“So what happens if we get caught?” I asked, pausing the marker over the page.
“We won’t. We’re too fucking smart for that shit. We’ll be careful. We’ll make plans and stick to the plans. Nobody will get in our fucking way. Nobody. Not my stepdad, not my uncle, not teachers, and especially not bitch-ass bullies like Tyler. I ain’t ever getting married. I ain’t ever having a girlfriend. This is just about Preppy and King crawling out of the shit instead of rotting in it.”
“But really, what if we get caught?” I asked. “I’m not talking about by the cops. I’m talking about by your uncle, or anyone else that does the kind of shit we’re talking about doing here. These are rough people. Bad people. They don’t like being messed with.” I knew these kinds of people first hand. More than one dealer had come to our house armed with guns, demanding payment. Mom would settle her debt by taking them into her bedroom and closing the door.
This kid may have just been screwing around, but the more I thought about it the better it all sounded. Living a life without answering to anyone. A life without fear of what someone could do to me or to this little preppy kid, who by the looks of it had enough bullying to last him his whole life.
The idea of growing up and being my own man, the kind of man people didn’t mess with, the kind of man who didn’t take shit from anyone, became more and more appealing as it rolled around in my brain and latched on, taking up residence where I was missing other things the guidance counselors said I was lacking, like a ‘firm sense of right and wrong’. But they were the ones who were wrong. It’s not that I didn’t know the difference.
It’s that I just didn’t care.
Because that’s what happens when you’ve never had anything to care about.
If I was going to take this kid seriously, I needed to know that he wasn’t going to bitch out on me if it all went south. I needed to know he was as serious about the plan as I was getting, so I had to ask, “What really happens if someone gets in our way? In the way of our business? In the way of our plan?”
Preppy held the end of a marker to the corner of his mouth where blood had begun to dry and crust over. For a moment, he stared over my head, deep in thought. Then, he shrugged and locked his eyes onto mine.
“We kill them.”
One
King
On the day I was released from prison I found myself tattooing a pussy on a pussy. The animal onto the female part.
A cat on a cunt.
Fucking ridiculous.
The walls of my makeshift tattoo shop pulsed with the heavy beat of the music coming from my homecoming party raging on the floor below. It shook the door as if someone were rhythmically trying to beat it down. Spray paint and posters covered the walls from floor to ceiling, casting a layer of false light over everything within.
The little dark haired bitch I worked on was moaning like she was getting off. I’m sure she was rollin’ because there was no way a tattoo directly above her clit could be anything other than fucking painful.
Back in the day, I could zone out for hours while tattooing, finding that little corner of my life that didn’t involve all the bullshit I had to deal with on a daily basis.
In the past when I’d been locked up, albeit for much shorter periods of time, the first thing on my mind was pussy and a party. But this time the first thing I did when I walked through the door was pick up my tattoo gun, but it wasn’t the same. I couldn’t reach that place of temporary reprieve no matter how hard I tried. It didn’t help that the tattoos people requested were getting dumber and fucking dumber.
Football team logos, quotes from books you know they’ve never read, and wannabe gangsters wanting tear drops on their faces. In prison, the teardrop tattoo represented taking a life. Some of the little bitches who wanted them looked like they couldn’t step on a roach without cowering in the corner and crying for their mamas.
But since the majority of time my clients paid in favors and consisted mostly of bikers, strippers, and the occasional rich kid who found himself on the wrong side of the causeway, I should’ve lowered the bar on my expectations.
But then again it was good to be home. Actually, it was good to be anywhere that didn’t smell like vomit and wasted lives.
My own life had been moving forward at nothing short of full fucking speed ahead ever since the day I’d met Preppy. I’d loved living outside the law. I fed off the fear in the eyes of those who crossed me. The only thing I’d ever regretted was getting caught.
