O Negative Read online

  Paul Curtin

  | O Negative

  O Negative

  Paul Curtin

  © Paul Curtin 2017

  All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Titlepage

  Copyright

  Dedication

  January 19th: 6:22 P.M.

  January 19th: 7:23 P.M.

  January 19th: 8:15 P.M.

  January 19th: 8:55 P.M.

  January 19th: 9:24 P.M.

  January 19th: 10:01 P.M.

  January 19th: 10:43 P.M.

  January 19th: 8:45 P.M.

  January 19th: 9:40 P.M.

  January 19th: 10:55 P.M.

  January 19th: 10:15 P.M.

  January 19th: 11:27 P.M.

  January 19th: 11:45 P.M.

  January 19th: 11:58 P.M.

  January 20th: 12:07 A.M.

  January 20th: 12:11 A.M.

  January 20th: 12:35 A.M.

  January 20th: 1:15 A.M.

  January 20th: 12:48 A.M.

  January 20th: 1:24 A.M.

  January 20th: 1:44 A.M.

  January 20th: 2:12 A.M.

  January 20th: 2:25 A.M.

  January 20th: 2:59 A.M.

  January 20th: 4:30 A.M.

  January 20th: 6:12 A.M.

  Acknowledgements

  About Paul Curtin

  | DEDICATION

  For Kaiti

  |January 19th

  6:22 p.m.

  Cole waited alone in the back of Jerry’s SUV, testing the seatbacks, collapsing them forward. He could stay hidden in the hatch, but wasn’t going to cram himself back there until it was necessary. Because God only knew when Jerry was going to show.

  The minutes dragged. He pressed up his coat sleeve to look at his watch. He wouldn’t make his other plans in time even if Jerry, right now in the hotel with some blonde woman, was a two-pump chump and wrapped it up soon. He shook his wrist and stopped looking at it. Instead, he thumbed his phone for Jerry’s information again—age forty-six, blood type O positive—scrolling through pictures of the guy while absently touching the stun gun and closed syringes in his coat pocket, a holstered pistol digging into the small of his back.

  Another opportunity to nab Jerry would come, he got to thinking. If he left now, he would still have time for his other commitment, but he would have to listen to his boss ream him for not getting the guy tonight. Not worth it, not after the shit he’d gone through. Usually these things were pretty easy. Not with Jerry, the asshole. Everything had been ten times more difficult than it needed to be with him. No, Cole was getting this one done tonight.

  The hotel valet eventually came toward the SUV, his hair tossing in a fierce breeze that blew through the parking garage like a wind tunnel. Cole slithered into the open back hatch and curled into a fetal position. The car locks clicked and the interior lights snapped on, bathing him in a weak overhead light. He kept still. Only paranoids check the back of their cars, and valets in a time crunch certainly wouldn’t. This valet didn’t.

  The valet started the car moving, Cole slipping on a pair of white latex gloves. The radio clicked on. Smooth jazz bellowed from the speakers. “How do people listen to this?” the valet said.

  The car was now washed in the bright canopy lights of the hotel entrance. Cole held still. A door opened, and cold air rushed in.

  “Here you are, sir,” the valet said. “Please, ma’am, I’ll get that for you.”

  A few seconds later, another door opened. A woman’s voice thanked him.

  “You’re welcome, ma’am.”

  A door shut. Another man’s voice cut through the bustling noise outside. Must be Jerry. “Good work, kid. Make sure you buy yourself something nice.”

  Apparently people don’t just use that line in the movies. He heard the kid say, Thank you, sir, before a leather seat crunched and the door shut, sealing the car from most of the outside noise. Cole exhaled. “Hungry?” the man said.

  “Starving,” the woman said with a slight vocal fry.

  The car moved.

  “I know a place with great steaks across town,” Jerry said. “Ever hear about Michael’s?”

  “Good things.”

  “You know Wes from IT? He said they got the best steaks he’s ever eaten. And you can trust Wes to know good food.”

  “He’s the fat one with the beard?”

  Jerry sighed. “Why would you say that?”

  “What?”

  “That he’s fat.”

  “Is he?”

  “Guy’s overweight, yeah, but he’s got a thyroid problem.”

  “I only know two guys from IT, the skinny one and the fat one.”

  “But he’s not fat, Kira. That’s what I’m trying to say.”

  “Why are you being like this?”

  “It’s a thyroid problem. He can’t control it.”

  “I’m not trying to be mean.”

  “But you’re calling him fat.”

  “Please, Jerr, I don’t want to fight, okay?”

  “I mean, I got a gut too. You think I’m fat?”

  “I don’t want to fight.”

  “All right, all right. I’m just saying the food’s good there.”

  Cole had already leaned part of the seatback downward and inched into the back seat, his broad shoulders barely making it through the gap. He sat hunched behind the passenger seat, running his hand around his back, sliding the pistol from its holster. His breath was calm, pulse scarcely above normal.

  “Did you hear what Jess did a few days back?” the woman said.

  “If you’re going to talk about work, I don’t want to hear it, okay? I get enough work while I’m at work,” Jerry said.

