Honey
Honey had raced back to her home in a daze. After she’d called the police and waited for them to arrive, telling them everything she knew about Bethany’s death, she’d felt like she was in some sort of terrible, terrible dream. Every time she’d closed her eyes all she could picture was Bethany’s lifeless body sprawled out on the bed, her eyes glazed over and her limbs limp.
She can’t be gone, she’d thought. This isn’t happening. They’re going to take her to the hospital and they’ll find out that she was just unconscious or something. She’ll be back to normal in a few weeks.
Honey had known that thinking that way was delusional, but facing the reality of what had happened, what she had seen, was too much for her. She’d spent the day in her apartment, pacing back and forth and trying to come to grips with everything. She’d had a shift that night, but she didn’t give a damn; as far as she was concerned, her life at Fantasies had ended when her friend died.
No one from the club had called her, and Honey’d figured that they’d known that she was hardly in a mood to work. After all, news of Bethany was likely rushing through the staff.
But when midnight had rolled around, and she’d realized that sleep wasn’t an option, Honey had decided to call Charlie and figure out just what the hell he knew about what happened to Bethany. After all, he’d been the one giving her drugs, and he’d been the last one to see her alive.
“Honey!” he’d shouted through the phone. “Where the hell are you?”
“Didn’t exactly feel like working,” Honey had said, her voice calm and cold. “But I want answers. You were the last person to see Bethany alive, and I know you’d been giving her drugs. I want to know everything you know about what happened to her.
A silence had fallen over the conversation.
“We’re closing up early tonight on account of Bethany,” he’d said. “If you want to talk, meet me at the diner near the club at around two-thirty.”
“In the morning?”
“You know how this business works,” he’d said. “We don’t exactly have the luxury of regular hours.”
“Fine.”
And now the hour to meet had arrived. Honey checked her phone and saw that it was a little after two. She didn’t know exactly what she was going to say to Charlie, or how he’d react. All she knew was that she needed to find out just what kind of man Charlie was. It was all she could do.
Honey arrived at the dingy diner on the corner down the road from the club and spotted Charlie in one of the back booths. She sat down with him and stared hard at her boss, the man she thought she knew.
“What the fuck happened?” she spat out before he could say a word.
“It’s a goddamn tragedy,” said Charlie, shaking his head sadly and looking away.
“Don’t give me that bullshit,” said Honey, her words ridged with venom and rage that she didn’t know she was capable of. “I know that you’d been giving her drugs, and I know that you were the last person to see her alive. So tell me everything you know.”
“I don’t know if I like this tone from you, Honey,” he said, taking on the tone of a scolding father. “I am your boss, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“Maybe so, but I’m the one with a dead best friend, so I think at the very least I’m entitled to some answers.”
Charlie sighed, looked away, and sipped his coffee. Honey got the impression that he was preparing to tell her something that would be very difficult to say. Or, at least, he wanted it to look like it was something that’d be difficult to say.
“Bethany … well, she was troubled. You knew that, I knew that—we all did. She did her best to turn her life around and stay off drugs, but a girl like that is just an addict down to her bones. It was only a matter of time.”
Honey said nothing, instead staring hard at her boss as she tried to figure just how much of what he was saying was bullshit.
“I found out that she was using again, and it broke my heart. I asked her where she was getting her drugs from, and she didn’t even know the guy’s name. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. And I’ve been around enough users to know that going from clean to doing random drugs that you don’t know what the hell they’ve been cut with is a good way to end up OD’ing.”
“So you figured you’d do the ‘nice’ thing and give her drugs of your own.”
“I’ll come clean—we’ve been running drugs out of the basement of the club. And I’m telling you that because I know I can trust you with this information—I’ll even make it worth your while to keep it secret. I figured that if Bethany was going to be using, then at least I could give her what I had. That way she’d be using with drugs that I knew, and she wouldn’t be shooting garbage into her veins from god-knows-where. It was all I could think of.”
“Aren’t you sweet,” said Honey.
“I was looking into rehab clinics for her,” he said. “I wanted to save her life. If she had to do a little bit until I could help her, then I figured it was better than her buying from some random shithead who didn’t give two fucks about her. But I just didn’t know how low her tolerance had gotten. When I left her that night she must’ve woken back up and shot up the rest of what she had.”
Honey crossed her arms and sat back in her seat.
“And I’m supposed to believe you?”
