Cormac
I dream of the day dad told me about mom. In the dream, I am as tiny as I felt in that moment, a little one-inch boy sitting in a chair as big as the Grand Canyon, with a giant the size of God looming over me. “You’re going to hear talk about her,” he said. “So I might as well tell you. Aye, it’s true, she was a whore. And she’s gone now. Vegas, I think. She don’t know you, and I don’t know her.” I remember wondering why it was a bad thing to be a whore. I never knew what the problem was. But then, as I got older, I started to see that most whores were on drugs or crazy or very sad all the time. I started to see that my mother must’ve been a weak person with no friends and no family. When I went down to Vegas to find her on my twentieth birthday, she was working as a receptionist, hair gray and skin leathered from all those hard years. I told her who I wa,s and she slapped me across the face and called me a lying bastard. I didn’t go back.
“So, remember,” the God-sized giant booms. “Never trust a whore.”
I wake in the middle of the night to the sound of Scar creeping across the room. Scar isn’t a whore, which is maybe one of the reasons I’m so drawn to her. Or maybe it has nothing to do with that. Fuck it, I’ve never known about stuff like that. People look inside themselves way too much these days, is my reasoning. You can’t take a shit without some talk show host somewhere trying to explain to you why that particular shit relates back to your childhood. My first urge is to turn over and say something to her, but that might stop her from coming over here. She’s way more complicated than I ever would’ve guessed, that’s what I’m starting to learn. She used to just be Scar, an FBI agent with a mask so solid it’d take years to crack. Something about seeing Moira—seeing me and Moira together—has changed that. I don’t know what.
She climbs into bed, crawls across the sheets, and places her hand on my belly. I feel hunger stirring and my cock hardening, but I know that if I try it on with her again so soon, she’ll get all crazy again. I guess I’ll have to settle for cuddling. Cuddling, goddamn, and with Scar it’s not such a bad thing. After a while, she starts to snore sweetly. Moving carefully, I turn over and look down at her face. The curtains are thin, allowing streetlamps, moonlight, and the light of passing trucks to shine onto her face. She’s smiling, a small, sad smile, and her eyebrows are furrowed in concern. I touch her face, smoothing my hand down her cheek, and her eyebrows relax. I feel pretty good about that, I have to admit. It feels like having a woman.
I lie back and wrap my arm around her, hugging her close to me. To have Scar as my woman ... now that’d be something else.
When I wake, she’s staring up at me. She quickly looks down, trying to pretend she wasn’t. The sun is shining now, cooking the room.
“I saw you,” I say. “And I feel violated. Staring at me like that.”
“You were moaning in your sleep,” she says quietly. “Moaning about your father—and your mother.”
“Bullshit.” I stand up and go into the bathroom, splashing some water in my face. “Moaning in my sleep,” I repeat, laughing to myself. “What a load of shit.”
“You know,” Scar calls from the bedroom. “Just because you’re a big strong man doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to moan in your sleep!”
“I was not moaning in my fucking sleep!”
I splash more water in my face.
“Okay, Cormac. Whatever you say, Mr. Big and Strong.”
“You’re a pain in my ass.” I walk back into the bedroom and start getting dressed. She’s on her bed now, legs tucked beneath her. At some point in the night she took off her clothes and now she’s in her underwear. Maybe her clothes were too uncomfortable. Her tits are pushed together and her long, lithe legs are driving me mad. Those are the sort of legs that men go to war for. I’d kill a thousand men to keep legs like those safe.
“Why? Because I try and bust through your phony macho-man routine?”
“I never knew you had freckles.” I walk across the room and kneel close to her, pointing to her chest. A smattering of freckles crawls from between her breasts up to near her neck. “They’re cute as hell, Scar. You shouldn’t’ve hid them from me for so long.”
“Pervert.” She pouts.
