I laid on the floor awhile after Zico left, trying to wrap my head around the snowstorm of emotions flurrying in my brain. I felt guilty about sleeping with Zico and going to meet up with him in the first place. I was angry at Gary for implicating me in his crimes when I didn’t know any better. If he hadn’t made me drive him around to do his collections, none of this would even be happening.
I was disgusted with Zico. For blackmailing me twice now. For breaking into my house and threatening my job, my livelihood, my life. And then, on top of it all, was a great deal of confusion. Zico had blackmailed me into having sex with him, but…I’d enjoyed it. And, despite Zico’s threats forcing me to take Gary down, I wanted Gary taken down anyway. I’d gone to Sergeant Hale to do just that. But more than anything else, I was tired. More tired than I’d ever been in my life.
Eventually, I heaved myself off the floor, collected my clothes, making a mental note to pick up the buttons from my shirt later, and took a shower. I lathered myself in layer after layer of body wash and let the hot water pour over me until it began to run cold and my hands and feet had gone pruney.
Afterwards, wet hair tangled around me, I collapsed into bed, where I fell instantly asleep.
The next morning, I slept through my first two alarms, but Gary didn’t say a word to me when I walked in over an hour late to work.
# # #
Over the next few days, Zico kept his promise. I heard from him, all right. He contacted me in just about every way known to man. Via email, text message, phone calls to my cell phone and my desk phone, letters taped to my door or wedged under my windshield wipers. Each message was nothing more than a number. A phone number, to be exact. Apparently, he expected me to call him.
After the third day of this communication barrage, I finally dialed the number. He picked up on the first ring.
“Took you long enough,” he said. It was the first time I’d ever heard him sound grouchy. His standard tone seemed to be a playful smartass kind of vibe. Grouchy didn’t suit him.
“I’ve been busy,” I said.
“Oh, yes.” His voice had taken on a mock concern. “You seemed so busy last night while you watched hour after hour of home improvement shows. I wouldn’t dream of interrupting your packed schedule.”
“STOP WATCHING ME!” I shouted. “How are you doing that?”
He laughed. “Close your blinds, sweetheart. I could see you vegging out in your pink pajamas from my car on the street. You aren’t exactly making it difficult to keep an eye on you.”
Immediately I jumped up from my spot on the couch and pulled all of my curtains closed, checking the edges to ensure there were no cracks. I sat back down, throwing a blanket over myself, still feeling vulnerable.
“So, what do you want, Zico?”
I swear, I could hear him smiling through the phone, his grouchiness from before all but gone. “I don’t think you’ve ever said my name before. I like it.”
“What do you want?” I sighed, purposefully not saying his name. In fact, if I could avoid it, I’d never say his name again.
“Have you forgotten our deal?” he asked. “Because I sure haven’t. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forget the night we made our agreement.”
“No, I haven’t forgotten. And, for the record, you’re disgusting.”
He laughed again. “Well, be that as it may, we have a contract. In case you weren’t aware, a spoken contract is just as legally binding as a written one.”
“In case you weren’t aware,” I said, “legality has nothing to do with your operation. The law doesn’t uphold contracts that require one or more of the signing parties to commit a crime.”
“You know what I mean. I’m here to discuss your end of the bargain. You agreed to help me take down Gary Unwin, and I’m just trying to make sure we have a plan.”
“No,” I said, making my voice as forceful as I could. “I’ll come to you when I have a plan. I know what your plan will be. It will involve murdering Gary in any number of gruesome ways and disposing of the evidence. I, however, refuse to be privy to a murder. If that tape of our exchange in the back room of the cigar shop gets out, my career would be ruined so you can imagine what would happen if it got out that I’d helped murder my partner. Not only would I not have a job, but I also wouldn’t have my freedom.”
“You sure are full of opinions,” Zico said. “I thought you were supposed to be a shy, naïve country girl.”
“The big city and the country aren’t as different as you’d think,” I countered. “We have assholes we have to learn to deal with in the country, too.”
“Ouch. You hurt my feelings.”
