Authors: Carmella Jones
Chapter Nineteen: Peach
I was actually wondering if I’d touched off something that had gone beyond what I’d intended it to when Bulldog exploded through my door the evening after Sal and Detective Taylor had come to his office. I hoped that Sal was just playing things up and doing a very thorough job of carrying out what I asked him to do. However, it was entirely possible that Salt Lake really had sent someone to check into the rumors. Had I just slit my own throat? If the network and the drug laundering were figured out, then I’d be right in the middle of the mix.
Bulldog and I had started hanging out together again and resumed, at least in practice, our regular sexual routine. However, it just wasn’t the same as it had been before. We were both in other places, and neither of us was as eager to go at it in the same way that we had before. I was wondering if that was what happened whenever a couple had been together too long, had grown tired of each other and just didn’t really care anymore.
I not only had my own form of paranoia working on the acid in my stomach, but I was also feeling myself being drawn more and more to Trevor and carrying an enormous weight of guilt on my shoulders.
Needless to say, when I received Trevor’s phone call and invitation to a weekend in San Jose, I was eager to go. It was an escape, of sorts, but it wasn’t an entirely enjoyable one, because I was escaping right into the arms that belonged to the source of my guilt.
We hadn’t waited to have dinner together or to even hang out when we arrived in San Jose. The instant the hotel room door closed behind us, we were stripping clothes off of each other while our mouths sought to devour each other.
His hands on my body were instantly pushing away all of the tension of the outside world and beginning to create a new sort of delightful tension that tingled throughout my body. No doubt, it was our stress that drove us to the primeval level of savage animals. I had lost count of my orgasms and wasn’t even aware of anything else in the world besides our two bodies wrapped together on the bed, in the shower, on the dresser, against the wall or any other surface of the room where our hunger came together.
As savage as our lovemaking was, there was something different working inside of me. That tiny splinter that had sat and festered in the back of my mind had been growing in size over the past week, and it was beginning to hurt when it stretched my conscience. My entire psyche had flipped itself over. Where before I had felt like I was cheating on Bulldog with Trevor, I’d begun to feel that when I was with Bulldog, I was cheating on Trevor. Moreover, I was feeling myself growing a closer and tighter bond with Trevor as we kept up our regular daily contact. The explosive force that hit me in that hotel room in San Jose was one of a new kind, and it was becoming extremely difficult for me to continue to deny that I had fallen for him.
Falling for someone who was supposed to be your mark in a scam would screw up the whole scam. Furthermore, the scam that I was running was on guys who you simply didn’t fuck with. Bulldog and Trevor were not the sort of guys who would take what I was doing lightly if they ever figured it out. They had both killed men before. In Trevor’s case, I knew it for sure, but in Bulldog’s case, there were only rumors. In either case, neither one of them would hesitate to eliminate Dish and me for doing what we were doing.
Though I ought to have considered it before, lying in Trevor’s arms while he slept soundly in our shared king-sized bed in that San Jose hotel was the first time I realized that I was playing an extremely dangerous game. I wasn’t sure which part of it was worse, however. Was it worse that they could kill me without blinking an eye or was it worse that once Trevor discovered what I’d done, I’d lose him forever?
Jesus, Leila, you don’t even have him. You’ve got to get over this stupid infatuation and keep your plan rolling or you’re going to be screwed big time.
The first two lies did little to override the reality of the fact that I still had to keep my plan rolling.
While I was sorting through it all, a thought hit me with the force of a bunker buster being dropped from a warthog, something that I had witnessed firsthand during a training exercise while I was in the Corps. That little twinge that I’d felt, the feeling that I had nothing to show for my life, hadn’t been what I thought it had been. That feeling, though I was still having some difficulty admitting it, was the seed of a longing for whatever it was that I had instantly recognized in Trevor the first time I’d seen him. Tragically, however, my misinterpretation of my own feelings was likely going to cost me everything.
“What’s up?” Trevor purred, whispering in my ear and blowing every thought out of my mind instantly. His lips moved from my ear to my neck.
“I thought you were sleeping,” I whispered.
“How can I sleep with such a delicious woman beside me?” he mumbled into my neck.
