Dirty Driver: Dark Crime Romance Read online

  Her groans as she clenched and hammered herself harder and harder against my thighs.

  Most of all, I remembered my frustration when I wanted to taste her more. Deeper, and for longer, and she clawed and dragged me up, in a rush for what she called the “main event.” And all the time people call me selfish. Damn.

  As the picture of the slave girl floated back up in my mind, I wondered how she would taste. Still, we were going for Corporate Brad, so I would never find out.

  It was another day, there was sure to be another damsel.

  Chapter Two

  Hayley

  A TALL, MYSTERIOUS MAN stood over me from behind, his sandalwood scent conjured images in my mind. Ancient forests and a dark quest.

  Something dangerous. Strange places we would have to travel. We would be companions in an adventure. Close companions.

  Seated at a long, pale wood table, I was dazzled, bathed in long shafts of morning light. The sun glared through the high windows of the library. Sounds were odd and disconnected, like they were in slow-motion or I was hearing them through thick liquid.

  The sounds distracted me, made it hard to concentrate on what he wanted to teach me. I couldn’t focus properly on the huge open book.

  His voice aroused me, kindled my desire. His eyes danced with the fire of knowledge. His tongue flicked across his lips as he saw my understanding begin to awaken. He leaned forward and the scent of his body made me want...

  Then things fell on me from out of the light. Live, moving, heavy things.

  “Haley! Get up, get up, get up!” Waynetta’s voice rasped like a high-pitched saw as the study hall blew away like wisps of cloud. Tarquin’s little hands bashed at me through the covers, barging away the last fading fragments of my sweet, long gone sleep.

  The squeals of little voices and thunder of little bodies landed on top of me like they’d been dropped out of the air. They felt like they were made of knees and elbows.

  It was a shock, just like always. By now I should have been getting used it, but the five o’clock barnstorming still took me by surprise every time.

  There was no point in fighting it. If I didn’t force myself up and out of bed now, Aileen’s children would only pound away at me until I did. There’s no way to sleep with two kids bouncing full of morning energy on top of you.

  ~<>~

  When Aileen interviewed me in her sumptuous kitchen, I should have been the one trying to convince her of my excellent childcare and domestic abilities, of which I had an almost perfect score of zero.

  When she offered me the job, it should have made me pause. The only thought I had was that I would be able to pay down some of my tuition fees. I should have stopped to wonder why this woman would be ready to hand the care of her children to somebody like me. Somebody who clearly had no skills or qualifications. My idea of a balanced diet was to alternate chocolate cake with ice cream, or get the Hawaiian topping on a pizza.

  Almost every kitchen that I knew smelled of nothing at all except the faint whiff of antibacterial wipes. Aileen’s kitchen smelled fresh, appetizing, and bright. It turned out to be the first of many deceptive things about my new employer.

  The small, nodding, golden Buddha should have been my first clue that Aileen was not quite the calm, straightforward, rational person she seemed to project.

  She produced the golden figure, a little thing a couple of inches high, with a sticky base. The blissful smile and lofty eyebrows bobbed as his head nodded and kind of drifted from side to side, like a Bollywood dancer. His right hand was raised with his two middle fingers folded down and the outer two pointed heavenward.

  “You need one of these for your car.” Aileen held the little ornament towards me.

  “He’ll protect you in your car. He’ll protect your car, too. He’ll keep you from having crashes, help you find parking spaces, keep you safe and bring you good car karma.”

  A big smile lit Aileen’s face. She said, “Car karma!” and she clapped her hands. “That’s really good. I’ll use that.” She fished in a bag for a notebook and a pen. “I have a little company.” She said, “We make things like this. Things that transform people’s lives and bring them peace and joy.”

  As she said it she made a note. Her lips were pulled between her teeth as she wrote, ‘CarKarma,’ then she looked up, smiling, “But this is going to be the one that really transforms our world.”

  She picked up the little Buddha and held it towards me again. “You gave me that inspiration.” She stopped a moment, “At least, your presence here was a part of me having the inspiration.” She smiled. “We really are going to get along.” I wasn’t so sure, but I had debts and they were a great motivator.

  The little Buddha’s head rocked woozily round and around, from side to side. “Really,” Aileen nodded, too, holding it towards me. “You should have one.”

  Fresh in my memory was the spreadsheet I made with my mounting college fees. Particularly the horribly long number in the bottom right hand corner.

  ~<>~

  When Aileen finally stumbled into the kitchen around 10:00 to yawn over the breakfast I prepared for her, she’d shouted over her children’s hyperactive, over-tired shrieks, “Mommy’s delicate this morning, darlings,” which only drove them to run harder around the kitchen and in circles around me, yelling louder.

