Electrify Me (The Fireworks Series Book 1) (4 page)

Chapter Six - Charlie

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Something is wrong. Something is very wrong. There is no way Gloria would ditch me and take my truck after what we…shared. What we did. She was volunteering at a suicide crisis hotline, for God’s sake. People like that don’t have sex with strangers and steal their work trucks. What would she want with a Seattle City Light Truck anyway? It’s not like she could sell it.

So something happened that made her drive off. And something happened or is still happening that made her not come back.

Fuck.

I have to shake down three Walgreen’s clerks with my work ID and lie about “an emergency power company issue” before one of them lends me their phone. I think, “I’ll just call her. There will be some hilarious explanation. Like I was about to get a ticket so she pulled out of the parking lot, then she took a wrong turn and ended up on the bridge (we’ve
all
done it). And now she can’t get back without going halfway through town because of road closures and New Year’s parties, and when she gets back, I’ll call work and tell them the truck won’t start and we’ll check into a hotel and I’ll fuck her until we both break down in tears.”

But I don’t have her phone number. We never got that far.

Do I call work and tell them I was planning on having sex with a girl I just met but we didn’t have condoms, so we stopped at Walgreen’s and while I was deciding between ribbed for her pleasure and those ones that make your dick tingle, somehow both the girl and my truck disappeared?

Or do I call the police? 911 is probably swamped tonight. And what do I tell them?

While I’m thinking about it, I have the brilliant idea to just call my own phone, which I left in the truck. Of course!

Except that it doesn’t even ring. Maybe she switched it off. Or…?

There’s nothing else to do. I call Dispatch.

“Dispatch,” a voice says. It’s Levi, who often works holidays because he’s an orthodox Jew and pays no mind to the Gentile calendar. He’s a cool guy, but, you know, pretty conservative. I don’t relish the idea of explaining how I lost a truck trying to get pussy. Maybe I’ll just skip over that part.

“Hey, Levi, it’s Charlie. Bad news. My truck got stolen.”

There’s a pregnant pause. “You’re making me want to say ‘oy vey,’” Levi finally says.

“I’m sorry.”

“You know I hate saying ‘oy vey.’ It’s so stereotypical”

“I get that Levi, I really do. But we have a bigger problem. There was a girl in the truck. Now I’m a bit worried.”

“Why was there a girl in the truck?”

The shelf display of massaging footbaths I’m staring at offers no suggestions as to how to avoid the inevitable.

“Fine. Look. I picked up a girl. All it is on New Year’s is cruising around waiting to go and flick someone’s fuse switch or pull a dead squirrel off a wire. So I was bored and I met this girl and I asked her to ride with me and one thing led to another, because, like, it’s New Year’s. And I was getting condoms, because, you know safety first and she was in the truck waiting and now she and the truck are gone.”

There’s another pause. “Oy vey,” Levi says. “Did this tramp steal your truck?”

“No! No, I don’t think so. I don’t know. And she’s not a tramp. Can you just track the LoJack?”

“Do you think she was car-jacked?”

Until that moment, I hadn’t really thought of it. But now that the idea is in my mind, it becomes so large I think I hear my skull creak from the pressure.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“Just track it down, Levi! I’m sitting here in Walgreen’s on some kid’s phone, and I don’t even have my phone because I left that in the truck too!”

Vaguely I can hear clicking noises on the other end. Levi is logging into the LoJack site. And judging me. I can feel his judgment leaking through the phone like that fog that turns people into zombies.

“She’s on the I5. Heading north. Running the border maybe?”

“The border?! Holy crap, where is she?”

“Just past UW.”

I almost scream in frustration. “Levi! She’s three hours from the border. She hasn’t even left Seattle. You scared the shit out of me!”

“Someone who picks up strange women for sex shouldn’t be so easily scared.”

I hang up on him.

The Walgreen’s kid takes his phone back with a worshipful look on his face, like I’m the biggest player he’s ever set eyes on.

“Do you have pre-paid phones?” I say through my teeth.

