Enforcer (30 page)

“None of your business is where. Now get out so I can get to it.”

“Please, Connor. Please. Don’t leave me here for seven hours. I’ll do anything you ask.”

“I’m asking you to get the fuck out of the car,” he said, flicking the automatic locks twice to let her know her door was unlocked. When she didn’t move, he gave her a hard look. “Give me one reason why you don’t want to stay here until I come back for you at nine.”

“I don’t want to get hurt today.”

“What does that mean? Do you owe them money or something? I can’t protect you from that kind of shit, that’s all on you.”

“I don’t want to fuck them!” she screamed at him. “I don’t want to fuck any of the girls when they make us do it so they can watch.”

Connor watched her for a bit. She’d relapsed back to tears, her head turned away. He wondered if she was playing a game with him again. Jera hadn’t been playing a game the night he had talked the client out of hurting her, from even touching her. She definitely hadn’t been playing when he’d picked her up at the Gas-Mart.

“Go get your shit,” he said. “Bring whatever you need for your appointment at ten, and if you have one after that as well. I’ll wait five minutes then I’m leaving. I’m not screwing around.”

Jera didn’t answer. She threw open the door and ran toward the entrance. The block guards had to know she didn’t have any appointments, and if they decided she would be staying until her next one, Connor wouldn’t help her. He was beginning to know what Petre might be feeling like when dealing with him. There was being nice, being a friend, something he was still far from when it came to Jera, and then there was covering your own ass.

It took her eight minutes to return, but he knew he would have waited if she had needed fifteen to get her things. She tried to hide a smile when she jumped into the back seat with a backpack. Connor glared at her in the rearview mirror before pulling out of the complex. He had no idea what to do with her. He definitely wasn’t interested in having her tag along while he hung out with Dana for a few hours.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Wherever you are going,” she answered.

“I told you, that isn’t happening. You can’t go with me, and I can’t have you waiting in the car. I’m going to be a while.”

“Why not? Wait. Are you going to see a girl? A girlfriend? A real one, not a prostitute?”

“I told you, none of your business. Where do you want to go?”

She crossed her arms, Connor bracing for an eruption of hatred and insults. “Take me to your apartment. I’ve been there before, and I can hang out there. You still have a TV right?”

“What? No way. And yes I still have a television. I would like to remain having a television, thank you very much.”

“Oh, so now I’m a thief?”

“You’re a junkie. And a whore. Sorry, but you don’t make good life choices.”

“So I’m a thief.” It wasn’t a question.

“No,” Connor sighed, “you probably aren’t a thief. But you’re a dopehead. I don’t want that shit in my apartment. I don’t want
you
in my apartment.”

“You can’t just drop me off somewhere for six hours! Please, Connor. You can go fuck your girlfriend and I’ll chill at your place. I won’t steal your television either, not even to buy dope.”

He looked in the mirror at her. She was once again trying to hide a grin from him. There was something about her that was kryptonite to him. She made a tiny soft spot in him when everything else was rigid, hard, immune to her.

“Goddammit,” he growled, moving the big car into a left-hand turn lane to go back toward his place. “Don’t steal my fucking television, and don’t drink all of my beer. And don’t fuck any guys on my bed. Not in my apartment either. No dope. No parties. No bullshit.”

“Okay,
Dad
,” she pouted. “Sheesh.”

*****

He looked over at Dana. They both lay in a tangle of limbs and sheets, their breathing receding into slow, steady rhythms. The first hour had been a bright flare of need followed by a long, slow discovery of each other’s bodies. His right thigh still twitched every few seconds, an odd artifact of the scar tissue somehow being affected by sexual release.

Dana felt it twitch again, giggling at the feeling of his leg spasming between both of hers. She frowned when he reached over to grab his phone, looking at the time.

“Relax, we still have a few hours,” she said, slapping at his arm to make him put it down.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Are you sure everything is okay? That was great, and I can still feel your leg quivering, but you don’t seem yourself.”

“I’m all right,” he said. “Just thinking about a lot of stuff.”

“What kind of
stuff
?” she asked, exaggerating the last word.

“What do you want to do with your life?” he asked.

“That’s the kind of stuff you think about?”

“No, that’s a question,” he said. “What do you want to do with your life?”

“Like, do I want to get married and have babies and grow old with someone?”

“No,” he said, frustrated. “What do you want to do with your life? What is it that drives you onward? If you could do anything, what would you want to do?”

“Oh,” she paused for a bit. “I want to be on a design team at one of the big IC firms, one of the teams doing relevant work. Designing the next generation of chips, maybe even work on artificial intelligence if we ever get that far in my lifetime.”

“IC?” he asked.

“Integrated circuit. Microchip. Processor.” He nodded his head in understanding. “A place like Intel or IBM. A place where I am respected because I’m good at what I do, not because I have nice tits.”

He reached over and gave one of them a teenage fondle. “They are nice.”

Dana slapped his hand away, but her smile betrayed the anger she tried to fake. “I’m serious. There’s not a lot of us in engineering and tech. I don’t mind the whole having babies and getting married thing, but I want to
be
somebody. I love being a nerd, I love solving problems, and I’m good at both of those things.”

He kissed her on the forehead and wrapped her in his arms. He loved her independence, her inability to accept that she couldn’t succeed at any task she put her mind to, her drive do something meaningful with her life. It put his own life in perspective.

“What’s the matter? Too deep for you?” she asked.

“No, I was just thinking of how awesome you are that you have your life on the same path as your goals.”

