“I was over there for three years.” Unlike Jonathan, I don’t raise my voice. I just stare into the guy’s eyes. “I guess I do know a little something.”
“Well, why the fuck didn’t you actually do something to get it over with?”
My stomach quivers.
“You don’t know shit!” Jonathan is now completely out of his seat and taking a step toward the other table.
“Sit down, Jon.”
He looks at me with fire in his eyes but ultimately complies.
“Yeah, sit down and shut up!” The bearded guy laughs as he drops back down in his seat.
“That dickhead needs to be taught a fucking lesson.” Jonathan picks up his beer bottle and nearly drains it.
“Undoubtedly.”
With everyone seated again, Jonathan and I finish our drinks in silence as he picks at the label on the beer bottle. The basketball game ends, but I don’t look to see who has won.
“Sorry if I made that worse,” Jonathan suddenly says.
“You didn’t,” I tell him with a shake of my head. “I’m good.”
He looks me over and probably knows I’m lying.
“You know I’m always one to take the moral high ground,” Jonathan says with a casual shrug.
That gets a chuckle out of me. I raise an eyebrow at him.
“Since when?”
“I’m a gentle soul at heart,” Jonathan manages to say with a straight face, “but some people just need to be beaten like a harp seal.”
I laugh at the mental image of Jonathan holding a big club and smacking the guy right upside his scraggly beard. I wonder if there’s enough hair to make a fur coat.
“Let it go,” I say. “Drunk morons aren’t worth the trouble. I got the tab.”
I toss a few bills at the bartender and tell him to keep the change. He gives me a little salute off the brim of his baseball cap, and I tense at the gesture. When I get back to the table, Jonathan is back at it with the asshole behind him.
“You don’t know who the fuck yer talkin’ to!” Jonathan yells. “You need to shut that fucking trap of yours before you end up uglier than you already are!”
“Let’s get out of here,” I say. I tap Jonathan on the shoulder to get him moving.
“Fucking punk,” Jonathan says, muttering as we start to head out.
Apparently, the guy doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone. Maybe he’s one of those people who just need to have that last word.
“Hey, GI Joe,” the asshole screams, “you’re a fucking coward! Go crawl back into whatever hole you came from!”
I pause and turn slowly. I feel heat on the back of my neck as if the desert sun had just reached its peak. I can taste sand in my mouth, and I can feel the sting of boots against my ribs.
“What did you say to me?” I respond slowly.
“I said”—the guy repeats his words as he squares his shoulders and moves up closer to me—“that you’re a fucking coward.”
There is no thought to my actions. I ball my hand into a fist and swing. He’s expecting the blow and doesn’t go down. He manages to hit me in the face before I jump forward and slam my forehead into his.
He’s not expecting that.
He goes down, and I’m on top of him. Left, right, left, right. I pound his face as he tries to kick at my sides and shove me off of him. He’s got more weight on him than I do and eventually dislodges me. As he stands, he connects with my mouth, and I taste blood. I regain my footing quickly and take another swing, connecting with his gut and doubling him over.
I can hear Jonathan laughing and cheering behind me.
One of the guy’s friends grabs his arm and pulls him back. He’s bleeding all over his shirt from a broken nose and busted lip. His hands are shaking, and his eyes are wide. I debate continuing the fight but decide he’s had enough of a lesson for one night.
I feel perfectly calm.
“Next time, use some manners,” I tell him.
From the corner of my eye, I see the bar’s bouncers heading in our direction and figure it’s time to slip out the back door. Jonathan is still laughing as we quickly exit.
“You rock,” he says as we step out onto the sidewalk. He grabs a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket and lights up. “I love hanging with you, bro.”
“Always a barrel of laughs.” I reach over and snag one of the smokes for myself.
Jonathan holds the lighter out for me as we walk to the corner of the street and wait for the light to change.
“You needed that, ya know,” Jonathan says.
“Did I?” I rub some blood off my lower lip. There isn’t much, and I barely feel any pain.
“Yep.”
I think about it for a minute. I do feel a lot less tense than I had before I walked into Sweetwater. I replay the encounter in my head.
“You know, it’s actually funny when a Marine lieutenant with a dozen medals is called a coward by a nebbishy tough guy in a sports bar.”
“Nebbishy?” Jonathan raises an eyebrow at me. “Isn’t that Yiddish?”
I shrug.
“I used nebbishy because ‘pussy-waste-of-rations-mattress-stain’ is no longer acceptable.” I grin up at him. “Standards must be maintained.”
Jonathan laughs and we both head down Lake Street. Maybe he’s right. A bar fight was just what I needed. I feel a little lightheaded with elation.
Up ahead of us is a homeless guy reclining against one of those walls put up to block the public from construction areas. I recognize him from the gas station a few weeks back. He’s still wearing the same worn coat and threadbare gloves. The coat isn’t even buttoned up to ward off the cold, and part of his chest is exposed. I see a tattoo on the left side of his chest, up near his shoulder, depicting an American flag and what might be eagle’s wings around it. I can’t see it all, but there’s a bit of green and yellow in the design as well. Taking a closer look at his face, I notice he’s the right age to have been in Vietnam.
