Flesh Into Fire

by JA Huss

  “OK. So? That doesn’t… You’re not making any sense.”

  “You don’t get it. Listen. I was at the drone store—”

  Tyler’s laugh is so loud, it startles me. “Drone store? The good old drone-porium?”

  “Fine. It was a warehouse. But whatever. Warehouse. Store. Same thing.”

  “Uh-huh. And who runs this ‘drone store’?”

  I think back, trying to remember the guy’s name. “Slade?” I say. “Slate? Slayer? I’m not really sure. Something like that. He was one of those mumblers, ya know? Kinda slow, with a drawl. Not Southern, but… redneck, maybe?”

  “OK.” He sighs. “So you’re buying a drone for the real estate stuff—”

  “No. For the wedding planner class I took. That’s the point.” I say it like, Duh.

  He shakes his head, like he’s trying to wrap his mind around my totally logical explanation. “Wait. No. What? No. I thought you bought it for real estate.”

  “No. I started thinking about it for the wedding stuff, but then that went south with Carlos and shit, and then later I thought I’d do something cool for tourists on the Strip, right? Like chronicle their crazy drunken adventures. But the drone laws are pretty strict, OK? So that wasn’t a good idea. And I was just randomly wasting time one day looking for my dream house on Zillow and… voilà. Real estate was the answer.”

  He pulls the car over by the curb, stops, pulls up on the e-brake. He blinks at me. Three times. Slowly, like this makes no sense, even though it does. “Ok, I’m sorry, I think maybe I need to focus. So let me get this straight. You took a wedding planner class, which gave you the idea for a drone to make videos of weddings.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you went to find a drone at a drone warehouse where some hillbilly called Slayer was running the joint.”

  “Well, it might’ve been Slate. Or Slade. But yes.”

  “Super. Then you bought a drone, and—”

  “No! That’s the thing. I didn’t have the money for a twelve-thousand-dollar drone back then. I was broke. I didn’t get the money until after I was working for Pete.”

  Tyler sighs. Pinches the bridge of his nose. “So when did you buy the drone?”

  “After I started at Pete’s. I just told you that. Jesus. I went in—”

  “Was Slate there?”

  “Coulda been Slayer, or Slade, but no. Some other guy. And I told him I’d been there before looking at the 900XZ, and I wanted it. Oh, and I had cash, because these guys only dealt in cash.”

  Tyler blinks again. Twice this time. “So you bought a stolen military drone?”

  “It was not stolen!”

  Tyler sighs. Longer and louder than before.

  “It wasn’t stolen. I have a warranty, OK? I registered it and everything. These guys were legit.”

  “Terrific. So—”

  “Hey! I’m serious. I got a warranty. They had to register it to me before they sold it. It was like a big fucking deal, too. Took them forever and they had to call a bunch of people and… I’m telling you, it was legit! I am not stupid, OK?”

  “OK, OK. Jesus. So, fuck, I’m—I’m just trying to understand what this has to do with Carlos and Pete.”

  It feels like I’m talking to myself. “The first time when I went in and talked to Slater—"

  “Slater?”

  “Whoever. And I didn’t have the money, and I didn’t know how I was gonna get it, there was a flyer for Pete’s on the table.”

  “A flyer?” he says.

  “Yes!”

  “For strippers?”

  “Yeah, it was like… a help wanted ad. Maybe not really a flyer. It was like a call for strippers.”

  “So… You’re saying that… Pete’s Strip Club was looking for potential strippers at the drone store?”

  “Yes! That’s what I’m saying!” I push him on the shoulder. He’s finally getting it.

  He puts his hands together like he’s praying, interlocking his knuckles until they turn white. “OK. Like, seriously, I don’t—"

  “My point is… I took the job at Pete’s after the wedding thing went weird. That’s all I’m saying. So Raven’s story, good as it is, doesn’t really add up, does it? I mean, I already knew Carlos when I took the job at Pete’s. See what I’m saying?”