  “She got a kitten.”

  “A kitten?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Seems out of the blue.”

  “The kitten?”

  “Yeah. This her third cat or something?”

  “So?”

  “So, the woman’s only thirty-one,” Jerry said. “There’s no rush to be some crazy cat lady just yet.”

  “You’re being mean.”

  “Listen, if any man walks into a place where a woman’s got that many cats, he’s going to start asking questions, is all I’m saying.”

  Cole pressed the gun against the back of Jerry’s neck. Jerry went stiff and choked the wheel. The woman was looking out the window, not paying attention. Jerry began to stutter and Cole said, “Breathe, Jerry.”

  The woman looked back at the gun, then at the hand holding the gun and the arm attached to that hand, and then at the gun again. She screamed. “Shut up,” Cole yelled repeatedly over her, but she was hysterical, shouting unintelligible words, if her slurred noises could be called words. Her screams went unbroken, not even to stop for a breath.

  “Be—be quiet,” Jerry said.

  She screamed louder.

  “Get her to shut up,” Cole said, her voice piercing into his ear canal like a threaded screw. “Tell her to shut up.”

  “Baby, you got to stop.”

  But she wouldn’t. So Cole grabbed the stun gun. With her shoulder blades against the window, the electric node hit her square in the chest. As if he had hit a mute button, her cry was replace with a gurgling sound and her body shook with seizure. He grimaced, and she slumped down.

  “Oh, God,” Jer
ry said, reaching out toward her.

  “Keep your hands on the wheel,” Cole said. Jerry did.

  The next node had already loaded into the stun gun. The battery whined. He put it away. After a few seconds, the woman rolled forward as if waking up with a hangover, her eyelids fluttering and mascara bleeding down her cheeks.

  “No more screaming. You stay cool, you won’t have a problem. My business is with Jerry here,” he said, poking him harder with the real gun, Jerry flinching. “If you shut up, you’ll be out of this car and on with your life. Understand?”

  Her hands drifted into the air, and she nodded a half dozen times.

  Cole turned back to Jerry. “And you. You stay nice and calm. You drive where I say to drive. You make me spill your collateral, you’re going to be owing even more than you already do, you get me?”

  Jerry was sobbing now. Most guys in his situation did. They weren’t used to the stress, so they reverted to acting like five-year-olds. Jerry’s underwear was probably soaked through with yellow too, maybe a little brown. It happened to at least half the guys.

  “Turn right on the next street.”

  Jerry did. Cole directed the SUV into a dark alley where an empty car with no license plates sat. When Jerry parked behind it, Cole fished a capped blue syringe with a plunger on top from his pocket and tossed it onto the woman’s lap. She looked down at it, sobbing.

  “Turn that light on,” Cole said, pointing to a button below the rear-view mirror, “and pull the cap off that.”

  She did both, popping the cap last, exposing a tiny needle. Her eyes didn’t blink.

  “Put the needle into the large vein inside your elbow.”

  She looked down and shook her head. “I—I can’t do that.”

  “It’s either that or in the neck. Take your pick.”

  “I don’t—I can’t.”

  “You do this, you’ll sleep for the next few hours and you won’t know what the hell happened, but you’ll be alive. The other option is I kill you.”

  She stared at the needle before taking it up in her shaking hand, Cole telling her to calm down, the woman gently sticking it into the curve of her elbow, depressing the plunger, and tossing it to the ground after. Her eyelids sank almost immediately, her head tilting back before her whole body went limp.

  Cole turned back to Jerry. “You know who I am?”

  Jerry shook his head.

  “But you know why I’m here.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I’m your collector, Jerry.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “God doesn’t have anything to do with it. Believe me.”

  “I—I worked out a payment plan, okay? I did. You’re acting on old information.”

  “I always am, aren’t I? Acting on old information.”

  Jerry took in erratic, deep breaths. “Please, don’t do this. I can’t do this.”

  “You signed on the dotted line, so to speak. You borrowed the money. And you didn’t pay.”

  “I can still pay.”

  Cole ignored him, instead reaching into his coat pocket and grabbing a small, plastic container filled with needles and thin paper strips. He tossed it into the front seat. Jerry looked down at it, but didn’t turn around anymore, probably for fear that if he looked at the gun pressed against him, it might go off. People get weird when they have guns pointed at them.

  “Take it,” Cole said. Jerry grabbed it, his hands in a tremor. “Take a needle and prick your finger. Apply one of the strips to the blood. Then hand it back to me. Got it?”

  “Let’s make a deal.”

  Here it comes.

  “You let me go, I’ll take you to my office. I have a safe’s got ten grand in it right now. You can just walk away with it. Easy as that.”

  “Let me ask you a question.” Jerry perked up. “How much did you tip the valet?”

  Jerry chuckled uneasily. “What?”

  “It’s a simple question.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I ask you a simple question, and you don’t understand.”

  “What does the valet—? I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t know why you’re making this more complicated than it has to be, Jerry. I ask you a simple question, you give me a simple answer. That’s it.”

