by A. J. Lape
Lincoln hadn’t shared that her face—or money maker—was in jeopardy. My guess was someone made the executive decision to tell him later. According to Dylan, the attack had happened mere minutes after he and I ended our conversation the night before. Lincoln had known when he met me at 7-Eleven but chose to let me sleep it off.
“Sister Mary Margaret prayed for the both of us when I delivered her pizza,” I told Dylan. “I have a feeling we might’ve been dead if she hadn’t.”
A nurse strolled into Dylan’s room to hang another IV bag. Dylan promised he would phone later right as a text came in on my phone. Glancing to my screen, the notification said it was from Clyde Sargent—I’d placed his name on the unidentified number the night before, assuming it to be him. How are you? it said. Saw the video. Gruesome shit. Can we talk?
I stabbed a hand through my hair. Could this day get any worse? I’d follow up with Sargent later. After I spoke with Jaws first.
When I heard the murmur of his deep bass voice, the tension in my neck eased…just a little.
“Jester, I’m glad you called,” Jaws said “You were on my mind. Listen, I’m traveling for a few days, and there are some things I wanted to cover before I leave.”
“Jaws, I—”
“Hold that thought,” he said in a rare interruption. “I don’t want to forget what I’m saying.”
Jaws never got distracted or off topic. Ergo, he must truly be pressed for time. “Sounds like you anticipate not coming back,” I said. No answer. Apparently, the end-of-your-life thing was going around. I sighed as Jaws dived into the things he wanted to address.
“Number one, do you recall when you asked me to get a PID on the John Doe found in Twenty Bucks’ storage unit?”
“The guy with his knee caps blown off who looked like he’d been run over with a car? Yeah,” I said, recalling that incident that involved Domino and Boozy last year. “He’s starred in a couple of my nightmares.”
Jaws sighed even deeper, telling me he was no closer to a positive identification. “Babe, I have no idea who the poor soul was. The damage was too severe, but just to make you happy, I’ve stored those pics on my mainframe.”
“You have a mainframe?” I inquired with a tad bit of confusion.
Again, no answer on his end. “Now, onto number two, which is Clyde Sargent.” Jaws informed me Sargent and his brother, Lee, were on a hunting trip eight years earlier with a group of friends. Clyde mistook Lee for a deer and shot him in the stomach when he moved. Lee bled out before they could get him to a hospital. “It was just a horrible accident, Jester,” Jaws assured me. “The rest of the party attested to the sequence of events and verified Lee refused to wear blaze-orange, settling for classic camo, which made him be mistaken for a deer. Sounds like Clyde Sargent’s having guilt over something he had no control over,” Jaws murmured. “I’ve even procured the official report on the incident and will email it to you once we hang up.”
I informed Jaws I didn’t need it. I would remember it verbatim. “How do you think he got my number? No one at the Ugly Pizza would ever give something up that personal.”
“I’m thinking he acquired it weeks ago.” Jaws then told me Sargent had worked for a cell phone carrier but had recently resigned. His resignation had not been the result of some probationary period that went bad. He simply had decided to leave their employ.
“What about the guy who supposedly died on his street?”
“No one died on his street either, Jester. Evidently, he has weird conversation-starters. Moving on to Ezra Huxley.”
“I didn’t ask you to find out anything on Huxley.”
“I did that one just because I don’t like the guy. Long story short, he’s clean as a whistle. Got into a few fights in high school, but other than what looks like a bad attitude and weird fascination with firearms, he has no prior record anywhere in the continental U.S.”
I figured as much, or he wouldn’t have made it to the academy. “Thanks. I, uh—guess what... this is hard…wow…I don’t know how to start…maybe I’m in shock…does shock make things taste weird in your mouth?”
Jaws made a funny noise, almost like his blood pressure took a dip, and his body stopped working. “Let me close my door and sit down,” he murmured “I have a feeling this is bad.”
I espoused the cold, hard facts about what had happened to me and likewise to Dylan, Finn, and Willow when Jaws settled. Jaws cursed in between sentences but then went deadly silent. I knew Jaws was Cincinnati mob, but I’d begun to get paranoid he might think hanging around me was a moral hazard. Even mobsters had rules about who they rubbed shoulders with.
