6. Knox
KNOX
SIX DAYS PRIOR
Fuck my life.
What was supposed to be the most coordinated seventy seconds on God’s green earth has spiraled into the biggest clusterfuck known to mankind.
There’s no way in hell the police could have responded that quickly to the store’s alarm system.
And if it wasn’t for Paul Blart here wanting to play Dirty Harry, we would have already been out the door and down the block before the police could even get to the shop.
Now, his brain matter is splattered across the dashboard in front of me.
It’s the first thing I see when I come to.
I’m so fucking out of it that it takes a minute to realize the vehicle is turned on its side.
The ringing in my ears is worse than any case of tinnitus I’ve ever had, but it’s still not enough to muffle the sound of Dominic cursing as he scrambles out of the back seat.
Thirty seconds later, I hear a gunshot go off.
Fuck!
Did the cops catch up to us? How long was I out for?
As soon as I start moving, I know adrenaline is compensating for the pain, because I don’t hurt nearly as badly as I should.
I’ve barely managed to pry myself out of the passenger side door when I find both of my accomplices wrestling with one another on the ground.
Jax may be four inches taller, but Dominic is a scrappy motherfucker.
The sight would almost be comical, if not for the fact that I see each of them trying to get possession of the handgun lying just out of reach.
Yeah, I’m clearly missing something here. There isn’t a helicopter overhead, and there are no police cars in sight. I snatch up the gun before either can get it, demanding to know what the hell’s wrong with them.
Dominic points up the hill, yelling about how Blondie from the shop escaped.
“You’re not gonna fucking kill her,” Jax snaps, earning an eye roll from Dominic.
“I was aiming for the lateral thigh, dickhead. Not her skull.”
“And then what?”
The two continue yelling at each other about taking Blondie captive again, but…
yeah, I’m failing to see the urgency here, or why the hell he’s demanding we go after her.
She isn’t any use to us now. Jax agrees with my sentiment, at least with the second part.
The last thing he wanted here was for anyone to get hurt, and we had been planning on leaving her here at the construction site anyway. But I recognize that look in his eyes.
Panic.
“What the fuck happened?” I demand.
You’d think I was the one who was shot in the head with the look Dominic gives me in return, like my skull really is suspiciously light.
“You mean apart from the fact that there’s a dead body in the backseat because your buddy here had to shoot the Rent-A-Cop?
Maybe the fact that he said your goddamn name when he warned you to get down! ”
May I say again:
Fuck.
My.
Life.
If you heard that a man made over four hundred grand in one morning, you would probably picture some kind of Wall Street executive or business mogul returning to his penthouse or villa. Yeah, that ain’t me.
Nope, I arrive at the same accommodations I’ve had for the past six weeks, a.k.a. an eighty-year-old shack that requires more maintenance work than the house is worth.
All I want is to take a nice long shower to wash all this shit away and let the hot water ease some of the pain from my muscles.
Instead, the three of us are treated to a bathroom where the toilet will only flush by lifting the rubber flap inside the tank and a shower that only produces two temperatures: lukewarm and Arctic cold.
And it’s nearly impossible to turn either handle on without the help of another person.
All the seals on the windows are broken, so whatever the temperature is outside will be the temperature in here.
And the electricity is prone to go out with barely the slightest provocation.
You’ll find living in the shittiest area in town that the electric company isn’t too eager to come out and fix anything, so all it takes is a soft breeze or even a squirrel sneezing for the lights to be out for the rest of the day.
After showering, nothing sounds better than crashing into bed, but even that’s not really an option.
I had a bedroom…until we got our first decent rainfall, and I discovered there were about a dozen holes in the ceiling.
I opted for the couch in the living room…
until a drive-by shooting left a bullet in the cushion six inches from my head.
Now, I sleep on a blowup mattress in the master bedroom’s walk-in closet.
And since it leaks air the entire night, it has to be re-inflated every evening unless I wish to sleep on the floor.
I collapse onto the sofa, every muscle and bone in my body protesting the impact, but I’m past giving a shit.
All three of us should be in the ER or at least an urgent care clinic, but what would we tell them?
That we got into an accident? Only one of us owns a car, and it’s parked in the driveway, in perfect condition.
Well, as “perfect” as the old beater can be.
It may be rusty as hell, but there aren’t any dents in it.
Yeah, I can’t say the same about myself right now.
If anything, I feel like the exact opposite.
Despite us being in our twenties, everyone’s moving around the kitchen and living room like we belong in a retirement community.
And because we’re all trying to be on the up and up, you know, with probation and everything, we can’t exactly risk having actual pain meds around.
All we’ve got is some over-the-counter bullshit that’s about as effective as a fucking breath mint.
And yet, our potential internal bleeding still doesn’t make the top three list of biggest problems.
Jax still doesn’t say anything next to me or even bother to look my way. He just hands me the bottle of whiskey he’s already helped himself to, those dark eyes staring into a void on the bare wall.
But I know what he’s really seeing. Unless you’re a straight-up psychopath, you don’t just move on from something like this. Not from taking a life.
What was supposed to be the easiest score in human history got blown to smithereens all because Keith wanted to prove the police were wrong for rejecting him from the force.
“I timed that asshole every fucking Thursday, and never had he gotten back to the shop sooner than six minutes and twelve seconds.” Because we still have neighbors to worry about, Dominic does his best not to yell, but he’s going on the kind of rant that even Bill Burr would be exhausted from.
He’s also having the same problem Jax and I had washing all the black shit off our eyes.
No wonder women need makeup remover. Without it, nothing short of paint thinner could get this off completely.
Even after we all showered, the black makeup only faded to gray.
But while Jax and I look more like variations of the Caped Crusader, Dominic’s bleached hair and neck tattoos make him look like an emo rocker who went overboard on the guyliner and theater makeup.
He continues to lather up another washcloth with soap over the kitchen sink, scrubbing his eyelids hard enough that mine feel raw just witnessing him.
“He forgot his wallet.” It’s the first thing Jax has said since we left the construction site, and he doesn’t look compelled to explain further.
The guy isn’t exactly known for being a chatterbox, but this is unusual, even for him.
If you were to just look at the guy, you wouldn’t think anything was amiss.
Everything about the guy is long. Long hair, long limbs, long fuse. It takes a lot to break a man like him, and it’s scaring the shit out of me that I’m seeing a crack.
Because I fucking put it there.
Nobody was supposed to get hurt. Yet, we are all beat to hell, the girl from the shop is in the hospital if the news is to be believed, and Jax’s cousin, our getaway driver (or rather drop-off driver), is still in the wind.
Everything that could have gone wrong did. And we were only at that shop because of me .
Either Dominic doesn’t notice or just doesn’t care—likely the latter—because he continues ranting, which doesn’t bode well for anyone in close proximity to the man.
If you didn’t know him, you’d think Dominic was on a stimulant of some kind.
The guy is always looking for a fight, and I’m pretty sure he quite literally gets off on violence.
If he’s worked up and can’t fuck, you can bet your ass that he’ll start throwing punches.
“Seriously, what the hell happened? One minute everybody’s fine, and then the next, the Rent-A-Cop just starts losing his shit next to me.
I mean, who the fuck would be that stupid to try something? ”
He’s got a point there. I figured maybe I missed what was going on from the driver’s seat, but nobody else seems to know why the guard snapped once we got closer to the interstate.