Hangman (Jason Trapp: Origin Story Book 1) Read online

  The guy paused, tipping the glass he was polishing. “Here’s to that. What was your unit?”

  Trapp closed his eyes. Part of him wished this guy would shut the hell up and go away, but somehow his lips started moving all on their own. “3rd of the 75th.”

  The bartender whistled. At least, his lips puckered up, so Trapp figured that’s what he was doing, but a blast from the nearest speaker drowned out the sound. “Rangers, huh? Damn. Much respect, my man.”

  “I guess.”

  “You out, or just on leave?”

  “Discharged. Medical. I was two months shy of my contract date anyway, so I guess they figured it wasn’t worth keeping their claws in me,” Trapp muttered through a loosened tongue.

  “Shit. Anything serious?”

  “Shot in the ass,” he deadpanned.

  “For real?”

  Trapp shook his head, and a smile worked its way onto his face for the first time that he could remember. “Back of my thigh, really. But I don’t like to ruin a good story with a bad fact.”

  “It hurt?”

  “What the fuck do you think?” Trapp replied with a slow grin. “Had to shimmy out of there with my hand clutched tight to my asshole. You think my unit ever let me live that down?”

  “No,” the bartender drawled. “I’m guessing they didn’t. So what are you doing in town, anyway?”

  Trapp’s shoulders met his ears. “Just passing through.”

  “Going anyplace in particular?”

  “Not if I can help it –”

  A raised voice from over his right shoulder caught Trapp’s attention, harsh and discordant, but doubtless far from unusual in this environment. He stiffened, his nostrils flaring like a dog picking up some long-forgotten scent. He resisted the urge to twist his neck and take a look and glanced up casually at the mirror behind the bar instead.

  The girl on the center stage had stopped dancing. She was dressed only in a G string, her prize assets hanging free. Still pert, but their owner looked to be well on the wrong side of thirty, and the course on which she was set had a habit of speeding up time. She stood in a confident pose, heels about 5 inches above her toes.

  “You know the rules, Jimmy,” she shrilled, pushing the creep back with a single pointed stiletto, her standing calf muscle elegantly shadowed by the stage lighting. “No touching!”

  Trapp clenched then unclenched his fists, noting the way a band of tension seemed to have gripped his shoulders. He felt like he was spoiling for a fight, though there was no good reason for it. This wasn’t his bar, and she wasn’t his girl. She probably wasn’t anyone’s girl.

  “You gonna do anything about that?” he inquired.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” the bartender sighed. “That’s just Jimmy Coffey doing what Jimmy Coffey does.”

  “Seems like a bit of an asshole.”

  “Yeah, maybe he is,” he said. “But he pays his checks, so management don’t mind him. And he pays the girls, so they don’t much mind neither.”

  Trapp jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “She seemed to.”

  “Just watch.”

  He did as he was told, shifting his gaze back to the mirror in time to see the dancer stepping down off the stage as the song faded away and following Jimmy Coffey outside. The tension faded out of his shoulders, and Trapp let out a sigh. “That allowed?”

  “Monkey see no evil,” the bartender replied. “You want one more?”

  He nodded. “Just one, then I’m done.”

  “Coming right up.”

  2

  “How much do I owe you?” Trapp asked, pushing his barstool back and climbing reluctantly onto his feet.

  “Forget about it,” the bartender replied. “Nice speaking to another vet.”

  “You didn’t need to do that,” Trapp said, surprise coloring his tone with genuine appreciation.

  “I know I didn’t. I wanted to. Just pass it along sometime, okay?”

  Trapp stretched out his hand. “You got it.”

  He left the bar, his hands jammed into the pockets of his road-worn denim jeans. The alcohol tickled at the edges of his consciousness, constricting the darkness and playing tricks on his mind. The parking lot outside the strip club was mostly empty now, explaining the paucity of paying customers inside.

  At the far end of the lot, a few more cars were parked in front of the motel he was staying in tonight. His bike was just barely visible, a skeleton etched into the gloom. He made his way across the open space, catching his boot a couple of times on a loose stone that went skittering across the shale surface before skidding to a halt.

