Ride: A Bad Boy Romance

by Roxie Noir

  “It used to be some kind of resort,” she said. “When I was a kid, there were waterslides and stuff, and after they shut it down we used to come out here at night, smoke pot at the top, and then slide down on cardboard box tops.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Someone finally got hurt doing that and the slides got torn down,” Katrina said. “I wasn’t there when it happened, I was in college already. But a slide fell apart with someone on it, and some kid broke his pelvis in three places and crushed a disc in his spine.”

  An involuntary shiver went through her, along with the same thought as always: It could have been me.

  God knows I wasn’t any smarter, just luckier.

  “What’s here now?” Zach asked.

  They still held hands, and he put his other hand on the fence, hooking his fingers through.

  “Just the hotel itself and an empty swimming pool around the back,” she said. “If you go to the top floor, there’s a great view of the lake.”

  “Is that where we’re going?”

  Katrina didn’t answer. She looked up at Zach and he looked down at her, and then, for no reason at all, she winked at him.

  “Come on,” she said, and pulled him along. “You’ll see.”

  It had been years since she’d visited the old resort on the lake — seven, maybe even eight. Since she’d gone to college, and especially since she’d gotten her own place, sneaking off to a spooky abandoned building to get up to no good had become a lot less tempting.

  Why risk tetanus when you could do it in your own apartment?

  But there was something about Zach that made her want to show him all her secrets, take him back through her life up to that point. She wanted to give him access to parts of herself that she didn’t give to anyone else.

  Katrina blushed, thinking of exactly which parts she wanted to give him access to. That was one reason she’d brought him here — she’d been moments away from inviting him back to her apartment instead, and that was no good.

  For starters, there was a more-than-decent chance that her scummy boss was going to want to interview him for a summer internship. But besides that, Katrina had never gone there with someone on a first date. She’d never really wanted to before this, but there was something about Zach, something wild and rugged and teasing, something that made her feel like warmth was trickling down the inside of her skin.

  In short, he turned her on, a lot, and she didn’t quite trust herself to make good decisions when they were alone.

  Katrina stopped in front of a patch of fence, examining it for a few moments. Then she nodded.

  “This is it,” she declared, and unhooked her hand from Zach’s.

  “This is what?” he asked, but Katrina was already running her fingers along the back of the steel fence pole, finding the metal hooks that held the fence together. After a couple of good yanks, she’d undone them and pushed the fence inward. Zach stepped after her, and she pushed the section of fence back into place.

  “Ta-da,” she said, waving her arm at the abandoned resort.

  It looked exactly like she remembered it, minus the waterslides. A big, hulking tan building, the blank windows staring out at them. Most of them were still intact and unbroken, and it made the place feel like it had just shut down for the season, rather than permanently.

  Between the two of them and the main building lay a parking lot, and that had seen much better days. In the eight years since the last car had driven off, weeds had sprung up in every tiny crack, widening them and working their way through the pavement until it was more plant than asphalt.

  Around the big, dark building, Katrina could just barely see the metal skeletons of two pool cabanas. Their roofs and sides, made of canvas, were long gone, but some of the structures still stood.

  Katrina took Zach’s hand again and nudged him toward an overgrown hedge that ran the length of the parking lot. When this place was open, it had only been waist-high, but it flourished in the absence of gardeners and now it was even taller than Zach.

  “Stick close to the trees,” Katrina said. “You’re less likely to get seen.”

  Together, they crept to the building and then walked around the side, careful not to step on anything that looked too sharp. The resort had been about half an hour outside Salt Lake City, just far enough that it didn’t have any squatters or junkies living there.

  She stepped around the corner to the back of the hotel, and suddenly, the Great Salt Lake was there, just beyond the empty swimming pool. It lay flat and glossy in front of them, the nearly-full moon backlighting the mountains far on the other side.

  Zach whistled.

  “It looks different from here,” he said.

  “Right?” said Katrina. “It could be a totally different lake.”

  The sky to the east glowed a pale orange with the lights of Salt Lake City, but that didn’t spoil the effect at all. Katrina felt like there was no one else anywhere in the entire world, just the two of them.

  She leaned her head against his shoulder. He unfurled his hand from hers and put his arm around her shoulders instead.

  “Thanks,” he said, simply.

  They spent a long time standing there, looking at the lake, before Katrina stepped away and grabbed his hand again.

  “Come on,” she said. “That’s just the first view.”

  Letting Zach follow her, she stepped to the broken automatic doors that had once led into the hotel. They were padlocked, but someone had smashed through them long ago, leaving the old building open. Rain, snow, and wind had trashed the back part of the lobby, but further inside still looked like it might have been a hotel once: a bank of elevators, big round columns dotted here and there.

  The furniture had been sold at auction long ago, but the front desk still stood, the space behind it blank and foreboding. Katrina pulled out her phone and flipped on the flashlight, walking into the deep darkness of the elevator bank and pushing on an unmarked door at the end.

  “Elevator’s out,” she said to Zach. Behind her, he’d pulled out his own phone and turned on the flashlight. “You mind taking the stairs?”

