by A. J. Lape
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Note from the Author
Also by A. J. Lape
About the Author
Copyright © 2019 by A. J. Lape
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
For the verbs in the world
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To all those “wind beneath my wings” people (Qamber Designs, Debbie, Heather, Melanie, Jeff, Lavinia, and Angela), thank you for sticking around for another release. I couldn’t do it without you; And to all those in law enforcement who allowed me to bend your ear. Thank you so much for your patience and expertise; And finally to the Lord, fans, and my family…I love you beyond words. Thank you for the endless support.
Chapter 1
I’D RATHER SHOVE MY FACE IN A CAMPFIRE.
When I make it to the Pearly Gates, I have a few questions: what’s in Area 51, who killed Marilyn Monroe and the Black Dahlia, and is “Bohemian Rhapsody” considered the greatest song of all time?
Right then, I wanted to know why my next customer was stranger than a hairless cat.
Tugging my keys from the ignition, I retrieved my red insulated pizza carrier and exited my 4Runner. Early Friday morning, it was the end of my shift as the night delivery driver for Rollo’s Ugly Pizza. As luck would have it, the delivery was close to the pizza shop, so I would have a short trip back to settle up receipts and then on to the room I rented from my boyfriend’s grandparents. Truth was, I might’ve employed the luck of the Irish because the delivery was to Clyde Sargent.
Sargent rang up Ugly Pizza every weekend for a fourteen-inch Rollo’s Revenge. The oddity here was that it wasn’t the official weekend. The sun had barely cracked open an eye. Any other time, I would ask why the change up, but my brain power, as it were, was solely trying to keep me conscious.
Stepping up onto his porch, I rapped my knuckles on the door in a three-tap. Sargent’s lips were curled around a Marlboro Light when he cracked open his door. Short and dweebish, he was naked except for white boxers, and his dark hair was gelled back with a copious amount of pomade. Going soft at the midsection, his body was out of proportion because his arms had the muscles of a serious bodybuilder with legs the width of a prepubescent boy. The cherry on top was a nose resembling the snout of a pig. I’d lay money he had no love life.
“That pizza a Rollo’s Revenge?” he clipped, inhaling so deeply his cigarette turned red on the end.
I called up my Ugly Pizza cheer. “Yup, complete with spinach, feta, garlic, white sauce, and fresh tomatoes.”
He knit his brows together as though I was the biggest liar on the planet. “Shape of a gun?” he verified, his voice laced with suspicion.
I inwardly rolled my eyes. A cardinal rule on the nightshift was that people didn’t have their health on their minds. Ugly Pizza regulars were regulars because they liked the taste of the food. For an upcharge, they could have their pizza in a requested shape, and Sargent recently had a fascination with firearms. “Yes. The crust is in the shape of a 9mm that can’t wait for you to take a bite out of it.”
I added a counterfeit smile, hoping for a large tip.
His brows furrowed even more, and he scratched his chest hair—alternating with his backside, giving me a glimpse of every nook and cranny imaginable. “My ex is letting someone else take a bite out of her these days,” he snarled. “She’s a liar, whore…”
I bleeped out the words at the third profane comparison, but he’d definitely covered all the bases. Unzipping my green money bag, I collected his cash and pondered Sargent’s backstory. His girlfriend dumped him some time in the last few months and shacked up with a man in an apartment across the street. Sargent wasn’t taking the defeat well. In fact, he’d set up a telescope in a window, conveniently aimed in the direction of her new home.
My eyes shifted toward the window—yup, still there.
“You were on TV last weekend,” he grunted. A question was in his voice.
I’d run from a man trying to shoot me, pulling another man the shooter had shot to safety. The LA nightly news caught the incident on tape. “Yes,” I said.
“Exciting, huh?”
Actually, it had been exciting, but I kept my answer short and to the point. “No,” I lied.
“Want to talk about it?” He grinned.
“I’d rather shove my face in a campfire,” I mumbled. There was an evilness in Sargent’s grin, and the last thing I would do was give a 411 to anyone with crocodilian incisors. Besides, I was exhausted, and making my mouth work seemed way too hard. After I slept off my shift, I would fly to Florida to watch my boyfriend play football at the University of Florida. It was the annual Orange and Blue Debut, which concluded spring practices with the first team offense and defense going against the second team. My boyfriend, Dylan Taylor, was a star attraction and had been since freshman year.
“I shot someone once,” he muttered.
Dear, God. I’m a psychopath magnet.
Quickly counting out three dollars and twenty-two cents, I placed it in Sargent’s open palm, getting the feeling I needed to back out of the conversation. Here was the thing though. If the man was in the middle of a confession, shouldn’t I document it? I blew out a gust of wind, forcing my mind to wake all the way up. “So are we talking murder one, murder two, involuntary manslaughter?” I asked while I removed his pizza and placed it in his arms.
“It was a hunting accident,” he said.
“Oh, okay. Accidents are different. Did the man live?”
“Depends on your definition of living.” Very philosophical response.
