Young Love Murder (65 page)

Authors: April Brookshire

BOOK: Young Love Murder

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Watching her fiddle with the radio, I wonder what my life would have been like had she never come into it. No, I don’t even want to think about it. Even with all the money in the world, it would have been dull. The type of woman I would have ended up with would have been dull. I’m not psychic, but I can see our future, and I like it.

Jackson

The room is dark, matching my thoughts. Boredom, apathy, dissatisfaction. Feelings I’ve grown all too familiar with. Another job just completed tonight and now I’m lying in the dark in this hotel room, with another naked woman next to me. Unforgettable and eventually nameless like all the rest. The feeling that there’s something I’m missing, something I need to find, is nagging me again. If only I knew what that something is. Barely twenty-three years old is too young to be having a mid-life crisis. Is there such a thing as a mid-twenties crisis?

The job I completed tonight was another drug dealer. Drugs make my world go round, considering all the business I get by killing its producers. Hell, I watched the woman lying next to me tonight snort a line before we fucked. The restless feeling is returning again with a vengeance. Like I need to open up the window and scream out into the cold Amsterdam night. Disgusted with myself and my life, I slide off the bed and start fumbling in the dark for my clothes.

When my phone rings, the woman stirs, and I think about how I better be gone before she wakes. That hopeful look on their faces the next morning always annoys me. As if I’m supposed to realize that they’re the one I’ve been waiting for. Guilt is another feeling I try to avoid with all the rest. I hate when they look to me like I’m the answer to their messed up lives. I’ve got my own life to worry about.

And I will never be stupid enough to fall in love. Just look at the hell my sister went through. The fact that she and Gabriel were able to work things out is a fluke of fate. They put each other through hell before finding happiness. I can’t ever see myself loving someone the way they do each other. The obsessiveness of it almost seems unhealthy.

“I’m here,” I answer before it goes to voicemail.

Simon gets right to the point, “Jackson, I have another job for you . . . .”