Chapter 3 – Conjured Plan

“So tell me what brings you here, Evan.”

I leaned back against the back of the chair and closed my eyes for a minute.  Mark Duncan, the military counselor assigned to me after I was discharged and moved to Illinois, seemed to be a patient man.  Though we had only spoken once before – the same month I relocated to Chicago – he understood it took a while for me to get going.

He was a short guy with dark hair and glasses.  He must have loved what he did because he didn’t make enough money to get glasses that actually fit, and the little marks on the side of his face where the frames bore into his skin were red.  There were papers all over his desk, and his bookshelf was disorganized to the point of annoying me.  There was a picture of a young woman, but it was an old picture.  Her hairstyle and clothing screamed the nineties.  There weren’t any other pictures of her, and I figured she must be an ex since she was too old to be his daughter.

There weren’t any family-type pictures, though he was prime age to be married with a couple of kids.  There were other pictures on his desk and on the window sill behind his chair, but they consisted of what looked to be a build site for a new house and a huge group of people holding tools.  There were also pictures of groups of kids holding banners that showcased various walk-a-thons and similar functions.

“I’m having dreams,” I told him.

He scribbled on his notepad, which made me want to roll my eyes, but I managed to refrain.

“Bad ones?”

“Not awful,” I said.  “Not like I’ve had in the past when they put me on meds.  It’s just that I haven’t had any like that in a couple years, and they’re keeping me up at night.  I don’t know why they’re coming back.”

“Can you tell me about them?”

“I…uh…”

Fuck.

I should have realized he was going to want me to talk about them.  Talking about the dreams meant talking about what happened in the desert, and I didn’t want to go there.  All I really wanted to do was get some sleep, and this option seemed to be the most expeditious.

“Just…just about the past,” I finally said.  “I just want to know why they’re back.  Why now, when I haven’t really thought about any of that crap for a long time?”

“If you don’t tell me what they were about, I’m not sure how much help I’m going to be,” he urged softly.

With my eyes closed, I went through some of the deep breathing shit the first counselor taught me to do when I had panic attacks.  I didn’t get those any more – not since the first year – but the breathing still helped sometimes when my brain went into overdrive.

“I’m…I’m in the hole.”

“Where you were kept prisoner?”

“Yeah.”  I swallowed a couple of times.  “I’m just waking up, like I did every day when it got hot.  I kept trying to spit sand out of my mouth, but I never could, you know?  There was always more of it.”

I swallowed hard, but the dryness in my throat made it feel like I was swallowing sand again.  I could almost feel it scratching my larynx.

“Fuck.”

“Where are you now, Evan?”

“Chicago,” I said quickly.  “I’m not there.  I know that.”

“Can you go on?”

“Yeah.”  I leaned forward, put my head in my hands, and took a minute to center again.  “There isn’t much more, really.  I’m just in the hole, waking up over and over again, and trying not to eat the fucking dirt.  It made me cough, and it would get in my lungs, too.”

“You haven’t told me much about what happened there,” Mark said.

“Not something I like to talk about.”  I hoped my succinct words and terse voice would dissuade him, but he was a fucking counselor, so that wasn’t going to happen.

“It was a very significant life event, Evan.  You were a prisoner of war for eighteen months.  Don’t you think that warrants some discussion?”

“I talked about it with the last guy,” I reminded him.  “The one in the hospital – in Virginia.  He cleared me.”

“He cleared you from the psychiatric hospital,” Mark clarified.

“Yeah,” I responded as I looked into his eyes, “where I was held for observation only, evaluated, declared unfit for further duty, but otherwise unharmed.”

“And when was the last time you talked to…” he glanced down at the file in his hands, “…Doctor Hartford?”

“Before I moved here.”

“Before you were discharged?”

“Around the same time,” I said.  “He’s the guy who discharged me.”

“With a diagnosis of PTSD.”

“Look,” I said, “I know all this, and we went through all this shit when I saw you the first time.  Do we really need to do it again?  I was really just hoping you could tell me if there’s some kind of sleeping pill or whatever I ought to be taking.”

Mark looked over my file, glanced up at me, and then back to the file again.  He adjusted his ill-fitting sports jacket before settling back into his chair with one leg crossed over the other.

“I’m a psychologist,” Mark said, “not a psychiatrist.  I can’t prescribe medication, though I can make a recommendation to your regular doctor.  Honestly, I think you’d be better off if we just talked for a bit.  It was recommended that you visit with me at least every other week after you moved here two years ago, but this is only the second time you’ve been here.”