I ignored him, not wanting to draw out this conversation any longer than necessary. “I need time to figure out Gary’s routes and uncover more information about his dealings. Once I have that, we can formulate a plan to get him captured.”
“Captured?” Zico asked, his voice unsure.
“Yes. Captured. Not murdered. Not dismembered. Not horrifically injured. Captured. He is going to be arrested by the police and tried for his crimes. There has to be some order to this operation, or I can’t be involved.”
Zico sighed. “You law types are all the same. So boring. So unimaginative. But fine. Gather your information, I’ll be in touch.”
I began asking when he would be in touch, but he’d already hung up. I threw my phone to the end of the couch and laid my head back against the armrest, wondering whether Zico had been honest before. Had he really only seen me through my windows, or was I being watched? I pulled the blanket over my head.
# # #
My refusal to mention anything about the Brancatis or Gary’s notebook seemed to put Gary more at ease. He settled easily back into his “mightier than thou” attitude and began treating me like dirt just like before. Thankfully, he also became complacent. Now that I had our route memorized, we took turns driving, and when Gary drove, he made a few stops.
“Just need to pick something up real quick,” he said, sliding out of the driver’s seat.
I stared at my phone, pretending to ignore him, but the moment he was inside the laundromat, I snapped a picture of the building and added the date and time of the stop to a spreadsheet on my phone. If I could figure out Gary’s patterns, I could alert the police and have him captured.
However, Zico had only given me two days to collect information, and there was no way I would be able to get a sense of his pattern by then. I couldn’t just observe him, I needed to do some snooping.
On the second day, I packed a sack lunch.
“Brown bagging it?” Gary asked, his voice monotone and uninterested.
“Yeah,” I said. “Trying to save a little money.”
He nodded and waved as he headed out the door. Gary preferred eating at the sub shop across the street. He walked over there every day at noon, ordered an Italian club, and then took it to one of the tables in front of the restaurant to eat. No matter how quickly he ate, he wouldn’t reenter the office until his entire hour was up. Meaning, that from the moment he left, I had an hour to search his desk and try to crack his computer password.
I counted to sixty after he left, saying each number under my breath slowly, giving him plenty of time to walk to the elevator, get to the first floor, and be on his way out of the building. When I reached sixty, I slid my chair around the corner of his desk and pulled on the top drawer. Locked.
“Shit,” I mumbled, tugging on it a few more times just to be sure.
I looked across the top of his desk and was elated when I saw his keychain sitting on the corner of the desk. He had a mess of keys, but only one tiny metal one. I slipped that key into the drawer’s lock and twisted. It unlocked with a satisfying click, and I pulled it open.
Inside, he had a silver watch with a ring of sapphires around the face that I’d never seen him wear, a small wad of one dollar bills for the vending machine in the breakroom, and a manila folder just like the one Zico had shown me in the back room of the cigar shop.
I sat the watch and the cash on his desk and slid the folder out of the drawer, careful not to bend the edges or drop it. I sat it carefully on top of his desk, then, handling it as if it would rip to shreds at any moment, I flipped it open.
Blank paper.
Gary kept a manila folder full of blank printer paper in his desk? I slammed the folder shut and dropped it into his drawer. What was the point of even locking a drawer like that? It was useless.
I swiped my hand across the desk, dropping his watch and the cask back into the drawer, slammed it shut, and turned the key. No sooner had I done this, and scooted my chair back over to my desk to take a few bites of my sandwich, when our office door flew open.
I jumped, nearly falling out of my chair as Detective Johnson walked in. He stopped when he saw me.
“Oh, crap, I’m sorry. I didn’t think anyone was in here,” he said.
Was Johnson in on it, too? Or, like me, was he investigating Gary? Trying to find dirt on him to clean up the precinct? Would I have help in bringing down Gary?
“That’s okay,” I replied, talking around my mouth full of sandwich.
Johnson held up a piece of paper. “I just needed Unwin’s signature on this, and he asked me to leave it on his desk.”
