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I GLANCED AT MY WATCH and sighed.
It was almost eight.
Where the hell was she?
The little coffee shop was only a few blocks from the hotel, close enough that I could actually see it in the distance from the corner booth by the window I was sitting in. I took a sip of the coffee and checked my phone again.
Eight on the dot.
She’d said she would be here at seven-thirty, and yet, Mom was nowhere to be found. I had texted. I had sent messages to her almost entirely Minion themed social media. I had even called. Nothing. It wasn’t like it was unlike her to be unreliable about being somewhere she was supposed to be—memories of baseball games I had to get rides home with from Kevin’s parents would attest to that—but this seemed weird even for her. Where would she go? She didn’t know Myrtle Beach well enough to just go off, right?
Five more minutes, I told myself. Five more minutes and then I’m out of here. There’s no reason to stick around if she isn’t coming. If she decided to go drink or whatever it was she was doing and completely skipped out on seeing me after somehow finding my room and leaving a note, then I was going to just not bother with her at all.
A shift in my peripheral vision caught my attention. The coffee shop was surprisingly busy for this time of evening, but one person stood out among the crowd. Unlike the mostly early-twenty-somethings standing around and drinking lattes and other drinks that barely qualified as coffee, he was sipping a single cup out of one of those little porcelain mugs they only gave to black coffee drinkers.
He had also been there since before I got there. And had been occasionally looking over at me.
At first, I thought maybe he was a coach from another one of the teams. It wasn’t unusual for opposing teams to get in a day early and hang out in the city, nor was it that weird that a coach from another team would recognize me. I was kind of a big deal. But this guy didn’t look like a baseball coach. He was short, for one thing, but wide. He was built like a very muscular bowling ball. He was also wearing a leather jacket, inside, in the heat.
I glanced over at him and saw beads of sweat on his bald head being wiped off with a napkin as his eyes darted away. From me.
He was trying not to be noticed. The problem was, I had noticed him. In fact, I thought I might even recognize him now that I got a good look at him. If I was right, then something was most certainly off.
I hit the button to call my mother again, and as it rang four times, I was about to leave a message when there was a click.
“Hello?” Mom said on the other end.
“Mom?” I asked. “Where the hell are you?”
“That’s no way to speak to your mother, Gavin,” she said, always aware of an opportunity to establish some power structure in a conversation.
“You said you’d be at the coffee shop at seven-thirty. It’s after eight. Where are you?”
“Oh, sorry, son,” she said, almost flippantly. “I had to go home.”
“What? I tried calling and messaging you. Didn’t you think you should tell me?”
“I was driving,” she said, emphasizing the word to appeal to the idea of the danger of messaging or talking while driving. It was bullshit, since I had personally witnessed her text and make calls while driving. Hell, I had watched her compete in online Texas Hold ‘Em games on her phone while driving. “I had to wait until I got home to call you.”
“But you didn’t call me. I called you,” I said.
She made a disgusted sound, the kind she always made when I caught her in some inconvenient bit of non-truth telling.
“Gavin, it was an emergency. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“What emergency?”
“Your father,” she said. She almost didn’t have to say anything else. It was always Dad. “He’s in some deep shit, Gavin. As a matter of fact, you need to keep your eyes peeled yourself.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why would I need to keep my eyes peeled? What has he done this time? And why would you come all the way out here to tell me personally rather than call me, and then leave before you could meet me?”
“I had to,” she said. “Look, I’m not going home. I’m going somewhere else.” She sighed. “I was trying not to distract you, but I am heading south down the border of South Carolina right now. I am on the run.”
“From what?”
“I just—I thought I escaped them. I thought heading to the ocean would lose them, and when I realized I was heading toward Myrtle Beach, I figured I could come see you and tell you what was going on. I didn’t think they would follow me. I’m sorry. But when I got there and found where your room was, I left a note and then saw them watching me. I had to leave. I think I lost them in Myrtle Beach, but I’m worried they know you are there now.”
“Mom, what is going on?”
“I told you. It’s your father. He’s in some deep shit this time.”
“He’s always in deep shit,” I said. “That’s what he does.”
“Gavin, stop it!” she shouted. She took a moment, seemingly breathing heavily, her voice faltering when she spoke. Like she was holding back tears. “This is different.”
I put my head in my hand and pushed the coffee away from me. The last thing I needed was more to make my nerves on edge.
The problem was, I didn’t know how much of this to believe. Neither of them were heavily into drugs, mostly preferring to drink their lives away, but it wasn’t like they didn’t occasionally do drugs too. As a matter of fact, this wasn’t the first time my mother had called me on the run from something she believed to be following her because Dad had done something terrible.
The difference was, when it happened before, I was at home, Mom was in Montana of all places, and Dad was at the shop. They had done LSD, and Mom had a bad trip, convinced herself that demons and angels were at war in the shop and that Dad had killed one of them with a tire iron. She got in a car and drove until she ended up in Montana two days later, unsure of how she got there or what was going on. I only knew why she left because Dad had wandered home later, coming down from the trip, and told me the story.