  He takes a slow breath like he’s trying not to yell or something. “So, OK, lemme work out what I think you’re saying. You’re saying… that, like, somehow Carlos steered you to the ‘drone store,’ knowing that he was going to demand his money back for having to cancel the wedding, but that you wouldn’t be able to pay him, and so he… planted a flyer there for Pete’s, knowing that you would then have to go become a stripper at the club of his old archnemesis and that that would eventually lead him to burn the place down? Is that basically what you’re saying? Because that is basically what you’re saying.”

  “Well, when you put it that way…”

  “So did you know Logan at the time?”

  Where did that come from? “Logan? No,” I say. “No, I don’t think I saw him until the night—”

  “The night you flashed him your pussy?” Tyler adds.

  I narrow my eyes. “Really? You want to do this now?”

  He gives me this look that says quite clearly that yes, he does indeed want to do this now. But he’s gonna be patient and leave that fight for later. And I’m sure he’s feeling magnanimous about that very adult decision he just made, but I’m thinking he’d be very stupid to call me out on flashing Logan right now. Because I’d go all redheaded devil on him.

  But I, like him, know when it’s time to adult, so I do that. “I’m just saying that it’s all too coincidental to be a coincidence. Y’know?”

  He looks at me like he’s not so sure. “I thought we all agreed that sometimes things just happen. You, me, your shitty shrink, all of us. We all agree that everything doesn’t always have a deeper meaning.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not sure that does it for me anymore. OK? I don’t wanna believe that I’m just floating along and shit happens or it doesn’t and it’s got nothing to do with me. I can’t fucking believe that anymore. I just can’t.”

  He reaches across and strokes my cheek.

  “I can’t,” I say again.

  “OK,” he says, “I get it. Look, let’s just go back to your place and forget about drones, and Slayers, and everything for now, OK?”

  I sigh. Leaning back into my seat. Because this has been a pretty fucked-up day. And say, “Yeah, sounds good to me.”

  By the time we get back to my house it’s almost dark. Caroline and Diane aren’t home, both cars are gone, so they must be at work early tonight. But that’s OK. Just means Tyler and I can have the place to ourselves.

  When we get inside I reach for the lights, but Tyler’s hand on mine stops me.

  “Leave ’em off,” he says, pulling me into his chest. “Let’s just go straight to bed.”

  I lean up on my tiptoes, kiss his mouth, and whisper back, “Sounds perfect,” as I reach down and grab his cock. He’s hard. When isn’t he hard?

  But when I try to pull away, he doesn’t let go. His hands come up to my face, palms on my cheeks, and he kisses me back. It’s a long kiss. A nice kiss. But there are a lot of promises in that kiss too.

  He reaches up under the tulle of my dress and rubs his hand along the inside of my thigh, his cool fingertips tracing the edge of my panties, making me shudder.

  I kiss him harder. Needing him tonight. So glad he’s here. He backs me up, pushing me in the direction of my bedroom, ready to make good on his bed idea…

  When the doorbell rings.

  We break apart, both of us staring at the door. There’s a small window, through which we can see the top of a head. Dark hair. Probably male.

  “Who the fuck is that?” Tyler asks.

  “I dunno,” I say, breaking away to go see.

  But Tyler pulls me back, says, “Stay here,” pointing a finger down at the floor
, and walks over to the door and peeks out the window.

  “Oh, motherfucker,” he says, more to himself than me. “You’ve miscalculated badly if you think you’re gonna start shit today.”

  He pulls the door open, and I have a second to recognize Other-Guy Ricky Ramirez on the other side of the stoop just before Tyler’s fist crashes into his face.

  Chapter Three - Tyler

  As I drag him inside and slam the door, I think that I’ve just about had it with this whole Carlos Castillo gang of idiots. I immediately recognize this dummy as the same t-shirt-wearing jackass I knocked out in the alley behind Pete’s. The one I so cleverly dubbed “T-Shirt.” And even though he’s wearing a light sweater today, I’m still gonna call him T-Shirt. Y’know, for simplicity. You start handing out too many nicknames and shit gets confusing.

  Anyway.

  On the one hand, it’s nice of him to ring the doorbell and stand there like a dumbass, allowing me to see who’s there by looking through the fucking window and then punch him in his stupid, drug-dealing face for a second time.