“Alright.” I smiled, even though my hopes of having a secret ally within the department had just been dashed.
He sat the piece of paper down where only moments before I had placed the contents of Gary’s locked desk drawer, saluted me with two fingers, and left.
I still had thirty minutes before Gary would be back in the office, but my resolve had been shaken. What if Johnson had walked in fifteen seconds earlier? How would I have explained myself? I needed to be careful, or I’d be labeled the office snitch, for sure.
The rest of the day was a bust. I spent several hours going over paperwork with Mary down in Human Resources. She refused to let me sign any piece of paper without reading the entire thing to me, and then, between each signing, she told me about her plethora of children, grandchildren, and grandpuppies.
There were many photos involved and lots of fake smiles on my part. And by the time I got back to the office, Gary had left a note to say that he was taking off early and he’d see me tomorrow. Feeling inspired, I took off early too.
Though I’d been in the city a few weeks, I hadn’t been too many places outside of my apartment, work, and the grocery store. Exploring had been pretty low on my list of to-dos, so with the insane turn my life had taken, I decided to treat myself.
Less than two blocks from the precinct was an old brick building that had been completely stripped down inside and remodeled to become a hipster’s wet dream. The floors were stained concrete, the ceilings featured exposed beams and piping, and the two-story structure, which had once been a bank, had been converted into a bookstore coffee shop combo.
I browsed the aisles, running my fingers along the spines of too many books to count. Shelves lined the walls and ran in parallel rows from one side of the store to the other. Something about being in a bookstore had always put me at ease. There was no requirement to talk to anyone or, for that matter, even pay attention to another human. It was perfectly acceptable to browse the shelves, sticking your nose in and out of books until you found the one you wanted.
I passed over the mystery, science fiction, and horror section. I didn’t need to read about detectives solving crimes or an ordinary girl discovering a world she never knew existed or a monster hunting down humans. My life had enough of those elements to satisfy me for a lifetime.
I needed something light and fluffy. Something I could get lost in, forget my troubles. I saw the sign for “romance” hanging from a shelf in the back and made a beeline for it. I’d always been a fan of romance novels. Even when my professors in college told me I should read something with more substance and my mom insisted that fictional men would simply ruin me on actual men, I repeatedly found myself between the pages of romance novels.
I liked that two characters, despite their differences and their disagreements, would always come together at the end. No matter how messy things got from point A to point B, there was always a happy ending. And what I needed more than anything at the moment was to know that happy endings existed, that they were possible.
I picked a small paperback up off the shelf. The woman on the front wore a long, flowing ball gown—the kind that is only ever seen in movies, and never in real life—as she ran through the woods towards a large house set up on a hill, the windows shining gold in the dark. Without reading the description, I took it to the register, bought it, and ordered myself a large cappuccino.
For the next three hours, I sat in the coffee shop on the second floor, sipping on my cappuccino, eating two blueberry muffins, and reading. For those three hours, my life was normal. Everyone who walked by didn’t see a detective working with the mafia to bring down a dirty cop. They didn’t see a woman who traded sexual favors for evidence. They didn’t see a woman who, only two nights before, had been blackmailed into sleeping with a mafia member, and, as much as she didn’t want to admit it, had actually enjoyed it. They saw a normal girl, sitting in a coffee shop, drinking a cappuccino, and reading a trashy romance. I liked being normal.
My attempt at feeling normal was short-lived though. It ended the moment I pulled up in front of my apartment. The lamp next to the window was turned on, and I remembered turning it off in the morning before I left for work. I knew it was Zico. Who else would it be? No one else in the city knew where I lived.
I sat in my car for a few minutes, wondering whether I should leave. Perhaps if I left for a few hours and then came back, he would be gone. However, I doubted that. Zico seemed patient, and, besides, I didn’t have anywhere else to go. It didn’t make any sense though. He’d told me the night before he would give me two days. It hadn’t even been a full twenty-four hours. What did he want?
