Days Gone By Chapter 8—Mister Bad Decisions
Novel Excerpt by Abram Dress
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Click here to read Prologue—The Bloody Wake
Devin Cole’s Story
Norfolk, Virginia
August 4th, 2018
“Look, Mister Nickels, I need the cash.”
I was wringing my hands. It felt pathetic, so I stopped.
I still felt pathetic.
A bad decision sat across the table from me. The bad decision was wearing a shiny, expensive white suit with a silk undershirt. The ensemble probably cost more than my parents’ house. It conflicted with the dirty, mostly empty bar, in which we sat.
This was a few months before all the bad things really started, but it was the decision that led to all those bad things.
Just one bad decision.
“Everybody needs cash. If you understand the terms, agree to the terms, the money’s yours. I don’t care what you do with it. You're a big boy. I'm sure you'll use it wisely.”
“I understand, and I’m good for it. Just got to get on my feet.”
Sammy Nickels nodded and slid the paper bag across the table.
“It’s all here. You’re welcome to count it if you wish.”
Of course I wanted to count it, but that’s not how you did business with Sammy Nickels.
“No, sir. I trust you.”
“Of course you do.” He grinned, flashing two gold-plated incisors. “The first payment is due next month. I'd appreciate it if you don’t force me to be aggressive in the collection process.”
“Of course not. I’m good for it.”
The money was gone by the end of the week—lawyers, doctors, mortgage. When the next month came and I couldn’t pay, he was very understanding.
“All I ask is a small favor and I’ll let you off this time.”
“Sure, Mister Nickels, whatever you need. Thanks for being understanding.”
The incisors flashed again. “My pleasure, Devin. Don’t fail me.”
“Of course not, Mister Nickels. I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Almost every week, the conversation was the same. I couldn’t pay. Sammy had a little task to pay him off for the week.
I’m not an idiot. I knew I wasn’t doing the Lord’s work. That paper bag I dropped off in the dark alley wasn’t full of life-saving medicine. That briefcase I transported from one shadowy hand to the next wasn’t filled with children’s literature.
But it paid the bills.
That led to the rainy Monday night at the college. That’s when it all really began.
Monday night found Lisa and me sitting in our respective favorite spots in the living room watching our favorite show. I leaned back in the worn leather recliner that Dad had spent too much money on so many years ago, before Lisa was even born. When I was little, I would sit in that chair, my feet sticking out parallel to the floor, while Mom and Dad cuddled on the couch on which Lisa now sat.
Lisa let loose a snorting laugh at some line from the show, and I couldn’t help but grin. Even after a rough day at the construction site, everything was good. That laugh was a pleasant break from the pre-teen moodiness. I gave up a lot to take care of her when Dad died. The carefree life of a young college student, a promising mechanical engineering internship, a way out of the dead-end life that killed our dad too early.
Two years, and she’d grown from a shy kid into a fun and frustrating pre-teen. My transition from detached big brother to de facto parent hadn’t gone off seamlessly, but we were still a family, and that was something. Even when the bills were piling up, it felt worth it.
Most of the time.
My phone rang. The caller ID told me it was a blocked identification, but I had an idea who it was. I got up and answered as I was walking from the room. Too late to hide the conversation from my sister, though.
Lisa started looking worried about the time I said “Look, I can’t pay that right now,” and she was already looking up the phone number for a babysitter by the time I said, “Sure, I’ll do it. This’ll pay off the debt for this week, right? … Yeah, I’ll help with the pick-up.” I hung up the phone.
“Just be gone for a bit while I take care of some business.” I pulled on my jacket and looked out at the rain with a sinking heart. “I need to go to the college, help some guy out.”
“The college?” Lisa raised her eyebrows. For a moment, her face captured the look of humor that Mom used to have when she was playfully taunting Dad. A face Lisa had never met. “Classy this time. Babysitter?”
“Nah, you’re old enough to take care of yourself.” Regardless of how old she was, we couldn’t afford one. I didn’t say that, but she knew. “Just call the Ortegas if you need anything. But only if you really need something. We’re not damn charity cases.”
“Swear jar.”
“We’re not doggone charity cases.”
“Too late.”
She watched me as I rummaged a quarter from my pocket and tossed it in the very full jar on the kitchen counter labeled FUCKING SWEAR JAR. She smiled and turned back to the television.
“Cool. What time will you be home?”
“Don’t know.”
A few minutes later, I rushed out into a torrential summer downpour and climbed into the back seat of the black Escalade parked in front of our house.
