The Trouble with Fate

by Leigh Evans

Back then the cool girls had called him Bridge.

  Heartless bastard had noticed my interest. He was glaring at me in a very unfriendly way as he tilted his jaw to the side, and reached into his ear and pulled out a small tube of pink foam. It landed in a clink on the soap dish. An earplug, the sneaky sod. He flipped his head to the other side to forage beneath his mane of curls for its twin. He really needed to shave. His heavy stubble ended in a rough line under his chin.

  He stepped back out of my range of sight. A second later his vomit-coated briefs landed in the sink. I reached for one of the earplugs and squished it between my fingers. There was a cylinder of something dense inside the foam.

  “Don’t touch those.” Now that he could hear himself, his natural voice was lower, quieter. Melodic. Bit of a rumble beneath the clipped sentences. Butter over what?

  He inhaled. “God, what is that smell?”

  “Febreze, booze, cigarettes, sweat,” I said to the wall, my own sour breath bouncing back at me. “Unwashed man—”

  “Shut up.” He rubbed his hand over his stomach, frowning. “It’s coffee. You smell like puke and coffee. And not much else.”

  My gaze dipped to his crotch.

  “Into the tub,” he commanded.

  The cold water was pit-pattering against the acrylic tub enclosure. “Uh-uh,” I said.

  “I’m not asking, buttercup. Get into the shower.” He reached for my hair again and then growled when I swatted at his hand. “Kid, I’m an inch away from taking your head off.”

  Losing my head sounded painful. I put a reluctant foot in and immediately wished I hadn’t. It would have been warmer taking a dip in the Atlantic in January.

  “No you don’t,” said Trowbridge when I tried to scurry out. He pushed me back in. Then, leaning away from the cold water, he forced my head under the shower’s spray and kept me there, spluttering under its frigid deluge, until he was satisfied I was rinsed, if not clean.

  I shrieked and skittered for the tub’s other end as he twisted the dial to warm and got in with me.

  “Relax,” he said, letting the hot water cascade over his chest. He picked up the soap. “I only do teenage hookers on Tuesdays.”

  * * *

  “Who sent you?”

  “I thought we’d already established that I’m working alone.” I was trying to wipe my face dry with his sheets. He’d taken the only towel, and dried himself off while I stood dripping and shivering in the tub. “Look, I made a mistake. You were drunk. I thought you were an easy mark. Either call the police or let me go.” He’d never call the police. And somehow, even though he spent a lot of time growling at me, I didn’t feel like he was going to kill me anymore. Fool. I was going to steal that amulet and both cell phones.

  “What are you?” Trowbridge shrugged into his jeans commando, eyes steady and hard on me. He jammed his foot into one old boot, and then took the time to put his white sock on his bare foot before picking up the next boot. He picked up his shirt, and thrust an arm through the sleeve. “You don’t have much of a scent, Tinker Bell.”

  I swear it was a cue. A car alarm went off in the parking lot. “What now?” he spat, whipping around to pull the curtains aside. I made quick like a bunny to the dresser, pocketed the alarm and Scawens’s cell phone. Then I sidled toward the door. Unfortunately, it’s next to impossible to move quietly in wet pants and squelching shoes.

  He caught my arm and pulled me beside him at the window. He craned his neck to the left, flattening his cheek to the glass. “Not the van,” he muttered.

  “I can’t see,” I whispered.

  He looked down at me as if he’d forgotten I was there, and tightened his grip, wrapping an arm around my ribs again, and lifting me up in the process. There was nothing loverlike in his cinch hold.

  “Do you want to live?” he asked me, his eyebrows pulled into a scowl. I nodded with as much vehemence as you can when your feet are dangling above the floor. “I don’t like liars. Think carefully before you answer this question: Are you with those guys by my van?”

  I opened my eyes as wide as I could and gave the smallest nope-not-me shake of my head. His beard covered up most of his mouth. All I could see of it was a lower lip. It didn’t look like a happy lip.

  Someone’s voice—a human’s, judging from the high fear in it—yelled. “You better get out of here, I’ve called the cops!” Trowbridge’s gaze returned to the window. He bent his head to see through the crack in the curtains.

