From the City to Simmons

"Not huge, is it?" Chris asked.

"No, but it's more than what you made at the office last year," Carrie replied.

"But there'd be two of us working full-time and you part-time. Is that enough money for us to live on?" Tina asked.

"It would be more than that, actually. This number represents the income that Roger ended up with. If we go back to being hypothetical, we could pretend that this would be what Chris would make. Then, if we go back through the payroll, we could pick this girl and say that would roughly be what you would make. If we add those two together, that would be my best guess as to what our total income would be," Carrie explained. "It's about the same for the past few years."

"That's quite a bit better, right?" Tina asked.

"Yeah, not bad."

"How much do you think Roger skims? Not that I would want to do that, but would it be a lot?" Chris asked.

"I doubt it from what those two were hedging around. There's only so much book-cooking that Roger could do before it would become ridiculous. I would definitely recommend that we not fuck around like that. Roger was lucky."

"So what is it that makes you so scared, then?" Tina wondered.

Carrie sighed. "It's a change that's going to affect the rest of all of our lives. If you guys aren't at least a little scared, then there's something wrong with your heads. I already said that I think we should go for it. Are you guys in or what? As Harold keeps reminding us, those two aren't getting any younger."

*****

After a bit more research, Jorge was able to figure out where Tina and Chris lived. He didn't expect them back right away, didn't know when they were coming back either, but he took the opportunity to have a look around the apartment. He didn't find a stash of drugs, or cash, or anything else to indicate that they had been living extravagantly. It could mean that they weren't involved, it could mean that they were just being careful.

His instincts had told him that the girl had nothing to do with whatever went down, but he was operating under a specific set of instructions now. There was no more time to waste on this affair, his talents were soon going to be needed elsewhere. He was going to wait for a few days for Tina. If she came back, then he was going to find out for certain what she knew. If she didn't, then lucky her, she would be able to enjoy the bliss of marriage for however long something like that lasted. He wasn't going to traipse across the country looking for her, it wasn't worth it.

The home inspection yielded some interesting bits of information. He found that there were at least three people living in the apartment, and it appeared as though they all stayed in the same bedroom. At least one of them was concerned enough with their safety to keep a loaded handgun under the bed. He disabled that, no need to have bullets flying, especially at him. Another thing that he found odd was the pile of what he assumed to be wedding presents in the living area. They must have been in one heck of a hurry to get on their honeymoon, didn't have enough time to open any of them. From the state that they had left the place, though, he still figured that there was an above average chance that they had planned on returning.

Jorge did not like the fact that there was now three people that he would likely have to deal with here instead of two, nor did he like the fact that he was running out of time to do what he had to do. He didn't care if they were innocent or not, his job was just to find out. There was no problem with the torturing or killing, it was just that the job grew more difficult to perform cleanly and quickly when you starting adding more and more subjects into the equation. It was all that much more likely that something could go wrong, there could be an escape, authorities could be contacted, things along those lines. Jorge wasn't scared, nor ready to throw in the towel, it was just all the more variables that he would have to deal with. That's why he got paid the big bucks.

It was nearing dark on the last day that Jorge had allotted for his fact-finding mission that he observed the three exit a taxi in front of the building. He watched them lug their bags through the entrance and decided to give them a few minutes to get into their apartment and relax before he set to action. Let them go into recovery mode from their trip, gain the advantage of surprise and their lack of energy.

He had a fresh batch of flowers in his hand, the third one of its kind, and was about to leave his vehicle when the husband came out of the doors and went into the parking lot. He jumped in an old sedan and took off. That could possibly make things a little easier, he decided. No need to change his plan now, besides there wasn't time.

He went inside and climbed the stairs, landing a series of heavy knocks on the door.

Carrie looked through the peephole to see an older, well-dressed fellow holding an armful of roses. Something about the guy seemed off. He looked more like an executive than a delivery boy. The fear that someone might still be looking for Tina suddenly sprang to the front of her mind.

"A little late for flowers, isn't it?" she asked through the door.

"Yes, it is. We tried earlier, but there was no answer, so I thought I would try again on my way home," came the reply.