Three guys in the vehicle. The driver was Fast Eddie, one of Sammy’s thugs, small but muscular. And mean. I didn’t recognize the other two, a buff guy with buzz-cut blonde hair over a forehead that screamed Aryan Nation. Some huge dude, fighter’s muscles hiding under middle-age fat, looking like a mafioso, sat in the back seat.
“We got shit to do, ese. Get in,” Fast Eddie said. “Don’t know why the hell we even need to have your worthless ass along.”
I slid in across from the mafioso and Eddie hit the gas before I’d closed the door.
The mafioso glanced over at me. “I’m Armani.” His voice was like a Fargo wood chipper, all rasp and hints of violence. “The muscular Mormon up there’s Lucas. I guess you know Eddie.”
“I’m Devin. Just here to back you up while you do this pick up. I’m just along as muscle.”
The expression that crossed the big man’s face didn’t indicate approval. He looked me up and down. I clear six feet, but I’ve never been beefy. Two years of construction had put on some lean muscle, and a lot of calluses, but one look at my face and someone like Armani–someone who would look down at me from several inches, and probably clocked in at close to three benjamins–would feel extremely at ease. I didn’t look like a threat.
He humphed. “Well, I’ll count on you to keep the bad guys under control.”
“I’m pretty sure we are the bad guys.”
“Bad motherfuckers, maybe.”
“Hey Eddie,” I said. “What’s the gig?”
“The gig is shut the fuck up until we get where we’re going. Then, the gig is listen and do what you’re told.”
Armani rubbed at the muscles on his huge neck. “Eddie’s a shit team player. We’re going to go pick something up at some college archeology building.”
“Pick something up?”
“Nobody’s gonna be there. Place is shut down for construction or something.”
“Who’s going to let us in?”
Lucas laughed. “Dumb fuck.”
“It’s a little B&E, Devin.”
I didn’t like the casual way Armani said it. What kind of shit was I getting into?
Fuck.
Breaking and entering was way more illegal than any of the other jobs Sammy had me do.
Fuck, fuck, fuck...
“You shits are giving me a headache,” Eddie said. “Shut it.”
Torrents of rain and idiot drivers made the drive to the college miserable and dangerous. William and Mary’s Archeological building was away from the main campus and surrounded by lightly wooded public land. The lights were out in the building and the front doors had yellow construction tape criss-crossing them. We cruised slowly through the parking lot, barely able to make out details due to the dumping rain. Several vehicles parked near the blocked off entrance.
I didn’t like that.
Something you learn quickly when you work for a crime boss is that witnesses are not a good thing. Hand-offs, pick-ups, drop-offs, all those things are best done near as few eyeballs as possible. Each of the half dozen cars in front of the archeological building belonged to someone with eyeballs. At least, that was a reasonable assumption. I couldn’t afford to go to jail. Lisa would end up in the foster system.
“Damn it,” Eddie whispered.
Our Escalade drove slowly past the cars, as we all peered through the rain to see if anyone was inside. Nope. They were empty. So presumably inside the building. The Escalade coasted past the cars at the front entrance, and around to the back of the building. No lights. Wait, there was something. Iridescent light shone out through a single sub-basement window near the back of the building.
Eyes.
Eddie parked the Escalade in the unlit reaches of the parking lot.
“Fuck this shit. Let’s get this over with.”
He climbed out into the pouring rain. The rest of us followed.
“But there are people in there,” I said. “The place was supposed to be empty, right?”
“Yeah, Ese. It was supposed to be empty. But it’s not. Hope you came prepared.”
He pulled a mask from beneath his sweatshirt and rolled it down over his face. Armani and Lucas followed suit, covering their faces to prepare for the illegal activities.
“I didn’t know we were doing this,” I protested. “I can’t be doing this shit.”
Armani growled, “You’re here to back us up, so start backing.”
“I don’t have a mask.”
“Then you best hope no witnesses are left alive to see you.”
Armani and the crew rushed through the rain to an emergency exit on the back of the building that was propped open with a brick. I followed, cussing under my breath as I pulled my soaking hoodie over my head as low as it would go.
The building’s dark shadows gave me some comfort as we crept through the halls. Eddie hadn’t explained where we were going, and I hadn’t asked. He held his barbed-wire bat in one hand and occasionally glanced down at the phone in his other hand. I glimpsed a blueprint image, so at least we weren’t lost.