“Hey, dude!” I say as I reach down and shake his arm a bit.
He looks up at me with glassy eyes and blinks a few times.
“I ain’t bothering nobody!” he exclaims. “You can’t arrest me!”
“Do I look like a cop?” I ask. I point to my busted lip. “Come on, let’s warm you up.”
“What the fuck are you doin’, Arden?”
I ignore Jonathan and haul the vet up to his feet. He’s got a collection of plastic bags filled with God-knows-what, and he gets them all arranged over his arms before reluctantly coming along with me. There’s a hotel in the next block, and I bring him up to the door.
“He can’t come in here,” the late-night doorman tells me.
“He can if he has a room here,” I say, arguing.
“Well, he doesn’t.”
“He will in a minute.” I stare at the guy in the stupid red uniform until he looks away. “Come on.”
“You’re nuts,” Jonathan says as I grab the bum’s arm and lead him up to the front desk. Jonathan doesn’t follow.
“Give me a decent room,” I tell the woman behind the desk.
She pokes around at her computer for a minute before giving me a price. I tell her to add a room service steak dinner and the breakfast buffet to the tab and then drop a few hundreds down. I lead the bum up to the fourth floor, and he looks around the room with wide eyes when I hand him the key.
“Get warm,” I say to him. “Dinner’s on the way, and there’s a buffet for breakfast. You’re all set for the night.”
He stares at me for a long moment. I can see our connection in his eyes long before he removes his coat and further exposes his tattoo, complete with the POW/MIA logo below the eagle and the flag. Before he can say anything, I turn around and leave. Jonathan is still out front, smoking a cigarette and calling the doorman an asshole. He’s probably regretting not getting more physically involved in the bar fight.
“What the fuck was all that?” Jonathan asks as I start walkin
g down the street again. “Since when did you become a good Samaritan?
I can only shrug.
“Did you know that guy?” he asks.
“No, he just looked cold.” I can’t say anything else. Some things just can’t be explained aloud.
“You’re a fucking nutcase.” Jonathan tosses his cigarette into the gutter. “You know that, right?”
“Yep.”
I felt good.
“With a room like that, the bum is more likely to get laid tonight than I am,” Jonathan says.
“He deserves it more than you do.”
“Yeah, he’s obviously worked real hard for his change today.”
“Fuck off.” I’m not really pissed off at Jonathan or anything. If he had noticed the guy’s tattoo, he wouldn’t be talking shit about him. He ignores my comment anyway.
“I might have to go your route and get me some hired pussy.”
“It does make things simpler.” Images of Alina flash through my mind—long legs, curved ass, and bright blue eyes. I wonder what her hair would look like if it were in two braids.
“Is that your plan now?” Jonathan asks as we get close to my apartment. “You gonna go find you a hooker?”
“Probably.”
“Well, I’m out then,” he announces. “This weekend’s a bust.”
We go our separate ways, and I jump in the Camaro to go looking for Alina and her long legs. Maybe we could stop at the drug store for a few of those hair ties. Then again, I bet her hair would feel good if I were just running my fingers through it.
The more I think about it, the more I like the idea. Save the braiding for later.
Of course, when you have an actual plan in your head, the world likes to work against you. I can’t find Alina anywhere. When I eventually stop and ask another hooker where she is, I’m informed that she has the night off. I’m finally in a good mood and horny, and she takes a vacation day.
Damn my luck.
*****
After more than a year away from Chicago, returning to the routine of work and life in the city has been easy for me. The streets are familiar. The bus schedules haven’t changed much, and I still prefer public transportation to driving in the traffic. Aside from the gang-bangers down south, Rinaldo had only sent me out on two hit jobs. One was out of town and completed with ease. The other was one of the former Seattle guys who thought he’d set up shop in our area. He was mistaken.
At least I haven’t lost my touch.
Though I make plenty of money on a hit, and I’m not a huge spender anyway, Rinaldo has also been paying me to keep involved in more of the day-to-day business. I have a pretty good head for the numbers and organization of legitimate businesses for money laundering, and I’m learning more about the operations of those facilities as well. It makes for long days, but I’m all right with that.
Felisa has appeared more than a couple of times, and each time she does, I feel less at ease about her. I don’t like how close she is to Rinaldo. I’ve followed her a few times. She’s living in the building where I used to live, and Rinaldo has her set up with a bank account and a credit card. At the same time, I don’t think she’s just a gold digger. If she were, I probably wouldn’t care so much.
She’s interfering with Rinaldo and Lele. That I care about.
I try not to think about it. I try to tell myself it’s ultimately none of my business, but it still nags at me. I need to keep my mind off of the whole thing. I need a distraction. That would be good for me because it keeps me out of my own head, and that’s in everyone’s best interest.
What I really need now is to get laid.
I’m tired, no doubt, but I’m not completely exhausted. The last couple of nights have at least allowed for a few hours of sleep. The nightmares have taken a different tone. I keep dreaming that I’m in a firefight in the jungle, which is new. I can only assume the image comes from seeing the homeless vet on the street. The dreams are still horrific, but at least they’re something different.