"You don't look like a delivery boy."

"I'm not, I'm the owner of the shop, Madam. It would just be a shame to have these go to waste. They are never the same after the first day."

"Who are they for? What does the card say?" Carrie asked.

This bitch was seriously starting to get on his nerves. He didn't want to spend more time standing out in the hall than he absolutely had to. She was definitely spooked about something.

"Uh, one moment." He didn't actually have a card, but he maneuvered the flowers so that it looked as though he was reading one. "They are for a Tina. It just says best of luck, and it is signed from the restaurant. This is where she lives, yes?"

"I think you have the wrong apartment. Goodnight." Carrie just wanted to get rid of the guy. There was something about him that was creeping her out.

Tina was sitting at the kitchen table and heard most of what was being said. She was puzzled at Carrie's reaction, but could read the concern on her face. Something was wrong.

Jorge would have agreed with her. Something was wrong. He knew that he had the very right apartment. He also knew that the woman on the other side of the door was suspicious as hell of him, why, he could not be certain. One thing that he was fairly certain of, no one acted that paranoid without having something to hide. He had to act fast, this would be his last chance. He dropped the flowers and threw his shoulder into the door.

"Get in the bedroom and call the police!" Carrie shouted.

Tina immediately did what she was told, with the other woman right behind her. Carrie slammed the door to the bedroom and flipped several locks into place. She dove under the bed to retrieve her gun while Tina dialed her cell phone.

Jorge slammed into the door again and again. Damn that paranoid woman and the thousand locks on her door. He should have probably done something about them when he was inside the apartment, but he had taken it for granted that he would somehow be able to charm his way past them. That's what he got for being cocky; a sore shoulder. It took far too long to get inside without having someone at least call the police. He figured that he had maybe four or five minutes at the most to get what he needed. He went straight to the bedroom, having heard Carrie's plan. Of course there were more fucking locks on that door.

"You tell me about the cocaine and I leave you alone!" he shouted, slamming his weight against the door. "Tina, you a smart girl, you let me know. Your gun, that don't work no more, mine does. You tell me and you get to live. You don't and I'll find out my way. My way hurts, Tina. You and your husband and your paranoid friend with the scar on her face. She going to have a scar on her whole body." Again, he threw himself against the door. It gave a little.

Carrie raised her weapon and pulled the trigger, aiming at the door. Nothing happened. The rotten fucker was telling the truth, he had done something to the gun. "The police are on the way, motherfucker!" she screamed.

"I don't have your drugs! I think Bobby got them, I don't know! I never saw the shit, didn't have anything to do with it!" Tina wailed.

"I know you went to Ohio, not Miami. You think you can hide in Ohio? I'll find you. I'll find where you go!" Jorge shouted. He was being reduced to using intimidation rather than a truly hands-on approach. He was running out of time, and the fucking door was rugged. He was just hoping that by some chance that the girl would tell him something useful before he was forced to retreat.

"I don't know anything!" Tina sobbed. She was still on the line with the 911 operator. Some robotic-voiced woman was telling her that she should remain calm and that help was on the way. Hard to stay calm when one more hit and the door frame was about to come out of the wall.

"He gets in here, I'm gonna attack him and get him out of the doorway. You run!" Carrie told her. All of her training had come down to this, a fight for her life.

There was a grunt, a slam, and the door came crashing down off its hinges. Tina screamed, Carrie steadied herself. Then nothing. Nothing happened for a brief moment that seemed to be frozen in time, then Jorge collapsed on top the fallen door, blood spraying in a macabre fountain from his head and neck. Chris stood in the doorway with half of a broken bottle in his hand. With a savagery of his own, he followed Jorge to the floor and plunged the jagged end of the bottle into the man's throat, twisting the broken shards through cartilage and flesh. He stood and turned to see the two girls staring at him in shock.

"Tina, Carrie! Oh my god! Did he get to you? Are you okay?" he asked frantically. They seemed to be stunned.

"We're okay," Carrie managed to reply.

