by B. B. Hamel
“She’s late,” Julian says softly. I can see the tension starting to form around his eyes.
I reach out and take his hand. He squeezes back and glances over at me.
“It’s not like her,” he says. “She’s normally right on time.”
“Just relax,” I say. “Besides, she was late to our last meeting, remember?”
“Yeah,” he grunts. “Guess so.”
“Just relax.” I feel like a hypocrite, telling him to calm down, but I can tell he needs me right now. Frankly, I want to get up and run screaming into the night like a wild animal, but I know better than that.
I haven’t survived this long as a junkie by being a complete moron. Nobody survives heroin and robbing houses and violence and all the things I’ve been through without at least some ability to get things done. I can turn off all the screaming voices in my head, at least for a little while, and that’s my greatest strength.
Julian squeezes my hand again and I want to lean close to him. I want to kiss him, whisper in his ear, but I stop myself. I keep doing this, I keep wanting to run away from him one second then wanting to kiss him and hold him the next. I can’t decide if he’s my kidnapper, a murderer, a bastard, or if he’s the only person that’s keeping me alive. I think he’s all of those things and much more.
That scares the hell out of me. I’ve never met a person that can be everything and nothing to me, all mixed and blended together into this strange and terrifying creature that has such complete… control.
It’s thrilling, it’s horrifying. I want him and I hate him. He’s handsome, he’s a killer. I squeeze his hand and he’s made of flesh and blood.
Families move around us with their shrieking kids and big ice cream cones. I want to be a part of them, even though I used to rob people like them and make fun of them all the time. Leo and I used to say how pathetic normal people are, but we were wrong. We were the pathetic ones. Now I wish I could be more like them, except I can’t.
I’m a vampire, stuck in the dark.
“You okay?” Julian asks me.
“Yeah, I’m totally fine.” I give him a forced smile.
His worry lines deepen and he’s about to say something when she appears, coming through the crowd like a goddess.
Alex is tall and strong but still strangely feminine. She’s wearing short jean shorts, a loose white tank top, and a colorful bikini underneath. She’s showing off a generous amount of cleavage and it’s taking all of my strength not to stare at her boobs. I glance at Julian and I expect him to be ogling her, but instead he still just looks tense.
“Glad you could make it,” he says, standing.
“And miss a chat with my favorite killer? Never.” She hugs him and he hugs her back a little awkwardly. “And I see you brought your little pet.”
I glare at her. “Kay.”
“I remember.” Alex smiles sweetly before looking back at Julian. “Okay, so I’m here. You got my ass down to Wildwood. What do you want?”
“We gotta talk about the other night,” he says.
She shrugs. “Okay, fine. Talk. But let’s get moving.” She glances around for a second and her smile vanishes. “I’m worried he followed me.”
She says it so quietly and casually that I almost miss it, but Julian sure doesn’t. He tenses even more and goes to look around but she puts her hand on his arm, a big smile on her face.
“Come on, idiot, be cool. Let’s go play a carnival game.”
I stand up and the three of us move off into the crowd, not talking. Alex stays cool and casual but I feel like I’m about to jump out of my skin. We bypass a few booths, ignoring the milk bottle game, the ring toss, the froggy hop mallet thing, the basketball, before finally stopping at the game where you squirt water into a hole to make your horse run.
We sit next to each other and Julian pays the guy to start the game. We’re off in a corner and the bored teenager with bad acne stays on the other side of the booth. He should be announcing the winners and all that but he clearly doesn’t care enough to bother.
“Do you actually think they’re listening?” Julian asks her.
“Maybe,” she says. “Probably not, but we should be careful, right?”
I get a strange feeling, a tingle on my neck. “If you’re worried you’re being watched, why did you come?” I ask her.
She shoots me a look. “Couldn’t pass this opportunity up.”
I go to say more, but Julian interrupts me. “We need your help,” he says.
“I know that. You want me to kill the bastard.”