“Honey, you can believe whatever you want. But I tried to help Bethany in my own way, and you can think I’m a liar or you and trust me. Either way, I’ve gotta make sure that I can trust you with what I’ve just told you.”
“About the fucking drug lab that you’ve been running under my goddamn place of employment?”
“It’s just been a temporary thing. We’ve been cooking under the club while a bigger facility gets built outside of town; shouldn’t be longer than another month or two. And in the meantime, if you can keep this information to yourself, and tell the police that neither of us had anything to do with what happened to Bethany if they ask, then I can get you enough cash to make sure that you don’t have to work as a stripper ever again. Say, enough to pay for a full-ride to college, maybe?”
It was a tempting offer, and Honey didn’t know what to do.
Maybe he’s telling the truth? she thought. Maybe he was just trying to do right by Bethany, in his own fucked-up way. And that money sure would be nice, especially with the fact that she was pregnant and would need all the help she could get.
But then she remembered Grit, the father of her child. He was doing everything he could to take that place down, and if she went to him with what Charlie had just told her, he’d have enough to move in and wipe that lab off the face of the earth. She could do the right thing, and maybe patch things up with Grit in the process.
“And …” said Charlie, a small smile forming on his lips, “I know that you have other things going on in your life that you need to be worrying about.”
“What?” shot out Honey.
“Bethany let it slip the night she died,” said Charlie. “I know that you’re pregnant, and it’s with a man who you’re not exactly in a committed relationship with.”
Fuck! thought Honey. She took a deep breath, letting the fact that Charlie knew about her biggest secret wash over her.
But before she could give the matter too much thought, she saw that over Charlie’s shoulder a small group of diner patrons and employees was gathered near one of the front windows.
“What the hell is that?” said one of them.
“Is that a fire?” said another.
“I think … is that fucking Fantasies?”
Honey and Charlie shared a surprised look before shooting out of the booth and rushing towards the window. Sure enough, down the road, Honey spotted the glow of a fire in the distance. She couldn’t tell from where she stood that it was Fantasies, but it sure looked like it.
“Oh fuck!” shouted Charlie. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
He took off through the front doors and Honey followed after him. She ran down the road as fast as she could, and with each step it became clearer and clearer that it was, in fact, Fantasies that was on fire. The club was totally in flames, fire shooting out of the windows of the place and smoke rising into the air. Even from where Honey stood across the street, she could feel the heat from the flames on her skin.
“What the fuck happened?” shouted Charlie. “How the fuck could this have happened?”
His questions were answered as a group of figures emerged from the alley around the flaming building. Honey couldn’t tell who they were at first, but as their bulky bodies came into clearer detail through the smoke, she realized just who was behind the fire.
It was Grit and the Vandals.
Grit stepped out into the street, his eyes locked on Honey.
He did it, she thought. He actually burned the place down.
“You Charlie?” called out Grit. “Sorry about your club.”
Charlie was beside himself.
“You fucking piece of shit!” shouted Charlie over the roar of the fire. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
Honey saw a smart-ass grin form on Grit’s face.
“I think I’ve got a pretty goddamn good idea,” he said. “I’m the one who started the fucking fire, after all.”
“You know how much shit you’ve just sent up into the air?” shouted Charlie.
“Not a problem,” said Grit. “We just torched the club on top of the lab. Once this place collapses, your little operation will be good and buried.”
Honey, despite everything that was happening, couldn’t help but smile. The place that had made the drugs that were responsible for so much death was now going up in flames. They’d delivered a hell of a blow to Charlie and his operation, and judging by the way that Charlie was freaking out, Honey could tell that this incident put him in a hell of a position.
But before anyone could say or do anything else, Charlie reached into the small of his back and pulled out a pistol. With lightning speed, he rushed over to Honey, grabbed her, and put the gun to her head. At first, she wasn’t quite sure what was happening, but as she felt the cold steel of the barrel pressed to her temple, she realized right away that she was being used as a human shield.
“You fuckers drop your goddamn guns now, or I swear to Christ that I’ll put a bullet through this bitch’s head!”
“Whoa!” shouted Grit, raising his hands into the air. “Don’t do anything stupid! You don’t have murder on your head yet; don’t need to make this shit any worse for yourself.”
“You have no idea just who those fucking drugs were for, do you?” Charlie shouted, his breath hot against my skin. “I’m as good as fucking dead.
Honey could see the anger boil in Grit’s eyes from where she stood. He wanted blood, but only the fact that Charlie seemed on a hair-trigger seemed to keep his rage at bay.
