Rising Heat (2 page)

“No buts about it — what’s your name?”

“Kathy Mason,” I said. To be honest, I didn’t want the guy to know my name, but in my new role, I had to try and make this right or I had a feeling I wouldn’t be an assistant manager very long. “Like I said, sir, it’s just about closing time—”

“I expect your pet store to fix this mess. I need a new tank and I need it now.”

I sighed. What was the protocol for this? I had no idea. “What are you suggesting, sir?”

“I’m not suggesting. I’m demanding. I need you to bring me another tank.”

My heart thumped down to the pit of my stomach. “That’s highly inappropriate—”

“I don’t give a shit if it’s inappropriate. If your store sells pet equipment, it should stand by that equipment. I need a tank. I can’t get it on my bike. I need you or someone in your store to bring one to my home. Now.”

I hesitated, mentally flipping through the store’s policy and procedures for something like this, and for the life of me, couldn’t remember reading anything about mandatory home deliveries.

“Give me the name of your manager. I’m going to—”

“Sir, just calm down, please,” I urged, trying not to sound intimidated. “I’m trying to figure out a way—”

“I have a way. Bring me a new tank. Or I’ll be at the store first thing in the morning with a major complaint to your manager about your refusal to help. In fact, I’ll tell him what lousy service I received and how you were more worried about closing time than you were about helping a customer.”

“Why would you do that?” I gasped. “You don’t even know me!” Would he stand by his threat? If he told Bodie, would the smarmy manager stand up for me? I doubted it. No matter how good an employee I was, he would buckle beneath this man’s anger, I just knew it. If the guy demanded Bodie fire me, I had no doubt that he would. Bodie was a pushover. Period. If I got fired, I wouldn’t be able to pay for all the things I already couldn’t pay for. I didn’t doubt that I could find another part-time job, but I’d lose that extra dollar and the lapse in weekly paychecks would be my financial death.

But going to a strange man’s house? An
angry
man’s house? Was it worth the risk?

“Sir, this is
not
an acceptable option.” No response. “Sir, are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Let me make sure I understand. You’re asking me to bring you a new tank?
Now?”

“You’re a genius.”

“I don’t feel comfortable—”

“Neither does my snake,” he interrupted. “I can’t keep her under the heat lamp if she’s not in a tank, can I?”

“No sir, but—”

“Here’s my address.”

He rattled it off. He wasn’t far. It was a LoDo address, about a ten-minute drive away. Was he telling the truth? Or was he setting up a scenario where I could be attacked? Raped? Killed even? I shook my head. Why would anyone call a pet store to do that?

“Well?”

I sighed and reached for the small pad of scratch paper and a pen by the register and mentally kicked myself. If something bad happened to me, I would only have myself to blame. But I needed my job. “Can you give me that address again, please?” He did, sounding only slightly mollified.

He lived in a converted warehouse. The door to his loft was located on the southwest side of the building. I was supposed to push a buzzer and he would come down. It did little to comfort me. “I’m telling you right now, sir, that I don’t feel comfortable doing this. And I’ll tell you something else. If you’re not calmed down by the time I get there, I’ll pepper-spray your eyes and then call the police. Is that clear?”

Silence for a moment. Then, much to my surprise, he chuckled. “You don’t have to worry that I’m going to attack you, lady,” he said. There was a definite smirk in his voice. “All I want is a tank for my snake. As soon as we get the snake settled, you can leave. You have my word. Okay?”

No, it wasn’t okay, but I didn’t know what else to do. Normally, I wouldn’t even consider doing such a thing, but at the same time, it was my job to provide excellent customer service. Plus, as much as I hated them, the poor snake did need a home. What if it got out of the building and frightened some old woman to death?

Heaving out a deep breath, I vowed to be careful. I would keep my keys at the ready, prepared to scratch his eyes out if he made the slightest move to attack me. I wished I could back up my threat about the pepper spray. It was going to the top of my shopping list for the weekend.

I had an idea where he was located and verified it by asking him the cross streets. “I’ll bring you a new tank,” I finally agreed. “I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes.”

“Thanks,” he said and the phone went dead.

