Chaos Lives in Everything - 4. Chapter 4

Rebecca Hall was so excited that she could barely breathe. Even though it was cold and misty with the promise of freezing, ice-laced rain, it might as well be winter-that was how happy she felt.

Once she got done closing business with this client she would have her debt paid off. Or at least half of it, she thought happily. But having half of it paid off is better than not having any of it paid off at all.

The bell jangled as she turned and stepped into Bellman’s Coffee Shop. She loved the atmosphere of the place. Dark counter table tops. Polished tables. Booths. A shelf full of old tattered paperbacks that you could read as you drank your coffee or ate a bagel. Sometimes she liked to skim through them first before sitting down, sometimes sniffing at them, enjoying the smell of well-used paper. The pages were always satisfyingly yellow and dry beneath her fingers, like the husk of autumn leaves.

She worshipped coffee like it was a god. Or anything that was laced with caffeine. Her fridge was stocked with energy drinks, her medicine cabinet with caffeine pills. Her diet consisted of Ramen noodles, Tostitos pizzas, and Little Hostess snacks and she never gained a pound. She went three days at a time without sleep.

Rebecca had fifteen minutes before her client came. She slung her bag over the back of her chair, pulled out her laptop and ordered a large coffee and a buttered croissant with the full intention of sitting down, gobbling it down and enjoying a good start to her morning. As she waited she checked her bank account. She had three-hundred-eighty-four dollars and fifty cents in her bank account. Even though she could have easily done so, Rebecca didn’t break into other people's’ accounts and pay her bills off with their cash. Or her debt with Bajork. She liked to think of herself as a hacker that had at least some moral value. She didn’t charge her clients extra cash for her services. Her troubles came from a series of very unfortunate events as well from the fact that she was fiercely independent and didn’t like to ask for help. She had asked for help once and it had gotten her into a bad situation that she was still paying for.

Rebecca was absorbed in an Anne Rice novel when her client cleared his throat. Corvin Malone was the owner of a very large tax firm. The main office was located here in Roc City. Recently someone had been embezzling billions of tax dollars out of their vaults all across the world. He had hired Rebecca to find out who it was.

He took off his hat and set it on the table as he took a seat. His hair was mostly black with little flecks of grey. Eyes the color of a stormy sky looked her in the eye, finely arched eyebrows raised, an almost aristocratic gesture. His nose was long and narrow but not unattractively so. A neatly trimmed goatee framed thin and somber lips that didn’t have a single laugh line around it. The suit he wore was crisp and looked as if it he just bought it right before coming here. That hat is probably the only half stylish thing that he has in his house, Rebecca thought. She could see his red Porsche parked out front. It was a Convertible she noted. Oh, how I would love to get my hands on the steering wheel and my foot on the gas wheel and just be able to drive it once! she thought.

Most of the clients Rebecca were very rich and had a lot of money, more money than she could ever dream of having. And while she wasn’t exactly rich herself she could have afforded nice clothes-but didn’t. Over half of her money went into paying off the debt and it was a major one.

Twenty-three years old, she always wore her golden-blonde hair in pigtails.. She wore a black halter top and trip pants with chains hanging off of them. Her eyeliner, eyeshadow, mascara, and lipstick were all black making her look imposing.

However looks are not always the best way to measure one’s life or wisdom. She had scars, some that could be seen and many that could not.

Rebecca smiled. “Good morning Mr. Malone. Did you bring the cash?”

He held up a briefcase. It was black, made of real alligator skin. Probably real, she thought. And probably very expensive! “Fifty thousand in this brief case right here.”

Fifty thousand down and another fifty thousand to go, she thought happily. My debt is almost cleared up. And then she could move on with other things. Maybe expand her business, rent out an office and buy more equipment. She grew excited just thinking about the endless possibilities.

“I found out who it was that has been stealing your money.” She reached into her backpack and pulled out a folder and slid it across the table to Mr. Malone. “The guy’s name is Mikael Olmstead. He lives in Germany, nineteen-years-old, still lives with his mother. I looked up his bank accounts and he’s a millionaire and his mother doesn’t even know it. Frankly I don’t know how anyone’s caught onto him yet. Anyway inside is everything you need to know about him: his username, bank statements, the works. I’ve already alerted the German authorities and he is in custody right now as we speak.”

Mr. Malone’s lips twitched, the closest thing to a smile he seemed to be capable of. He picked up the briefcase and handed it to her. She opened it and grinned at the neat little stacks of bills, wondered if she should up the prices of her services.

“Thanks,” she said, beaming

“No Miss Hall, thank you. Should I need your services again I will definitely give you call.”

And just like that the deal had been signed, sealed, and closed. It was short, sweet and simple, just the way that she liked it. That was how all her jobs went since she did everything from her laptop and worked at home. Rebecca was a heavy believer in the power of convenience.

Rebecca ordered another croissant before leaving and read a few more pages of the Anne Rice novel, tapping her right foot as she did. She loved the poetic way Rice wrote, the way her words and descriptions opened up the five senses and sucked you into whatever world the book took place in. Her eyes barely skimmed the pages she read so fast.