“Maybe not all of them,” she said. “Most of them so far, yes. What about you? Since you are being Mr. Philosopher.”

“My goals are stupid,” he complained.

“Sure they are,” she joked, “just like mine are. Who wants to admit being a nerd and wanting to make computer chips? That’s even too nerdy for nerds. Regular nerds just want to play video games about dragons and watch science fiction marathons.”

Connor laughed at the way she used her hands to accentuate her words, furiously mashing controller buttons while playing a video game, mimicking male masturbation and drooling when talking about sci-fi shows.

“Okay, fine. It’s stupid, but I just want to play hockey. That’s what I want to do. I keep lying to myself, telling myself if I play harder, practice more, I can get back to the big time, or at least close enough to it that it means something more than what I’m doing right now.”

“Why do you think you are lying to yourself?” she asked.

“Because I
know
I will never be good enough again. I’m twenty-six. Every year the leg feels worse, wears out faster, not to mention my fists and my face. I never had to fight until I came back from rehab and found out that I skated like I had dead animals strapped to the bottom of my feet. I wanted to play so badly that I learned how to fight so I could be useful, feel like I was still important.”

“Fighting is the only thing teams want you for now?”

“There’s that, and the fact of who I am. Most people, especially Americans, have already forgotten who I am, if they ever heard my name in the first place. Hockey fans remember, and if there’s at least a few hockey fans in a city that has a team, those hockey fans will go on the internet and get the full story if they don’t know it already and spread it to their friends, to anyone who might be interested in seeing a hockey game.

“It draws the fans, because who doesn’t like to see a has-been every night in case he shows some of the brilliance he once had? Then one day they’ll see me on something like ESPN where they go find out what used-up athletes with compelling or tragic stories attached to them are doing.

“If it happens to me, I want to be one of those guys still playing the sport they love. Everyone watching will shake their heads and make sad condolences to what I’ve become, talk about how great I could have been, maybe even talk about how they felt when the accident happened if they’re a real hockey fan. Or Canadian.

“I don’t care if they think I’m just holding on to glory that I never achieved. I don’t care that I might seem like a sad, old man who can’t give up the dream. I grew up being the best. I was the best for a short window. I’ve never won anything since then. I’ve been on teams that have been close, but just like this season, we always end up breaking everyone’s hearts, including our own.”

“You don’t believe that you are cursed, do you?” Dana asked, curling up tighter against him, trying to keep her eyes dry.

“I don’t know,” he said, and let out a long breath. “Look at what I’m doing now. I’m barely playing hockey. I’m doing crazy shit that not only could get me kicked out of hockey forever, but could land me in jail.”

“You aren’t cursed,” she told him. “In a bind, yes, but cursed, I don’t believe that. You might not have been able to win, but everywhere you go, people are drawn to you, right?”

“Yeah, but that’s only because I’m some guy on a hockey team that they are paying money to see compete, a guy who gets paid to play a sport for a living.”

“But that’s a good thing,” she said. “People are drawn to you because you play hockey, but they like you because you sign autographs, you teach their children how to skate during the summers, you smile and you’re nice to them because you are happy someone is paying attention to you, appreciating you for the skill you’ve worked a lifetime at to get where you are.

“People need to be needed. They need to feel wanted, useful. You’ve had that all of your life, being the center of attention I’m sure, and you deserved it. Then something happened and you lost it all, but you didn’t lose the part of it that was inside you. The part that knows you were the best of your peers, that you were maybe destined for greatness at the top level of the game. You play because you not only want to validate that you are still the best, but because you get validation from fans who cheer for you, who tell you that you are their favorite player.

“You aren’t necessarily asking for validation, but there’s a part of all of us that can’t get enough of it. Hockey is the only thing you’ve had as your goal from the time you realized you were good at it and it was fun. It’s okay to not want to let that go. If you are happy and getting something out of earning a paycheck for skating around and punching guys, then you are doing what you love. Isn’t that what it takes to make you happy? To do what you love to do, what you’re good at?”

“I thought you were majoring in engineering,” Connor said to her. “This sounds like some American college psychology theory to me.”

She grunted and tried to get away from him, her struggles useless. Both were laughing, and soon they were breathing heavily, hands clutched together, taking everything the other had to give. Just before he climaxed, he told her he loved her. She grabbed him by the back of his head and pulled it to her, keeping her mouth busy so she wouldn’t have to say it back to him.

CHAPTER 25

Jera hadn’t stolen his television, and he didn’t detect the odor of sex or burning meth in the apartment. He couldn’t even get a hint of cigarette smoke, something that Jera seemed to leave lightly wherever she lingered for a period of time. He’d taken her around to finish her appointments, barely thinking about her.

His mind was on Dana, and the unsolvable equation of how to break free of Ojacarcu and take her with him. Or he’d follow her wherever she went. She had her goals and dreams, and he wouldn’t be happy if she wasn’t happy. Connor didn’t want to be the type of partner who made her move around the country as he played for a different team every season or two. Teams he would likely play for were far from the Bay Area for the most part.

There wasn’t an IBM plant or Intel fabrication facility in the Midwest or along the Gulf Coast. The big tech companies might have a satellite office in a place like Tupelo, Mississippi, or Muskogee, Oklahoma, but she’d never be anywhere near a design team in those locations, not even working remotely.
Besides
, he thought,
there are plenty of hockey options in the Bay Area, at the very least beer leagues.
He envisioned opening hockey camps in the area, using his name to help draw customers in and get the word-of-mouth spread when they found out that a leg injury didn’t mean he’d forgotten what it took to get to the top.