Save Me from Dangerous Men--A Novel Read online

“Why not?”

  “You came over here, drank my booze, had me take my goddamn clothes off. You think I had you over ’cause I needed the conversation?”

  “Where’s your girlfriend?” I asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Right. Roommate,” I said, my voice dripping with contempt as I nodded at the picture.

  “We broke up.”

  “I’m not going to screw you, all the same.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Serious.”

  “All right,” he said. “Then get the hell outta my house, you crazy bitch. Go on, now.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  His features shifted into a different look. A dangerous look.

  A look that said Run for the hills if you know what’s good for you.

  I stayed right where I was.

  His hands were clenched into fists and his jaw was tight. “I’ve had it with your cock teasing. I don’t know who you are or what you want, and I don’t care.”

  “You should,” I said. “That’s the thing. You should care about those things.”

  He ignored me. “All I know is that you’re on my property and if you don’t get out in five seconds I’m gonna dump you headfirst on the damn curb with yesterday’s garbage.”

  I looked evenly at him. Said nothing.

  “I mean it.”

  I was quiet.

  “Five.”

  I didn’t say a word.

  “Four. Three. I’m serious.”

  Kept looking down at him. Silent.

  “Two. Last chance. I mean it.”

  I took an even breath in. Blew it out slow. Feeling my pulse starting to hammer in that familiar way. We were almost there.

  Almost.

  “One.”

  I drew in another breath.

  Let it out slow.

  “Okay, you asked for it.” He started to get up, hands still clenched.

  I waited until he was halfway out of the chair. Off-balance, legs bent, weight shifting forward awkwardly.

  Then I stepped forward and hit him.

  I was a southpaw. Delivered a hard crack with my left hand. A short, twisting punch that had the full weight of my body behind it. Felt my fist explode into his nose with a crunch, the yielding, squishy feeling of cartilage. Different feeling than hitting a jaw or cheekbone or temple. A long time ago I’d gotten sick of busting my knuckles up. The armored motorcycle gloves were designed to hit asphalt at eighty miles an hour. They did wonders. Now I barely even bruised.

  He fell back into the chair, clutching his nose with both hands. “Shit,” he said. His voice was muffled. “You broke my nose.”

  I stayed where I was. Drew in another breath, let it out. Controlling my breathing, my pulse. Scrapingly aware of every tiny detail like I was on some kind of drug. The world coming in sharp and clear, every movement, every sound. I chose my words carefully. “You ready for another taste? Or do you need a minute?”

  That got him back up. This time he rose cautiously. Nose dripping blood steadily out of both nostrils. He ignored the blood, never taking his eyes off me. He didn’t lunge forward this time. Gained his feet, faked a rushing tackle, then stepped forward and threw a massive right hook at my head. The kind of punch that would knock someone into next week and have them wake up wondering what bus they’d stepped in front of.

  I slipped it easily.

  Came under his arm while he was off-balance, our faces three inches apart. I hit him four times in two seconds. A hard uppercut to the jaw and a short right hook to the side of the head. Just above the ear to destroy his equilibrium. A left to the broken nose and finishing with a nasty hook into his drink-sodden kidneys.

  He went down face-first into the coffee table.

  I didn’t talk this time. I didn’t wait. I lifted his left arm away from his body and carefully positioned myself. Then I brought up my boot about six inches under his left armpit and drove the heel down as hard as I possibly could. There was a cracking sound. He screamed loudly. I looked at him lying there. No more fight in him. Done.

  “You have a landline?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer. Just lay there moaning and holding his side.

  “Do you have a landline?” I repeated.

  His breath came in gasps. “You broke my damn rib. Oh, God, it hurts.”

  This wasn’t getting anywhere. “If you don’t have a landline, can I borrow your cell phone, please?”

  “Why?”

  “To call you an ambulance.”

  “No, why’d you hit me?”

  “Because you had it coming. Can I get that phone now?”

  He raised himself slowly off the shattered coffee table. “My jeans.”

  I went over to his pants and found the phone. I didn’t need the passcode for the number I was dialing.

  “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

  “This guy I’m with,” I said. “I think he was in a fight. I think he lost.”

  3

  I was hungry. I rode around until I found a twenty-four-hour diner a few miles away. Three black guys were walking out, laughing as they got into a Jeep. One of the newer models, headlights narrowed to squinted strips. They saw me as I took my helmet off and one called out, “Damn, girl, you got style!”

  I grinned at him and gave them a wave as they pulled away. Inside, a sign by the front said SEAT YOURSELF so I did, at a booth in the back. The place was mostly empty. It was past one in the morning. A slow period for diners, after the graveyard shift had been in to eat, and before the drunk crowd headed in after the downtown Oakland bars closed at 2:00 A.M. The waitress came over almost immediately and I ordered coffee and one of the big Lumberjack breakfasts, eggs over easy and sausage and bacon and hash browns, a short stack of pancakes, and buttered sourdough toast. I read until the food arrived and then tore into it, still reading. Ordered more coffee and got three refills on my ice water, feeling the last effects of the whiskey slowly trickling away.

