A pair of vertical, needle-like lengths of light cut through the dim and wonderful darkness of my bedroom. I was awake, but only just barely. This had been the case for what my heart told me must have been several hours but what my head informed me was likely only measurable in minutes. Probably not even warranting a fraction of an hour. Both my heart and my head, however, both cursed the sunlight that cut past the edges of my bedroom’s blackout curtains and stabbed me like trained assassins through my pupils. The curse spread to my lips, and though I wanted to scream it I found myself grumbling something that was a distant cousin to “fuck” before letting my head fall back in an effort to remove the daggers from my eyes.

My skull banged against the headboard, and the next round of “fuck”s were more recognizable.

I dragged myself out of bed, still cursing and now rubbing the back of my head. A digital alarm clock flashed from my nightstand, seeming to repeat in nagging flashes that it was a little after four. This, I knew, wasn’t true. The power had crapped out sometime around ten or eleven in the morning, or so I gathered from the four hours that had lapsed since then. That the day’s sunlight was peeking through my curtains meant that noon had come-and-gone; the sun had finally circled my building and started its afternoon journey. It was a safe bet that it was closer to two or three, which meant I was, in a truly uncharacteristic achievement, getting up early.

Yay me!

I rolled my eyes, spit out the foul taste in my mouth across the stretch of gray carpet at my feet, and caught myself fingering the pale dimple at my left shoulder. Forcing my left hand back to my side, I growled out another “fuck” and threw myself to my feet—ignoring the irony when I stepped in my wad of spit.

The power outage, passing with little mind paid to it, had taken its toll on my stereo. The old system was testy on its best of days, and it had a rude habit of holding grudges if one so much as toggled its volume knob too quickly. An all-out and sudden loss of power, it turned out, was enough to transcend the realm of simple grudges and pitch the once expensive and, as far as I was concerned, still impressive piece of audio hardware into a silent treatment.

And Mercury wonders why I call it ‘the second wife,’ I thought, beginning to finagle the old girl back to life.

This day, like yesterday, the day before that, and every day prior to that, was going to suck, and I wasn’t about to embark upon the first steps of a sucky day without Jim Morrison reminding me to break on through to the other side. He’d go on to remind me that people were, in fact, strange and that days of an equally strange nature were upon us. Then, with any luck, he’d tell me a bit about some riders on a storm, and that would be enough to motivate me to plant my denim-clad rear onto the seat of my chopper and ride off into my own storm. That the only troubling weather in the forecast was inside my head was beside the point, right?

Twenty long, Door-less minutes later had me certain that this was no marital dispute with my stereo. The old girl was good and thoroughly fried: a casualty of an unholy darkness that insisted to spread through my cozy section of paradise. And me? I’d slept through the whole thing; blissfully unaware of the death of ‘the second wife.’

Grumbling—I’d managed to start evolving from “fuck” to linking together a chain of obscenities that would have made my mom disown me and my old man proud—I finally turned away from the corpse of my (wife) stereo and spotted the flashing light on my phone. I was about to pass it off as another product of the power outage. It had, after all, murdered my sound system and left my alarm clock with a stutter. Then I realized that my phone was not announcing some crippling injury, but only alerting me of a waiting voicemail. It appeared that the power outage, another product of the unseasonably hot summer, had only managed to claim two victims. I sighed, seeing the name on the caller ID as I pressed “PLAY” on the message, and prepared myself for the aching temples that came from excessive eye rolling.

“Jason? It’s Eric…”

“Again,” I said with the first of no-doubt many eyerolls.

“… again,” the message echoed. “I bet you’re just going to ignore this message like all the others…”

Rolling my eyes again, I said, “You’d win that bet.”

“… but I’m still holding onto hope that you’ll come back to us.”

My eyes made another journey as I turned away from the phone, stabbing with insincere optimism at my dead stereo. “What’s wrong, Eric? The new guys not working out?”

“It’s these new guys, Jay,” Eric’s voice rambled on, “they’re just not working out. They’ve got half the work ethic and demand twice the pay.”

“And you assume that I just can’t wait to play the part of the chump and come back to work twice as hard for half the pay, that right?” I groused and, yes, rolled my eyes again.

“Which is why I’m willing to take you back at four times your original salary,” Eric boasted. “Way I see it, if I can get you back by getting rid of TWO of these lazy, money-grubbing schmucks then I’m willing to—”

“Still a dipshit, I see,” I grumbled, turning back and stabbing my finger against the machine, deleting the message.

