Why shoot the girl? We’ve both heard the rumors about a roving gang of hot as fuck Prescott girls who hold up rich boys.

  Everybody here knows about it. It’s considered a badge of honor to be chosen. Shit, some men like it so much that they purposefully try to recreate the same scenarios with hopes of seeing the girls again, of feeling that rush of adrenaline when a beautiful woman pulls a gun on you, the way sweat pulls at the base of your spine, runs down either temple, clings to your lips as you lick them and wonder why you’re so goddamn hard during a robbery.

  Anyway, those are the stories I’ve heard. Just give ‘em the cash, the watches, the credit cards. They don’t take wedding bands so curious wives never have to ask. Considerate thieves, that lot.

  So my brother knew he could just fork
over petty cash that would mean literally nothing to him or my father and move on with his day. He chose instead to pull out his favorite handgun—a Ruger LCP—and put a hole through a seventeen-year-old’s skull.

  At least, I’m assuming it was him. I don’t know for sure quite yet. It’s possible that it was my father or one of his men, but … only possible. Not probable.

  Probably, it was my fucking brother.

  As usual.

  I shouldn’t say anything to Scarlett Force. I shouldn’t tell her. I should win that race tomorrow and fuck her just the way she said, on the hood of my Mustang. Watch her tits bounce as I plow into her, listen to her sweet cries as she calls my name, as she threads those tattooed arms around my neck and holds me tight while I push my cock into her sweet cunt over and over again.

  Or maybe I’ll ask her to bend over, palms on the car’s hood, and offer her pussy up to my waiting mouth. Take her with my tongue and make her drip, make her quiver and beg for my dick. Make her want me that night and every other night that follows. Make her crave me the way I’m craving her right now.

  But if she wins, I’ll tell her all the possibilities about who might’ve been in that car. I’ll let her see it—if it’s still here. My brother likes to make sure any concrete evidence against him disappears in a timely fashion.

  That, or he just blames whatever the incident is on yours truly.

  I could die for this. Scarlett could die, too.

  I rub both hands down my face and then head inside, finding my way into the kitchen for something to eat. The sound of raucous laughter draws me into the dining room.

  My brother, our father, and his two favorite people in all the world—the CEO of Archer Realty Investments and the Springfield Chief of Police—are all enjoying their fair share of pricy imported Scotch and vodka and gin. There’s a box of cigars resting on one corner of the table, a tray filled with marijuana edibles, and a line of cocaine laid out in front of Aspen.