  There was a table of four men nearby. White guys in their late twenties or early thirties. They were throwing a few looks my way. I didn’t care. Kept eating. The food tasted good. I was hungry.

  The four guys were whispering and laughing to each other. I seemed to be the subject. One of them finally walked over. He was handsome, with a slender build and three or four days of tobacco-colored stubble. Curly brown hair cut short, wire glasses. He wore a corduroy jacket and with bemusement I saw a little golden cardboard crown atop his head, like what Burger King gave away to birthday kids. “Permission to approach the bench,” he said.

  I finished chewing and put my book aside. “And why would you want to do that?”

  He came a step closer. “My friends said you wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “Sounds like they think very highly of you.”

  He giggled. “I mean—you’re really pretty and you seem really focused. I’ve learned that’s a bad combination if I’m trying to talk to a girl. For me, I mean, not the girl. The pretty, focused ones usually ignore me. Actually, even one out of two and it doesn’t work out so well.”

  I sighed. “Look. You’re talking to me. And I’m talking to you. You win the bet. You can go back to your friends now and tell them that the really pretty focused girl talked to you.”

  I picked up my book and my fork. Went back to the eggs.

  “Look, I wasn’t trying to bother you.”

  “It’s okay,” I told him. “You didn’t bother me.”

  Then he surprised me. “‘Infinite resignation is that shirt we read about in the old fable. The thread is spun under tears, the cloth bleached with tears, the shirt sewn with tears; but then too it is a better protection than iron and steel.’”

  I put my book back down. The cover visible again. Fear and Trembling.

  “Okay, hotshot,” I said. “You’re a Berkeley grad student and you can quote Kierkegaard. I’m guessing philosophy?”

  Now he was surprised. “English, actually. I
just have a soft spot for long-dead Danish existentialists. How’d you know the rest?”

  “Because you’re up too late to be a professor and you’re too polite for an undergrad. And if you were at Stanford you’d be going out in San Francisco, not Oakland. So that leaves Berkeley.”

  “Those are a lot of assumptions.”

  “Everyone makes assumptions. The only question is if they’re right or not.”

  He frowned. “So I’m of little to no mystery to you? That’s depressing.”

  “I do have one question.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The crown,” I said. “Can’t figure that one out. Very mysterious.”

  He rubbed his head self-consciously. “I finished my dissertation today. We’ve been celebrating.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Well, it still has to pass. But this is a step, anyway.”

  “Who did you write on?”

  “William Hazlitt.”

  “The Fight. A favorite.”

  “Wow,” he said. “Nobody knows Hazlitt anymore, except maybe his Shakespeare stuff. But nobody knows The Fight. Are you in school, too?”

  “Nope. Just a working girl.”

  “Working where?”

  “I work in a bookstore.”

  “Around here? I know them all.”

  “Then maybe you’d know this one.”

  He glanced around the nearly empty restaurant. “So why are you here tonight?”

  “You mean I don’t look like I just finished a dissertation?”

  He grinned, showing white teeth. “You’re way too sober to have done that.”

  I liked his smile, I realized with mild surprise. “Okay. Fine. You can sit.”

  “I was waiting for you to say that,” he said, sitting down. “I’m Ethan. And you are…?”

  “Nikki.”

  “You like Kierkegaard?”

  “Sometimes,” I said, “I feel he’s the only thing holding me together.”

  “Look,” Ethan said. “I don’t usually give out my number to strange women.”

  I had to laugh. “Was I asking?”

  “Your eyes betray you.”

  “I see.”

  He winked at me. “I’ll make an exception. Just this once.”

  “You will.”

  “But we don’t sleep together on the first date,” he said sternly. “That I’m sticking to. Not up for debate. I don’t care what you say.”

  I sipped my coffee and tried not to smile. “Setting terms, are you?”

  “Well, someone had to. Now, if you would be so good as to lend me your phone, I’ll put in my number, and then you can pretty much go ahead and call me, like, whenever.”

  “I don’t have a cell phone.”

  He was surprised. “Everyone has a cell phone. My grandmother has a cell phone and she doesn’t know how to turn it on. Literally, I’m not exaggerating, she would not know where the Power button is. But she has one.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “Why?”

  “For the same reason that I don’t have a pet hamster. Because I don’t like them.”

  He took a hash brown off my plate and chewed it thoughtfully. “Be careful. Now I’m starting to really like you.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Come on,” he said. “We’re going to go out together, and it’s gonna be fun.” He took a napkin, pulled a pen from his jacket pocket. “That’s my number. How do I reach you, No-Cell-Phone Girl?”

  He had blue eyes. Soft ones. And he did have a good smile.

  “Fine.” I took the napkin, tore off half, wrote down a phone number and address, and handed it back to him.

  He took the napkin, surprised. “Your address? You barely know me.”

  “Monday,” I said. “You can come over for dinner this Monday, seven o’clock. If you want.”

  “You’re inviting me to dinner? I feel like I should be inviting you to dinner.”

  “Well, you didn’t. Besides, I promise you that I’m a better cook than you are.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Call it another assumption.”

  “I’m kind of a shitty cook,” he confessed. “But I love to eat.”

  I checked my watch again. Almost two thirty. It was time.