“I don’t usually need it.”

“But you do now.”

I shrugged and leaned back against the chair.  I glanced at the couch, and though lying down did sound good, I had never felt comfortable on a shrink’s couch.  It was just too cliché.  I was glad he had the high-backed chair as an option because Hartford never had.

“I just want to get some decent sleep without…”

“Without what?” he asked when I stopped talking.

I took a long breath.  I was so off my game, I was going to fuck up at my job which was completely unacceptable.  I needed sleep to focus, and I couldn’t seem to get any rest without Bridgett, the newbie hooker, in my bed.  That was about as fucked up as some of the shit I went through in the Middle East.

Well, no, it wasn’t, but it was still fucked up.

“I just need some sleep,” I finally said.  “I really think if I just got a couple nights of decent sleep, I’d be fine.”

“How about I make you a deal?” Mark said.  “You tell me a little more about your time in the desert, and I’ll talk to your doctor about the possibility of getting a prescription for sleeping pills.”

“I don’t have a doctor,” I admitted.

He eyed me again, wrote something down on his notepad, and then looked back up.

“Taking care of yourself isn’t much of a priority for you, is it?”  Mark leaned back a bit in his rolling desk chair.  He put the end of his pen in the corner of his mouth and chewed on it a bit.  I wondered if he was a smoker because it reminded me of Jonathan and how he would play around with anything even slightly cigarette shaped.

I checked out his fingers and noticed slight yellowing.  Inhaling slowly, I detected the slight scent of tobacco smoke in the office.  He didn’t smoke in here – it wasn’t strong enough for that – but the scent was on his clothes.

I looked up at him through narrowed eyes.

“It’s a little hectic at work,” I snapped. “The place doesn’t offer health care.”

Quite the opposite, really.

“There are still some basics you should be considering.  When you were in the Marines, you had regular physicals.  Don’t you think that’s important now?”

“I’m not sick,” I stated.

“Sickness is relative,” Mark replied.  “You are here for a reason, just like you might go to an urgent care facility if you had a cold you just couldn’t shake.”

“I’m not sick,” I repeated, “and I don’t go to the ER for a fucking cold.  I know what I was diagnosed with, and I know I didn’t go and get every single checkbox checked that I was supposed to after discharge, but I also didn’t see the point.  I wasn’t getting severance since I didn’t have six years of active service.  Hartford gave me the diagnosis just to make sure I could still see him after I left the hospital.”

“And did you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I sighed.

“This is totally irrelevant,” I said.  “I didn’t come here for this.”

“Your health is exactly why you are here,” he countered.

“Just forget it.”  I stood and began to walk to the other side of the room.

“I’d like you to stay,” Mark called out.  He stood up and took a couple of steps towards me, which emphasized a slight limp.  When I glanced down, I could see he wore a shoe with a thicker heel and sole on his right foot.  “There’s only twenty minutes left in the session.  You can stick it out that long, can’t you?  I really would like to talk to you some more.”

“Morbid curiosity?” I sneered.

“No,” he replied sincerely.  “I’m concerned about you.”

“I don’t want anyone writing a fucking book about it, all right?”

“All right,” Mark replied through narrowed eyes.  “What makes you say that?”

Tensing a little, I tried to keep myself from actually balling my hands into fists.  Whenever I thought about Hartford and his ideas, I wanted to punch something.

“Hartford wanted to write a book.”

“Ah.”  Mark shifted in his seat.  “Well, I’m not much of a writer, and I really just want to know how you are doing now, so can we finish the session?  I mean, you already paid for it.”

Forcing myself not to roll my eyes, I sat back down in the chair and looked at him.

“What do you want to know?” I asked.

“All I really know is the part that is a matter of public record,” Mark said.  “Anything you want to tell me that isn’t still classified would be a good place to start.  If you’d rather talk about the known stuff, that’s fine, too.  It’s up to you.”

There was a lot that was still classified as far as I knew.  It wasn’t like there was anyone coming out here to debrief me of any changes, of course.  Regardless, it was best to go with the things that could be found by anyone who did some digging.

“You see the video tape?” I asked.  An involuntary cold shiver went down my back, and my stomach tightened up.

“I have,” he admitted.  “I watched it again when you were assigned to me, but I had seen it on the news before then.”

“That guy – that writer guy,” I said.  Inside my head, tiny little explosions began to commence in the center of my skull. My hands clenched without my permission, and my mind fought to only say the words, not actually see the pictures. “You know the one?  When they had us all on our knees in front of the camera – right after the bags were taken off our heads – he was on my left.”