When I wasn’t locked up, I’d spent almost every single day of the twenty-seven years I’d been on the earth in Logan’s Beach, a little shit town on the gulf coast of Florida. A place where the residents on one side of the causeway lived solely to cater to the rich who lived on the other side, in high-rise beachfront condos and mansions. Trailer parks and run down houses less than a mile from the kind of wealth it takes more than one generation to accumulate.
On my eighteenth birthday, I bought a run-down stilt home hidden behind a wall of thick trees, on three acres of land that practically sat under the bridge. In cash. And along with my best friend Preppy, we moved on up to the rich side of town like the white trash version of the motherfucking Jeffersons.
True to our words, we became our own men and answered to no one. We did what we wanted. I turned my drawing into tattooing.
Preppy got bitches.
I fucked. I fought. I partied. I got wasted. I stole. I fucked. I tattooed. I sold dope. I sold guns. I stole. I fucked. I made fucking money.
And I fucked.
There wasn’t a party I didn’t like or that didn’t like me. There wasn’t a chick who didn’t give me the go-ahead move, lifting her hips so I could slide off her panties. I got that shit every single fucking time.
Life wasn’t just good. Life was fucking great. I was on top of the fucking world and no one fucked with me or mine.
No one.
And then it all changed and I spent three years in a tiny windowless cell, studying the changing cracks in the concrete block walls.
When I was done with the purple cartoon cat, I applied salve, covered it with wrap, and disposed of my gloves. Did this girl think that guys would be turned on by this thing? It was good work, especially since I’d been out of commission for three years, but it was covering up my favorite part of a woman. If I undressed her and saw it, I would flip her over.
Which sounded like a good idea. Getting laid would help shake this post prison haze and I could get back to the things that used to be important to me without this lingering sense of dread looming in my conscious.
Instead of sending the girl back out to the party I roughly grabbed her and yanked her down the table toward me. I stood, flipping her over onto her stomach. With one hand on the back of her neck, I pushed her head down onto the table, releasing my belt buckle with the other. I grabbed a condom from the open drawer.
She knew beforehand that money wasn’t the type of currency I was looking for, and I didn’t do free. So I lined up the head of my cock and took her pussy as payment for her new tattoo. Of a pussy.
Fuck my life.
The girl had a great body, but after a few minutes of irritating over-the-top moaning, she wasn’t doing anything for me. I could feel my cock going soft inside her. This wasn’t supposed to be happening, especially not even after years of my right hand and my imagination being my only sexual partners.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
I grabbed her throat with both hands and squeezed, picking up my pace, taking out my frustrations with each rough thrust in rhythm with the heavy beat from the other room.
Nothing.
I was about to pull out and give up.
I almost didn’t notice the door opening.
Almost.
Staring up from my doorway was a vacant pair of doll-like blue eyes framed by long icy-blonde hair, a small dimple in the middle of her chin, a frown on her full pink lips. A girl, no older than seventeen or eighteen, a bit
skinny.
A bit haunted.
My cock stirred to life, dragging my attention back to the fact that I was still pumping into the brunette. My orgasm hit me hard, spiraling up my spine and taking me by complete surprise. I closed my eyes, blowing my load into pussy tattoo, collapsing onto her back.
What the fuck?
By the time I opened my eyes again, the door was closed and girl with the sad eyes was gone.
I’m fucking losing my mind.
I rolled out of and off the brunette who was luckily still breathing, although unconscious from either strangulation or the dope that had made her pupils as big as her fucking eye sockets.
I sat back on my rolling stool and dropped my head into my hands.
I had a massive fucking headache.
Preppy had organized this party for me, and the pre-prison me would’ve already been snorting blow off the tits of strippers. But post-prison me just wanted some food, a good night’s sleep, and these fucking people to get the hell out of my house.
“You okay, boss-man?” Preppy asked, peeking his head into the room.
