I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and centered myself before speaking.
“I’ve got a better idea,” I told him. “You turn around and go back to the slimy cunt you crawled out of, and I won’t blow your dick off and shove it into the sewer. I’m pretty sure this particular sewer flows right up to the river. You know the river, right? It’s where all of us who own your sorry asses work.”
The older guy’s eyes opened wide, but the younger one just looked pissed.
“I think fuckin’ you up would be a lesson you don’t soon forgit!” he sneered.
“Evan,” Lia whispered as her hand gripped my bicep, “just give them what they want. It’s okay.”
“Fuck that,” I spat. “I’ll give them what they fucking deserve.”
“You need to listen to yo bitch,” the kid with the knife started to say as the other one tried to stop him.
It was too late, though. I’d already had enough.
I pulled my Beretta out, pointed it between the younger kid’s eyes, and flicked the safety off. I could hear Lia’s quiet gasp and watched the younger guy as he started to take a step back. He seemed confused for a moment, and I thought he might actually be stupid enough to take a stab at me.
“Go ahead, you piece of shit,” I said calmly. My eyes stayed locked with his. “Take a swing. I’ll make sure my bullet doesn’t hit you fatally so you can watch me castrate you with that piece of shit blade. Dick to throat, I’ll show you what a cut really looks like, and then I’ll slam my fist through your ribcage and fuck the hole I made. What do you think of that?”
There was a long moment of silence as the kid’s eyes got bigger and bigger. He didn’t seem able to move or speak.
“We cool,” the older one finally said as he cleared his throat and took a step back. He smacked his friend on the arm with the back of his hand. “Come on and let these nice folks git on wid der business.”
They backed up slowly until they were a good twenty feet away, then turned around and quickly made their way back across the street toward some nasty-looking liquor store. I took a calming breath and turned to face an ashen Lia.
“Come on,” I said quietly. “Let’s get inside before any other trash wanders up, okay?”
She could only nod dumbly.
“You fuckin’ mo-ron,” the older guy was saying as the pair reached the other side of the street, “don’t you know who dat is?”
I grabbed Lia by the arm and headed for the motel entrance before the gang-bangers started yelling out parts of my resume for everyone to hear. She’d already seen and heard enough from my own mouth. It wasn’t something I wanted her to see, but I wasn’t about to risk her getting hurt. Demonstrating exactly who I was ensured her safety.
They knew better than to mess with the mafia. We’d put them in their place before, and we’d do it again. Even though I was in their territory, they still knew power when they saw it.
Lia didn’t say a word until after we’d checked into the motel, found the right door, and hauled our bags inside.
“Are you going to explain that to me?” Lia asked quietly as she sat down on the end of the bed.
“Explain what?”
“For fuck’s sake!” Lia stood up and put her hands on her hips as she glared at me. “Explain all of this shit! What are we doing here, and where are we going? What the hell was that testosterone display outside? Where the fuck did that gun come from?”
“I wasn’t going to let them mug us,” I said with a shrug. “This isn’t a great neighborhood, so I was prepared to deal with it. I was in the Marines, so yeah—I have a gun.”
“Don’t you bullshit me,” she snapped. “That was hardly a little display of self-defense. I am not stupid, and I’m not blind!”
I sighed and dropped my ass to the edge of the little desk and looked her in the eyes. I knew immediately that she wasn’t buying any of this shit and that holding off on answering her questions wasn’t going to work much longer.
“That guy out there—he knew who you were.”
I rolled my eyes.
“How did he know you, Evan?”
I didn’t respond. I didn’t even look at her.
I really didn’t know what to say.
“Fuck this,” she snapped. She stood up, grabbed her bag, and headed to the door.
Moving quickly, I stood between her and the door and placed my hands on her shoulders.
“You can’t leave,” I said.
“Like hell I can’t!” she retorted. “Am I a prisoner or something? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No, but it’s not safe for you in this area by yourself. You might have noticed that already.”
Her eyes tried to burn little holes in my forehead.
“I think I’ll be fine,” she said. “I think all I have to do is tell anyone who tries to fuck with me that I’m Evan Arden’s girlfriend, and they’d just leave me alone, wouldn’t they? Or do you have some code name I should use instead?”
Fuck.
She kept telling me she wasn’t stupid, and she was right. I still hadn’t given her enough credit though. She kept catching me off guard with her ability to infer the relationship between my words and the actions of others. Maybe I was just used to chicks who knew enough about what was going on to turn a blind eye to their surroundings, and Lia didn’t fit into that category. She was trying to figure this shit out, and she knew how to put the pieces together.
It wasn’t helping.
Lia must have tired of me staring at her and tried to push past me again. I wouldn’t let her, and she glared nuclear bombs at me from her irises.
“Get out of my way,” she growled.
“I can’t,” I replied with a shake of my head.
“You won’t,” she snapped back. “That isn’t the same. I’ve already gotten rid of one dickhead who spent a lot of time controlling me, Evan. I didn’t do that just to pick up another one.”
