Otherwise Occupied (Evan Arden)

by Savage, Shay

  A quarter.

  Though I rarely admitted such things to myself, I had been doing a decent job of keeping a certain abandoned-in-the-desert brunette out of my thoughts. As long as I kept myself busy, I was fine, but every time I saw a fucking quarter, it was like it all came rushing back to me.

  “Not going to do it,” I told myself as the urge to pick up the coin washed over me.

  A couple of college kids glanced at me and quickly looked away again.

  Fucking awesome. Now I was talking to myself right in front of other people. I stood up and got off the train at the next stop, walked twelve blocks, and then hopped on a bus instead. By the time I got back to my place, Odin was looking like he might actually piss on the carpet.

  “Sorry,” I muttered. “I can’t even blame work this time – I was just fucking around.”

  He sneezed once and then stood by the door as I grabbed his leash. I took him out, then spent a few minutes rubbing his head before I left to meet Jonathan at the bar.

  Sweetwater Bar and Grill wasn’t my kind of place at all – big sports bar with a hundred TVs all around and guys with baseball caps serving your drinks. It was packed both with tourists and locals pretty much ninety percent of the time, which meant the bartenders never really had a chance to talk with anyone. They were quick with the drinks, but the place was just too crowded.

  Jonathan loved it, but he was seriously into football.

  It was the most convenient drinking place to my apartment, though, so I was there often enough. I recognized the bartenders immediately – a girl I liked and a guy I hated. I couldn’t remember the dude’s name. I knew since the day the place opened he was far too busy to do anything other than smile politely and make sure whatever you asked for was poured efficiently.

  Okay, so that was basically his job, but I liked a little more effort.

  The chick was dark-skinned and had a huge mound of braids all over the place. I couldn’t remember her name – only that it started with a “T.” She was a lot friendlier than the guy, and her smiles more genuine, but it was still the same “I’m too busy” vibe I got from the rest of them.

  It was also a total meat-market.

  Jonathan got up to smoke on the porch, and I held onto our ill-gotten table.

  “Hi there!”

  I only glanced at the girl as she sidled up to the booth where I sat. There was a huge line at the door, and I had seen her come in as I was entering. Of course, Jonathan had used some app he wrote on his phone to hack into the waiting list, and his name was up front as soon as a table became available, so we didn’t stand at the door for very long.

  She peeked over the back of the booth, probably making eye contact with the blonde who came in with her before focusing back on me. Her red-lipped smile only annoyed me as she moved closer, leaned over, and made the tops of her boobs stick out of her shirt a little more.

  “Watching the game?”

  “Not a fan,” I answered. I picked up the pint glass of whatever microbrew had been on tap and took a sip.

  “What do you like?” She tried to give me what I assumed was her version of bedroom eyes, but I just couldn’t be bothered. I wasn’t looking to get laid tonight. If I was, and it was going to be her, I’d end up having to buy her drinks all night and spend nearly as much as I did with Bridgett.

  “Go wait for your own table,” I muttered just as Jonathan was getting back. The girl glared at me before stomping off.

  “Hey, dude – she might have had a friend!”

  “So?” I countered.

  “Even Nick would have helped me out there, bro!”

  “Nick would have gone home with her and her friend.”

  “Point taken.” Jonathan sighed, leaned back in the booth, and tapped his fingers on the table top rhythmically to the beat of whatever song was playing. “Didn’t your mama teach you to be nice to girls?

  “I don’t even know who my mama is,” I said as I tipped back my beer.

  Jonathan laughed for a moment, and then looked at my face and the laugh died.

  “Dude – are you serious?”

  “No clue,” I replied. “Never met her. Don’t even have a name.”

  “Man, I’m sorry,” he said. “I had no idea, brother.”

  “It’s okay.”

  The server came back and set his chocolate milk down on the table, and I snickered a bit.