I pointed to the unconscious girl in the chair. “Come get this bitch out of here.” I ran my hand through my hair, the pulsing of the music making the pounding in my head grow stronger. “And for fucks sake, turn that shit down!” Preppy didn’t deserve my rage, but I was too fucked up in the head to dial down my orders.
“You got it,” he said, without hesitation.
Preppy slid past me and didn’t question the half-naked girl on the table. He hoisted her limp body over his shoulder in one easy movement. The unconscious girl’s arms flailed around on his back, smacking against his back with each step. Before he could get too far, he turned back to me.
“You done with this?” he asked. I could barely hear him over the music. He gestured with his chin to the brunette on his shoulder, a child-like grin on his face.
I nodded, and Preppy smiled like I’d just told him he could have a puppy.
Sick fuck.
I loved that kid.
I closed the door, grabbing my gun and knife from the bottom drawer of the tool box I kept my tattoo equipment in. I sheathed my knife in my boot, and my gun in the waistband of my jeans.
I shook my head from side to side to clear away the haze. Prison will do that to you. Three fucking years sleeping with one eye open in a prison full of people with whom I’ve made both friends and enemies.
It was time to keep some of those friends and call in some of those favors, because there was something more important than my own selfish shit that I needed to take care of.
Someone more important.
Sleep could wait. It was time to go down stairs and make nice with the bikers. I’d avoided doing business with them in any capacity for years even though their VP, Bear, is like a brother to me. Bear tried to get me to join his MC a hundred times, but I’d always said no. I was a criminal who liked my crimes straight up, without a side of organized. But now I needed connections the bikers could provide as well as access to shady politicians whose decisions and opinions could be swayed for a price.
I never cared about money before. It used to be something disposable for me, something I used to fund my I don’t give a fuck lifestyle. But now?
Payoffs to politicians didn’t come cheap, and I was going to need a lot of cash and very fucking soon.
Or I was never going to see Max again.
Two
Doe
Nikki was my one and only friend in the entire world.
And I kind of fucking hated her.
Nikki was a hooker who’d found me sleeping under a bench. I’d unsuccessfully avoided the previous nights downpour and had just shivered and chattered myself to sleep. I’d already been living on the streets for several weeks at that point and hadn’t had a real meal since running away from Camp Touchy-Feely, a nickname I gave the group home I’d been left to rot in. I’m pretty sure Nikki was trying to rob me—or what she thought was a corpse—when she just happened to have noticed I was still breathing.
Frankly, I’m surprised she even bothered with me after realizing I was very much alive.
Not so much living, but alive.
Nikki snorted the last of her blow through a rolled up post-it-note off a yellowed sink that was days away from falling free from the wall. The floor was littered with toilet paper, and all three toilets were on the verge of overflowing with brown sludge. The overwhelming scent of bleach singed my nose hairs like someone doused the room with chemicals to lessen the smell but hadn’t bothered with any actual cleaning.
Nikki tilted her chin up toward the moldy ceiling tiles and pinched her nostrils together. A single florescent light flickered and buzzed above us, casting a greenish hue over the gas station bathroom.
“Fuck, that’s good shit,” she said, tossing the empty baggie onto the floor. Using the wand from an almost empty tube of lip-gloss, she fished out whatever was left and applied it to her thin cracked lips. She then smudged the thick liner under her eyes with her pinky until she nodded in satisfaction into the mirror at her racoon-esque smoky look.
I stretched the sleeve of my sweater down over the heel of my hand and wiped the filth off the mirror in front of me, exposing two things: a spider web crack in the corner and the reflection of a girl I didn’t recognize.
Light blonde hair. Sunken cheeks. Bloodshot blue eyes. Dimple chin.
Nothing.
I knew the girl was me, but who the fuck was I?
Two months ago, a garbage man discovered me in an alley where I had been literally thrown out with the trash, found lying in my own blood amongst a heap of garbage bags beside a dumpster. When I woke in the hospital, with the biggest fucking headache in the history of headaches, the police and doctors dismissed me as a runaway. Or a hooker. Or some hybrid combo of the two. The policeman asking me questions at my bedside didn’t bother to hide his disgust when he informed me that what probably happened was a simple case of a John getting rough with me. I’d opened my mouth to argue but stopped.
