TEMPTATION - A Bad Boy Romance (76 page)

He walked over and picked up the bag from the table.

I reached my hand out to grab it, but he was too quick, and before I had a chance to respond, he had deflected my hands away from the bag and brought the bag up to his own shoulders.

I took a deep breath and focused in on him with my entire attention.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I demanded.

“I probably should have done this in the very beginning,” he said “instead of sitting down and trying to talk with a woman like you. Just because you think you’re on the inside of some criminal underworld doesn’t make you hard; it makes you a fool. Every single fool just like you gets chewed up and spit out by whatever big dogs you think you are charming with that pretty smile of yours. Now that I’ve been inside of you, I figure you’ll come around sooner or later for more. Then we can talk about how you want to deal with this bag.”

With the bag slung over his shoulder, he began to walk out of the kitchen.

I got in the way to stop him and even threw my foot up for a kick to his groin. My efforts were pathetic at best. The whole movement was immediately caught by his body. He raised a knee to deflect my leg and then kicked that same leg out so that his own leg hooked underneath mine. With his leg high up in the air, and my balance completely thrown off, all he had to do was push on my forehead with the tip of his fingers and I was down.

My ass landed with a thump on the linoleum, and I grimaced at the pain. By the time I had a chance to actually scramble to my feet, he was in the living room, only five steps away from the door. He wasn’t moving quickly. The cocky asshole that he was, he was confidently striding toward the door, effectively holding my personal belongings ransom.

“Fucking scumbag!” I yelled.

“Call the police,” was all he said, not even turning around.

I reached under the table and pulled out a pistol that I had kept there for situations just like this. Drawing the pistol out, I cocked the weapon and issued my final demand.

“Drop the bag,” I said, with a cold edge to my voice.

Of course, I didn’t even need to say anything, because as soon as the weapon was cocked, the man stopped moving, and put his hands in the air.

I was zeroed in on the back of his body, and ready to lay him out flat. I watched as he turned around, slowly. As he rotated, he let the bag slide down his right arm, until it hung on his fingertips, two feet above the ground.

“You want the bag?” he asked. “It’s yours, but don’t expect my help unless you’re going to come around and reciprocate. I’m just not into unequal relationships.”

I sneered again, but my contempt was broken when a forceful knock came to the front door.

My nerves were jarred, but I took a deep breath and fought to hold onto what little composure I had left. With the weapon still trained on the man, I held my position.

With a burst, the door was kicked open. Little splinters of wood shot into the air to the left side of the man by the door. On instinct, the man dove to his left, still holding the bag, and out of sheer surprise, I pulled the trigger.

Chapter 10 - Piper

Within a matter of minutes, I came to understand why people who own firearms need to be highly trained in their use.

The whole point of owning a weapon is to be able to effectively use it against an opponent, in the service of either aggression or protection.

In my case, I initially was trying to protect myself against what I thought was essentially a thief, stealing my personal belongings. What ended up happening was that I fired on my employer and wounded one of his main men.

A cry came through the door, and the shot was followed by a series of other shots as people fired into my home from outside of the door.

Frightened as I was by the cry of the man who had been hit outside of the doorway, I ducked to the side. Crawling on the floor, I began to move toward the side of the kitchen where I could hide and regroup my thoughts. That fucker still had my bag, but it seemed as though in the moment I had other things to worry about.

From my position in the corner of the kitchen, I heard more gunshots fired into the living room, followed by the dull sound of one body hitting another. A groan filled the air, followed by demands from someone who sounded like my boss.

“Piper, who the fuck is this?” the man demanded.

The man obviously responded with force, as more weapons sounded off. The noise inside of my tiny apartment was so awful, and while I was concerned for my own life, at least I knew who was there. The problem was that my own lack of cool had started the whole thing, and now the police were for sure going to come. I realized that I had to stop this senseless fighting, otherwise we were all going to go down for assault.

“Stop!” I screamed. “Stop, the police will be here any minute.”

“You called them?” one of the men who came with my boss yelled at me, recognizing my voice.

“Just cool it with the fucking weapons,” I said, “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“You heard her, now, put down the gun,” I heard army boy’s voice rise above the chaos.

Turning around from my place in the kitchen and daring to look into the living room long enough to realize what was happening, I saw that my boss had been knocked over, and was bleeding from the nose. Another man had been shot and was bleeding out on my floor. The wounded man’s back was pressed up against the front door. He didn’t look good. In fact, he didn’t look like he was going to make it out of my living room.

A sinking feeling came over me, and I looked up to see the bullet hole in the door. The wood to the door was cheap, and the light coming through from the day outside only caused a bleak contrast to come into my mind.

I trained my weapon on the man who had stopped by to drop off the bag. The man who had stolen the bag from me, and who had gotten me into this mess. I blamed him wholeheartedly, and I knew that there were only minutes left before the police arrived. I was certain that the neighbors would have called the moment that they heard the first gunshots. My entire cover was blown, I had to think fast.

That was the first time I had actually shot a man.

I wasn’t prepared for the psychological trauma caused by taking such an action. We may think, at times, that we are capable of pursuing a certain type of action, and we may even play around by pretending that we are comfortable moving in a given direction — if the theater of the moment suggests that such an action take place.

I took a deep breath and began to cry.

“Fuckin’ shoot him, Piper,” my boss said.

He was on the floor and had his pistol out on the ground. My pistol was locked on the man with my bag, and the man’s pistol was focused on my boss. My eyes continued to shift between the man dying at the door, and the man who stole my bag. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t move forward with the kill.

While I was still deliberating over what the hell I was going to do, the man jumped through the front window, carrying my bag with him as he left.