“Lia, I can’t let you go out there. It’s dark and it’s the fucking murder capital of the world out that door. You are not going out there!”
“Bullshit.”
“You want me to bring it up on the fucking internet? You go look up this neighborhood!”
She paused for a moment and glanced from me to the door and back again. She took a breath and clenched her teeth together. The tension in her arms and legs told me exactly what she was thinking: one, she didn’t believe me, and two, she was considering punching me right in the face to get by.
There was an asshole inside of me who wanted to tell her to just fucking go and leave her on her own. She was making all of this too difficult, and I didn’t have the time to fuck around with it. It was the same part of me that took over when I fixed my scope between someone’s eyes and pulled back on the trigger. That part of me, however, apparently wasn’t in control.
“I need you,” I said quietly.
“What? So you can sleep?”
It was snarky and sarcastic, and I deserved it.
“Yes, but not just that.”
Her look softened, and she dropped her hands from her hips.
“I mean it,” I said with a softer tone. “I can’t let you go out there by yourself. Fuck, I shouldn’t be out there, but it was the best option for now. In the morning…”
I paused, felt my heart start beating faster in protest but continued anyway.
“In the morning, if you still want to, I’ll take you to the airport and buy you a plane ticket to wherever you want to go. You don’t ever have to see me again, but I can’t let you wander around this area of town at night. You wouldn’t last an hour.”
Her eyes locked with mine again.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” she finally said.
I nodded, and she dropped her head and shook it slowly as she turned around and walked back toward the bed. She turned abruptly and yelled at me.
"I don't know what's going on here, but you're scaring me!"
Stepping forward and reaching out with
my hand, I cupped the side of her face and moved in to kiss her. She wasn't going to have any of that, though, and turned her head away as I leaned in. I pulled back and ran my tongue across my lips.
"I'm not trying to scare you."
“Well, you are!”
My stomach tightened up on itself. I couldn’t figure out any way to resolve this with her and didn’t have the slightest idea what to do or say. My normal reaction to anyone else would have been to sit down, shut up, and I would do what I needed to do. With her, everything was ridiculously complex. None of my usual responses worked.
“You need to stop with all the cryptic shit,” she informed me. Her hands moved up to pull out the scrunchie holding up her ponytail. I tried not to get too distracted by the way her hair fell around her shoulders, but all I could think of was running my fingers through it.
“I told you; I’ve never done the boyfriend thing before. I have no idea what to do here.”
“Start by telling me what the hell is going on,” Lia said.
I sighed and rubbed my fingers into my eyes.
“I don’t know if that’s really the best way.”
“It’s a start.”
It was more likely to be an end, which was what had me on edge. The thing was, I was afraid she was going to walk out. I even recognized it as fear though I might not have admitted it to anyone else. If she left and I never saw her again, I wasn’t so sure I’d survive. I had to do something to keep her with me a little longer.
“Tell me about you,” I said. It was my last ditch effort to try to delay what was coming. “I hardly know anything about you, either. You tell me about you, and then in the morning, I’ll tell you about me.”
It gave me one last night with her and one last morning of waking up with her.
Lia looked skeptical, but I also saw a hint of resignation in her eyes, which allowed me to breathe without my lungs feeling like they were being compressed.
“I don’t think what I have to say is all that interesting,” Lia sighed as she sat down on the edge of the bed again.
I sat down next to her and reached for her hand.
“I still want to know,” I told her. “I’ll get something for us to eat, and then you can tell me, okay?”
Lia took a long breath and nodded her acquiescence.
Auburn Gresham wasn’t an area I’d spent much time exploring in the past, but when gang activity in the area began to push up into Rinaldo’s heroin trade, I’d been part of a group that came down and let them know exactly who was in control in the city. The message had been clear—go ahead and do what you want in the south, but don’t fuck with businesses in the north. We even picked a line—the 47th Parallel. It didn’t quite match Korea, but it still served as an easy reminder. It was based on 47th street, not any line of latitude, but it served its purpose.
During my tenure in the area, I’d found the best pizza place and made friends with the owners.
“Is that who I think it is?”
Jack Anderson leaned over the cash register and stuck out his hand, which I shook. He was a dark-skinned man in his mid-fifties with white hair and stubble around his chin. He’d been running the pizza place since his father passed away in the seventies.
“It’s been a while,” I said with a smile.
“You want the usual?” Jack asked.
“I haven’t been here in nearly a year,” I laughed. I couldn’t believe after all this time the dude still remembered what I wanted on my pizza. He didn’t do the traditional Chicago style, but the guy made the best thin crust and sauce around. “Can it still be referred to as a ‘usual’?”
“Well, I don’t know anyone else who ever orders it,” Jack said. “Face it, Evan, no one else thinks pineapple and mushroom go together.”