“I know who you mean.”

“He kept saying he had a wife and kids,” I remembered.  “He kept begging them and talking about his two little girls.”

I hesitated.  Most of this was on the tape – the one they played over and over and over again.  There were probably five hundred copies of it up on YouTube.  Most of it, but not all of it.  There was a whole bunch of it before that part that never got out of the government’s hands.

“Before they had us on camera, when the guy was talking about his kids – there was one of them – one of the insurgents – he said someone had to die, and I told them to just shoot me instead of the writer guy because I didn’t have a family.  It didn’t make any difference though.  They shot him anyway.”

Pain in my lungs made me stop speaking for a second.  They were trying to go into overdrive or something, and it took all my concentration to stop myself from hyperventilating.  My fingers gripped onto my knees in an attempt to stop shaking, but at least my voice remained steady.

“Sometimes I think he got off easy,” I said.  “Thinking that sometimes makes it hard to sleep, too.”

“That’s a change in your thinking,” Mark said.  “At least, as far as what you talked about when you were here before.  There’s nothing about the video in Doctor Hartford’s notes.”

“Maybe it’s still classified and no one remembered to tell me.” I shrugged.  “If you see any MPs coming up the driveway, give me a chance to run, okay?”

I laughed, but he didn’t smile, and I couldn’t really hear the humor in my voice, either.

“It was on the news a lot.”

“I was still in Saudi Arabia when it broke out,” I said, “then Germany, and then the hospital in Virginia.  I didn’t see it for a couple of months – not until they were discharging me.  It was a year old by then, anyway.  It’s not like I had paparazzi following me or anything when I got back.  Instead, I had freaking MPs.  The whole media circus didn’t have any effect on me.”

“You think something like that just goes away after a year?” Mark asked.

“No,” I said, “but it wasn’t the worst anyway.”

“What was?” he asked quietly, but I shook my head.  He must have realized he wasn’t getting any of that because he changed tactics.

“Did you dream about that time?” he asked.  “Did you dream about the video?”

“No,” I said, “just the hole.”

“Your focus when we first met was on the others who were with you when you were captured.  Your dreams then revolved around feelings of guilt – that you should have been able to do something to save them.”

“Yeah.”  I cleared my throat, and my head began to pound a little under the effort of not remembering.  “Not those dreams.  None like that this time.”

“You still blame yourself,” he observed.

“I fucked up.”

“You were ambushed.”

“I was the one tasked with not letting that happen,” I said.  “I was their officer.  I was in charge.  I fucked up, and they died.”

“Do you expect yourself to be omnipotent?”

“Yes.”

“Evan,” Mark sighed, “you know that isn’t reasonable.”

“I don’t give a shit about reasonable,” I said.  “It’s what I should have done.  They were counting on me.”

“I have the files,” he reminded me.  “Full investigation.  You were found to be completely without…”

“I don’t give a shit about what they said!” I snapped.

Mark’s eyes went wide for just a half-second before his carefully constructed therapist’s mask came back into play.  He couldn’t completely hide his shock from me.  I could almost hear little gears clicking in his head as he considered this new information.  He wrote on his notepad while his eyes stayed on me.  I could just imagine the words on the page.

Evan Arden does actually have an emotion in there somewhere.

“Sorry,” I muttered.  “I guess I’m a little on edge.  Work has been a little hectic, and with the nightmares…well, I’m not sleeping much, like I said.  Very sorry for my outburst, sir.”

Mark stared at me for a moment, undoubtedly wondering what he could say to make me explode again.

“What you went through was horrific, Evan,” Mark finally said.

Like I needed to be reminded.

“You’ve come a long way since then, haven’t you?  You still work at the gym?”

“Not right now,” I said.  “I took a little extended vacation.  Just got back into town a month ago.”

“So where are you working?”

“Nowhere at the moment.”

“You just said work had been a little hectic.”

Shit.

“I…ah…”  Damnit!  What the hell was wrong with me?  I never made such stupid mistakes.  “I don’t have a real job.  I’ve just been helping out a friend.”

“Evan, I can’t help you if you keep things from me.  You have to trust me if this is going to work.  You know whatever is going on, you are completely protected by doctor-patient privilege.  Unless you tell me you’re going to hurt yourself or someone else, it will all be totally confidential.”

Well, that was the problem there, wasn’t it?

