Authors: Carmella Jones
Chapter Twenty-Four: Bulldog
Everything about Peach had changed. Everything that we’d had in our somewhat tenuous relationship from before seemed to be crumbling right in front of me. Initially, after we’d had that first little blow up in my office when she’d returned from Reno, I’d thought that maybe she’d found out that I’d slept with Dish. I’d kept my distance and hoped that everything would blow over. When it finally did, I thought things were headed back to normal, but they weren’t.
I blamed myself, really. We’d gone to Vegas on the long weekend trip, and when we’d returned, she’d been pushing things toward the next level. I was scared. There just wasn’t any other way to put it. I could see her wanting to settle down with me, get a house together, start having babies and starting to want me to do something respectable. I just wasn’t ready for that at the time. As she started to drift away from me, however, I began to realize that maybe I did want those things, and that Peach was the only way that I was ever going to get them.
“Hey, babe,” I smiled when she shuffled through the door of my office with her latest delivery from Reno. She looked wrung out and depressed. I felt my heart sink instantly. I wasn’t sure whether or not I was in love with her. I was never really sure that anybody ever knew that sort of thing, but I did know that whenever she was cut, I tended to bleed. “You alright?”
“Long ride,” she said, slumping into the usual chair.
I knew it was a long ride and I also knew that she never really enjoyed it, but she seemed to be well beyond the usual level of distaste and into whole new emotional territory that really didn’t make sense to me.
I watched her out of the corner of my eye while I counted the money. She was definitely down about something, but I could only guess at what it was. The dark circles under her eyes suggested that she hadn’t slept well the night before. The fact that they were even there, especially on her typically perfect face, was a shock to me. She was either sick, sad or scared.
I finished counting and slid the bills across the desk toward her just as I normally did, but I didn’t draw my hand back.
“What?” she asked, when she noted that I was holding on to her money.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “I’m not letting this money go until you start talking.”
“I’m just tired,” she sighed.
“No, you are also stressed, depressed, sick or sad. You look like shit and don’t seem to care that you do. Now, if it was me looking like that, it would be no big deal. I’m up to my ass in who knows what and I’m meeting myself leaving when I arrive, but you shouldn’t be having that kind of stress. So, start talking.”
“This has all started to get to me,” she finally said with a sigh. “I’m constantly looking over my shoulder and worrying that somebody is watching me or trying to set me up. With that detective snooping around, I’m just not myself.”
“You want to lay low for a while?” I said, not really listening to her words, but mostly to the same paranoid feelings that I’d been experiencing myself. “I can get somebody else to do the deliveries for a while.”
“I don’t know, maybe?” She chewed on her lower lip, glanced up at me and then quickly shifted her eyes back down as though she was afraid to look at me. “I hate to let you down, but I’m also afraid that I’ll blow it, you know?”
That little eye-shift wasn’t like her either. She was typically confident and on the edge of cocky. For her not to be able to look me in the eyes told me that there was something going on inside her head that was well beyond being tired from the ride, from lack of sleep or from looking over her shoulder. The money was all there, so she wasn’t skimming. Was she up to something else?
I reconsidered what I had been thinking about earlier, how our relationship had changed dramatically in the last month or so and how I was beginning to miss it, even thinking about seeing if I could recapture what we were doing after we returned from Vegas. Maybe it was time to get out of town again and see if we couldn’t get things back together.
“You want to go to Vegas or take a trip somewhere? Maybe ride somewhere and just get away for a while?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t know what I want.”
I was trying to remain patient with her. I wanted to start questioning her and see if I could figure out what was going on. It struck me suddenly that there was another reason that she might be acting strange. She wasn’t looking over her shoulder and paranoid about the investigation and the problems that were following me. She was looking over her shoulder and paranoid because she didn’t want me to catch her in something. She had somebody else. That’s why things had cooled off between us. She had somebody else and she was afraid that I’d find out.
I instantly realized what it felt like to have someone cheating on you. I’d done it hundreds of times, thinking that it was okay since we hadn’t ever made any sort of an exclusive agreement. Being on the other end of it didn’t feel nearly as good. In fact, I was afraid that I was going to explode the moment that the idea that she had been seeing another guy hit me. I sucked in a deep breath and tried to get myself under control.
“Let me ask you a question,” I said, trying to hold my jealous temper intact.
