Page 16 of Roma King
Those last four words.
God.
You can trust them.
Someone broke into Corey’s house, and they took the little boy. I did the unthinkable. Instead of protecting Corey and taking care of him, I did the exact opposite. I told him to hang up the phone. I told him he could trust the man who had just broken into his house.
“Okay, then. Bye bye,”Corey whispers. The line goes dead on the recording, just as it went dead in real life, and my stomach drops through the floor. I am responsible for this missing child. I’m the one who told him to hang up and not to worry anymore. I told him he could trust the man at the door; god only knows what happened to him after that. I press my hand to the base of my throat, my fingers digging into my skin. None of this makes sense.
The payphone should never have rung.
The recording of Corey’s 911 call should never have gone missing. It certainly shouldn’t have just played down the line for me now.
There’s no way anyone should have even known it was me who answered Corey’s call the other night. And no way anyone should have been able to find out where I live. Who would go to the trouble of finding out? If someone broke into the Petrov house to steal a child, then the crime was against the Petrovs. But to bother finding me, to track me down and constantly call the payphone? That gives the crime a different meaning altogether. That connects it tome, makes it personal tome. And why would anyone kidnap a child just to fuck with a twenty-six-year-old woman, who lives a small, normal, quiet life and doesn’t have even the slightest bearing on the rest of the world?
A swarm of questions light up in my mind and fade like dying lightning bugs. I can’t catch hold of them quick enough to process them, and my voice has fled my throat anyway. I’m a statue, standing in front of a payphone—a woman bathed in flickering street light, constructed of marble, and fear, filled with the desperate need to run back up to her apartment and hide. My legs are rooted to the sidewalk through my feet, though, and my heart is skittering behind my ribcage, and it’s all I can do to remember to breathe.
Corey’s timid voice is gone now, but another voice follows. It’s neither female nor male, the timbre of its words distorted and crackling too much to provide any kind of indication as to who it might belong to. It says only a few words.
“Rochester Park. The end of the line.”
I know Rochester Park, of course. I’ve lived in Spokane long enough to have heard the name, but I’ve never been there myself. When I find my voice, it’s ragged and harsh. “Is…that where he is? Is that where you took Corey? Is the boy still alive?”
But there’s no response. I’m too late. The line has gone dead.
6
PASHA
PROXY
Another fight. Another twenty grand. Another night filled with the most intense sex dreams I’ve ever experienced. Even more intense than the ones I used to have when I was twelve years old and I was jizzing in my shorts every other second of the live-long day.
It’s Thursday. I’m not fighting tonight, which is a relief. I don’t normally open the shop on Wednesdays or Thursdays, but a guy booked in for a full back piece, over a grand’s worth of work, and he could only do today, so I’m making an exception.
I spend a full thirty minutes in the shower, doing my best not to touch my dick. Unlike my pre-pubescent self, I haven’t come all over my bedsheets as a result of the crazy dreams that have been pervading my sleep, and…there’s something to be said for carrying around the sexual tension that now plagues me, coiled like a riled cobra in the pit of my stomach. It clears my head, somehow. Makes me mentally sharper in a way that feels weirdly good.
My dick is still pulsing like a goddamn beacon in my pants as I drive across town to the studio. I try not to think about the woman from my dreams, which is both easy to accomplish and difficult at the same time. Easy, because, no matter how hard I try, I can’t recall her face, or what she looks like. I see her so clearly in my dreams that it feels as though every aspect of her should be deeply engrained and burning in my memory, but no more than thirty seconds after I wake up, she vanishes from my subconscious and fades away, until only the mere shape and sense of her remains.
She is like a ghost, hovering in the peripherals of my vision from morning to night, watching over everything I do in silence; the moment I turn my head, trying to catch sight of her one more time, she disappears in a puff of smoke. It’s a futile exercise, trying to close the fingers of my mind around her, and so I do my best to let her go altogether.
I need to focus. As I go through the motions of driving, I force myself to do each action purposefully and with intent. Brake. Clutch. Shift. Signal. Turn. Change lanes. Turn. Signal. Brake. Clutch. Wait at each set of lights, my eyes burning into the red light, willing it to change color until it does, then hitting the gas, changing lanes, braking, shifting. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. By the time I kill the engine in the parking space reserved for the shop, I’m comfortably numb and detached from my body, even though I can still feel the restlessness tugging at my limbs, trying to pull me in four different directions.
I walk slowly across the parking lot, despite the fact that it’s fucking freezing and any sane person would jog across the stretch of blacktop to get inside quicker.The cold’s good for you, you stupid prick, I tell myself.It’ll stop your mind from wandering.
Inside the shop, the place is as cold as a meat locker. I don’t have much choice now: the frigid temperatures might be good for my mental state, but they’re hardly conducive to expert tattooing skills. This guy’s back piece will end up looking like a fucking four-year-old’s kindergarten scrawl if I can’t feel my fucking hands properly.
It’s not long before the studio’s a comfortable seventy-five degrees. I down a coffee as I get the place prepped for my client, and then I down another as I sit at my desk and sketch out a mockup of the tattoo I’ll be doing today, as per my client’s instructions.
An ouroboros—a vivid, bright green snake, twisted around on itself, eating its own tail. The symbol for eternity in many cultures, including my own. In the background, I draw long, thick bands of fire, the flames leaping high over the serpent’s head, and in the sky, an owl in flight. I develop a facial tic as I draw the owl. I pretend I’m unaffected by the bird the guy has chosen, but I’m not very good at lying to myself.
To my people, an owl isprikaza.If a Roma hears an owl hooting just after dawn, it’s believed that someone is going to die. My mother would wash her hands repeatedly if she saw what I was etching right now—not a part of Roma culture, per se. Just something she does whenever she feels like she needs to rid herself of bad luck.
I shove all thoughts of bad luck and my mother out of my head, leaning over my desk as I finish up the sketch, and before I know it an hour has passed. I’ve just completed the finishing touches to the tattoo design when the door chimes and a gust of arctic wind blasts through the toasty warm space.
“Be right there.” Unclipping the tracing paper from the white pad it was tacked to, I brush it off, checking the ink lines to make sure they’re perfect, and then I head through into the front of the shop…
…where I find Patrin perusing the gallery of tattoos, flicking through each of the displays, frowning at the work.
