"There isn't anything else."

"You don't think you have anything to offer a woman?"

"I don't think anything I have to offer a woman is in her best interest. Seriously, you've got a better idea of how...of what I've...of what happened. How could I ever try to explain that to a date?"

"Lots of people deal with PTSD every day, Evan," he reminded me. "You don't do too badly for yourself. I know working under the table isn't ideal, but at least you're not a criminal, right?"

I tried not to actually laugh.

"Tell me one thing," Mark said as the session ended and I got up to leave, "how did you know about my father?"

"Your jackets don't fit right."

"What?"

I took a long, deep breath.

"You're fine in jeans and polos, but whenever I see you wearing a b.u.t.ton down shirt, dress pants, or a jacket, they're wrinkled and they don't fit right. Rich kids get taught that s.h.i.t. You're a blue-collar guy."

"You still haven't said anything about my father."

I rolled my eyes.

"No blue-collar guy goes into a white-collar profession without p.i.s.sing off his dad."

Mark laughed, and I took the opportunity to get the h.e.l.l out before he asked me anything else. Besides, I had a little side trip I wanted to take, and I needed to do something first.

I grabbed my phone out of my back pocket.

"Hey, Nick," I said when he answered.

"Hey there!" Nick replied.

"Am I interrupting anything?" I asked.

"Nah," he replied. "I'm just hanging out, shootin' the s.h.i.t with some buddies. What's up with you?"

"Just wondering..." I paused, suddenly unsure how to even ask.

"You still there?"

"Yeah." I cleared my throat. "I was just wondering...what's the best way to apologize to a chick?"

"Oh, that's easy," Nick replied. "You gotta go down on her."

"Don't I have to get her to speak to me first?"

"It helps!" Nick laughed.

"So, how do I get her to talk to me again?"

"Just do something nice for her," Nick replied. "It doesn't even matter what, cause guys never do anything nice for chicks, so anything works. That's why the flower business is so good."

"So, buy her f.u.c.king flowers? That's it?"

"Yeah," he said. "Or one of those fancy vibrators."

Yeah not gonna happen.

"I dunno." I leaned back and stared up at the cloudy sky. "Flowers seem kind of...cliche."

"There's a reason for that," Nick said. "They work."

I couldn't argue with him, so I stopped at a florist shop and wondered what kind of flowers said whatever it was I wanted to say. There were too many varieties too many colors to choose from to actually come up with something that looked right. They all looked right. They all looked wrong, too. I couldn't think of any words to put on the card, either. Maybe the basics were best.

Roses are red, Violets are blue.

I'm just a f.u.c.ked up hit man, And nothing rhymes with that.

It was entirely possible that poetry was not my strong point.

Whatever I did, I'm sorry.

Sorry.

SORRY.

The ridiculously simplistic note I left on top of the skewed sheets covering the worn out, twin-sized bed in Arizona fluttered down and landed at the forefront of my mind, mocking me. If there was anything I knew, I knew that I wasn't any good at this kind of s.h.i.t.

I left the flower shop, ripped four daffodils out of the window box on someone's deck, and drove myself over to Bridgett's corner. Traffic was heavy since it was still the tail end of rush hour, but I was patient as I crawled along with the other travelers. I still wasn't sure what I should say, so I let different scenarios clamber around in my head while I waited for people and cars to get the f.u.c.k out of the way.

Once I reached the right corner, I saw Melvin, the pimp, leaning over the car in front of mine. My eyes scanned the area, but there wasn't any sign of Bridgett.

"Hey, baby. How about some sweet stuff?"

I recognized Candy as she swayed around from the back of my car and up to my window. She leaned over enough to put her t.i.ts in my face and asked what all she could do for me. She didn't seem to know where Bridgett was, though.

"Haven't seen her since the day before yesterday," the girl said. "She's got a regular john, so that's not so unusual."

Yeah, maybe except I was the regular john.

"Where's she stay when she's not here?"

I had to give the wh.o.r.e fifty dollars to talk, which she slipped inside her shirt while watching Melvin out of the corner of her eye. I figured out what building Bridgett lived in by Candy's description, and it only took a minute to drive there.

There was only street parking, so I drove around the block twice before I found a spot. The sky was pretty much dark by the time I pushed open the door, found her apartment number on the mailbox, and went down a handful of stairs to the lower level units. I looked down at the daffodils in my hand and wondered just how ridiculous I was apologizing to the chick I paid to f.u.c.k me but I needed to sleep before I went completely over the edge.

I knocked.

I had to physically force myself to not tap my toe on the ground, stare at my watch, or start whistling. There was no way I was going to pull off any kind of casual encounter anyway it was obvious what I was here to do. The daffodils kind of gave it away.

I knocked again.

There was that distinct feeling moving slowly up the sides of my spine that I had rarely felt outside of combat. It was a completely irrational knowing that came from nothing other than gut instinct, but it had served me many times in the past.

It was a gut instinct I trusted.

My mind and the memories within took over for a moment, and I felt the dry, stale heat of the desert air around me. It had been mid-summer in the desert, and the heat was absolutely unbearable. I had walked around the corner of a small building to reach just a bit of shade to relax a moment and take a p.i.s.s when it all started.

One hand had touched the wall of the building as I leaned against it, while the other loosened my fatigues and pulled out my d.i.c.k. There had been a noise from the other side of the building that I couldn't identify something that didn't sound quite right. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

There was something very, very wrong. I was sure of it.

"Bridgett?" I called as I brought myself out of the memory and banged harder against the door. "Bridgett open the f.u.c.king door!"

Still no answer.

I didn't think I just leaned back and kicked the handle. I had to kick twice before the s.h.i.tty lock splintered the weak wooden doorjamb and the apartment was open to me.