  Aileen told me it was “lovely” that the children were so fond of me.

  While I blitzed her curly kale, edamame, quinoa, and cress smoothie, Aileen moved to muss the children’s hair and hold them in front of her. They looked the perfect, idyllic family. For about a half a second.

  Tarquin beamed as he pulled Wanetta’s hair. She screamed and chased him, squealing around the tiled kitchen.

  “We’ll have to drop them at the party in about twenty minutes,” Aileen said, “and then I’ll need you to come with me. Just run a couple of quick little errands while I get my treatments. Then you can go back to the party and look after them from there.”

  A few little errands. I knew that would involve visits to any number of stores, with lists of the most unbelievably specific demands. No, it wasn’t enough that I would have to provide crowd control, quite possibly unaided, to dozens of hyper-energetic, mood swinging mini athletes, but first I would have to be her surrogate customer from hell, with a mission to ruin the mornings of about a dozen perfectly nice business owners.

  As Aileen’s demands rolled off her tongue, I pictured how the color would drain from the shop assistant’s faces as the corners of their mouths struggled to hold the expression of agreeable politeness that upmarket stores always strive to provide.

  “A little table, with mother-of-pearl and Abilene inlays, and a glass top. Carved in the Islamic style, like the one in this painting,” she pointed at an old picture in an art book, “Only with a glass top, of course.” She smiled, serenely. All of Aileen’s requirements were like that. Unbelievably specific about things that were mostly unachievable, yet incredibly vague about the things that were essential.

  About an hour later we drove up to the house of the pool party and Tarquin and Waynetta exploded out of the back of the car. Aileen said, with uncharacteristic sense,

  “Haley, maybe it’s better if you stay with the children and I can take care of my little errands.” I couldn’t decide whether that was a blessing, a miracle, or a curse.

  The front door of the house swung open and a thin, shell-shocked woman in her late twenties stood in front of a waist-high raging sea of mostly blonde, tousled heads. Plump little bodies dashed, writhed and flailed, through a crackling storm of little voices. The devil, or the deep blue sea? I thought.

  Of course, the apparent outbreak of sense was just one of Aileen’s tricks. Pretending she could come to a reasonable conclusion, when a perfectly deranged one was just in reach.

  “No,” She smiled at the hostess. “I’m sure they’ll be fine here.” The thin hostesses eyes seemed to float in her head. Aileen said, “You’ll take care of them
for half an hour, won’t you?” The woman looked slowly around, and without waiting, Aileen thanked her and we left. When Aileen said, “half an hour” it always turned out to be four times that at the very least.

  Aileen drove us to one of the ritzy little mini-malls that were her home away from home and on the way she recited her incomprehensible array of errands and tasks. Stores and businesses I was to visit with her requests. Her demands that would stretch the politeness of a Royal butler.

  She left and I practically twitched as I curled up for just one, peaceful moment on the creamy, soft, leatherback bench seat of the massive BMW. If Aileen came out of the salon-spa and found me asleep, I would never hear the end of it. But I had been awake since Tarquin and Waynetta had run into my room at five-fifteen that morning.

  I would take just a couple of moments peace for myself before I went to chase and hunt for all of her fastidious needs.

  More than anything, I wanted a brief visit back to my dream in the sunlit study hall.

  Chapter Three

  Ryan

  THE DENNY’S SIGN BOUNCED in the windshield and made the sun flash in my eyes as I drove.

  “We won’t always work for Gregor, will we, Ryan?” This had been Tynie’s theme almost all the way there. Any time he leveled up in the game or collected extra weapons, powers, or armor, he looked over to me and asked about Gregor.

  I had tuned him out a little, let myself daydream about the slave girl. Why she played in my imagination the way that she did, I wasn’t too sure. All I knew was what a happy picture I got when I thought about her.

  She wasn’t the leggy, athletic, primped up and pouting type that I was usually all over. One time I saw the Dragon Lady bustling out across the lot and the slave girl was running to keep up with about a dozen shopping bags from upmarket stores dangling from her arms. That picture of her—the slave girl, energetic, flustered, and bouncing—stayed fresh in my mind.

  More than once when I was in the shower, I remembered her that way.

  Her figure, I guess, was a lot more womanly than my usual type, and I wondered whether it meant that something in me was starting to change. Whether this was the time in my life that my needs would grow to be more for women and less for girls. People kept saying I would grow up one day. There still didn’t seem to me to be much chance of it happening.

  But there was something else, something about the slave girl’s face, the look in her eyes, that kept coming back to me. Her face was soft like a teenager’s, but her eyes were steady like a woman in her late twenties. Like she had understanding. Experience. Even though I was sure that she didn’t. She was a puzzle.