  But on the other hand, it really, really bugs me that these are the dipshits we’re dealing with. That these cock-knockers are the ones who killed Pete. And Jeff. And are threatening Maddie. I dunno. Maybe it’s just ego, but I think everything would go down for me a lot smoother if it didn’t seem like Amateur Night at the Apollo every time I had to confront one of these clowns.

  And right as I’m thinking this, I get a powerful reminder about the dangers of hubris.

  Because just as I’m about to tap him up again and give him a middle-of-the-day nap with a rock-a-bye-baby, he spins out of the way with some, like, crazy Krav Maga-looking shit, grabs my arm, pins it behind my back, and then slams me against the wall.

  Honestly, apart from the fact that my hard-on slamming into sheet rock instead of into Maddie is a huge bummer, I’m pretty stoked. I may have misjudged the guy, and the fact that I now might have a chance to win something resembling a fair fight makes me feel a little less bad about the ass-kicking I’m about to hand out.

  And then, for the second time in five seconds, I am again taught a lesson about over-confidence.

  Because just as I’m about to push backwards, driving this knobgoblin across the room so that I can break free and see just how much pressure his windpipe can take before it snaps… He throws me into a choke-hold and presses a SIG P320 against my temple.

  Well, shit.

  It may be strange, but the only thought I have in this moment is, Eh, this’ll be quick. That’s a really good gun. I hope the blood doesn’t ruin Evan’s suit.

  But before he can pull the trigger, Maddie screams, “No!”

  And in return, T-Shirt says, “Dile a tu amigo que se calme, Madison.”

  Now here’s the thing: I like to think of myself as pretty multi-lingual. I can say “hello,” “thank you,” “give me a beer, please,” and “I didn’t know she was your daughter,” in like six different languages. But it turns out that while those phrases are more or less all you need to get by in most situations, they don’t really help me much in the one I’m in now.

  “What?” I ask. Then I tell him, “Fuck you, dude. What’d he say?” I ask Maddie.

  She ignores me. “What are you doing here? I still have two weeks for the money and you’ve already taken a more than sufficient deposit, don’t you think?” She spits out the words, and then she actually spits at the guy. She’s fucking awesome.

  “Maddie, calm down. I’m just here to talk,” he says.

  Huh. Either I speak more Spanish than I thought, or this dude’s speaking English now.

  “What the fuck do you want to talk about?” She steps toward him. He spins me around, putting my body in between him and Maddie. She stops, but doesn’t take her eyes off T-Shirt. And I can’t help but smile. I twist my neck to talk in his direction.

  “Bro,” I say, “you need to think real hard about what your next move is, because if I’m still standing in ten seconds, you won’t be. And if I’m not, then you really won’t be.” And I wink at Maddie.

  (Shit, that was awesome. That’s better than most movie dialogue. Maybe I should write screenplays. If I don’t die in the next couple of minutes, I’m gonna put some thought toward learning how to be a screenwriter.)

  There’s a tense beat where I think he’s gonna call what he believes is my bluff (it’s not, she’ll totally kill him if I don’t) and blow my brains out, but then he wisely thinks better of it and pushes me forward, toward Maddie, while keeping the gun on both of us.

  “Jesus,” he says, “Do you think if I came here to hurt anybody that I would’ve rung the goddamn doorbell?”

  “Yeah, I do,” I say. “From what I’ve seen, you guys are really bad at your job.”

  “I just want to talk, OK? I’m gonna put the gun away.” And he commences slowly lowering the gun. I’m just about to Conor McGregor the dude one more time when he asks me, “Were you Special Forces?”

  The question grabs my attention and I stop calculating his demise for a second.

  It’s not that I trust his actions, or really even the question itself that stops me from turning his day into night. It’s the way he asks it. Without an accent. At least without a Spanish one. Or Mexican. Or whatever. My ear is not well attuned enough to regional dialects to be able to discern precisely where this dude might be from, but I likely would not have said Wisconsin. Which is where he sounds like he’s from now. Or Ohio. Illinois. Idaho. Wherever. I dunno. Someplace that my high school speech and debate coach would’ve called Standard American. Which is dumb. There’s no such thing as Standard Americans. I hate generalizing.