Ash

I
hung up the phone, not really caring at the moment that I was being an ass. The woman on the other end of the line had sounded flustered. I knew it was closing time but this was ridiculous.

Fuck.

Nothing was going right lately. This was the second time I’d bought equipment from that pet store and had a problem with it. Maybe I just should’ve waited until morning, insisted on speaking to the dick manager who sold it to me. Middle-aged, weak chin. Instead, I’d taken out my frustration on the assistant manager. Probably some snot nosed kid barely out of diapers. Or a fifty-something ex-hippie in a Muumuu.

I wasn’t normally such a jerk, but the thought of going to bed with my python slithering around somewhere pissed me off. Not only did she cost me a lot of money, but I didn’t want her to freeze. Not that it was snowing outside. Still. The loft where I lived wasn’t exactly easy to heat. The flooring was usually cold. Not good for snakes, I knew that much.

I didn’t often fall into a pit of self-pity, but the past couple of weeks had been a shit storm. Nothing had been easy about them. Now the snake. Such a stupid little thing, really, but come on; did everything have to be such a struggle? Not that I was afraid of struggles. God knows I’d dealt with enough of those over the past decade. But I was trying to change. Trying to change my attitude, my outlook, the way I thought about and did things. Shouldn’t that count for
something?
Instead, I had to deal with this?

I gave up my search for Alice for a few minutes and sank down onto the couch with a disgruntled groan. My loft was big. Nearly two thousand square feet. I liked it, but I hadn’t done much to the place since I bought it about a year ago. The building was old, built sometime in the late 1800s. The bank of factory windows that took up nearly the entire west side were grimy. Most of them didn’t open.

The large space was broken up by a few free-standing half-walls. One just inside the doorway blocked the view of my couch and television in the southeast corner of the cavernous room. To my immediate left was a section where I kept my bike gear and spare parts. It was separated from view by a shorter half-wall.

The bathroom in the northeast corner was completely walled in. The kitchen area was also situated along the north wall. Ancient gas stove, rattling fridge, cast iron sink, a second-hand microwave on the counter. Just beyond the kitchen, in the northwest corner was my bedroom. Another free-standing wall blocked the view of my bed from the doorway.

That was it. My castle. My man cave. My place. A dreary, shadowy space, cold most of the year. Cost a fortune to even try to heat, but I didn’t care. It was cool in the summertime, but during winter, I could often see my breath. Now that yet another Denver winter was on the way, I had to have a decent place for my snake. Which circled me back to the annoying situation with the damn tank. I gazed around the darkness, only the dull glow of a forty-watt bulb lighting the living room area.

It was a dump. I paid prime for the space and with a little work, it could be amazing. But I’d done nothing. Absolutely nothing to make it a home. I blew out a breath, sick of my own mental whining.

Me, Ash Bascom, feeling sorry for myself? What did I have to complain about? The fact that I had lost my way? I only had myself to blame for that.

I had few friends left, and only one I could count on. All I had to do was pick up a phone and ask him for help, which I wasn’t about to do. My family wasn’t an option. They were so dysfunctional that we’d become estranged long before I left home.

I turned my back on that very same family, even my fraternal twin sister, because she had the audacity to criticize me. In my own defense, she was a damn know-it-all. She had an answer for everything but was still living at home, following the rules and toeing the line. I hadn’t had the patience for that.

My twenty-ninth birthday was just around the corner and here I was, living alone, friendless, trying to start over after ten years of… well, let’s just say I was in the process of trying to put a recklessly indulgent past behind me. I’d spent, no, squandered the last ten years of my life getting wasted, living on the edge, binge-drinking, experimenting with drugs, and indulging in irresponsible sex with any woman who came on to me.

I shook my head as I stared out the grimy windows of my loft, wondering what the hell I’d been thinking, but even more curious as to what had given me my wake-up call. The fact that thirty was another birthday closer? That I was tired of the people I hung around?

Correction. Used to hang around.