“So did you end someone’s life or not?” I twisted my face into a frown. “And if you did, was it on purpose?”
He took a long drag on his cig. “Maybe I’m not in control of things that are on purpose.” Cue the Black Sabbath music. “Hey, did you know a guy died in the middle of this street last week?” he added. “A car hit him while he was jogging.”
“People die every day. It’s horrible.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry I missed it. I talked to him once. He thought he was better than everyone else.”
“Six feet of earth makes us all equals,” I said, quoting an Italian proverb. “So back to the murder thing. Did you intentionally kill someone or not?”
All of a sudden, Sargent’s face spaced out, like he did a mental rewind of the event while performing a what-exactly-can-I-say thing in his mind. “Why don’t you just keep the change?” he muttered, thrusting the money from his hairy palm back in my face.
“Is that a bribe?” I inquired. “Because if you just bribed me, that’s only three dollars and twenty-two cents. A bribe needs to be larger than that for it to be taken seriously.”
“Three dollars and twenty-three cents,” he said, correcting me. “You gave me an extra penny.”
You a-holllllllle.
Keeping the money, I hustled back to my car, backward walking as I went, having no desire for a bullet to strike my spine. I’d relocated to Los Angeles, California, to become a
police officer. Dodging wayward or intentionally fired bullets was a scenario I would have to get used to in six months. But I had no plans to die delivering a pizza. When it was my time to go, I wanted to die with explosions detonating around me and fighter pilots doing a flyover—something that would at least look good in an obituary.
Most didn’t suspect that when they spotted a five-foot-ten, green-eyed blond cruising the streets. Then again, I’d never fit the prototype of your traditional girl. Not able to attend the academy until I was twenty and a half years old, I’d become a delivery driver for Rollo’s Ugly Pizza to make ends meet. It wasn’t a glamorous job, but it did have its perks of teaching me the ins and outs of the city.
Why did I want to deliver pizzas when my mentor, LAPD Captain Lincoln Taylor, had offered me every job under the sun? It had been my experience if you didn’t know the pitfalls of the way the other side lived, then you could fall victim to the same temptation. I’d chosen to be out with the people, see how they lived, hear what they said, and above all…find a way to befriend or defuse when they veered from a sane orbit.
What morsels of wisdom had I gained delivering pizzas?
The biggest thing was that people didn’t understand the difference between want and need.
It was Hollywood. Everyone needed a good body to be taken seriously and was on the fad diet of the month. But when the late-night munchies hit when you didn’t make a producer’s short list, everyone wanted to binge eat.
Pretty much every other scenario in life could be filtered through the want versus need paradigm. When people didn’t get what they wanted—or felt they deserved—they either hustled harder or acted out, oftentimes taking it for themselves by any means deemed necessary.
My late-night shift punctuated this philosophy by reintroducing me to murder when I found a customer with half his face on his TV screen, complements of a bullet to the back of the head. He’d been caught up in a love-triangle-gone-bad, and his murderer decided to take the competition out of play. I eventually solved that case, but it made me an overnight phenom in the pizza business when the murderer chased me back to my workplace on a revenge tour. That attempt on my life had been captured on television, as Sargent evidently had viewed. Farfetched? Not really. It was Hollywood. Anything was possible if you had a good scriptwriter and someone with deep enough pockets to finance your vision. Was I traumatized? In one word, no. I’d seen more than my fair share of corpses and had been instrumental in bringing their murderers to justice. This last case, though, left me inescapably intertwined with an enemy from my past.
An enemy—i.e., an international crime syndicate called AVO—who’d had me on its radar since sophomore year of high school.
How were we intertwined? The Head Padre of the West Coast, or regional leader of this organization, was the individual who’d rescued me from the man who’d attempted to shoot my brains out. Why the vested interest in keeping me alive? Especially when I’d given his syndicate a proverbial headache while in high school? In another strange twist of fate, that West Coast Padre, AKA Twenty Bucks, kidnapped a friend of mine and held him as collateral to force another friend into paying a gambling debt. When that friend couldn’t produce the green, I stepped up to the plate and personally saw to it that all debts were cancelled. How did I do that? Twenty Bucks commissioned me to deliver one of his enemies to him.
Caveat? The enemy had to be dead.
Gut check.
I had no desire to murder anyone.
Kismet appeared to be on my side because I delivered the enemy’s lifeless body to Twenty Bucks roughly twenty-four hours after he’d enlisted me to do so. Did I kill the man? Indirectly. Let’s just say fate and her weird way of working things out helped that along. I’d hoped—and on some level believed—I would never see Twenty Bucks again, but when he said he owed me an apology because he didn’t think I “had the stones” to kill someone, I joked that a box of chocolates, roses, and a Mylar balloon would make us even. Twenty Bucks interpreted the joke literally, and the day he chose to repay me for being a quasi-murderer was the day that attempt had been made on my life. Twenty Bucks shot the man execution-style who’d left me for dead. I owed the very breath in my body to one of my enemies.
Raise your hand if your head’s reeling…anyone? Yeah, me too.
