by Hadena James
Nyleena
Nyleena stared at the paperwork in front of her. She couldn’t believe she was going to sign it. She couldn’t believe she had typed it. If anyone deserved to die, it was Alejandro and she didn’t care how it happened. Death by Patterson was good enough for her, but the paperwork in front of her was meant to keep Alejandro from meeting Patterson in The Fortress. It was a request to have him held at Leavenworth should he be convicted.
Technically, it wasn’t her case. She didn’t have to make the request. Everyone in the Federal Prosecutor’s Office knew that Patterson had masterminded part of the debacle. They also knew that Patterson was certain to kill Alejandro within the walls of the Fortress. Someone else could make the motion, should make the motion.
It wasn’t her place. She was too emotionally involved. She picked up the document and shredded it. If no one else thought it was a problem for Patterson and Alejandro to meet in jail, it wasn’t her problem either.
She shut off the office light and popped the muscles in her neck. It had been a long damn day, she wanted to go home, take a shower, and watch a movie. There were footsteps in the hallway; she turned to look. Her breath escaped loud enough to make noise.
“Did I startle you?” Aislinn asked her.
“A little.” Nyleena hugged her, holding her for longer than she knew Aislinn was comfortable with. Sometimes, Aislinn just needed to have her boundaries pushed. “I heard you are getting along with Fiona.”
“It would seem that pulling a gun on her has led to some sort of bonding.”
“Only you,” Nyleena let go. Aislinn took two steps backwards. “I’ve decided not to file the paperwork you asked me to.”
“I understand. Alejandro is just as much of a psychopath as Patterson. Alejandro might survive it. Patterson might not. At least if he is at The Fortress, I will not have to worry about him trying to kill me anymore.”
“Don’t worry, it won’t be long before another psychopath rises up to fill the void,” Nyleena smiled at her. For a moment, Aislinn remained blank, her face unreadable, and then the corners of her mouth turned up. “Are you sure you are ready to go see Malachi?”
“Yes,” Aislinn answered.
“Then give me your Taser,” Nyleena held out her hand. She knew Aislinn enjoyed tasering Malachi, she wasn’t sure that it was always justified. Of course, she wasn’t sure that Malachi didn’t provoke Aislinn in the hopes of being tasered by her. The two had a strange relationship. Aislinn handed over her Taser.
“First, we need to go see Patterson,” Aislinn told her. Nyleena had anticipated this; she’d already called the prison. There were perks to being a federal prosecutor.
“Are you going to ask him not to kill Alejandro?”
“Something like that,” Aislinn frowned. “I am also going to ask how many other women he has seduced with his charms and are now using to kill people he does not like.”
“This should be an interesting conversation,” Nyleena had been dreading it all day. She had known the moment Aislinn called that this was going to be how the day turned out. She was going to be surrounded by psychopaths, struggling to outdo the other one. She rubbed her neck. She was getting a headache.
Epilogue
My deranged dog peed on me the moment I walked in the door. My mother scolded him, but he didn’t seem to notice. I considered tasering the dog, but that seemed like a bad idea. I would get in trouble for animal cruelty and he would probably start shitting on me.
“How was Malachi?” My mother asked as I shook my pants leg.
“Awake and being his usual self,” I answered. “He offered to marry me again.”
“He’s getting where he does that about twice a year. I hope you told him no.”
“Of course I did. One of us would go to jail for murder, probably me.” I took off my jeans in the living room and tossed them into the laundry room.
“You haven’t been using that cream on your scars, have you?”
“I did for a while, but I believe the scars are getting too bad for even an expensive scar removal cream to fix.”
“Oh well, even with the scars, you’re a beautiful young woman.”
“Thanks, Mom.” I went upstairs and put on a new pair of jeans.
“By the way, Green asked me the best way to ask you on a date,” she shouted up the stairs to me.
“Did you tell him there was not a good way to do that?” I shouted back.
“Yes,” she answered. “I think he’s still going to try. Will that bother Malachi?”
“It might, if Malachi actually believed he loved me, but he does not believe it any more than I do. It would just be convenient for him. Besides, Green would have asked Malachi’s permission before doing it. It is psychopathic code or something.”
“They are both such nice young men,” my mother said as I came back down the stairs.
“They are both psychopaths.”
“That doesn’t mean they can’t both be nice young men, it just means you have to alter your definition of nice.”
“Along with your perception,” I stated. “You possess a strange sort of optimism.”
“I’ve spent my life around people who are like you and Malachi. It requires you to rethink what you supposedly know about the deranged. For instance, you are a good person, despite being a sociopath.”
“And Patterson?” I asked, knowing she would have been informed about his correspondence with Helena.
“Patterson walks his own path,” my mother said. “Sometimes, it’s on the side of good, sometimes it’s not.”
