The man adjusted their positions, so they were facing me head on. “She’s fine. Breathing still.”
“I can see that, but it’s not always about what’s happening outside of the body. Sometimes the damage on the inside”—I tapped the side of my head—“is worse. I have to figure that you holding a gun to my wife’s head is fucking her up inside her head, so I’m checking to make sure once you’re gone, she’ll be okay.”
His eyes narrowed further, and his nostrils flared. “Are you trying to do one of those psychic things here?”
“Do you mean psychoanalyze?”
“Yeah,” he nodded furiously. “That’s the one.”
“I’m not a shrink, a therapist, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, or whatever you want to call them. I merely own a restaurant and love that woman you’ve got a gun pointed at with my whole heart.”
Something flickered in the guy’s eyes, and I realized I’d made a mistake when he bent down and sniffed her hair. “She smells great.”
That fucking piece of shit.
He closed his eyes momentarily and tilted his head back, like he’d tasted something amazing. “Mmm, for that scent, a man would do big things. Am I right?”
Fuuuuck!
Looking blandly at him, I said, “I’d give my life for hers, so yes.”
A tear slowly trailed down Heidi’s cheek as the words penetrated. Yeah, baby, I feel the same way.
“But would you give your money for her?”
My hand wrapped around the wallet in my pocket, and then I threw it at his feet.
“Have it. Money doesn’t buy you happiness, and I know that for a fact. You can have all of the money in the world, be able to buy whatever the hell you want, and still be a miserable fuck. I don’t want it, I want her. That’s where my happiness is, not in that wallet.”
His eyes kept flicking from me to the wallet and back again until he nudged Heidi forward. “Walk to it, and then we pick it up. Don’t fuck around.”
She staggered slowly forward until she got to it and then stopped. He must have had hold of her top, because she didn’t attempt to run away from him when he bent down to pick it up.
Opening it, he raised an eyebrow. “Your name’s Bond Klein?”
“It is.”
“What a fucked up name. Your parents hate you?”
They’d called my brother Canon, so, no, I wasn’t the one who got the wrong end of the deal with names. If he’d been called Nikon, I’d have been jealous, but camera preferences are what they are, I guess.
“Nope.”
One handed, he rifled through the contents, stopping when he got to something and whistling. “Wow, you’re a member of one of those sex clubs in Tennessee. Never had y’all down as kinky fuckers.”
I looked guiltily over at Heidi, who scowled back at me. I’d been given the membership as a gift from a friend and had gone twice to check it out when I visited him. That was it. Apparently, I was going to need to have a come to Jesus with my wife after this nightmare was over. And I would be able to do that because any other possible outcome from this disaster was unacceptable.
“I was that guy once, but then life changed, and I grew the hell up. You wanna tell me your life story?”
He lifted his eyes, looking angrily at me. “You wanna know why I’m this way? Try having nowhere to live. No job, no money, no roof over your head when it’s cold. Know that cold snap that hit Texas over the winter? What do you think I did during it? I suffered. Lost three toes and two fingers from it, and did the government do anything to help me? Did they do anything to help anyone living on the streets?”
“Yeah,” I shouted back, “they did. There were quite a few of them who flew down here from different states to help out. Some places opened their doors to the homeless off their own backs. Even restaurants served up hot meals and let people stay there because there was only so much everyone could do.”
“Well, it didn’t help me. I’ve tried getting a job, but they want me doing bullshit jobs I can do in my sleep.”
Heidi’s scowl morphed into an incredulous ‘what the fuck’ look.
“No one sees me for what I can do. They just want to pay me as little as possible and bleed me dry.”
“Gotta earn shit like that, man. We’ve all done it.” Like both men who sold the broken golf balls at the club Hurst had told us about. We were all taking it in turns to buy the ones from the guy selling them there now, because he deserved to have money to live on.
The asshole just sneered at me and then sniffed Heidi’s hair again, making her cringe and shudder. I saw it the moment she moved her arm forward, and I knew exactly what she was about to do.