Tina rushed over to him and threw her arms around him, sobbing with terror and relief at the same time.

*****

"So, you were on your way back from the liquor store when you saw your door broken down and heard the shouting," Detective Lopes repeated.

"Right, we wanted to have a little drink to celebrate the purchase offer that we had just signed but didn't really feel like going out. We had just got back from our flight from Ohio. We don't normally do much drinking, so we didn't have anything at the apartment. I decided to go down to the store around the corner and get a bottle of champagne. I was only gone maybe fifteen minutes. The guy was almost into the bedroom, he just busted the door down. I still had the bottle in my hand, he never saw me coming," Chris told the detective. It was the second time that he had been through the story. He was tired of being treated like a murder suspect. He wanted to be alone with his girls.

"Almost took his head off," Lopes commented. "Then you stabbed him in the throat for good measure." The detective sighed.

"You're god damn right I stabbed him in the throat!" Chris shouted, slamming his hands down on the desk in front of him. "What did you want me to do? Ask him to have a seat and wait for the cops to come? Those were my girls in there! I'd kill the motherfucker again if he were here right now!"

"Hey, hey, relax. I'm on your side here," Lopes tried to assure him, holding his hands palm-out in front of him. "You did what you had to do. I would have taken the guy out, too, if I had been there in your shoes. Do you think I have any sympathy for a scumbag like that taking his last breath? I don't. I'm not gonna lie, though. I kind of wished that you hadn't killed him."

"Why not?"

"Information. This guy is involved in a filing cabinet's worth of open cases. He'd eventually get the needle, I'm pretty sure, but it would have been nice to hear what he had to say."

"You think he'd really confess to anything?" Chris asked.

"Who knows? Probably not. Sometimes you get lucky, though."

"Are we gonna have to worry constantly about another guy like this coming after us, or what?"

Detective Lopes smiled. An unsettling look. Chris wondered what it took to make the man happy, it surely didn't seem natural.

"I have a little information in that regard. Not likely that you'll have to worry much about that. We know who your attacker's employer was. They're soon going to have a little more on their plate to worry about than a little of their product that went missing a few months ago. Drug cartels aren't the only ones that have operations going on. That's about all I can say about that for right now, but I'm sure that if you keep an eye on the paper for the next couple of days that you'll find out all you need to know. I'll stay in touch, and you all have my number if you need me."

After a painfully long night at the police station, the three were able to leave and check into a hotel during the early hours of the next morning. All mood of celebration had long since vanished. Chris was shaken to his core. He had just killed a man with a broken bottle. Tina and Carrie had just come within a hair's breadth of having their own lives cut short in addition to having seen the man that they love kill someone. It hadn't been a night that they would soon forget.

"You guys saved my life again," Tina stated flatly.

"I didn't do anything. Chris saved both of us," Carrie replied, hugging the younger girl fiercely.

"Carrie didn't let the guy in. Tina, you called the cops. They were right behind me. You saved yourselves," Chris told them both.

"He broke the door down. He had a gun. He would have shot Carrie and he would have got me," Tina stuttered between tears.

Chris didn't know what to say to that. He stepped over to the girls and took them both into his arms. Somehow, they had all lived through a nightmare.

They did little for the next couple of days than remain as close to each other as they possibly could. None of the three felt a burning desire to return to the apartment, even after the police had told them that they could, so they stayed in the hotel room. They made plenty of love, slowly and quietly, more for comfort than anything else.

It was on the third day of their self-imposed exile from the rest of the world that they had seen on the news what Detective Lopes had been referring to during his last chat with Chris. They also ordered a newspaper from the front desk to confirm in print what they were seeing on the television.

There had been a massive, state-wide, drug bust that had taken place. It would seem as though it was years in the making and several dozen arrests were carried out in the process including what appeared to be many top-ranking members of the criminal enterprise.

"That had to be what Lopes was talking about, right?" Chris asked the girls.

"Fuckin' A. I'm calling him," Tina announced, bouncing up from the bed. She grabbed her phone from the top of the dresser and punched his contact. It was a brief conversation, but one that brought a smile to her face. "Those were the guys. The one that they sent after me worked for them. Now they're all fucked!"

