Resignation

Lia was afraid of the black-bound book that rested on her passenger chair. A life of crime and misandry and the first time her soul felt dripped in dread came from a familiar friend, a notebook she once briefly owned. Her arm poked through the shattered car window, and it weighed heavy in her hand. Debt. Obligation. Mistakes.

It unclasped without difficulty, ominously. Each page is haunted with pressed currency. Some fell neatly to the pavement, and others held to the dried ink. She had no need to count the leaves, the book rested with the exact heft as when she saw it last. A leather Rolodex of twenty thousand dollars in bills, ten dollar names, and empty dreams.

She understood the message.

“You are dead.”

She could also feel the heat of headlights on her neck.

Lia entered the Den of Domino willing, a rare thing, for his power was limited to the premises, and to enter was to submit.

She wasn’t good at that, Lia was more sneaker than submitter. Her heart was atheist, but she was decidedly mortal, and mortality dictated necessity. She needed food, food needed money, money needed work, and unfortunately Domino was how she got that work.

Do deals with the Underworld, don’t be surprised when you wind up damned.

The irony wasn’t beyond her, she just hoped the hands of fate had no need for the flesh too.

But the smile on his face spoke a mile. It hurt how confident he was. I had lost his $20,000, change to him, and he knew he could compel me to get it back.

‘You can’t help yourself.’ His voice was flat, open road for miles, ‘smart money is to call the loss and run.’

He was right, Domino had the prescience to rarely be wrong. An empire could be built on that instinct, and it was.

‘But I can help you.’ Lia threw the words out at an Olympic pace, a tongue with joggers lung was her weapon of choice and the room knew it. She could hear space crumple, paper in the Domino’s hand.

‘All of it- more,’ desperation rattled her voice, She had to make each word count, for she was on a liar's count. ‘The money, in twenty-four hours.’

Then her arms got hard, the air had claws and it wrapped the length of her bicep. If she was to die they would ensure it happened now, as divine judgement.

‘I can make it go away. I can pull the stitch and get you the return I fucked up.’

The window was open now, raised sheet like a guillotine, Lia could hear her fear down the street, an echo mocking her attempt to pay with a dead woman’s currency.

Domino had the world pause, that’s how it felt. Nobody, not even Lia would take action until the big made his call. The only sound was inside her head. He watched as the shadows of defeat cast across her face, he watched Lia beg with her eye’s whites. He watched keenly as he offered a Devil’s Bargain.

‘Even the debt. Within the hour.’ The Devil would be jealous of his ruthlessness. ‘And, you leave by the window.’

Lia craned her neck downwards, the fall, whilst far, wouldn’t kill. What a gracious god. But she was pretty sure it would hurt. A pointless pain, or she guessed, more pointless pain, Domino was a criminal, but often his demands had purpose.

She’d take the deal, not that she gave herself much of a choice.

But where does a woman go for fortune in desperate manners- to the only person who can’t turn you away. Calling an Uber, she ordered haste to Tact Gallery and refused to tip the driver. He treated her with disgust in kind, dropping Lia beside a sign glowing ‘Beautiful Women, Affordable Rates’. She didn’t have time to care for appearances, She had a need for a businessman so cheap these neighbours were a plus. She needed her brother.

Calling upon him however, became quite the ordeal. The receptionist, still attending the desk this late in the evening, locked the glass sliding door before she could enter. He gave Lia a look that withered. She replied with a punch that hurt. Life remained unmoved.

Not letting a bad start get her down, she hounded the building’s edges; service entrance locked, delivery bay locked, main entrance still locked and still protected by an annoyingly loyal employee. Frustrated by a lack of civilized entrance she took to climbing a drainage pipe, fingers nicked open against the clay bricks as she fought for safe purchase upwards and through a windowpane. Leaving a nice trail of glass shards and blood smudges on his white walls was adequate recompense for her pain and suffering. Lia eventually tracked Gale down playing with superglue on a broken frame in a hallway filled with tacky frames. Portraits with eyes that follow look down on you with nothing but displeasure. Her brother, he was different. Same expression, but looking up.

She told him, ‘I need money,’ and she wished she wasn’t on such thin ice with the familiar face that followed. Lia told him she left a trail of broken glass and dreams to get here, that this was the last time after the last time, and that the next last time would never come. She begged him.

Pleaded.

Lied.

