HIS BABY’S KEEPER: Desert Marauders MC

by Evelyn Glass

  I was staying at a women’s shelter at the time. When I returned to the room I shared with a Nigerian women called Asor, I fell into my bed giggling like a hyena, wrenching giggles that sounded barely human. She asked me if something was wrong. “No, everything is alright now,” I’d giggled.

  I thought it was. Assault and he’d gotten eight years for it. That was three years ago.

  And now he’s here, looking at me with that big dumb bulk of a face, his eyes deep set and shadowed beneath a Neanderthal’s jutting forehead. As I watch, he rubs his hands together.

  The handsome man moves toward Eric, stands behind him, and then begins talking. It looks like they’re friends. When Eric turns around, he laughs, a strange sound even in the arena, with thousands of people cheering and screaming. It cuts through the noise like a foghorn, alien-sounding. The two men laugh and talk together.

  The dance ends and it’s like I’m being carried off the court, even though my legs are carrying me. It’s instinct, part of the routine, and before I know it I’m back in the locker room and Elle is grinning at me, exhilarated as she always is after a dance. I’m rarely the same. Mostly, after a dance, I’m thinking about money and doing equations in my head. How many hours of college did I just buy? How much closer am I to becoming a vet? But today, as Elle babbles on, all I can think about is Eric.

  When did he get out? Why was he released so many years early? How did he find me? For the rest of the night, these questions circle my head. It’s a good thing I have all the dances memorized. I remember nothing, doing nothing, seeing nothing, except Eric’s face. The next thing I know, I’m back in the locker room, and all the girls around me are changing out of their uniforms.

  I think about asking one of the security guards to walk to my car with me, but I decide against it. I don’t want to have to explain why, open a crack to my past life and the woman I used to be. Elle and the other girls respect me. That’s how it seems, anyway. If I tell them that I was once beaten, defeated, that might change. Instead, I get out my college book and begin reading.

  “Are you coming?” Elle asks, standing over me.

  “Just going to sit here for a little while,” I answer, as calmly and casually as I can.

  Elle nods, looking at me suspiciously, but she doesn’t press. The sight of me sitting there with a book in my hand, reading it when I don’t have to, isn’t suspicious enough to cause any problems.

  Soon she leaves me, the locker room empties, and I try to focus on the book.

  My plan is to wait until everyone, the girls and the fans, are gone. There’s no way Eric will wait around that long. And even if he did, what’s he going to do with all the security around?

  ###

  The parking lot is surprisingly still crowded with fans and police. Not security, but actual police. Their blue lights bounce off the asphalt. It’s dark, autumn, and the car park is glazed with a fine sheen of rain. The moonlight and the police lights combine to make the floor seem bright, too bright for my eyes. I walk through the crowd, squinting. I try to ignore the police cars and the people, but soon I realize I’m walking through the crowd, toward the lights. A coincidence, I tell myself. The lights just happen to be in the same direction as my car. Anyway, I’m constantly scanning the crowd, waiting for Eric to spring out on me. A can of hairspray bulges from my pocket. If he appears, I’ll blind him and run.

  Finally, I thread my way through the crowd and reach my car. I stop abruptly at the police barrier. An officer waves his hand in front of my face and tells me to back away. People nudge me from all sides, peering over my shoulders at the car; the car which the police have surrounded. My car.

  My mind conjures up stories which make no sense. I imagine Elle planting drugs in my glove box. She would never do that, doesn’t do drugs as far as I know, but I imagine her all the same dropping the drugs into my car with a sly smile. Or perhaps someone has attached a bomb to my car. Or something . . . what? What?

  “What . . . what . . .”

  I realize I’m shouting above the crowd. The officer who waved me back—a beanpole man with a thick brown mustache above thin lips—approaches me.

  “Ma’am, step back, please.”

  “What happened?” I shout.

  “Nothing to worry about, ma’am—”

  “That’s my car!” I roar.

  My heart gallops in my chest, hooves thudding against my ribcage.

  “Oh,” the police officer says. “Wait here.”

  The news reverberates through the crowd, but I barely hear it:

  “It’s her car!”

  “Who is she?”

  “A cheerleader! The short blonde cheerleader!”

  “Her car? What the hell?”

  A man wearing a long black coat returns with the beanpole officer. His face is haggard and his eyes are pits and he looks world-weary. He’s a detective, I guess.

  “This your car?” he spits.

  “Yes,” I answer.

  “Can I ask you, ma’am, if you’ve ever heard of a Eric Lewis.”

  I swallow. “He was my husband. He’s my ex-husband.”

  He leans in, and already I know it’s a detective’s trick. Perhaps I saw it in a crime documentary once. He’s going to tell me something and gauge my reaction, try to see if I’m in on it. Whatever it is.

  He leans right in, his lips close to my ear so only I can hear. “We’ve just found him dead in the trunk of your car. Please, come with me for questioning.”

  I take a stunned step back. “Really?” I gasp.

  The officer chews his lip, studying me. “Really,” he says, and some of the tension seems to go from his face. He lifts the tape and waves me through. “We may need to take you to the station. Nothing to worry about. Just a few routine questions.”