We laughed as he put in my order, caught up on some neighborhood shit, and then said our goodbyes as he handed me my pizza in a cardboard box with a stack of napkins on top. I hoofed it back to the motel and Lia. She gave me a strange look when I told her what was on the pizza but seemed to like it once she tried it.
“So, where were you born?” I asked.
“Dallas,” she said. “My father worked for AT&T when I was young. When my parents divorced, he and my mom split custody while I was growing up. When mom got an offer for a new job in Phoenix, Dad didn’t want to be that far from me, so he quit his job and moved to Arizona as well. He started working with the Navajo Nation to set up their computer networks.”
“What does your mom do?” I asked.
“She’s in the financial business.” Lia took another bite of pizza, chewed for a bit, and then put the slice back in the box. “I know she works in information security, but I honestly don’t quite understand it all. She keeps hackers out of their systems, basically.”
I snorted.
“Is that funny?”
I shook my head.
“I just don’t think it’s very successful,” I said. “There are a lot of people out there who are very good at getting past the security folks.”
“I’m sure that’s true, but she tries. It’s pretty good money, at least, so she could afford to set aside money to send me to school. I still haven’t managed to get a degree anywhere, of course, because that was about the time Dad died.”
“How did he die?”
“Cancer,” she said with a shrug. “It fucking sucked.”
I watched her closely, noticing her fingers twitch and her eyes blink rapidly a few times to hold back the moisture forming in them.
“You were with him,” I said.
“I had just finished high school when he was diagnosed. They said he had maybe a year, but he didn’t make it past eight months even with all the chemo and shit. I took care of him because there really wasn’t anyone else, and William did all the business stuff while he was sick so we could afford medical bills.”
“So your fiancé worked for your dad?”
“Yes, for about six years.”
“While you were in high school.”
“We started dating when I was fifteen.”
“How old was he?”
She blushed a little, and my suspicions about him being quite a bit older were confirmed before she answered.
“He was twenty four at the time.”
“Around here, we would’ve called you jail bait,” I said.
“Only if the parents pressed charges,” she said, and I knew she was right. If the parents were okay with it, well, at least one parent, then the law would turn a blind eye.
“What did your mom think?”
“She didn’t like it,” Lia said. “She didn’t like Will, anyway, and definitely didn’t like me being with him.”
“Just because of the age thing or something else?”
“I think just age initially, but I also think she realized, long before I did, that he wasn’t quite what he pretended to be.”
“You mean before he threw you out of a moving car and left you for dead?”
Lia glanced at me with dark eyes and then looked down at her hands.
“Something like that.”
“Have you seen him since then?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
She looked back up at and me and bit her lip for a moment.
“He was there at my mom’s house.”
“After I dropped you at the bus station?”
Lia nodded.
“What happened?”
“The usual,” she responded. She seemed to want to leave it at that, but I wouldn’t let her. Eventually she told me the rest. “He was drunk; Mom was yelling, and I was stuck between them. The major difference was that I had decided I wasn’t going to do it anymore.”
“Do what?”
“Put up with him and his crap!” she growled. “He could have really hurt me when he pushed me out of that car, and then he just left me there! I wasn’t going to listen to him go on about how he came right back and was so sorry and spent hours looking for me—it was bullsh
it, and I wasn’t going to listen to it!”
She took a deep breath before she went on.
“I told him I’d found someone else.” Lia glanced at me, seeming embarrassed for a moment. “I know we didn’t really…well, it’s not like we committed to each other or anything, but for the first time since high school, I realized there were other options out there besides Will and how he treated me.”
She looked up at me, and her eyes began to sparkle with tears.
“It’s all right,” I soothed. “Go on.”
“He didn’t like that answer,” she said with a shrug. “He started yelling, and Mom told him he needed to just leave. She came up near us, and he pushed her away. Then he grabbed my arm and squeezed really hard–”
Lia’s breath caught in her throat, and the tears that had been building up since I stopped her at the door finally cascaded down her cheeks. Dealing with crying chicks was definitely not something within my repertoire, so I went with the only thing I could think of—I grabbed the box of tissues from the bathroom and handed them to her.
Lia wiped her eyes and gripped her fingers around the crumpled tissue as she composed herself.
“I had bruises there for over a week afterwards. Mom started yelling—said she was going to call the police—and that made him let go. I told him we were through and that I never wanted to see him again.”
“What did he do?”
“He laughed. He said I was his, and nothing was going to change that.”
A tickle in the back of my head—one that was rarely wrong—told me that I was going to kill that motherfucker someday.
“He still wasn’t leaving, so Mom ran inside the house and came back out with the phone in her hand. When he realized that she really was calling the cops, he got in the car and left. That was the last I saw him.”
I tried to clear my head enough to listen to the rest of the story, but it wasn’t easy. I didn’t know what the asshole looked like, but I had enough of a vision in my head that I could see myself with the business end of my Beretta in his face. At some point, I was going to have to find a picture of the guy and make all that come true.
Lia continued.
“Mom immediately started quizzing me about the ‘new guy’ and if that meant I really was done with William for good.”