  Even if she was, it was a puzzle I wasn’t likely going to get to solve. I thought about it, though. For a moment there, I even thought, What if we take corporate Brad’s BMW, I drive it over to Gregor’s. Then, later maybe, I go back and grab Dragon Lady’s car. Maybe there’s a way that I can wind up meeting with the slave girl. Dumb, right?

  Guess I hadn’t had enough coffee. Would there be time to get into the Denny’s and grab some, I wondered, and get back out for Corporate Brad’s BMW? I looked at the clock. Not now, obviously. And anyway, sauntering into the restaurant, getting a coffee while Corporate Brad was in there… what the fuck was I thinking?

  Then, as we were approaching the parking lot and I had the turn signal on to pull in, Corporate Brad pulled out right in front. Gave me a cheery wave as he cut across my path.

  “Follow him, Ryan.”

  “Tynie, we don’t do that. You know we don’t.”

  “But his is going to be the better car.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I told him, “We have a plan. We stick to the plan.”

  “It’s a bad sign, Ryan. We should follow Corporate Brad.” He was quiet for a moment. “Maybe we should come back. That’s it, Ryan, we should come back tomorrow. Take Corporate Brad’s car tomorrow.” Tynie was nodding rhythmically. Hugging his gamepad.

  I grinned as I shook my head.

  “We need the car today, Tynie. This morning. You know that.”

  “What if Dragon Lady’s car isn’t there, Ryan? Then what?”

  “Then we go get backup number two.”

  It was hard to shake an idea out of Tynie’s head once he got a hold of it.

  So all the way across town to the mall—the boutique-y upscale mall where the Dragon Lady practically lived—Tynie bitched about how hers wouldn’t be as good a car. How Corporate Brad was so fussy and neat, his BMW would be much better maintained than hers, with fresh oil and clean transmission fluids.

  “I bet the jets of the Dragon Lady’s injectors are blocked and I won’t be able to get it into shape fast enough for Gregor.” Tynie stabbed irritably at the screen of his gamepad.

  Thoughts of the Dragon Lady’s slave girl kept me happy. Thoughts of her hips, in particular, and a very shapely thigh that I’d caught a flash of when she was running to keep up with the Dragon Lady day before yesterday.

  When we swung into the mall, I parked up near the exit. That way Tynie could leave real fast in the RAV4. I would follow him in the BMW. From there, it should have taken us twenty-five minutes, half an hour tops, to get to Gregor’s.

  Nothing went the way it was supposed to that morning. It should have all turned out so differently.

  Tynie and I walked in parallel paths between the parked cars to the BMW. It was parked nearer to the entrance doors than I would have liked. The Dragon Lady always parked as near to the door as she could. That was one thing that made her car the second choice, rather than the first, truth be told. Near to an entrance, you can get a surprise. The owner can show up.

  We both passed around the car, making sure the hood wasn’t too hot. If somebody’s just got out of the car, especially somebody like the Dragon Lady, they can be halfway to where they’re going and remember they left something behind. Come running back out. You don’t want that. Not in this line of work.

  I had a metal shim in the sleeve of my jacket, but Tynie made a couple of strokes on his gamepad and all the BMW’s orange lights flashed and it chirruped happily like we were its good old buddies.

  As I opened the door to get in, Tynie worked his gamepad a little more. He handed it to me, and then reached under the BMW’s fender for a radio receiver he’d left there two days ago.

  Sliding into the driver’s seat, I caught the scent. Straightaway it made me think of the slave girl. The Dragon Lady’s fragrance must have been in the mix too, and there was a sticky candy smell underneath it all. I figured she had kids, though I hadn’t ever seen them.

  Tynie’s gamepad had a red button in the middle of the screen. I pressed it and the engine jumped to life. Just quickly enough, I reached for the stereo and turned it off. It’s always a hazard, that the driver has left a radio station or some music turned up loud. That’s a great way to draw attention to yourself.

  Tynie was way ahead in the RAV4 as I pulled out. There were a couple of vehicles between us when I followed him out of the lot and we threaded our way back to the highway.

  ~<>~

  Traffic was more snarled than a regular morning jam. The farther I got along the highway, the more bunched up the traffic got. Sirens and emergency whoops sounded every few seconds and from all around. A helicopter flew slow and low, just a couple of hundred feet above the road. Whatever it was they were all trying to get to looked like it could be somewhere about half a mile or so ahead where red and blue lights flashed and the vehicles looked like they were stationary.

  That was about where the helicopter seemed to be lurching to.

  There was a whoop whoop of another police cruiser from a few hundred feet behind.