“I went to see him to find out how many other women he has wooed into helping him. He just smiled at me and talked about how great it was to see Nyleena and me together. The Butcher’s influence is broader than I had considered. It makes me think he turned himself in because it was not actually the end for him.”
Loud noise suddenly emanated from my front lawn. My mother put her hands over her ears. The dog whined. I drew my gun and went to the front door. As I approached it, I realized the ear-splitting noise was music.
On my front lawn, dressed as Elvis, was Caleb Green. The boom box on the ground next to him belted out the music to an Ozzy Osbourne song. Caleb was singing along. I glared at him until it ended.
“You realize that song is about death, right?” I asked when the music shut off. “She cheats on him, so she offers to kill herself to prove she loves him.”
“Yep, it’s a great song.” Caleb grinned at me. He had bandages over one ear, stitches in his face, and a cast on one arm. If there were more injuries, I couldn’t see them.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I am serenading you,” he looked a little hurt.
“Why?”
“Because I want to ask you out on a date.”
“I do not date.”
“Oh, come on, one date, no big deal, I don’t expect you to put out. I know that isn’t your thing. We’ll do something unconventional and I’ll pay for it.”
“Unconventional? Fine, I am bringing my mother and my dog, just in case you get any strange ideas. I am also bringing Nyleena, because she is good at making conversation when it slows down and it will slow down with me. And we have to wait for Malachi to get out of the hospital because he will find it really funny to watch me on a date.”
“I was thinking a truck and tractor pull, so everyone can go, except the dog,” he said. “I’ve even made arrangements for Lucas, Trevor, Xavier, Fiona, and Gabriel to go.”
“This is not a date. It is therapy, isn’t it?” I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Well, it started out as a date, but Lucas told me I’d have better luck getting you to agree to therapy, so I gave up on the idea. I guess Lucas told Xavier and Xavier decided you were having issues with fairs in general since your case last summer, so we…I should ask you out anyway and make you do aversion therapy.”
“The theory being that if I go and nothing bad happens, I will not hate fairs anymore.”
“Something like that,” Caleb said. “If it makes you feel any better, I would ask you on a real date, but I’m fairly certain you would shoot me.”
“I agree to your terms, but you must also purchase a funnel cake sometime during the evening for my enjoyment and deal with the fact that I will protest eating it for a few seconds because all that fried food is terrible for my migraines.”
“That sounds suspiciously like a real date. Only most women complain it will make them fat.”
“Fat I can live with, migraines not so much.”
“Great, I’ll pick you up on Saturday. We’ll be convoying our way there. Malachi gets out on Friday, but he’ll be on crutches. I believe we will all be in for a night of entertainment.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I can’t imagine how Malachi is going to react when Lucas gets tired of waiting on him and carries him to his seat. I have those bleacher stadium seats that I’ll bring.”
“Was the song really necessary?” I asked.
“No, but it sounded like fun and it was,” Caleb smiled again, then turned and left.
“Aversion therapy,” I looked at my mother.
“A double dose, fairs and dates,” she smiled and went into the living room.
About The Author
I’ve been writing for over two decades and before that, I was creating my own bedtime stories to tell myself. I penned my first short story at the ripe old age of 8. It was a fable about how the raccoon got its eye-mask and was roughly three pages of handwritten, 8 year old scrawl. My mother still has it and occasionally, I still dig it out and admire it.
When I got my first computer, I took all my handwritten stories and typed them in. Afterwards, I tossed the originals. In my early twenties, I had a bit of a writer’s meltdown and deleted everything. So, with the exception of the story about the raccoon, I actually have none of my writings from before I was 23. Which is sad, because I had a half dozen other novels and well over two hundred short stories. It has all been offered up to the computer and writing gods as a sacrifice and show of humility or some such nonsense that makes me feel less like an idiot about it.
I have been offered contracts with publishing houses in the past and always turned them down. Now that I have experimented with being an Indie Author, I really like it and I’m really glad I turned them down. However, if you had asked me this in the early years of 2000, I would have told you that I was an idiot (and it was a huge contributing factor to my deleting all my work).
When I’m not writing, I play in a steel-tip dart league and enjoy going to dart tournaments. I enjoy renaissance festivals and sanitized pirates who sing sea shanties. My appetite for reading is ferocious and I consume two to three books a week as well as writing my own. Aside from introducing me to darts, my SO has introduced me to camping, which I, surprisingly, enjoy. We can often be found in the summer at Mark Twain Lake in Missouri, where his parents own a campground.
I am a native of Columbia, Missouri, which I will probably call home for the rest of my life, but I love to travel. Day trips, week trips, vacations on other continents, wherever the path takes me is where I want to be and I’m hoping to be able to travel more in the future.
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