There was an unusual sense of satisfaction in the act. Even while taking pleasure in the hollow beep that signified that my old boss’s words had been ejected from the machine and sent to wherever it was unwanted recordings went, I couldn’t quite figure out just what it was that felt so good about it. It wasn’t like I’d moved on to bigger, better things; not really. Sure, none would argue that the life I led was a great deal more exotic—and, yeah, some might even argue “exciting”—than replacing shingles and yanking out old wiring in houses that should’ve been demolished before they’d had a chance to try to power a microwave. Saying that I saw more excitement now than I had then would be like saying my temperament was better than it was when I’d been running track in high school that week I’d gotten an ingrown hair on my balls. Granted, there were less horny housewives waiting for me to “catch” them conveniently standing by their bayside windows with their open robes and their how-embarrassing-slash-oh-well “fuck me”-eyes. But I hadn’t been interested in any of that nonsense then, and I sure-as-shit wasn’t any more interested in it now.

No…

What really threw me about the satisfaction I felt from deleting the message had nothing to do with me liking my new life—I couldn’t lie to myself like I could to everybody else; I hated everything about my new life—but, rather, that it gave me an opportunity to carry some of my hatred back into that old, simple life.

It was the sort of satisfaction I might’ve felt if I had the chance to hop into a time machine and kick Larry Wakowndrie in the balls for giving me all those swirlies in middle school. Or the sort of satisfaction I might’ve felt if that same time machine took me to Annie Turner’s living room the night she stood me up so that Billy Dillinger could finger her on the couch I’d helped her father carry in only a few days earlier; the sort of satisfaction that would come from seeing their shocked faces as I flipped them off and called Annie every dirty name in the book. Or the sort of satisfaction I’d feel if I took that time machine back to the old house the night that I’d been out on an emergency job for Eric and T-Built decided to pay me a little visit…

I forced myself to stop the thoughts there, and I discovered that I’d turned away from the answering machine; I caught myself staring back at the deader-than-dead (wife) stereo. That there was hot wetness spreading from my eyes was something I wouldn’t discover for another few minutes. Glaring past the shimmering edges of my vision, I regarded the stereo as if it was something—somebody—else.

If you had to die, I wish I could’ve at least been there to see you off…

I heard the words so clearly that I initially wondered if somebody had broken in just to whisper them at that moment. That, however, was absurd. There wasn’t a pair of balls in the city big enough to try something like that. So I was left wondering something even more unsettling:

Had I actually said them aloud… or were my thoughts just that noisy?

My cell phone rang, making me jump, and I answered it with a “WHAT?” that I made no effort to filter the agitation from.

“And a chipper ‘hello’ to you from the rest of the world, as well, ya moody shit!” Danny’s voice sang back to me.

“Mercury?” I asked, then rolled my eyes at myself, thinking the words as he chimed them back at me:

“Heh! Who the fuck else would it be?” he challenged, followed by, “‘Less ya got some other fag running the books for ya. And tracking the jobs… and calling the shots… and—”

“I get it, I get it!” I groaned, combing my fingers through my hair. “You want a raise or something?”

“Nah,” Danny “Mercury” Thorn said with a drawled chuckle. “Just yer word that ya ain’t got any other fags working this hard for yer ungrateful ass.”

I scoffed at that and shook my head even though there was no one there to see it. “No, Merc, you’re the only fag in my life.”

“Don’t be so certain, Chase,” he said, dropping his voice to a playful “I’m warning ya”-level and saying, “Ain’t’cha been watching the news? We’s got agendas ‘gainst all arrows.”

I laughed at that, still wondering why he insisted on calling all straight people “arrows,” and caught myself shaking my head again. “Noted. So what’s up?” I asked.

“Wanted to know when we could expect the pleasure of yer company,” he answered, “but then ya answered the call like an angsty bitch, so now’s I gotta know who put a pricker-bush up yer poop-chute!”

“Nobody,” I grumbled, rolling my eyes at the man’s too-keen senses. “I just… the second wife croaked. Fucking outage blew a fuse or something, and to make matters worse my Doors CD was still in the damn tray—can’t get it out.”

Danny grunted into the line, and I could practically see him rolling his eyes at me. “Lemme have a whack at the ol’ girl. I’m sure I can get her singin’ again. The very least I can prolly get her to give Morrison back before she flatlines for good. Then we’ll see ‘bout getting’ ya a new one; a better one!”

“I’d appreciate it,” I said, distantly aware that I was wiping my eyes. Then, ignoring the moisture streaked across the back of my hand, I asked, “Any idea what caused the power outage, anyway? I feel like I would’ve woken up if there’d been a storm.”

“No storm, kiddo,” Mercury said, his breath coming out a little heavier than before—whatever he was doing, he was moving—“not in the way ya mean, at least.” Something passed over the receiver on his end—his hand, I guessed—and his suddenly muffled voice shouted an order to move the latest shipment to the back room for inventory. Then, “Sorry ‘bout that, boss. Anyways, it’s the heat. That’s what’s to blame for the power goin’ out. Blackouts ‘cross the whole damn city.”

“The heat?” I repeated, glancing towards the heavy curtains blocking out the windows and remembering the needles of light that had pierced my eyes earlier.

