EIGHTEEN
~JACE~
Fuck.
I’d never shot for this long. Truth be told, I’d never really been the killing-type. There’d been deaths, sure—a decent number some might even say—and some had even been directly by my hand. That number was substantially less, however; while I might have been partially responsible for the destruction of T-Built’s first drug lab, and while there might have been a decent number of drug-peddlers still inside when the place went up, one couldn’t exactly compare this to personally taking aim with a gun and pulling the trigger.
So, depending on who you asked and the perimeters of their beliefs, I was either responsible for the deaths of roughly thirty people or exactly five. Before T-Built, that would’ve meant somebody could count the number of people I’d personally killed on one hand while still letting a finger take the day off.
I’d more than doubled that number in just a few minutes.
Fuck, I thought again, reminding myself that, yes, it had only been a few minutes.
And, just like that, the number of people I could personally claim to have intentionally killed—looking them right in the face when it happened and everything—was up to eleven. I felt numb to the reality of what that number represented and more perplexed by the realization that eleven just felt like a weird number of people to have killed. Hell, eleven just seemed like a weird number in general.
Didn’t it?
Or was I in some sort of funky killer’s shock?
If Mack was still out there then I could make it an even twelve. Something about that seemed right. I couldn’t be sure if it was the Mack-part or that the number twelve seemed more appealing than the number eleven.
I paused on that thought, circled it, studied it, and came to the conclusion that it was a truly fucked-up thought to be thinking.
“Thought to be thinking.”
Thinking thoughts makes the thoughts that I’m thinking into thoughts that I thought I thought… I think.
Fuck. I think I’m…
Think I’m thinking?
“Jace!”
I thought I felt thinks—no, slaps! I felt slaps at my cheek. There was a ringing in my ears—that was something real I could hold onto in that moment; like a thought preserver in the vast, roaring sea of my rattled mind—and a face inches from mine.
“Mercury?” I grumbled. “I’ve killed eleven people.”
“No, son. No,” he gave me a few more slaps then, beckoning me back to the here-and-now. “Today ye’ve only killed six. Nice try, though; no stacking points ya ain’t earned, got it?”
I didn’t have it in me to tell him I meant in total.
Either way, I was coming to a shaky realization that I wasn’t the killing-type…
But Mack!
Oh, boy! For Mack I’d be happy to make an exception.
That thought brought me back in my entirety.
“Any sign of Mia?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Danny admitted. “But that’s where Candy said they were holding her, so…” he trailed off, not bothering to finish.
I nodded, scanned the immediate area for any straggling members of the Carrion Crew. Taking down those men had taken longer than I had wanted it too. By some miracle, my men hadn’t been too injured in the fight and as I looked around, I felt a swell of pride again at how loyal they had been. Then, confident that it was safe to do so, I started for the house.
That was when I heard a gunshot ring out from just inside. A gunshot…
And Mia!
I think I said something then—probably calling her name; hers or Danny’s, either seemed a good thing to say then—and I was running for the door.
A sane mind hears a gunshot and runs in the other direction.
But haven’t we established that I’m not…
Well, you already know.
I distantly heard Danny call after, “GET YER ASS GOIN’!” and I realized that he must have had a bit of the crazy in him, too.
Why else would he encourage such insanity?
“We’re all mad here,” I muttered, surprised that I hadn’t just thought it. Then, remembering my dazed moment seconds earlier, I said, “The time for thinking’s done, anyway.”
****
It took longer than I was proud to admit to get through the door. In my defense, it was a well-built door—solid oak or some shit like that—and, after finding the damn thing locked, I busied myself by kicking away at it for an embarrassingly long time. I was starting to feel something like a lumberjack working on a particularly stubborn tree when my boot finally came down just beside the polished doorknob and the first sweet sound of strained wood beginning to splinter let loose its rumbling groan. Motivated, I pummeled the wooden slab a few more times with a series of violent kicks—tiny, enraged screams belching from my lungs in increasing volume with each one—until the door finally shrieked around its thrown deadbolt and swung open.
Inside was…
Nothing.
No Mia, no Mack, no sign of whoever had fired the gun or anything. There was just nothing.
No noise at all.
Either I’d gotten through in time, or I was already far too late.