“Now I know why my Google alert for you blew up my inbox,” he hissed. “I’m hanging up. I want to see your neck.”
“Trust me. It looks bad. No need to—”
Still, he ended the call and FaceTimed. I let it ring, not wanting to endure another lecture about something I had no control over. Right before the call buzzed with its sixth trill thingy, I connected. Jaws had a split second of impatience because he knew I’d been stalling. It quickly disappeared when he caught the fingerprint impressions and swollen bruising around my larynx. “Sonovabitch,” he cursed. “The asshole nearly choked you to death. So you swear to me he’s really dead?”
“You could drive a MAC truck through his chest.”
Jaws was playing with a controlled rage, but the contempt in his voice said the control part was almost unleashed. “Good riddance,” he hissed. While Jaws called up the YouTube video, I gave him a blow-by-blow one more time, but this go-around he cut in every three sentences or so, prodding for more explicit details and processing as he went. “Left the academy, right?” he asked.
“Anthony was the one who accidentally discharged his weapon. I assumed he left on his own, but perhaps they kicked him out? I didn’t question it.”
Jaws rubbed his hand down his face, his whiskey-colored eyes growing pained. “At the risk of sounding like a broken record, would it do any good if I begged you to quit the academy, move home, and work for me?” he said when I’d finished.
Again, doing what? And Jaws begging? Seriously, I had no visual. And furthermore, a working relationship with Jaws, where I clocked in every day and drew a paycheck, would never be totally legal. “Why does everyone want me to quit?” I said, tears spilling to my cheeks. “I can do this. Everyone’s making me feel like I can’t do it.”
His voice softened. “Are you crying?”
“My eyes are just sweating.”
His gaze shot through me like a physical embrace. “Jesus, don’t cry. I don’t think you can’t do it. Far from it. I’m just…Babe, please...I can protect you here. I’m worried about you being so far away from me. There are things…” He skidded his words to a halt, scrubbing his hand down his face once more.
I should’ve died a million times by now, but my curse just could be to live through it all and see others die around me. “I’m holding on to my preferred plans, but I’ll let you know if I decide to bail.”
He exhaled a big gust of air. “Then be extra diligent, understood?”
Jaws didn’t say anything for a while, and then I heard classical music kick on in the background. He played that particular selection a lot. It had a haunting violinist solo I had never quite decided was beautiful or the precursor to a crime spree. “What do you have planned for the day?” he said.
“After I drive to Sargent’s house to call him on his behavior, I’m off to see my therapist.”
“Someone with a good reputation, I hope.”
“Yeah. Krispy Kreme Doughnuts.”
Chapter 4
DEFLECT. DEFLECT. DEFLECT.
Clyde Sargent didn’t answer my knocking, and the woman in the apartment next to him said she’d spotted him leaving with suitcases earlier that morning. I wouldn’t have guessed that scenario, but I was at a 50-50 on whether his preoccupation with me was over. It was feasible his latest text had been a goodbye sort of thing. If so, then s
ayonara. I had the academy, not to mention Kirby York, on my plate, which was more than enough psycho for anybody.
Speaking of York, I’d asked Jaws to obtain his official arrest report before we disconnected. Jaws surprisingly hadn’t called back when he said he would, though, and my impatience made me do something really stupid.
After I went through the drive-thru for some McLovin’, I hit up the mob for answers.
Driving to the Century City district, I threw my car into park and snagged my Coke and McDonald’s bag, swinging my hip into the car door to close it. Marching up to Alejandro Gutierrez’s building, I struck the little green talk button and announced myself as Jester. I was definitely hitting the guardrails here, but I needed answers, and Twenty Bucks could be the man to supply them.
I found myself sitting in his office five minutes later, sharing two cheeseburgers and a large order of fries in front of his humongous mahogany desk. Twenty Bucks gazed at me with eyes so dark and primitive, I wasn’t positive he even had pupils. Couple them with a scar on his upper lip, and he held the patent on the word “omen.” Normally, an appearance such as his would have me inking the man’s name on my personal hit list, but he was just this side of sociopath, and occasionally I needed people like that around.
