She set them down. Fear seeping into her. I was turning out to be the least she expected. I suppose the real me had to show sooner or later.

Dye and dying. We lay together our backs to the ground. A car pulls up and we look over. Its Ville, instantly I know, he set us up. His smile confirms it. He first walks over to Carmen’s smashed up vehicle and grabs the cache full of jewels. He motions for a goon to get the cache from my car. We can’t move but if we could he’d be in a shit storm right now, then again he’d probably have his goons kill us so where we are is how we will be…dead. He doesn’t say a word just laughs and gets back into his car and drives off. Carmen laughs, it’s pained and choked but she laughs.

“You know Shane…….this is fitting…don’t you think?”

“No…..I don’t….”

“Thinkthink about it…….those cache’s where in a museum, in a truck in garage….anyone could….could have jacked them……Ville coulda gone all by his…his lonesome….why us?”

“It was too easy….god……”

“He knew…..he knew that this shit was in those caches’s he knew that I wanted to kill him…..”

“Yup……”

Yeah…..he knew. Well its too late know….isn’t it?

Chapter 8

So picture me coming home to my empty apartment wearing the apron from the supermarket job. I get home and for the first time in a long while I don’t feel like everything is out to get me. I feel good, the invisible itch under my skin, I didn’t feel like scratching it. I crack open a Pepsi and sit by my window. I don’t think about putting guns to peoples’ heads, I don’t think about Carmen tied up and bleeding, I don’t think about my mother telling me that I was a cancer in her life, I don’t think of my big brother dead in the ground, instead I think about Tricia, I think about would she mind maybe taking a walk and talking and other things.

I look at my arm, my forearm really and I try to smell for her perfume or lotion whatever it was….nothing. So I called her. She answered….