Enforcer (36 page)

Connor shrieked with terror as the maggots fell out of her empty eye sockets when she leaned down to kiss him.

*****

He woke to the sound of his own scream. Jera was shaking his arm, her eyes about to burst from her head. She looked as scared as Connor felt. He was afraid this was going to be just another dream within a dream, and her body would melt or decompose, or his old pals Niklas and Travis would pop into the room any second to surprise him.

“Oh my God, Connor, are you okay?” Jera’s eyes had returned to normal size, but her face was still full of terror.

He stared at her for a while, waiting to see if she would be part of another nightmare.

“How long was I asleep?” he asked.

“About two hours. I got bored of television and wanted to sleep.”

He got out of bed and headed to the bathroom. The light pierced his eyes, forcing him stand in front of the toilet for a few extra seconds until he could open them enough to see what he was doing. He heard movement and looked toward the doorway. Jera filled the gap, watching him urinate.

“You have no shame and no boundaries,” he complained.

“Like I don’t see what men are made of every night,” she said, dismissing his embarrassment. “I just want to make sure you’re okay. That’s the third time this week, and each time it happens, it scares the shit out of me.”

“You don’t have to be here to be annoyed by it,” he replied, flushing the toilet then turning the sink on.

“Don’t be an asshole. I’m worried about you. You never tell me what the nightmare is about.”

“It’s not important. And it’s over, I’m awake,” he said as he splashed water on his face. He turned off the sink and dried off with a towel.

“It
is
important. I can see how it affects you for a long time after, sometimes all day and night.”

He slipped by her and made his way to the kitchen, calling out, “You want coffee?”

“Stop avoiding it, damn it!” she yelled after him.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he told her after she followed him into the kitchen.

“I didn’t want to talk about shooting up between my toes or carrying around a pipe everywhere I go.”

“Yeah, well, that’s you.” He banged the cupboard doors open and shut, unable to find any coffee.

Jera walked to him, grabbing his arms to stop him from slamming another door. She wrapped her arms around him, holding him, her head against his chest. Connor waited for her to turn into a rotting corpse, a skeleton, even a fire-breathing demon. He couldn’t get the residual fear out of his mind.

“I know you hate me, but I don’t hate you,” she said, pulling her head back to look up at him. “I care about you, I trust you. You’re the only one on Earth who is nice to me, who helps me. You
have
helped me, more than I can ever repay. I just want to try and help you once.”

Connor removed her arms from his midsection and filled a glass with water. As he walked back to the bedroom, he grabbed her by the arm and led her along. He took a long drink of water, setting the glass on the nightstand before lying down on the bed again. Jera joined him, but left half of the bed between them.

“It’s a dream I’ve had since I was eighteen. I had an accident, a skate cut my leg open,” he explained.

“The scar, on your leg?” she asked. She’d seen it a few times and couldn’t help staring at it, wondering what could have happened to leave such a scar.

“Yeah,” he answered. “The guy who did it, he kind of lost it after that, gave up on life. But it was an accident, you know? He didn’t mean it, that’s just how shit goes sometimes. I talked to him a few years after, right about the time he was starting to seriously consider suicide. I laughed and joked about it, kept telling him that everything was great, I had done rehab and was working my way through the ECHL and AHL, trying to get back to what I was.

“I told him he needed to put on his skates again and forget it ever happened, that there was nothing wrong with me, that I had nothing to forgive since he didn’t do anything wrong. He did, and a year later, he was playing for the Sabres in the NHL. It was a great story. Then he died in a car accident, head-on collision that shoved a steering wheel through his chest and ground his lower legs up like hamburger.

“I used to dream about the goal I scored, and the skate cutting me right after. I’d wake up sweating, reaching down, expecting blood all over my sheets and being able to feel inside my leg. Then Niklas died and I started dreaming about him. He and I were almost always in a locker room, talking about nothing, hockey or girls, whatever, and then he’d start falling apart before my eyes. Like he was going through rapid decomposition, turning into a zombie.

“But he wouldn’t even be aware of it. He’d be laughing and telling me some story about a time in a game versus the Rangers, or while on the plane as they were traveling to another city. His skin would turn black and fall off, his eyes would sink into his skull, his fingers would fall off. He’d stop when my face got all twisted up I guess, and ask me what was wrong, and I’d start freaking out, trying to run down the dark hallways under the arena, except it was a perpetual circle.

“I’d keep passing by the locker room every minute or two, and he’d be standing in the doorway, missing a lower jaw, or a leg below the knee, his guts spilling out into the hallway, and he was just so fucking… calm about it. He’d keep talking like we were having a dinner conversation. Eventually, the nightmares evolved. Now they involve him and all kinds of other stuff, daily stuff, or people I know.”

Jera reached out and grabbed his hand. “I’m sorry. Do you always have them this often? Or do they come in cycles?”

“They cycle,” he said. He squeezed her hand before letting it go. “I can go a week straight and have one or even two per night, and I can go a month without dreaming about anything.”

“Am I in any of them?” she asked, stopping herself from grabbing his hand again.

“Sometimes,” he admitted, not willing to go into detail about her role in his nightmares. He couldn’t tell her about Travis, or how the nightmare didn’t come on with any regularity until he’d watched the man murdered within arm’s length. He left Dana out, and he wasn’t about to detail the sometimes sexual nature of the dreams.

“Am I a good guy or a bad guy?” she asked.

“What?”

“Am I a good guy, or a bad guy?” she asked again. “Do I do terrible things to you? Or do I try to help you?”