  “Not at all,” he said.

  She paused.

  “Sometimes there are bats in here,” she warned. “Though usually they’re gone by this time of night.”

  Zach just raised his eyebrows and aimed his flashlight at the ceiling of the stairwell. Katrina didn’t see anything there, but felt like one couldn’t be too careful of bats.

  By the time they reached the door to the roof, eight stories up, Katrina was breathing hard and she could feel the sweat starting to trickle from her hairline and down her back. There had only been one bat, hanging from the handrail. It opened its eyes and glared at Katrina and Zach as they puffed past, but it hadn’t done anything.

  On top of the roof, facing the lake, were two camping chairs. Their canvas seats looked a little worse for the wear, but it was obvious they were new additions, brought there by someone else who enjoyed looking at the lake in the moonlight.

  “Why did this place shut down?” Zach asked, looking around at the view.

  From up there, Katrina felt like she could see all of Utah: the lake, the mountains, Salt Lake City, the vast inky blackness off in the south, dotted by the lights of occasional towns.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “There was some big scandal, I remember that much. Everyone thought that it was doing okay, and then one day, it just shut down. Something with shell companies and bankruptcy, that kind of thing.”

  Zach nodded.

  “The usual,” he said.

  “Right.”

  They sat in the chairs and Katrina perched her feet on the raised edge of the roof.

  “You didn’t tell me what happened after you fell in with Obsidian’s bad crowd,” she said. “I’m imagining that you rode ATVs through the desert and mouthed off to old people sometimes.”

  Zach made a face that was half-grimace, half-smile.

  �
��Sort of,” he said. “There were ATVs. That part’s true.”

  “But?”

  “But,” he said, and paused for a moment, gazing at the lake. Katrina wondered if she was prodding at something that he didn’t like talking about.

  I’m just being nosy, she thought. Quit it.

  “The middle of the desert is a pretty great place to make meth,” he said.

  “Shit,” said Katrina.

  Meth?!

  “Hard to find the lab, and if it blows up, it’s totally possible no one else will ever even know about it,” he said. Then he looked over at her.

  “I barely made meth,” he said.

  He sounded like he was trying to reassure her.

  “Okay,” she said, eyes narrowing.

  He’s clearly doing fine now, she reminded herself. He gets straight A’s in a hard major. Chill out.

  “I had a friend who knew a guy, pretty much,” he said. “And I met this friend-of-a-friend once, and for whatever reason, he took a shine to me. He knew I wasn’t doing anything besides making life hard for my brothers and being a totally useless waste of space, so he asked if I wanted to make some money.”

  “And of course you did.”

  “Exactly. Part of the problem in Obsidian is there’s no jobs. Seth worked in construction, but even that job took him six months to get. Someone practically had to die before there was an opening, and I had no way out of that place.”

  Katrina looked out over the lake, trying to imagine what that must have been like for Zach. To be stuck in a place where there were hardly any prospects, unable to get out to somewhere better.

  I’d end up cooking meth too, she thought. Just for something to do.

  “Anyway, I was only in the meth kitchen for maybe a month. One day, I’m walking out of this old concrete bunker in the middle of nowhere, and there’s a Jeep parked next to it, a guy leaning against the side of it, and I just freeze, because I’m no good at danger.”

  Katrina held her breath, eyes wide. Zach squeezed her hand and grinned.

  “Not the cops,” he said. “The boss man, in from Denver. They just called him ‘La Cabeza.’ The Head.”

  “And he gave you a Christmas bonus for being really good at cooking meth?” Katrina asked.

  Everything that Zach was saying felt totally alien to her. She’d grown up in the suburbs, drinking in the desert every so often and sometimes getting high on her friend’s brother’s cousin’s neighbor’s pot, but she’d never made drugs. She’d never met a kingpin.

  “Kind of,” Zach said. “The month that I was cooking, I’d made some refinements, done a couple of things to streamline the process. And, apparently, drug making is kind of like working in any job. You get promoted for doing your job well.”

  He paused.

  “Also for being one of the few guys there not getting high on the job,” he said. “Honestly, I was way more interested in the chemistry parts and the science aspects than I was in getting high.”

  “You never tried it?”

  “I did, once.” Zach made a face and looked at the lake, then shrugged. “I got lucky, I guess, because I hated it. I couldn’t wait for it to be over so I could feel normal again. If I’d liked it, I’d probably still be in Obsidian, just with considerably less teeth.”

  “Ew.”

  “Yeah,” Zach agreed, laughing. “Anyway, whoever La Cabeza worked for — I never knew, honestly — was working on making new synthetic drugs for the club scene.”

  “The massive club scene in Obsidian,” Katrina said.

  Zach laughed again.

  “Does Salt Lake even have a club scene?” he asked.

  “Barely,” she said. “It’s a pretty buttoned-up city. The church has a lot of influence, you know.”

  “Right,” he said. “The drugs were mostly bound for Vegas and L.A. So I started working at the experimental lab, in a different part of the desert. I was just an assistant, working under a guy with a Ph.D. in chemical engineering.”

