Flesh Into Fire

by JA Huss

  He comes toward me with his arm out, like he’s gonna calm me down, and I flash back to the morning he drove me home to Vegas from Carlos’s compound in… wherever-the-hell it is. Back before he was Richard the DEA agent, when he was just Ricky the drug-dealing scumbag.

  Ese es tu problema. Tienes mal genio, he said to me then. That’s your problem. You have a bad temper.

  Yeah, Ricky. You’re goddamned right I do.

  He reaches me with his outstretched hand and I grab his palm, twist his wrist, kick the inside of his thigh, and the next thing I know, he’s flat on his back and I have my knee dangerously close to his fucking balls.

  Emily gasps, Tyler claps and shouts, “Fuck yeah, baby!” And Ricky stares up at me with a look that’s half-surprised, half-impressed, and says, “OK, then. And which was that? Aikido? Ju-Jitsu? Wing Chun…?”

  Breathing heavy, and with no real clear image in my head of what exactly just happened, I let go of his arm, stand up, step back, and say…

  “Pretty sure that was just Maddie Clayton.”

  Chapter Eight - Tyler

  The mood in the firehouse is heavy.

  I came by for lunch. I’ve been spending all my time with Maddie and I haven’t even really seen Evan since the funeral. But the air in here is thick. Jeff’s death is still fresh in everyone’s mind. It probably will be for a while. Losing someone is always tough, but when it’s a guy like Jeff, who was young, and eager, and had his whole life ahead of him, it’s downright Shakespearean. So even though I’m losing my shit over Maddie offering herself up as a lure to reel in Castillo, I’m trying my best not to freak out about it in front of Evan and the guys.

  “Dude, I am freaking out about this shit with Maddie,” I say.

  Fuck.

  Evan nods. “Yeah, well, that’s understandable. Be weird if you weren’t. Who exactly is this guy?”

  “Which guy?” I say.

  “The fuckin’ guy,” Rod chimes in. “This fuckin’ drug guy. Fuckin’ Richie what’s-his-name.”

  “Ricky,” I say.

  “Yeah, fuckin’ Ricky. Ricky fuckin’-drug-fuck. What’s his story?”

  “His story? I dunno. He was in the military, got out, now he’s a DEA agent. All I really know about him.”

  “Yeah? He trying to fuck your old lady?”

  “Rod,” Bear says, with some exhaustion in his voice, “go play in traffic.”

  “Fuck did I say? I’m just asking questions.”

  “No, Rod,” I say. “I don’t think he’s trying to fuck Maddie. Of all the things I’m worried about with this whole setup, Ricky’s prick is not one.”

  “Yeah?” says Rod, grinning. “Why? You seen it? He got a teeny peeny?”

  Bear pushes Rod’s chair with his foot and Rod falls over backwards. Nobody else moves. I get the feeling it happens a lot.

  “Why you gotta be a dick?” shouts Rod.

  “So you trust the guy?” asks Bear, ignoring his half-sized cohort.

  “No. I didn’t say that.” I stand up from the table and start pacing a little. “Fuck should I trust him? He’s recruiting an untrained asset off the street? That seems… I dunno. The whole thing just makes me uneasy.”

  “Yo, brother, lemme ask you something.” That’s Dean. “Are you supposed to be talking about all this shit to us? I mean, it’s cool, pretty sure none of us are gonna say nothing to nobody, but still…”

  “Oh. Yeah,” I say. “I mean, yeah, I got a whole big lecture about secrecy and all that shit, but I’m assuming it really only applies to Maddie’s roommates.”

  “Why?” asks Dean.

  “Because they’re hookers. You know how chatty pros can be.”

  “Nah, man,” he says. “I really don’t. Never paid for that shit.”

  Of course he hasn’t. Fuckin’ Dean. So fuckin’ cool. Asshole.

  “I gotta tell you,” says Alex, lumbering to his feet, collecting everyone’s empty lunch plates, “when people ask me why I don’t believe in relationships, I’m gonna tell ’em this story.”