And he saw right through it without pause from his work; taking care to restore the frame, but leaving visible the fracture lines through it, for Gale cared about the small things that made the character of life apparent. Lia cared for her life, and deeply wanted to avoid stepping on the cracks that ran through it.

So she offered him everything she had left. He knew she bore no cents to her name, her wallet contained only acronyms, IOUs and false IDs. Gale could have turned her away then and there, he always had the right to. Instead, he gave her what he had; he went into the office and returned with a sleeve full of Dreams. His business demanded that as payment; he had no criteria for display beyond that. His gallery featured the talented and hacks alike, their need to be presented often greater than the cost of what it took. He was a criminal, kin to Lia in more than blood. A family of snake oil salesmen. She spoke in lies, he exhorted in dreams, their parents, the worst of all, fabricated them.

Leaving the way she came, Lia didn’t thank him. It ate her up inside and had her choking on fumes, but she couldn’t give him that, it would be asking for absolution.

No, someday he would take heed and cast her out without the thing she needs. That would be a good day for Gale indeed.

The dark light of promise lit the street. Dancing girls in neon and a beacon that spoke comfort beckoned all inside the bordello. But the parking lot was barren. No one was seeking absolution tonight, nobody dared keep watch over the lost to see if they were ok. Only to see if they were criminals.

The joke was; Lia didn’t know anyone who wasn’t.

Her Uber didn’t wait around, so she was forced to call another and wait. When it arrived, the handle lacked pull, and the friendly-faced driver let her know that it was temperamental. He rolled down the window and told her to climb through, Lia guessed her face read desperation, because the clock was not her friend. She couldn’t stop thinking about how his teeth had grit and cheeks scarred red. The drive to Domino’s place was silent until she asked for his name.

‘Charon’ replied Charon. The conversation didn’t go further.

The Redbrick Apartments loomed large, her car the only vehicle left in the parking lot. The entire structure left empty for a single man. Or perhaps the single man filled it. Door still jammed, she climbed out and then looked up. Her previous exit would not be her new entrance, lacking a charming drainage pipe or easy handholds she would have to enter like a person.

The front door agreed.

Domino hardly looked up for his drawings, he wore a dog faced expression, his pen partway through a sketch of a puppy. He offered her a seat. She couldn’t help but stare at ‘the’ window.

‘How do you survive living the way you do?’

She answered truthfully. ‘Badly.’

He gave her a smirk. He liked honesty, but he liked what she brought more. He examined the notebook over, feeling the folds of the skin and tracing the spine. He didn’t need to open it, nor count the individual bills. He couldn’t care for the value of a dollar; the cost of the notebook easily paid the debt. Content, he flung it out the open window.

‘And how will you pay the next debt?’ He stood for this. He was just a face and a suit and needed the height to reach the literary three. ‘Because I can see your mess as it crests the horizon, and until I stopped you there’d always be another debt.’

Lia was out of words. She had spent all her saved words on Gale, and become holistically broke. It was her only attribute. She figured it was better to let him talk; let someone else talk.

Domino was quite the orator. He spoke of the Underworld, how years of tending to the dregs of society had given him perspective, given him purpose. He had money, money came easy to him, brought by fools to his doorstep. But why carry on he asked? He refused to give her the chance to answer, this was his speech. Lives were his new drug. Not life and death, but stories, journeys, ends. A thousand lives to be led without ever leaving the room he was currently in.

It was a weird speech.

But then he adopted an intonation. He started to talk about her. Her family. Gale.

He called her a parasite. It was one of the kinder things she has been called. Explained that she had many chances to change, and instead chose this last chance to hurt someone who was doing ‘his’ level best to change.

‘In truth, the devil’s bargain was not to pay me off, but to see if you’d take a chunk out of him again.’ He smirked. ‘To see if you would give into your meager instincts.’

Domino didn’t need to say she failed. She got it.

Just like she got it when he showed her the door. Lia regretfully wished she remembered to ask for her car key before stepping out.

So there she stood by her car with a broken window and headlights fuzzing the edges of her vision. She turned around, and saw exactly what she expected. Charon with the teeth grit and singed skin, holding the passenger door for her.

‘Can I offer you a lift?’

Lia looked him up and down, placed the notebook back into her car, and walked over.

Charon was pretty sure she saw the gun he had in his hand, but like all he gives ‘lifts’, they don’t care anymore.

It was an easy job for a wetwork man.