  Jonathan loved chocolate milk; he couldn’t get enough of the stuff. He’d move over to booze soon enough, but he always started the night with a big glass of chocolate milk, usually ordered off a restaurant’s kids’ menu.

  “So who raised ya?” Jon asked. “Your dad?”

  “Nope. Never met him either.”

  “So who then?” he pressed a bit. “I mean, if ya don’t mind my asking – I ain’t tryin’ to pry or whatever.”

  I sipped, considered, and then downed my beer.

  “I was raised in a convent.”

  “With a bunch of nuns?” Jonathan laughed loudly. “Are you serious?”

  “Why do you ask me that?” I looked over at him as I drained the rest of the beer. “When do I bullshit you?”

  “I get ya,” Jon said with a nod. “I just didn’t know.”

  He pulled another cigarette out and lit it right there in the bar. I raised an eyebrow.

  “If they bitch, you’ll be able to order another beer.”

  I shook my head slowly and stared at the top of the table. I inhaled deeply, and wondered if taking up smoking again might help me sleep.

  “So what was that like?” Jon asked.

  I considered for a moment again and figured what the hell? My shrink was only interested in the war shit and had yet to get around to the “tell me about your childhood” shit. He was far more interested in how I was tortured as a prisoner.

  I was still pretty sure the fucker was writing a book.

  “Pretty fucked-up,” I answered honestly. “I was the only guy there except for the one priest who came by every Sunday for Mass.”

  “Seriously?”

  I rolled my eyes at the word.

  “Sorry, bro, it’s just habit. So how’d you end up there?”

  “No one would ever really tell me,” I answered. “When I got older, I figured it was one of the nuns, and they just didn’t want me to know which one. I tried to figure out who it might be, which is when I started watching everyone around me really carefully. I thought if I could read their body language, I’d be able to figure out which one was my mom.”

  “Did you figger it out?”

  “Never did,” I said. “Learned a lot of other shit.”

  I laughed.

  “There was a girl there named Marie.” I recalled the heart-shaped face of the redhead. “She was a couple years older than me, and she’d been sneaking out of the convent at night to meet up with some guy. I found out, and she offered to fuck me to keep quiet.”

  “Did you take her up on it?”

  “That’s how I lost my virginity!” I exclaimed with a grin.

  “Ha! Ha!” Jon laughed. “That’s custom!”

  I finished up my beer, and Jon clacked his fingernails against his chocolate milk glass.

  “I might be able to find out,” Jonathan said quietly. “I mean, they gotta have a birth certificate on file somewhere, right?”

  “I have documents signed by the Mother Superior as my legal guardian according to the State of Ohio,” I told him.

  “What’s the date on it?”

  I glanced up at him and narrowed my eyes.

  “My birth date,” I said. “May fourteen.”

  “Are you sure?”

  The server interrupted us at that point, and we ordered a round of the same microbrew. I rubbed the heels of my hands into my eyes and thought about it. The idea that the date I had always assumed was my birthday might not be what I thought it was pissed me off.

  I had to know.

  “Okay,” I said, “see what you can dig up.”

&n
bsp; “No worries, bro,” he replied. “I’ll see what I can find on the interwebs.”

  When we parted ways, I slowly walked between the buildings to get back to my apartment. I passed the drunks and the tourists without a glance, my head focused on two different memories.

  One was the time I flat out asked Mother Superior if she knew who my parents were, and the look on her face told me she did, even as she lied about it. I reminded her about that particular commandment, which earned me a full day of prayer to reflect on my sins.

  The other memory was Lia.

  Again.

  Her body, her voice, her eyes when she glanced back at me before boarding a bus to Phoenix – it was stuck in my head on repeat as I reached my apartment and took Odin out for a late-night walk. She was stuck in my head when I lay down to sleep as well, but the dreams I had were of a different sort.

  The girl is young, maybe seven or eight years old, and she’s wearing a long robe, but isn’t yet old enough to be required to wear the hijab, the traditional women’s scarf, around her head. She watches me from a dark corner as I struggle with the ropes around my wrists.