“Woah.” I stand up, holding my hands up. “Don’t pull your gun on me, Agent O—”
The door crashes open so fast that, at first, I think a bomb’s gone off. The hinges explode in shrapnel and the door collapses onto the floor with a heavy thump. I’m behind my bed, rooting around for my gun. Scar’s doing the same, but neither of us is quick enough. Two men, both of them holding twelve-gauge shotguns, march into the room, barrels aimed at us. The first man is even taller than me, almost seven feet, with a caved-in nose and a thin mustache penciled on above a small, cruel mouth. He’s bald, but wearing a Yankees cap to hide it. The other man is short, with ratty blonde hair and a goatee, wearing glasses which reflect the motel room in miniature.
“Okay, okay,” the big man says. “Let’s all stay nice and calm, okay? I don’t want to have to paint the walls with you, Cormac, but I will.”
He doesn’t speak like a criminal—not like any criminal I’ve ever met. He has this way of looking around the room, of holding his weapon, that tells me he’s police-trained. He looks like Scar when she goes into business mode. He looks like FBI.
“Hot damn,” the shorter one says. He has his gun trained on Scar. “Damn, sweetheart. Those are what I’d call some titties. Look at these, Bryan. These are what I’d call some titties.”
“Don’t use my name you fuckin’ dipshit,” Bryan snaps.
“Who cares, man? These two will be dead when we get them to the boss, anyway. I don’t see no harm in having a little fun with ’em. Look here, missy, my name is Harold, and this here is Bryan. Bryan, just think about it. We can do anything we like to these two and it won’t make no matter. Dead is dead. Just look at those titties, man. I’ve died and gone to titty heaven.”
Bryan shakes his head, growling as though Harold often goes off like this. He turns to his partner, still with the gun trained on me, but with his eyes looking away. I inch forward, clenching my fists and wishing I had my gun in my hand. I’ll have to be quick and brutal. Bryan looks like he could pick up a vending machine with one hand without breaking a sweat.
“Just leave her alone, you fool. What’d you think the boss is gonna say if he finds out you’ve—”
“Why would he care?” Harold hisses. “What’s it to him if the hole’s a little stretched?”
“You’re a sick fuck, you know that?”
“A sick fuck who gets more pussy’n you can ever dream of, you ogre cunt. Anyway, we both know you like it. You didn’t complain about the stripper sluts last night, and they weren’t exactly willin’. You need more powder or what?”
“Go fuck yourself, man. I’m getting us outta here.”
He’s about to turn back to me when I lurch forward and grab the barrel off the shotgun. He fires on instinct, but I just manage to push it away so that the thin, cheap wall is blown to hell, not me. Scar is screaming, Harold is shouting, and all around me is mayhem, but I just focus on that gun. Just get that gun aimed at his bald head and blow his brains out, and then it’ll be time for thinking. But Bryan is strong, stronger than any man I’ve ever fought. I wrench the gun one way, twisting it, hoping to twist his wrists and make him drop it. But he just wrenches it right back.
“If you keep fighting with my partner, I’ll blow her face off!” Harold roars. “Three, two ...”
I step back, letting my hands fall to my sides. Harold has his shotgun pressed into Scar’s mouth, right up to the back of her throat, and the fuck seems to be taking pleasure from it.
“That’s more like it,” Harold says. “That’s more like it, indeed.”
When Bryan smacks me across the jaw with the butt of the gun, I’m sure my neck has snapped. The pain is absolute, gripping my head, neck, and shoulders, making it so that when he pulls me to my feet, needles of pain work their way under my skin. The two of them drag us into the morning sunlight, across the tarmac, and throw us into a big black sedan, Scar and I sitting side by side. They haven’t let Scar put on any clothes. The sick fucks. The sick fucking bastards. I’m just wearing sweatpants, but I don’t think Harold or Bryan are going to give me much trouble. But Scar ...
They handcuff us to the seats, then climb into the front.
“Try anything and I’ll be eating her teddies for breakfast.” Harold grins at me. His teeth are yellow and he has a Band-Aid on the bridge of his nose. A cokehead. As if to confirm this thought, he sets out some lines on the dashboards and vacuums them up. “Teddies for breakfast, that’s what I’m talking about.”
“Just shut up,” Bryan says, backing the car out of the lot.
I look to Scar and see that she’s looking back at me. I thought she might be scared, but she doesn’t look scared. She looks like she has a plan.