  “What?” says Bear. “You don’t believe in relationships because a Mexican drug lord might fall in love with your woman and she could possibly get approached by an undercover DEA agent to become involved in an off-the-books op to try to bring him down?”

  Alex grabs up the last plate, stares at the floor, considering the question, and after a beat says, “Yeah. Exactly,” and then ambles off into the kitchen.

  Bear turns to me and asks, “Is there anything we can do, man?”

  “No,” I say. “I mean, fuck, I dunno. But no. Of course not. I wish there was. Thanks.”

  “Well,” says Bear, hauling his massive frame up to its full height, “we’re always here for you if you need anything. You know that, right?” He sticks his hand out. I take it and we shake.

  “Yeah, I know, man. Thanks.”

  He pulls me toward him with his monstrous grip and says again, “Right?”

  Most people will say things like, ‘I’m here for you if you need me.’ Or, ‘Let me know if I can do anything.’ But Bear means it. And it means the world to me.

  “Yeah, brother, I know. Thank you.”

  We shake, he pats me on the shoulder, and then he walks off toward his office, Rod trailing him, bitching at him the whole way.

  “Yo,” says Dean, putting a leash on Gladys the French Bulldog, to take her for her post-lunch constitutional. “Real talk? You know he’s not bullshitting? We got you, man. You feel me?”

  I shake my head and laugh a little. Because I know he means it too. They all do. But the thing is, it’s not because of me. It’s because of Evan. They love Evan so much that they’re honor-bound to have my back too. And I couldn’t be more grateful for that.

  “Yeah, bro,” I say. “I feel you.”

  Dean goes to dap me off, but I kind of fuck up the handshake because I am a lot of things, but as cool as Dean is not one of them. Finally, he just slaps me on the back and says, “All good, baby,” as he takes off with Gladys.

  I take the balled-up napkin that I’ve been fiddling with in my fingers and lob it across the station house. It lands dead in the middle of the trash can on the other side of the room. Three points.

  “We should go shoot around sometime,” Evan says.

  “You hate basketball,” I remind him.

  “Yeah, but I love bumping up against sweaty guys.” He smiles and nudges me. “You gonna make it?” he asks me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I dunno. Just… Are you?”

  I take a deep breath and let it out on a long sigh. “Shit. I have no idea. I’m fucking trying. It’s been an… eventful… couple of months.”

  Evan chuckles, “Yeah. I guess it has.”

  “Hey, what are they saying about the fire?”

  Evan looks down and shakes his head. “Electrical.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? Fucking electrical?”

  “I know,” he says, “I know. But the official inspection report says that there was most probably a faulty outlet and that the breaker box wasn’t up to code and blah, blah, blah. That’s the official cause.”

  “Dude, there was a fucking explosion. I saw it.”

  “Caused by the chemicals contained in a stockpile of cleaning supplies.”

  “Jesus.” I walk forward a few steps and then track back.

  “I know, man,” he says. “I know.”

  “And that doesn’t fucking piss you off?”

  “Of course it does,” he tells me. “But I’m not the commissioner. What am I gonna say? ‘I have no hard proof I can provide, but I’m pretty sure that this was arson and that your inspector is on the take, being paid off by a Mexican fucking crime boss?’ Yeah, that wouldn’t go over real well. I gotta work in this town, man.”

  “Dude—” I start, but Evan cuts me off.

  “Bro, it’s Vegas. We do the best we can. I’m a firefighter. Not a cop. I’m sorry.”

  Shit. Of course, he’s right. It’s
not his fault, and it’s not his problem, and there’s nothing he could do about it anyway. The only thing that any of us can do about it is already being done. By Maddie.

  “So when does all this go down?” he asks.

  “Day after tomorrow.”

  There’s a long moment where we both stand in the open door of the station, staring out at the sky. The winter sky in the desert looks like air. There’s really no other way to describe it. Even with all the ways that we have polluted and fucked up the planet, tried as hard as we can to run it into fucking oblivion, there’s something about a winter sky in the desert that looks pure, and untouched, and tranquil. It’s an illusion, I know. There is no tranquility, there is no purity, and there’s no place we can go that hasn’t already been altered by our merely having been here. But sometimes it’s nice to pretend.