  “Oh, you bastards, you’re going to pay for that,” he said in a low voice.

  Pay for what? I tilted my head to look.

  His attention returned to me. “I’m finding it hard to believe that you being here is a coincidence.” The thumb and pointer finger on the hand clamped down over my mouth came up and pinched my nose shut. What was it with the smothering? I lashed out with my legs, catching him on his shin. He didn’t even grunt. Instead he waited.

  My eyes started to burn.

  “See how easy it is for me to take you out?” He let go of my nose. “It’s that easy. Now, we’re going out this door, together. You’re not going to make any noise. You’re not going to fight me. If you do, I’ll snap your neck like a…”

  Like what? I wondered, as he backed me up and opened the door. Trowbridge covered my mouth with his hand, and eased us over the threshold.

  There was a drama going on by unit 1. The room’s door was hanging on its hinge, its frame splintered. Light from the rental’s ceiling fixture spilled through the open doorway, providing ample illumination to the vandalism occurring in the parking lot. A guy was crouched inside Trowbridge’s van, tossing the contents out onto the pitted asphalt—mostly clothing, bedding, and books from what I could see.

  Another Were—short, dark-haired with one of those spiky, emo haircuts—stood beside the van’s open door, his expression glum, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of the black hoodie he wore over a graphic T-shirt. Closer to thirty than twenty, he was one of those oddballs who favored sneakers over runners, and green laces over white ones. He wasn’t doing much in the way of helping, though he did wince when an acoustic guitar went shooting over his head and made a hard landing.

  Trowbridge kept me pressed to the front of him as he silently backed us away from the danger. And we might have made it, had my foot not caught one of the white plastic chairs positioned outside unit 10.

  It made a hell of a racket as it fell on its side.

  “Shit,” said Trowbridge, soft in my ear.

  The van trasher’s head popped out of the open van’s door. He was a little older than me, with a wide jaw, and small narrowed eyes. The type of face that spoke of hockey rinks and beer. Light glistened off the pointed tips of his dyed yellow hair. Eric.

  “He’s here!” Eric pointed to us. Rocker-Were swiveled to follow his finger.

  “Shit,” said Trowbridge again. Then everything moved at fast-forward: I saw a girl step out of unit 1, just as Trowbridge spun me around and pushed me into a run down the motel’s covered walkway. We came to the end, veered right at the Laundromat, and pelted down the service road between the motel and strip mall. Another left, and then he was shoving me ahead of him, toward the end of the short unlit back alley.

  Which of course, because God hates me, turned out to be a dead end.

  Chapter Seven

  Trowbridge grunted in frustration and changed directions. The back door to the Laundromat was ajar, propped open by a milk crate. He pushed me in, then kicked the milk crate into the alley. The fire door closed behind us with a thick metal clunk.

  The noise of the place hit me, the almost deafening tumble of clothes as they rolled around the metal dryer cylinders, the angry thrash as they were pummeled by the washers’ agitator; it all mixed into a wall of sound that hurt my already tender ears. The place should have been empty, but it wasn’t. There was a blond girl behind a narrow service desk to the right of the front door. Standing by the long table that split the Laundromat in two was a tired wom
an in purple pants holding a bottle of spot remover. Trowbridge motored us around her as smoothly as a speedboat around a buoy. “Hey,” she spluttered in our wake.

  Trowbridge’s head swiveled as he made for the front of the Laundromat. In the three seconds it took for him to push and pull me down the length of the room, I watched him evaluate everything. The blonde by the door, the woman with the spray bottle, her laundry basket, the cash register, the video camera mounted on the wall, and the chairs. I case a room like that when I feel the urge to steal—he was casing it for survival.

  “You got a car?” Trowbridge asked me as we came abreast of the blond girl sitting at the service desk. Her mouth fell open, exposing a wad of gum sitting on her back molars as she took in Trowbridge’s unbuttoned shirt, my gaping wet blouse and rattailed hair. Something heavy thudded against the emergency back door. Fist, foot, or body, I wasn’t sure. But it was loud enough to make the blonde squeak.