I could hear the police sirens echoing throughout the cityscape. They were on their way, and all I could do was stand there frozen, and helpless.

My boss checked the pulse on the man on the floor and found that it was negative — he was already gone. Running over to me, he grabbed me by the arms and dragged me forcefully outside of the room. We left out the back and ended up running through the corridors of the apartment maze adjacent to where I lived.

The whole area was slummy, and we as we ran, we were given shelter by the ambivalence of the community members living nearby.

It wasn’t that they wanted criminals to live near them, it was that they had enough problems by their own merit without having to resort to intervening in the problems of others. I watched doors shut, and curtains get drawn while we passed through the narrow passageways of Venice.

My lungs burned, and yet my boss continued to run and pull me along with him. His grip on my arm was held fast, and there seemed to be no way that he was going to relinquish control. My own heart was beating so fast, and all I could think about was how everything had changed as a result of a single action.

Perhaps it wouldn’t have gotten to this if I hadn’t of pulled the trigger. Or, if I traced things back further than that, perhaps I wouldn’t have arrived here if I had been more selective about where I placed the bag. Finally, I realized that my thoughts moved onward until they reached the place where I was forsaking my own life.

If I hadn’t of been born
, continued my inner dialog,
none of this would have happened.

When you reach a place like that in your mind, the easiest thing to do is to conclude that you should either act on that information or stop wasting time thinking about the consequentiality of events in sequence. I decided to do that latter, though it took me a fair bit of mucking around in confusion to reach that conclusion.

My boss was absolutely livid during the entire process. He held so tightly onto my arm that I could feel bruises welling up beneath my skin.

Finally, we made it to a place about two miles away from my house.

Apparently, we were far enough away from the apartment, because my boss pushed me into a wall, and got about an inch from my face.

“What the fuck was that about?” he spat.

I could tell that he was furious. He had only been rough like this toward people when they had caused him serious problems. Knowing what I did about how much the bag was worth, I knew he would be upset, unfortunately, I wasn’t in a position to do much of anything besides hyperventilate, and cry.

Then he slapped me.

The strike was a hard, open palm hit across the face. He didn’t hold back either. I was so shocked that he had actually hit me that my tears immediately stopped. I felt a throbbing pain pulse through my face and stared into the eyes of the man who had struck me. I didn’t know it yet, but with that hit, everything had changed.

“You want to explain to me why you fired on Johnson?” he growled, while clutching my shirt inside of his fist.

“I didn’t know…” I began.

“You didn’t know. Well, because you didn’t know, the goods are gone, and one of my best men is now in the morgue.”

I cried. Tears came down from my eyes without much awareness as to why they were coming out.

“I was trying to shoot,” I tried to explain.

“Well, obviously you weren’t trying hard enough, because when you had a chance to shoot him a second time, you held the trigger. Who was that? Some kind of freelance friend of yours, trying to work with you to rip us off?”

His voice was on edge, and it seemed as though he was trying desperately to regain control of a situation that had proven to be completely out of his control.

My boss was a man who didn’t like to be out of control. He liked to have everything just so, and when things didn’t go according to plan, he wasn’t exactly the most graceful man I had ever met. I was authentically scared. There was very little that I felt like I was able to do, and in that moment, with his hand on my shirt, and the knowledge that he had a weapon pointed at my chest, I felt like my life was about to end.

Instead of thinking about why I had shot Johnson, or about why the other man had stolen the bag, I was caught in a thought loop where I was visualizing my death, then and there, in an alley on the east side of the slums. He could have done it, he really could have killed me right there, and nothing would have been done about it. The way that he grit his teeth, and kept exhaling in a fierce and abrupt way demonstrated that he was struggling to maintain control.

“I swear, I didn’t mean to do that,” I begged, my voice quavering. “ I was surprised… and you kicked the door down.”

“I kicked the door down because I thought you were getting mugged! We were visiting to check on things, to make sure that everything was going smoothly. Imagine our surprise, when we have entrusted you with a package as rare and valuable as that particular shipment, only to hear you screaming while some dude is ripping you off.”

Then he lowered his voice, and each word of his question was punctuated by a thrust of his weapon into my chest.

“You’re going to talk, and you’re going to talk now. Who was that man?”

My heart was racing. I could barely think. I was so scared, and if he had only slowed down, or stopped being so aggressive, I might have been able to think clearly, to respond more appropriately to the situation. As it was, I was too frightened to say much at all.

“I don’t know his name,” I replied, haltingly.

“You don’t know his name? A man walks into your house, and walks out with four million dollars worth of inventory, and you don’t even know his name?”

The hand that held the pistol raised up and he slammed the butt of the weapon into the bricks to the right of my head. Little pieces of the wall broke off from the force of his blow, and then I realized that if I was going to get out of this alive, I would have to adapt my approach entirely. I had to become unafraid of this man, and I had to reclaim ownership of the situation.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes for a second. He slapped me again, but this time, it didn’t sting as it had the first time. As it turns out, the first time, I was responding more in shock than in pain. I didn’t show the same amount of resistance the second time.

They say that when you meet an aggressive force, there are psychological pressures that are buried into an interaction template that both parties are unconsciously participating within. The aggressor, in this case, my boss, was furious, and as I continued to be afraid of him, he continued to push forward in the same method. In order to psychologically break the pattern of engagement, the party who is more conscious needs to assume a role which is outside of the behavioral matrix that has been established. The ‘victim’ needs to shed the role of ‘that which is aggressed toward’, and move into a new state of mind — one without fear.

When I opened my eyes, I stared at him coldly, as unemotionally responsive as I could muster. My eye contact in that moment told him more than anything my words could have ever shared.