Mere days from the academy, I worried where that intersection had me headed, but with no ready answers, I employed the one coping mechanism birthed inside me at an early age: I looked at a problem, poked it around a bit, and then filed it in the recesses of my brain only to be brought out when I was dumb enough to kick at it. And why did I oftentimes shove things down, going totally against my psychiatrist’s advice whose mantra was to acknowledge, give it its space, find resolution, and only then move on? Because when you poked at bruises incessantly, all it did was cause the injury to not heal. And why the mental bruise? That went back to a traumatic childhood and series of grievous moments so acute that no amount of counseling in the world fixed what was broken inside me.
Do you know what it feels like to be mere seconds away from someone you love but are too late to stop the unspeakable?
I do.
And it fundamentally changed me.
My mother was murdered when I was nine—right in front of my eyes—and I still felt responsible for something that wasn’t my fault.
It was why I lived on the edge, teetering over a cliff that at times was pure genius and at others, supreme idiocy when I tried to right a wrong. I didn’t live life with a wealth of empirical data—only that loss at an early age shaped a person. It either shaped you for good or shaped you for bad…or left you so lukewarm you were unappealing to both sides of the coin.
No matter what the next few days or weeks would bring, I would soldier on as Darcy Walker—a “dark walker” who went at everything with full heart and soul, slaying the day and capsizing those hypothetical boats that sailed solely to produce harm. Unfortunately, the way destiny occasionally liked to unfold, those I’d recently rubbed shoulders with would like to steal my soul and never give it back.
Chapter 2
DYLAN WAS AS PERSISTENT AND PREDATORY AS THE BLACK MAMBA.
Never underestimate the healing power of staring at a great butt.
Consider that the gospel according to Darcy Walker.
It was Saturday, and thank heavens I’d finally get to see my six-foot-six, two-hundred-and-seventy-pound boyfriend in action…in tight pants…sweaty…and eye candy for the soul.
I’d spent the night before in Orlando, Florida, with my boyfriend’s grandparents, Lincoln and Alexandra Taylor, their adoptive daughter, Pixie, and my boyfriend’s mother and father. Dylan’s parents had a summer home at some swanky O-Town neighborhood, and whenever we visited, we would sleep there and drive to Gainesville to the University of Florida campus, which was about an hour and a half away. While I dozed on the car ride to the stadium, I reminisced about the last three years. I’d logged several thousand miles of air travel, trying my best to keep the love alive with the guy who set my world in motion. Dylan and I saw one another as much as possible, and if we had tons of chemistry in high school, it paled in comparison to the emotions we felt as adults. It was difficult to fathom that only five years earlier I’d fought romantic feelings for the guy who had been my best friend since childhood. But Dylan was as persistent and predatory as the black mamba. If he wanted you, you weren’t going to get away. I loved the fact that after all this time, I could still raise his heart rate with one single kiss and drive him wild when I ran my fingers through his hair. Dylan drove me crazy with desire, and the fact he felt the same was the only thing that got me through the lonely days and nights while he was sequestered in Gainesville alone.
Alone but sought after by every red-blooded American girl who appreciated the tall, dark, and handsome type.
Let me assure you…many a girl wanted to wear red and be his handmaid. Praise be.
We went through too many sorority girls to count, a track
star who was an All-American, and a soccer player who had World Cup hopeful written all over her. The student government president even took part in the love fest, and she could feasibly live on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if she ever set her mind to it. Dylan never spoke personally of them, but there was one power the universe bestowed upon girlfriends. We came specially equipped with radar that would zero in on anyone who was a threat to our happiness. When the waves of insecurity crashed down, I took comfort and a perverse pleasure in one thought: I’d made it known I would eventually carry a gun for a living.
A thought that regularly made me smile.
Regardless of the groupies, I lived for football season. When I wasn’t working, I would show up on game day, proudly sporting the number eighty stamped with Taylor on the back. I rotated between the home and visiting jerseys and the pink T-shirt his mom had given me that had “Property of Dylan Taylor” silkscreened across my Barely-Bs.
This afternoon, Dylan wore blue, the color of the first team. Always wearing my lucky houndstooth hat and orange polka-dot socks, I’d chosen jeans and a long-sleeved white T-shirt, tugging a blue number eighty jersey over top. I’d spoken with Dylan the night before and sent him a good-luck text a few minutes earlier, predicting he would have the game of his life. He hit me right back with words so carnal I clicked a screenshot for private viewing when I was PMSing and feeling insecure.
Three episodes of snoring later, I exited the SUV and headed for The Swamp, the nickname of the U of F stadium. From the moment my feet hit concrete, I could hear the Florida Gator fight song, blaring from the band. Games at The Swamp were a religious experience with some walking miles just to step inside the stadium. Not a single parking space was empty with tailgating tents positioned on every square inch of grass. The smell of hot dogs and charcoal briquettes permeated the afternoon air, and a sea of blue and orange danced amongst the sunny day. The afternoon’s game was televised, but for those in the seats, Gator Nation would be as magnificent and spiritual as a T.S. Eliot poem.