“Come with me, you bitch!”
The gun still pressed against her temple, Charlie dragged Honey down the road towards where his car was parked. She looked at Grit with a terrified expression, tears in her eyes. She’d never been so scared in her life, and she wanted nothing more at that moment than to be safe and in his arms. But there was nothing Grit could do.
“Honey!” he shouted out. “I’ll come for you, I swear it! I won’t let him lay a fucking hand on you!”
Charlie and Honey reached the car, and he opened the truck, threw her inside, and closed it tight. She heard the engine rev, and soon they were in motion. Her heart pounded with fear, and she prayed to anyone listening that Grit would come to her rescue.
Grit
Watching the car peel off into the distance, Grit felt more helpless than he ever had before in his life.
“Boss!” shouted Stone. “What’s the plan?”
“We get the fuck out of here, now!” he shouted. “And follow that asshole!”
The men nodded and, grabbing their gear, they rushed for the van. The building creaked and groaned, and the fire roared. Grit took one last look at the place, hoping that his plan to bring the club down on top of the lab would work. If it did, it would prevent the chemicals from getting out, and give the cops who dug it up some evidence to bring to justice anyone who was involved in that operation.
The men piled into the van and soon they were off. Grit was in the driver’s seat, and he gunned the engine and tore down the road. Charlie’s car was a sporty thing, and Grit knew that it wouldn’t be easy to keep up with him. He wished more than anything that he had his bike; if he were on that, he’d be able to catch up to Charlie no problem and put a bullet in the man’s head before he managed to get a mile away.
Grit gunned the van’s engine, redlining the thing as he weaved through the late-night traffic of the city. Eventually, he caught up to Charlie’s sports car and got close enough that he could see the now-manic man’s face.
Fuck, he thought. If I shoot the asshole, he might just crash that thing into the nearest telephone pole. And I can’t exactly tail him in this.
Before he could think too much about his next step, he watched as Charlie raised his gun, aimed it at Grit, and fired. The bullet smashed into the windshield and sent spider-web cracks crawling across the glass.
“Shit!” shouted out Stone. “This guy’s not fucking around!”
Another shot rang out, this one smashing through the windshield and thunking right into Grit’s headrest.
“Godddamn!” shouted Grit. “You boys all all right back there?”
The men sounded off, and Grit continued to drive, placing the van behind the car and out of Charlie’s line of fire.
Charlie seemed more manic than he’d ever been before, and Grit kept clear in his mind just what wild animals did when they were cornered. He knew that if he let this car get away, he might not ever see Honey again.
But before he could do anything else, Charlie stuck his gun out of the window, pointed it downward, and blind-fired every last shot he had. Nearly every bullet went wide, some hitting the front of the van with a hard, metallic “ping,” but one managed to hit the front left tire. The tire exploded with a massive bang, and the car immediately went out of control. Grit kept his hands on the wheel as hard as he possibly could, doing everything possible to keep the van from flying off the road and crashing. The car tilted on its two right wheels, nearly tipping as it spun out of control. The men in the back yelled, and Grit prepared for the worst.
He was able to keep the van somewhat steady, bringing it back down on all four tires. The van spun around and around, eventually coming to a halt in the middle of the road. Grit watched helplessly as Charlie’s car drove off into the distance and disappeared.
“Fuck!” shouted Grit, pounding hard on the wheel and screaming in anger. “Fuck!”
His mind raced as he tried to think of something to do. Part of him wanted to get out of the van and run after the damn car as fast as his legs would carry him.
“Boss!” shouted Stone. “We gotta get the fuck out of here. Nothing we can do now, and the cops are gonna be out looking for whoever torched the club. And this van isn’t exactly inconspicuous, you know?”
Grit looked over the bullet holes in the windshield and knew that Stone was right.
No chance in hell they’d make it more than a few miles before cops rightly figured that they were up to something. Grit pulled the steering wheel hard, pulling off the road and smashing down the brakes hard. He gripped the steering wheel so tightly that he worried he might split the cheap fabric that covered it. The rest of the men knew better than to say a word—they knew by now that dead silence from the boss meant that he was in no kind of mood.
“Goddammit!” he yelled finally, slamming his fist into the steering wheel and causing it to bend just a bit. “God-fucking-dammit!”
The yell forced just enough anger out of him for Grit to be able to focus on the task at hand.
“We gotta get back to the hotel room,” he said. “We gotta figure out the next step before it’s too late.”