Feeling like there was no other option, I got out of my car and walked up the sidewalk. As I was unlocking the door, I saw the curtain pull back slightly, Zico’s green eyes peeking out. I could only see a sliver of his face, but I could tell he was smiling, the grooves along his mouth deepening, his eyes shining.
When I opened the front door, he was standing there, arms open wide. “Hello, honey. How was your day?” he said, beaming.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, shutting the door behind me, doing my best not to look at him. “You said I had two days.”
“And you do—I’m a man of my word. But is there a rule that says I can only stop by when it concerns business?”
I hung my coat from a hook next to the door and slipped out of my heels, my feet thanking me immediately.
“Actually, there is a rule that says you can never stop by my house. It’s called breaking and entering. It’s illegal.”
He pursed his lips and waved his hand, dismissing me.
“Seriously, what are you doing here?”
“Seriously,” Zico said, his voice mimicking mine, moving closer to me, “can I not just stop by to see you?”
Finally, I looked at him. His hair was less slicked back than usual, and several dark tendrils had fallen forward across his forehead. He had a plain black T-shirt on that tightly hugged his chest, and I tried to resist staring at him. It was annoying how beautiful he was.
He wasn’t just handsome or ripped. He looked like artwork, like a painting you could see in a museum and stand in front of for an hour, trying to figure out who the subject was. Their likes, their dislikes, their past, their future. Zico forced you to admire him, even when it was the last thing you wanted to do.
“I’d prefer if you didn’t,” I said, turning away from him.
He placed a finger on my chin and turned my face towards his. His breath was sharp and minty, and it mingled with the warmth I felt pouring from his body. He felt like a furnace next to me, a perpetual fire.
“Are you sure?”
I hated that I wasn’t sure at all. At that moment, I didn’t want him to leave. I didn’t want him to drop his hand from my face or take a step away from me. I knew that I should. It only made sense that I’d want him as far away from me as possible. However, something about his nearness made my brain go fuzzy. My body ached for him, remembering him from our previous encounter. Against my will, my body shivered, and Zico felt it.
“I knew it,” he whispered, his lips moving against my cheek. He pressed a kiss to the hollow there and then left a trail of them up to my ear. “Fuck me.”
His breathy whisper set my body on fire. I reached out and unbuttoned his dark wash jeans, sliding them down as I lowered to my knees in front of him. I heard him release a low chuckle that died in his throat the moment I pulled him out of his boxers, then massaged him up and down with my hand. He groaned, and I liked feeling like I had some sort of power over him. Like I could control him, even if only sexually.
I ran my tongue from the base to the tip and then took him shallowly into my mouth. He reached down and gathered my hair in his hand, holding it away from my face so he could look down and watch me. I took him all the way into my mouth and looked up, watching as his eyes shifted from green to a shade darker, as his pupils dilated, as his animal instincts began to take over.
Using his other hand, he pressed his palm to the back of my head and pushed me down onto him, forcing himself into my mouth. I relaxed my jaw as he touched the back of my throat. I ran my tongue along the base of him, and he moaned, pushing me down harder onto him. Just when I began to run out of air, he released me and I pulled back, catching my breath.
“My God,” he moaned out. “You’re incredible.”
There was no sneer or joke in his voice. He sounded genuine, vulnerable. I wondered how often he let his guard down with people, particularly the women he slept with. I wondered how many layers there were to him. How many he would let me uncover.
We repeated this series of events several more times. Me taking him in my mouth, him pushing me down onto him until my nose pressed against his abdomen, and then him letting me go, each time his breathing growing heavier and heavier, his legs shaking more and more.
After the fourth or fifth time—I lost track—he grabbed my arms and pulled me to standing. Then, without hesitating, he grabbed the hem of my shirt and pulled it over my head, discarding it in the corner. He did the same with his own shirt.
I don’t know what came over me, but I reached out and ran my fingers along his torso, letting myself experience the mountains and valleys of him, the shape of his beautiful body. I didn’t know if it was my imagination or not, but his breath seemed to hitch in his chest. Was he nervous? Certainly not. He’d been with too many women to count, I was sure. But still, when his hand reached out to grab mine, when he lifted my hand to his lips and kissed each of my fingers, I couldn’t help but notice that his own fingers were trembling.