“Fuckin’ A,” Mercury drawled. “Hot as a parade of greased-up Dwayne Johnson clones out here.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it,” I offered, daring a peek outside. The air itself swirled as the blazing sun cooked through it and took a fresh stab at my eyes. The glass felt hot enough to fry an egg. “Shit…” I muttered.

“Yuppers,” Mercury sang back. “It’s a ‘risk the ride without yer helmet’-sort of day if ya ask me.”

“I didn’t,” I teased, deciding against wearing my leathers, “but I won’t, anyway.”

“Won’t what? Ride with yer helmet? Yeah, we know. Ya think it sends out the whole ‘fearless leader’-vibe, but really it’s just got us taking bets ‘bout when you’ll spill yer stubborn-as-a-mule brains all over the damn streets.”

I resisted the urge to say “sooner rather than later, I hope”—knowing I’d only be locking myself into a nagging, drawling lecture later for it—and offered only an “uh-huh” as I finished getting ready. “So how we looking?” I asked, heading for the door.

“Me, personally? Fucking gorgeous, of course,” Mercury said with a laugh. “But, assuming ye’re askin’ ‘bout the shipment, it looks like we’re a bit on the shorthanded side.”

I actually stopped walking at that, clenching my teeth. “Short? Fuck! How short?”

“Whoa there, cowboy,” Mercury said, his voice hurried. “I said it looks like we’re a bit on the shorthanded side. Still got a few crates to unload, and I ain’t even got a chance to eyeball the invoice reports. For all I know I fucked up the order—missed a zero or something, or maybe I just flat-out forgot to order—”

“Be real with me, Merc,” I said, cutting him off, “what’s the likelihood that you fucked up? Be honest.”

Silence.

I nodded and shook my head. “Thought so.”

“Look, Chase, it ain’t that big of a deal,” Mercury assured me. “So’s we gotta pin a few pricks against the walls and remind ‘em not to fuck with us; let it be known that, whether or not the streets are divided, we still got those turkeys by the gizzards.”

“Yeah,” I sighed, rolling my eyes. “Just that easy, right? Except it’s not that easy, Merc; not anymore. Used to be—used to be!—we could just lay a little muscle down on these guys and remind them who they’re working for, but it’s not the case anymore. Muscle don’t mean shit now that the Carrion Crew’s rolling in and actually taking lives. It’s sort of hard to put the muscle to these guys when our competition is willing to step in and flat-out waste them!”

Mercury sighed. “What do ya want me to do, Chase? Start ordering our boys to slit the delivery guys’ throats? ‘Cause, ‘less ye’re willing to take it to that point, it’s not like we’ve got a hell of a lot to work with to convince ‘em to do things the way they used to be done.”

I pressed the call button for the elevator with one hand while retrieving my keys in the other. The ding and rattle were distant noises in my head as I considered Mercury’s words and asked myself what my father would do.

Probably wouldn’t have let shit get so out of hand that your own boys decided to run off and start another crew that’s willing to take things this far, asshole.

Fair, I thought in response to myself, except that they weren’t my boys when all this went down.

Then, just like that, my warring thoughts stalemated on the only conceivable deduction:

Michael was the asshole that had failed Dad and the rest of the city.

Not liking that thought—not liking any thought that painted my older brother in a light that wasn’t pure and golden—I accepted that, no, I must be the failure and the asshole. It wasn’t like I hadn’t already been wearing those titles. Bad enough that Michael’s funeral was still fresh on my mind, wasn’t fair to go and shit on a fresh grave.

“You still there, Chase?” Mercury called.

“Uh… yeah. Yeah, I’m here,” I answered, struggling to find my voice. “Just getting on the elevator. Might lose you.”

“What? You talking over a rotary phone or something?” he laughed, “Since when do phones cut out in elevators?”

I cursed inwardly. “Just warning you in case it happens,” I explained.

“Uh-huh,” he answered knowingly. “Look, just get yer ass out here, kay? We’ll check over the order—see if anything’s actually worth worrying ‘bout—and discuss the next move depending on what we find.”

I hung up with yet another eye roll—my temples already starting to ache and the rest of my head not too far behind—and forced myself not to look back at my dead (wife) stereo. If only I had a sense of irony. But, no, there’s no room for irony and regret when there’s iron to ride and pain to deliver. And, as the elevator doors slid open to the parking garage and I slipped out of my air conditioned fortress of solitude and into a concrete box that felt like a tunnel heading right into the sweltering pits of Hell, I discovered that any lingering strands of irony or regret had burned away.

I’d almost miss them if it weren’t for all the brain cells that I was sure had burst into flames, as well.

God damn, it was hot!