“Sounds like a fuckin’ plan, boss,” said Stone, clapping his hand down on Grit’s shoulder.
Grit nodded; he knew that at the very least, he had a solid crew of men who’d have his back until the end. But he knew that they had no idea about the extent of Grit and Honey’s relationship. Sure, Charlie had said that he’d knocked her up, but who the hell knew if they were even thinking about that. He realized he’d have to come clean once they were back in the room.
After replacing the blown-out tire, Grit pulled the van back onto the road. The silence in the van continued for a time, but about halfway back to the hotel the men started letting their pleasure at the successful op show through.
“You fuckers see that place go up?” asked Stone. “Goddamn, that shit was brighter than the Strip.”
“Fuckin’ right, it was,” said Gray. “Those assholes didn’t even know what hit ’em.”
Grit decided to let the men enjoy their victory, but he was in no mood for anything like a celebration. All he could picture as he drove was Honey in the back of that fucker Charlie’s car. He imagined the terror that she was going through, how she had no idea what her boss had in mind for her. And neither did Grit—Charlie had revealed himself to be an unsteady psycho, and now that he was in deep shit with whoever was depending on him for those drugs that were currently buried under tons of burning rubble, he was likely ready to lash out in whatever desperate way was possible.
They arrived back at the warehouse and the men climbed on their bikes.
“Back at the hotel,” said Grit in a stern, no-nonsense voice. “A-fuckin-SAP.”
The men nodded and took off on their rides. Grit approached his hog and looked it over, part of him wanting to jump on that thing and ride through the city until he found just where Charlie was. He imagined holding that fucker’s neck in his hands, squeezing the life out of him for a little bit, then giving it a hard twist. He’d never felt this kind of rage before—it was boiling and raging, but also calm and calculated.
However, the “calm and calculated” part of the anger vanished as soon as he was behind the shut door of his hotel room. His men watching, Grit stormed over to the large, tacky painting of a sunset that hung over the bed, grabbed it off the wall so hard that the nail it was hung on launched out, and flung it against the opposite wall, smashing the thing into pieces of broken frame and ripped canvas. Then, with a roar of rage, he grabbed a nearby bottle of vodka and swung it into the TV, breaking the glass into a thousand pieces and sending sparks flying. His men watched the display in silence, knowing that such an outburst of rage from the boss, while rare, was something that was better not to get in the middle of.
And he wasn’t done. Grit picked up the coffee table in the middle of the room and, with a heave, launched it against the full-length mirror that hung in the large hotel room’s hallway. The coffee table hit the mirror with a deafening crash, sending the thing down in shards. Grit stood in the center of the room, the men still gripped with silence. He took in full, deep breaths as he stood hunched over like some kind of berserker beast, his large hands balled into tight fists.
He wanted to kill.
But the destruction had taken the edge of the most out-of-control side of his anger, and his thoughts shifted back to the more controlled, constrained rage that he’d felt before.
“First things first,” he said. “We gotta find this asshole. He’s got the girl, sure, but he also connects us to the fire. If he wanted to, he could report us to the fucking cops and get us all tied up in arson charges.”
“You think he’d pull some shit like that?” asked Razor. “Sounds pretty fucking low, even for a goddamn drug slinger.”
“It’s low,” said Gray, “but if he got the cops on our tail, it might take the heat off of him enough to be able to get the fuck out of the city. Even a day of cops questioning us would be enough time for him to take the girl and go God-knows-where.”
Grit nodded, Gray echoing his thoughts completely.
“We gotta find this guy and find him fast,” said Grit.
He made his way over to the bar, snatched out a bottle of whiskey, and took a long drink.
“Just one thing, boss,” said Stone. “I don’t wanna, you know, step on your toes or some shit, but just what’s been going on with you and this girl? She’s fucking pregnant?”
As the whiskey burned in his belly, Grit realized that part of him wanted to tell his men that it was none of their goddamn business, that all they needed to know was that he was their fucking president and that they had direct orders. He hated having his personal life on display like this, but he knew that keeping his men out of the loop would be an easy way to make them resentful and untrusting of his leadership. That was the thing with being president, he knew—you didn’t get to forget that you were a leader just because things had gotten tough; that was actually when it was most important to remember just how to act.
“Here’s the fucking deal,” said Grit. “Honey and I had been meeting up to exchange information for cash, just like the agreement. She was meeting with Razor and Pitt, but she eventually started insisting that I meet with her personally. I should’ve known that was a bad fucking idea, but oh fucking well. Yeah, shit happened between the two of us, and things got serious. More serious than I was expecting.”