  “Fine. But . . . Is he really dead?”

  The detective nods. “Dead as dead can be.”

  Despite the shock of it all, despite the gawping eyes of the crowd, and despite the arm which leads me away from the car toward a police car, I can’t help but smile to myself.

  Eric is dead. Eric is dead!

  But then the smile slips.

  Who the hell put him in my car?

  The police car pulls away, and I sit in the back, forehead resting against the glass.

  Too late, I realize I left my college book back in the locker room.

  Chapter Two

  Samson

  One last job, I tell myself. One last job and then I’m done. New York can go to hell. I’ll go away, somewhere, anywhere. I’ll meet beautiful women and see beautiful things. I’ll screw a woman from every country in the world and I’ll stand on the Great Wall of China and piss off the edge of it.

  The life has been kind to me because I’ve always understood the life. My dad was a killer and so am I. That’s what I am: a killer. Not an assassin or a hitman or a contract man. Just a killer, and when you can come to terms with that, really accept what you are, this life will be kind to you. You kill, you get paid, and the cycle continues until you’re where I am: twenty-nine and rich, all my limbs intact, my face remarkably unscarred. These days I do less work, only take contracts I have some personal belief in, sort of like an artist who’s earned enough to paint or write or sing only what they want to now.

  But if I’m an artist, I’m a Jackson Pollock type, the only difference being that my paint is blood.

  In this case, it’s the blood of a worm of a man, a barely-human creature who doesn’t deserve to breathe and should’ve been put down a long time ago. A half-life man. Less than a slug. Less than an atom. I was never much good at school—deep in the life, even then—but as I understand it an atom is the smallest thing there is. He’s less than that, this man. Taking him out for a large paycheck won’t be a struggle, and that’s a fact.

  I stand a few people over from him, watching Anna Hill. It was her father who hired me, a big-time businessman, wealthy, but with a complicated relationship with his daughter. I knew before I even met w
ith him what he was going to ask me to do. I make a habit of researching my clients. He’s richer than God, or close, and yet his daughter dances to pay her way through college when he could easily pay it. He wants to pay it, too; I managed to get that out of him. So Anna Hill is dancing because she does not want to take his money. Instantly, I respect her. Working for it means more. That’s what my old beast of a father used to say.

  Her father, Ian Hill, told me that Eric Lewis was married to his daughter once. I already knew this. But he also told me that he has contacts in prison, and all Eric’s talked about to his cellmates is that when he’s finally free, he’s going to kill Anna. He used to beat her when they were married. This from a man who was released early for good behavior. God bless the justice system.

  The man will be dead by the end of the night. The evidence is conclusive, as the boys in blue would say. One of my hacker contacts found encrypted emails on his hard drive, sent through the dark web, containing all sorts of juicy details about how he was going to slice and dice his onetime beloved. Three different cellmates confirmed that he’d bragged about wanting to kill her.

  But I like to be sure, which is why I found Eric in a bar two weeks ago and bought him a drink, and another, and another, until he began to talk to me. He talked about his bitch wife and how she never valued him or gave him what he needed. Then he’d leaned in, swaying from how drunk he was, and he’d whispered to me about how he was going to do her, do her nice and proper. I laughed with him, stifling my emotions. I couldn’t kill him there in the bar. It wasn’t one of my bars.

  But here, tonight, it won’t be so hard.

  I push past the people and tap Eric on the shoulder. With a visible effort—as though he is dislodging his haze—he turns and faces me. I laugh, a fake laugh, and he laughs too. “It’s you,” he grunts, in his stupid slow drone of a voice.

  “It’s me,” I say, and we both chuckle. “You’re a fan of the Nicks, then?”

  “The Nicks rule, sure,” Eric says. His lips spread into a snakelike grin, all gums. “But that’s not the only reason I’m here.” He stops for a moment. “You’re a good guy, aren’t you, Reed?” I’d told him I was Reed because I never take risks. What if he’d mentioned Samson Black to somebody and discovered that Samson Black is an infamous boogeyman?

  “Of course I am, buddy,” I say, and then I slap him on the back.

  He nods to the dancers. Anna: short and blonde and bouncy, smiling widely as she waves her pom-poms. It’s a fake smile, of course. I can tell that just by looking at her. It’s the same smile I’m using now, forcing the muscles of my face to contract in a certain way, with absolutely no emotion behind it. But when she shakes, wiggles, it’s magic. My mind tries to stray, but I force it back on track. There will be enough time to fantasize about this woman later. Maybe I’ll even introduce myself when this business is done. Doubtful, I think. I’ve never been to prison because I don’t do stupid shit like that.

  “That’s my ex-wife,” he says, his beads of eyes glinting. “And tonight’s the night.”

  “Wow,” I say, and I say it as though I am impressed, as though this wife-beating psychopath is my best pal, and he grins. I lean in. “When are you going to . . .”

  He reaches up and touches my shoulder. Great pals. I want to snap his hand at the wrist. “After the game,” he says. “I’m going to wait for her in the parking lot.”

