Cash by Scott Hildreth

Author:Scott Hildreth [Hildreth, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-02-09T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

Tito, not unlike the rest of us, lived modestly. A true nerd since childhood, he spent what little time he wasn’t riding his motorcycle with his nose buried in a book or against the screen of his computer.

I meandered up the walk and stepped onto the porch. Before I had a chance to raise my fist to knock, the door of the two-bedroom ranch home swung open.

Dressed in a pair of swishy pants and a wife beater, Tito stood in the opening. The wires that held his jaw together left him incapable of speaking. He stepped to the side and gestured toward the living room by tilting his head.

“I’ll make this quick,” I said. “I know right now I’m probably the last motherfucker you want to see.”

He swept his laptop off the end table and sat down on the couch. While I took a seat in the chair across from him, he opened it and then looked up.

I glanced around the sparsely decorated home and wondered how many times a day he cleaned it. Free of all clutter and fitted with three pieces of leather furniture and four end tables, the living room resembled a psychiatrist’s office, or a waiting room in the hospital.

He turned the screen of the laptop to face me and cleared his throat. Four words – large enough for me to read them from across the room – were on the screen.

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

“I want to admit I wasn’t right when I hit you.”

He pecked at the keyboard, then flipped the screen so I could see it. The massive font took up the entire screen.

YOU’RE ADMITTING YOU WERE WRONG?

I nodded. “Yep.”

A few strokes of his fingers later, and his next thought was revealed.

SAY IT. SAY YOU WERE WRONG.

“Fine.” I crossed my arms. “You want me to say it?”

He nodded.

Other than when my mother forced me to apologize as a child, I couldn’t recall ever being wrong. Not once. There was nothing I could do, however, to convince myself any aspect of what I’d done was right.

“I’m wrong,” I said.

Surprisingly, the words didn’t get tangled in my throat.

He studied me for a moment, and then typed another message.

BAKER TOLD ME WHAT YOU SAID

“About what?”

ABOUT WHY YOU SUCKER PUNCHED ME

“What’d he say?”

I KNEW WHICH OF THOSE GIRLS WAS YOURS

“Bullshit.”

I DID

My eyes thinned in disbelief of his claim. “How?”

GOOSE SAID HER HAIR WAS BLACK

“When did he say that?”

AT CHURCH

Church was biker slang for our weekly meeting. I felt uneasy. Much worse than the feeling of being wrong. Or, being doubly wrong. I felt like the idiot that Baker often said I was. As necessary as an apology was, I wasn’t going to allow Tito to beat a dead horse. I was wrong, and I was willing to admit it, but I wasn’t going to be chastised for an hour about it.

“Well, I was wrong, and I’m sorry.” I waved my hand in his direction and stood. “Maybe when you get your jaw unwired you can go back and see that chick.

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