“It’s just…not completely on the up and up,” I said as I tried to buy a little time for a plausible story.  I was falling into a pit of lies, and I needed something simple so I could keep it straight.  I had already said far more than I had planned to say.

“Doing what?” he pressed.  He wasn’t going to let this go until I gave him something he would take to be me opening up – trusting him more.  What I had said before was in the files – he could have read it already.  He needed something new.

The story actually came pretty quickly.

“Well, it’s just…”  I hesitated and rubbed my fingers in my eyes.  I was surely the perfect picture of angst.  “It’s not totally legitimate, you know?  I’m doing some roofing work for this guy’s brother.  Strictly cash, all under the table, you know?”

“Yes, I know.”  He did a wonderful job of not showing his disappointment.  I was just pleased he bought it.

“You’re not pissed?” I asked, supposedly surprised.

“Not at all,” he said.  “I can’t say I think it is the best thing for you because legitimate work will always be in your best interest, but I’m not pissed, as you put it.”

“My Marine buddies would have a fit,” I said.  It was the truth, or at least would have been if I had any Marine buddies.  “Everything has to be on the up-and-up, you know?  It’s a matter of pride.”

“And does doing that kind of work hurt your pride?”

“Yeah, a little,” I admitted with a shrug.  In my mind, I considered what I actually did to make my illegitimate cash.  “I know it is ultimately illegal and immoral, but if I don’t do it, someone else will.  The gym wouldn’t hire me back since I didn’t exactly tell them I was going to be gone for a while.”

“So where did you go on your trip?”

“Arizona.”

“You went to the desert on vacation?”

I looked up at him, and we just stared at each other for a minute.

“Yeah…um…I guess I did.”

“And you’re wondering why the dreams came back?”

“Well, now that you put it like that…”

I leaned forward and rested my forearms over my knees.  The throw rug in Mark’s office really wasn’t all that interesting, but I stared at the blue, swirly patterns in it anyway.

“Did your vacation remind you of the Middle East?”

“I didn’t really think about it while I was there,” I admitted.  “I mean – it wasn’t the same at all.  Just a little cabin, me and the dog…it never even crossed my mind while I was there.”

“What did you do while you were there?”

“Nothing,” I said.  It was accurate enough.

“Sounds like an exciting vacation.”

I glanced up and raised an eyebrow at the sarcasm, but Mark wasn’t apologetic.

“I wasn’t looking for any excitement,” I said.  “I’ve had enough excitement in my life.  I just hung out in the cabin.  I didn’t go anywhere or do anything, really.”

“Did anything significant happen while you were in Arizona?”

My eyes dropped back to the rug, and my tongue darted over my lips.  I could still taste her there, the brunette beauty who stumbled across my path in the middle of nowhere, spent the night in my bed, and then disappeared from my life.

Lia.

Did she ever go back to that rickety old cabin?  Did she call my name, wander inside, and find the lame-ass excuse for a note I left her?

Would I ever know?

“No,” I finally said.  “Nothing happened while I was there.”

*****

Much like the other times I had visited a counselor before I had been discharged, I was left feeling empty inside, more unsure than I had been before I walked into the office, and in need of a lot of distractions to keep my mind from dwelling on whatever was said.  Keeping myself occupied usually came in one of three forms: throwing myself into exercise, spending all my free time with a hooker in my bed, or focusing on my work.

Sometimes doing all three was the only way to keep my mind off of whatever was bothering me.  When I wasn’t even sure what was quite literally keeping me up nights, even that didn’t help.  For the moment, my best distraction was work, which meant digging into my target’s life.

Brad Ashton was not an easy guy to get close to, that was for sure.

The whole Hollywood scene sucked, whether you were in LA, New York, or downtown Chicago.  Red carpet events weren’t overly common in the area, but I guess when you’re into a mob boss for a shitload of gambling money, you do what you need to do.

The premier of Ashton’s new movie was all over the place, and this was just the Chicago leg of the tour.  I knew I wasn’t going to get close enough to him tonight – not with all the insanity going on at the AMC River East 21.  There had to be at least ten thousand people there, and every one of them was trying to get up close and personal with the dude.  The vast majority were women, mostly in their mid-forties, and mostly crazy.

They had to be.

I mean, some of them were actually carrying cardboard cutouts of the guy and trying to get him to sign his own face.

That shit’s weird.

There were at least two dozen people acting as a human shield at any given moment.  They were all decked out in basic B-movie secret service attire – black suits, receivers in their ears, sunglasses regardless of the weather.  They were pretty comical to watch.