“Yes and no.” Julian frowns. The game starts ringing and our cannons fire water. We’re all aiming, but not aiming well. The horses move forward limply as we keep talking.
“What do you mean?” Alex asks.
“We need to get on the Oakes beach. Kay and her ex buried a stash of heroin near the dunes, and we need to dig it up.”
She hesitates before laughing. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I know, it’s a big ask.”
“Security’s been crawling all over the beach ever since they decided to hunt you down. Maybe two weeks ago, no problem. But now?”
“Please,” Julian says. “It’s important. We’re going to use the drugs to get close to Hunter, and then…”
Alex frowns. “And then I can castrate the bastard. Is that what you mean?”
The game starts to ring as lights and a siren go off. I’m a little startled when the pimple-faced teen comes over. “Winner,” he says, in the most droll and bored tone imaginable. He hands me a tiny duck plushie. I take it and stare at it for a second before Julian hands him more money, and we start all over. The kid shrugs and head back to his stool, ignoring us again.
“You know you want this,” Julian says to Alex. “I know it’ll be hard, but you can think of something to distract them.”
She sighs as the game starts again, and the horses are off.
“Maybe,” she says finally. “But it won’t be easy. Did you hear?”
Julian cocks his head. “I’ve been underground, Alex, so no. I haven’t heard anything.”
“Ah,” she says, a little smile creeping to her lips. “Lionel is dying.”
Julian lets his cannon drop, squirting the bottom of the set. The kid glances over but doesn’t bother getting up.
“No shit,” he says softly. “And that means…?”
“Hunter’s going to inherit everything.”
“What’s wrong with the old man?”
“Cancer. Bad cancer, and it’s been bad for a while. They’ve been hiding it from everyone, including the family. I only found out two days ago.”
Julian chews his lip. “This is why he wants me dead,” he says. “He’s afraid that if his father finds out what I know, he won’t get his inheritance.”
Alex frowns at him. “What do you know, exactly?”
Julian shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it. Fact is, I’m taking this to my grave.”
“Maybe it would be better, letting it out. Maybe if he loses his inheritance, he can’t hurt you.”
Julian laughs at that. “You know him, he’ll personally find me and kill me real slow if I did that. No, nobody needs to know.”
Our cannons keep firing water as my horse takes the lead from Alex. “Fine, keep it to yourself. I guess it doesn’t matter, as long as I get to look into his eyes when I murder the fucking bastard.” Alex’s jaw is set and she aims her cannon square in the center, sending her horse galloping forward.
She wins by a nose. The teenager tosses her a duck which she throws on the ground. We stand up as a group and move away from the game.
“Can you do it?” Julian presses her.
Just a short hesitation. “Fine.” She purses her lips. “But it won’t be easy. Let’s say, two nights from tonight.”
Julian nods briskly. “We can handle that.”
“Good, you’d better. Once you get the shit and get out of there, we’ll meet up again and set up a meeting with Hunt
er.”
“And if everything goes well, he’ll be dead in a few days.”
“And you’ll be free.” Alex claps him on the back. “Cheer up, big guy. Things are looking good.”
I watch her carefully and I don’t get it. I don’t get why she’s so chipper, so easygoing in this moment. She’s signing on to do something dangerous, something really, really dangerous. She might be signing her own death warrant right now.
I suppose that’s just the kind of people these two are. Fearless, intense, unbreakable. I wish I were more like that…
Still. There’s nothing in her eyes that would even hint at what she’s about to do.
“Good,” Julian says. “Two nights from tonight, then.”
She smiles and gives him another hug. “Good luck.”
“We won’t need luck if you can pull this off.”
She winks and dances off, practically skipping away into the crowd.
We’re left standing there between the rope ladder crawl and the funhouse entrance. Julian watches as she goes before turning back to me.
“Well?” he asks.
I arch an eyebrow. “You want my opinion?”
