Far Too Young To Die: An Astraea Renata Novel

by Wayne, Douglas

  “So, what do you do?”

  “For a living?”

  I nodded. “How do you pay for that absolutely gorgeous house?”

  He lowered his head and let go of his fork. Whatever he did, he didn’t look proud of it.

  “Whatever it is, I’m sure I’ve done worse,” I said to break the tension.

  “Somehow I doubt that.”

  “Try me,” I said with a smile as I jabbed him with my fork.

  He looked around the diner and waited to speak until he was sure everyone was out of earshot. “I sell things.”

  “Door to door?” I asked.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then what…” I stopped my sentence when I noticed him leaning his head in and giving me one of those ‘think about it’ looks. “Oh. Sorry I asked.”

  “Not exactly proud of it,” he said with a sigh, “If minimum wage could pay the bills, I’d be all over it. But I’d be lucky if it paid just my car payment.”

  I nodded, understanding. “You do what you got to do.”

  He let out a snort. “Until you get caught selling to an undercover officer.”

  I opened my mouth to say ‘oh,’ but ended up closing it without letting the word slip through my lips. “Is that why they sent those guys to kill you?”

  “Pretty much,” he said. “That and I told the officer a few things, to get a lesser charge.”

  “Wow, so you turned in the whole operation?”

  “Nothing important. I gave them the names of a few of the people I delivered to from time to time. Nobody big anyway. I figured I delivered to him, so he couldn’t have been that important. Apparently, he was the boss’s right hand.”

  “That’s not good,” I said. I put the fork down on the plate and pushed it to the center of the table. “Why don’t you leave town?”

  “Everything I own is in that house. Everything my parents ever owned.” He leaned forward and placed his head in his hands. “I just wanted to make enough to pay for the house. They worked too hard for that house for me to lose it.”

  “You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want,” I said as I pulled his hands apart so our eyes could meet. “How did you end up getting in so deep?”

  “I guess I got used to having money. When you go from being a college dropout making maybe two hundred bucks a week to making more than double that a night, it’s hard to go back to that other life.” Our server walked over, refilled Aiden’s coffee and dropped off another Diet Pepsi for me. When she was gone, he continued. “My father was a lawyer and my mother was a doctor. I grew up having everything I’d ever wanted, but when I turned eighteen, they cut me off.”

  “Life lesson time?”

  He nodded. “It wasn’t like a total shutdown of parental funds. They paid my way through college, even sprung for an apartment so I didn’t have to share a dorm. The only thing I had to do was study, show up to class, and get a decent grade.”

  “What was your major?” I asked.

  “That was the problem,” he said, stirring a spoon in his cup. “I didn’t pick one.”

  “So they cut you off.”

  “Since they were responsible for funding, the school gave them certain updates about my progress.”

  “Thought that was illegal. They aren’t supposed to share anything since you are an adult.”

  “It is, but they looked the other way in my case. Might have something to do with the large donation my father sent right before I started. Not like I can argue with it. He was willing to continue supporting me as long as I made an effort to support myself.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Both gone. They took a trip to Peru two years ago. My father chartered a plane to fly them over the coastline at nightfall. He wanted to get pictures of the ocean sunset for his office. Something happened to the plane though. I’m not sure if it was on its way out, or back in, but it went down in the Pacific. They found the plane, but the bodies were missing.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, looking down toward the table.

  “Don’t be. They died doing what they always wanted to do. Traveling the world.”

  “And what is it you want to do?”

  “Let’s just say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

  “Then why stay here? Why do something you are ashamed of just to pay for the house.”

  “It doesn’t feel right, letting it go.”

  “But you don’t want to be here,” I said. “I saw the pictures at your house. Why let something like a house tie you to a life you don’t want to live.”

  “Because I don’t want to fail them again.” He slammed his fist on the counter, nearly knocking over my soda. “All they wanted me to do was to graduate college. Two years is all I had left. I let two measly years of my life become more important that doing what they asked.”

  “School isn’t for everyone. Especially four or more extra years. Did you ever try to sit down and talk to them about it?”

  He nodded. “My dad didn’t want to hear any of it. He said it was time for me to grow up. Before he kicked me out, he gave me a choice. Finish college or get out of their lives forever.”

  “Harsh.”

  “Was it?” he asked, almost sounding sarcastic. “I grew up with the world in the palm of my hands, and I let it all get away.”

  “If they wanted you out of their lives, how did you end up getting the house?”

  “The estate ended up being put in my name, but there was a catch. I got the house, but I had to send a check for a thousand dollars every month to some child hunger charity in Africa. The will gave me three months to come up with the money, or the house and everything inside would be sold and donated instead. The killer part is that they also left me everything else. Money, stocks, bonds, the works. You can take a guess how that gets released.”

  “So that’s how you got in this mess?”

  He nodded. “The good news is that the house is paid up for the next year.”

  “The bad news is you can’t go back there without getting killed.”