We bumped our drinks together in a toast. “When I invited you to dinner, I had planned to pay, Jester.”
I lifted my cup to my lips, taking a sip. “So you’re a traditionalist.”
“I am.” He paused. “Too soon for a date?”
“Yeah, we’re not there yet.”
Twenty Bucks appreciated the allure of the opposite sex. I recognized his sexual energy from our last meeting. He lifted the can of Dr. Pepper to his lips, and let’s put it this way—if I were that soda, he was guzzling me down.
I bit into my burger when he placed his can on the table and leaned forward. “Then why are you here?” he murmured in a deep voice. “When I know what happened to you last night.”
My eyebrows climbed. “You know?”
“I know everything that happens in this city.” Twenty Bucks had zero accent—shocking since I suspicioned he hadn’t been born on U.S. soil.
“You saw the video?” I inquired incredulously.
“I watched it but also went to Ugly Pizza earlier to see if I could find out anything.”
Twenty Bucks had been sniffing around my work, which made me as paranoid as Richard Nixon. So I’d almost been choked to death. No big deal. The way I saw it, I was a simple human being. I enjoyed Coke, cookies, and long romantic walks to the refrigerator. That was the gist of my complexities.
He stared. I stared back. As with Jaws, I believed the man wanted to protect me. I didn’t know what to do with that, so I did nothing.
Slowly pushing to his feet, Twenty Bucks came out from behind his desk and sat on its edge in front of me. I’d worn my hair down. Lifting it from my neck, he appraised the bruises—lightly touching the swelling down the column of my neck—and swallowed. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “It must be difficult to speak.”
I used my standard line while I slid a fry through ketchup. “I’ve had worse happen to me.”
When he narrowed his eyes, it reminded me of being in my therapist’s office when we talked about the loss of my mother and the resulting fallout. That remembered pain surpassed the immediate discomfort and traveled straight to my soul. My mother was not a subject I wanted to broach—if only in my head. Painfully clearing my throat, we rehashed the tragic but almost murderous case of Eugene Anthony, both of us amazed he’d made it through the academy’s psych evaluation. After we batted a couple of theories around, I gave him my experiences with Kirby York and how he’d ultimately stabbed Dylan, Finn, and beat the living daylights out of Willow on the same night. Twenty Bucks walked back to his seat, his thoughts deeper than a bottomless pit. He didn’t like how York raised a hand to a woman. Chivalry evidently wasn’t dead on the mob.
To put a face with a name, I pulled up the video of Dylan and York fighting, hitting the play button.
After a few moments, Twenty Bucks murmured, “Your boyfriend is very good at what he does, Jester. He’s used his fists before.” Something in his gaze longed to inquire how Dylan had become such a good fighter. Did he know I’d been kidnapped? What Dylan had endured and ultimately done to get us out?
“Dylan excels at everything he does,” I said. Twenty Bucks paused the screen to get a better look at York. “Can you find out all you can on the guy?” I requested.
Stuffing another fry in his mouth, Twenty Bucks zoomed in on the video, squinting. “I need my readers,” he grumbled.
A mob boss with readers. I’d seen it all.
He opened and closed all the drawers on his desk. When he couldn’t locate them, we tore the room upside down until I found them in his private restroom next to a Forbes magazine. He might be a Padre, but I swear, he read on the toilet like every other middle-aged man in the world…while he studied the stock market. A total mystery.
While he finished off his burger, he watched the video half a dozen times when he suddenly paused it. His frown tightened. “Jester, the bottom part of this tattoo insinuates he’s in a gang.” He tapped the screen to York’s forearm. York had been wearing a black shirt, sleeves rolled to his forearms that evening. I hadn’t noticed any ink, but then again, my mind had been on his wallet. Peeking out from underneath his shirt was the bottom part of what could be three half-moons. “Those tattoos are much like AVO’s,” he said. “They don’t signify he’s—"
“In the extermination business?” I said, cutting him off.