I took everything in.

It was a small place one room efficiency with a small cubby bathroom off to the side. There was a little half window with a view of a brick wall. It wouldn't have let any light in at any time of day and was probably too small for the fire marshal to allow without some kind of bribe involved. The stove looked like it might have worked well in the seventies, and the fridge was one of those half-sized ones you find in college dorm rooms.

Despite the size, the room was neat and orderly. Everything seemed to have its place, including a small shelf with books and an aloe plant, a box for mail, and a small candle. No pictures none at all. There wasn't much in the way of furniture just a card table with four plastic chairs, the book shelf, and a futon along one wall. It wasn't pulled out into a bed, though there was a body lying across it.

I knew she wasn't dead there was no tell-tale smell of death, and the slight rise and fall of her shoulder made it obvious. Her back was to me, but I didn't need to see her face to know she was unconscious. The lack of reaction to having her door kicked in was evidence enough that she wasn't just asleep. Hesitating only slightly, I moved across the room and knelt next to the futon.

With my hand on her shoulder, I pulled her body towards me. The black and blue bruises that covered her face and shoulders were maybe a day and a half old, not much more than that. There was a cut over her lip, and her chin was streaked with blood.

As I pulled her closer to me, her arm fell away, and I could see the bruising on the rest of her naked body. Clear hand prints in purple circled her wrists, and the circular bruises on her thighs were clearly fist marks. The scent of stale s.e.m.e.n on her was unmistakable.

"Bridgett?" I said and felt her jerk in my arms. My hand touched the side of her face where she wasn't bruised. "Open your eyes."

They fluttered at my order, and the lids parted. Her expression quickly moved from fear, to shock, and then to sadness. Sobs began to shake her body as her forehead pressed against my shoulder.

"Evan," she croaked. Her voice didn't sound right it was rough and scratchy. I tilted my head to get a better look at her neck and saw the finger-shaped bruises there as well.

"Can you hold on to me?"

Her fingers gripped my shoulder as I wrapped the sheet back around her and lifted her up into my arms. I held her against my chest as I walked out the door, crushing the dropped daffodils as I left. I got a few looks from the b.u.ms on the street as I carried her off and lay her down in the pa.s.senger seat of my car, but no one said anything or tried to stop me. I was carrying a beat up girl, naked and wrapped in a sheet, and no one cared.

Nice f.u.c.king neighborhood.

Back at my apartment, I was a little more concerned. Since I was in the parking garage, it was easy enough to get to the elevator without anyone laying eyes on me or what I was carrying, but being in the elevator had me on edge until we got to my floor. Luckily, there was no one else around. The elevator doors opened, and I glanced quickly down the hall before carrying her to my apartment.

I dropped the sheet in the hallway, figuring I'd come back in a bit and throw it out. It stank of sweat, beer, and s.e.m.e.n.

"I'm going to get you cleaned up, okay?" I said as I carried her through the bedroom door and into the master bathroom. "Can you stand on your own?"

I took off my jacket but couldn't seem to get my shirt unb.u.t.toned while I kept Bridgett from falling, so I ended up taking her into the shower with my clothes still on. She kept her arms wrapped around my neck as I filled my palms with liquid soap and ran them over her skin.

When I washed between her legs, she flinched and started crying again. I ended up holding her for a minute, not having any idea what I was supposed to do. Eventually, she steadied enough for me to finish.

Once she was rinsed, I stood her on the bathmat and tried to dry her off, but it wasn't easy with one hand holding her up.

"I can do it," she said with a scratchy voice.

I steadied her as she ran the towel around and then rubbed at her hair.

"Do you...um...do you have a hairbrush?"

I laughed and ran my hand over my closely cropped hair.

"I guess you wouldn't, huh?" She smiled a little, but it seemed to hurt her busted lip.

She sat on a towel at the edge of my bed, wrapped up in my robe as she ran her fingers through the strands of brown hair. Her hair was a lot darker when it was wet, and I tried to force thoughts of another woman from my head for a while, but it didn't really work.

It never did.

I peeled off my wet clothes and hung them over the shower door. Once I was dry, I pulled on some clean ones and grabbed my phone.

"I could use a little help at my place," I said into the phone.

"You get shot?" the voice on the other end asked immediately.

Franklyn Johnson might have been a doctor once, and he might not have been. No one ever called him Doc or anything like that just Franklyn. Still, he knew how to take a bullet out of a leg, st.i.tch people up, and do a lot of other emergency room kinds of procedures. He did stuff like that when Rinaldo's people were hurt, and a hospital visit would end up causing questions.

He wasn't expecting a beat up hooker at my place.

"She's been through the wringer," Franklyn said when he left the bedroom. He reached up behind his head and scratched at the overgrown, graying mop there, which reminded me of Christopher Lloyd's character from Taxi. "I sedated her and gave her a morning after pill, but there isn't much else I can do."

"Anything more serious?"

"What, aside from the multiple rapes? What else do you think she needs?"

His eyes shot daggers.

"I found her, a.s.shole," I growled, and his look towards me softened a bit.

"Nothing permanent," he finally said. "Well, not on the outside. I doubt she'll ever be the same on the inside. No broken bones, no internal bleeding. Dehydrated a bit make sure you get some more water in her when she wakes up."

He left, and I went back inside to see how she was doing. She was asleep, and Odin was right there beside the bed, watching her.

"Are you finally going to make yourself useful as a guard dog?" I asked him.

He sneezed and then peered up at me through curly white hair.

"She'll be okay," I informed him, though I wasn't sure why I felt the need to do so. Odin dropped down on the floor next to the bed, and I moved around to the other side to get in.