  “I heard the academic job market was tough,” Katrina said. “I didn’t know it was that bad.”

  “You’ve got it backwards,” Zach said. “This guy — I just called him Tortoise, I don’t know his real name, I never knew any real names — loved drugs. Loved them. I listened to hours and hours of him talking about how drugs were the way for humans to really open up their consciousness and expand their minds.”

  “Did it work?”

  “I only tried one or two of the things he made,” said Zach. “One just made me feel like I was underwater, which was kind of unpleasant. And the other made me feel like my brain was folding in on itself, like I was a sheet of origami paper. Didn’t like that one, either.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Katrina said.

  “I’m pretty square,” Zach said. “When I became a full-time student last year, I finally got my wisdom teeth out, because I had dental insurance for the first time. The day after it hurt like hell, but I hated being on opiate painkillers so much that I just suffered through it with Advil.”

  Katrina just laughed.

  “I got Vicodin for the same reason,” she said. “I thought it was pretty fun.”

  “That’s what I hear normal people think,” Zach said, dryly.

  “So, you made club drugs for a while, and then took over the whole business by age twenty-four?”

  “Not exactly,” Zach said. “I got there one day, and Tortoise was frantically packing up all his notes, files, computer equipment, anything that would fit into two huge duffle bags. Apparently there was a raid on another operation run by the same people outside Denver, and he thought it was best to cut and run, and told me I should do the same.”

  “And?”

  “I took my drug money, went back home, and enrolled in community college the next semester.”

  “And they say crime never pays,” Katrina said.

  “The statute of limitations is probably not up,” Zach said. “Don’t go telling everyone all my secrets. As far as my official record goes, I worked in a bakery for a couple years and then decided to go back to school.”

  Katrina leaned forward and put her elbows on her knees, examining Zach’s face. Part of her didn’t want to believe him, because that story was ridiculous. Who got into meth, then other drugs, and then escape scot-free and became an engineer?

  She did believe him, though. That was the thing — it felt like he was telling her something he’d never told anyone before, and the whole story had a ring of truth to it. If he was lying, why not embellish? Why not say he’d run half the operations in the Southwest at some point?

  “Is that really the truth?” she asked, narrowing her eyes a little.

  “I swear,” Zach said. “Believe me, I couldn’t make that shit up.”

  “You just got out, like that?”

  He shrugged.

  “I was paranoid for a good year after it happened,” he said. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his face close to hers. “But I never heard another word from those guys. I didn’t know anything — just show up here, use this eyedropper to put this liquid into this pipette. I’d only just started to learn what I was doing when it all ended.”

  Stranger things have happened, Katrina thought.

  After all, someone saw his brother turn into an eagle.

  Her heart sank, and she swallowed hard. For most of the night, she’d been able to forget the whole reason they’d met at all — MutiGen wanted to know more about this guy.

  “What’s wrong?” Zach asked, frowning.

  He reached out one hand and brushed her hair away from her face, his rust-colored eyes searching hers. The tingling started in her toes and rose through her body, his fingertips on her face sending shivers down her spine.

  “Sorry,” she said, smiling. “Nothing.”

  Zach’s hand was still on her face, and Katrina leaned into it a little. She wanted to feel more of him against her, his warm skin on hers.

  His thumb stroked her cheekbone,
and she felt frozen in that moment. Held in place by desire.

  Then Zach leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. It felt like everything stopped. She leaned into him a little more, pressing herself forward, and moved her lips against his.

  The ache inside Katrina only deepened, and then her hand was on his cheek, in his hair, holding him to her as tightly as she could. The arm of the camping chair dug into her ribs, but Katrina barely noticed.

  Lightly, Zach parted his lips against hers and Katrina could just barely feel the tip of his tongue come out and run across her bottom lip. She opened her mouth, wanting to let him in.

  Not far away, a siren squawked, and both of them sat bolt upright.

  5. Zach

  “Shit,” Katrina breathed, her blue eyes going wide.

  Zach took her hand and squeezed it, still at a loss for words. He didn’t give a damn that the cops were there, he just wanted to kiss her again, there on the roof in the moonlight, the lake spread out below them.

  “We’ll be fine,” he whispered.

  “This never happened before,” Katrina whispered back.

  Zach didn’t know why they were whispering. The cop car was parked on the street, outside the fence and on the other side of the parking lot. It wasn’t like the police could hear them from where they were.

  “They’ll just tell us to stop trespassing and we’ll go home,” Zach said. He let his hand move to the small of her back and his fingers pressed into the base of her spine.

  Everything about her made him feel electrified, like he could fly away.

  Out by the road, a speaker crackled to life.

  “You’re trespassing on private property,” a man’s voice said, staticky and tinny over the bullhorn. “Come down from there immediately.”

  Katrina looked like she might be on the verge of tears, and something inside Zach turned flinty and hard.

  I’ll kill anyone who makes her cry, he thought, then blinked.

  That seemed a little extreme. Sure, he’d fuck up anyone who tried to hurt her, but kill someone?