  I threw a twenty on the table and got up. “I have to go now. And by the way,” I added. My fingers brushed his jeans pocket, where his Cal ID peeked out. “Sometimes it’s only a matter of looking close.”

  Then, because I couldn’t resist, I took his crown, put it on my head, and walked out of the restaurant.

  4

  Ten minutes later I was back at the Craftsman house.

  Again, I left my bike down the block. The homes on either side of the street were darkened. Cars littered the curbs and the Port’s sodium glow spread spookily through the sky. The street was quiet.

  I’d noticed a funny thing about people who left home in an ambulance. They never remembered to lock their door on the way out. Just wasn’t something they thought about. They had bigger concerns. The paramedics never locked the doors, either. It wasn’t their job.

  So I wasn’t surprised to find the front door unlocked.

  I let myself in.

  He wasn’t back yet. Friday night in Oakland, the emergency rooms were running at full capacity. Even with a broken nose and rib he’d have to wait a bit. Oakland was a city, and kind of a violent one. Not as bad as it used to be, but people still got shot, run over, stabbed. All kinds of bad things happened every day, and Friday nights seemed to bring out the worst in people. The ER wasn’t going to drop everything for a guy with a broken rib and busted nose. No one was going to die from a broken rib. But they wouldn’t leave him sitting there forever. He hadn’t come in with a sprained ankle. I figured I’d have to wait one hour, maybe two at the most. Depending on how busy the night had been. Depending on how many bad things had happened to people I’d probably never meet.

  He’d mentioned coffee.

  I rummaged through the kitchen and found a bag of Peet’s, pre-ground. Could be a lot worse.

  I brewed a big pot in the coffee machine and settled in to wait.

  * * *

  I heard the door just before three thirty. I didn’t bother to get up. Stayed in the armchair as he walked in. I wasn’t worried about police being with him. He wasn’t going to tell anyone that he’d had his ass kicked by some girl he’d invited over. And the last thing on his mind was the possibility of me still being there.

  Of me having come back.

  I waited until he had closed the door. “Robert,” I said, and clicked on a light.

  “What the hell!” He literally jumped backward. His nose was partly obscured by a white bandage and both his eyes were blackened from the break. A few stitches on his forehead from where his head had hit the coffee table. Probably ACE bandages under his shirt. There wasn’t much to be done about broken ribs except to let them heal without doing anything to stop that from happening. Not a fun injury. He winced in pain as the words left his mouth. With broken ribs even breathing hurts pretty badly at first. He was backing away from me. “Why are you here?”

  “Relax,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you. We’re going to talk.”

  “You want to talk? After what you did to me?”

  “Yes, I do. Sit down. Please.”

  His face showed fright and anger. “You’re in my house, telling me to sit down?”

  “I’m asking you to sit. I’ve never yet told you to do anything.”

  “You’re not going to hurt me? You promise?”

  I got up, went into the kitchen, and came back with a mug. I handed it to him. “I made coffee. I hope that’s okay.”

  “You made coffee,” he repeated. Now he just looked confused.

  “Figured we could both use a cup.”

  He took the cup skeptically, as though I’d dropped in a cyanide pill. We sat in the living room. Except for the broken coffee table, everything looked the s
ame as when we had first arrived. “What do you want?” he asked.

  I opened my purse, took out a narrow sheaf of pages, and handed them to him.

  He saw the first page and looked up, startled. “What is this?”

  “Your girlfriend’s name is Angela Matterson. Your name is Robert Harris. She works as a special education teacher in San Leandro and you’re a mechanic at Sharkey’s Motors. You’ve been with Angela for two years and seven months.”

  “How do you know that?”

  I ignored the question. “Six weeks ago, you two got in a bad argument. Tempers flared. And then you hit her. You hurt her pretty badly.”

  He stared at me. “Who are you?”

  “I don’t pretend to know who was in the right. I don’t give a damn who said what. But as shown in those hospital intake records you’re holding, you put your girlfriend in the ER with a broken nose. The broken rib she got when she fell down the front steps trying to run. She told the police that she had tripped, and stuck to it. She wouldn’t admit you had touched her.”

  “I lost my temper,” Robert said in a more subdued voice. “I felt bad about it. I’d never laid a hand on her before.”

  Maybe it was true. Maybe it wasn’t. “After the hospital, she checked into a women’s shelter,” I continued. “She received counseling and then she came back here to get her things. She had decided to move out, and start a new life. She made those decisions for herself.”

  He looked at me but said nothing.

  “When she came back here, though, you were waiting.”

  “To apologize! To ask for another chance.”

  “You did apologize. That’s undisputed. But she didn’t change her mind. She packed a suitcase.” I set aside my coffee. “That was when you showed her the gun. Said you’d find her and make what you’d done look like nothing.”

  I was quiet. Challenging him to contradict me.

  He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I never would have done that. I wasn’t serious, I was upset. I just really wanted her back.”

  Again, maybe true, maybe not. Didn’t matter. “Sure. Maybe you were bluffing. Maybe you did really love her. Maybe you still do. I don’t know. I don’t pretend to know. But what you said was enough to terrify her. And that’s where I come in.”