Love and Death on I-80 West by Connor Mays

21 - TUCCI JOURNAL: PART SEVEN Motor City. Motown. Rock City. Why the hell did I pick Detroit? The Old Asshole called it the Murder Capital of America, so it seemed like a natural landing spot for a mass murderer from the Deep South. I figured I’d be King Shit in a few weeks, given my skills and employment background. Didn’t quite work out that way. Wayne County offers the usual flavors of roach hotels, so the first thing I did after finding a place and locking up my gear was to lose the van. There could have been an APB or BOLO or something on it, so a few days of walking was well worth the inconvenience if I could break the chain of evidence. I wiped it down and left it on a back street with the key in the ignition. The van was gone an hour later. My plan was to, in order of importance, get laid, get a job, get some respectability, become The Man. The plan was interrupted by “get shot.” Quoting a classic, it was only a flesh wound, a hole in my leg from a random drive-by. I was negotiating some evening entertainment with this tall ebony goddess (who I was pretty sure was all woman) when my danger signal went off, maybe because of the sound of distant tires. Either way, I threw the working girl to the ground behind some trash cans and threw myself on top of her, when something hit me hard in the thigh, like the feeling of getting smacked with a baseball bat. I got off lucky with a ricochet shot, through and through. The dude standing three feet from us was the intended target and took two gut shots. He died slowly before the

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Love and Death on I-80 West by Connor Mays

ambulance arrived. He bled all over the floor while the EMT dug around in my leg, making sure there were no immediate problems other than him digging around in my leg without offering me the benefit of analgesics. I was tempted to break his fucking arm, but maiming an EMT is not the best way to make the best first impression at my first home. It dawned on me the cops were going to run my record at the hospital and see if anyone was looking for me. I was planning my escape when the EMT put something in my IV and knocked me out. Thanks, asshole. A few hours later, I woke up in the poor folks’ ward with cotton mouth, numbness in the leg from the crotch down, and no handcuffs or restraints. The cops never visited or questioned me. Such is the state of affairs in Detroit, where the wounded innocents aren’t even worth a second look. When I was released three days later, the ebony goddess was waiting. She picked up my gear from my room while I waited in the car, and she took me to her condo to show me a week’s worth of gratitude. Thank God for Chinese food delivery services. And, yeah, she was all woman. Emma took me around to meet the right kind of people, and I hooked up with another personal security firm, though this one was worlds different from the one in Texas. The old company was a pseudo-military force with standards of conduct and written procedures for most scenarios. My latest employer was much more street wise and flexible enough to respond to all types of urban threats and situations. It reflected the owner, a dude who would be a special problem for years to come.

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Love and Death on I-80 West by Connor Mays

Like before, I took on all the grunt assignments because I was the freshest meat in the door. I worked ten, twelve, sixteen hours at a pop because I wanted to prove I was an asset. It was boring at first, me as a rent-a-cop, making sure the property didn’t grow legs and walk away, but soon I got pulled into personal protection details and other fun things. Top of this list was the company panic team, where a bunch of us practiced taking down doors and inflicting intimidation like your friendly neighborhood SWAT cops. It started off as a “team-building exercise” on a paintball course, but it turned out to be an audition for new members, and I was a natural fucking talent thanks to my MP training. We got formal training from mercenaries, and we became the company “tip of the arrow” when called upon, which averaged once a month. When someone owed money or needed to be scared off or something else, and all other means of communication had been exhausted, we knocked on the front door...or knocked down the front door, if needed. We were good, damn good, moving like a synchronized machine of terror. If the cops knew of our existence, they never stopped us. The idea of our panic team visiting your neighborhood was enough to quiet things down. It was the first and last time I touched firearms since leaving the Army. Using them was no small problem for me, but I signed up for the team with my eyes wide open. I never had to pull a trigger for real, so that might count for something when I stand in front of St. Peter. All things considered, I miss the camaraderie and ass kicking, but the next time I touch another gun will be too damn soon.

