Blood to Dust

“Help! What help?! Nate! Come back here right now! You can’t do this! Stan will kill me if he sees me like this. How could I explain it to him?”

I pause, and look back at her like I’m actually contemplating the question. She’s trying to wriggle free. “That’s a very good question. And not my fucking problem.”

“You low-life!” She swings from side to side. “You’re nothing but a stupid servant with swim trunks,” she spits.

“Yeah, well,” I grab a ludicrous amount of cash and shove it into the back of my pants, “the fact that you’re tied up to a fucking tie rack less than four minutes after you walked in on me in your bedroom doesn’t put you up for the smartest person in the world award, either. Have fun explaining this to your husband, Mrs. H.”

I jog back across the street with my mask on, my body heavy with all the cash I have tucked into shit knows where. Do I have dollar bills between my ass cheeks? Damn right I do. The stolen car is waiting for me, engine revved up and Pea sitting behind the wheel with her shades sitting on the tip of her nose. She’s glaring at what used to be her house, but snaps her attention back to me when I slide into the passenger seat and order, “Get the fuck out of here, fast.”

We bolt through the neighborhood, every mile we put between the car and the Hathaway house relieving a bit more of my panic. When we cross the gates, she zigzags out of the rich area of Danville, out of the town, out of the region, moving north toward Sacramento. Good call. We need to fly low until this evening.

“Your zipper,” she states, glancing briefly to my jeans as she maneuvers the vehicle. Gotta hand it to her—she’s a class act behind the wheel. Drives like Diabla and looks much more comfortable in the tiny, confined space of a sports car than I am. “You’re unzipped. Please enlighten me as to why your cock came out to say hello at Mrs. Hathaway’s house.”

I keep a straight face and casually roll my zipper up, before I start plucking out stacks and stacks of the one hundred dollars bills I need to count.

Where I expect her to be ecstatic, she remains silent. “Did you do anything with her?” Her voice shakes.

I place all the bills on my thighs and start counting. “This dick only salutes to you, Baby-Cakes. Didn’t even touch her. Actually, that’d be a lie. I did tie her up to a tie rack.”

She sniffs, making a U-turn in the middle of a town I don’t know. We’re just cruising along, getting farther away from our crime scene. I ease back into my seat and count silently, my eyes bulging out as I keep adding more digits to the number.

Six thousand. . .eight thousand. . .no wonder it felt so fucking heavy on my body. How much money does Stan Hathaway keep in his safe?

“Has she touched you?” I hear Prescott ask from the seat next to me. I still mumble the numbers as I answer, “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so or you know so?” she presses. My head shoots up.

“Problem, Cockburn?”

She chews on her inner cheek, tapping on the steering wheel fast with her fingers.

“I hate not knowing what happened in there.” She hitches one shoulder up, looking fucking adorable doing so. I have a few more stacks of bills to count, but I’m already at fourteen thousand dollars.

“I got to the safe, she walked in on me, so I had to act fast. I stripped down to my boxers and waited for her. Pretended to seduce her. Didn’t touch her. I tied her up to a rack, grabbed the money and went back to the girl of my dreams, who was waiting in the car, feeding herself useless fears. Got it?”

She finally relaxes, taking a deep breath. She’s acting like a cute, jealous girlfriend. An unsolicited desire for her to be all those things stabs at my gut.

I want to treat her like a girlfriend. Wish I could take her to a restaurant nearby, or even a drive-thru, but it’s too risky to get out of the car or even make a brief stop at a junk food chain. Especially now, when not only is Godfrey on our heels, but also, more than likely, the police. By now, they’ve probably figured out I broke my parole, stole from my previous employer and might have even tied me to the Sebastian Goddard murder case. It’s all about the timing, and a lot of shit’s gone down since I went MIA.

As if on cue, we pass by a digital billboard, and when I see my face looking back at me from the panel, I choke on the very air I breathe.