  And then I look across the street and I see Brandon, New-Guy Brandon, sitting by himself on a bench in the park, eating a sandwich.

  “What’s that all about?” I ask.

  Evan shrugs and presses his lips together. “Since Jeff, he’s been quiet. Just kind of keeping to himself.”

  “Unlike usual?” I ask with the one eyebrow I can arch lifted to its maximum level of suggested sarcasm.

  “More to himself,” says Evan. Then he asks, “You wanna do anything special for Christmas?”

  “Asks the Jew.”

  “Bro, I’m married to a dude who’s so WASPy that albinos are like, ‘That guy is white.’ Christmas is like a whole thing. My hope is that with you there, we can make up some weird Christmas tradition where you make Robert, like, put live swans in the pool or something. That’d be hilarious. Swans are assholes.”

  “Honestly, man, until I know that Maddie’s gonna be OK, I doubt I’m gonna have a lot of Christmas cheer to offer. Though if we really wanted to do something funny, we should try to force him to do a living manger, with me as Joseph, you as Mary, and make him be the baby.”

  “I like it. Feels like a long shot though,” Evan says.

  “I know. I’m just spitballing.”

  And suddenly I feel like I can’t stand still. I’m thinking about Christmas without Maddie, and more importantly, what Maddie’s Christmas is going to be like, stuck alone in a fucking compound somewhere with Carlos. And Logan. And then I think of all the Christmases I spent in the Middle East with no one to talk to. And all those Christmases I spent drifting the planet with no one to talk to. Christmas after Christmas alone. No family who gave a shit, nobody to call back home…

  Except now I realize that I did have someone there all along. Someone waiting for me to reach out. And I blew it. I just fucking blew it. And now that we’ve found each other, and we’re together, we’re being pulled apart again.

  But if recent history holds its course, I guess there’s some hope. Because Halloween was an actual horror show. But then Thanksgiving was a true moment of thanks and reparation. So, possibly, if we’re lucky, we can believe that we might get handed some kind of Christmas miracle. Jesus, I hope we can all just make it to the new year. Because then, just maybe, everything can start fresh for all of us, and—as Nadir would have said—joy shall cometh with the morning.

  Or else the whole goddamn world will just up and explode. Could go either way.

  “Dude, I need to get back to Maddie,” I say.

  “Right on,” Evan says, giving me one of the loving hugs only my brother can give. “Come over the second she leaves, OK? I don’t wanna have to go chasing you down to make sure you’re all right.”

  “Respect,” I say, and slap his hand.

  He heads back inside the station, and I start off for my car, but then I glimpse Brandon again, just sitting there, eating his sandwich.

  Fuck it.

  I trot across the street and come up to the side of him cautiously. I still don’t know this dude at all and I don’t wanna go sneaking up on some physically jacked, psychotically quiet firefighter I don’t know.

  “Dude?” I say, kind of waving my hand and leaning in to let him see it’s me. “You mind if I sit for a second?”

  The plastic grocery bag that holds the rest of his lunch—a banana, a bottle of apple juice, some animal crackers—is sitting on the bench beside him. He twists his head to look at me, chewing a bite of sandwich, then he looks back in front of him and picks up the bag and moves it to the other side of him without a word. I take that as my invitation and sit down. Brandon takes another bite of his sandwich and continues staring ahead.

  I look to see what’s in front of us. It’s a dog park. There’s five or so dogs and their owners inside the fence. The dogs are playing, running, y’know, shit dogs do.

  And then, out of nowhere, just as I’m about to try to make some kind of overture to get the guy into a conversation, Brandon says, “They just are what they are.”

  “They… Sorry, what’s that?”

  He takes the final bite of his sandwich and he says, “Dogs. They’re just… dogs.”

  I’ll be honest. I’m not sure what my next move is here. Fortunately, and to my surprise, Brandon keeps talking.

  “They don’t try to be something they’re not. And nobody expects them to. They don’t judge themselves and they aren’t judged. They run. They play. They eat. They sleep. And they love you if you don’t hurt them. That’s it.”

