Derek

Primer: This is one of two short stories I wrote for Dead Reckoning Collective’s Summer 2021 writing contest (https://deadreckoningco.com/pages/about). Derek was not submitted.

1000 Words

June 2021

Glendale, AZ

The Motel 6 room door closed and Derek slid down the inside of it. As he sat on the ground, ass to the floor, tears began to collect in his eyes. He began to sob...gently at first and then profusely. The emotions of the last hour began to sink in and the stomach knot became a lump in his throat. Tears and snot began flowing down his face and he tried unsuccessfully to control his emotions. The sobbing turned to fast breathing that transformed into kicking. As he lost control, Derek kicked the cheap dresser that occupied the front wall of the budget rate room. His right foot stipped wood shavings of the discount dresser each time he kicked it.

After several kicks, Derek’s brain began to feel a sharp pain in his right ankle; undoubtedly the consecutive strikes had hurt something in his foot. Derek sensing self-harm gave a final, half-hearted kick. His foot glanced off of the corner and a piece of the faux-wood laminate tore off. Derek started to calm down and rubbed his eyes. Snot from his sobbing stuck to his arm as he did so. Derek feeling gross, blew his nose into his shirt. A short-sighted decision but at least his nose was clear and the mucus was not on his arm.

The past hour had been the end of a series of short-sighted decisions that led to that moment. The descent to this moment was unexpected. A few months ago, Derek decided to leave a bar and sleep off his buzz in his car. Unfortunately, Derek had turned the car on to listen to the radio and an overzealous Phoenix motor cop caught him. In any other time in the Air Force, a single DUI probably wouldn’t have cost the young Airmen his career. However, his DUI was the fifth in a month for his squadron. Derek became his commander’s sacrificial lamb to scare other junior enlisted. The choice to turn his car on cost him his career and earned him a bad conduct discharge. That combined with the fact that Derek had no degree or marketable skills, made jobs limited. Derek had been a personnelist in the Air Force and only had customer service skills to show for it. The only place that would hire him was a seedy strip club off of I-10 and McDowell in Phoenix.

Derek had spent the last two months translating his customer service skills into bouncing at the strip club. Six nights a week, he stood at the front door checking IDs and welcoming men (and some women) looking for a dimly lit sexual experience. He had developed a reputation for making problems disappear and keeping the clientele happy but not too happy around the girls. This ability to be a subtle problem solver attracted the attention of a regular at the club. The regular asked Derek if he wanted to make $5000 for solving a problem. Derek, not naive, knew that that kind of going rate for problem solving came with strings attached. Given what Derek knew about the regular, he knew the strings were going to be illegal. However, five-grand was more than enough to get him out of the motel and into an apartment...he took the gig.

The problem was a grey 2013 BMW 328i. The regular told Derek the job was simple; drive the car to a warehouse in Tucson. Once there, he told Derek to call a number taped to a cheap, pay-by-the-minute cell phone, let the person who answered know the car was there, and then find a way back to Phoenix. That was it; a 115-mile drive, don’t ask questions, and make $5000.

The next morning after a long shift, Derek met the Regular in the garbage-strewn parking lot. Derek took the keys to the car, the cell phone, and the club and headed toward the freeway.

At the last stoplight before the freeway, he noticed two men in the rearview mirror approaching the car from out of nowhere. He couldn’t see their faces but could see both men had pistols in their hands. Derek panicked. He knew this would be hard but he didn’t think he would be in this amount of danger at the start. He took his foot off of the brake and pressed the accelerator to the floor. The BMW chirped as he sped into the intersection, ignoring the red light. His eyes jumped from the mirror to the window just in time to see the side of a minivan.

The glancing collision sent the speeding van into a concrete barricade where it burst into flames on impact. Derek’s BMW spun 180 degrees around and was now facing the two armed men. Through the deployed airbag smoke, he could see the two armed men charging toward his now-busted BMW. He tried the front door and it wouldn’t budge. He crawled into the backseat and tried the right rear passenger door. It creaked open and Derek crawled out. He looked up to see the two men leveling their guns at him. They were yelling something about police but Derek’s ears were not working right. Derek couldn’t hear them over the ringing in his ears and the car horn that was still blaring from the crash. He crawled to his feet and ran away from the two armed men. Derek thought for sure that they would have shot him. “Oh, shit..they are cops.” Derek thought as he sprinted past the burning mini-van. He managed to evade them by running into oncoming traffic and ducking down into a small gap between the freeway on-ramp and freeway. Derek could hear a helicopter and more sirens in the distance. He ran for what seemed like an eternity until he reached his motel. As he ran up the steps to his second-floor room, the phone he had been given rang. Derek threw the phone into a garbage can and kept running toward his room. As the sound of a police helicopter lumbered in the distance, Derek entered his motel room, closed the door, and slid down to the floor next to the door.

This was probably the best decision Derek had made in a long time.

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