As far as my cover went, they were going to be my best chance to get to him.

I heard Ashton was staying at the Embassy right next door, so I made myself comfortable in the bar there and sipped club soda while a scotch sat untouched next to me.  It was a long while before the noise of screaming females alerted me to the star’s arrival.  He was escorted by the caricature guards to the bank of exclusive elevators and disappeared.

Just a little longer.

A few more patrons were hanging out and watching various sports on the large screens around the bar, but no one paid any attention to me except for the bartender.  The next time he came around, I ditched the soda and started sipping the scotch.

Two guys in black suits, sans ties, and unbuttoned white shirts came out of the same elevator where Ashton had disappeared and headed towards the bar.  Not surprisingly, they opted for a bar-side seat instead of a table.

I watched from the end of the bar.

They were both in their mid twenties, which was convenient.  As they talked, I picked up that one was named Jim, but no name was mentioned for the other.  They drank cheap beer in bottles and watched football until closing time but didn’t talk about work.  Jim was apparently a Raiders fan.

They sat reasonably close like they knew each other, but not close enough that they might accidentally touch one another in passing.  They both had short hair but not military cut like mine, just neatly short.  There were little marks around their right ears where the receivers had pinched them.

They were career guys, not just hired for this event.  They would go with Ashton when he left Chicago, which was exactly what I needed.  I kept my head down, turned my body away as they passed me, and finished my scotch before heading home.

The next day was a television appearance for the popular actor and then back to the same hotel for some beauty sleep before he flew out to LA.  The same two guys came down to the bar again the next night.  I sat in the same spot as well, but this time I was wearing a Raider’s jersey.

Fortune was on my side, and after the first drink, Jim’s buddy called it a night, but Jim didn’t seem ready to turn in just yet.  It didn’t take long for him to approach me and start talking football.

Too easy.

“Raider’s fan, huh?”

“Like anybody with a lick of sense,” I replied.  “Best team in the fucking world!”

I held up my glass of beer and clinked it against his bottle.  The beer was still light, same as his, but just different enough not to appear suspicious.  This guy knew security, and I couldn’t be that obvious.  Even wearing his team’s jersey on a day when they weren’t playing was a little risky.

“Damn straight!” Jim replied.  “I’m Jim Conner – mind if I join you?”

“Marshall Miller,” I said as I shook his hand.  “You staying here at the hotel?”

“Yeah, I’ll be heading out in the morning.  I work security, and my boss is staying here.”

“That’s cool,” I replied.  “I hear the rooms here are really nice.”

“You aren’t a guest?”

“Nah,” I said.  I wiped the back of my arm across my mouth.  “I just like the bar.  Other sports bars around have kind of a crappy crowd, you know?”

“I do,” he agreed.

I made a point of scooting my chair a bit so he could sit down without going all homophobic on me or anything.  Sports guys could get kind of uptight sometimes, and I didn’t want something that simple to blow my chances.  We talked about the team’s performance over the season and their chances for the Super Bowl and then went on to politics.

I argued with him about one of the viewpoints expressed on the nightly newscast.  I took it just to the precipice of pissing him off and then dropped back down.  We eyed each other cautiously for a moment before touching our drinks together once more in a truce sort of toast.

It was all about as perfect as it could be until he insisted on shots.  I probably should have known better – really wasn’t much of a drinker.  I’d have a drink or two, yes, but that was usually it.  Being out of control wasn’t my favorite feeling, but sometimes the job called on you to do shit you didn’t want to do.

“Did you play?” I asked Jim as I tipped back the third.

“Nah,” he said.  “I love the game, but I was never good enough to play more than JV.  You?”

“In college, yeah,” I said with a frat-boy grin.  “Tight end freshman and sophomore years and then screwed up my knee.  There went my scholarship.  I couldn’t keep up with everything after surgery, and I never was the same again.”

“That sucks, man,” Jim said.  As some sort of celebration-slash-condolences he bought the next shot, which we both downed too quickly to count, so we had another.

“I always thought I’d play for the Raiders someday,” I mused.  “I guess since that didn’t happen…well…you know.  Life and shit.”

“I do know that,” Jim agreed.

I didn’t really think he had any idea what he was agreeing with, but it didn’t really matter.  We did another shot, and my head was getting a little fuzzy.  I didn’t drink often, and it was hitting me a little harder than I expected.

“I got laid off a week ago,” I told him.  “I was a mall cop, if you can believe it.  It was kind of a crappy job – mostly chasing teenaged shoplifters – but it paid the bills.”

