Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
DOM
I saw her before I saw the fox.
The thing people don't understand about me is that I notice everything.
Every detail, every movement, every fucking thing that's out of place.
It's a survival instinct I picked up young, back when noticing things meant the difference between getting jumped and making it home in one piece.
You learn how to read a room, read a street, assess a person in the span of a heartbeat.
And once you learn that skill, you can't unlearn it.
So yeah, I saw her.
A flash of pink on the side of Route 89, bright against the desert rock background and the fading light.
A girl crouched on the shoulder like she was praying to something.
I almost didn't stop and kept driving, because what the fuck did I care about some random girl on the side of the road? But then I saw what she was looking at.
The fox. Dead. Flies swarming, a matted carcass along with that particular stillness that only comes when something's stopped being alive and started being meat.
And she was drawing it. Weird to some, intriguing to me.
I pulled over about fifty yards back, and just watched.
She didn't notice me as she was too focused on her work, her pencil moving across the paper in quick, confident strokes.
She wasn't sketching it like some nature artist trying to capture beauty.
She was lovingly capturing its essence with every detail of the decomposing animal and the purpose of what that fox had become.
I got out of my car, leaned against the door and lit a cigarette, fascinated by the woman and the way in which she worked.
She was small, petite, I would guess maybe five foot two by the length of her legs, which is pretty small compared to my six foot.
She had long black hair that fell past her shoulders, catching the hue of the light of the sunset.
I also noticed that she was sucking on a lollipop, which again, was interesting to see, considering what she was doing.
She was wearing a bright pink hoodie, which shocked me in this heat, but didn’t seem to affect her, and cut-off shorts that showed off tanned legs that went on forever despite her height.
From this distance, she looked like sunshine.
Like one of those girls who smiled too much and laughed at everything and pretended the world was a good place.
But I knew better. Girls like that didn't crouch on the side of the road drawing roadkill. Girls like that didn't have that particular intensity in their posture, a focus that said she wasn't just passing time, but was doing something that mattered to her.
I took a drag of my cigarette and studied her the way she was studying the fox.
There was something about the way she moved. Gracefully and very measured. Like every stroke of her pencil was exactly where it needed to be. No hesitation or second-guessing. She knew what she was doing.
Music drifted from her van, some 80s shit I vaguely recognized. Depeche Mode, maybe. The van itself was a piece of work. Old, painted a baby powdered blue. From what I can see of the inside, it’s like some hippie dream, all bright colors and fairy lights visible through the open door.
The contrast was fucking beautiful. Sunshine van, dead fox, girl in a pink hoodie drawing roadkill.
I should have really gone on my way and ignored her, but I found myself pulling over before I could convince myself otherwise, because something about her had hooked into me, and I needed to see more. Needed to understand what I was looking at.
I'd spent my whole life around people who pretended.
Who put on an act and played their parts and lied about who they really were.
Growing up in the neighborhood I did, you learned quickly that everyone was performing.
The tough guys who acted hard but folded the second real violence showed up.
The dealers who talked about loyalty but would sell out their own mothers for a lighter sentence.
The girls who said they loved you but were already fucking someone else behind your back.
Everyone was fake, and the world was one big set. A green screen of bullshit. It’s all so tedious. Everyone is so goddamn boring in their predictability.
I'd stopped trying to connect with people years ago. I stopped pretending I gave a shit about their small talk, their shallow concerns and their desperate need to be liked. I prefer being alone, prefer the joys of silence to the constant noise of people lying to themselves and each other.
But this girl…
She wasn't performing, she was just being. Crouched there with a dead animal, drawing it like it was the most natural thing in the world. No audience, she wasn’t filming herself for social media or doing it to impress friends. It was only her and her art and evidence of the circle of life.
I wanted to know what was going on in her head.
I finished my cigarette, crushed it under my boot, and walked toward her. She didn't look up, even when my shadow fell across her work. Too absorbed in her own little world. I liked that. Liked that she wasn't jumping at every sound and wasn't showing awareness for some invisible gathering.
When I got close enough, I looked at her drawing. And fuck me, it was perfect.
She'd captured everything. The emptiness in the fox's eyes, the way its body had collapsed in on itself, the specific texture of death. I’ve seen some art before, similar to hers, but they never get it right, they never detail the spirit.
They make it too peaceful and clean, too much like a peaceful sleep.
But she'd gotten it exactly right. The brutality of it.
The finality. The way death stripped away all the bullshit.
"That's good," I said, and I meant it. "Really good."
She didn't respond right away and kept drawing, like I was an interruption she was choosing to ignore. I respected that. I wasn’t sure if she would be startled, grabbing her shit and running like any other normal human being.
But she just kept drawing, finishing whatever detail she was on before she acknowledged me.
When she finally looked up, I felt it like a punch to the chest.
Big brown eyes, dark, mysterious and completely unafraid.
She looked at me the way she'd been looking at the fox, assessing and cataloging every detail.
Not the surface shit everyone else saw. Not the tattoos or the black clothes and the general fuck-off energy I carried around like armor.
She was looking deeper, trying to figure out what I was made of.
And I was doing the same to her.
I crouched down beside her, close enough to smell her, a hint of vanilla mixed with the scent of rot from the roadkill. She didn't move away or even flinch, she only watched me with those dark eyes, waiting to see what I'd do.
I looked at the drawing again, then at the fox, comparing the likeness.
"You got the eyes right," I said. "I’ve seen drawings where the artist fucks up the eyes by making them too alive, like they are aware. But you got it. That emptiness. That's what the end looks like."
