Taken (Dark Desires 1)

I tried to sob quietly, so April didn’t hear me.

I’d moved back home, out of the apartment Brent and I had rented less than a month before he was killed. I couldn’t afford to live there on my own.

I was back in the same room April and I shared growing up. April was just eighteen, six years younger than me, and just starting junior college. She needed her space and her sleep, but she welcomed me home with open arms. They all did; April, mom, dad. They tried to make me feel like it was all going to be all right, that one day I’d wake up to find that I hadn’t cried myself to sleep the night before.

“Time heals all wounds,” my mom kept saying as if it was a mantra for driving away the spirit and memory of my dead lover.

That was bullshit.

For me, time makes all wounds grow deeper.

Time makes them fester and grow, like cancer that eats at your heart and soul, until it consumes you, leaving nothing but an empty shell and the desire to simply lay down and die.

April rolled over and sighed. I buried my face in the pillow to stifle my tears. After a moment, I could hear her snoring softly. I found some comfort in the sound of my sister’s breathing. It was so calm, so peaceful. It was the breathing of a girl whose greatest worry in the world was which pair of cute jeans she should wear to the mall on Friday night to make the boys notice her.

I remembered those days.

For me, they were gone for good.

I wiped my eyes on the blanket and forced the tears away.

I used to lie awake nights thinking about my wedding.

Now I lie awake and wonder how many good people are killed every year just because they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I knew of at least one.

And he died before he could see me in my wedding dress.

For some reason, that was the saddest thing of all.

RICK WRIGHT

I pulled the black Lincoln Navigator into a spot in the parking lot in front of Crown Jewelers and slid the gear into park. I parked far enough away so no one would notice us watching the place.

I left the motor running so the cool air would keep pumping out of the vents in the dash. It was the middle of September and hot as fuck in the city.

The black t-shirt I wore clung to my sweaty back like a second skin. My next truck would have those built-in seat coolers like I saw advertised on TV. After this job, I’d go check out the new Navigators. If everything went as planned I’d be able to buy a fucking fleet of them in a couple of weeks.

I was a Lincoln man way before that fuck Matthew McConoughey started doing their commercials. I was still a Lincoln man despite him. Fuck their commercials and Matthew McConoughey. I just loved Lincolns; always had, always will.

Eddie, my little brother, best friend, and second in command, was slumped in the passenger seat with a black baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. I shook my head at him. He didn’t seem to comprehend that the heavily-tinted windows prevented anyone from seeing inside the truck. Even the upper part of the windshield had a heavy tent, obstructing our faces from traffic cams.

Funny, during a job, Eddie was the one I always worried about not being careful enough or flying off the handle and doing something stupid, but when we were casing our next job, like the hit on Crown Jewelers, he was a paranoid bundle of nerves.

> “That’s it,” I said, nodding at the strip of stores in front of us. “Crown Jewelers, next to the Men’s Warehouse.”

“Don’t look like much,” Eddie said, pushing the cap back from his forehead with his thumb. He leaned in toward the windshield and took off the dark sunglasses he was wearing.

“Looks can be deceiving,” I said.

He slid the sunglasses back on his nose and pulled the cap low again. Sitting back, he asked, “So, what’s the setup? What do they have in the way of security?”

“The setup is one small showroom lined with jewelry cases,” I said, describing the place from memory. I’d gone into Crown’s two weeks earlier to buy the vintage Rolex Mariner that was strapped to my left wrist. I loved old Rolex’s about as much as I loved Lincolns. I’d paid cash for the watch, nearly nine-thousand dollars, part of my cut from selling a semi-truck load of stolen cigarettes to a gang of goons from upstate somewhere.

Buying the watch was just part of the reason I was there. The main reason was to case the place to determine if it should be the target of my gang’s next hit.

I rested a hand on the steering wheel and aimed a finger at the storefront. “There is a fat fuck of a security guard who sits right inside the door. He has a pistol in a holster that he’s probably never even fired. He can be taken out before he knows what hit him. When I was there, he had his nose stuck in a newspaper and wasn’t paying too much attention to what was going on around him. There is one door at the back of the showroom that leads to an office, and a room where they do jewelry repair.”