As for the angel he had supposedly killed, it was a cardboard stand-up advertisement of Shaquille O’Neil hawking some weird motorcycle motor oil.
But this sounded different. For one, Mom didn’t sound as frantic or unintelligible as she had when she called me from Montana, or from the voicemails Dad had played for me when he was trying to find her. She sounded sober, even. And terrified.
“Okay,” I said, trying to keep my composure. “What happened? Explain it to me.”
Out of the corner of my eye, the man in the leather jacket stood. He took his mug to the counter and set it among the other dirty dishes that were there and turned his back to me. Briefly, he seemed to look back at me as he pushed through the door leading outside, and I thought we made eye contact. Then he was outside in the increasing darkness. Out of sight.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m so scared, Gavin.”
“Mom, you were fine like two minutes ago. Have you been drinking? Taking drugs?”
“Gavin, I am terrified. I was trying not to worry you,” she said. “But the more I think about it, the more I think you might be in danger too. These men are not to be messed with.”
“Who?” I asked. “Who aren’t to be messed with?”
“The biker gang,” she said. “The snakes, or eight-balls, or whatever they are called.”
“Eights and Aces?” I asked.
“Yes, that,” she said. “Those men. They... they are very angry at your father. And me. And I am afraid they might take it out on you.”
“How?” I said. “And why? I have nothing to do with anything.”
“They don’t care, Gavin,” she said. “These are ruthless men. Awful men. Your father is a fucking idiot for getting involved with them. But he kept telling me, no, they are fine. They just want his help. But they didn’t, Gavin. They wanted his life. He’s screwed us over. All of us.”
“Mom, slow down. What happened?” I asked.
“Your father. He was... he was helping hide money for them. In the shop.”
“Oh shit,” I said.
I could see where this was going. Dad could not be trusted with cash. Not even my piggy banks were safe as a kid. He would routinely take little bits from what tiny amount I had to pay for essential things like gas or food, all because he’d blown his money at the bar or gambling. It was always on me to help supplement my own dinner through buying groceries out of my savings.
I could only imagine what stupidity he’d gotten into if someone was dumb enough to leave money in his presence for more than ten minutes.
“He’s an idiot, your father,” she said. “I love him, but he’s stupid, Gavin. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
“What did he do?”
“He spent it,” she said plainly. “All of it. He spent all of it. He kept saying he could make it back, but then there was less and less of it. And he kept finding things he needed to pay for. Then they came back asking about it, and he didn’t have it. He told them he had to go get it, that he moved it out of the shop for safekeeping.”
“Then what?”
“Then he found me at the hair salon, gave me an envelope with two hundred dollars in it and said to run. Immediately,” she said. “He said not to use our cards, not that they had anything on them. He said to just run. To put as much in the tank as possible and go. That he would call me when he could.”
“When was that?”
“Three days ago,” she said. “Gavin, I am so worried.”
“Mom, if something happened to him, they wouldn’t be looking for you,” I said. “They would have already done what they wanted to Dad.”
“No, Gavin,” she said, her voice dropping low and serious. “Not these men. They will hurt everyone he knows until they get their money. Gavin, they will come after you if you aren’t careful.”
I sighed.
“Mom, how much money does Dad owe these people?”
My voice was monotone. In the back of my mind, I wondered if this was just some elaborate plan to get my scholarship money. If it was, she was going all the way for it. But if I could give them a couple thousand dollars and shut them up long enough to get through the season, as much as I hated it, maybe it was worth it. Especially when the other option was dealing with situations like this.
“Twenty grand,” she said.
There was silence for a moment as I swallowed the enormity of what she’d told me. I didn’t have twenty grand to just give away. Hell, that was pretty much every dime I had in savings, and I would still need to survive.
“Twenty thousand dollars?” I confirmed.
“Yes,” she said, her voice trembling like she was on the edge of tears. Real ones. Not the ones she often employed when she felt like she was trying to get something she wanted. But the ones that really sounded like she was being completely honest with her terror.
“Mom, that’s a lot of money. How did he spend all that?”
“I told you,” she said. “He’s an idiot. He bought things. Stupid things. So many stupid things.”
“And you kept asking me for money?” I asked.
“Gavin, I was trying to pay it back!” She was sobbing on the other end now. I would feel bad for her if I didn’t also feel the incredible weight of making this right for them. Of fixing it for them. Of cleaning up their mess. Again. “I just wanted to fix it.”
On the other side of the window, looking out toward the street that led to the hotel, I could see the man in the leather jacket again. His bald head shone in the light from the streetlight above him. He was waiting.
For me. I knew it in my bones. He was waiting for me.
What the hell was I going to do?
“Mom, I have to go,” I said. “Call me when you feel like you are in a safe place.”
“All right,” she said. “Gavin, please take care of yourself.”
“I will,” I said.
I watched as the bald man lit up a cigarette and turned away from the shop.
What was I going to do?