  At the very center of the lot was parked a lone truck, starkly apparent in the darkness due to the glow of one of the interior lights filling the cabin.

  Way to kill your battery, asshole, Trapp thought drunkenly before some better angel in his nature compelled his legs to trundle forward toward the lonely vehicle. He figured that its owner had probably left one of the doors ajar. It would be a simple enough task to slam it shut and save the man – because judging by the size of its tires, only one gender was likely to operate a truck like that – from waking up to a jumpstart.

  His rubber-soled boots crunched against the parking lot’s gravel surface, drowning out the muted tones of whatever trashy pop song was playing in the strip joint behind him. In the stillness of the night, the sound of the crunching stone was so loud it even muted the sound of his own breath. To compensate, he half whistled the tune under his breath.

  He reached the parked truck a few seconds later, his arm extended and searching for the expected seam on the driver’s side door. In a combat zone, his alcohol-dulled response time would probably have condemned him to death. Thankfully, the scene that presented itself wasn’t nearly so perilous.

  At least, not to him.

  The woman was naked from the waist up, a couple of skimpy items of clothing lying messily discarded on the dashboard. Only the pale skin of her back was visible, the ridges of her spine slightly reflecting the dull glow of the cabin light overhead. Her head was bobbing up and down.

  Trapp’s eyes widened. It wasn’t like he’d never seen something like this before. Military bases weren’t exactly custodians of virtue at the best of times, and he’d spent his late teens and the early part of his 20s exposed to pretty much every shade and shape of flesh imaginable, especially when the imagination in question was an eighteen-year-old private, of whom he’d met too many to count.

  He just hadn’t expected to stumble across a blow job in the middle of an otherwise empty parking lot – though given that the lot was built right next to a sleazy strip club, he probably shouldn’t have been overly surprised.

  Feeling a little stupid, he dropped his arm to his side. It had lain outstretched for a few seconds too long as his dulled mind processed the images being provided by his eyes. Somehow, the truck’s inhabitants hadn’t noticed his presence. He figured the girl was otherwise occupied, and the john had other things on his mind.

  The pieces fell into place pretty fast after that. She was the dancer from the bar, which made him Jimmy Coffey.

  So I guess this is what Jimmy Coffey does, Trapp thought dryly.

  He turned as quietly as possible and started retracing his steps, planning to give the truck a wide berth as he headed back to his motel room. What happened in the privacy of the truck’s cabin between an enterprising stripper and a paying client was no business of his. The morality of the situation didn’t disturb him. He’d known plenty of guys who’d retained the services of the world’s oldest profession in his time in the Army, though he had never gone down that route himself.

  The crunch of his boots now sounded impossibly loud. He raised his knee slowly and placed the sole of his foot back down on the gravel with exaggerated care, but even so he couldn’t help but imagine that if this was a war, he really would be dead. There was nothing stealthy about this retreat, even if the truck’s inhabitants didn’t seem to care.

  He
heard the woman’s yelp a second later as he stood on one leg, his right foot frozen in the air as he attempted to place it down without making a sound. He remained in place, listening for a few long seconds. With his breath held tight in his lungs and the sound of footsteps momentarily stilled, all he could hear were muffled lyrics drifting over the parking lot.

  Trapp figured he must be imagining things. He was drunk. Not falling-down, waking up missing a tooth drunk, but drunk nevertheless. Drunk enough to mistake a moan of pleasure for a whimper of pain.

  Because that’s surely what he’d heard. The sound of an entrepreneur ensuring that her customer came away satisfied.

  Literally.

  Trapp exhaled slowly, deciding he truly was mistaken. He was imagining things, or else his mind was filling in the gaps and creating a narrative that the facts didn’t support.

  And then he heard it again. The dancer cried out in pain, and Trapp’s neck whipped around. He squinted in the darkness, focusing on the indistinct shapes in the dimly lit truck’s cabin. He saw a woman’s head jerk up and back, her tied hair dancing from side to side.