Connor thought of all the times he could remember her being in the nightmare. She was either arousing him with some part of her body, or she was arousing one of the dead men. A few times, she and Dana would be having sex with each other, while the corpses were taking turns with both of them. He wondered how twisted his head must be to constantly dream about such things.

“You’re a good guy, usually,” he lied. “Sometimes you try to save me. Once in a while you’re hurting me.”

“How am I hurting you?” she asked.

“It’s not important,” he answered, turning on his side to face her. “It’s just a dream. It’s a jumbled brain fart at the end of the night, exhausting all of the day’s memories so you don’t go insane when you wake up with a head still stuffed full of nonsense.”

“That sounds like clinical dream dissection,” she mocked.

“It sounds like what I believe. And even if I don’t believe it, so what? It’s just a dream. Sometimes trauma can haunt you for a long time, sometimes your entire life. Don’t you ever have nightmares where you are being knocked around, raped, hurt in terrible ways?”

“Sometimes,” she answered. “Mostly though, I dream about when I was in high school and college. I think my brain shuts out all the other shit to protect me.”

“Sounds like clinical dream dissection,” he said.

“Yeah, so sue me. I tune out whatever I’m doing when I’m working. Sometimes I can’t, but most of the time I can. The dope helps a lot, especially when it has a bit of heroin in it. Greg has pretty much perfected the right mix of meth and smack to keep me up and going, while relaxing me so I can zone out.”

“You just turn reality off while you’re fucking these guys?”

“Most of the time. I think about the shit I did in high school, the guys and a few girls I slept with in college. How I’m only short three semesters for a degree. I ponder the reason I started getting high in the first place. I didn’t have a shitty life at home. I didn’t get picked on in school. I didn’t get rejected by either men or women in college. I had grades almost good enough for the Dean’s List each semester.”

“So why’d you start using?”

“Honestly? I don’t know. I went from getting a good alcohol buzz on, to smoking a few joints, to dropping Ecstasy and acid, then some guy I met during summer break took us to a party and we smoked some crystal. I just sort of lost control. It ate me up and I didn’t care because the high was so good. Then school started again and I did well for the first three or four weeks before getting high started to be more important than Evolutionary Biology and Linear Algebra.

“I dropped out a couple of weeks later, or had already been withdrawn by the professors, depending on who you asked. I moved in with Terry, the guy who turned me onto the stuff. He lost his connection and we fought every night as we struggled to find a new connection and the money to buy it when we could score.

“One of the dealers we met offered to give me a decent amount if I’d blow him. I slapped him as hard as I could and ran out crying, Terry chasing me down the street. When he finally caught me, I told him what the guy had offered, and he pulled me all the way back by the arm, telling me how he was going to make the dealer apologize and give us some dope or face getting his ass kicked.

“Instead, he negotiated a better deal for himself, and talked me into giving the dealer head. ‘It’s just a blowjob’ he’d say, then go on about how many I’d already given in my lifetime, how many I’d given him. He convinced me that it was five or ten minutes of shame and an entire night of getting high out of our minds.

“The problem with it was that he ended up being right. It was ten minutes of easy work for me to get high for an entire night. I walked away from Terry once I realized what I could do for myself. Not having to share any with him meant more for me. I told myself sucking a dick was one thing, as it was mostly a handjob, but I would never spread my legs for dope. Somehow, I thought it was too degrading.”

“But you did,” Connor said, no trace of insult in his voice.

“Yeah, I did. I eventually ended up with Larry. He was always holding, and his shit was the best. It blew away anyone else’s crystal. I sucked and fucked and he kept me flush with dope, cigarettes, whatever I wanted. Which was mostly just dope and cigarettes. Then he started using his own shit with me, and from there… you saw what it looked like.”

Neither of them said anything for a few minutes. Jera moved closer to Connor, reaching out again to take his hand, finding his arm in the darkness instead. She thought he’d shrug her off like he always did. She shivered when she felt him touch her waist, his large hands spreading warmth through her skin where he touched it.

He finally spoke. “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t judge me,” she said.

He pulled her closer. “I’m not judging, I just can’t wrap my head around it. Around you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” he said, removing his hand and rolling over to sit up. “Let’s go get something to eat, I’m starving.”

CHAPTER 30

Connor sipped at his coffee, watching the people around him come and go. He had two more hours to kill before Jera’s next appointment. She was probably asleep on his bed. The boundaries they had agreed on were sometimes hard for her to honor. It was the reason he still spent time away from her as often as possible when she wasn’t working. He liked her, but the problem for him was his weakening resolve to honor the boundaries he’d been adamant about her agreeing to.

One of the boundaries was his bed. He made it clear that when he was trying to sleep, she had to find something else to do. He didn’t enjoy waking up to find her in his bed, especially after she’d just become a night terror in his dreams. More than that, he needed to keep his distance so he wouldn’t develop feelings for her. Petre’s words were at the front of his mind, though they were close to being drowned out by his thoughts of Jera.

“Connor Dunsmore?” a voice asked from his left, interrupting his thoughts.

He turned to his left. The man looked like serious business in a high-dollar tailored suit. He turned his head to the right to see almost a mirror image of the man on his left staring down at him.

“May we sit down and have a few minutes of your time?” the suit on his right said.

“Sure,” Connor waved to the seats at the little table. The coffee shop was almost empty.

“I’m Agent Gauthier, Idaho Drug Enforcement,” the man on his left said, producing a badge for Connor to look at. Connor was impressed that the man pronounced his last name as if he’d just immigrated from Quebec. “This is Agent Kline, DEA.”

“Am I being busted in some weird drug sting at a coffee shop?” Connor asked, trying to be humorous, but afraid the rising panic inside him was bleeding through his skin.