by L. A. Cruz
“No, seriously. I’m not trying to be a dick or anything. I’m authentically curious.”
“I come from Jersey. It’s the smog. It tints my skin and makes me squint.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I bet you’re a real hell-raiser, aren’t you?”
“So I’ve heard.”
He stood from his drafting table. “So what can I draw for you tonight?”
“A snake," she said and circled her finger around her thigh. “I want a big snake wrapping around my leg. How much will that cost?"
“On those stems? Five hundred.”
Helia reached into the pocket of her olive drab cargo pants. It was her favorite outfit: tank top, trousers, and heels. The guys at the bar didn’t know what to make of it. She pulled out a wad of cash and thumbed off five one hundred dollar bills and gave them to him. It was the entirety of her “get the hell out of Florida fund.”
He stared at the money for a moment. “I’m gonna be a good samaritan here. It looks like you ain’t in the clearest of mind-frames, if you know what I’m saying. You sure you want to do this?”
“Are you the best in town?”
“Of course.”
“Then I want to do this,” she said and planted the money on the rolling station. She kicked off her heels and without hesitation, pulled off her pants and took a seat in the chair. The cushion was cold on her skin.
“You know this can’t be undone. You sure this isn’t a knee-jerk reaction to a break-up or something?”
“No. My knee-jerk reaction to a breakup is to jerk my knee into his balls. Do you ask something that sexist of all the bikers who come in here?”
“No. I’m just saying. You have beautiful skin.”
“And it’s your job to make it beautifuller.”
He sighed and pulled up a stool, only a single glance at her underwear. A consummate professional, he pulled on a pair of black gloves. “You want the whole thigh?”
“And drumstick too,” she said. “Rumor has it you don't even need to sketch. You go straight to the skin.”
“Such words may have been uttered,” he said. He set up his gun and dipped the needle in the ink. “May I ask who said that?”
“Rodney Crane.”
The artist looked up. “You know Rodney?”
Helia nodded.
“How's he doing?”
The artist leaned over her thigh and the needle buzzed and bit into her skin. Helia didn’t flinch. “He’s doing life.”
“Damn,” the artist said.
“He has to do his own tats now. He sucks the ink out of a pen and uses a blade. He couldn’t be prouder, but I’ve seen a couple and they’re real sloppy. Looks like some kindergartner went wild with a maker.”
“Tell him to knock that shit out,” the artist said. “It’ll leave scarring. You can’t touch up that shit.”
“Go ahead. Give him a call. See if he listens.”
“Good ol’ Rodney,” the artist muttered.
As if she were a constrictor rolling and twisting and squeezing its prey in the marsh, Helia rolled around on the leather as the artist made the snake curl around her thigh.
She forced her eyes open. A strong wind was pulling through the open window and pulling the fumes out the open door. Ahead, through the windshield, she could see the empty road. The dust had settled, but the clouds on the horizon had neared and turned day into night.
The rendezvous vehicle was long gone.
She swallowed and brought her handcuffed hands up to touch her neck. She was still alive. Beside her, Makab had completely imploded. It seemed the reaction was over.
Another strong wind came, blew the grasses flat, and brought relief from Makab’s ghastly—and gassy—emissions. Thank God for the oncoming storm, she thought. The wind had thinned the fumes enough to keep her alive.
She leaned forward and with two fingers, her wrists still cuffed, gripped the gate and pulled herself to her feet. She looked in both front seats, but the radio was nowhere to be seen. Fanning must have taken it with him.
She rattled the cage. The door was locked. She squatted and reached a finger through the grate for the keys. They were just barely out of reach. She pressed her face into the metal mesh and got a her finger up to the knuckles through the gate. Her fingernail reached the keys. She pressed harder, the metal mesh bowing, and snagged the keys.
Quickly, she unlocked the cage door. Then got out of the vehicle and stood on the side of the road and took a deep breath. There was a ragged burning in her chest, but she relished the wind.
On the horizon, a jagged stroke of lightning splintered the darkness. Then came a crack of thunder. The dust swirled down the road and the grasses whipped around her legs.
She had expected to be surrounded by cruisers by now, but the road was empty, no signs of activity for as far as she could see.
“Thanks for the support,” she muttered. “My tax dollars at work.”
A drop fell. It landed right on her forehead. Then another. And another. Then a ping, ping, ping, on the roof of the SUV. The sky opened up and the rain came fast and hard. She was instantly soaked. She raised her hands to the sky and wiped off her face, letting the rain wash away whatever poisons had gathered in her pores.
When she was sopping wet and sufficiently cleansed, her ponytail slick and sticking to the back of her neck, she went back to the SUV and looked at Makab. He looked downright freaky.
“He took the radio, didn’t he?”
The Major’s answer was a gurgle.
She’d have to save herself. She grabbed Makab by the boots and yanked him off the bench. It left half his back on the seat. She pulled him out of the cage, his spinal cord bumping over the floor, and dropped him on the wet pavement.
He weighed far less than he had in life. His skin was so melted that the rain tore him apart like machine-gun fire. She left him on the side of the road and looked up at the rain clouds, the water streaming down the sides of her face. There was a boom of thunder and she opened her mouth and let it fill with water and swished the water around and spat it on the side of the road.