Ten interminable minutes later, I leave Walgreen’s with a phone that feels and performs like a brick crossed with an old ham radio. But at least I have a connection to the world. Of sorts.

I dial Dispatch again. Levi answers.

“It’s me,” I say. “Are you still tracking the truck?”

“Yes. And I called it in to the police.” He gives me a report number about thirty digits long, which I memorize because desperation makes brain cells work twice as hard, I guess. I hang up on Levi again and phone 911. When the operator finally answers, it takes me three tries to get the report number right, but eventually I’m connected with someone who seems to know what’s going on.

“Charlie Zhang?” a gruff woman’s voice asks. “Are you the one who called in the grow operation in Ballard?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

“Do you think the disappearance of your vehicle has anything to do with that?”

God.

Oh, my
God
.

I start running. To where, I don’t know. Because, for fuck’s sake, Walgreen’s is about two blocks from that grow house. Two blocks where that tattooed dealer clocked me, Gloria and my truck not two hours ago.

“Mister Zhang?”

“
Do something
!” I yell. People smoking outside a pub stare at me. “My girl is in the truck. You have to find her!”

The woman on the phone becomes marginally more interested. “Kidnapping certainly bumps the priority up. I’m going to send the LoJack signal to cruisers in the area. Try not to worry, Mister Zhang. We’ll find her. Can we reach you at this number?”

“Yeah.”

I hang up. My head is spinning, like I might faint.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid
. All that combat training , that course in the psychology of enemy combatants, the hours spent getting my electrical license add up to nothing against the good old fashioned stupidity of letting yourself be seen by a dirt bag. I lurch sideways and lean on a wall, taking deep breaths before I realize I’m leaning on a bank machine.

“Yo, dude,” someone says. “You getting cash out or what?”

I whip out my wallet and bank card. Then I take out as much cash as I can from both my bank account and my two credit cards. Running into the street, I wave down a taxi and pay the two drunk guys in the back a hundred dollars each to let me have it. The taxi driver looks at me uncertainly.

“I will pay you any amount to get me to I-5 northbound,” I say.

Like a good taxi driver, he doesn’t ask questions, and in seconds we’re heading towards the freeway.

Chapter Seven – Gloria

Bone Hand turns off the freeway just north of the outlet mall. Minutes later, we’re winding along a dark road, blobs of shadow that might be houses blurring past us.

“What’s your name?” Bone Hand says. The first noise he’s made in nearly an hour.

I glance at the clock on the dash. 11:15. Looks like I’ll be ringing in the New Year with a gun pointed at my head. If I live that long.

“Name?”

My mouth is so dry I can barely peel my tongue from my teeth. “Gloria,” I finally manage.

“Gloria what?”

Briefly I consider making something up, but the only things that come into my head are names that obviously don’t fit like Kurosawa and Gandhi, as if my favorite film-maker and a famous pacifist can help me now.

“Falcon,” I say, making a point of pronouncing it the proper Latino way, “Fal-CONE,” even though four generations from my great-grandfather, most of us just go with “falcon,” like the bird.

“Falcone? Mexican?”

“My great-grandfather was Cuban.”

Humanize yourself. Make them connect to you. This was more advice from self-defense. I’m sure somewhere in those college classes that I probably spent the majority of texting my friends, was also a lesson about not sitting in a parked car with the door unlocked and the window open. But I guess that didn’t sink in.

Human connection. I can do that.

“Why? Are
you
Mexican?”

“You think just because I’m a drug dealer, I must be Mexican? That’s racist.”

So far so good. I’ll just shut the fuck up. It seems safer.

“I’m Jewish,” Bone Hand says, after a moment. “I’m a Jewish queer and a drug dealer. How’s that for messing with your preconceived notions?”

The car bumps over a pothole as we turn onto a narrow road. I never had any preconceived notions about Jews, or queers or drug dealers. Now I’m worried I’m going to be terrified of all three, which is awkward because my boss satisfies two of those criteria. And my landlord too, come to think of it, because I’m pretty sure he and his boyfriend sell their excess Vicodin on the side.