“Have you been looking for something else?” Jim asked.

“Looking, sure,” I responded.  I waved down the bartender for two more shots since it was my turn to buy them.  “Finding is a whole other thing.  I like the security stuff, though.”

We did a couple more shots, talked more football shit, and bitched about the economy until the hotel bartender finally tossed us out.  Jim and I shook hands, and he wished me the best of luck.  I jotted my cell number down on the back of one of the cardboard coasters used at the bar and asked him to call me if he heard of any work.

Once Jim was out of sight, I pushed my way through the revolving doors and hailed down a cab to take my drunk ass home.  I hadn’t actually planned on drinking as much as I did – I didn’t like the out of control feeling of intoxication – but it seemed to have served its purpose as far as “bonding” with Jim was concerned.

I stumbled into my apartment and nearly fell over Odin twice as I attached his leash and took him out the back door.  My head was swimming, and I had such a rough time just getting Odin outside in the first place that I decided to forgo the leash law and just dropped the people-end of the thing.  Odin never wandered off anyway, and it allowed me time to lean against the wall of the building and debate the merits of puking in the bushes versus puking on the rocks.

Splatter was bad, so I maneuvered a little closer to the bushes.

The dog went about his business, watered down a couple of sticks that were likely going to be bushes in the spring, and then took a shit next to the sidewalk.  That’s when I realized I hadn’t brought any doggie bags down with me.

There was no way in hell I was going to make it all the way back up to the apartment and then down again to clean up shit.  It was going to have to wait until morning, and whatever neighbor who was out at this time of night to complain could suck my cock.

I whistled, and Odin lumbered up next to me.  I checked around to see if anyone had noticed my dog-owner’s ultimate sin, but there wasn’t anyone around.  Just as I was picking up the end of his leash to take him back inside, Odin decided there was something seriously interesting about the “flower bed” recently constructed in the park.  There weren’t any actual flowers or even any dirt – just a lot of slate rocks.  I was actually considering puking on them, but Odin was more interested in what was down around the brick base.  I sighed and let him continue on – it was easier than moving, anyway.

Odin suddenly stopped sniffing at the ground and let out a growl.

I looked up through blurry eyes at the two kids who were walking across the grass of Lake Shore East Park, coming from between the buildings on East Randolph Street.  It really was too late for them to be doing anything legal, and the way they looked up at me and nudged each other was so obvious, it was almost pathetic.

At least, it would have been pathetic under other circumstances.

Normally this situation wouldn’t have concerned me.  Two punk teenagers didn’t tend to be much of a challenge, but I was drunk.  Aside from drunk, I was also unarmed and feeling pretty damn stupid to boot.

The two kids moved off to one side of the walkway where the light wasn’t as good, but I could still see them pretty well.  One had dark hair and a pretty beefy build, and the other was smaller, thinner, and had red hair in a greasy mop on the top of his head falling over into one eye.

The dark-haired one reached around to the back of his jeans and pulled out something shiny and sharp looking.  Whatever doubts I might have had before about motives evaporated.

Odin growled again before he took a couple steps to move himself between me and the two teen boys.  I put an end to that immediately because the last thing I needed was for the dog to get knifed.  I wasn’t in any shape to drive him to the vet.  I cut him off with my legs, forcing his bulk behind my knees and partially into the rock garden.

“How about you give me your wallet,” the kid on the right said.  “Maybe then I’ll decide not to leave you and the pooch bleeding in the street.”

I debated telling him that the street was a good hundred yards away but decided against it.  The other dude snickered, and I just shook my head a little.  That action caused enough vapor trails to make me stop moving immediately.  Taking a step back, I almost tripped over the damn dog again.

“The dude’s fucked up,” the red-haired kid said.  I couldn’t help but look at his hair and remember David Hasselhoff in Piranha 3-DD.  He had played himself in the ridiculously campy horror movie Jonathan once made me watch.  In the movie, he kept going off on a little red-headed kid who was too stupid to live through to the end.  He kept calling him by the same nickname throughout – little ginger moron.

I heard myself snicker.

“You think this is funny?” the darker kid asked.

“Now that I think about it, yeah,” I answered.  “You gonna knife me and the dog here in the park and then drag us over to the street?  What exactly does that accomplish for ya?”

My vision blurred again, and the next thing I knew, there was a sharp pain in my side and I dropped to my knees on the cement as Odin let out a short bark.

There was just no way this night could get worse.