  It’s taken hours to shake the bag from my head, and my eyes are still adjusting to the light.

  “Salam,” I croak from my dry throat.

  The girl’s eyes widen, but she doesn’t come closer or reply. I’m not sure what I would do if she did say something back – I only know about a dozen Arabic words, and I’m not about to embark on a long conversation. I focus on her eyes, but she keeps looking away. I nod towards a large barrel.

  “Ma?”

  Her eyes dart off to the side to the barrel of what might be water, but she doesn’t move. We go back and forth for several minutes, and she finally goes a little closer to the barrel as she watches me. She reaches for a little cup, dunks it inside, and comes back with her fingers dripping water.

  “That’s it,” I whisper. “Ma…min Fadlak.”

  She gives me an odd look, and I realize I’ve addressed her as a man, but I can’t remember how to say “please” to a female, and I think she has the idea anyway. My pronunciation is presumably atrocious either way.

  She takes three steps towards me before a man comes around the corner, immediately begins to scream at her, and she drops the cup into the dry sand. The precious water is soaked up by the sand immediately.

  I woke in a cold sweat feeling thirsty. After stumbling into the kitchen for water, I was completely unable to get back to sleep at all. The girl’s eyes as the man surprised her, picked her up, and carried her out of my sight made my heart pound in my chest.

  My memories of her were clear, though I never saw the girl in the compound again. I had no idea what happened to her or what kind of trouble she might have been in for trying to help me. I’d caused so many others, at that point, to die on my watch. I never found out if I had attributed to her undoing as well.

  The idea haunted my thoughts regularly. What if she was punished for doing what I asked her to do? What would her punishment have been?

  Further memories – ropes, chains, fists, knees – flooded my head until I felt sick.

  I tossed and turned, dozed just long enough to taste dry sand in my mouth, and got back up again. I took a piss and came out to find Odin standing there, looking up at me and wagging his tail. I took a step closer to him and reached out my hand to scratch his head.

  Odin took the affection, then turned and headed back into the main room of the apartment. I followed, assuming he was going to want to go out, but he didn’t. He stopped, looked at me, then went over to his dog bed near the window. He lay down and placed his head on his paws.

  “You think I ought to just sleep with you?” I asked him.

  His tail answered me by thumping against the carpet. I went back into the bedroom, grabbed my pillow, and then came back to the living room again. With the pillow held to my chest, I looked down at Odin.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said.

  Odin’s tail thumped.

  “It’s not going to work.”

  More thumping.

  Sighing heavily, I lowered myself to the floor and put my pillow down next to Odin’s bed. I lay down on my stomach with my arms on top of the pillow and looked over at him.

  His eyes shone brightly in the nighttime city lights reflected from the window, and he panted, which always made him look like he was smiling. He reached out with his tongue and licked my arm before putting his head back down on his paws.

  “That’s gross,” I told him as I closed my eyes.

  Sleep came eventually. It wasn’t great, and I still had nightmares, but when I woke, Odin was there, watching me and thumping his tail.

  *****

  I spent the next six weeks in my apartment researching. I took Odin out for walks, but December brought winter and the weather at the edge of the lake sucked, so neither of us wanted to be out there too long. The rest of the time he would just lay across my feet until they went numb, and I would have to throw his rubber bone to get him to move.

  Sleep was still something of an issue.

  On a good night I would maybe get three or four hours, but it wasn’t usually consecutive. The dreams weren’t any worse – in fact, they were almost exactly the same every time – but they still woke me up and kept me from going back to sleep. Not sleeping consistently was taking its toll on my ability to think clearly, research thoroughly, and generally pissed me off.

  It was the not knowing why the dreams had suddenly returned which was going to drive me crazy.

  Mark’s idea that my trek to the Arizona desert reminded me of Iraq wasn’t a bad idea; I just didn’t buy into it. I didn’t have nightmares while I was there – I didn’t remember a single dream until after I had returned. Maybe there was a connection, but I didn’t think it was the climate.

