*****
Suze and I pretty much kept to ourselves for the next two hours. She commandeered a couple bottles of Jack and a two-liter of cola, and we stayed in our cozy little corner. It wasn't an ideal way to spend an evening, but it beat waiting alone for Frank.
Her quarter flipped into my cup while the one I threw missed the table entirely and ricocheted off the wall behind her. I was way too drunk for this game.
"Drink up, baby girl. You'll have an iron constitution by the time I'm through with ya," she said, with a giggle.
"I've mentioned how gross whiskey smells, right?" I asked as I pinched my nose and threw back the double shot of Jack. I wasn't a big drinker, in all honesty, though it seemed like Suze was working on changing that.
A sudden crash across the room sent the entirety of the room into panicked shrieks. Most of us launched ourselves out of our chairs, knocking over glasses, bottles, and in some cases, each other. Only Suze seemed to not be scared shitless.
She shot to her feet, all laughter drained from her face, and cut through the rest of the girls. I managed to catch a glance of bandanas and leather spilling into the small, packed room.
"Get the fuck out the way!" Paulie's voice roared through the rise of female voices.
The small crowd parted, and I blinked fuzzy eyes at the men as they scrambled inside. Paulie and Niko, another man that rode with us, were both staggering in, spatters of red all over them. They were carrying something between them, and it took a considerable amount of concentration on my part to realize it was a body.
"Shut the door," Frank's voice called out.
Suzanne hurried to the door and shut it, locking the dead bolt with a sharp click. The boys, who were carrying the body by the feet and shoulders, moved towards me and the bed. Paulie crawled up backwards on the mattress, hoisting the bigger man onto it placing him into full and perfect view. It was Chuck.
Or what used to be Chuck. His face was so swollen and busted up I could only recognize for the black Durangos on his feet.
"Oh my God," I said, feeling my stomach start to churn.
"What happened?" Suzanne asked, her eyes wide.
Joy Anne was close behind, her makeup running down her cheeks. "Oh my God. Oh my God, Chuck. Please don't die! Don’t die, baby!" Her voice grew shriller and more painful to hear with each syllable.
Chuck's shirt was shredded. There was so much blood I couldn't help but stare at it in numb fascination. The more I stared, the more I started to make sense out of what I was looking at. There was a gaping hole in his chest, the edges of his flesh shredded around it, blood drying darkly inside it. It looked like the exit wound of a close-range shotgun blast.
"What... happened to him?" My voice was barely audible over Joy Anne’s sobs.
Frank looked at me, then, and I tore my eyes from the corpse to meet his. His face was hard, unreadable. If there was any grief there, I couldn’t see it. Drops of red spotted his chin and drew my eyes further down. He was covered in blood. His arms were coated in it, stomach painted in it. We locked eyes for a minute, and only Joy Anne's shrieking made him look away from me.
"He's gone, Joy Anne." His voice was eerily calm.
I forced myself to move towards Frank. I couldn't tell if the blood on him was his own or Chuck's. I needed to see if he was okay. It was too much blood. Far too much.
"Are you hurt?" I asked. He didn't even look at me. He just stared down at Chuck's lifeless body as it lay on the bed.
"Frank," I tried again but Suzanne cut me off.
"What the Hell happened out there? Who did this?"
I tried to touch Frank's shoulder, but he gave a sharp jerk away from my hand. That was when I noticed how hard and fast he was breathing. He had looked so calm, so collected, until I noticed that. Now he seemed wild like he might snap at any moment. What the fuck had happened? He looked to me, then to two of the other girls that were with us. He whispered something I couldn’t hear to Suze and she just stared at him, unmoving.
"Get them out of here. Now!" He barked at her.
She stepped back, her eyes going wide, but nodded. She grabbed my still-hovering hand and turning me to the door.
"Come on," she whispered to me, and then raised her voice. "Shelby, Roxy. You, too. Out."
I stared over my shoulder at Frank as Suze all but pushed me out of the room.
"Suze, what the Hell? Talk to me!" I shouted, finding my voice.
She turned me around and grabbed my face in her hands, forcing me to look at her. Her eyes were large, fierce, and alive with an emerald fire I couldn't explain.
"Go to your room. Pack your shit," she said in a hushed whisper. "Take a cloth and wipe down everything. Anything you or Frank might have touched. Do it fast."
"What? What are you talking about?"
"Just go. We're leaving. Don't talk to anyone. Just go. Do what I said and wait for Frank. It'll be okay, alright? It'll be fine."