“Sure,” she replied in a bored tone.
“Are you seeing someone else?”
Her eyes snapped up and she stared directly at me. Not only was there a sharpness to her look, but there was acid in her tone. “This is coming from you? I know what you do when I go out of town. Did you have one of the groupies last night? Or was it two of them, or three? Or”—she dragged the word out before finishing in a lower tone—“did you fuck my best friend again?”
I had started to protest, but when she asked about Dish, I withdrew my hand from the money I’d slid across the desk and sat back in my chair.
Peach didn’t wait for a response. She scooped up the money in the same movement that she used to stand up. Within seconds, she was out the door, slamming it behind her.
The silence in the office was thick, but I was a mess inside. I went back over the conversation several times. I tried to justify what I had done; with the groupies, it was no big deal, but I’d crossed a line by being with Dish and I knew it. There really wasn’t any way that I could take it back and, at the moment, I didn’t have any clue how to fix it, so I tried to push it out of my mind and turned to making out the deposit slip and preparing to go to the bank.
It was then that it hit me like a ton of bricks. I had never told anyone about a detective snooping around. Peach was up to something and she’d just made a perfect maneuver to sidetrack me. The second the idea entered my mind, I started to see things that she’d said and done in a different light.
Chapter Twenty-Five: Peach
Marines are supposed to be the consummate tough guys. Female Marines are supposed to be the same; it’s part of the training that sets them apart from everybody else. There wasn’t a single ounce of that Marine toughness left in me.
After my meeting in the park with Trevor, I’d gone back to my hotel room in Reno and spent the night crying, tossing, turning, flipping channels and doing anything and everything that I could to avoid feeling the incredibly painful ache that gripped my chest. I’d started to dial Trevor’s number several times, but never pressed send. He probably wouldn’t have answered my call anyway.
The following morning, though I hadn’t slept for even a moment, I dragged myself out of bed and took a shower to try to bring myself to some semblance of life. I still had to pick up the money from the casino and ride back home. I wasn’t dreading the ride home. I was eager to get back to my place where I could hole up for a while and try to put the shattered pieces back together.
Dish had been right. There had been no way that I was going to be able to escape what I had started unscathed. She was also right about which part was going to be the worst of it. I was already living it and wishing that I might have been found out and murdered instead.
The shower had done little good, though I suppose that I was a little bit more awake than I had been before I took it. I pulled on my clothes, not worrying about how I looked, scooped up my bag and headed out of the room.
I didn’t waste much time picking up the money that I’d been sent to get. With the delivery packed away inside the left pouch of my saddle bags, I straddled my Fat Boy, fired it up and started off out of the parking lot and on my way back home.
Dropping off the delivery at the Hot House was going to be an extremely uncomfortable inconvenience for me. I’d rather have passed up that part of my return home and just gone straight to my house without any detours. Since that wasn’t an option, I tried to draw up at least a little bit of that old desire to “do my duty,” the crap that had gotten me through some rough times in the Corps. It was enough to get me off my bike, get into the bar and into Bulldog’s office. I wasn’t sure that it was going to get me beyond that.
Fortunately, Bulldog’s interrogation had given me the extra bit of energy that I needed to get out of the bar and back home. It had started off harmless enough. I looked like shit and it was pretty hard to hide that from him. I’d tried to avoid getting into any sort of altercation or any kind of discussion, for that matter, but he wouldn’t leave me alone.
I was afraid that because of the way I was avoiding looking at him or talking to him that he was going to see right through me and know what I had done to him. I’d tried to use the old “give him a good story to get him to leave you alone” trick, but he didn’t bite on it like I thought he would. Then I saw the wheels in his head start turning and I was sure that he was putting it all together. When I saw him fighting down his anger, I was sure that things were about to explode, and then he hung a pitch over the plate for me and I knocked it out of the park.
Sure, it wasn’t fair to use him screwing Dish against him. After all, I’d set that little meeting up on purpose. But it was the perfect way to distract him and wiggle my way out of the trap that I was just about to step in. Storming out in a huff after dropping that little bomb on him had worked perfectly, and I’d been able to retreat and get started on my way back home.