Bone Hand taps his pistol on the steering wheel as he drives. Idly, rhythmically, as though he has a song playing in his head. I work up the courage to take a good look at him. Maybe if I get through this night, I’ll need to describe him to a sketch artist. I’m about five minutes into thinking of descriptive words for his eyes (sunken), nose (crooked), and lips (ringed with smoker’s wrinkles) before I remember  I’m actually a trained artist and could easily render a good likeness of him in any number of media, including Manga-style cartoons. Heck, I could illustrate a whole graphic novel of this guy. Now that I’ve taken a good look at him, I’m not likely to ever forget.

He’s not very tall, but heavy-set with dark hair and eyebrows. His clean-shaven face is marred only by what looks like a burn scar on his chin. The tattoos I can see, apart from the bones on his hands, include a skull on his neck and a spider behind his right ear. He’s wearing a bullet pendant on a leather strap around his neck. If he has hair, it’s concealed under a black knitted hat.

In short, he really looks like a criminal. For some reason that makes me think of Charlie’s painfully pretty face, his tall lean body, tousled black hair and cheeky smile. A tear drips down my cheek that I don’t dare wipe away. Fuck the New Year’s gods to hell. I hate them so fucking much right now, I could murder anyone who so much as waves a sparkler in my face.

My chest muscles squeeze on my heart, as I realize Bone Hand is pulling the car into a dark driveway. We bump over gravel for a few seconds before coming to a stop in front of a large, creepy-looking farm house.

He pulls the key out of the ignition and pockets it as he gets out of the truck. “Well?” He bends back into the door to look at me.

I don’t move, staring forward and hugging my arms over my chest to keep from falling apart.

“Come on, sweetheart; don’t make me get all thuggy with you.”

And that’s it. I can’t take it anymore. I start to cry, curling over and sobbing into my chest. I don’t even know how long it goes on before I hear the passenger side door open. A few seconds later, I feel his hand on my shoulder and flinch away.

Bone Hand sighs. “Listen, I’m a deviant. But I’m not that kind of deviant. I just need to go deal with a few things in here, and I can’t leave you right now. But I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you. Okay?”

As I turn and look at him, I’m sure the incredulity on my face must be glowing like a neon sign reading,
Are You Fucking Kidding Me
? “Anything bad?” I gulp back a sob. “You kidnapped me and stole my boyfriend’s truck.”

Bone Hand smiles slowly, revealing one canine tooth jutting out at an odd angle. Another detail filed away for my sketch. “Your boyfriend? I thought you didn’t know him.”

I curl up into a ball with my face pressed onto my knees. Bone Hand grabs my arm and pulls me out before I have time to stand, sending me crashing into the gravel driveway. Pain lances through both knees as I land. When he hauls me to my feet, I see I’ve torn holes in my stockings. Bastard. These are my favorites.

After unlocking about six bolts on the front door, Bone Hand shoves me into a very dark and dusty hallway, bolting the door behind us. As my eyes struggle to adjust to the dark, his hand slams onto my chest again. He presses me against a wall.

“Are you a cop?”

I shake my head.

“Detective? DEA?”

“No! I’m a graphic designer.”

He releases the pressure on my chest. In the shadows, I can just barely see him step to the side and shuffle a few things around on a nearby table. There’s a flash of light and Bone Hand turns back to me, holding a candle in an old-fashioned candle holder, haloed in golden light like some demented Jack-Be-Nimble. He waves the pistol in his other hand. “Walk.”

In the low light, I take careful steps along the long hallway, trying to note details for any police report I may or may not get to make. The house is derelict, I think. Debris is piled up in corners, wallpaper torn, light fittings missing their light bulbs. We pass three warped and peeling doors before Bone Hand instructs me to open the fourth.

I smell that skunky scent of fresh weed again and see the dim blue glow of grow lights leaking under the door as I turn the knob.

God. I’m going to die tonight.

The door leads to a set of stairs. Going down.