He slid over a dark eye. “No, they do not signify that, but he is part of collections, and collections, as you know, can sometimes be just as deadly.”
Twenty Bucks and I only knew one another because a man who headed up his proverbial collections business went rogue and shot me.
He was dead…rest his evil, rat-ass soul.
“Get me a photo of the entire tattoo, and I will tell you for certain which, if any, gang he is in,” he murmured.
“I’m not sure how to do that. What are you thinking anyway?”
He snatched two more french fries. “I’m not going to worry you with hypotheticals. Let me ask around, and then I can give you the facts.” He paused, shoved the fries in his mouth and found a yellow post-it note. “Gainesville, correct?” he mumbled while chewing. I nodded while I bit a fry in two. “There was a shakeup in the organizational structure on the East Coast a few years back.”
Twenty Bucks had eaten most of the fries. Snagging the last two, I shoved them in my mouth, chased by a generous bite of cheeseburger. “Shakeups usually mean someone wasn’t doing their job,” I said between mouthfuls. He shrugged, noncommittal…whatever the heck that meant. “So how does that have anything to do with me?”
“That shakeup happened in Florida territory.” He called up the video once more. “I can’t tell from these tattoos to be one hundred percent, but my contact will definitely recognize the kid’s face and if he’s one of theirs. He looks like an angry young man.”
That coming from a mob boss.
But I did agree. York was definitely the angry type…if only for the sake of being angry.
“I know in my gut he’ll come back for Dylan. And I’m scared. I’m scared because Dylan has a tendency to live his life like he’s unstoppable and that the good guys always win.”
“If that was always the case, I wouldn’t be sitting where I am.”
Did that suggest the man had some form of a conscience or just a mere awareness of what he’d done and his capabilities? Curiosity knocked on my brain. “Exactly how did you find yourself on LA’s throne anyway?”
“That’s a story for another day.” An answer Jaws would’ve given…and had. I studied Twenty Bucks’ office, spotting a worn black leather moto jacket. It was scuffed on the back and arms, almost like someone was wearing it when they wrecked their dirt bike…or jumped off a cliff. It lay neatly over the back
of a leather chair, almost in reverence. And dare I say, Holy? I found myself ducking, wondering if God’s henchmen would throw a lightning bolt straight for my butt since I’d even uttered the H-word in Twenty Bucks’ office.
“Reminiscing about the last time you were here?” he asked.
“How can I not? Nice jacket,” I said, pitching my chin toward it. “Looks like it fits a woman.”
He inhaled sharply. “It belonged to a woman very hard to forget.”
“Belonged? As in she’s not coming back to get it?” I pushed.
No answer. But something flashed in his eyes I couldn’t put a name to. The air grew thick with emotion. What was it? Remorse? Sympathy? Affection?
An expensive crystal bowl sat beside the jacket on an adjacent end table, filled with an array of hard candy in red, yellow, and white wrappers. Pushing out of my chair, I traveled to the dish, horrified to discover every piece was hard candy. “This is old people’s candy,” I grumbled, turning my nose up in horror. “No chocolate? Hershey’s Kisses?”
Twenty Bucks lifted his head, watching me plunge my fingers in and out of the bowl, dropping them one by one in an exaggerated disgust. “Would you like some old people’s candy?” he asked, using the formal voice of a blue blood.
“My father told me to be scared of strangers who offer me candy.”
His head went back down to the video. “How is Murphy?” he murmured.
I swallowed a mouthful of dread. He knew my father’s name. I faltered my way back to my chair, pondering exactly what that implied. If he knew of my father, then he knew of my sister…and that my aunt and uncle were hotshot attorneys in Cincinnati. Surely, he knew that meant they wouldn’t approve of our relationship…and yet, here we were.
“Are you square with Raymond?” I inquired, plopping down and nervously wanting to change the subject.
“I am.”
Twenty Bucks had taken Raymond White’s baseball card collection and some of his family mementos as collateral until Raymond’s youngest son, Boozy paid a debt. “Did you give him back his family mementos and baseball card collection?”