I raised my chin to give him better access to the part at my throat. He took advantage of the opening and sent tingles rushing all through me as his lips did their magic on my skin.
“I’m not going to be able to sleep if you keep that up,” I murmured.
“Were you wanting to sleep?” He stopped kissing me and looked into my eyes; his own were twinkling devilishly. “You want me to stop?”
“You can keep going for a little bit,” I lied. I was okay with him continuing for as long as he wanted, especially after his lips made their way down my neck and found my nipples. They sprang to life in response to his attention to them. They weren’t the only thing that was coming to life, either. I felt something very hard brush against my thigh, just above my knee. I was hoping that it was heading a little bit further north. Much to my delight, it did and I felt him fill me up once more. My guilt could wait.
Chapter Twenty: TNT
The time with Leila in San Jose had gotten me thinking. I’d grown more and more uncomfortable with the work that Bulldog had me doing. It was starting to be a great deal more dangerous and with him being pissed off at me for whatever reason, and it was only a matter of time before he set me up to take the fall for him or sent enough goons to take me out. And I was thinking about her.
I hadn’t really given a damn before. There had always been another party to go to and another woman to bed. There was always more money, more booze and more sex waiting for me just around the next corner. I was losing interest in all of that since Leila had come into my life. I kept doing the part of my job that was easy: collecting the cash that was picked by me or others and laundering it through the casino. Even that had lost its luster.
I’d been sitting for several hours and it was about time for a break. I parked my bike along a deserted road and got off to stretch my legs. I’d strolled about 20 feet and was about to turn back when I saw the dark sedan coming down the road toward me. I stretched my back, arms and shoulders and rolled my neck around while I waited.
“Get in, have a seat,” the man wearing dark shades said when he pulled up in front of me.
“That’s alright, I’ve been sitting for quite a while,” I responded.
“Suit yourself,” he replied.
“So?” I said after a long pause. I’d been waiting for him to start, but it seemed that he either didn’t have anything to say or didn’t know how to say it.
“I need a little something to make my mouth work right.”
I unzipped my jacket and reached inside.
“Be careful, there,” he growled, leveling a pistol at my chest. “I can see that lump under your armpit.”
“Jesus, you’re jumpy,” I chuckled, slowly bringing my hand out of my jacket with a banded stack of hundred dollar bills in it and presented it to him “How about we just set this right here until we’re finished talking?”
I placed the stack on the dash board in front of the steering wheel. It was still within easy reach for me, but the steering wheel made it hard for him to get to it. That didn’t really matter, he could just shoot me, drive off and retrieve it at his leisure, but I needed to let him know that his information came before his hand was on that stack of bills.
He put the pistol away and smiled. “Can’t be too careful, you know?”
I shrugged and waited.
“I’m coming up with nothing,” he said after a long pause. “I’ve kicked around all over Salt Lake and as near as I can tell, neither your name nor his has been brought up in anything.”
“Is he having me watched?”
“If he is, then he’s got somebody doing it who is invisible or too damned good for me to keep up with.”
“I’m not implicated in Salt Lake, then?” That was the only solid thing in his report that I could hold on to, so I grasped onto it.
“Not even a whisper,” he replied.
“And you’re sure that no one is keeping an eye on me.” Repeating it seemed to be the only way to get it to sink in. Something wasn’t right, but I still didn’t know what it was.
“I haven’t picked up the slightest trace of anyone keeping tabs on you. Nothing. Like I said, maybe he’s too good for me to keep up with.”
It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Some answers, any answers, good or bad, would have made me rest a little easier. The absence of answers only made me more paranoid. If Bulldog hired someone as good or better than me to keep an eye on me, then I could get hit and never even see it coming. Maybe it was time that I got out of it all. If I did, I had to do it clean and I had to disappear completely.
With Leila in the picture, that option was looking more and more attractive. However, I would be taking her away from her life too. Could I do that to her?
“What if I decided to get out, maybe disappear and start a new life?”
“That would require a dozen of those.” He nodded toward the banded stack of crisp hundred dollar bills on the dashboard.