The cold dread that began to swim its way inside was washed away with hope. I couldn’t let myself think Mia was gone. If she was…
If she was…
Well, Heaven and Hell would have to join forces to protect the world from Jason Presley if that had been the case.
Because I wasn’t going to chase off the craziness a moment longer if I wasn’t doing it for her.
I shook my head, glad no one was around to see how crazy I must’ve looked. Though, for my men, that look probably was what they were used to. But I’d changed since then, I could feel it and from their reaction, they could see it as well. I had to use that strength now, had to hold onto the hope that Mia was inside here and that I would get to her in time; that I’d be able to protect her.
I deserved at least one success story before I died, didn’t I?
I closed my eyes for a moment, wishing that I could have her back in my arms.
Time for sentiment’s later, Defense warned. Now you gotta get some killing done.
Or, you know, just find Mia and get the hell out of here, Logic offered. No reason you can’t let the others finish all this while the two of you—
“Enough,” I interrupted my own thoughts and, as I did, took a cautious step into the house.
I raised my gun, holding it at the ready—smelling the occasional wisp of lingering gun smoke ooze from the barrel as I worked my way deeper into the house—and mentally counting how many shots I’d fired since my last reload. It was nothing like the movies. There was no stylized action to the whole mess. Bullets started flying, and everyone involved was just a drying leaf on an Autumn tree branch: terrified for its own safety while hoping the elements would tear the others from their perch. If the first shot didn’t do the trick—didn’t finish the deed—then everything after that was a frantic follow-up that practically sang “oh shit!” until the first bullet’s job was finally done right.
And, meanwhile, there were a bunch of other assholes’ first bullets, second bullets, and, yeah—for the shitty shots, at least—their thirteenth bullet screaming for you while all this went on.
Far as I was concerned, the only “oh shit!” more pressing than every bullet following the first that didn’t do its job was the one bullet you had to wait on; the one bullet you knew you were about to fire, but the when and the where weren’t yet upon you.
Now that was an “oh shit!” for the ages.
And, ladies and gentlemen, I was officially up to my eyeballs in “oh shit!”
As I looked around the empty rooms, the dread began to grow and this time, I was struggling to rid myself of the feeling.
Come on, Mia. Where are you?
I froze, hearing a creak in the floorboards and turned towards the source of the noise. As I made my way down a ridiculously long hallway, I side-stepped into the neighboring living room, gun raised—leveled and ready…
And I froze.
Mia stood there, a look of pure terror on her face, with Mack practically hiding behind her. I’d thought he was a scrawny fuck before, but, seeing how easily he concealed his entire form behind his sister, save for his rat-like face and wide, peering eyes, it occurred to me just how small he really was. Mia’s head was cocked back at an awkward angle, her throat stretched and bulging hideously around each breath. It took me a moment to realize that Mack was tethering her by hair, pulling it down and back. Judging from the way her midsection jutted forward, I could only imagine that the gun I’d heard fired was presently slammed so hard against her lower back that it was forcing her to hold that awful posture.
“Heya, lover-boy,” Mack called out to me, his voice chummy—almost to a horrific degree given the circumstances—and the part of my brain that knew I was crazy actually started to doubt the awful scene before me solely because of that tone.
I imagined I was seeing one thing while, in fact, he was just sitting in that recliner over yonder, caught in the middle of passing his sister an iced tea.
But that would just be crazy.
“Mack,” I said, but then realized I had nothing to follow it up with; the name just hung there on its own, a morbid sort of greeting in its own right.
“My sister punched me in the cock,” Mack said, delivering the news as one might inform a buddy of last night’s sport’s scores.
“That a fact?” I answered, only because I imagined a statement like that demanded an answer. “Everything… uh, still working?”
“Oh, yes, yes.” Mack’s voice rose, excited, and I realized with more than a little discomfort he sounded like he was hissing on the word “yes.” “Working very well, actually. Isn’t that right, Mia?”
Mia’s throat only distended with another nervous breath, her eyes boring back at me; apologetic.
That she looked sorry in that instant was almost enough to send me into a blind rage…
Except that would be ensuring things went very badly very quickly.
“ISN’T THAT RIGHT?” he repeated in a shrill yell, yanking Mia’s head back roughly before relaxing his grip enough to let her speak.
“Y-yes,” she croaked, her voice little more than a whisper.