  “Story of my life.”

  “Let me help you,” I said as I placed my hand on top of his. “I can’t help fix everything, but we can take whoever is trying to kill you down. That will at least give you a chance to make things right.”

  “I don’t know,” he said with a sigh. “I don’t know if I can live with myself if something happens to you.”

  “I can take care of myself, sweetheart.”

  He smiled, then gently tapped my sore ankle with his foot. When I winced he said, “sure you can.”

  “They got the jump on me that time. As long as you tell me where to find them, it won’t happen again.”

  “I dunno.”

  “Come on.” I kicked him in the shin with my good foot. “I won’t leave you alone until you do.”

  “Fine.” He let go of my hand to rub his shin. “The guy I work for has houses set up across the city where people can go to get a fix. These usually aren’t the type of people they didn’t like sending me too.”

  “Addicts?”

  “And beyond. Many of them would kill their own kids just to get another fix.”

  “Why risk the houses? If I was in that business, I’d want to keep them as far away from me as I could.”

  “The houses are well protected. You have three people at the house at all times handing the transactions. Each of the rooms inside doubles as a place for the junkies to sleep off their high. Also is the perfect setup to get rid of anyone who is making trouble.”

  “Invite them in, get them high, kill them off, dispose the body?”

  “They only get them high if they are lucky. Usually they end up with something that ends up killing them.”

  “They handle new people OK?”

  “Depends. If one of the street dealers brings you there, you are usually cool. They also have the girls go there to get their fix as well.”

  I gave him a disgusted look. “Those kind of girl
s?”

  He nodded. “They usually get into that line of work because of the drugs. As long as they keep bringing in the money, they get whatever they need to get through the day. Out of all the people working for my boss, they get treated the best.”

  “Until they are too messed up to make any more money.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  I actually wouldn’t have been surprised. Some men are more than desperate when it comes to spending quality time with a woman. I already knew there was a steady demand for women willing to spend that kind of time with a man. Eventually, the level of desperation could get to a point where they’d be willing to sleep with anything that’s female. Tracked up, unconscious, or not.

  “Tell me where to find one of these houses. I’ll do whatever I can to bring the operation down.”

  “I’ll do it under one circumstance.”

  “Name it.”

  “I need a place to stay.”

  I thought about it for a moment. There was more than enough room in my place, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep him that close. I’d lived alone for most of my adult life and I wasn’t sure I was ready to change that. Especially with a guy who I’d known for less than twenty-four hours.

  While my house was out of the questions, there was one person who would probably be willing to do me a favor, if only to keep another hot guy away from me. I hated answering for him, but I knew he would understand after we explained the story.

  “You have a deal.”

  - 9 -

  We pulled up to Greg’s house a little after two o’clock. As we walked to the front door, Aiden slowed down to hang back behind me, apparently waiting for me to introduce him. Unfortunately for Aiden, Greg and I don’t have that kind of relationship.

  I opened the door to Greg’s house and held it open. “You coming in?”

  “I was waiting for you to knock.”

  “You can if you want, but you might want to take a seat,” I turned to walk into the house. “You might want to see if you can have your house moved here too then. I hear it gets a little chilly in the winter.” I heard his footsteps following me in shortly after.

  Greg’s house was a mess, like it usually was when I haven’t been around for a while. Clothes were scattered around the living room floor in loose piles separated by color. There were two more piles on his leather sofa, one with unfolded clothes and the other one folded. An empty laundry basket sat on the coffee table, next to a half dozen empty bowls with spoons resting inside.

  Dust covered the TV stand against the back wall from top to bottom, thick enough to build a house on. His sixty inch flat screen TV, however, looked as if it was cleaned off just a few minutes ago. Given it was on the news, I was probably right.

  “Greg, you here?” I shouted as I walked towards the kitchen.

  “Want me to follow you?”

  “Nah, stay here. He gets a little upset sometimes when I bring people he doesn’t know over.”

  “I can wait outside.” He took a few steps back towards the front door.

  “It’ll be fine. Greg and I go way back.” Like middle school back. We met in the sixth grade when we both failed miserably to learn to play an instrument. I’d played the flute, and he’d tried out the trombone. After the end of our first year, we were the only two students to have ever failed sixth grade band. The teacher was strict, but it wasn’t his fault. How could we expect to pass the class when neither of us had produced a sound that didn’t sound like a wounded duck.

  We spent the next two years in art. Our grade wasn’t a lot better, but at least we were able to spare civilization from an otherwise inevitable apocalypse of rupturing eardrums.

  “Just take a seat on the floor.” I pointed to the sole cleared spot next to a small square end table. “I’ll be right back.”

  I checked the kitchen and attached laundry room before moving my search down the hall. It was just about time for him to head to the bar to open, so I guessed he was probably back in his room getting ready.

