There were plenty of options, including heading back downstairs and seeing if there were any other chicks around that looked like they might be ready for a tumble. Honestly, though – I wasn’t in the mood. I wasn’t in the mood to be alone, either, but I didn’t want to hang out with the crowd any more.
My phone beeped, and I went back inside to check it.
A text from Lee asked if I was done. He wanted to come back to the room and refill his drink. Chris had ditched him, and he’d been hanging out with Brian, the body painting guy we’d met earlier in the day, and they were both ticked at the price of booze in the hotel bar and wanted to drink from the private stash. I was all right with that. Brian was cool, and I’d been kind of fascinated by how quickly women just took off their clothes so he could start brushing various colors of paint all over their bodies. I mean, the shit h
e did was beautiful; I’d just never seen anything quite like it.
I replied that it was safe to come upstairs to the room.
There was another text from Chris that contained a lot of exclamation points and informed me that there were some girls who heard I was here but didn’t believe that he really knew me. He wanted me to come to the con suite and prove to them that we were buddies.
That’s the kind of shit that pissed me off. There wasn’t a lot that really got me going, but I could become pretty annoyed with people who were basically using me to feel like they have some sort of in with my criminal father. If they had any idea what that meant, they wouldn’t want anything to do with getting to know me. Chris basically using me and that relationship to get some pussy was enough to make me consider turning in for the night.
I took in another long breath and blew it out in a huff before I switched the phone to silent, dumped my drink down the sink, and threw myself onto the bed to get a few minutes relaxation before going back out. My head was spinning, so I reached over and grabbed the cigarette pack inside the nightstand drawer – the one that contained my weed.
The little baggie inside the pack was also empty.
“Really?” I yelled out into the empty room. “Really, Lee? That is so not cool.”
Never rooming with him again. As a matter of fact, I was tempted to say, “Fuck it!” and just grab a taxi back home and stick him with the entire bar bill. If he had come to the room right at that moment, or if I ended up back downstairs with a group of chicks wanting to ask me shit about my father, I’d probably lose my cool.
Especially without any weed.
No doubt – I should skip the party.
By a mile.
Chapter 2
Some people are just perfectly fine with infamy.
Most people wouldn’t recognize the guy on the street, but if you had anything to do with Chicago’s illegitimate business at all, you’d probably heard the name Evan Arden. People who didn’t even know him were scared shitless of him.
People who knew him were also scared shitless.
If you actually managed to get up close and personal with him, you’d figure out that for the most part, he wasn’t a bad guy at all – he had a decent sense of humor, could hold intelligent conversations, and took a lot of pride in his work. If you spent enough time with him, you’d quickly figure out there was something inside him just under the surface, and that something was pretty intense – like a thousand-year-old volcano that was about to pop the top off a gigantic mountain. If you had the opportunity to watch him hold a rifle to his shoulder and obliterate a little paper head on a target from five hundred yards away, you’d know just how destructive an eruption from him would be.
The noise at the shooting range would sometimes put me on edge, but I had lucked out far more than I thought I would have when I decided to hang out with Evan Arden and Jonathan Ferris over the weekend. I should have known shooting would be involved, but I hadn’t thought about it when I accepted. I’m not a gun dude. I don’t have a problem with them, and I end up around them all the time, they just aren’t my thing.
I wasn’t expecting to get any decent action at the shooting range, either. It wasn’t exactly the kind of place a lot of women tended to visit. Not trying to be sexist or anything, but they just didn’t seem to ever be there. This time was an exception, though, and while Evan and Jonathan were blasting holes in paper people, a hot little brunette with a deep tan walked into the open area outside the range and leaned up against the wall.
Jonathan glanced at me as I started to move away, and I heard him chuckle.
I kinda had Jonathan figured as Evan’s BFF or whatever, but they were as polar opposite as an elderly nun and a Chippendale dancer. Jonathan could be loud and in your face, but you always knew there wasn’t anything inside of him that was all that threatening. Well, not physically at least. I wouldn’t piss him off because he’d have my bank accounts hacked four seconds later, but I never got the idea he was into much violence. He was just your typical, brilliant, bored kid at one point and discovered the most interesting challenges were using technology to see just what he could get away with. My dad used that to his advantage, and Jonathan seemed pretty happy to get paid to screw around on the internet and write useful apps to hack websites and other apps, which he then put up for free in the iTunes store.
Of course, once downloaded, the apps would start sending all the user’s private data back to a hosting system, but they rarely ever figured that out.
Without saying a word to my companions, I walked over to the brunette who was leaning against the rail, watching the shooters. She had on those jeans that were really tight along the legs and high-heeled sandals of some sort. They were hot, but I thought jeans and high heels together were just kind of unnatural. I mean, jeans were supposed to make you feel comfortable, and heels were just…well…silly.
“Is this the sort of thing you like to do on the weekends?” I asked her. I tilted my head and half smiled as she turned her eyes to me.
Now before we go any further, let’s get something clear – I have had plenty of people get on me for emphasizing words in kind of a random sort of way, but I assure you there is nothing random about it. It’s quite intentional, and very distinct, which is the point.
People don’t forget me.
Fame or infamy? I don’t know; I just know it gets me laid.
“Not really,” the brunette admitted. “It’s too loud.”