But his jittery shakes gives him away. I don’t really know what’s going on here, and I’m not too familiar with the drug world either, but to me it seems like he’s guilty.
“You fucking did,” suit disagrees with a sharp shake of his head. “And we all know it. This isn’t the first time this has happened, is it?”
“I was mugged… I swear, it wasn’t me.”
Suit steps back and makes a hand gesture at the other man. I take a tentative step forwards feeling that the moment to intervene is coming but before I do something happens to stop me. The other suited man pulls out something from his pocket and all I manage to catch is the metallic glint of a gun.
A gun? Fuck, this is bad.
My heart thunders in my chest, I can barely breathe enough to get any air into my lungs. Panic consumes me, it swallows me up whole causing my legs to freeze to the spot. I’m so covered in ice that I couldn’t move even if I wanted to… and to be honest I’m not sure that I want to. Just because I’m an employee doesn’t mean I want to risk my life. I’m sure as hell not getting paid enough to lose my life.
“Anything left too say?” suit yells. “Anymore bullshit excuses.”
A thick ball of emotion lodges itself in my throat as the man pleads for his life. I don’t know how, but I feel like I’ve seen enough movies to know how this is going to end and it isn’t good.
Bang!
Everything moves in slow motion. It’s almost as if it isn’t quite real. I hear the gun shot, even though a lot of the sound gets lost in the wind, but since there’s no immediate after effects I start to believe I might have just imagined it. Maybe I’m going a little crazy.
But then something slams into sweat pant’s chest and it sends him flying over the edge. His body spills from the boat like a rag doll, which is a truly sickening sight. I actually feel vomit ball up in my stomach, I think it might burst out onto my feet at any given moment.
“Fuck.”
The word fells out of my mouth without me thinking about it. I don’t even know how loud I say it until the men in suits both spin around to look at me. My eyes widen, my frozen legs start to melt, the need to get the hell away from this horrible situation overshadows anything else. It’s as if I have a survival instinct deep inside me, and it finally kicks in.
Flash.
I see a bolt of lightening or a camera flash as I take off in the direction of my bedroom but I don’t stop moving. I need to escape, I need to be alone in my room, I need to lock myself away so that I feel safe.
In all of this, Tia is long forgotten. All I can concentrate on is my fear and my need to get away from it. It’s my life on the line here, I can’t think about anything else.
Chapter Seven - Tia
Home, sweet home, I think sarcastically as I step through the door. Oh fucking joy.
I don’t want to be back here, this is the last place in the world I want to be, I just don’t have any choice. Now with the cruise behind me, I really need to start focusing on my real life. There are no more excuses, I need to get back to reality.
I drop my bag on the floor in the hallway and run my eyes over the mass expansion of house that lies before me. I’ve always thought that we have far too much room for three people, especially when there are plenty of homeless people in the world, but just like the rest of my opinions it means nothing.
I run the pick around in my fingers, trying to draw some comfort from it. The orange guitar pick that Stephen pressed into my hand with a promise to return… a promise that he obviously had no intention of keeping. I woke up eventually the next morning, still naked, still alone, with only the pick for company. At first I tried to make some excuses for why he didn’t come back. I told myself it didn’t matter because it wouldn’t be long until we saw one another again anyway. I naively assumed that there wasn’t anywhere on the boat that he could vanish to until we docked somewhere… but it seems I was wrong. Somehow, he managed to vanish forever, leaving me with only this pick to remember him by.
I should chuck it out, I know that would be the wise thing to do, but for some reason I can’t. When I do I’ll be accepting that it’s over forever. Silly as it is I just can’t let it go.
“Mom?” I call out, actually hoping that she isn’t home. Really, I want to be by myself for a bit. “Dad?”
No one answers me, so I walk through the house aimlessly like I used to do a lot as a child. I always had a lot of friends, but I wasn’t ever allowed to have them over at the house… obviously because of my dad and his dodgy dealings. I went to their homes, but I couldn’t all the time, and because I was an only child I just used to walk around the house looking for something to do. Sure, I had all the toys, but what fun are they with no on to play with? That’s just boring. So, I would wander around aimlessly, just like I’m doing now.
I guess some things never change.
Maybe this is where the loneliness started actually. I’ve been blaming it on other things but there’s a very good chance that it started right here in this very house. It came for me early on and has stuck with me ever since. For one brief naïve moment, I thought my wild night with Stephen might be about to turn into something to cure that, especially when he said that he wanted to talk, but that – like everything else – turned out to be bullshit.
I sigh loudly and shake my head. I need to forget about Stephen now, I need to push him out of my mind if I actually want to get my life in order. He’s gone, he made sure of that, and there’s no way in hell I’m getting him back. I don’t have his cell phone number or his address and he doesn’t have mine. We met on the cruise ship, we had one wild night, and that’s the end of it. I just need to shake off this sadness and start moving my life in a positive direction. That’s all. Easy peasy.
“What do you think, boss?”
All of a sudden I’m shocked by a voice floating down the hallway. I assumed I was in the house alone, no one answered me as I yelled out, but clearly I didn’t do it loud enough. I recognize the man’s voice well. It belongs to Adrian Walker, my father’s ‘business partner’. He’s always been a familiar face in this house, but I still don’t know what he does. Obviously, something dodgy if he works with Dad. Plus, there’s also the fact that he also refers to my dad as ‘boss’. That seems weird and mafia like to me.
I can’t stop myself, I sneak along to the room I can hear the voices coming from, needing to know more. I’ve always been kept out the way of these business meetings, for obvious reasons, which has only made me more intrigued. Now I can discover what I think I know, what I need confirmed, without anyone giving me shit for it. I just need to make sure I’m not caught eavesdropping. No problem at all.