I’d screwed everything up and I’d screwed it up in so many ways that I had no clue how to unravel it again. I doubted that my life was in danger with Trevor. I saw hurt in his eyes instead of anger, and I didn’t believe that he would take his revenge on me. He didn’t need to. I was close to being dead inside anyway. I’d let myself rot from the inside out and the ultimate result would be the same.
Whether or not Bulldog put it all together in time to either slit my throat or send someone else to do it before going to jail depended upon how well I had motivated Sal O’Neal to push all of the shit that had gone down over the last several years in Bulldog’s direction. I’d had some pangs of guilt, even about that, initially, but I’d gotten past that and no longer cared how things played out. Maybe it wasn’t right that I had done what I had to Bulldog after he had treated me so well, but there wasn’t much else I could do to stop what was already in motion at that point.
When I got home, I fixed all of the deadbolts on my door, turned off my phones, stripped out of the clothes that I’d worn on the ride home and lost myself in the hot water of my bathtub. Accompanying me in my bath were two bottles, in one was Coke and in the other was Crown Royal. For several hours, I filled a glass half full with each and drank them down until I was numb. At some point I didn’t bother with the glass anymore. I grabbed a bottle in each hand and alternated taking drinks out of each one. Sometime later, I didn’t even bother with the Coke any more.
How I had passed out without slipping into the water and drowning is still beyond me, but I was still very much alive when I awakened several hours later shivering from the cold water and trying to figure out how to work the knobs to get the water warm again. I finally gave up, slipped out of the tub and onto the carpet. That little jolt of activity stirred up all sorts of evil things in my stomach and I crawled to the toilet where I let them escape from my open mouth.
Having emptied my stomach of all that was in there and after enduring the dry heaves, I forced myself up off of the bathroom floor and, holding onto whatever I could for support, I made my way into my bed and slipped under the covers. In my bed, I realized that my binge hadn’t really accomplished anything. Not only could I still feel the same excruciating ache in my chest that I had before, but I was freezing, my head hurt, my stomach was churning and I still couldn’t force Trevor out of my mind.
I curled up into a tight ball, let the bed do all of the spinning that it wanted and began to pray that I could just go ahead and die. Without Trevor, and after what I had done to the people around me, I didn’t feel like I deserved to live anyway. It would be better to just get it all over with. In fact, for a moment, though I never bothered to roll over and open the drawer, I considered the 9mm in the nightstand beside my bed. I could get rid of the pain permanently that way. It never happened, because once again I passed out.
Chapter Twenty-Six: Bulldog
“What the fuck is this all about, Sal?” I snarled when he knocked at my office door and then entered with a grim look on his face. “We’re supposed to meet somewhere discreet like we agreed. You getting mushy in the head?”
“No,” he replied. “This time it’s official business.”
“Official business? What the fuck are you talkin’ about?” My voice rose in both pitch and tone. “Is your little detective friend here again?”
“No,” he replied. He was trying to remain calm and tell me what it was that had brought him into my office, but I wasn’t giving him much of a chance.
“By the way, Peach found out about your detective friend too. Since I didn’t tell her about our little visit, it must have been you.” I narrowed my eyes and glared at him. He was the only possible person to have passed along that little bit of information. Zane might have, but Zane didn’t have any idea who either Sal or the detective were, and, more than likely, Zane didn’t really care. He ran the bar, kept to himself and didn’t bother with anybody else’s business.
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” Sal replied. “I didn’t talk to anybody about that detective.”
“You sure you didn’t let it slip when you were trying to get into Peach’s pants?”
The surprised look on Sal’s face was more than enough to tell me that I’d struck a chord. I hadn’t known anything, other than the way that he leered at her whenever he saw her, but I had dropped a lure in the water and accidentally caught a big fish.
“I wasn’t trying to get into Peach’s pants,” he protested. His eyes widened with fear for just a moment before he regained control of himself.
“A little pillow talk, Sal?” I grinned. It was the sort of grin that you might find on a jack-o’-lantern. “She suck that little secret right out of you?”
“You’re out of your mind,” he grunted.
“Did you come here to rub it in my face?” I was furious and pushing him. It probably wasn’t the best idea that I’d had up to that point. I needed Sal on my side, and I was in the process of alienating him, but for some reason I didn’t give a shit. I had gone beyond sound reason. The paranoia that had been hounding me for more than a month had gotten the better of me, and I kept pressing my luck. “Did you enjoy that tight ass of hers, huh? Did she ride you like a savage?”
