4. Hannah Flagg
FOUR
HANNAH FLAGG
Wake up, wake up, it’s time to go to work! Wake up, wake up, it’s time to go to work! WAKE UP, WAKE UP, IT’S TIME TO GO TO WORK! WAKE UP, WAKE UP, IT’S ? —
I slammed my hand down on the fucking screen of my phone and flung the annoying thing across the room in my half-asleep stupor. With a groan, I yanked the covers back over my head and closed my eyes, praying I’d hit fucking cancel and not just snooze.
Ten minutes later, as I drifted half-asleep, about to float back off to dreamland, it started back up. I rolled out of bed, hands and knees on the floor, and crawled over to where my poor, abused phone lay, the screen cracked in places from so much use.
Thank god for screen protectors.
My fingers fumbled and managed to turn off the alarm; the urge to go back to bed and tell the world to fuck off so strong, I practically passed out right there on the floor. This life I’d chosen for myself was more grueling and taxing and demanding than I’d ever imagined it would be, but I wouldn’t change a thing.
The wild differences between this and my past life kept me safe and kept the wolves at bay.
My morning was routine, and before I felt like I’d blinked properly, I was already heading to work, messenger bag slung over my shoulder, knife in hand, ponytail swinging behind me like a metronome.
Some say that there’s two different cities. Two Port Wyldes. That the daytime one is worlds apart from the one after nightfall. I think that people just hide it better in the light.
At night, the real criminals were emboldened. They wandered the streets, doing just about whatever they wanted. Killing. Raping. Looting. Hell, just last week, there’d been a headline of some business mogul being tied to the back of a couple of dirtbikes and dragged through the street. Apparently, it came out that he was also a kiddy diddler in his off hours, so good riddance to that piece of trash. Personally, I thought the criminals who acted under the cover of anonymity, hiding from the whole of society, denying their misdeeds, were the worst of the worst. If you’re going to do evil, at least have the balls to own up to it.
Cowards, the lot of them.
The sun was up early today, already beating down on the same pavement my shoes clapped noisily along as I turned off the street filled with dilapidated buildings and abandoned apartments, and onto Crowe St, where the businesses might still be shit, but at least weren’t boarded up.
I was honestly surprised by how many people brought their nice ass cars to Big John’s in this neighborhood to get fixed. Then again, good work was so hard to find these days. It was probably saving John an arm and a leg in wages to post up and work in a seedier, desperate neighborhood where many people had to choose between rent or dinner several times a month.
I wasn’t usually the first to work, so it didn’t surprise me to see some cars already in the lot. What did surprise me was the one I didn’t recognize in front of bay one, still running.
That Torino wasn’t on our schedule.
John was a piece of shit, but there were some things he could be counted on for. One of them was an almost rigid adherence to the schedule. If you weren’t on the calendar, didn’t have an appointment, you didn’t get serviced. And I knew all the cars we were scheduled to work on for the week.
A 1970 Ford Torino sat there, painted in that insanely dark Vanta Black shit, making it look more like a void and less like an actual car. It would not surprise me if this thing disappeared at night. I couldn’t imagine driving in front of floating headlights.
Tony and fucking John were standing outside, ogling the fucking thing like two boys who’d just seen their first pair of tits. Leave it up to them to appreciate a car more than their women .
"Oy, John!" I waited for him to look in my direction, but it was like he couldn’t hear me. "John!"
Nothing.
Figured.
I marched past the sexy as fuck muscle car and wandered into the office, giving a nod to our receptionist on the way to the lockers. Ten seconds later, I’d zipped into my jumper, tossed my bag in the locker, spun the dials on my lock, and marched out to start the day. Hell, all I was missing was a pair of gloves, and a half-greased up towel dangling from my back pocket, and I’d be every movie’s stereotypical mechanic.
"Good morning, Hannah," Annie, our lovely receptionist chimed. "You wanna look at the book today, or did you memorize the schedule again?"
I chuckled and fake-punched her shoulder playfully. "You know me too well." I took the fresh towel she held out and tucked it in an unused belt loop, then meandered into bay three, my home away from home.
Throughout the day, I watched my typical clients come and go, working through my scheduled jobs in half the time I planned for. The blacked-out Torino had conveniently disappeared when the bay doors rolled up, and I hadn’t given it a second thought other than to wonder how much money they had in the paint job alone.
When the last client for the day had picked up their car, I rolled my bay door closed and wiped the sweat from my brow with my now near-black towel, which only served to smear grease and oil across my forehead.
Great. Now I was dirtier than when I’d started.
I could not win for losing here.
I gave up on looking halfway decent on my walk home and trudged slowly into the locker room, slipping off my jumper carefully so I didn’t get the filth of the day on my clothes beneath it.
Tony eyeballed me while I stripped, like the fucking perv he was. Dude just couldn’t take a hint. Tongue hanging half out of his mouth like some comical cartoon dog, he licked his lips, sucked on his teeth, and shot me a raised-brow look of contempt.
"So, you sure you don’t wanna go with us tonight, Flagg?"
The last time he barked up this tree, I kicked him in the nads. He either had short-term memory loss or a really thick skull. An intelligent man wouldn’t have tried that again.
Tony wasn’t an intelligent man.
I rolled my eyes, then counted to five before I turned to face him, hoping against the odds that he managed not to say something that shot me over the line. I didn’t want to do anything I would regret later. Some things you couldn’t take back. This might be Port Wylde, but murdering a coworker wasn’t on my to-do list today.