Almost hot enough to make me resent the sight of my V8 chopper. Almost! The sharp contrast of the smoldering flame decals against the navy blue body rippled with the waves of heat swirling off the concrete of the parking garage. The chrome shot back a warped reflection of my approach, and it took me a moment to realize that my face was dragged down in a sneer. Whether it was as far along as the shimmering mockery of Droopy Dog I stared back at or if that was just a trick of the curved surface was something I dreaded checking in the mirror. Slipping my helmet off the handlebar where I’d left it, I set it down on the concrete—letting it serve as a placeholder for me and the chopper in our absence—and then keyed the bike to life and welcomed the waking roar.

“Atta girl,” I praised her, slipping into gear and starting out of my parking spot. “Good to know you didn’t croak in this heat.”

My grip slipped on the clutch as I said this, throwing the chopper into a momentary sputter, and a stab of panic twisted in my throat as I imagined my words jinxing me at that moment. Regaining control, I gave the bike some gas and gasped at the gust of not-so-refreshing air that rose up to slap me in the face.

As I pulled out into traffic and started up the road, I couldn’t help but feel that the day might have been cooler—maybe even all-around better—if my (wife) stereo had survived the morning and I’d gotten my fix of Morrison.

A strange sort of dream always comes over me whenever I ride. It’s like that one where you’re falling, except all of the familiar sensations—the pull of gravity at your insides, the air whipping around you, the casual resignation of your very life to powers you’ll never come to grips with—are aimed ahead instead of straight down. The fear’s there, too, but it’s a crazy, “try it if you dare”-sort of fear; the sort of fear where, like in the dreams, a part of you knows you’ll wake up before you die. Whenever I ride, though, it’s the other way around: I find myself wondering if I might die before I “wake.” In this dream, unlike the other, I see the road ahead of me—I feel like I can see everything when I ride, even (especially) the stuff I don’t want to see—and, just far enough away to make it hard to be certain, I see her.

She’s always standing dead-center in the road. Her belly’s still round, one hand hooked around the bottom of it, and her other hand’s held up in a still wave. Smiling; she’s always smiling, or at least I think I see her smiling. A part of me wants her to be smiling, and I know that desire could be motivating the sight; altering it. Another part is certain and lectures the rest of me at great length for doubting it for a moment—Just LOOK at her! it says in my head, Of course she’s smiling! She sees me, and she always smiles when she…

But then there’s the other part of me—the part that, for better or for worse, hasn’t lost its mind—that knows she isn’t there, knows it’s crazy to think she would be.

Why would she be standing in the middle of the road?

Why would she be waiting for us in a spot that’s always, always, always just out of reach?

And, inevitably: Why would she be anywhere but six-feet under where you last saw her?

Then, every single time, the other parts soak in the logic of those questions and are forced to answer them. And all the parts, the crazy and the not, came up with the same answer: She wouldn’t be.

It happened again as I rode out to meet with Danny and the boys, the crazy heat throwing mirages off the concrete and making the subject of my waking dream dance in a painfully tantalizing manner in the middle of an intersection. Then a semi, belching diesel-fumes in its wake, smashed through her and she was swallowed by a reeking black cloud and cast into a distant place called “Not Real.”

I sighed, shook my head, and convinced myself that the moisture dragging back from my eyes and closing in on my earlobes is from the hot, stinging gusts of air striking my face. When that thought didn’t quite take, I blamed the stereo and the resulting ruination of my waking routine.

That one stuck to the walls of my mind a bit better.

Gritting my teeth, I ran a red and leaned too hard into my turn.

Danny, had he seen it, would have called it a suicidal move; I told myself it was dramatic and abandoned the thoughts at the curb…

A part of me knew that curb should be smeared with the contents of my head.

The vision of her was already waiting for me—round belly supported in the hand that wasn’t raised towards me—at the end of the new street.

For what was very likely the thousandth time since I woke up, I caught myself muttering “fuck.”

“Got some good news an’ some bad news fer ya, Chase,” Danny drawled after watching me pull up to the open doors in the back of our shop.

While the front said “MERCURY’S MOTORS & MECHANICS” in massive, legitimate-looking letters, the rear of the building is littered in cracked-open crates of just about everything except motorcycle parts. Big, plastic-wrapped bricks of marijuana, fireworks, bootlegged DVDs, and stacks upon stacks of counterfeit everything—starting with thousand-dollar handbags and ranging all the way to molded porn star body parts that, surprise-surprise, weren’t molded from the actual porn stars.

Some poor sap will never know his pocket pussy is more Granny Smith than Bonnie Rotten, I mused to myself as I passed by a crate featuring some (in my opinion) sloppy-looking packaging for a “life-like” replica of the name-sake’s no-no zone. Still smirking at my own joke, I called back to Danny, “Give me the bad news first, I guess. That way I can at least end on a good note.”

“Fair ‘nuff,” Danny said with a shrug. “The bad news is ya look like shit.”