  “Station wagon,” I replied. “There.” I pointed to it through the glass. The Taurus looked gray under the weak light.

  “Good.” He pushed open the door, turning to me. “Keys?”

  “In the ignition.”

  “Aren’t you worried someone’s going to steal it?” he asked with a twisted smile. He paused with his hand spread on the door, and gazed down at me. The shower had turned his hair into a mass of fat, loose, corkscrewing curls. I could have threaded my finger through the center of one and it would have been lost, covered with dark wet silk. Something crossed his face—not regret, not anger. It softened his mouth, and gentled his eyes. Then it was gone, replaced by a look of decision that thinned his lips. He opened his mouth and said, “Kid, this is where—”

  I’ll never be sure what he was going to say, though I can guess. Both our heads turned at a squeal of tires: a red racing Honda peeled into the parking lot, its rear end fishtailing as the driver braked hard. It skidded to a smoking stop a few yards from the Laundromat. Stuart Scawens had evidently detached himself from the radiator. He sat behind the wheel, and even through the windshield I could see his eyes burning, promising me a new lesson in payback pain.

  “Shit, they’re multiplying,” Trowbridge said, pulling the door closed. “Just how many friends have you got, kid?”

  “They’re not my friends.”

  His head snapped to the left as Eric came thudding out of the alley. “Son of a bitch,” hissed Trowbridge, turning the lock. “How many more?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Eric didn’t even see the red Honda. He ran straight for the door, grabbed the handle and pulled. The door shuddered and my stomach plunged when it seemed like the handle would give way. Trowbridge stood his ground, not moving a muscle. Impassively, he stared the younger Were down through the plate glass. When Eric finally broke eye contact, Trowbridge jerked a thumb to the video camera mounted on the wall. “Think about it, champ.”

  “Eric, over here,” called Scawens through his car window.

  Eric whirled around. “Trowbridge’s in there.”

  “So’s the bitch with the amulet,” said Scawens. “Come here. You got a phone?”

  “Kids. They’re sending kids after me now,” Trowbridge muttered.

  Even through the glass, Scawens heard that. “Come on out, pops,” he yelled. “We have to talk. You don’t want to do that in front of the others.”

  “No, I think I’ll stay in here.” Trowbridge folded his arms.

  “They’ve probably called the cops already.” Rocker-Were came ambling out of the alley. “We should leave before we pick up an audience. He can’t run that far now that we know where he is.”

  “When I want your opinion, Biggs, I’ll ring your fucking bell, okay?” Scawens fixed Rocker-Were with a withering glare. “Now, shut up.”

  I didn’t like the way they were eyeing the front of the Laundromat. “They’re going to come right through that door.”

  “Depends.” Trowbridge stared steadily at the three Weres.

  “On what?”

  “How fast they think police will respond to the 911 call the woman at the back of the Laundromat is making right now. How brave they think they are. How much force they think they’ll need to expend. But most importantly, it depends on what they’ve been told to do.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “So, my little thief, you want to tell me what they want?”

  I took a step closer toward the back door. “I don’t know.”

  “You’re lying again.”

  “You can take them, right?” My stomach wasn’t happy at all.

  “They’re kids. They don’t have the juice.” Trowbridge’s eyes flicked briefly in the direction of the blonde sitting at the narrow service desk. A couple of feet past the front door, she was positioned to greet the customers, and keep an eye on the clientele as they fluffed and folded. It was dead center in the kill zone. The blonde must have come to the same conclusion, because her baby blues were so wide that her thickly mascaraed lashes fringed them like clumpy exclamation points.

  “Does that thing work?” he asked.

  Her forehead creased in confusion. He surged sideways toward her, and she gave another mouse squeak as she scuttled into the corner. Trowbridge pointed above her head. “I asked, does that thing work?” Her eyes rolled up to the video camera mounted near the ceiling.

  “Uh-huh,” she said, with a vigorous nod. She cringed into the corner as he leaned forward.

  “Where do you store the video?” he asked in a soft voice. Below the counter evidently, given the direction of her panicked eyes. “Got a cell phone?”