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Love and Death on I-80 West by Connor Mays

I went through some personal changes, starting with my fitness or lack thereof. I could blame the bullet hole and the rehab, but I got lazy. My company didn’t want dudes with crewcuts and military looks. They wanted men of substance and muscle who could announce their presence by how they filled the doorframe. It’s amazing how many problems disappear when you look like the biggest, meanest motherfucker in the room, whether you are or not. I was as round as I was tall. The other significant change was I got married. Again. One mistake after another. Sandra was...weird. She could be a case study for psychiatrists for decades, like the ones dealing with geniuses with schizophrenia. She was a serious Catholic by day, but living with her was like living with two different people. Let me back up. I was making some serious coin on the job, both from the payroll and from helping myself to goodies along the way, which was acceptable to the bosses as long as they got their cut. We’re talking street goods, wholesale clothes, and other merchandise “from the back of the truck,” and anything else we wanted to cash in on along the way. If we wanted to moonlight, we had to get permission first and, again, make sure management got their slice. (They were getting rich in other ways, I’d learn down the road.) I played bouncer at various parties, including private ones where the celebrants held nothing back and, sometimes, left nothing to the imagination in clothing and behavior. When you’ve screwed as many hookers as I have, you’d think you’d seen everything in the way Tab A fits into Slot B, but nope. Way wrong. Some of these parties were hashish-powered sex marathons where anything and everything goes. This

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Love and Death on I-80 West by Connor Mays

was the easiest money to make because no one wanted to hurt anyone, so I stood around and watched the free show. This one party had a small stage in the middle of a room full of couches and Barcaloungers, and this tall blond vixen let herself be used there by this well-hung saltand-pepper twosome. This lady started clothed in something out of Victorian romance and was escorted to the stage by these dudes in tuxes. The place went dark except for the lights around the stage, the music was slow, and someone turned the heat all the way up as they stripped her down. She was caressed, spanked, lifted, and squeezed between the two of them. By the time the lights came up, they filled every hole on her body with their meat, and our ears rang with her screams of ecstasy. They got a standing ovation. When she walked by me on the way to the bathroom, I told her how impressive she’d been. She thanked me and kissed me. I could taste her and her stage mates on her tongue, but I didn’t care. It was all very hot, and I was ready to put her up against the wall and do her right there. She must have sensed something from me, because she took my hand and dragged me into her changing room, where we did, in fact, do it up against the wall. Sandra got my cell number, and we met at odd hours of the night, sometimes at my place and sometimes at a hotel. It didn’t take long to learn she was a true nymphomaniac. Not all dramatic or stereotypical like you see in bad movies, but a woman who had to have a man touching her. It validated her existence to herself, I suppose. It was cool by me because I was the male kind of nymphomaniac, whatever it

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Love and Death on I-80 West by Connor Mays

is. Plus, she orgasmed every time, no matter what we did. It wasn’t fake; it was like her body was one long, overstimulated clitoris. After a while, we agreed it was ridiculous to live apart, so I moved into her penthouse (a sacrifice after my roach hotel), and we jetted to Vegas one drunken weekend and ended up married. It’s not to say I didn’t hesitate, because I did. I put her off for weeks because she was Bruce Wayne and Batman: a pious businesswoman of the Catholic community during the day and a dark creature at night. In the light, she was respectable and the majority owner of a string of prestigious art galleries around the country. Politicians and parishioners sought out her opinion (and her money), and Sunday morning found her on her knees at the local church praying for forgiveness. She wore out their damn confession booth. When the sun went down, a switch was thrown in her personality, and she hungered for flesh in every way possible. It wasn’t a fake job, either. She loved sex all the time, but only after the sun went down for the day. She was even more complex than I can describe. For instance, people overuse the word “genius,” but Sandra was a genuine intellect. Her mind was as amazing to watch in the way she juggled her day and night lives. If she played chess, you knew she had the next twenty moves planned out in front of her. I couldn’t imagine what she’d be like if she’d been raised “normal,” whatever the fuck that is, but two events screwed her over bad when she was in her formative years. The first, her father’s suicide at the hands of others, removed her moral backbone and respect for law enforcement. This man, her hero, was a stockbroker and played the game the legal way. He disintegrated as a human being almost overnight because