  Lia.

  As soon as the name entered my head, I refused to think about her. I would not dwell on the woman who wandered into my sights and made me feel something for the first time in ages. There wasn’t any point; no good would ever come of it, and I simply refused to consider her.

  How well was that working?

  I stood up from the desk that housed my computer, stomped to the kitchen, and started pulling out frozen fruit. I added half a banana, some pineapple juice, and some flax seed to the blender before turning it on and cringing as the noise invaded my ears. I poured the smoothie into a glass, added a straw, and downed it while my fingers tapped against the counter. Odin walked up, sat down at my feet, and eyed me impatiently.

  “What?” I snapped at him and then immediately felt bad about it when he looked so happy about me giving him a little attention, even if it was gruff. I’d been ignoring him a lot lately as I dived into the internet.

  Odin stood, wagged his tail at me, and then walked around in a circle a couple of times before knocking into my hand with his head. I rubbed the velvety spot on top of his nose, and his tail wagged harder.

  “Fine,” I muttered. I grabbed his leash from the hook near the door and headed outside.

  Lake Shore East Park was right behind my apartment building. It had a decent-sized dog run, lots of grass and trees, which Odin enjoyed, and was usually less crowded than Navy Pier. There was always a pile of kids at the playground, but we stayed away from that area. Odin had never really been around kids, and though he was quite well-behaved under normal circumstances, you just never knew what a kid might do. If Odin got agitated and snapped at someone…well, that would draw way too much attention to me.

  Besides, I liked Odin. If he bit someone, and they told me I had to put him down…well, that wouldn’t go over well. I imagined there would be a lot of dead bodies around, but none of them his. At least, not until someone managed to take me out.

  They would, too. Nice little park like this, surrounded by high-rises – there were plenty of places for snipers to hide out and strike without ever being seen. It was part of the reason I chose to live in the area. That and the dog-run.


  We traversed all of Odin’s favorite trails, circled the whole park, and paused to rest while I checked out the specials at III Forks. I hadn’t been out to a restaurant for a while and wondered if Bridgett would like to go out for dinner sometime. I could call the pimp up early on and tell him to dress her up for me in something a little classier than thigh-high stockings and see through tops. Hell, I could get her a dress myself and then she could keep it.

  I nodded to myself and decided to do it. That would be better anyway, since pimps were assholes and he’d probably just take the cost of a dress out of her cut of my money.

  I wondered how Lia would look all dressed up for a night on the town but shook the thoughts away again. Thinking about it definitely didn’t help, and I had a reason to consider Bridgett instead.

  My mind wandered to her body and dwelled on the curves of her tits and her ass. My hands remembered the feeling of her, and I decided she was probably about a size eight. I recalled just exactly how much I needed to bend over to kiss her and figured she was five-six.

  That ought to be enough information to get a dress picked out for her.

  “Come on,” I said to Odin, and we started back home. I cringed a bit as the door of the parking garage exit across the street from the dog run opened, blaring out a warning signal that echoed through the otherwise peaceful park. It was a fairly recent addition to the area, and the noise always pissed me off, public safety be damned.

  We crossed the street and headed over the grass towards my building. As we did, thoughts of obnoxious noises, dinners out, and hookers left my head as my target took over my mind. The more I considered it, the more I knew this job was exactly as described – fucking difficult.

  I needed to do more recon.

  As soon as we were back inside and Odin’s leash was put away, I walked back to the computer, pulled up Ashton’s official schedule, and called Jonathan.

  “I need a plane ticket to New York.”

  “Chasing what’s-his-name?”

  “Yep.”

  “Hold on.”

  A few moments later, Jonathan provided me with an online account number and all the credentials I needed to get a plane ticket. Ten minutes after that, the dog sitter was arranged. Within a half hour, I was throwing shit into a bag and calling a cab.