Shortly, we arrived at a stairway leading down into the museum’s basement. Lucas and Eddie led the way in and down the stairs as Armani held the door, waving with an after you gesture. I paused next to him and let Eddie and Lucas get ahead of us.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone here, big guy. What the hell are we looking for?”
Armani leaned back against the open door and sighed. “If someone needs hurting, you had best get to hurting them. But we can probably avoid it. We just gotta get this scrawl and get out of here.”
“A scrawl?”
“Yeah, like a rolled up toilet paper thing with words on it.”
“A scroll.”
“That’s what I fucking said.”
“What about the people in here? We’re heading down to the basement, and there are lights on down there.”
“What about them?”
“What if they’re, like, guarding the… scrawl?”
“It’s like I said. If someone needs hurting, you had best get to hurting them.”
He turned from me and moved down the stairs, more quick and agile than I’d expect with a frame like that. I followed, wondering what scroll was worth this kind of risk, and especially, the possibility of hurting people.
Eddie glared at us as we caught up, but said nothing. He flicked off his flashlight and the rest of us did the same. A long hallway led to another stairway going up, with an EXIT sign glowing green above it. Plastic signs attached to the numerous doors along the hallway told us they were for storage, facilities, boilers, whatever. The only door that interested me was the one that was cracked open, with light and voices streaming from it. The sign next to it said “STORAGE”. Eddie looked down at his phone, back at the door, then pointed at it.
“That’s where we’re going.”
My heart sank. I couldn’t make out what was being said in that room, but it was at least a few different voices.
So many eyes.
Eddie crept up to the door and sneakily peered in, then stepped away. “Let’s find another way. Looks like there’s some connecting rooms.”
We snuck around to a nearby door and slid into the adjacent storage room. From there, we entered the brightly lit room from the back. There was plenty to conceal our motion. Boxes, crates, and shelves covered with archeological detritus from countless digs covered the walls and turned the central space into a haphazard labyrinth. We crept through the maze toward the source of the light and sound.
An area in the middle was clear, and eight people stood in a circle in the middle. One of them, an older man in jeans and a colorful sweatshirt, gazed down at a roll of ancient-looking paper that rested open on a podium. The other seven people were younger, college age. Their expressions varied from fascinated to bored. A young woman with blonde hair, a form-fitting business suit, and a make-up job that was done by an expert asked her question.
“How much extra credit is this going to be, exactly?”
The older man sighed. “A full letter grade, Miss Michaels. If I’m able to get through the whole reading with no more interruptions.”
The woman rolled her eyes and stared at her nails. She stood equidistant from the students to either side. Her designer pumps stood on an X made from duct tape. The other students also stood on X’s, which formed a perfectly equidistant circle around the older man’s podium.
“May I?” the professor asked.
Mumbles of assent from the students.
“Very well.” He ran a finger down the scroll, rested it on a promising spot, and began reading.
I had taken Spanish in high school. I was arrogantly confident after my first semester, the misguided certainty that only a book-smart fifteen-year-old can muster. When our neighbors, the Ortegas, invited me over for dinner one night, I told them they could just speak Spanish all they wanted. I spent the rest of the meal with no idea what anyone was saying.
Whatever the professor was reading wasn’t Spanish. It was English. But I couldn’t comprehend the words any better than fifteen-year-old me had processed the words flying across the Ortega’s dinner table. I knew the words, but somehow couldn’t put them together.
Armani staggered back into me, holding his head.
“What the fuck is that guy saying? I can’t…”
The big man fell back on his ass, hard, shaking his head like he couldn’t focus. Eddie was squeezing his baseball bat hard, one hand safely on the handle but the other wrapped around the barbed end. Blood dripped down his arm onto the linoleum floor. Lucas swayed back and forth, like a stoned Phish concertgoer.
Waves of confusion washed through my brain, but I focused. I stared at the professor. Focused on what he was saying. If I could just grasp a single word, perhaps I could ground myself.
“Sacrifice.”
He kept saying that word. There were many other words around it, but he kept coming back to that one. Every time he said it, a student winced, or bent over in nausea, or whimpered.
The professor meandered his way through the other words, and when he returned to sacrifice, he said it like a gunshot. A handsome young man, dressed like he would never have to worry about student loans, grunted and collapsed face first onto the tile floor. His jaw made a cracking noise and blood leaked from his mouth.
Lucas stepped forward into the light, then walked towards the fallen student.
The professor glanced up and a look of concern crossed his face. But he didn’t stop reading. More word salad, then a gunshot sacrifice and another student dropped.