Grit stopped, realizing just how uncomfortable he felt sharing this information with his crew. But he took a deep breath and another belt of whiskey and went on.
“Then I found out she withheld some serious fucking information from me—information that could’ve gotten this shit off the streets sooner than tonight. I was fucking furious, but now I see that she was just a scared kid afraid of betraying her boss. But I didn’t at the time. I flipped the fuck out and told her to get lost.”
He took another swig of booze.
“And now she’s fucking pregnant. So now I got all that shit to deal with.”
Grit looked around at his men and saw that they were right there with him.
“Shit, boss,” said Razor. “No one here blames you for losing your goddamn cool. I don’t know what the fuck I’d do if some girl carrying my kid had just gotten fuckin’ abducted. I’d be doing more than wrecking a fuckin’ hotel room, that’s for sure.”
The men said their agreements, and Grit realized just how lucky he was to have a crew like this. He had no doubt that they had his back to the bitter end.
“Just one thing, boss,” said Gray. “And I don’t want to speak out of turn here, and I hope you don’t, you know, take this the wrong way, but are we sure that this girl’s on the level?”
Grit snapped his gaze over to the rookie brother, his eyes narrowed in anger.
Is he really suggesting that Honey’s doing me fucking dirty? he asked himself. This guy’s got a lot of fucking balls on him, that’s for goddamn sure.
“Explain,” said Grit, his voice lined with razors.
“It’s just that this all seems a little strange, you know? You said yourself that this girl held out information on you that would’ve made the difference between us moving in now, and us moving in a week ago. Hell, we only moved in now because you felt fine with rolling the dice and hoping the lab was there; if you’d wanted to be more cautious and shit then we’d still be hanging around with our thumbs up our asses, hoping that this girl would be dropping us something a little more, well, actionable to work with.”
“Just saying,” he continued, “that it’s possible, just possible, that this girl was working with her boss, trickling you just enough information to keep you at bay until they got this shipment off. Think about it—they were planning on moving this whole operation out somewhere in the middle of the fucking desert, and once they pulled that shit off there’s no chance in hell that we’d be able to find them. I mean, how sure are you that you know this girl, you know? She is just a stripper, after all. I mean, how sure are you that she’s even pregnant? This could all be some story to make you go easier on her.”
Grit said nothing. Part of him wanted to strangle this little asshole right then and there for daring to say shit like this right to his face. And looking around the hotel room, he could see that the men were thinking the same thing. They all had the same shocked expression on their face, like they were about two seconds from witnessing this kid get tossed out of the window and onto the Strip.
But the better part of Grit admired just how ballsy it was for Gray to speak up like that. And Gray was right to think that way; he was right that Grit should be a little more skeptical about some girl who he barely knew, that was all of a sudden telling him that she was pregnant, that was withholding just the information that he needed to know to move in on the drug lab.
The entire room was still and silent as Grit looked Gray up and down, sizing up the young man who’d said such things to the president.
“I see what you’re saying,” said Grit, finally.
He could’ve sworn that all of the men in the room besides him and Gray let out their held breaths at that moment.
“And all I have to say is that I need you guys to trust me. I know this girl, and I know that she wouldn’t pull anything like that. Maybe all I got to go on is a gut feeling, but going with my gut and trusting myself that I know what the fuck I’m doing is how I got to where I am. That, and having the best fucking crew that anyone could hope for. So if you guys want to sit this one out, fine, that’s your call. But if you’re ready to finish what we started and put the asshole who killed Pitt in jail or in the ground, then let’s fucking do this.”
“We’re right there with you, boss,” said Razor.
“Till the end,” said Gray.
Killian and Stone stood up and nodded. None of the men needed even a moment to figure out if they were going to stand at the boss’s side.
Grit chided himself a bit for it, but he couldn’t help but feel his heart warm a bit.
Fuck that, he thought with a smile.
The men got their gear ready to move out, and as they did, Grit poured himself another drink and stood out on the balcony. As he let his eyes drift into the distance of the Strip, the purple and yellow and green neon of the place melting into a bright blur, all he could think about was Honey. He thought about how beautiful she was, how her eyes looked when they made love, and how he’d do anything to keep her safe. And the fact that she was carrying his kid made the urge to crack some fucking skulls even more pressing.
Grit was ready to act. The time for screwing around was over.