She wasn't quite joyous, but she surely was relieved. Carrie and Chris were, too. They weren't prepared to let their guards down by any stretch of the imagination, that probably wasn't ever going to happen. But, as Detective Lopes had said, the people that were after information from Tina surely had more pressing matters at hand than trying to track down some girl like her. It made the possibility of an assassin around every corner seem much less likely.

They never did return to the apartment again to stay, though they certainly spent a lot of time there packing during the next week or so. They were able to leave their jobs on more or less amicable terms with their former employers, especially when it was made known the drama that the three of them had just went through. Chris had no problem leaving his job at the office, it took him all of about ten minutes to clean out his cubicle and say goodbye to the friends he had there. He thought of Whitmore's and the people there more fondly, but he had no desire to stay there, either. He and Tina were moving on to learn a new menu.

*****

It was a long, lonely drive out to Simmons, Ohio. Long because of the distance. Lonely because they were in three separate vehicles. Tina and Carrie were driving the cars, Chris was in charge of the large Ryder truck that they had rented to move the bulk of their possessions. They were able to chat amongst themselves by way of their cell phones, but the trip still proved to be tedious and boring. It was a relief when their caravan pulled into what was then, still Roger's driveway.

Roger emerged from the house to greet them. The weather was still quite chilly, but the majority of the snow that had been on the ground the last time that they were there had melted. Chris hopped from the truck and stretched his legs.

"Nice to see you made it," Roger said. "I was worried that you might get cold feet."

"Naw. I think my ass might be asleep after driving for two days, but my feet are fine," Chris assured him.

"Good, good. How about you ladies?" Roger asked, turning to the girls who had walked over next to Chris after parking.

"About the same, I guess," Tina said.

"I'm sure not about to turn around and drive back right away," Carrie agreed.

"Good, good. The old homestead's a better lookin' place with you two on it, that's for sure. Harold's inside, complaining about getting older, no doubt. All he's really good for these days. Are we ready?" he asked them.

"Sure," Chris replied, as they walked toward the front door. "You get all your stuff out okay?"

"Yeah, yeah. Knew some boys in town that could use a few bucks to help me move the heavies. Sent everythin' I wanted to keep off to Colorado. Had a heck of an auction. Gave away a lot. You don't know what you got 'til you start goin' through stuff you've been savin' for fifty years."

"Hope you didn't get rid of anything you wanted to keep," Tina said.

"Aw, hell. Stuff is just stuff. Most of what I did keep probably wasn't worth keepin'. Some of the furniture and things like that that's left in the house we talked about is yours. Unless you find a bag of gold coins layin' around, then that's mine and you can mail it to Denver."

"You lose a bag of gold coins?" Chris asked.

"No, but if you find one, then I did."

"Oh. Heh. You got the number for those guys that helped you with the heavy stuff? I wouldn't mind some help with some of the stuff in the truck. The girls are nice, but they're more for lookin' at than real work."

The words had no sooner left his mouth when a rather forceful smack was delivered to the back of his head from his sister. Tina shot him a sinister look as Roger held the door open for them to enter.

"There's a lot of other buildings for you to sleep in here other than the house," she reminded him.

"Lots of space," Roger agreed. "Perfect for when you get into little spats. Before you do, though, Harold's got all the papers in the kitchen. Let's get them signed and then you can fight all you want."

The house seemed much larger than they remembered it, walking through to the kitchen. That was probably due to the absence of Roger's belongings. Carrie voiced what they all were thinking.

"The place really looks huge now that it's empty."

"Yeah, kind of sad for me really, to see it like this," Roger said. "I'm sure you folks will fill it up nice, though. Lots of room for little ones, if you're interested in that sort of thing."

Harold was sitting at the kitchen table, one of the pieces of furniture that they were getting with the house. It was a massive thing, made of thick chunks of oak, and must have weighed close to a ton. Wouldn't have been any fun to move, in other words. He lifted his head at their arrival and looked as though he was about to speak.