  There’s a long moment where we both watch the dogs all chasing each other. And then he says, “I hope, if there’s another life after this one, I get to be a dog.”

  Shit.

  Brandon.

  “So, hey,” I start, “Um, what you did with Jeff—”

  “Was my job,” he says, still looking straight ahead of him.

  I don’t say anything. I just nod. Because he’s right.

  “What do you want to know?” he asks me after a moment.

  “Sorry?”

  “You wanna know something. What is it?”

  He’s right. I do wanna know something about him. Anything, really. Everything. I’ve been watching this dude for weeks now and every time I see him I wonder what his story is. And now that I’m sitting here with him, and he’s inviting me to ask him, I find myself unable to make the words.

  “Um,” I mumble, “I… I dunno. Why did you come over here from Heavy 44?”

  “Shortage of manpower. They needed some volunteers to go to some other stations, so I went.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Sorry if you wanted some big, dramatic story. There isn’t one. Help was needed, so I helped. What else?”

  “Uh…” I seriously don’t know what to say. “Are you doing… OK?”

  He turns his head to look at me again. “Whattayou mean?”

  “Well, Jeff, and… Are you doing OK?”

  He stares straight at me for a long time, just like he did on Halloween night when I asked him how he was doing. I don’t look away. I just look into his eyes to see if I can find anything hidden there that I can understand.

  Finally, he says, “It’s because people are easily disappointed.”

  “What?” That was an answer to a question no one asked. “Sorry. What?”

  “That’s why I don’t talk to people. Which is what you want to know. Why I don’t talk to people. It’s because then people expect stuff from you. Because they feel like they know you. Or they understand you. But they don’t. Nobody knows anybody. Not really. Because what can they know? The things you think? The things you say? None of that is you. You’re not your thoughts. You’re not the stuff you say. You’re more than that. But people get attached to the stuff they think they can assign to you and then that becomes who you are in their minds. And once they develop that attachment, they come to have expectations. And once someone has expectations, they can be disappointed. If you don’t take that first step, then there won’t be a second, and people go away and attach to somebody else who can disappoint them instead.”

  I don’t speak. Not because I don’t have anything to say, but because I have
too much to say to put it into coherent language.

  “So that’s all. That’s why I don’t talk to people.”

  “I…” I begin. But he cuts me off before I can continue.

  “But you already know all that,” he says.

  He turns and looks at me. I look back. Then he reaches into his plastic bag and opens the box of animal crackers. He pulls one out, then another, then another, and places them to the side. Finally, sifting through, he finds a lion. He hands it to me. Then he digs out another lion, and then places the rest of the box down as well.

  He gives me a short, curt nod, then he bites the head off the lion and turns back to look at the dogs playing in the park again.

  I slowly, carefully take a bite of my lion as well, and even though I’m anxious to get back to Maddie and be with her as much as I can before she goes…

  I sit for a moment, watching the dogs play without a care in the world, and devour the king of the jungle.

  Chapter Nine - Maddie

  December twenty-second. Three days before the artificial deadline that Carlos created in order to wield power over me. Three days before I have to give him money I don’t owe him or give him my body. So I’m packing to get ready to go.

  Ricky, Emily, and I have decided that I should go ahead and deliver myself to him tomorrow. Waiting doesn’t make any sense and this way we can create something resembling a strategy. Waiting just delays the inevitable.

  So the plan is to tell Carlos that I called the number Ricky gave me, told him that I’m not going to be able to come up with the money, and that he convinced me to just bring myself to Carlos now. It will have the added benefit of gaining Ricky additional favor within the organization. Because what I’ve also found out is that Carlos is none too happy with Logan about what happened to Pete.

  Apparently, killing Pete was never supposed to be part of the deal. Logan was supposed to make sure that Pete was out of the club before he and his goons burned it down. But we all know what happened there.

  So I guess Carlos is keeping a tight chain on his nephew now and Ricky has been given most of Logan’s old duties. Notably, keeping an eye on me. Which is how he’s been able to get close enough to recruit me into this whole thing without arousing suspicion.