It was nothing, really, especially when you considered that I’d blown through that much over a weekend in the casinos. It wasn’t my money and, in general, I was meant to lose most of it, so that made it a little easier to part with. If I decided to disappear, I wouldn’t be using my own money either. I didn’t respond.
“So, are we good or is there something else you need?”
“I’ll let you know,” I answered, stepping back from the car and folding my hands in front of me so that there would be no mistaking my intensions, which might lead to the pistol being used to end my life.
“Pleasure doin’ business with you.” He kept his eyes focused on me as he turned the key in the ignition, the electric window slid up into place and he began to pull away slowly.
I waited until the car had disappeared over the horizon before walking back to my bike. My mind was full of more questions than it was answers. Leila had said that I was being implicated in the killings in Salt Lake and that Bulldog had someone watching me. Neither of those things had turned out to be true. Was Leila lying to me? Was she playing me?
Someone might as well have plunged a knife into my chest when those two questions came into my mind. It wouldn’t be the first time that a woman had played a man, but it just didn’t seem right in my mind. Not with her. She was much too real. What we had was genuine. “I suppose every man who’s ever been played thought that way,” I muttered to the empty road.
The possibility was there, of course, but nothing inside of me would allow me to believe it. As I rode my bike back toward Reno, I had convinced myself that the most likely scenario was that Leila had been fed misinformation, intentionally. Was it Bulldog or someone else who was feeding it to her? Up until recently, I’d had no reason to mistrust Bulldog. What had caused that trust to disappear? I ran the past couple of months back through my head. I’d started to become frustrated with my role and the way that he was dragging me in deeper, but I hadn’t confronted him about it.
It had all changed right around the time that I’d had to kill Denny and his two guards. Was that a setup too? Was I supposed to have gone down in that fight? Why? What had I done that had made Bulldog want to kill me?
Another scenario, one that I didn’t like, was playing in my head by the time that I arrived back home. It raised some more questions for me. Why had I only seen that one glimpse of Leila before Bulldog conveniently brought her along to our meeting in Vegas? We had both been working in the casinos in Reno for more than two years and never happened to bump into each other. Was she sent to unsettle me? Was she the one who had been sent to keep an eye on me?
I didn’t like any of the scenarios that were assaulting my mind. In every one of them, it appeared that Leila was being used to get to me, either knowingly or unknowingly. Getting clear of her would have been the smart thing to do at that point. There was just one big problem with that: I was beginning to believe that I simply couldn’t or didn’t want to go on with my life without her in it.
Chapter Twenty-One: Peach
After spending the weekend in San Jose with Trevor, my guilt was overflowing. Regardless of how much I tried to push it down or ignore them, I simply could not hold back the growing feelings that I had for him. Even worse, I had started something that was rushing out of control and I had no way of stopping it. That something could get Trevor killed or, worse yet, if he ever discovered that I was a part of it… I pushed those possibilities out of my mind. It would do no good for me to waste my energies worrying about what could happen. I had to figure out a way to fix things.
“You don’t look so good, Peach,” Dish said as she came into the den. It was one of the rare nights that both of us were free, and she’d come over to see how I was doing. We’d talked little about our plan or about how things had gone in our particular roles.
For the most part, I had only used Dish to help push the boulder off of the hill. I had known that Dish had gotten under Bulldog’s skin, mostly by his reaction more than by what Dish told me. I’d intentionally worked things that way so that Dish would not be in too deep and could maintain plausible deniability. “Gee thanks,” I mumbled.
“Having second thoughts?” she asked.
Dish had always been good at reading me, but she’d taken a pretty good leap to reach that conclusion, unless I was suddenly wearing my emotions on my sleeve. If that was the case, then maybe I wasn’t playing my role well for anybody. “Is it that obvious?”
“It is to me,” she replied.
“Great, everybody probably has it figured out.”
“Chill, Peach,” she said, sitting on the opposite end of the sofa. “I have a lot of practice reading you.”
“I hope it’s just you, because if either of the other two have figured it out, then I’m a dead woman walking.”
“I’ve never seen you lose your nerve like this before,” she commented. “Unless I miss my guess, you’re having some second thoughts because a certain someone turned out to be more than you expected him to be. Am I right?”