He could’ve been right.
Nothing else made any sort of sense.
No wallet. No ID. No money. No possessions of any kind.
No fucking memory.
When someone goes missing on the news, teams of people gather together and form a search party. Police reports are filed and sometimes candlelight vigils are held in hopes the missing would soon return home. What they don’t ever show you is what happens when no one looks. When the loved ones either don’t know, don’t exist…or just don’t care.
The police searched the missing persons reports throughout the state and then the country with no luck. My fingerprints didn’t match any on record, and neither did my picture.
I learned then that being labeled a missing person didn’t necessarily mean I was missed. At least not enough to require any of the theatrics. No newspaper articles. No Channel-Six News. No plea from family members for my safe return.
Maybe, it was my fault no one had bothered to look for me. Maybe, I was an asshole and people celebrated the day I went away.
Or ran away.
Or was shipped down river in a fucking Moses basket.
I don’t fucking know. Anything was possible.
I don’t know where I came from.
I don’t know how old I am.
I don’t know my real name.
All I had in the world was reflected back at me in the bathroom mirror of that gas station, and I had no fucking clue who she was.
Without knowing if I was a minor or not, I was sent to live at Camp Touchy-Feely, where I only lasted a couple of weeks among the serial masturbators and juvenile delinquents. On the night I woke up to find one of the older boys standing at the foot of my bed with his fly unzipped, his dick in his hand, I escaped through a bathroom window. The only thing I left with was the donated clothes on my back and a nickname.
They called me Doe.
As in Jane Doe.
The only differe
nce between me and a real Jane Doe was a toe-tag because what I was doing sure as shit wasn’t living. Stealing to eat. Sleeping wherever I could find cover from the elements. Begging on the side of freeway off-ramps. Scrounging through restaurant dumpsters.
Nikki ran her chewed-off fingernails through her greasy red hair. “You ready?” she asked. Sniffling, she hopped on the balls of her feet like she was an athlete amping up for the big game.
Though it was the furthest thing from the truth, I nodded. I wasn’t ready, never would be, but I’d run out of options. It wasn’t safe on the streets, each night in the open was a literal gamble with my life. And not to mention that if I lost any more weight, I wouldn’t have the strength to fight off any threats. Either way I needed protection from both the elements and the people who lurked around at night before I ended up a real Jane Doe.
I don’t think Nikki was capable of registering the feeling of hunger. Given the option, she chose a quick high over a full stomach. Every single time. A sad fact made obvious by her sharp cheek bones and dark circles under her eyes. In the short time I’d known her, I’d never seen her ingest anything but coke.
I judge her and I feel shitty about it. But something inside me tells me that she’s better than the thing she does. When I’m not extremely irritated with her I feel almost protective of her. I was fighting for my own survival and I wanted to fight for hers, but the problem was, she didn’t want to fight for herself.
I opened my mouth to lecture her. I was about to tell her that she should lay off the dope and change her main priority to food and her overall health, when she turned toward me. There I was, my mouth agape, ready to rain down judgment on her regarding like I was better than her. The truth was that I could’ve been knee deep involved in the same shit before I lost my memory.
I closed my judgmental mouth.
Nikki eyed me up and down, appraising my appearance. “I guess you’ll do,” she said, blatant dissatisfaction in her tone. I refused to cake on makeup or pluck out all of my eyebrows just to draw a thin line in their place like she did. Instead, I’d washed my hair in the sink and used the hand dryer to speed along the drying process. My face was makeup free, but it would have to do, because if I was going to do this, I was determined to do it my way and without looking like Nikki.
King Series Firsts Box Set: King, Lawless & Preppy Part One Page 2