A young woman in a floral pattern dress and fluffy leather boots shook her head, as though she had broken free from whatever trance the professor’s words held over her. She stepped back off the duct-tape X and looked around.
“Stop it!” she yelled. “What are you doing?”
The professor’s words continued, and when he reached the gunshot sacrifice this time, he looked directly at the floral print woman. She flew backward as though she’d been punched in the chest by a comic book villain. She slammed against a pile of crates.
As she struggled to get up, a wall of darkness, like a dense fog bank, gathered around her head. It solidified for a couple seconds, then flew at the professor.
When the fog connected, the professor fell backward, tripped, and collapsed to the floor. He lay on the ground, shaking his head. He clung desperately to the scroll, cradling it to his chest like a newborn.
With his words stopped, the students and my companions came back to reality. Shaking heads, grumbles of confusion.
And a furious Eddie.
“You motherfucker!” he screamed, charging into the circle of confused students and leaping over the podium. He yanked at the scroll, coming away with one torn half. Eddie kicked the man in the gut. “Fuck you!”
The young woman in the business suit charged at Eddie.
“Leave him alone!”
She pulled Eddie away from the professor. Why was she helping him? Hadn’t he just tried to kill her?
The professor crab-walked backwards, holding the other half of the scroll.
Eddie’s furious eyes snapped to the young woman and he walloped her in the face with the butt of the bat. She stumbled backward. Eddie took another menacing step towards her, this time with the business end of the bat raised.
I imagine there was some kind of decision-making process that happened in my head, but I wasn’t really aware of it. Basically, a mean guy beating up a girl? Gotta stop him. I leapt towards Eddie, grabbing him. He was strong, stronger than me, and twisted out of my grip. He spun to face me.
The barbed wire bat hit me on the side of the head and I went down.
When I opened my eyes, I was in a hospital bed. Intense pain throbbed across my temples. My vision swam as I tried to focus on the scruffy figure sitting in my hospital room.
“Glad to see you’re finally awake.” The voice sounded familiar. Broken glass bottles being shoved into a wood chipper.
“Glad to be awake.”
I got my eyes focused on the man. Armani Determan. I don’t think he’d changed clothes since I last saw him.
“What day is it?”
“Friday.”
Friday. It was Monday when I went to the museum. Was it four days… I tried to do the math and couldn’t figure out what the number of days would be if it was the next week, or the next month. Every thought in my head seemed to flit out of grasp, like minnows you try to catch with your hands in a murky pond.
“Am I dead? I’m not dead. You’re not dead, are you?”
The big man stared at me for a moment, mouth open as though he wanted to answer a question but couldn’t figure out what I’d even asked.
“Yeah, you took a hell of a hit to the head, kid. Wasn’t even sure you’d make it the first week.”
“The first week? How long…” I struggled to get my misbehaving brain to do some simple computations. More than a week since the fight? “Where’s Lisa?”
“Ah, yeah. You got blasted in the head… erm…” He glanced down at his fingers, ticking off numbers. “You got hit almost three weeks ago, so that’s something like… twenty days or something.”
Twenty days? Lisa!
I sat up. A web of wires and tubes trapped me. My head did a triple lutz off a high board into a shallow sand pit filled with broken glass. I collapsed back into the bed and tried to focus my vision through the tunnels of light and darkness that were competing for my focus.
“That college girl said you’d probably be worried about your sister when you woke up. Told me to tell you that some neighbor was looking after her and she’s alright.”
None of the words he said meant anything to me.
“College girl? Neighbor? Do you mean the Ortegas?”
“Ortega, that sounds right. Yeah, the college chick, one of them that was in the archeology place. You asked her for help while she was trying to stop your bleeding. I guess she checked on your sister. She’s been in here to see you a few times. I’d fuck her.” Armani paused. Furrowed his brow. “The college chick, I mean, not your sister.”
“I don’t remember any of that.”
“Yeah, motherfucker, you’re probably not going to be remembering stuff so great for a while.” He tapped his head. “I don’t know how you’re alive.”
He was right. I was already forgetting how to stay awake.
“Why are you here? Are we friends now?”
“Naw, you and me gotta help Sammy get his merchandise back. You probably noticed that the pick-up didn't go exactly as planned.”
“Yeah, I can help. Totally. I’m good.”
I passed out.
CONTINUE READING Chapter 9—Signed, Sealed, Delivered
Copyright 2024 Abram Dress
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