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Love and Death on I-80 West by Connor Mays

others weren’t so straight. When millions went missing from his clients’ accounts, he was blamed and prosecuted, and he ate a bullet from the gun he put in his mouth the night before going to prison. The investigation after the fact fingered his “trusted” work partner, and he served three years for fraud. Three fucking years. When she was at her weakest without her hero to protect her, she was seduced by a pedophile. He played her like a fiddle and pretty much killed any idea of normal relationships for the rest of her life. Maybe it wasn’t going to happen, anyway, because her brain wasn’t wired right in the first place. Either way, she was fucked over in every way possible by the time she hit fifteen, and this poor little rich girl became two people, one of the sun and the other of the moon. Marry her or not? I was getting her ass for free, as it was. Eventually she broke the impasse like women have been doing since Eve offered Adam a tasty little treat. Like him, she got my dick to do the thinking, and I married the night creature. One mistake after another. The one time she was normal around the clock was when her daughter came home on breaks from her private boarding school. Jenna was eleven years old when we met, still a kid, and the cutest thing on two legs. Neither Sandra nor Jenna mentioned her real father, and it was clear he was long gone from the picture, but Jenna took after her mom in a lot of ways: smart, funny, and you knew she was going to be a beauty. We got along okay, and she was fun to hang out with and protect from kids sniffing around her.

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Love and Death on I-80 West by Connor Mays

I quit my day job and became Sandra’s boy toy and computer guy. I missed the life on the streets, hanging with the guys and busting bones and other fun stuff, but working from home had its advantages, too, like playing with the best technology on the market. My wife was an information junkie, needing it almost as bad as flesh against her skin, and she paid thousands for the most current systems. We pulled down credit histories, family information, real estate titles, income brackets, the whole nine yards. She used these tools in her day job to predict sales to her high-end customers. I used them for my own hobby: eliminating scumbags. By body count, I was a mass murderer before Motown, with the nine scalps already on my belt, but I wanted more, and Detroit was more than willing to give them up. I had to be selective because everyone in Motor City has three guns, even grandmothers. I set up a system: I roamed the streets and read the newspapers. If I saw illicit activity, like someone selling drugs, I wrote down the license plate and went back to the office to do some research on the driver. If a pedophile was released on a legal technicality, I made sure the evidence convicted him, even if the courts didn’t. In the four years I lived in Detroit, six more assholes went to meet their Maker at my hands, two pedophiles and four drug dealers. Not a humongous number and not near the volume of bodies I wanted, but cops don’t want people killing people, for some reason, so I had to be careful and not fall into patterns. You’re reading this and maybe wondering about my psyche, maybe my soul. Don’t bother. It’s not complex. People are not people to me. Ninety-nine point nine percent are annoyances I let live because they don’t drop to the level of scumbag like fifteen things I killed in Houston and Detroit.

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Love and Death on I-80 West by Connor Mays

Am I pathological? I see it more as a matter of perspective. Would Harry Truman have dropped on the bomb on Japan if he had lived in Hiroshima for a year? Would Hitler have sent six million Jews to the gas chambers if some had been his foxhole buddies in World War One? History is full of examples of world leaders engineering the deaths of good men, women, and children anonymous to the guys pulling the trigger. Like I said, perspective. I’m not a thoughtful man, but I knew the names of the people I killed, both before and after the deed. They were not good human beings, and I was looking forward to years of cleaning up the streets of Motown. It all ended when I got my ass arrested in Chicago.

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Love and Death on I-80 West by Connor Mays

This serial and book are solely owned by its creator, Connor Mays (a pseudonym). Copyright © 2016. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. This creation of literary art was drafted and edited via public wi-fi networks. The owners, operators, and employees of these networks have no ownership claim in any form of this work or the residuals, if any. For more information and permission requests, the author may be contacted via email only: connormaysbooks at gmail dot com. Website: http://www.connormaysbooks.com

Copyright © 2016 Connor Mays. Please note further copyright information on the last page.