“Bulldog, stop it. Get control of yourself,” he raised his voice.
“Or what?” I taunted. “You going to arrest me or shoot me?”
“Come on, Bulldog, don’t be like that.” He’d changed his tone to a softer one and tried pleading with me. “We’re friends, and we can work our way out of this mess.”
“What mess, Sal? I didn’t say anything about a mess. Did you get us into some sort of mess? Did you set me up, Sal? Did you and Peach get together and set me up? Is that the mess we’re talking about?”
“You know the mess that I’m talkin’ about, Bulldog,” he struggled to keep his tone even, in spite of my accusations. “The same mess that had Detective Taylor here. If you’ll just settle down and come with me, then I can help smooth things over.”
“Come with you?” It suddenly hit me what his official business was. “Come with you where, Sal?”
“Come with me down to the station,” he replied.
“Are you arresting me, Sal?” I growled. I towered over him and looked down at him menacingly.
“Damn it, Bulldog,” he replied. “They’re sending a group of officers down here to take you into custody. I’m trying to get you out of here so that you can show up at the station and present yourself voluntarily, but we’re running out of time.”
“That’s not the biggest problem you’ve got, Sal. You’ve got at least two others. The first one is that you don’t want to be seen with me, because if you are, you’re screwed and you know it.”
“That’s not it, Bulldog,” he protested. “I’m trying to talk some sense into you so that when you arrive down at the station of your own accord, you can play things off right and we can make all of this go away.”
“You know, I’ve poured a lot of fuckin’ money into you over the years and look where the hell it’s gotten me.” What he’d said had started to penetrate my addled mind. I was still furious, but underneath it, I could hear a voice telling me that Sal was still the best chance I had. As pissed off as I was at him, I still needed him. I sat back down behind my desk and took several deep breaths. After a few moments, I spoke again. “Don’t you want to know what the second one is?”
“The second what?”
“Your second problem. I told you that you had two problems. Don’t you want to know what the second one is?” I was still wound up and not quite ready to let things go.
“What’s my second problem?”
“Not getting killed trying to arrest me,” I replied.
He stared at me, challenging me for a long minute. I’d pressed a button and I knew it. He was a proud man and he was confident of his abilities. I’d just leveled a threat at him and he was in the process of figuring out what to do with it. The time ticked away like the fuse on a bomb, and then suddenly his lips formed into a smile. “Jesus, Bulldog,” he broke into a chuckle. “I thought you were serious there for a minute.”
I was serious, but I’d finally gotten a hold of myself and decided that I’d better back off of the tack that I had been taking and try to think my way out of the mess that was in front of me, rather than trying to plow through it swinging with both fists. I shrugged. It was the best response. It neither told him that I was serious, nor did it deny it.
“Is there a back way out of this place?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I replied, pulling the door open and looking down the hall toward the entrance.
“Why don’t you take it? Those other guys will be along in a little bit. I’ll stick around here and buy some time for you to get yourself together and then show up down at the station. As long as you look like you’re cooperating, it will go a long way to making this all go away. You weren’t in Salt Lake. That goes a long way toward helping you out.”
He was right. I had deniability. It would be pretty hard for them to pin anything on me. I got up from my chair and moved toward the door, following Sal out into the hall. Before we reached the front room, where I would cut behind the bar and head toward the back door, I grabbed his shoulder and turned him. “You better get me out of this mess, Sal or I’ll fuckin’ kill you.”
Without looking back, I cut behind the bar and started toward the back door. Zane looked up with a curious expression as I passed by him, but he didn’t ask any questions or act like it really mattered to him. He was taking down a glass and approaching Sal when I slipped through the back door.
I’d lost it in my office; there was no two ways about it. I’d allowed the paranoia and the stress to push me beyond reason. Had I not reeled it in when I did or if Sal had tried to force things, the shit would have hit the fan and I’d have made things a lot worse. “I’ve got to get control of myself,” I said aloud as I straddled my bike and started down the back alley. I’d go somewhere, cool off a little bit and then head down to the police station. If Sal was right, and if he was still on my side, this would all blow over, but I’d have to keep my cool.
There was one more person who could help me out of the mess that I was in. It was because of him that I was in it in the first place. I pressed the speed dial button for TNT. When the call connected, I didn’t wait for a greeting.