“You can’t steal my girlfriend, then come into my house and assault me,” he stammers.
“Can’t really steal something that was mine to begin with, can I?” I muse as I stand, gesturing with my hands like the tipping of a scale. “And if you think a little broken nose is assault,” I blow a long breath through pursed lips, “I got some news for you, friend.”
“It was an accident,” he pleads. “I didn’t mean to hurt her. I just pushed her and—”
“Hmmmm,” I consider, my lips pinched tightly together. “Pushing her kinda means you were trying to hurt her, doesn’t it? So here’s what’s gonna happen – you have two choices. Option one: you delete her number, forget her name, and leave the fucking city. Option two: I call three of my buddies to come spend some time with us. They’re about as big as me, and they have the same tolerance for guys like you as I do. You ever had every bone in your body broken at once, Ethan? Probably hurts worse than a nose.”
He honestly thinks I’m joking - for a second, at least, until he realizes that there is zero fucking humor on my face; that’s when his own goes about four shades paler, and his throat bobs while he swallows hard.
I walk toward him, propping a foot up on the couch next to where he’s seated. I reach for his arm, draping it over my knee while he fights me, struggling to pull his arm out of my vise grip. “You had to go and hurt what’s mine. So I’m gonna have to hurt something of yours. You understand.”
“Get the hell off of me, asshole!”
“Sophia say that when you were doing whatever it was that put that bruise on her?”
I lock my eyes onto his as I push down hard at his wrist, throwing my weight behind it until I hear his arm break with a loud crack, making him scream when the bone splits clean in the middle. It’s not the worst break in the world, but clean enough that his skin splits open at the site, letting a fragment of bone pierce through it. A small pool of crimsonrises to the surface of the split flesh and the back of my jaw tingles.
“What the hell is wrong with you?!”
I stare down at him while he cradles his wobbly, L-shaped arm, weeping over it like Colt’s baby when she’s overdue for a nap; I mean, actualtearsare falling down the guy’s face.
Thisis the guy she was seeing? Really?
The girl I met in Mexico would have laughed at this guy, not dated him.
“A lot of things, probably,” I shrug. “Now listen, you’re not gonna bleed out, but you ought to get that set before it gets infected.”
“Just get the fuck out, man! I’ll leave! Fuck!” He shrieks at me.
I ruffle my fingers in his hair before brushing off my jeans and taking a few steps toward the door. Something nags at me, that sting in the back of my jaw, and I cock my head in thought, pursing my lips together.
“Nah...this isn’t right,” I think out loud, shaking my head as I walk back toward him. “I can’t just leave you here like this, with a broken arm, all upset. No, what Iought todo is—”
In one swift motion, I reach behind me, pulling my handgun from the band of my jeans and level it against his temple, squeezing the trigger with even pressure until the telltale pop of a bullet’s discharge fills the room, a thick silence following as the smell of a spent round fills the air.
As I draw the weapon back, I flick the safety back on and slip the gun’s barrel back into its resting place at the back of my jeans. Ethan’s body slumps forward, a steady stream of blood spilling from the hole left in his head and dripping onto the floor beneath him to gather in a small pool of slick, sticky crimson.
I give his leg a couple of taps with my booted foot, checking for any sign of life, but the leg collapses in on itself,his foot sliding across the growing pool of blood on the ground. Maneuvering my way around his body, I bend down and take a look at the other side of his head. No exit wound.
“Ah, shit,” I sigh, grabbing his hair and wiggling his head around. “Your little pea brain is just scrambled eggs sitting inside that fucking head, now, huh?”
I pull my phone from my back pocket and pull up Colt’s number, hoping to fuck that the old fart has his ringer on as I press CALL.
“This is Colt,” he answers, his voice groggy and thick with sleep.
“Hey, old bastard, got time for a quick favor?”
I hear my best friend pull in a breath, letting out a heavy sigh, and I just know that he’s got his hand scrubbing down his face, like he always does when he thinks I’ve done something stupid and gotten myself into trouble. “County?”
“No, I need you to pick someone up for me.”
“It’s one o’clock in the morning, Davis, I am not about to pick someone up for you to have—”
“I made amess,” I cut him off, “and I’ve gotta get it cleaned up. So can youpuh-leeeasegrab the person who is waiting for me and take her to my apartment, old man?”
There’s a long silence on the line, and for a second, I think the call might have been dropped. I pull the phone away from my face to see the timer still ticking up to count the seconds that we’ve been on the line. A few too many seconds more pass until I finally hear the jingling of keys on the other end of the call.
“Alright, where am I going and who am I getting?”