“Of course I do.”
I laugh a little bit. “I don’t trust her.”
“No, you don’t.” He sighs and starts walking. “But why?”
“I don’t know her.”
“I do.”
“She’s his cousin.”
“She hates him.”
“Why?”
He hesitates. “He got her beaten up… but it’s more than that. He did things to her when they were younger.”
“Like what?” I ask softly. “What could be so bad that she’d want to kill him?”
He looks straight ahead and talks quietly. “They’d have sleepovers, since they’re family and around the same age. He’d sneak into her room at night and strangle her within an inch of passing out. He was a lot bigger than her back then. He also apparently…” He clears his throat. “Did things to her a cousin shouldn’t do.”
“She told you all this?” I ask softly.
He nods. “We used to get drunk together a lot, back when I was fighting. She liked to talk.”
I take a breath and let it out. “Even assuming any of that’s true… she seemed too calm. Like she wasn’t in any danger.”
“That’s just her,” he says, waving me away. “She’s a fighter. She knows what she’s doing.”
I don’t buy it though. Julian’s as much of a fighter as she is, and I can still see the stress in his eyes. There was nothing on Alex’s face, absolutely nothing.
In the end, it doesn’t matter. As much as I don’t trust her, we have no other options. We have to do this, we have to get the drugs. We have no other plan.
I step closer to Julian and take his hand. “I’ll trust you,” I say pointedly. “But I don’t trust her.”
“Good enough for me.” He squeezes it once and lets it drop. “Come on. We better get back and start preparing.”
“Yeah,” I say softly. I want to stay among the families and the games, pretend like we’re a normal couple, a normal family. I can close my eyes and imagine that I’m pregnant, a little baby coming to make things normal.
We’re not normal though, and I don’t know if I’ll ever have any of that. We leave together, and I can tell Julian’s mind is on business and nothing else.
20
Julian
Two nights later, we’re both dressed head to toe in black and walking along the sand.
Kaylee stays close. We stick to the dunes, trying to blend in as much as possible to the landscape. There’s nobody else out and the only other sound is Kay’s breathing and the ocean slowly rolling in.
I look back at her and she nods, her face tight and grave. The beach probably doesn’t hold good memories for her. Leo was murdered out here, killed by my own hands. Nothing good happens out on the beach… except that one night, in the dunes, when she was almost caught.
I sigh and glance up at the stars. It’s a clear sky though the moon isn’t full. That’s actually good. We won’t want there to be too much visibility tonight.
The Oakes beach is up ahead, about a half mile up. There’s a stone embankment that juts out into the ocean that marks its beginning. It’s still a public beach and people are free to walk up along it, but the Oakes family controls everything that happens there. The cops know it, the lifeguards know it, everyone knows it. Nobody does anything on their turf without them knowing about it.
“Where’d you bury it?” I ask her softly as we get closer.
“Near there,” she says, pointing up ahead. “Close to the dunes, where it won’t get touched. Ten paces from the trash cans.”
I nod a little, scanning the area. Normally there’d be people out patrolling, other dark forms in the night, along with ATVs roaring up and down the sand, their headlights illuminating everything. Instead, it looks just like every other silent stretch of beach we’ve walked across tonight.
We move past the stone embankment and onto their territory. I expect sirens and yelling and gunshots, but there’s nothing. The silence is nearly staggering, just the endless licking of the waves over the sand.
Kay takes the lead. We head over to the trashcans that sit right at the entrance to the beach. That path leads back toward the Oakes family mansion that’s sitting behind the dunes, big and majestic, probably the most ostentatious house in the whole damn town. Kay stops at it, turns her back, and slowly counts out ten paces toward the dunes.
When she’s done, she looks around, frowns, and motions for me. “I think this is right,” she says, stomping her foot. “I can’t remember exactly, but…”
“I got it.” I pull the shovel out from underneath my sweatshirt. She does the same as I shove the spade into the sand and start to dig.