No one was coming to help her. So, soaked to the bone, her skin still stinging, she grabbed the keys, climbed into the driver’s seat, and made a K-turn and drove back the way they had come.
The rain overwhelmed the windshield wipers, even at full speed, and torrents of water ran off the glass.
The whole time, there had been no other cars on the road. And then she saw why. Lighting up the gray afternoon sky, reflected within the graying sheets of rain, were the red and blue lights of a roadblock.
She slowed down and put her hands in the air.
“I’m okay,” she whispered to no one. “Glad to see you too.”
Chapter 8
Helia paid the cabbie in cash, climbed out, and slung the duffel bag over her shoulder. She had much preferred to drive her Rodeo back—Fort Leavenworth was only five states away—but the prison psychologist had said she wasn’t fit for a long drive by herself and the military had confiscated it under the guise of “looking out for her mental health.” They said it would be waiting for her when she returned from leave.
How thoughtful of them.
Now, the cabbie pulled away from the gravel road, the stones crunching under its tires, but unlike Kansas, the air was humid enough, the gravel muddy enough, that it didn’t kick up any dust.
The yellow car quickly disappeared around the bend of mangroves and palms trees.
Standing at the end of her driveway, the mailbox rusted and hanging off the post as if it were hanging its head in defeat, ready to vomit the junk mail into the tall swampy grass, Helia stared at the shack in which she had grown up. It was a crumbling bungalow with a marsh in the backyard, a house not fit for a dog, let alone two children, but when her father had gone on a bender with a prostitute in Jersey, her mother had insisted on going “far, far, away to start a new life for the family.”
Zephyrhills had an opening at the local hospital and
so it was determined.
Helia adjusted the duffel bag on her bare shoulder. She was now wearing a white tank top and jeans. The only thing that remained of her uniform was her combat boots. The Army had insisted after the incident that she throw her uniform away, including her boots, but she had spent all of basic training with abraded heels and had no desire to break in a new pair.
All she was really looking forward to was a nice pair of cheap flip-flops. She walked the gravel driveway, her father's beat up pickup truck hidden in the tall grass, the wheels down to the rims submerged in mud. It hadn’t been driven since his incarceration a decade ago.
A single car was sitting in the gravel driveway. It was a small, two-door Nissan. There was no sign of her brother’s Camaro. She took a deep breath and chewed on the humid air. She pulled the tie out of her ponytail, shook out her hair, and ran her fingers through it before tying it back up again.
Then she hopped onto the porch, the whole structure swaying, and banged on the screen door.
No one came.
Typical, she thought. Her brother was nowhere to be seen. He had probably gone on some late-night excursion with his high school buddies and wouldn’t be back for another few days. It boiled her blood when he left their mother alone like that.
She opened the screen door and went inside. The one floor bungalow was strewn with trash, littered with hanging crosses and other religious paraphernalia, and the shelves were lined with plastic vases full of dead flowers that had been gathered from the side of the road. Helia was pretty sure they were the same flowers that had been there when she left.
Old photographs, warped and bubbled from the humidity, were trapped inside the cheap metal frames on every available surface. There were pictures of her as a young girl, pictures of her standing up at the top of the sliding board after running up the wrong way. Pictures of her in her Catholic school uniform at elementary school standing next to her brother who was four at the time. Pictures of her extended family, not blood, not even recognizable, but family none-the-less.
Two jade Buddhas sat fat and grinning on the nightstand by the couch and a folding tray stood in front of the old television. The smell in the living room was familiar—dead flowers and stagnant water—and the smell of egg rolls wafted from a frying pan in the kitchen.
She felt as if she had never left.
On the couch, an old woman was lying on her side. She was snoring. Tita Annabelle. Her face was dark, her skin leathery, and she was curled up like a Cajun shrimp. Sitting on one of the armrests was an ashtray. On the back rest was a blanket.
She sighed. Nothing had changed.
Helia dropped her duffel bag just inside the door. She unlaced her boots and took them off and left them in the pile of shoes by the door. She pulled off her black socks and balled them up and bunched them in the neck of her boots. Barefoot, she crossed the floor, careful not to step on any of the strewn clothes, the empty TV dinner dishes, the napkin wads, or the takeout boxes from the Chinese restaurant a few miles down the road.
She grabbed the blanket from the back of the couch and crossed into the kitchen. The sink was piled high with dishes and was buzzing with flies. She pushed through the back door, and stepped onto the back porch.
There, her mother sat in a wheelchair. She facing the swampy dock. The first thing Helia noticed was how much skinnier she had become. Her cheekbones were sharp, her hair matted, and her knees were nothing but bony protrusions sticking out of her leggings. She was only sixty-three, but the years of enduring Rodney Crane had been hard.
Helia stooped and draped the blanket over her mother’s knees. It was ninety degrees, but her mother was always cold.
She gave her a gentle shake on the shoulder.
“Mom. Can you hear me?”
Her mother opened her eyes. It took her a moment to recognize who she was looking at. And then her eyes went wide.
