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Chapter Eight

Aasif is scratching his beard as he enters the tiny snack shack. He always does that when he’s uncomfortable. Body language is one of our worst enemies. It reveals our inner truth when we believe we are being discreet. It’s like a two-faced friend handcuffed to your wrist, shouting your secrets to anyone who’ll listen.

He doesn’t look at me as he removes his blue windbreaker and tucks it into one of the cubbies under the snack shack counter. Aasif calls the store building the snack shack because the space is only about ten feet wide by fifteen feet long, and a large portion of the space is occupied by the clerk’s counter. The entrance door to the snack shack is always locked at nine p.m.; two hours before my shift begins. After that, all transactions are made through the slot in the bullet proof glass storefront windows.

I never have to deal with customers coming into the floor area. There’s always a couple of inches of glass separating us, which makes this the perfect job for me. I can sit here reading a book by the light that shines through the window from the pump bays. Most customers pay at the pump with their credit cards, so I only see a couple dozen customers per shift. There’s the occasional complaint about a card reader or a pump not working. But, on the plus side, the panhandlers don’t come around here at night. So, for the most part, this is a quiet job, which I’ve come to love.

Aasif looks up at me with that bored exasperation I’m starting to get really sick of. He’s ticked off that he couldn’t fire me when he wanted to and even more ticked off that I still haven’t bothered asking if he was threatened. I’m not stupid. If I question why Aasif didn’t fire me for calling in sick two weeks in a row, that will just open up the possibility of him telling me who threatened him. And I don’t want to know. As soon as I know, that makes me an accomplice to blackmail.

Aasif opens his mouth to speak and he’s interrupted by a knock on the glass. I spin around on the stool behind the counter and my heart nearly stops. A man in a black hoodie slips a fifty-dollar bill into the curved slot. I reach for the money and accidentally graze his cold fingers. I snatch my hand back, still unable to tear my gaze away from the shadowy blackness where his face should be.

He reaches up and pushes the hood back. “Thirty on number two.”

I sigh with relief at the sight of a young hispanic guy with a spiderweb tattoo on his neck. But then I remember something that stops me cold.

It must have been about two months ago. A man in a dark hoodie came to the window to pay cash. What kind of car was he driving? I try to recall all the images surrounding the mystery man in my mind and I’m sick to my stomach when the image materializes. The vehicle behind the guy in the dark hood. A gold Mercedes.

“Are you gonna give me my change, or what?”

The harsh voice snaps me out of this horrifying memory. I hastily slide a twenty-dollar bill back at him through the slot, then I turn to Aasif. His eyes are narrowed and one of his thick eyebrows is cocked suspiciously. He knows something’s going on with me and I’m not being forthcoming with him. I have to find out what made him change his mind.

“Aasif, why didn’t you fire me?”

He rolls his eyes. “Because you do a good job scaring off the criminals in that costume.”

“Now is not the time to fuck with me, Aasif. Tell me! Why did you change your mind?”

He looks at me like I’m crazy for pretending not to know. Then his features soften and his round dark eyes widen with surprise.

“You really don’t know?”

I glare at him, a silent reminder that I’m not in the mood to be fucked with.

He shrugs. “I got an envelope in the mail. When I opened it up, it was a picture of my mom and sister with the top of the picture cut off at their necks. The note on the back said that I’d regret the decision if I fired you.”

I cover my mouth in horror. “Oh, my God. That’s disgusting. Who would do something like that?”

He looks like he’s not sure if he believes that I had nothing to do with it. “Look, you can leave now. I’ve got it covered.”

I want to insist he tells the police, but I have no idea who sent him that letter. And I have no way of knowing if contacting the authorities will cause this person to retaliate against Aasif and his family.

I nod my head as I tuck my paperback novel into the cubbie under the counter. He wants me gone. He doesn’t want to talk about this, and I don’t blame him.

I pull the drawstrings on my hood a bit tighter and exit through the rear entrance. I hear the click of Aasif locking the door behind me and I stare at it for a moment, trying to figure out who would threaten his family. Initially, I believed it was my father because I refused to believe Daimon would care enough about me to do something like that. And his hasty exit from my apartment six days ago sort of proved his apathy. But now I don’t know what to think.

Especially now that I remember a customer in a dark hoodie driving a gold Mercedes just like the one I saw the first night I saw Daimon. But it doesn’t make sense. Why would Daimon kill someone who was driving his car? He said it was a known sexual predator in that car. Unless, the predator just happened to have the same car as him. Or the man I saw at the gas station two months ago wasn’t Daimon.

It’s too much of a coincidence to be unrelated. And now Aasif and his family have been pulled into this. But why does this person care if I still work at the gas station? What does all of this have to do with me?

I turn away from the back door of the snack shack and head for the sidewalk. It’s four a.m. The sun won’t come up for another two to three hours. These are the hours of absolute darkness, when I should feel most at ease. But I’ve never felt more uncertain about walking home alone.

Then I see it. For the first time in a month, I see my father’s silver Audi S4 parked about a block and a half farther down Hope Street. I get a strange urge to wave at him. To let him know that I see him. That I appreciate him. And that, despite his mistakes, I love him.

But I can’t. Because a larger part of me still wishes he would have been a better father. Teaching your child to fight isn’t a sufficient means of showing affection. I needed to know that I wasn’t a monster. I needed to know that I was loved. And I still don’t know if my father loves me. All I know is that he loved the fighting machine he created. He loved that machine, then he kicked it to pieces and threw it away.

I continue walking down Hope, watching as the glowing cherry of my father’s cigarette flies out the driver’s side window and he drives away. I shake my head. He still hasn’t quit. The last few years I lived at home, I had to go easy on my dad during sparring matches. All that tar in his lungs was slowing him down. I tried to make sure he didn’t know I was going easy on him, but I’m sure there were times he suspected it. Those times when he’d cut a match short and chew me out for doing something wrong. Punishing me for his own shortcomings.

Isn’t that what we always do? Punish others for our own weaknesses. Maybe that’s what Daimon is doing to me. Maybe he hasn’t come to visit me in six days because he recognized some weakness in himself while he was with me.

It’s a long shot, but it would make me feel better. Like I hadn’t been used.

Still, I find it hard to believe that a man like Daimon would go to all that trouble to use a woman for sex just once. He killed someone in front of me; someone who was possibly driving his own car. Then he came to my door and introduced himself as a detective, which I didn’t believe for a single second. Until I contacted the Los Angeles Police Department yesterday.

They confirmed to me twice that they do indeed have a Detective Daimon Rousseau in their department and that he works the Hope Street area. They wanted to know if I had a complaint about him or if I had some information for any of his cases. I told them I did not have a complaint and that I’d call Detective Rousseau directly to give him my tip.

I knew if I called from my home phone, Daimon would know it was me. So I called from a pay phone on Wilshire and disguised my voice. The fact that I have to go to such lengths to find out more about the man who ravaged me six days ago is disturbing. I willingly granted him access to the deepest parts of me and he thanks me by pretending I no longer exist.

I’m near the place where my father was parked just a few minutes ago. I look at the black asphalt and immediately see the cigarette butt he tossed out the window. The cherry is still barely giving off a thin stream of smoke. I gaze at it for a moment, trying to figure something out. Then I step off the curb, take two steps into the street, and pick it up.

Holding the cigarette butt up in the air, I smile as the streetlight shines down on it. Then I tuck it into my pocket and head home.

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