It’s tiring work, moving sand like this. I don’t know how two fucked-up junkies managed to do it. I guess you don’t mind as much when you’re high out of your mind. I do most of the digging, although Kay takes a turn or two, pulling sand while I watch and catch my breath.
Sweat rolls down her skin and I think for the thousandth time how beautiful she is. She’s getting more gorgeous every day. The bruise under her eye is nearly faded entirely, and she’s already looking healthier now that she’s not living on a heroin diet. She’s rounding out, just a little bit, but in all the right places. Her breasts look plumper, fuller, perkier, and her ass is definitely getting rounder. She looks stronger, more confident, happier. I wish I could keep her like this. I wish she didn’t have to dig in the damn sand for drugs.
I tap her shoulder and we switch off. The hole is a few feet deep now and getting deeper as I dig. “How far down?” I ask her.
“Deep,” she says. “Took us hours to do.”
I grunt a little. “We don’t have hours.”
“We’re moving a lot faster.” She squints up at the stars before scanning the beach again. “Looks like you were right about Alex.”
“I told you, we could—”
Almost as if on cue, a new sound breaks the otherwise calm quiet. We stand there, totally still, and listen, both of our bodies tense as we hang on the noise.
She reacts first. “ATV,” she hisses.
I jump into action, digging as fast as I physically can. She jumps down next to me and we’re digging, throwing sand wildly.
“How deep?” I grunt at her, my arms tired and my back screaming.
“I don’t know.” She panting and digging as fast as she can. Our shovels clang against each other but we’re not trying to be subtle anymore.
Another sound joins the first one. It’s a second ATV, coming from the same direction.
“We have to hurry,” I growl.
“We need to run.” She jumps out of the hole. “Forget the drugs. We’ll figure something else out.”
“No,” I say. “We have to finish this.”
“Julian.” Her eyes are wide. “I can see the lights. They�
��re coming,”
“Fuck,” I growl, arms throwing sand, faster and faster.
“Julian,” she says, her voice tinged with panic.
My shovel hits something hard. I dig faster, getting around the corners, before dropping to my knees.
It’s a hard plastic suitcase. She jumps down next to me and we’re scrabbling at it with our fingers. The noise is louder now, and they’re so fucking close. I manage to rip the case up from the sand, and although it’s heavy, I jump from the hole like it weighs nothing.
We leave the shovels. “Come on!” I yell and we start running. The ATVs aren’t far at all as we sprint away from the Oakes beach.
Sand kicks up from our heels. I think about veering off and heading into the dunes, but I don’t know if that’ll help. We could get up toward the street but they’ll catch us there for sure.
The ATVs are getting closer. I look over my shoulder and spot them, four hundred feet away at most. They’re screaming closer, closer, and the headlights catch us.
“Julian!” Kay screams as the first ATV reaches us. The guy grunts and grabs at her, but I swing the suitcase, cracking him in the helmet. He grunts and rears back, nearly falling off. I grab Kay and shove her, and we keep running.
The second ATV circles around in front of us, spraying sand from its wheels. I get the grit in my mouth and eyes. Kay screams again and I grab her arm, yanking her away. We sprint toward the ocean, going as fast as we can. I hear the ATVs behind us, moving to catch up.
Blinding pain strikes up my back. I stumble and nearly fall. One of the ATVs comes past and the guy’s holding a bat. I realize he hit me with it, but not hard enough to knock me out. I keep moving, toward the water, Kay in tow.
“What are you doing?” she yells.
“Can you swim?”
“What?”
“Can you swim?” I squeeze her arm.
“I can swim,” she gasps.
“Come on.”
We burst into the water, running over the waves. The guys on the ATVs must realize what we’re doing, because they stop and dismount. We make it over the initial waves and get into water deep enough to start kicking and stroking. As we get away from land, the natural undertow pulls us out further into deeper, darker water.