Rebecca took the bus to her apartment on Sycamore Avenue. For three hundred dollars a month she rented a little efficiency apartment. There wasn’t much to her apartment. Her living room had a sofa and a mattress in the middle of the room. There was no TV or cable. She could access everything through her laptop.

Rebecca pulled out her keys and unlocked the front door. She stepped into the low, dimly lit apartment. Curtains had been drawn across the windows, blocking out the sunlight. She always kept it dim like this. The walls were barren, no pictures of families or friends worth preserving memories over.

As soon as she shut the door she senses something wrong, danger. She was good at sensing danger.

She reached for her mace gun, felt her fingers wrap around the handle, was about to pull it out. Before she could something grabbed her from behind, whirled her around, and slammed her up against the wall. The mace gun fell from her hand. She had bought it just last week on Amazon for forty bucks. I should have bought a real gun, she thought. I doubt this will do much good anyway. Bajork, you fucking bastard. Why can’t you just leave me the hell alone?

Yorjk was Bajork’s most loyal henchman. Since Bajork stayed behind the scenes and never revealed himself Yorjk carried his dirty business for him.

“Uh, hiya Yorjk,” Rebecca said, trying to sound as friendly as she could. “What can I do for you?” Her voice was calm and measured, not so much as a tremor could be detected in her words. But inside her stomach was a twisted knot of nerves and muscles wound tight. She wanted to claw at his eyes, bite him, bash his brains in with her fist, fight back, do something other than nothing. If she screamed maybe someone would hear her and come running to the rescue.

But fear of Yorjk and his size and strength kept her jaw wired shut to tight that her jaw hurt and her arms pressed flat against the wall at her sides, stiff and useless. She was nothing but a toy doll with pigtails compared to him. He could lift her up and tear her apart with both hands. Nasty images of him doing just that floated into her brain. She could see his giant, meaty, picking her up, crushing her bones into sand. Then he would rip the upper half of her body from the lower half and her entrails would splatter on the floor. Just thinking about it made her throat constrict and her head painfully dizzy.

Don’t think about it, she told herself. Just do whatever you have to do to survive.

“Bajork wants to know if you have his money,” Yorjk grunted. His voice sounded gravelly, as if he had a bunch of rocks scraping against the insides of his throat.

She pointed at the briefcase. “There’s fifty thousand dollars right there that you can give to him. That’ll pay off half of what I owe.”

He glanced at the briefcase and let go of her. She had to lean against the wall to keep her knees from buckling out from underneath of her. He opened the case, peeked inside.

“You can count it if you want,” Rebecca said. Her voice trembled. Tears burned her eyes, threatened to overwhelm her.

But he didn’t count the money. He picked up the brief case, walked towards the door. Before leaving he turned to her. “Bajork is giving you a week to pay off the rest.”

She clenched her jaw. “What happens if I don’t pay it off in a week?”

“You know what will happen.”

Go away! she wanted to shout in her jaw. Just get out of my fucking apartment!

Yorjk rounded the corner and was out of sight.

Rebecca slammed the door behind her, cursing. She had heard of stories of what happened to people who didn’t pay off their debts to Bajork. They weren’t pretty. And there’s no way that I can get the money paid off in a week, she thought. Not unless I were to steal from a bank. Which she wouldn’t do. She refused to resort to illegal action!

Her rent was coming up. There were bills that needed to be paid. She was fucked. She needed advice and there was only one person who she trusted.

The pier had once been one of the hot spots in Roc City. Not long ago, at this time of the year the beach would have been blanketed with people stretching out on towels, letting the sun sear their skin; kids would run up and down the street, laughing and chasing each other. Vendors sold ice cream and milkshakes and elephant ears, beer and fish and bait. Sail boats would look like tiny specks against the line of the horizon.

But now the pier was dead. Most of the vendors had closed down their stands and many of the stores that had once been teeming with the crowd had gone out of business. Occasionally you might see young star-crossed lovers strolling along the bank, holding hands or a group of children making a half-hearted attempt to build a sand castle. But now the pier was a place of ghosts and stale memories.

Twig lived in a washed out building that had once been a grand resort. The rooms had been refurbished into apartments. Twig’s apartment smelled of dried cum. Twig’s eyes were always wide, his words tumbling out of his mouth so quickly that sometimes Rebecca could barely understand what he was saying. His apartment was so cluttered that it made her feel claustrophobic-which was saying something because Rebecca was no clean freak himself. Whenever Rebecca saw Twig her heart ached for him; each time it felt as if it was breaking all over again.

Rebecca was bisexual. She had dated both men and women. And out of all of her relationships Twig had been her greatest love-and her greatest failure. He’d taken her off the streets and given her a home and a sense of security. He’d whispered the sweetest words that she’d ever heard in her ears at night, his fingers running gently through her hair. On the night that those four men had savagely beat her and tried to rape her, he stayed up with her all night and comforted her, held her. But in the end she had come to realize-or maybe she had always realized-that drugs had always been Twig’s greatest love.

