“Hell, no! I said I was done with her. What more do you want?”
I yank Ray by his shirt and start making my way toward my truck. The girl behind us watches with rapt attention as I toss his bloody ass in my back seat. Great, now I’m going to have to get the car detailed.
“I’m sending you a bill for my seat cleaning,” I tell him as I start the car. I throw back a small box of tissues so he can stop dripping blood on my backseat.
“I’m going to kill her for this,” I hear him mutter under his breath, and I can’t believe my ears.
I pull out my Glock 19 that I keep underneath my car seat for self protection and point it directly at Ray’s ugly face.
“What the fuck did you just say?”
“I wasn’t serious!” Ray raises his hands up in surrender. “I was just talking.”
I notice Ruby opening her front door and quickly decide that pulling a gun on someone on a residential block may not be a good thing to do if the cops are indeed on their way.
Both she and her wife watch us closely as they check on the mess we’ve left on the front lawn. Ray trampled their tulips. I crushed a few of their solar lights and the political sign they had posted is halfway into the street. My guess is that Karma will be beside herself with guilt if anything at her friend’s house was damaged tonight, so I’ll be sure to send Ruby some cash to cover the loss.
I place my gun discreetly back under the driver’s seat and then pull away.
“You’re a psycho,” Ray whines from the back seat. “What is someone like you doing with my girl?”
I pluck a cigarette out of the center console and use an old Bic lighter to light it up. After a few drags of the smoke and driving for a moment, I’m finally calm enough to answer him.
“She’s not yours, Ray, and don’t ever threaten her again. I’m not sure if you’re talking out your ass or if you’re serious, but to me it sounds like a threat and I don’t take kindly to threats.”
There’s a scowl on Ray’s face, but he doesn’t talk back, so I continue. “What’s going to happen now is that I’m dropping you at the next corner and how you get home is your business. If anyone tells me you’ve been back to that house, I’m going to come find you and finish what I started. Don’t look for Karma, don’t call her, don’t even think about her.”
After a long silence, Ray responds to my warning. “I don’t know who the hell you are, but Karma would never mess with some tatted up gangster like you. She’s got standards. What are you, some kind of drug dealer? Do you have kids selling meth for you at school recess?”
I’ve got to hand it to Ray. He probably can’t see for shit, is bloody embarrassed, and he’s still talking shit. He’s either got more balls than I gave him credit for or he must have a death wish.
“What a lazy assumption to make about a person, Ray.”
“A guy like you doesn’t have a car like this unless he’s doing some street shit.”
“A guy like me, huh? You see my ink and my wheels and conclude that I must be doing something illegal?” I sneer. Little does he know that I could buy and sell him a hundred times over and it would be a perfectly legal transaction every single time.
“Well, you certainly aren’t a businessman,” he says, flinching in pain. “I know a drug dealer when I see one.”
“And what are you, besides a man bleeding to death in my car?”
“I’m everything that Karma needs in life… normal.”
I drive for a few moments and consider what Ray just said. There’s nothing normal about me. It never mattered much to me before what people think of me and where my money comes from (even when I was a kid), but I wonder what Karma thinks? Has she made the same sort of assumptions that Ray has about me? Do I even give a shit?
I shouldn’t.
But maybe…
The disgusting sound of Ray blowing his bloody nose in the back of my car snaps me back to reality. Obviously, I shouldn’t give a rat’s ass what either of them thinks of me. One is a woman beater, and the other is the sister of the man who butchered me.
Ray catches me staring at him in the rearview mirror and postures. “You have something else to say, drug dealer? You’ve already ruined my face.”
“Yes, if you say one more fucking word, I’m going to pull over this drug dealer car and shove those two buck teeth of yours straight down your throat.”
I keep my eyes trained on him as he considers whether his next breath is going to be a painful one.
“Well?” I throw one of my hands up for emphasis as I challenge him to say one more thing, because I’m just itching for an excuse to pulverize this beady-eyed bastard for another few minutes. He’s got a lot of mouth, but nothing to back it up with. “What’s it going to be, Ray?”