I rolled my eyes at him and said, “I probably smell like it, too. It’s hotter than Hell out here and I’ve been riding through the steaming bowels of this city twenty-miles over the damn speed limit to get here.”

“R’mind me not to go sniffin’ ‘round ya anytime soon,” Danny said with a laugh as he turned to head inside.

I followed after. Inside, despite the “CLOSED” sign on the shop’s front entrance, the vast space of the rear storage area was bustling with activity. Close to three-dozen of our crew were toiling over the crates, moving them inside and working to pry the lids off. While the boys’ prowess for productivity was impressive, I’d seen it enough before to tune them out as I continued after the gang’s second in command.

“So what’s the good news, Mercury?” I pressed.

As he passed it by, Danny snatched a series of stapled pages off of one of the crates that had already been brought in and held it over his shoulder for me to accept.

I did, but I didn’t bother looking it over, knowing its contents would be explained to me soon enough.

“Order came in exactly as we wanted,” he went on, slapping the side of yet another crate. “Seems the boys’ve decided to go green or some shit. Changed the way they pack their stuff, so what’s normally two-hundred of these sons’ve bitches”—another slap was thrown against the side of the crate—“was cut down to one-fiddy.”

“How economic,” I said with a smirk. “Then we’re good, right? No problems?”

Danny wagged a bushy eyebrow back at me and said, “Ye’re asking if we still gotta figure a way to put the scare in the boys without killin’ them?”

“Actually…” I corrected, leaning against another crate and nearly falling back as it skewed slightly under my weight. “Shit!” I groaned, steadying myself and regaining my composure, then, going on, I said, “I was asking in general: as in, ‘no problems’ with anything.”

Danny shrugged at that and said, “Ya still look like shit.”

“So you told me.” I gave a half-hearted roll of my eyes, then stopped when something caught my eye. “What the hell are these?” I demanded, starting towards an already half-emptied crate.

“Oh…” I didn’t need to see Danny to know the color was draining from his face. “Those.”

“Yeah,” I growled, snatching one of the pistols by the barrel from the crate and holding it out to him like a piece of rotting fruit. “Mind telling me what the fuck these are doing in our shipment.”

“They’re… uh, getting shipped,” Danny answered, trying to sound coy but only sounding nervous.

“You’re hilarious, smartass,” I shot, seething. After a quick glance, I saw that the numbers had been filed away. I wouldn’t have been surprised if further investigation told me they’d been modified, as well. “Since when do we deal guns?”

Danny gave a look that would have been more appropriate on the face of a teenager trying to explain the concept of email to their grandparents. “Since the Carrion’s started dealin’ guns, Chase. Either we keep up with ‘em and try to cut ‘em off at each turn or we hand ‘em the city. An’ if they get everything then these”—he snatched the gun out of my hand and waved it back to me—“will be the least of our worries.”

“How do you figure?” I demanded.

Danny rolled his eyes. “The ones who would be buyin’ from the Carrions are the ones who are currently buyin’ from us,” he explained. “If the Carrion’s say that they can get untraceable guns an’ we don’t get untraceable guns, then the ones buyin’ from us who want untraceable guns start buyin’ from them. Then they’s got an edge on us. Then they start bringin’ in bigger, badder merch with all the cheddar they’re makin’ off our old buyers. Next thing ya know, the Carrion Crew’s got the leverage and the firepower to smoke us for good.”

“So you’re telling me this is a necessary evil?” I shot at him. “Fucking Michael Kors knockoffs, pot, and fake pussies ain’t enough to run things? Now we gotta smuggle in weapons and deal in death?”

“I appreciate that ye’re sticking to yer old man’s morals in how we used to run things,” Danny said in a lecturing tone, “but don’t ya think that ye’re lettin’ yer past cloud yer judgement here?”

I shot him a glare that was all fury, and, judging from the flinch and the wide step he took away from me, he got the message. “And if I was,” I said slowly, challenging him, “would you say I was being unreasonable?”

“I… I…” Danny wiped his face with a calloused, oily hand and shrugged a single shoulder. “Dammit, Chase, I don’t think anybody could say that—nobody who knew ya, least. But… shit, man, ya know what the alternative is, right?”

I did.

Damn it all, I really did.

Screaming, I hauled back and drove my foot into the side of the crate, knocking it over and spilling out the remaining contents across the floor. The display wasn’t as dramatic as I’d hoped; I’d envisioned an airborne crate exploding into splinters against the wall and sending shattered gun parts raining down over awestruck and terrified workers. It was as unrealistic as…

The phantom face, smiling, of a waving beauty cupping her round belly burned behind my eyes.

Exploding aerial crates of guns: right there in the realm of “Not Real” with her.