I looked at him and tried to see the man behind the mafia member. I tried to imagine how I’d feel about him if I didn’t know all of the horrible things he’d done. If our relationship hadn’t started because of blackmail and under the table deals and sexual favors.
What if we’d met at the bookstore? What if he’d seen me reading the trashy romance novel with my two empty muffin wrappers on the table? What if I’d seen him picking through the science fiction section or reading a classic novel? I tried to picture Zico reading War and Peace and almost laughed.
He leaned in to kiss me, his eyes already closed, but I pulled away from him, placing my hand on his chest to stop him.
“What’s your favorite book?” I asked.
He froze and opened one eye, his eyebrow raised in a question. “Excuse me?”
“Your favorite book,” I repeated. “What is it?”
He laughed softly, the sound purring in his chest. “Slaughterhouse-Five, I guess,” he said, shrugging. “Why are we talking about this?”
Even when I had asked him the question, there was never a single part of me that had anticipated he would answer. And now that he had, I was scared. Slowly but surely, he was revealing himself to me. And despite my efforts to despise him, I couldn’t. There were parts of him that I was attracted to. Parts of him that made me wish I wasn’t a cop and that he wasn’t a mafia member.
He pressed his lips to my neck, and they were warm and soft against my skin. I leaned into him, breathing him in. He smelled like ice cold air before a snowstorm. Like the inside of a snowflake.
I stepped away from him, reached around behind my back, and unhooked my bra. It fell to the floor in a lacy red heap. He watched me, enraptured, as I unbuttoned my jeans and slid them slowly down my legs before stepping out of them. When there was nothing but my red panties left, I turned around, and slowly slithered out of them too, letting them fall around my ankles.
Zico licked his bottom lip, and his eyes never stopped moving, scanning me from top to bottom and back again, devouring me entirely. I took a step towards him, my finger caressing the smooth skin below his chin.
I whispered, my lips moving slowly around each letter, “Fuck me.”
In one swift movement, Zico had me in his arms and was wrapping my legs around his waist. I didn’t know where we were going, but he was carrying me out of the living room and towards the dining room, his mouth moving hot and fast across my breasts, pausing to suck on each of my nipples, causing me to throw my head back and moan.
He sat me on the edge of the table and pushed on my chest until I laid back. I heard him sliding out of his jeans and then a quick crackle of aluminum before he was massaging his hands up my legs, running his fingers over my calve muscles, to my thighs. Then, he hooked his hands under my knees, laid my legs over each of his shoulders, and pushed into me.
Just as I had the first time he’d ever entered me, I gasped, shocked at the size of him. It took several pulses before he was fully inside of me, but once he was, he didn’t hold back. His body slammed into mine over and over until the backs of my legs felt numb. He wrapped his hands around my hips for more traction and pulled me towards him, using the slippery surface of the table to slide me onto him again and again. My body felt rigid, coiled into a tight ball that was only growing tighter and tighter.
Then, he ran his hand down my abdomen until his thumb found my clitoris, and my body blossomed. Every muscle released, adrenaline and endorphins flowing through me, warming me from my head to my toes. I slid my legs from Zico’s shoulders and wrapped them around his waist, hooking my ankles together and pulled him closer to me. He leaned forward and sucked on my breasts, his hips still thrusting into me. He continued this way until my body settled, until the spasms and clenching of my abdomen subsided.
When he pulled out of me, I felt empty, vacant, and I reached out for him, my fingers begging for him to come back. He grabbed my waist and slid me off the table until I was standing. Then, he spun me around and pushed on my spine, forcing me onto the table.
A few moments later, he was pushing into me from behind. I pressed my cheek against the cool wood of the table and let my arms lay lazily over my head as my body shook with every thrust. He groaned, each time getting louder and louder, until finally, he dug his fingers into my hips and held me to him, hard. I felt him finishing inside of me.
When he was done, he left warm kisses down my spine, and then left without saying a word.