  “Good man,” I say.

  In the bar, I’d told him that I was an ex-con who was recently released for murdering my wife. And the fool had eaten it up. Eric is not a man to think about something he’s told. He is a man to strike a woman in the face and watch as the blood drips down her cheeks like tears, laugh and joke about it, and then, when the woman is lucky enough to escape, steal her life.

  Killing him will feel good. Men who hurt women are no men at all.

  “Maybe I should come with you?” I ask.

  He should think: ‘I don’t know this man. I just met him in a bar. And why is he here, sitting near me at the game? Surely that isn’t a coincidence. Surely he followed me. I can’t trust him. I shouldn’t do anything tonight. I should retreat, come up with another plan, and lose this man’s trail.’

  But that’s how a logical person would think, and men like Eric aren’t logical. They’re barely even human.

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Eric says.

  “Roll on out at the end of the game, then,” I say.

  ###

  The man is almost frothing at the mouth as we thread our way through the crowd toward the exit. We’re not the only ones doing this, but I’m sure we’re the only ones who are leaving for good. Everyone else is going to the toilet or to get some food. I find myself jealous as I leave. The game, as much as I’ve been able to watch it whilst bullshitting to Eric, is a damn good one. If I wasn’t working, I know that my eyes would be glued to the court, and nothing would be able to unstick them. But work comes first, even before my amazement at a three-pointer scored milliseconds before the halftime buzzer sounds. I’ll watch the replays, I think reluctantly

  Eric and I emerge into the parking lot, filled with cars but completely empty of people. It’s like we’ve wandered onto the set of one of those zombie movies that seem to be everywhere these days. The world has ended, and Eric and I are the only survivors. The thought makes me want to wretch. Just me and this ugly cruel man, wandering. Even if he was the only person alive other than me, even if he was my only chance at human contact, I’d still end the sadist.

  He walks through the parking lot muttering under his breath, getting himself psyched up. There are some jobs where you have to worry about the body, but this isn’t one of them. Eric’s a large man, the type of man who’s just waiting for a heart attack, and the needle in my pocket is just that: a heart attack. No one will question and far fewer will care. He’ll be found amid the screams of a startled onlooker and then he’ll be carted off to a coroner’s office and forgotten about forever. Another job done. Most importantly of all, Anna will never be any the wiser. As far as she’ll know, her psychopath ex-husband came to one of her games and died of a heart attack.

  We’re about halfway across the parking lot when I hear, far back near the entrance, the sound of the people emerging.

  I have to act quickly, but I don’t panic. In one smooth motion I take the needle out of my pocket, step forward, and pierce him in the arm.

  He looks down, dumbstruck, face already going slack, and then I remove the needle and step away.

  “You shouldn’t have hit a woman,” I say.

  Then I turn, pocketing the needle, and jog away.

  ###

  Who? Why? And they must’ve been so damn fast. Too damn fast. To move it in between the gap of me killing him and the people emerging. What. The. Fuck.

  I get the news when I’m sitting in my penthouse on the couch. The place is a bit of a mess, as it always is, but I never claimed to be a cleaner. Unless you count cleaning the streets of scumbags and woman-beaters and rapists and all the other filth that seems to haunt New York when the sun goes down.

  I lean forward and turn up the volume on my plasma screen. The bottom of the screen is obstructed by empty beer cans, the coffee table radiates the smell of day-old pizza, and clothes are strewn across the floor between the couch and the TV.

  But I can see well enough: see the reporter, and hear her.

  “We have just had confirmation, Jack. The body was found in the trunk of a cheerleader’s car. The male, around twenty-five to thirty years old, heavyset, was found in the trunk of a cheerleader’s car earlier this evening by a Nicks’ fan who noticed a foot extending from the back of the car. The onlooker described the body as ‘jammed in there’.”

  She was never meant to know, but even as the camera zooms in past the crowds and the police, I see that it is Anna’s car. They would’ve taken her for questioning, which isn’t a problem. She’s innocent of it all and she knows nothing. Plus, she has an alibi. There are cameras in the arena
and the hallways, and they’ll exonerate her.

  But it’s not the police that causes my hands to clench into tight fists.

  It’s whoever the hell this phantom is, this phantom which appeared from nowhere and moved the body in the space of half a minute, who must’ve been watching me the entire time and must’ve darted from the shadows the second Eric fell.

  I’m a predator; that’s how I think of myself. I lean back on the couch and stare up at the ceiling, a throaty groan escaping my lips. I’ve been outplayed, and now Anna is in danger. Whatever else this is, it’s an open declaration.

  They’ve made her a part of this.

  ###

  One thing you learn in this business is that very little happens by coincidence. The mafia, and even private clients, are big on messages. Sometimes you’ll have to arrange the scene in a certain way, or do the job with a certain tool, or record a short message before the grave is dug. Sometimes you’ll have to wait until a certain day or tell the target that they have so many days before the end. When some poor bastard pops up on TV with a finger in his mouth, it’s no random collection of meat; it was put there for a reason.