I’d recently left the Outlaw Biker Boys motorcycle gang. We weren’t a gang like the Hell’s Angels or anything like that, and we weren’t your typical gang bangers. Just a group of misfits who had found camaraderie because of our dysfunctional lives, our bad attitudes, and our “I want it so I should have it” mentality. At least that’s how it started.

I glanced down at myself and shook my head. Tattered jeans, biker boots, and an old leather belt that I’d had for I don’t know how long. At the moment, I wasn’t wearing a shirt. Emblazoned on my chest were two thick, black tattoos that spanned my torso at chest level. Two strands of barbed wire, one between my nipple line and my collarbones, the other just below the base of my pecs. My first and only tattoo. Got it at the age of seventeen. I’d gotten drunk with a friend from high school, took one look at the image samples in the fat notebook at the tattoo parlor and pointed to the barbed wire. At the time it seemed to encompass how I felt about my life.

Trapped.

Being drunk and stupid, we had each gotten a tattoo. The barbed wire went on me and, my friend — I couldn’t even remember his name now — had gotten a skull with fangs on his shoulder blade.

I tried to think back, trying to determine exactly when my rebellion erupted. Junior high school? I’d always had the reputation of being a bad boy, a troublemaker, the one pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules. A sorry bid for attention, I supposed. But things had gotten out of control during high school. The deeper reason, one I deliberately pushed from my mind, niggled around the edges of my consciousness.

I guess people who thought of me, if they did, considered me the product of a dysfunctional family, scarred by demons, not the least of which was the burden of overwhelming criticism I’d felt by every one of my family members. I can’t remember how many times my father, the one and only Harold Bascom, financial mogul and major asshole, told me that I was damaging his reputation and I had better cease and desist, or else. My mother, who after
the incident
couldn’t seem to look at me without that goddamned expression that, to her credit, she tried to hide but couldn’t.

And my twin sister, Lacey, who tried to be my supporter, my confidant, until I managed to push her away too. So pathetic. I tried to think back to what the family had been like before the accident, but I couldn’t really remember. Were we ever normal? Were we dysfunctional even before the tragedy that turned our lives upside down?

The snake forgotten, I leaned my head against the back of the couch, staring up at the ceiling, not seeing the old ventilation or the crisscrossed copper water pipes. I looked past the ancient wooden braces that creaked and snapped every winter, doing their best to hold onto the roof when the spring winds blew, the rain poured, and the weight of snow that fell on it every winter.

Lowering my gaze to the walls, the windows, anything to distract my mind from what it wanted to remember. Becky. Becca to me. My little sister, younger than Lacey and me by two years. I was sixteen, she only fourteen that day she begged me to take her for a ride.

I had just gotten my driver’s license. My dad was as some board meeting, but my mom was puttering out in the backyard, tending to her prized roses. She liked to garden; always said that digging in the dirt and smelling the freshly turned soil renewed her spirits. I thought that was incredibly corny at the time, considering she only spent her days volunteering for charity events and playing bridge, but now I think I understood what she was trying to say.

Unwilling, but now distinctly meandering down the path toward memory lane, I relived that day, recalled every sound, sight, and smell. The smell of burning rubber on the asphalt as I peeled out of the dirt driveway of our home and onto the highway. The delighted squeal of my little sister as she hung onto the car door handle with one hand, clutching at my arm with the other. We were both laughing. Becca. Sweet, innocent Becca. Always smiling, always finding the good in people, always able to make my father smile and my mother’s face soften with affection.

I swear to God I hadn’t had anything to drink before I got into my brand new Mustang that afternoon. I hadn’t smoked a joint, was not driving recklessly, nothing. Yes, I was going over the speed limit, but nothing outrageous. We flew down the two-lane highway just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, the windows down and the wind tugging at Becca’s hair. I’ll never forget the startled cry that erupted from her throat when the front passenger tire blew; a loud bang that took us both by surprise. I’ll never forget the wrench of the steering wheel as my fingers automatically tightened around it.

In my mind, I told myself not to over-correct, don’t over-correct… but the next thing I knew, the two right tires found the loose dirt at the side of the highway and the two left tires had lifted off the ground. Neither one of us were wearing seat belts. I should’ve known better. I should’ve insisted. I should’ve—