The back room went quiet as all the workers, diligently working to unload and stockpile the shipment, looked over to see what was wrong. They’d just seen their leader—God! I hate being called that!—throw a tantrum and kick over a bunch of handguns; they probably thought I was about to start shooting next. Granted, the majority of them knew that the Crows wasn’t that sort of gang—my father and, after him, my older brother had seen to it that things were done differently with us—but with the Crows “under new management” and half of us disbanded and working to bury the other—literally!—I figured they wouldn’t be surprised to see the other shit-covered shoe drop on our way of life.

“Damn…” I grumbled.

“Feel better?” Danny asked.

“Not really, no,” I admitted.

Danny sighed, folded his arms across his chest, and leaned against a stack of crates. I wasn’t proud to admit to myself that I was inwardly jealous of his success at doing so without having the stack betray him and nearly topple him as my own crate had done to me. “Ya know,” he began, stretching out his already lengthy drawl into something almost comical. Almost! “What ya need is a—”

“I swear, Merc,” I cut him off, “if you’re about to offer to buy me another prostitute—” Seeing him already shaking his head, I stopped and sneered. “Or if you’re going to suggest I buy my own…”

Danny rolled his eyes and planted his hands on his hips in a manner that gave away his sexuality in spades. Not that he cared, I knew; anybody in the Crows that wanted to try to take a chance at jabbing their second-in-command for being gay either had a death wish or half a brain. And since we didn’t recruit the suicidal or the stupid, it was a safe bet that Mercury could do whatever he wanted—even parade about as the neo-trucker incarnation of RuPaul—and most wouldn’t even bother to quirk a brow in his direction. The only case of somebody actually saying anything in regards to Mercury’s lifestyle was still, to this day, called “Pee-Bag Ricky.”

And, as my old man had put it so many years earlier, “Let’s just say we didn’t call Ricky that before he decided to open his big, dumb mouth.”

“Whores’re fine and all,” Danny drawled, “but what ya really need, Chase”—I could practically hear the suspenseful percussion rolling in his own mind as he paused for dramatic effect—“is a date!”

I blinked at him. “So… a prostitute.”

“BAH!” Danny waved a dismissive hand, clearly losing hope in me, our lives, and likely the entire human race in that instant. Whether it was a gay-thing or just a Danny-thing, there was something to be said about the flare that punctuated just about everything he did. “Ya’ve let yerself get too far along if ya think datin’s as simple as ten minutes and a crumpled twenty… or as cheap!” he finished with a loud, barking laugh.

I sighed and shook my head, turning away. “I’m already tired of this conversation,” I informed him.

“How can ya be tired of a conversation that’s only jus’ started?” he asked, his heavy footsteps starting after me.

It was my turn to laugh. “‘Cause it’s a conversation we’ve had before, Mercury! And many times, I might add. And, what’s more, it always ends with you giving up, tracking down some prostitute, and throwing a wad of bills at her to ‘show me a night.’”

“An’ do they show ya a night?” Danny asked.

I stopped in mid-step, sighing heavily, and gave an exaggerated shrug so that I could be sure he’d see it from behind. “Yeah. Sure. I guess.” I turned to face him and asked, “Is that what you want to hear? That I accept your little gifts?”

He shrugged back. “Better’n thinking I was wasting my money.”

“You are wasting your money,” I told him. “I just don’t let it go to waste. There’s a difference.”

“How ya figure?” he demanded.

I raised an eyebrow at him. “You never bought anything for yourself that you knew you didn’t really need?”

Danny opened his mouth to argue, thought better of it, then shut it again. A moment later he opened it again and said, “Least I know I got some enjoyment out of whatever it was.”

I rolled my eyes. “Well I get about as much enjoyment from your ‘dates’ as I do from a band-aid. I get one, use it, regret it the instant I peel it off of me, and then forget about it until the next time I get one.”

Danny sneered. “That’s disgusting.”

“Says the guy who once lectured me on the finer points of eating ass during a drunken rant,” I fired back.

He furrowed his brows, confused, and then shook his head. “Must’ve been a tequila night,” he mumbled. “That shit does not agree with me.”

“And I don’t agree with prostitutes,” I said, turning away again. “So let’s just skip this whole tired song-and-dance and just leave me to my—”

“Jason Andrews Presley,” Danny threw my name at my back like a weapon.

It made contact like one. The muscles of my back ached as I tensed and once more stopped in my effort to retreat.

I turned to face my old friend, second-in-command, and the closest thing I had left to a parent.

“If I thought all ya needed to bounce back from this shit-show ya’ve been callin’ yer life was a whore I’d’ve buried ya in price-tagged pussy months ago!” he lectured, closing the distance between us. “But Anne wasn’t no whore, an’ it’s time ya got back to—”

“Shut the fuck up, Dan,” I said, my voice low, even, and laced with an acid edge that seemed to cut the very air between us. The sting of the words meant little, though, as my eyes narrowed on him.