Something shifted in her expression. Recognition, maybe, or understanding. Like she'd been waiting her whole life for someone to see what she saw, and I'd just proven I could.
"Who are you?" she asked, her voice rough and real. I smiled, I couldn't help it.
"Dom, and you?"
“Roxy.”
Roxy. I allow that name to swirl in my mind, loving the sound of it with each repetition.
"Nice ride," I said, nodding over to her van.
We talked for a few minutes, not very long. Just enough for me to confirm what I'd already suspected, which is that she was like me. That she saw through the bullshit, saw the world for what it really was. That everything was ugly and not presented in a pretty package with a bow.
I found out from her that she sold her drawings to private collectors, to people who appreciated the darkness. Buyers who craved reality instead of the clean version everyone else peddled.
Yeah. She was exactly like me and I didn't want to forget her. I wanted to know everything about her. I had an urge to peel back every layer and see what was underneath. To understand what had made her this way, what had broken her enough that she found beauty in decay and truth in death.
I wanted to keep her.
The thought came as quick as a flash of lightning, my inner monster coming to the surface like it had found its mate.
Mine. She was mine. I'd found her, recognized her, seen her for what she was, but now I couldn't unsee her.
I couldn't let her just drive away and disappear into whatever nowhere she was heading.
I composed myself before I stood up so I didn’t just throw her over my shoulder and run off with her, and brushed off the dust off my jeans.
"You heading somewhere?"
"Nowhere specific."
Excellent. No destination meant no timeline. No one waiting for her and no one who'd miss her if she disappeared for a while.
"Good," I said. "Neither am I."
I turned and walked back to my car, feeling her eyes on me the whole way.
I got inside the drivers seat and started the engine, letting it roar.
I opened my window and looked at her one more time, memorizing the way she looked in the dying light, small and fierce, and completely unaware of what she'd just started.
"See you around, Roxy."
I drove off, but I didn't go far. Just far enough that she wouldn't see me when she got back on the road. I pulled off onto a side track, then killed the engine, and waited.
Ten minutes later, her van passed by, heading north. I waited another minute and then followed.
I knew what I was doing and I was aware that morally it was fucked up, that in the normal world it crossed about a dozen lines that other people didn't cross. But I'd stopped being normal a long time ago. Stopped pretending I operated by the same rules as everyone else. It’s too exhausting.
I'd grown up in a neighborhood in New York where savagery was currency and trust was a liability.
It was where the strong survived and the weak got eaten alive.
I'd learned early that the world didn't give a shit about fairness or justice or any of the other lies people told themselves to sleep at night. My mom was a drug addict and my dad was a long-time-serving convict who I’d never met, so I’d had to learn young how to survive.
The world was brutal, harsh and completely indifferent to suffering.
And I'd learned to be the same way.
After witnessing my first murder at age ten, and then finding my mom dead from an overdose at fifteen, I had to find a way to stay alive and out of the system, so, I'd run with crews, done things that would make you shudder, hurt people who probably deserved it and some who didn't.
I left New York when I was eighteen as there was nothing keeping me there. No family or attachments.
I took a car from an acquaintance who owed me money, a black Chevy that he wasn't using.
He didn't want to give it up, but I didn't ask.
I just took the keys one day after he couldn't pay what he owed me.
No registration in my name or paper trail, just wheels and a tank of gas and the ability to disappear. So I drove west with no plan.
It didn’t take long to find people to work for, bad people, and not the kind who talked tough in bars or sold dime bags on street corners. It was the kind who had money. Real money. They needed things done and didn't ask questions about how.
I started in Philadelphia first. Did a job for a man who ran loan operations out of a pawn shop who needed someone to track a debtor who'd skipped town. I followed him for three days, cataloged his movements, patterns, and where he slept. I reported back and then got paid in cash.
The man asked if I could do more than just watch. No problem.
Pittsburgh. Cleveland. Chicago. Detroit.
Always moving, but always finding the same kind of work.
Stalking people who needed to be found. Tracking movements for people who needed leverage.
Hurting people when the job required it, like breaking fingers, ribs, whatever sent the right message.
Intimidation and collections was the job that required someone who could read a situation instantly and didn't hesitate.
I was good at it. Better than good. I could walk into a room and know within thirty seconds who was dangerous.
I could follow someone for days without them ever noticing, hurt people without flinching.
I didn't feel fear or guilt, and that made me valuable and the money was substantial. Enough to disappear whenever I wanted.
It’s now six years later, and at the age of twenty-four I've learned that most people are weak, that they fold under pressure, and that their morals are just convenient fictions they abandon the second things get hard.
But I've also learned that I prefer being alone.
That other people are needless accessories that cause issues.
I'd rather spend time with the dead than the living because they don't maintain the mask of the living with lies and cheating. Instead they’re just gone, finished, stripped of all the bullshit that makes people unbearable.
Until her. She wasn't boring or predictable and she certainly wasn't weak.
She was the first person I'd ever met who looked at the world the same way I did, and from then on there was no going back.
I’m not following her because I’m bored or curious or even looking for a distraction. I’m following her because she’s the only real thing I've ever found. The only person worth knowing.
She just doesn't know it yet. But she will. I'll make sure of it.
I keep two miles back as her van winds through the darkness, the taillights disappearing and reappearing around curves. She has no idea I’m there. No idea that her entire life changed the moment she looked up from that sketchbook and saw me looking back.
By the time she figures it out, it will be too late. She'll already be mine.