“Helia?” she said in a thick Filipino accent. “What are you doing home?”
Helia bent and hugged her. “Where's Manny, Mom? He's supposed to be here, looking after you.”
She parted her lips. She was missing another tooth. “Tita Annabelle is here,“ she said.
“Tita Annabelle is sleeping on the couch. Manny is supposed to be here. Where is he?”
“He got a job.”
“A job? Be still my hopeful heart. Are you serious?”
Her mother shrugged. It took all of her energy to raise her shoulders and left her breathless. “He’s with the police.”
“Did he get a job? Or did he get arrested?”
“A job. He moved to Arizona.” It sounded like moobed.
“We went to police Academy?”
“Yup.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Same as you,” her mother said.
Helia sighed and pulled up a plastic chair and sat beside her mother's wheelchair. After all the time spent in the airport—the flight from Kansas had taken the better part of the day—the humidity was now getting to her head.
Across the marsh between the mangrove trees and the vines, the sun had turned pink and was making its last descent. A pink ribbon of light cut across the cattails, poking out of the scummy water, and reached up to the end of the rickety dock.
She needed something to ease the headache before it took root. “I’ll be right back," Helia said.
She got up, went inside, and opened the fridge. It was mostly empty. There was a bottle of soy sauce, a bottle of MSG, fish sauce, shrimp paste, and a few egg rolls left over on a paper plate with the cellophane barely covering them.
She grabbed an egg roll, sniffed it, and took a bite. There was meat inside. Tita Annabelle had made it. Two Miller light cans stood on the door next to its comrade like two forgotten soldiers. Her brother had probably left them there before leaving. She grabbed the beer and popped it open and then went back to the porch and sat next to her mother.
Helia took a long drink and watched as the sun dipped below the hanging vines. Her mother had fallen asleep again.
She watched the sun light the marsh on fire and thought about her brother. That little bastard. How could he possibly have moved to Arizona and joined the police?
That was like a beaver becoming a fur trader.
The phone rang in her pocket. She pulled it out and looked at the screen. The number was unidentified.
Thinking it was her brother, she flipped it open. She loved her old flip phone, by the way. She could never get the hang of texting on one of those new touch screens, but mostly, she didn't want to have to worry about the ongoing expense, nor from breaking the screen if she got in a scrape at work. Having an old phone was as practical as driving an old car.
“Hello??
Whoever was on the other end hung up immediately.
Helia thought little of it and slipped the phone back into her pocket. She took a long drink of beer and watched the sun slide under the water.
So this is what it had come to. She had endured training on top of training, drilling, briefing, written tests. All that after dropping out of community college, and now she had been given indefinite leave, with directions after two weeks of recovery to check in with the psychologist at Camp Blanding.
They thought she was fragile. The prison psychologist had said there was a strong possibility of lasting emotional damage. PTSD. But, if she hadn't gotten PTSD by now, not after all the shit she’d endured in her childhood, then one little car ride with a melting man wasn't going to do the trick.
She took along another long drink of beer. It was cold enough that she could feel it run down her esophagus. She thought of it leaking out of the cavity in her chest like Major Makab.
The Army was being politically correct. That was all. They put too much stock in worrying about her psychological well-being and not enough stock in keeping her nose to grind stone. That was the military these days. They thought everyone needed to be handled with white gloves—and not the kind that Marines wore.
Tha
t would be a welcome diversion.
She finished her beer and crumpled the can and dropped it onto the porch beside her mother's wheelchair. Her mother was snoring now and Helia pulled the blanket all the way up to her mother’s chin and draped it over her shoulders. They had gotten so skinny that the blanket hung off her shoulders as if they were a coat hanger.
It was best to check on Tita Annabelle. Best to make sure she was still breathing and hadn’t smothered herself in the couch. She’d check on her in a minute, Helia thought.
Finally, she stood. But stopped. Through the screen door all the way through the kitchen, past the living room and through the front screen door, she could see a pair of headlights at the end of the driveway.
A black SUV.
What the hell? She thought of the SUV that had whisked Fanning away. After all that, she didn’t want to see another black SUV for as long as she lived.
There was no way to tell if this one was friendly or not.
She slowly opened the back door and slipped into the kitchen. She sidled along the cabinets, over to the refrigerator, and opened the silverware drawer. She reached past the plastic forks and knives and pulled out her father’s Glock.
It was right where he had left it a decade ago.
She checked the magazine. Still loaded. She leaned against the fridge, trying to settle her brain, and focused through the mild buzz from the beer.
There were footsteps on the porch. The creaking ran all the way through the house, right under her bare toes.
She slipped her finger onto the trigger.
Chapter 9
Helia pressed her back to the refrigerator. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly through her teeth. Her heart echoed in her ears, her training kicking into gear, her system flooding with adrenaline.
There came a hard knock on the front door, one that seemed to shake the entire house and the downspouts rattled.
“Corporal Crane?“
It was not a voice that she recognized. She had expected a Russian accent maybe or maybe even the higher pitched femininity of Fanning's voice, the voice that had been stuck in her head ever since the kidnapping. But instead the accent was flat, as normal a North American accent could be.