He flinched and backed up. “Chase,” he started, “all’s I’m tryin’ t’say is—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” I told him. “I want you to get your ass back to work unloading these crates. I want you to keep these men working on doing the same. I want you to go about business as usual, and I want you to throw all of those”—I jabbed finger in the direction of all the guns that I had spilled across the floor—“into the fucking river.” I swallowed a growl that, despite the effort, still managed to make itself heard and took a step towards him. “And I want you to promise me you’ll never say that name again. In fact, I want you to promise me you’ll never have this conversation again. The subjects of Anne, prostitutes, or my life—past or current—are officially off limits. Got it?”

Danny sighed and looked away, dragging a shoulder back in a dejected shrug. “The boys and I will finish up around here,” he assured me before giving a lazy shake of his head. “But ya can’t expect me to turn a blind eye to yer wellbeing, Chase. I made a promise to yer daddy that I’d look out for ya, an’, with all due respect, he was my boss first.”

“That’s nice, Dan,” I said, already starting to walk away. “You make that same promise to the old man about Michael?” I felt myself wince around my late brother’s name and was thankful Danny could only see my back. “‘Cause I don’t think whores would’ve helped him when he was getting his throat cut by the Carrions.”

I could only faintly hear Danny as he said “That’s not fair,” but by that point I was already out the door and heading back for my chopper. Once again I found myself glad that he couldn’t see my face. He would’ve seen the regret there; he would’ve seen that I agreed with him.

I made it a whopping seven blocks—seeing her standing at the end of each one, waving and smiling ahead of me until I could stand her no more and turned onto the next stretch of road—before I finally had to stop. I was in the middle of making excuses for my moist eyes and blurred vision when I saw the “GOING OUT OF BUSINESS” sign hanging in front of an old media outlet shop. Seeing a potential distraction, I dismounted the bike, wiped my face on my arm, and hurried inside.

A small bell on a bent copper spiral sang like a breaking wine glass as I pushed through, and an aging hippie with a tied-back rats’ nest of cloud-colored hair regarded me behind rose-tinted, wide-rimmed glasses.

“You alright, brother?” he asked in a voice that sounded half-choked on bad weed and good snacks.

I managed an eloquent “Huh?” in response as I half-stumbled to a stop on my way past his counter.

“You know, man…” he urged, nodding back towards me.

I frowned, now fully stopped, and regarded him coldly. “No, man,” I challenged him, “I don’t know.”

The old hippie, starting to look flustered, waved an open palm over his face in a mimed effort to illustrate my own face. I realized that I hadn’t done such a great job of wiping away the (tears) sweat, and I fought the urge to add a blush to the mix.

“The fuck you expect?” I demanded, hurrying past him. “It’s hotter’n Hell out there!”

“That it is, my man;” the old hippie was just as quick to agree with me, obviously just as eager for a way out of that conversation as I was. “That it is.”

I allowed myself to be swallowed by the tall, narrow rows of shelves. “Westerns” occupied my left; “Sci-Fi” the right. Every few steps brought me past yet another neon-bold cutout of paper with equally neon yet aggressively contrasting ink reminding me that “EVERYTHING MUST GO!!!” and that “ALL TITLES 90% OFF!!!!” in varying phrasings and exponentially rising numbers of exclamation points. It seemed that for every five steps I took the urgency that I heed their call became that much more demanding. I was certain that, should I dare to venture further—perhaps be so bold as to even turn a corner—I might find an entire wall glowing like fluorescence with an army of punctuation poised to ululate their bargain-themed war cries at me.

Daring to turn and start down another aisle, I was stopped by no such obstacle. I was free to browse, and my mind was free to wander.

Whether it was the browsing or the wandering that compelled me to pause on a lonely looking copy of “Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” sitting at a cocked angle beside an abandoned, half-empty cup from 7-Eleven. While I felt an irrational kinship with the cup, it was the DVD that had stopped me. Without meaning to, I found myself holding the case in both hands, staring down at it through a fresh veil of wet, blurring tears.

Somewhere in the shadows of my childhood, I heard my father say “Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!” around an already amused chuckle as he fed the cassette into our VCR for yet another viewing. Though I’d been too young to understand much of what was happening in the movie, I remembered doubling over with laughter each and every time it was playing. That my uproarious wails were shrill, childish echoes of my old man’s own laughter had mattered little then and, in hindsight, mattered even less there in the dying store run by the nosy old hippie.

There was just something about finding a movie from your childhood…

Clutching this as one might a treasure, I hurried away from the cup and its silent taunts. Each step carried me deeper into the store and, likewise, deeper into my memories. “Strangelove” playing on the TV—Dad seated in his recliner and kicking his bare feet with each bout of laughter and me lying on my belly the floor, dancing my own feet in little pedaling cycles as I matched his reactions—while Mom and Michael did what they could to ignore the two of us; Mom burying her nose in whatever new vampire novel she’d picked up at the supermarket and Michael furiously mashing buttons on his Game Boy. Each round of laughter would earn a pair of sighs from the two of them, their own mini-ritual played out against ours, and more than likely a shared look of “What are we going to do with them?”

