Authors: Bryan Smith
But Vera didn’t care much about the source of the woman’s anger. She didn’t know the young lady, nor would she ever know her. The gulf of years between them was unfortunately far too wide for that. Therefore the cause of this drama was irrelevant. All that really mattered was that it was happening and for that she was grateful. The woman’s hair was a shade of midnight black so perfectly dark it had to come from a bottle. Vera loved her razor-sharp bangs and the way the glossy locks brushed her narrow, alabaster-pale bare shoulders. A
lot
of bare flesh was visible thanks to a wardrobe so skimpy it was hardly there at all. She wore a tiny black halter top, tight denim cutoffs barely larger than a bikini bottom, flip-flops and nothing else. Her large breasts jiggled pleasingly every time she swung the golf club. And then there was the proliferation of colorful tattoos. This was another thing that would have scandalized the prudes in her time. Until today Vera had never had much of an opinion regarding illustrated flesh one way or the other, but that had now changed. The tattoos enhanced the woman’s beauty and contrasted her ghostly pallor in a way that was quite striking.
Soon a well-built young man clad only in boxer shorts emerged from the house and attempted to placate the tattooed beauty. He had long blond hair Vera judged too pretty for a man. She realized this was unfair given her own preferences, but she couldn’t help how she felt. The woman screamed at him. It seemed this man was the mysterious Casey. It was clear he had been the woman’s lover, but he had done something to bring their relationship to the brink of ruin. The nature of that something became obvious as another young woman—this one a shapely blonde wearing a man’s dress shirt and nothing else—came out of the house and started screaming at both of them. The blonde lady seemed more upset about the damage to the Lexus than anything else.
The tattooed woman screamed again and charged at the blonde lady. The man intervened, putting himself between the women. He managed to wrest the golf club away from the tattooed woman. By then a male neighbor had emerged from the house next door and was threatening to call the police. The blond man displayed some venom of his own, telling the neighbor he had things under control and that he should mind his own fucking business. At that point the tattooed woman broke off her attempted assault on the blonde woman and headed for a truck parked at the curb. She got in the truck and started it up, apparently having left her keys in the ignition prior to entering the house. She did a three-point turn in the middle of the street, got the truck positioned so that the driver’s side was facing the driveway, and screamed a final threat at Casey and his blonde floozy.
“You stay the fuck away from me, asshole! I ever see your face again, I’ll fucking kill you, and that’s a promise.”
Then she hit the gas and peeled away from there. The black-haired beauty was so consumed with rage she took no note of either Vera or her dog as she drove away. Only a desperate, last-second tug on his leash saved the life of Puddles the Pomeranian.
Vera lingered a couple moments longer as Casey and the blonde woman exchanged a few heated words before going back inside. Once this last bit of drama was over, Vera turned away from the house and headed back in the direction of her grandson’s home. The grandson remarked on how subdued she seemed upon returning, but Vera did not mention the fabulously exciting things she had witnessed that afternoon. She spent the rest of the day thinking of little else, though, and only became sociable again later that night when she made tea for the grandson.
She dosed the condescending asshole’s cup with rat poison.
It was a satisfying end to one of the most remarkable and enjoyable days of her long life.
She was so consumed with rage and incipient hatred she nearly crashed the truck several times on her way out of the whore’s neighborhood. The truck swerved wildly every time she let go of the steering wheel and slammed her palms against it. With just one exception, she was able to right the vehicle in time to avoid colliding with cars parked at the curb. But that one time she was a touch too slow correcting her course and wound up clipping the fender of a big old Buick. There was a thump followed by a loud rending of metal.
Echo Vaughn never considered stopping. The way she felt right now, she was likely to kill anyone who got aggro with her, which the Buick’s owner was certain to do if she stopped to talk with him or her. So she put the accelerator to the floor and Casey’s F-150 tore away from the Buick with an even louder sound of rending metal. A glance at the rearview mirror as she sped away revealed significant damage to the other vehicle. Its fender was badly shredded. Any other time she might have felt bad for what her negligence had caused, but right now she didn’t give a damn.
She couldn’t believe Casey had cheated on her. She had been convinced he was the total opposite of all the other losers she’d dated, who by and large had been a bunch of conniving jackasses who took advantage of her generous nature. And too many of them had been a little too happy about her being a stripper. The worst was when they’d bring a gang of their equally brain dead friends to the club to see her dance. That was some creepy shit. It happened often enough she had to wonder if all guys were natural degenerates.
But Casey had never been like that. He often tried to talk her into quitting the world of adult entertainment. There was no way she could do that. It was far too lucrative and she didn’t have the skills to do anything else. Casey countered this by saying she could go back to school. He told her she wouldn’t have to work at all if she enrolled at one of the local universities, promising to take care of her and provide for her until she got a degree. Which sounded great in theory, but somehow Echo had never quite been able to buy into it. Getting a degree would take years and would require a level of commitment she couldn’t imagine any guy—even one as seemingly true-blue as Casey—ever being able to manage.
Turned out she had been right about that. The bastard had the same commitment issues every guy had. A gossipy neighbor tipped her off to Casey’s fling with Ella Barton. There had been no hard proof of an affair, just repeated sightings of a busty blonde woman coming around to Echo’s house while she was at work. So she paid a guy from the club five hundred dollars to stake out her house and, if necessary, follow Casey around while she was working. Her paid stalker reported the bad news via a call to the club earlier today.
She fled the club in a blind rage and took Casey’s truck—which she frequently drove to work—to the address her informant had provided. Echo was incapable of playing it cool. So many guys had come and gone in her life and the eventual parting of the ways never bothered her. Again, though, Casey was different. He had really gotten to her on a level no one else ever had. She had tears in her eyes when she arrived at Ella’s cute little prefab house. The visible emotion annoyed her. No one had ever made her care enough to shed tears. And this guy—this fucking snake—didn’t deserve any fucking tears.
