As for the truck, that was up to me to steal. The Dixie Mafia was still important in Knoxville back then, though they were on the fringe of things. But when one of their members, an asshole named Pate with a big beer gut and a scraggly beard, said they had a job for me, I was pretty quick to listen.
Pate wanted me to steal him a truck. He said that if I could pull it off, then he’d consider giving me his old one. To a dumbass kid who wanted more than anything to be a real gun-toting Dixie man, that sounded like a fucking dream. Plus, I might get my own truck out of the deal.
Before that, I’d never done anything but petty crimes. I shoplifted some shit, sold a little weed here and there, basically all the beginner criminal shit. This, though, this was the big leagues as far as I was concerned.
I was such a dumb fucking kid. I remembered the night I snuck onto my neighbor’s land, a guy who owned maybe ten piece-of-shit, beat-up trucks. I figured he wouldn’t even notice if one of them went missing. Of course, as soon as I got there, I had no fucking clue how to actually steal one.
My neighbor caught me trying to break one of the windows out. I ran, but not fast enough, because the cops showed up on my doorstep the next day. I got off with a warning, thankfully, since a record could’ve fucked my chances at becoming a SEAL. But the worst part of it was, Pate stopped by the following day and beat my ass bloody for letting him down.
That beatdown really soured me on the Dixie Mafia. They went from badass heroes to a bunch of petty thugs practically overnight.
I enlisted in the military not long later. There were other reasons, good fucking reasons, but that was one of them. My brother was another reason.
I snapped back to reality and pressed my ear against the door again. The crying had stopped or moved into another room, so I figured it was time to get in there before the ice melted. I unlocked the door and stepped inside.
Hartley was sitting on the chair, looking blindly toward the bathroom.
“Got the ice,” I said.
She looked at me and nodded. “Thanks.”
Her bruise had gotten worse it seemed in the last ten minutes. I walked into the bathroom and grabbed a little towel and then wrapped it around some ice. I gave the towel to Hartley, and she pressed the thing against her eye.
The sun was beginning to set outside as I walked over to the dresser and pulled out a drawer. Inside was a nice bottle of whisky I’d bought on my way into town, just for this sort of occasion. I grabbed two glasses, opened the bottle, and poured us drinks. I returned to the table, putting the glass in front of her and holding on to mine.
She tried to smile weakly. “I must look like a mess.”
“Actually, I’ve never been fucking harder,” I said. “A woman with a black eye and running makeup does it for me.”
“That’s sick,” she said, laughing.
“What can I say? I can overlook certain defects in favor of certain other qualities.”
“What sort of qualities are you talking here?”
“For example, those lips of yours. And fuck, that body in that pretty dress. Every man in that bar probably wanted you.”
She smiled weakly. “I doubt it. They were all too drunk to notice.”
“I noticed,” I said seriously. “Couldn’t keep my eyes off you.”
She blushed and looked away. “What were you doing in there anyway?”
“Killing time,” I said. “I was on my way to visit my brother.”
“He live in town?”
“Something like that,” I said, avoiding her question. “If it’s time to ask questions, I think we ought to have a talk.”
She sighed and nodded. “I guess you want to know what that was all about.”
“Seems like a good place to start.”
“There’s not much to the story, honestly. When the recession hit, my family’s peach farm started bleeding money. We took a loan from the mafia just to stay afloat. Years later, they wanted us to pay up, so I came here hoping to make a deal or at least to work off the debt.”
I shook my head, completely fucking amazed. “Are you insane?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. They seemed reasonable at first.”
“Fucking reasonable,” I said, laughing. “Let me guess. They wanted you to fuck your way out of debt?”
“Pretty much,” she said. “I was working at a diner near here, giving them every cent I made, but it wasn’t enough.”
“Can’t imagine that would be,” I said. “You’re one brave girl. You know that?”
“I don’t feel brave,” she said.
But she really fucking was. Any person who would come to the heart of Knoxville and offer to work for the Dixie Mafia to pay off a family’s debt was very fucking brave. Maybe a little fucking stupid, maybe a little naïve, but very, very brave.