Since the night of the bar fight, I haven’t been able to locate Alina. No one will give me any information on her whereabouts, and I’m starting to wonder if she didn’t take a month-long cruise in the Bahamas or something. All right, it hasn’t been a month since she was last in my apartment, but it has been three or four days. I still haven’t fucked her. When she had been there before, I had been content to get some sleep rather than do anything else, but I feel different now.
I want her. I don’t just want a hooker; I want that hooker.
She never even questioned the lack of sex, and I definitely appreciate that about her. I’d caught her eyeing me a bit in the morning when I drove her back to her corner, but she never asked anything. She never even brought up the nightmares again. I know she spent the night holding me until I fell back asleep, surrounded by the scent of lavender, but she didn’t make a fuss about it.
I’m grateful for that.
I cruise up and down the usual streets, looking for the one and only hooker I actually want to fuck, but she’s nowhere to be found. I do find Loretta and eventually get her to come over to the car.
“I ain’t goin’ with you.”
“I’m not asking you to,” I say. “Have you seen Alina?”
“She’s my roommate,” Loretta says. “Of course I seen her.”
“Well, where is she?”
“She got picked up a while ago.” Loretta shrugs and looks down the street. “I been busy, so I ain’t been lookin’.”
So much for the vacation.
“Do you know when she’ll be back?”
“Do I look like her keeper?” Loretta puts her hands on her hips. “She’s got normal johns to take care of.”
Why do you even care if it’s her? One is as good as another.
I consider offering Loretta double to come home with me, but it’s not only a lost cause; it’s also rather demeaning. What’s worse than a desperate john?
While I debate with myself, Loretta walks off without another word. I glance up and down the street once more, but the only face I recognize is Ralph’s. He’s loitering around the back of my car, eyeing the Soccer Mom sticker.
I have to get that thing off the bumper.
I drive to the nearby gas station and fill up the tank. While it’s filling, I go around to the back bumper and try to scrape the sticker off. It’s really stuck on there, and all I manage to do is fray the edges a bit.
I buy cigarettes and hang around the door to smoke one. Then I go back inside and get an iced coffee, smoke another cigarette, and finally climb back in the car.
She has to be back by now, right?
The street corner is empty when I drive around the block. Loretta must have found someone she can tolerate. I take a short drive around the neighborhood before coming back again.
Alina’s still not there.
“Fuck her,” I mumble to myself. I shove my foot down on the accelerator and go look for action on another street. It doesn’t take me long to find an available whore. She gets in the car, and as I move into traffic, she starts talking.
“So, I’m Angela,” she says as she tosses frizzy red hair off of her forehead, “and I’m a Sagittarius! You wanna maybe get some dinner? I’m famished!”
“No.”
She looks at me with a giant, fake smile. Her face is thin and gaunt; her eyes can’t seem to focus properly, and I’m fairly sure she’s high.
“What are you thinkin’, then?”
I check around the immediate area and locate an alley. I pull over and yank up the parking break.
“Just blow me.” I unhook my belt and unbutton my jeans.
“Sure!” She’s trying to sound enthusiastic about the whole thing, but she fails.
I stare out the driver’s side window as Angela sucks my cock, trying to focus on the sensation of her lips around me. I close my eyes, lean back in the seat, and try to be in the moment—just feel.
I need to get off, release some tension and ex
perience a moment of pleasure, no matter how brief. If I could come up with some way to relax for a while, I could get through another night or two.
My body is reluctant to cooperate. I’m hard, but I can’t seem to bring about that feeling. Maybe it’s because I know Ralph is standing near the car and looking in on us. Maybe it’s because I know there isn’t anyone there at all.
“Take me deeper.”
Angela complies, licking and sucking my cock as she does. I close my eyes again and concentrate on the warm moisture of her mouth. I hit the back of her throat and feel it constrict around the head of my cock.
“Yeah, that’s it.”
She changes her angle a little, rising up on her knees in the passenger seat. I reach over and squeeze her ass. She’s got a nice bubble butt. I consider getting her up underneath me and fucking her ass instead of just taking the blowjob, but apparently the thought of it is enough to get me going. My thighs contract as I push up into her mouth.
She takes me deep in her throat, and I hold her head while I come. She finishes me off with a long lick around my head and shaft and then sits back in the passenger seat with a disingenuous smile.
I run my tongue over my lips and ride out the aftershocks of the orgasm. At least my body has calmed. I breathe in cool air as I dare to look out into the alley. Ralph is thankfully nowhere to be seen. I button up my jeans, grab my wallet from my back pocket, and toss a couple of bills at Angela.
“Thanks,” I mutter as she opens the door.
“Anytime!” she replies with another fake smile. She walks around the front of the car, out of the alley, and back toward her corner.
I really hope this will be enough to keep me going.
Chapter 7—Untrustworthy Associates
I shouldn’t be here.
Rinaldo and Felisa have been in her apartment for the last two hours. It’s not like I’m out here, staring at the front door, wondering what they are doing—it’s quite clear. I don’t even wonder why it makes me so angry. It is obvious this isn’t a casual fuck for him. If it were, he’d already be done with her, not buying her diamonds.