Though I’d never actually seen this from either my mother or my brother when I was transfixed on the black-and-white ongoings playing out before me, it seemed like just the sort of reaction either of them would have had.

A small, synthetic squeal drew me to the present, and I realized I’d begun rubbing the pad of my thumb across the DVD’s case. I lingered on it a moment longer, taking in the sight of the conniving-looking man behind his shaded glasses staring down at a round table populated by tense men in suits, before forcing my gaze away. I wanted to try to escape the tight grip of nostalgia it had over me.

I only succeeded in leaping out of the frying pan and into the fire as I came face-to-face with an ashy-gray rendering of Gary Oldman. The bust, featuring a heavy-lidded and undead vision of the actor as he greedily lapped at a blood-caked straight razor, seemed to stare back at me; thick slash-like letters that all-but cried out “Dracula” staring out beneath a leering, demonic face set into the base of the statue. Then, just like that, I was thinking of my mother and her bookshelf which, along with all the books, housed any number of other vampire-related knick-knacks. Whether she’d owned this particular trinket was something I couldn’t bring myself to recall, but I knew with absolute certainty that, if she had come across it, it would’ve had its own claim on that shelf. With a trembling hand—vampires still creeped the ever-loving hell out of me after all these years—I snatched it up, being careful to keep my fingertips away from Oldman’s fanged and waiting mouth.

Then, with a fresh set of distractions (none of them wholly uplifting), I made my way past the neon cutouts plastered with neon boasts and salted with neon exclamations to the aging hippie at the front of the store.

“—system’s been cleared out, I’m afraid,” he was saying to a young woman leaning across the counter. “But what I can tell you is that, if we got it, it’s on the shelves somewhere.”

“Any idea where?” she asked, sounding eager but not impatient.

The old hippie shrugged. “Folks been coming and going all day; picking things up, carrying them around, and then setting them back down wherever. Used to be we’d try to put everything back where it belonged, but…” another shrug, “Most of my employees left the day they found out the place was going under. The rest have enough to worry about with trying to keep people from leaving their trash lying around or having sex in the back, where we keep the ‘after dark’ vids,” he made a point of air-quoting the words “after dark” with two pairs of arthritis-chewed fingers.

“That’s disgusting!” the girl exclaimed. “People are actually leaving their trash lying around?”

“I know,” I said absently, “I actually had a stare-down with a to-go cup back in the ‘Sci-Fi’ section.”

“Uhg!” the girl made a face, but a grin that had begun to form as she caught sight of me abandoned her effort to feign any sense of nausea.

“Yeah,” I went on, setting my DVD and the Dracula bust on an available clearing of counter space in front of me. “Worse yet, the cola they left in it was warm.”

The girl gave a giggling half-squeal of “ewww!” before breaking out into an all-out laugh. Then, seeing that I was waiting to pay, she stepped back and motioned for me to continue.

Without any prompting, the old hippie started punching at the keys of his register as he offered a “hmm” at each of my selections.

Not wanting to try for another conversation with him, I turned back to the girl and asked, “So what is it that you’re looking for?”

Though I did my best not to seem rude, I felt my mind begin to wander again the moment she said the words “Air Bud.” As she went on, smiling mouth spouting something to do with how much she loved dogs, I leap-frogged through my memories—watching old movies with my dad, cowering under the many threatening gazes of my mother’s vampire shelf, sneaking downstairs with Michael to watch R-rated Schwarzenegger movies after Mom and Dad went to sleep…

And then to simply watching the clouds ride across the sky with Anne.

“Hey!” the girl’s voice rose to a nearly painful level, cutting through the memories with a shrill pitch. “Are you okay?”

Both she and the old hippie were staring at me, and I realized I was staring back at them through a familiar haze of blurry wetness.

“Y-yeah,” I managed, working to free a fifty dollar bill from my wallet and leaving it on the counter. “Just… It’s just really hot out.”

Leaving that and my money—despite the more than thirty bucks in change I had coming—I snatched up my new belongings, remembering what I’d said to Danny about buying things that one didn’t really need, and hurried for the door and, beyond that, my chopper. Though the young lady and the old hippie stayed and stared after me, the memories followed; them, and Danny’s words:

“Least I know I got some enjoyment out of whatever it was.”

Looking down at the DVD and the bust, I couldn’t help but see them in the same light I’d seen the nearly suicidal turn I’d taken earlier—arguably fun and dramatic, but morbidly self-destructive and pointless in the long run.

The vision of a smiling, waving beauty was waiting for me at the end of the road even before I’d gotten the bike started…

Through the haze of heat and tears and the blurred line between the “then” and the “now,” I heard my voice as I once again uttered “fuck.”