Mack leaned in, his lips fluttering by her ear.
“I-I… can feel… him, J-Jace,” she went on, seeming at that moment to be little more than a toy built to repeat the words spoken into her. “A-against… me.”
Mack grinned at this—a pet owner grinning at a successful trick—and he let his tongue snake out and flick her earlobe before he returned his gaze to me.
“This isn’t me, Jace,” he said, once more conversational. “Isn’t who I am—what I am, I mean. Between the life I lived, the struggles after I left home, all that business with the Carrion Crew, and prison—ah, Jace-Jace-Jace; they’ll love you in prison, you and your pretty mouth—it’s just that I’m so… so worked up, you know what I’m saying, Jace?”
Not a fucking clue, bucko!
“Yeah, sure. I guess that makes sense,” I said.
“Can’t help it,” Mack muttered, his eyes drooping away from me and down to…
I fought any number of urges as I realized he was staring down Mia’s shirt; trying to get a decent look at her breasts.
“Best thing about whores,” he said, and I got the impression he wasn’t talking to me anymore, “is that they’ll do anything for anyone. Anyone. Even… their own…”
If only you were fast enough.
Just a little faster.
You can save her.
You can save her.
You must save her!
Mia and I locked eyes then, and I saw the slightest hint of a nod. I had no idea what it was she was conveying in that instant…
But something in me did.
I was running then—thinking, this is crazy! with each step—and closing the distance. Time slowed as it had a funny way of doing in moments of death. Mia, seeming almost to move in slow-motion, was twisting and side-stepping; seeming all the world in that instant to look like a cat righting itself in mid-fall. Her hair went taut, but the rest of her didn’t seem to care as she twirled—a bizarre, almost ballerina-like vision—and Mack’s hand started to drag out as he maintained his hold. Mack, all the while, seemed only confused that the pair of tits he’d been working to ogle were no longer occupying the field of vision he’d established for himself.
Then, twisting free of her brother’s hold, Mack was standing before me without his human shield.
Just as Mia had been forced to confess, there was a steely erection waiting in his pants. It was almost as threatening as the gun he still held in his hands; the gun that wavered uncertainly between me and Mia. Then, deciding, it started to swim through slowed time in Mia’s direction.
I heard Mack say, “We die together then, like Romeo and—”
But I reached him before either his gun or his mouth could finish.
I came upon him like a missile, barreling him back. He managed to keep his feet on the ground, but what this kept in balance he lost in control; his legs forced to pump him ever further back just to keep us both upright. Then, exhausting the open space, we crashed into the wall—Mack’s back and shoulders making a loud WHOOMP!-sound as we did. His hot, stinking breath was knocked from his lungs and into my face, and visions of cramming my head in a gas stove swam on my thoughts. I was screaming, this I knew, but I couldn’t be sure when I’d started or how long it went on. My fists pummeled—left, right, left, right; an ever-constant rhythm—into the soft, tender meat just below either side of Mack’s ribs. He barked and coughed under the weight of each impact, showed all the tell-tale signs of pain, but never seemed to truly be worn down by it.
I got the horrifying impression that I was beating up something that was too used to being beaten to benefit from it any longer; a slab of meat too tender to yield to the hammer.
And, all the while, his erection never went down.
Still I worked, punching and screaming and, once or twice, throwing a knee into his groin, hoping to see him finally buckle and fold.
Then, realizing too late that only one of us—me—had dropped his gun in the start of the tussle, he brought his weapon up in a moon-like arc, cracking me along the side of my head with the long, flat silver of his pistol.
The world corkscrewed to one side. I worked to counterbalance this sudden shift. Then I discovered the world hadn’t moved at all; my aggressive lean became an all-out fall.
The sound of the floor slamming into my ear was louder than the cries of my name from Mia’s mouth, but I heard both; received both with the same sense of confusion.
Then there was a cold that seemed to drape over me. It seemed strange to me—that a blanket should seem so cold—but I accepted it as I felt I had to accept all things in that instant of dizzy confusion; I was a child being covered by a sympathetic mother…
And mother knows best.
But, when I looked up, there was no mother. Just Mack, leering, aiming two very different yet very similar weapons down at me.
So lost in my confusion, I was having a hard time discerning between the barrel of his gun and the tent of his erection. I could only be certain that both were quite terrible and dangerous in their own ways.