  “Jimmy!” she moaned. “You’re hurting me!”

  Trapp froze for a second time. If anyone was watching, it would have made for a comical sight. He was standing on one leg, his head turned, owl-like, and his arms held out wide for balance. If someone was watching extra-close, they would probably have noticed him swaying slightly, over-compensating as the potent mix of darkness and drink threatened to topple him over.

  He couldn’t hear Jimmy Coffey’s response. The man’s voice was too low, or else he was too drunk. But he couldn’t help but notice a man’s hand drive upward, grab the dancer by the hair, and drag her down.

  A wave of anger surged from deep within Trapp’s mind. He had no truck with men who abused women. By the age of ten, he’d seen enough of that to last a lifetime. By the age of twenty, the man responsible for abusing his mother was gone. And Trapp had played his part in making sure that was the case.

  He ground his teeth together, the sound of crunching enamel momentarily obscuring that of the gravel beneath his feet. He let his foot drop back down to the ground and spun on his heel, not caring if he made a sound. Jimmy Coffey hadn’t seemed to care before, and if he chose to now, so the hell what? Trapp liked his chances in a bare-knuckle fight, and he wasn’t planning on being nearly so generous as that.

  Before he knew it, he was standing by the driver’s door, his arm outstretched a second time. He yanked the handle open, sending the door flying back after it. He grabbed Jimmy Coffey by the back of the head and smashed his face forward. The horn let out a single, mournful whine, then drained away into nothingness.

  There was a short moment of stunned silence, in which Trapp realized that his actions had run a little ahead of his decision making, and in which Jimmy didn’t yet realize he was hurt.

  Surprisingly, and yet perhaps predictably, the girl was the first to respond.

  “Who the hell are you –?” she squawked, more angry than afraid.

  The realization that he’d been hit finally seemed to wash over Jimmy Coffey, and the man let out a low, pitiful groan as he brought his hands to his face, forehead still resting gently on the steering wheel, and lolling from side to side.

  “Get out,” Trapp replied.

  “Will I hell!”

  Her reaction might have surprised him, but he still had his mind on the mission. He had a job to do, and the analysis could come later.

  “Move your skinny ass out of this truck, or I’ll smash Jimmy’s face into that steering wheel until even his mom won’t recognize him.”

  “His mom’s dead,” she sneered.

  “Too bad,” Trapp said, his voice gravel. “Now get the hell out.”

  The menace in his tone finally seemed to dawn on her, and she started grabbing her belongings – mostly discarded clothes. She held them tight to her naked chest and slithered out of the passenger door, saying, “I’m sorry, Jimmy – I don’t know who the hell this guy is. I didn’t have nothing to do with this, okay?”

  Why the hell is she apologizing to this guy? Trapp thought, growing increasingly baffled as every second ticked by. As usual, he’d stumbled into a situation that he didn’t come close to understanding. Was Jimmy her boyfriend? And if so, did that mean he’d stumbled into some kind of weird role-play?

  “You fit to drive, Jimmy?” he asked, largely because taking action – any action – seemed better than thrashing himself deeper into a mire of questions without answers.

  “He’s drunk,” the girl said with a curled upper lip as she joined Trapp’s side. He noticed that she hadn’t bothered to dress herself, though at least her vitals were covered by the mass of clothing clutched to her body. She was attractive, in a way, or at least she had been once. A little older than he was, a lot more worn-out.

  And after fifteen months in the desert, that’s saying something.

  “Fuck off,” Coffey snarled.

  Before Trapp had a second to react, the man twisted the keys and the truck’s engine jumped to life. Belatedly, Trapp attempted to stop him, but before he had a chance Jimmy stomped on the gas, and he was forced to throw himself backward, or have his toes crushed under the vehicle’s spinning tires.

  The truck kicked back smoke and stones and dust, and for a few seconds, the storm assailed Trapp’s eyes. He squinted, rubbed them, and as he stared at the departing taillights he said, “Well – that could have gone better…”

  For a second, silence reigned.