She was right on target. “How did you figure that out?”
“Well, I’m not a mind reader, but I’ve watched how you’ve acted when you’re on the phone with Trevor, how you’ve acted whenever you come back from Reno and how, after spending a fabulous weekend in San Jose, you have done nothing but mope. Unless all of my past knowledge and experience are useless, I’d guess that someone has fallen for her mark.”
That particular observation opened up the flood gates for me. I told her everything. I told her about all of the other aspects of the plan that she wasn’t in on. I told her about how I had actually been successful at getting between the two of them and that they were ripe for setting up the final confrontation that would lead to me being able to take over.
“But you can’t see it all to the end,” she interrupted before I had completed my story.
“But I can’t stop it either,” I admitted. “It’s gone beyond my control. The two of them will face off and one of them will get killed—”
“And you are worried that one in particular will be killed,” she jumped in again. “It could go the other way. What you’ve told me about Trevor, he could beat Bulldog.”
“But that’s the problem. I don’t want him to beat Bulldog. I don’t want this anymore.”
“What happened to not having anything to show for yourself?”
“It isn’t what I thought it was,” I admitted. I didn’t bother to tell her that those feelings that I’d had about my life being meaningless had been connected to those instincts about Trevor and wanting to move into a new phase in my life that included a husband and a home. Even when I thought about it, it sounded far-fetched and hokey, at least for me. Maybe that sort of thing worked for other women, but…
“So, what are you going to do?” She rescued me from having to continue my thought.
“I have to figure out a way to undo all of this,” I replied.
“I doubt you can undo it and walk away unscathed.”
It was the truth and there was no way that I could deny it. But could I push it in a direction that was more favorable to me? I remembered one of the Tomb Raider movies when Laura Croft was riding the large stone battering ram and the monster was trying to kill her. Could I figure out a way to push things off course and destroy the monster that I faced? It worked for her, but then, that was a movie. It was in the script to work out that way. Nobody in my drama was working from a script.
The worst part of the entire set of circumstances was that I knew that, at some point, I was going to have to tell Trevor what I had done. I could no longer be duplicitous with him. My heart, my very soul, would not allow it. But I also knew that, in the process, I would probably lose him. How was I going to save him from harm, stop the runaway boulder, keep from being killed and hold onto Trevor too? I couldn’t bring Dish into it any further, but I needed to open up about what I was feeling before I fell completely apart.
“I can’t lose Trevor,” I whispered.
“I don’t know if that’s possible at this point,” she replied. “When I said that I doubt that you can walk away unscathed, that’s what I was talking about.”
“I really don’t know what to do.”
“Seems like you have to make it so that you and Trevor definitely win. You probably have to bring him in on the plan.”
I liked the first part of the response, but not the second. The two of us winning was a good option, but letting him in on my plan would mean that I’d have to admit that I had set him up along with Bulldog. There wasn’t anything savory in that part of it. There had to be another way.
“I can’t tell him. Not yet. I just can’t.”
Dish shrugged. “That’s the only way I see you getting out of this.”
“There has to be another way.”
She shrugged again and looked at her watch. “I’m here if you need me to help, but, well, you know how I see it and I’ve got somewhere that I need to be.” She stood up and started toward the door, putting her coffee cup on the bar as she passed by the kitchen.
There wasn’t any point in her rehashing her arguments and I appreciated that she didn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to draw her in deeper and risk harm to her because of my stupidity. If I figured a way out of the mess that I was in, it would have to be something that I did alone.
An idea was beginning to play out in the back of my mind. It would take a little bit more uncomfortable work—very uncomfortable work—but it could be a way of turning things in my favor and minimizing the damage. It might even help me avoid having to tell Trevor what I had done.
“I know you’re always here, Dish. Thanks for that, but I have to figure this one out on my own.” I followed her toward the door. It was good that she couldn’t stay longer. I needed the space to try to figure out my next move.
“You be careful,” she said, giving me a hug before opening the door to leave. “It’s better to stay alive with a broken heart.”
“I know, I will,” I replied.