A very distant part of me said, Fuck.
That felt right.
BANG.
The sound of the gunshot, something that the past few minutes had made me very familiar with, felt like a harsh length of rope that, at that instant, yanked me back from my daze.
I’d been aware of a gun aimed at me.
And I’d even, in some airy, very distant sense, been aware of what that could mean.
But it was the sound—that sound—that made the possibility that I’d just been shot jolt me back into awareness.
Except…
Except that I didn’t feel shot.
And, yeah, I knew what that felt like. Absently, my hand traced up to my left shoulder, just above my heart, and it occurred to me that it was very stupid to wonder if I’d been shot in the same place twice.
Then how come that’s the only part of me that hurts right now?
Because that would be your heart, stupid.
A pair of thuds, hard and unforgiving—like the legs of some strange furniture crashing down—resonated beside me. There was a momentary warmth, and I remembered Mack’s breath on my face a moment earlier.
Then it was raining blood.
It poured like it had earlier, hot and thick and awful.
I thought, No way I can ride in all this.
And then Mack’s body slumped over me, dead as dead could be.
Still eleven, Logic sighed.
Damn… Defense groaned.
She’s sexy, Neutral offered.
And I, the amalgamation of all Jaces and, at the same time, some new, recently blossomed Jace, was uncertain what all these fractal-perspectives meant at first.
Then, all at once, I knew.
And I fell in love with Mia all over again.
I shoved the dead waste off of me. Mack thumped to the floor, alone and forgotten as easy as that, and I was distracted with the suddenly tolling chore of standing. Mia let the spent weapon drop from her hand. My gun clattered to the floor, and, like Mack, was forgotten as easy as that.
Finally—finally!—we were holding one another. Once more it felt more necessary than desired; we needed one another just to keep upright.
“At least this time the house isn’t on fire,” she said with an exhausted smile.
“Wouldn’t it be funny,” I said with a groan, “if you saying that made it happen?”
She studied me for a moment, smiled sympathetically, and shook her head. “No,” she said, “that wouldn’t be funny at all.”
“Right,” I nodded, pointing to what I was sure looked like a sizable head injury. “Sorry. Just a little concuss at the moment.”
She giggled a little, but it seemed more for my benefit than out of any actual humor. “Come on,” she said, “let’s get out of here.”
****
It wasn’t the first time, and it sure-as-shit wasn’t going to be the last time, but I was wrong. I was not concuss. The doctor practically made fun of me for even thinking it, in fact. What I did have, he’d informed me, was a very ugly bruise on my temple. I was given four aspirin, a drink of cold water from a paper cone, and a look that promised no end to the ball-busting.
I could practically hear Danny and Candy busily starting and comparing lists to tease me with.
Mia, my guardian angel—the one who’d come around and saved my life while I’d been in the midst of saving hers—offered a far greater medicine: a kiss to the temple. Then, confessing to her it was the best sort of healing I’d even received, she offered another, then another to my other temple, and, finally, another to my lips.
I’d say that I felt all better from that alone…
But that would be crazy.
****
~TWO DAYS LATER~
Candy was seated in what was normally my office with Danny and two other prostitutes. They were going over paperwork, finalizing agreements, and casually discussing prices. I walked in somewhere in the middle of a debate about whether or not a rimjob should be bundled with a blowjob as a form of oral sex and, therefore, lumped within a single price or, as it existed as a completely different form of oral stimulation, not only be considered separate, but also offered at a different price.
One of the prostitutes—the one to Candy’s left—said that using the mouth was using the mouth and what did it matter if it was a cock, a nipple, or an asshole that was getting the attention.
The other—the one seated at Candy’s right—argued that if she was going to be using her mouth on a John’s asshole that, first, she wanted to be made aware of it from the get-go and, second, she wanted to be getting something extra for the effort.
Danny seemed to be trying very hard to maintain a straight face through all of this.
Candy, whose back was to me at that moment, stayed silent. She was leaning back in her chair, letting the two monopolize the conversation, and, despite my limited view, seemed generally pleased with things.
Progress is progress, I thought to myself, and tried to keep quiet as I slipped across the room towards the filing cabinet.
If I could just get that address and slip out before—
“Jace?” Danny called, announcing my presence to everyone else and making me flinch.