  But just for a second.

  “What the hell did you go and do that for?” the girl yelled, her index finger flying out and stabbing the air to accentuate her point.

  “It sounded like you needed the help,” Trapp grunted, crossing his own arms across his chest in a defensive posture.

  She matched him, hissing, “Did I fucking ask you for any help?”

  “Well…”

  “No,” she said mockingly. “I was doing just fine, and then you have to come along on your high horse and scare him off. Jimmy’s my best customer, you know that?”

  “How the hell would I know a thing like that?” Trapp said.

  “You know what it’s gonna take for him to trust me again? I’m going to have to let him fuck me half price for a week. And I sure as hell ain’t paying for that. I didn’t ask for any help, and the way I see it, you’ve cost me half my week’s earnings.”

  “I don’t like guys who hurt women, all right?” Trapp growled, irritation rising within him now. He was only trying to do right by this girl, wasn’t he? Why was she taking it so damn hard?

  “And another thing!” the girl yelled, her shrill voice filling the empty parking lot and causing Trapp to glance around with a creeping sense of embarrassment, hoping no one was watching.

  “What the hell do you want now?” Trapp grumbled.

  “Why did you have to make him drive off like that?” she asked.

  “Why do you care?”

  “Jimmy’s my ride home. Like clockwork, three nights a week. Eighty bucks for letting him do his thing, and I get a free ride out of the bargain. What am I supposed to do now–walk?”

  “How’s that my problem?”

  “You scared the prick off! The way I see it, you broke it, you own it. This isn’t my problem, it’s yours.”

  “I’m drunk,” Trapp protested. He looked left, then right, anywhere but her naked breasts.

  Her arms crossed against her chest again, thankfully – if briefly – solving that particular problem. “So?”

  “So I can’t drive.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not driving drunk,” Trapp insisted, a little more forcefully. She was really pissing him off now.

  “Why the hell not?” the girl repeated, grinding the knuckles of her right hand against her left bicep with frustration.

  Trapp opened his mouth, then closed it nearly as quickly. Should he tell this woman, whose name he didn’t even kn
ow, about all those times he’d watched his own father return from a bar, a half-drunk bottle of Jack on the passenger seat of his beaten-up truck?

  The image of one of those nights flashed across his vision. It was probably just a manufactured memory, a composite of a hundred such nights, and yet it had the force of truth behind it. The crash of the truck door thundering open, swinging back, and drawing a curse from his old man’s lips. The glow of the headlights against their rickety wooden shack flaring, then dying.

  The crunch of the man’s boots and a groan of wood as he stepped onto the porch. His mother’s tears.

  “I just don’t, and that’s the end of it,” he growled instead. “You’re telling me you really don’t have another way home?”

  The dancer, or whatever she really was, shifted her feet apart and jerked her thumb back at the strip club. “Not unless I go back in and open my legs to some other prick, and I was supposed to be done for the night.”

  Trapp’s eyes flickered from the woman to the bar and then back again. He didn’t know what the decision would be until he opened his mouth, but when the words came out, he wasn’t surprised. He started walking toward the motel on the other side of the lot.

  Without looking back, he said, “I’ve got a room. You can stay with me.”

  “I’m not fucking you for free,” she said, her cocky attitude a little less effective now she was forced to follow in his wake.

  Trapp didn’t reply until he was standing outside the motel room, keys in his hand. “You’re not fucking me at all.”

  “Oh yeah?” she said, dragging her tongue across her lower lip in a parody of sensuality, even if she probably didn’t intend it that way. “How old are you, anyway?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “Old enough. Or don’t you swing that way? I don’t judge, honey.”

  Trapp closed his eyes, not bothering to stifle an irritated grimace. “Just get inside before I change my mind.”

  “Okay,” she said, “but I’m warning you, if you so much as lay a finger on me without putting the money on the nightstand first, I’ll bite it the hell off.”