  But then again, I was just kind of generalizing where T-Shirt might be from just because he was speaking Spanish. He could be Russian and just speaking Spanish to throw me off for all I know. I have no idea.

  Ugh.

  Rambling.

  “Ty…?” Maddie looks up and nudges me to bring me back to the present.

  “Uh… No. Special Forces? No. EOD. Navy. Why? Fuck do you care?”

  “Because you punch like a Ranger,” he says. And, rubbing his jaw, he gets a little smile and adds, “It’s a compliment. Only been knocked out twice in my life. Once by a Ranger in Mosul and once in an alley behind a strip club in Vegas. By you.”

  This whole exchange just took some unexpected turns.

  “Fuck were you doing in Mosul?” I ask him.

  “Fighting ISIL,” he says, tucking the gun away in the back of his pants and raising his hands in a gesture of surrender.

  “Ricky?” says Maddie, shaking her head. “What the fuck?”

  “You know his name?” I ask, confused and mildly agitated.

  “He drove me back after I convinced Carlos to give me time to get his money instead of being his sex slave or whatever.”

  “What?” What is she talking about? “Um, I feel like there’s a lot I still don’t know about what’s going on,” I say.

  “Not now,” she says, waving me off. OK. That’s fair. I still haven’t told her I burned my apartment down. I’m in no position to judge. “His name is Ricky Ramirez,” she says. “His card says he’s a distributor for Castillo Tequila, which means that he actually distributes Carlos’s meth, or cocaine, or whatever the fuck it is.”

  Ricky nods carefully and volunteers, “Yeah, well, I also have another card. Which is what I’m reaching for now, OK?”

  He leans over slowly, unbuttoning the side pocket of the cargo pants he’s wearing. I take a step toward him, just in case. So does Maddie, which makes me hard again.

  Fuck! Jesus Christ. Not now, Chuckie.

  Sure enough, he pulls out a business card, cautiously, and hands it to me. I hold it so that Maddie and I can look at it together. It reads…

  “United States Department of Justice. Drug Enforcement Administration.”

  I glance up at him without lifting my head. He nods just enough for it to register as a nod. I shift my eyes back to the card.
Underneath the header is…

  “Richard Martinez. Special Agent.”

  Chapter Four - Maddie

  I take the card from Tyler and read it again just to make sure I’m seeing this right. Yup. DE fuckin’ A.

  And then I swing, and my little fist crashes into Ricky’s tightly-clenched jaw. And there’s this weird moment when Tyler looks at me in surprise, and Ricky looks at me in surprise, and I have to collect my thoughts so I can put into words what that punch really meant.

  But I do it. I smooth an imaginary wrinkle out of my dress, raise my chin, and say, “Eso es por mentir.”

  Ricky rubs his twice-punched jaw.

  “What?” Tyler says. “What’d you just tell him?”

  But I ignore Tyler and take another step towards Ricky. I point my finger in his face and say, “I hate liars.”

  “I get that,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  “We spent like eleventy-billion hours together driving back to Vegas. You couldn’t tell me this then?”

  “I can’t risk talking in one of Carlos’s cars. I’m risking enough by even being here now and having the damn card on me.”

  “And then—” I’m so angry, I’m seeing red. “And then you threatened to kill me if I didn’t have the money in time when you dropped me off.” I swing again, but Tyler catches me by the wrist before I can make contact.

  “What?” I snap, turning my head to glare at him.

  “Why are you mad at me?” he asks.

  “I’m not mad at you,” I snap again. I walk right over to the couch, plop down, causing my dress to flounce out over the sofa cushions, and I hug a pillow to my lap. I’m so mad.

  “OK…” Tyler says. “Can we try again? Without the Spanish this time?” He points to both of us with two fingers forming a V-shape. Ricky nods. “So, OK. So, you’re a fucking DEA agent?”

  “I am. And, just so you know, nobody knows I’m here today,” says Ricky.