Things were moving so fast, and I couldn't keep up. Suzanne was already walking the other two girls to their rooms, disappearing around the corner. I wanted to go back, to barge into Joy Anne’s room and demand answers, but panic turned me the other way and sent me to do exactly as I was told.
It was the first time I'd been grateful for having so little to my name. My clothes and makeup fit into my backpack, even without taking the time to fold them neatly. Frank's bedroll was already on his bike and everything else of importance was locked in the saddlebags. After five minutes of packing—which was more like me running around in a blind frenzy—I moved onto cleaning up our fingerprints.
I should’ve taken a moment to stop and ask myself why I needed to do this. Why did our fingerprints matter? I should have, but the truth was I was scared out of my skull. Suzanne was good people, and if she said we needed to do this then who was I to argue with her?
After grabbing a washrag from the bathroom sink, I darted around wiping down everything in sight—the doorknobs, the dresser drawers, the telephone. I ran the cloth over everything Frank and I may have touched, unsure why I was doing it or how it was going to help with the whole "Chuck’s dead" situation.
I was scrubbing the remote when the door opened. I dropped the rag, my heart roaring in my chest as Frank stepped inside.
"Oh God," I breathed, throwing myself at him.
His hands went up and he stepped back; a clear message for me to not touch him. He'd cleaned some of the blood off of him, but his palms were still tinted red. Seeing the stains on his palms helped convince me to keep my distance.
"Are you hurt?" I asked, trying to control my voice.
"No," was all he offered before shoving past me.
"Well... what happened? How did he..."
"Drop it, Harley." He grabbed a pack of cigarettes from the side table and slammed them into the heel of his palm.
I stared at him as he took one out then slipped the smokes into his jacket pocket. I barely recognized this man anymore. He never used to be this closed off and hostile toward me. He was hiding something. Something big. I'd seen my first dead body tonight, and everyone's first reaction was to pack up and run. That wasn't right. In fact, it was very, very wrong.
"Drop it? Exactly what the fuck am I supposed to drop, Frank?" The shock was giving way to desperation. "Chuck is dead! What happened to him? Why are we not calling the cops? I don't understand how you can be so calm about all this."
Frank didn't say a word. He straightened his jacket and grabbed my backpack from the bed. It clicked. In that moment, watching him not even give a damn that his friend was dead, I knew exactly how he was keeping so calm.
"Oh my God. You did it, didn't you?"
He looked at me then. It was brief, a mere flash of narrowed eyes, but it was enough. I started towards him, not sure what I was going to do when I reached him.
"You told me nothing was going to happen. That you guys were just going to talk to him." My throat was tight. He continued to ignore me.
I wanted to grab h
im and force him to look at me. If I stood my ground for a change, then maybe I could finally get some answers from him. I reached out for him again as I snapped, "Frank!"
He grabbed me. Hard. Fast. His fingers gripped painfully into the meat of my arms, and he spun me around so that my back crashed against the door. It knocked the wind out of me, stunned me. Ow.
"Shut up!" he shouted less than an inch from my face. "Just... Shut. Up."
I don't know if it was shock from hitting the wall, or that Frank had been the one to do it, but I shut up. My lips pressed hard together, and I just stared at him. I stared at the face of the man I was beginning to wonder if I really knew at all.
"Chuck's dead. I don't want to talk about it now. I... can't talk about it right now." His grip and his face softened and the roiling violence inside him seemed to be ebbing away. He swallowed hard. "We don't have time. We have to get out of here. I need to get you away from here, now, Harley. Let me get us safe, get us somewhere where I can think again, and I'll explain."
He let go of one arm and I flinched as he pressed his hand to my cheek and his forehead to mine. His breath came out in a dry sob that turned into a bitter laugh. I didn't see anything funny about this. I had so many questions, and he just gave me so many non-answers. What I did know was something not good was happening. Whether it was happening to Frank or happening because of him was something I'd have to find out in time. But for now, in this moment, he looked desperate, afraid, and in shock. Whatever was coming after us he wanted me away from it.
"Please."
That one word spoke volumes to me. He didn't use it often. Sometimes it seemed like it was a special little word he used only for me, and even that was rare. To stand here pleading to me to go with him—it was the most vulnerable he’d allowed himself to be to me for a while. A long while.
"Okay," I said, finally. "But once we get wherever we're going you talk to me. I need to know what I'm doing in all this."
That was brutal honesty. I needed to know why I should stay with them. Why I should throw my life away to run with Frank and everyone else knowing that they could just leave someone like Chuck dead in a run-down motel?
I went with them for answers and because Frank needed me. For whatever reason, he needed me. The question was, why?
Deny the Moon Page 4