Page 10 of Cruel Lies

Thank god for screen protectors.

My fingers fumbled and managed to turn off the alarm; the urge to go back to bed and tell the world to fuck off so strong, I practically passed out right there on the floor. This life I’d chosen for myself was more grueling and taxing and demanding than I’d ever imagined it would be, but I wouldn’t change a thing.

The wild differences between this and my past life kept me safe and kept the wolves at bay.

My morning was routine, and before I felt like I’d blinked properly, I was already heading to work, messenger bag slung over my shoulder, knife in hand, ponytail swinging behind me like a metronome.

Some say that there’s two different cities. Two Port Wyldes. That the daytime one is worlds apart from the one after nightfall. I think that people just hide it better in the light.

At night, the real criminals were emboldened. They wandered the streets, doing just about whatever they wanted. Killing. Raping. Looting. Hell, just last week, there’d been a headline of some business mogul being tied to the back of a couple of dirtbikes and dragged through the street. Apparently, it came out that he was also a kiddy diddler in his offhours, so good riddance to that piece of trash. Personally, I thought the criminals who acted under the cover of anonymity, hiding from the whole of society, denying their misdeeds, were the worst of the worst. If you’re going to do evil, at least have the balls to own up to it.

Cowards, the lot of them.

The sun was up early today, already beating down on the same pavement my shoes clapped noisily along as I turned off the street filled with dilapidated buildings and abandoned apartments, and onto Crowe St, where the businesses might still be shit, but at least weren’t boarded up.

I was honestly surprised by how many people brought their nice ass cars to Big John’s in this neighborhood to get fixed. Then again, good work was so hard to find these days. It was probably saving John an arm and a leg in wages to post up and work in a seedier, desperate neighborhood where many people had to choose between rent or dinner several times a month.

I wasn’t usually the first to work, so it didn’t surprise me to see some cars already in the lot. What did surprise me was the one I didn’t recognize in front of bay one, still running.

That Torino wasn’t on our schedule.

John was a piece of shit, but there were some things he could be counted on for. One of them was an almost rigid adherence to the schedule. If you weren’t on the calendar, didn’t have an appointment, you didn’t get serviced. And I knew all the cars we were scheduled to work on for the week.

A 1970 Ford Torino sat there, painted in that insanely dark Vanta Black shit, making it look more like a void and less like an actual car. It would not surprise me if this thing disappeared at night. I couldn’t imagine driving in front of floating headlights.

Tony and fucking John were standing outside, ogling the fucking thing like two boys who’d just seen their first pair of tits. Leave it up to them to appreciate a car more than their women.

"Oy, John!" I waited for him to look in my direction, but it was like he couldn’t hear me. "John!"

Nothing.

Figured.

I marched past the sexy as fuck muscle car and wandered into the office, giving a nod to our receptionist on the way to the lockers. Ten seconds later, I’d zipped into my jumper, tossed my bag in the locker, spun the dials on my lock, and marched out to start the day. Hell, all I was missing was a pair of gloves, and a half-greased up towel dangling from my back pocket, and I’d be every movie’s stereotypical mechanic.

"Good morning, Hannah," Annie, our lovely receptionist chimed. "You wanna look at the book today, or did you memorize the schedule again?"

I chuckled and fake-punched her shoulder playfully. "You know me too well." I took the fresh towel she held out and tucked it in an unused belt loop, then meandered into bay three, my home away from home.

Throughout the day,I watched my typical clients come and go, working through my scheduled jobs in half the time I planned for. The blacked-out Torino had conveniently disappeared when the bay doors rolled up, and I hadn’t given it a second thought other than to wonder how much money they had in the paint job alone.

When the last client for the day had picked up their car, I rolled my bay door closed and wiped the sweat from my brow with my now near-black towel, which only served to smear grease and oil across my forehead.

Great. Now I was dirtier than when I’d started.

I could not win for losing here.

I gave up on looking halfway decent on my walk home andtrudged slowly into the locker room, slipping off my jumper carefully so I didn’t get the filth of the day on my clothes beneath it.

Tony eyeballed me while I stripped, like the fucking perv he was. Dude just couldn’t take a hint. Tongue hanging half out of his mouth like some comical cartoon dog, he licked his lips, sucked on his teeth, and shot me a raised-brow look of contempt.

"So, you sure you don’t wanna go with us tonight, Flagg?"

The last time he barked up this tree, I kicked him in the nads. He either had short-term memory loss or a really thick skull. An intelligent man wouldn’t have tried that again.

Tony wasn’t an intelligent man.

I rolled my eyes, then counted to five before I turned to face him, hoping against the odds that he managed not to say something that shot me over the line. I didn’t want to do anything I would regret later. Some things you couldn’t take back. This might be Port Wylde, but murdering a coworker wasn’t on my to-do list today.

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