Twig sat at his computer chair in front of a large bank of computer screens and wires tangled haphazardly together. His desk and the floor around his chair was covered in candy bar wrappers. Hacking, porn, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, Rebecca knew, were Twig’s favorite things. They had all three in common.

“You want to go see Skold?” Twig’s fingers tapped nervously against his thigh. Rebecca couldn’t help but stared at the blackened tread marks that went up his arm, from wrist to elbow. “He’s dangerous you know. You don’t want to get yourself into trouble.”

“Well, it’s not like I can get myself into any more trouble than I already am. You know what happens to people when Bajork makes them disappear. They’re never seen or heard from again.”

“What if Skold decides not to take you as a client? Can you even afford his services? I hear he’s very expensive.”

“I don’t know, Twig!” Rebecca shot to her feet. “I’ve only got a week to get fifty thousand dollars together. There’s no way I’ll be able to get the money together in that amount of time.” The walls of Twig’s tiny, cramped apartment were closing in on her. She wanted to cry all over again. Why did I come here? she thought. What made me think that Twig was going to be able to help me? He can’t even help himself.

Twig got out of his computer chair and came to her. His thin arms wrapped around her shoulders and held her to him. She could feel the sharp angles of his shoulders; just how thin he was. Twig had always been tall and lanky, the type of person who never gained weight no matter how much junk food he ate. But now he was like a skeleton, all skin and bones and nothing else.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry that you’re going through this,” he said, rubbing her back. “I know some people, maybe I can get the money together.”

In the back of her mind Rebecca knew that he had the best of intentions; he was trying to comfort her, to make her feel better. But in the end his words were hollow, meaningless. He was just in as much trouble with the people he knew as she was. Still, she kissed him on the cheek. She had always loved Twig for his heart, for his weakness. Weak things were beautiful things.

If only good intentions could save her life.

The sun had slipped beneath the sky, day had become night. Rebecca strolled lazily along the banks of the ocean, her hands stuffed in her pockets. There was only one name that ran through her mind: Skold.

She had seen him just that one time and that one time only, and even then, it had just been a fleeting glimpse. Still it was something that she would never be able to forget, an experience that haunted her in her sleep most nights. Even now she could feel the pain and the fear as the four men kicked at her, in her ribs and chest, and the small of her back. She could still hear them laughing and cheering, four men just having a good time. She remembered how the blood had run from a gash in her forehead, how it had leaked into her eyes, turning the night red; she remembered how she’d bled from her nose and split lips.

The one man, the biggest man had turned over. He was an ugly, bearded brute with nasty teeth. When he spoke, she could smell a mixture of tobacco and beer on his breath. His eyes burned with madness and his words were slurred. “We’re going to have a party little girl,” he said. “Just the five of us. And guess what? You’re the guest of honor.”

Rebecca didn’t scream. She’d already tried that. No one came to the rescue, no one cared. In this city people only cared about themselves. The man had stood up, looking like a giant from where her crumpled body lay. She watched him unzip his fly. She closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see the rest. She was sure she was going to die, and she would feel a great deal of pain before then. A lot of pain.

Then she felt blood splash her face, heard the man scream in agony. It was not her blood but the man’s blood. When she looked up she could see his body still standing over her. Where his head had once been was a bloody stump. Rebecca screamed as the body fell on top of her, pinning her to the ground. She heard the others scream but she didn’t see them die; she didn’t want to see them die. Then the alleyway was silent except for the sound of the city’s industrial spirit moving on around her.

Somehow, she managed to push the body off her and sat up. And there he stood, his back turned to her.

Skold.

She knew it was him and yet she couldn’t believe her eyes. Skold, the bounty hunter, a legend. She’d seen his name in the newspapers many, many times. People were afraid of him. In that moment, she wasn’t afraid.

He was looking at her with those silver eyes that seemed to be made of the moon itself. Even though his face was covered in blood it was still unimaginably beautiful. He held a single knife in his hand. He said nothing to her. She looked down at the ground. He had literally ripped the men to pieces, their body parts scattered around the alley.

And then she’d fainted. When Rebecca woke up she was in the hospital.

That was two years ago.

Even now, it felt like it had happened just yesterday.

Rebecca stretched out in the sand and looked up at the moon. She didn’t care if sand clung to her clothes and the biting chill of the wind didn’t bother her; she’d lived in Roc City her whole life. She was used to the cold weather.

It always went back to that night. Why did he save her? Why did he take her to the hospital? Why hadn’t he asked her what her name was or stay to make sure that she was okay? Why had he bothered at all? For two years, she fought the temptation to seek him out and ask him these things, to tell him thank you. Just when she thought she had gathered up the courage she realized that she wasn’t brave enough.

Now she didn’t have a choice. If anyone could help her it was Skold, he was sure of it. People cowered in fear at the whisper of his name. Skold-the monster, the sociopath. Only the most powerful of people went to him. People with money, people who were involved with organized crime. People that could get away with murder.

Rebecca was none of these things but she was desperate. She didn’t want to die, she knew this for sure. She was only twenty-three. She was too young to die. And if she didn’t figure out some way to deal with Bajork he was going to kill her for sure.