"I’m sure; thanks, Tony." I groaned as I moved to grab the empty bottle of mechanic’s soap on the shelf above the sink. "Oh, come on, who the fuck forgot to change out the bottle?"
Ron snickered in the corner. "Think we’re out, but you know it wasn’t me."
John shrugged as he tugged his boots off and slipped into sweats and joggers. "I’ll order more. Just use the backup soap under the sink."
I yanked the cabinet door open and chucked yet another empty bottle at his head. "You’ve gotta be fucking with me. There’s no soap here! What am I supposed to do with all this grease?"
Tony wheezed in my ear. "I’ll give you something you can use that slick hand for."
I didn’t think. Didn’t even realize I had moved. All I knew was, one minute I was standing there with Tony the Two-Faced Lizardbrain over my shoulder, and the next, I had spun around and now had his blood on my fist. The same blood that was streaming from his nose.
A very broken nose.
Oh. Whoops.
"Sorry, Tony," I muttered dismissively, "my hand slipped. Must be all this grease."
John grunted, the closest sound to a laugh he ever made. Ronnie busted up laughing, not even trying to stifle his reaction. Tony, however, turned as red as the blood pouring from his nose and launched himself at me, rage-fueled snarls escaping him.
Unfortunately for him, I was adept at getting out of the way in time.
His head made a lovely cracking sound as it bounced off the fucking metal bench, and John gave me a look I knew well as he hoisted Tony up by the back of his collar and dragged him out of the employee locker room. We’d be talking about this later. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon. And though I wasn’t at fault, I was gonna have to pay for this, one way or another. If I wasn’t outright punished, I’d have to pick up some of Tony’s jobs. He’d milk this ‘workplace injury’ for all the sympathy and time off he could.
And John had little sympathy to begin with.
Ronnie slid over to my bench as I attempted to wipe as much grease as I could onto my already dirty jumper instead, failing miserably. "You see that tricked-out Torino this morning?"
I rolled my eyes. Ronnie was, at his core, just another man. Granted, he was an older and wiser one, but cars were his passion, and that thing was probably as old as he was. "Yeah, I saw her. She was a beauty, huh?"
He sighed and looked at the ceiling. "Original rims, BF Goodrich drag race tires, beautiful upholstery, leather seats, blacked-out windows, and Vanta Black paint. Easily the nicest restoration I’ve seen in a long ass time. "
"I thought you were a GTO guy, Ron," I teased, turning to rummage through my locker in the hopes I found something to help me out. I squealed with excitement when I found a half-empty bottle of hand sanitizer hidden behind my shoes. "Fucking jackpot!"
The alcohol-based fluid cut through the grime and finally, finally, I could slip into my white running shoes. I should have worn my old shoes, but they were still soaked from the fucking puddle I’d tripped right into on my way home yesterday.
Ron and I walked out to his car together, the stragglers, as usual. He offered me a small smile, patting my hand in that condescending way I usually let slide. "Are you sure you don’t want to join us tonight, Hannah?"
I shook my head, fighting the urge to sigh. "Not this time, Ron. Maybe if I find myself too lonely to bear it, I’ll wander over."
"I’ll keep a barstool warm for you."
I watched his taillights disappear into the evening fog, darkness making it appear more ominous than it was. I hadn’t let the fog and dark scare me before. I wasn’t about to let it get to me this time, either.
I tightly gripped the strap on my messenger bag and started for the end of the parking lot until my eyes caught on a dark shape at the end of the alley that shouldn’t have been there.
My heart dropped into my stomach, and I felt a sheen of sweat break out on my forehead.
That fucking Torino.
The damn thing had no business being here at nightfall. Yet there it was, idling, a small cloud of exhaust fumes erupting from the tailpipe as I looked into its all-black surface, wishing I could see behind the fucking window tint.
I clenched my bag tighter, pulled my knife out, and counted to three slowly as I turned around and headed in the wrong direction .
Maybe they’re here for someone else. Maybe they’ll just stay there, and I’ll be on my way.
All lies I told myself until I couldn’t ignore the sound of the engine revving as the headlights bathed me in a bright glow of pale blue-white light.
Fuck.
Fuck.
I didn’t think. I couldn’t, considering my brain was in panic mode, and every fight or flight instinct was on high alert. I didn’t even bother hiding that I knew they were after me. My feet flew, and I was off, heading down the neighboring street, praying that I didn’t end up in one of the dead-end alleys around here.
Running for my life with a knife in my hand wasn’t a smart decision, but there wasn’t time to weigh out the pros and cons, really. My life was on the line, and I had one chance to get away from these assholes before they caught up to me and ended my life.
I’d been hiding for seven years. The past year or two, I thought I’d finally been able to relax. I’d let my guard down, and now I was paying for it. My lungs burned as I gasped for air, sprinting down another alleyway into a mess of overflowing dumpsters and empty boxes that littered the street. Just when I thought I was safe, I turned the corner and ran headlong into a solid brick wall.
No escape. Dead end.
Shit.
There was a nearby fire escape that I couldn’t reach on foot, but if I climbed onto the dumpster nearby, I could make the jump and get away. But there wasn’t time. I’d heard the sound of footsteps following me for the last three turns now. They were right behind me, whoever they were. In a last-ditch effort to protect myself, my brain latched onto the idea of hiding in the pile of boxes, but I knew there was no point.
I had just enough time to make a single decision .
I wasn’t going down without a fight.
Swinging the blade up and in front of my face, I crouched slightly in a fighting stance and waited for my pursuers to catch up to me.
They’d better come prepared, because I wasn’t going to be an easy target.