After slipping into the house via an unlocked back door, she found the semi-clothed couple making out on a sofa in the living room. They were both clad only in their underwear and Casey was on top of the woman, prone between her whorishly spread legs. Ella was writhing and moaning as he kissed her, her hands tangled in his long hair. Echo loved Casey’s long blond locks. He was a good-looking guy to start with, but the hair really sealed the deal.
Echo totally lost her shit.
She screamed.
She threw things. Anything that was handy, especially if it looked expensive.
Casey tried to reason with her, shedding tears of his own and sounding oh-so-sincere as he told her over and over how sorry he was for “fucking up”. But Echo was in no mood for his apologies, regardless of how heartfelt they seemed on the surface.
She didn’t depart until Ella—a woman she’d known in passing from hanging out with Casey at a local bar—got on the phone to call the police. On the way out, she grabbed a golf club from a bag of them propped up in a corner in the foyer.
Now that she was out of the neighborhood and driving back toward town, the worst of her rage seemed temporarily spent. She started thinking about her next move. Obviously Casey was getting his cheating ass kicked out of her house effective today. She briefly considered trying to get to the house before he could so she could systematically destroy everything he owned. But she rejected the idea immediately. Trashing his stuff would just reinforce the impression of being devastated by his actions. Now that she was thinking more clearly, that was the last thing she wanted. What was called for now was absolute cold detachment. She would show no emotion whatsoever when he came around to see her again.
An image of Ella’s shapely legs wrapped around Casey’s muscular back made her grip the steering wheel harder and push the gas pedal to the floor.
Or fuck that
, she thought.
Maybe I’ll just kill the son of a bitch.
She could do it. A vivid fantasy formed in her head as she drove. Casey on his knees as she held a gun on him, crying and begging for his life. Then her smiling coldly as she pulled the trigger and blew his worthless brains out.
It would be nothing less than what he deserved.
So why did she have tears in her eyes again as she thought about it?
Rather than going home or returning to the club, she drove for a few more miles and pulled into the parking lot of a bar called Buffalo Ted’s. An ordinary dive from the looks of it. Nothing special. But it would do for what she had in mind. And what she had in mind was getting shitfaced drunk in a place where she wasn’t likely to be recognized.
She grabbed her bag and got out of the truck, her flip-flops flapping loudly on the asphalt as she hurried across the parking lot en route to the bar’s entrance. The sooner she could get that first drink inside her, the better she would feel. Or maybe not, but at least it would be something to do.
A bell chimed as she banged through the front door and took a quick look around. A few faces turned in her direction. Most of the handful of patrons present went right back to their drinks, but a few gazes lingered, which was not surprising. Echo was long accustomed to being ogled by a certain percentage of the population wherever she went. She had tantalizingly long, exquisitely toned legs and a chest that irresistibly compelled the attention of heterosexual males wherever she went.
But she wasn’t much interested in male attention or company right at the moment. Her opinion of the male species was at its lowest ebb ever, and that was really saying something coming from someone who considered almost all men scum or trolls. So instead of sidling up to one of the guys perched at the bar to await the inevitable drink offer, she took a seat at one of the little tables in the small dining area and waited for a server to come by and take her order.
Before that could happen, a forty-something fat man with a skullet—bald scalp ringed by long hair hanging to his shoulders—in a Molly Hatchet T-shirt slid off his stool at the bar and waddled over to her table.
“Mind if I join you for a drink? My treat.”
Echo shot him her most withering, disdainful glare. “Fuck off, troll.”
The unexpected harshness of her response made him take a reflexive step back. Echo detected a note of genuine hurt in his surprised expression. This pleased her immensely.
The fat man scowled. “Fucking dyke.”
Echo laughed.
“What’s so funny, bitch?”
Echo smirked. “What part of ‘fuck off’ don’t you understand? By the way, what is up with the Molly Hatchet shirt? What are you, lost in time? Nobody listens to that dinosaur bullshit anymore. On second thought, don’t answer any of that. Just go the fuck away. You smell like vomit. Did you know that? Again, don’t answer that. Fuck off. No, better idea. Go home and kill yourself.”
The fat man looked stunned. He obviously had not been on the receiving end of this kind of vitriol in a long time. The pathetic loser looked like he was about to start crying. A part of her realized she was being excessively unkind. It was just bad luck and timing on his part. He was a guy and thus was Casey’s unknowing proxy in this situation.
She sighed. “Look, dude, you really don’t want to be around me right now. Trust me. Please just go away.”
The fat man regarded her with a blank look for another long and exasperating moment, but then he did something that surprised her. He dropped a twenty dollar bill on her table. “I’m gonna buy you some drinks even though you treated me like shit. I think you need them more than me.”
He walked out of the bar before she could say anything or give the money back.
Echo felt bad for about five seconds.
He
had
called her a fucking dyke, after all. Not that there was anything wrong with being a dyke, but it had been meant as an insult and that was just plain rude.
A server belatedly swung by to take her order. She was a slender woman in her late thirties with hard features arranged in an unpleasant expression. Echo couldn’t decide whether the woman was pissed at her for the way she had treated the fat man or if she always looked like she was mad at the world. Either way, the last thing she wanted at the moment was some bitter old skank of a waitress spitting in her drink.
So she summoned her sweetest smile and said, “I’ll have a shot of tequila and a tall glass of beer.”
While she waited for the drinks to arrive, she opened her bag and removed her phone, which she had switched to silent mode before heading out to Ella’s house. A glance at the screen showed a half-dozen missed calls received within the last twenty minutes. They were all from Casey. There were also some voicemails. She didn’t need to listen to them to know they were all Casey pleading with her to call him back.