  “Okay.”

  “How much did you tip the valet?”

  “A hundred.”

  “How much did the hotel cost?”

  “What does that have to do—?”

  “I asked how much your hotel cost. I don’t give a shit if you think it has anything to do with anything. I’ve got a gun to your neck, and I want to know.”

  “Six hundred.”

  “Yet three months ago, you come to one of my boss’s associates. You say, I need fifty grand. Fifty grand. He says, What do you need it for? To which you reply, I need the money. My business is failing. I’m in the red all this year, blah-dee, blah-dee, blah. And yet you’re out here dropping a hundred on valets, and six hundred for a hotel room, and more on an expensive steak dinner—Michael’s isn’t cheap you know—with this lady here who’s not your wife.”

  “I can pay.”

  “Who is she anyway? Because I swear if you’ve been jeopardizing your collateral with diseased women, my boss won’t be happy.”

  “She’s my secretary.”

  “Your secretary,” he said, and leaned forward to look at her. “What is she, eighteen, nineteen?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “And you knew some pretty blonde 21-year-old isn’t going to date some fat, old sack of shit like you unless you’ve got money to spend. So you collateral your own blood so you can wine and dine her.” He scoffed. “I hope it was worth it.”

  “I’ll give you everything.”

  “You know what always happens when someone can’t pay? Two things: they can suddenly get the money or there’s a safe full of cash they can give me to just walk away. But guys like you don’t have that cash or you wouldn’t be sitting here now with my gun pressed to your head. So, let me bring this down nice and easy so you understand. We’ll take that money in your safe, if it actually exists, and you’re going to the Mill, and there we’re going to drain your blood and sell it to pay down your debt, and there you’re going to stay until it’s all paid back. Which, given that you’re O positive, will be a while. The hospitals aren’t exactly paying arms and legs for O positive.”

  Jerry sobbed. It was the worst part of the job, having to listen to men blubber like children. It was embarrassing, watching grown men do that. They cried out for mercy and their mothers and to God. Poor things. “Please, don’t. Please.”

  “Prick your finger.”

  “I can’t do this. Please.”

  “Prick your finger.”

  “Please don’t.”

  Cole wanted to knock the poor bastard out right now, but a shock from the stun gun might stop the guy’s heart and the sedation chemicals mess with the tests he needed to run. He smacked Jerry across the face so hard that he dropped the plastic kit. “Jerry, stop. Have some respect for yourself. Prick your finger.”

  Jerry, sobbing, picked up the kit and opened it. The needle was encased in a small sleeve of plastic. He broke that and held the needle between his fingers, staring down at it. “Go on,” Cole said.

  He brought the needlepoint to his finger, the skin dimpling but not breaking, holding it there for a few seconds before Cole said, “You’re wasting my time.”

  Tears rolled down Jerry’s cheeks, and he pressed the needle a little harder. A small bead welled to the surface.

  “Get some blood on the paper strip and hand it back to me.”

  While Jerry stuck one of the thin strips onto the blood and held it over his shoulder, Cole grabbed his phone and opened his applications. He took th
e piece with a gloved hand, enclosed it in a glass slide, and finagled the slide into a tiny slot on the bottom of his phone. The screen indicated that it was processing. “I really hope this girl didn’t give you HIV or something,” he said. “For your sake.”

  The phone buzzed and spit out the slide, the screen laying out Jerry’s blood type and any pathogens present. “Congratulations, Jerry. You’re clean.”

  Jerry began to plead, but Cole pulled back his gun, grabbed Jerry’s forehead, yanking his head to the side, and stuck a syringe into his neck. Jerry struggled against him, but soon went limp. Cole exited the car and collected anything he may have left behind, wiping everything down, lugging Jerry into the trunk of the other car, and screwing the license plates back.

  Getting into his car, he checked the dash clock. He thought for a second that he could delay delivering Jerry, with time running out for his other plans. But then he thought about his boss and decided against it.

  No one gets between his boss and his money.

  |January 19th

  7:23 p.m.

  Cole stood on top of a concrete buffer at the bottom of a warehouse loading dock. He hammered the side of his fist against the garage door. An icy wind kicked up every few seconds. He stared out over the parking lot, empty field, and perimeter barbed wire fence beyond. A couple lamps flickered overtop industrial crates in the property across the street, no sound but the breeze and the rhythmic hum of his phone trilling in his pocket.

  The call went to voicemail. He already knew what she was going to say if he picked up now. She would be pissy unless he said he was on his way right at that moment, probably even tell him not to come. No use having that conversation until he had his payment in hand.

  He smacked his palm against the loading door, the sound ringing hollow. His wristwatch clicked the seconds off in the cold silence. Something clanked inside, and then the door in front of him soared open.

  “Delivery,” he said.

  A larger man eyed him. “In the trunk?”

  He nodded. People scurried around inside, most of them wearing white aprons, heavy coats, and latex gloves. A few were shedding their layers. Full blood bags hung from racks nearby. Someone opened an industrial-sized refrigerator at the other end of the room and started wheeling the racks inside.