  As I walked down the hall, I heard the sound of running water getting louder. Greg was in the shower which wasn’t a surprise. The fact that he was doing it with the door open was. It had to be a guy thing. Wanting to be ready to rush out of the shower at a moments notice to answer the phone or door, or whatever the reason. As a woman, I was more in the, ‘I need more locks to put on my bathroom door’ camp, even though I lived home alone. Thanks to movies like Psycho, my biggest fear is having someone sneak up on me while I’m stark ass naked in the shower. Leaving the bathroom door open just seems like an open invitation for any creepy stalker to just kick back and enjoy the show.

  I waited outside of the door with my back against the hallway wall for the water to stop running. The shower curtain opened with a screech and I heard him step out onto the fluffy green mat in front of the shower.

  “Getting ready for work already?” I asked, leaning towards the open door.

  “It’s about that time.” He walked out of the bathroom with his towel wrapped around his waist which allowed the water to drip down his chiseled chest. If you’ve never seen Greg outside of work and the long baggy clothes he loves to wear, you’d never know he was hiding an amazingly toned body under his otherwise nerdy looking physique. Where he has time to maintain his figure, I could never tell, but I suspected it was the reason his housework always seemed to get behind. “You getting ready last minute again?” he asked.

  “I’m going to be a little late tonight. There’s something I have to look into.”

  “Is it about the guy from last night?” He folded his arms across his chest.

  “Maybe?”

  “I told you, you need to leave this guy alone. Whatever he did to bring that down on him can’t be good.”

  “He just got tied up with the wrong people, that’s all.”

  “How do you know that?” he asked, face turning a light shade of red.

  “Because he’s kinda in your living room,” I said, sheepishly.

  Greg jerked his head to the side as if he could spot him from this far down the hallway. “Why would you bring him here?”

  “Because his house isn’t safe and I don’t feel comfortable bringing him to my house.”

  “But it’s OK for you to bring him here?” He exhaled sharply and took a few steps back. “I get it. We are no longer a thing, but that doesn’t mean you can parade your boy toys here whenever you get a new one.”

  “It’s not like that,” I tried to assure him.

  Greg isn’t exactly the jealous type. If he was, he would’ve killed or maimed eighty percent of the men who came into Olson’s. But for whatever reason, he always ends up being around whenever I’m actually in a relationship. He has a way of running off even the best guys without much of a fight. I always put up with it because his friendship means more to me than any other guy, but days like today make me wonder if he was ever going to let me move on, or force me to live a life of solitude.

  “Then what is it like?”

  I sighed. “He seems like a good guy, but ended up with the wrong crowd. People willing to kill you for crossing the line. This morning, when I went to talk to him, three guys came up and tried to kill him. I don’t know who these people are, but he doesn’t deserve that. Nobody does.”

  “What are you going to do about it? Find out who they were and call the cops? Kill them?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, holding my arms out to the side. “I kinda thought I could figure it out when I got there.”

  “Sounds like a wonderful plan. Let’s just go into a group of bad guys and figure it out.” He used air quotes around the last part, apparently trying to make fun of me.

  “Would you rather I kick him out so he can deal with this all on his own?”

  “Now that you said that…” he pushed past me into the hallway and headed towards his room. “I’m going to change and then I’m going to the pub. You remember the pub right? The place we bought together?”

 
“Don’t do this Greg.”

  “Do what? Act like I don’t care? We bought the ambulance so we could save people, Ast. The thing you don’t seem to get is that there are some people you can’t save.”

  “I can still save him. He’s here.” I nodded my head back towards the living room. “Now. He just needs a place to lie low for a few days. It won’t be permanent.”

  Greg huffed, then turned around. “Fine. One night. Tomorrow morning he needs to be packed up and headed somewhere else.”

  “Thank you, Greg.” I leaned in and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll call Molly and have her cover for me for a few hours.”

  “Her pay comes out of your money.”

  “Deal.”

  I turned around and let Greg get ready for work while relishing in my victory. Greg may seem tough, but he is a softie on the inside. He’s like that parent who is angry you brought home that puppy from the grocery store. While it’s never easy, they can usually be talked into keeping it around for at least a night. And that’s all it takes to get them attached to them, making them willing to keep the extra mouth around for a while longer.

  While I doubted he would welcome Aiden into his house long term, I knew I’d be able to stretch out his stay as long as it took to find the people responsible for the attacks. Worst case, I’d just end up telling Greg I’ll let him stay with me. He’d probably be willing to give up his bedroom once I said that. I hoped I didn’t have to take it that far.

  As I walked into the living room, Aiden stood up from his little clean patch on the floor. “Well?”

  “It’s all set,” I said with a smile, then pointed over to the loaded couch. “He’ll be here in a few minutes to meet you. I’m going to assume he’s going to make you sleep there.”

  “Fine by me. Unless he has killer roaches I don’t know about.”

  I laughed. “The house may be a mess, but it’s one hundred percent bug-free. I’d never let it get that far.”