Three other pairs of eyes turned to face me.
“Didn’t think ya were comin’ in today? Thought ya an’ Mia were headin’ out on a date, weren’t’cha?”
I groaned and nodded, motioning towards the filing cabinet. “I was just here for my address book,” I confessed, pointing to the little black Moleskin set atop the four-tier cabinet. “I made a note of a place I wanted to take Mia to and—”
“Care to weigh in on this rimjob debate?” Candy offered, seeming more entertained by the idea of my response than actually interested in the nature of it.
“There’s very little else in this world I want to do less than weigh in on this rimjob debate, Candy,” I said outright and flat-out.
“Ye’re right to want to duck out,” Danny offered, but was all the same reaching into the desk as he said it. “But, long as ye’re here, I was hoping ye’d be willin’ to take a gander at this?”
He held out a rather thick-looking folder to me.
I had to awkwardly maneuver between Candy and the hooker who was okay with lumping ass-licking in the same place as cock-sucking. Though I wasn’t about to say so, I thought that, while she was a real go-getter and an undeniably adventurous girl, her business savvy left a lot of room for improvement.
“Long as I can ‘gander’ at it over dinner with Mia,” I said, tucking the bundle under my arm.
“Ya can gander at it however ya like, so long’s as ya gander,” Danny said, seeming to lay on his Southern drawl a little heavier as he did.
****
As promised, I gandered over the papers over dinner with Mia.
Feeling a renewed sense of involvement with all this Crow-related, she was almost more interested in what it all had to say than I was.
Okay, so she was a lot more interested than I was.
“It’s really tough to read this when you’re kissing my neck, you know,” she chastised.
I grinned, nodded, and kissed her neck again. “Yes, I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m doing it.”
She giggled at this, tried to pull away—trying, in fact, to pretend she didn’t love it—only to have her giggles slip into laughs. Betrayed by her own response, she let herself fall against me and craned her neck to accept a few more kisses before turning her head to catch the next “attack” on her lips. We both moaned, satisfied by this turn of events, and explored its possibilities a bit further.
Then the wine came.
We parted—our eyes seeming to agree it was a temporary shift, at best—and, as the waiter shuffled off, embarrassed, we each took a sip. As we partook, our eyes, by no real fault or intrigue—solely, it seemed, by chance—fell upon the paperwork. I sighed, feeling a sense of entrapment by the authority of the printed pages, and I shuffled a bit through the stack, hoping that doing so would transfer the content into my brain through the skin of my palms by some new form of desperate osmosis.
This did not happen.
Instead, Mia’s free hand came down with a sudden-yet-not-harsh abruptness, stopping me on one of the pages, and she pointed to a line.
“Who is this?” she asked.
The page, what appeared to be a printout of an email, depicted a scene as it had been followed by one of Danny’s informants. This, however, was not what Mia was asking about.
Her finger tapped specifically over a name:
Papa Raven.
“Him?” I asked, then, to clarify, I said aloud: “Papa Raven?”
Mia nodded.
Then, sighing, I set down my glass of wine and told her a story—the story of my father, his dream for the city, and a man who, long ago, had lied to his face, called himself a “partner”…
And then taken everything, including my father’s life.
“And that,” I finished with a sigh, “is how Papa Raven fractured the Crow Gang, started the Carrion Crew, and murdered my father in one single act.”
A moment of silence passed then, Mia, saddened by my story, considering it and mulling it along with whatever it was that had motivated her to ask about him in the first place. Knowing she’d tell me her end soon enough, I read through the rest of the printed page.
By the time Mia was ready to talk, I’d come to the conclusion that our work—both my work with the Crows and my work with ending the looming threat of the Carrion Crew against Mia—was far from done.
Our entrees came soon after, and we teased at our plates for the first few minutes as we finished talking about Papa Raven and, in the long run, finished talking about business in general.
We were, after all, on a date. We would go on to appreciate our meal, attend a double-feature—a horror movie for her and an action-comedy for me—and then, finally, we’d go back to my condo, with all its fancy new security add-ons, and have toe-curling, headboard-cracking sex. The hardest decision that we needed to concern ourselves with at that moment was which hole that sex would focus on, not matters of the Carrion Crew or Papa Raven.
That was just crazy.