  She swallowed and offered up a phone covered in candy-pink leather. “Let’s ramp up the visibility,” Trowbridge said, pulling the phone out of her shaking fingers. He dialed 911. His fingers drummed impatiently on the countertop as the phone rang.

  Cell phones. Tibetan monks and I must be the only ones on the planet who don’t own one.

  Outside, Scawens sprang out of his car. His head looked mostly normal now, except for the dried blood caked to his hair, which flattened some parts, and made other sections stick up stiffly. He’d removed the knitting needle, but the blood trail still marked the place where it had been embedded in his chest. He squinted at me and then rolled his neck as if he needed to perform warm-up stretches before he exerted himself in the tiresome task of hurting me. “Come on out,” he said. Eric stood right behind him.

  Biggs dug his hands deeper into his pockets and rested his hip against Scawens’s flashy red car. Everything about his body language screamed “not engaged.”

  Trowbridge passed the phone back to the girl. I heard the operator ask what the emergency was. She had to ask twice, because a series of loud thumps on the back door distracted the blonde as the Were on the other side got impatient. With each angry kick the woman’s eyebrows ratcheted up until they got lost under her bangs.

  “Tell them murder and mayhem,” Trowbridge prompted. “Total cluster fuck. Bad guys outside. Another bad, crazy guy inside. Really crazy, tearing the place apart.” He gave her a lunatic’s smile. “Altogether bad, okay? Maybe a gang war. Mortal danger, blood, real bad guys.”

  “There’s a man here,” the blonde said in a wispy voice to the operator. “He’s scaring me.”

  Scawens paced outside, every so often pausing to make a Bruce Lee “come on” gesture. Except he did it with two hands, which made him look more like one of those guys who back planes into the hangers. “Come on out, you piece of shit.”

  Trowbridge walked over to a chair, picked it up, tested its weight, and brought it down hard on the nearest washer. I covered my ears, and the girl with the phone squealed, “Oh God, he’s going to kill us.”

  “Trowbridge, stop,” I warned.

  “Tell them,” he yelled over to the girl, totally ignoring me. “The address.” He smashed the chair again. “And that the crazy guy has turned violent.”

  She did, adding a few “Oh Gods” at the end.

  Trowbridge made a closing clam motion with his f
ingers, and said, “Hang up now.” She whimpered, but closed the cell and then stood there shaking, holding it close to her heart.

  “That’s me, big scary bad guy,” muttered Trowbridge, examining the splintered chair. He popped the plastic seat off one leg. The blonde gasped as a silver U-shaped leg fell to the floor with a clang. He glanced at the Weres on the other side of the door as he methodically disassembled the cheap molded chair. With about as much effort as I’d use with twist ties, he wrapped the two metal legs around each other, until they became one crude length of steel. Then he folded one end into a ball. When he was finished, he’d fashioned a club; I started to feel hopeful. If Scawens had that type of strength he would have used it to kill me. But he hadn’t killed me, right? So, he couldn’t be as strong as Trowbridge. Things were looking better.

  From the back end of the place, I could hear the purple pant lady on her phone. “Things are getting bad in here, real bad.”

  “I do not get involved with other people’s problems.” Trowbridge ran a hand through his hair. “Forget that once and look what happens.”

  “Why aren’t they coming inside?” I asked.

  “The security video. YouTube and the Weres don’t go well together. No one wants to be the first asshole featured in a video. We’re not supposed to exist. Give the world proof we do, and you’ll have the Were Council down on your ass, and then there’d be no place to run.” He kicked aside a piece of plastic. “Which makes me wonder how you’re running around with the kin, alive and unbruised. We aren’t much for mixing with others.”

  “Can’t you take them?”

  “Three kids? Of course I can. But there are certain problems in attacking someone’s pup, when you don’t belong to a pack. If I attack first, I’ll be on every bad boy list in Canada. It’s better they come through here, with witnesses and video.”

  “They can kill witnesses.”

  He smiled. “Only if I let them.”

  I didn’t realize I’d been taking steps backward until my butt hit a washer. I corrected my course, and kept backpedaling, heading toward the door. “Why don’t you just call the pack?”