They were so quiet that Steve was sure he could hear the click of the camera’s shutter. With every second that ticked by, Steve’s adrenalin drove him into even higher gear over those photos.
“Be careful,” Kayla mouthed.
Steve was ready to pounce and felt like he could run a mile. “Don’t you worry, baby, this body is so limber, I’m gonna get to him in three strides,” he whispered.
With that, he pushed off and leapt toward the trees to his left. It actually only took two strides. Not that it mattered; the photographer was so startled by Steve’s sudden pounce that he wouldn’t have been able to react fast enough for six, let alone the two. The reporter’s brown eyes reflected back at him in shock and a fair amount of fear.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, man?!” Steve yelled, grabbing the reporter by the lapels of his coat. “That how you get your kicks? Taking naughty pictures of people and ruining their lives? That how you do things? Huh?!”
“Let me go!”
“Let you go? You want me to let you go? Now why would I do that?” he said in a menacing whisper.
Darrel Canby hadn’t been on the job very long, but the young journalist was as a real up-and-comer at The Spectator. Full of clever ideas for stories that would make the front page. Also full of clever ideas for how to get a young buck Assemblyman in his back pocket. He knew how the game was played, and when he saw Jack Deveraux’s beautiful young wife participating in quite the extra-curricular activities with the lowlife from the riverfront, he knew that he had a ringer on the field and would finally get to play.
What he didn’t count on, however, was that Steven Earl Johnson was not a man you wanted on the opposing team.
Now that up-and-comer was nothing more than a deer in the headlights. He absolutely didn’t know what hit him.
Steve shook him hard by the lapels he was still white knuckling and shoved him against a tree. “You’re not getting any more pictures, man, you got that?”
“I-I-I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Steve punched him in the jaw, and the reporter cried out in pain.
“You wanna try that again?”
“You hit me!” he spat out. “I-I’m gonna file charges against you!”
“Really? I don’t see anyone here to corroborate your story.
The reporter glanced over at Kayla, still sitting in the cart.
“Don’t you look at her!” Steve snarled. “Don’t you fucking look at her!” But he didn’t shift his gaze away soon enough for Steve, so he hit him again.”
“Steve!” Kayla called with warning concern.
“See! She knows you’re assaulting me!”
“Oh yeah, is that what she knows? Somehow I don’t think her concern was for you, you sniveling pile of pond scum.”
“He’s right,” she said as she got out of the cart. “I’m concerned that he’s going to give me a reason to wrap a bandage around another part of him is all.”
“You stay there, baby,” Steve called back to her, then with a dangerous grin he looked back at the man whose pictures sent Jack over the edge from Assemblyman to rapist. “Ya think you got all the answers.” The man’s eyes were darting around and landed briefly on Kayla. “And didn’t I tell you not to look at her? You’re gonna have to pay for that, now.” Steve then kneed him in the groin, knocking the proverbial wind out of him. He sank to his knees and moaned in pain. “Where’s your camera?”
The man rolled over holding his crotch.
“Answer me! Where’s your camera, pond scum!”
Kayla saw a glint in the moonlight and pointed it out to Steve. He picked it up and looked it over. “You digital yet? Nah, too early isn’t it. Guess I’ll need to do this old school.”
The reporter had no idea what Steve was saying, his primary concern being the pain radiating in droves from his testicles up through every last pore.
“You’re gonna have to ask BillyJack to up your budget over at the paper when he takes it over in a couple years, man, ‘cause this thing is about to be rendered useless.”
“You can’t do that …”
Steve squatted down and stared daggers into the man’s wide, brown eyes. “Oh yes I can. This is how it’s gonna happen, dude. You listening?” he asked in a low and dark tone as he grabbed the man’s chin in his hand. “You put on those listening ears, now, ‘cause I’m only gonna go over this one time.”
The reporter was shaking now, and it wasn’t from the cold.
“This film is never going to get developed.” He opened the back of the camera and pulled out the 35mm film that was coiled through the bowels of the apparatus, then he held it out to Kayla for her to take. She walked over to him and grabbed it, putting it in Steve’s coat pocket. Her heart was pumping as hard as Steve’s was. “Go back over there, now, baby,” he told her with far less edge in his voice as she followed his instructions. The reporter watched this exchange in attentive silence. “And this camera,” Steve said as he broke the back of the camera off its hinge, “is never going to be clicking again.” He then grabbed a nearby rock and crushed it down on top of the camera, smashing it to large pieces. Steve stood back up. “Now give me your wallet,” he demanded.
The reporter leaned up on one elbow. “You’re robbing me?!”
“Did I tell you to talk? Now you give me your wallet real nice like or I’m gonna have to start fishing in your pockets, and neither one of us wants that.”
The man looked at Kayla with pitifully pleading eyes. “How can you let him do this!” he said to her, “You’re married to—”
“Dude, you’re dumber than I gave you credit for.” Steve roughly pulled him from the ground and punched him in the jaw again, this time opening up a nice gash in his lip that started bleeding immediately. “That’s for looking at her again. You say one more thing to her or so much as blink funny, I’m gonna rearrange your whole goddamn face. Now I’m not tellin’ you again. Give me your fucking wallet.”
The man made sure to look only into Steve’s unsmiling right eye as he reached into his inside coat pocket and handed his wallet over to him.
“How we doin’ on time ya think, baby?” he called over to Kayla while looking the reporter right in the face.
“I don’t know for sure, but I think we really need to hurry.”
“Don’t you worry,” he called back.
Steve rifled through the wallet and found what he was looking for. “Canby. Ok, Canby, ya see this?” he asked holding up his driver’s license. “This tells me where you live. Now I hope your listening ears are still on, man. Because not only are the pictures you took tonight goners, but any other little pictures you got hangin’ out in a darkroom or envelope or something somewhere, you know what you’re gonna do with ‘em, dude? You’re gonna burn ‘em. And the negatives, too. Ya know how I know that? ‘Cause I’m coming to pay you a visit tomorrow morning, and if you’ve got anything I don’t like, then you’re gonna get introduced to my nasty side. This here right now? I’m still a pussycat right now, so that sure would be a bad day for you if you were stupid enough to get on my bad side.” Canby just glared at Steve in stunned silence as he tried to shrink back as much as he could into himself. “Then after tomorrow’s little visit,” Steve continued with a solid shake to drive it home, “all those plans to follow us and take more pictures … never gonna happen. Because if you do, I’ll know. And I’ll come after you with more than just a little slapping around.”
Canby was still staring Steve right in the face when he closed the wallet and roughly placed it back into the pocket where it had come from.
“That pretty face of yours is gonna need a couple stitches,” Steve said. “Don’t even think of getting them at the Emergency Center.” Canby nodded nervously. Steve gave him a final threatening look, then opened his blazing green eye wide and said, “I know where you live, Canby.” Then he let him go with a final shove. “Now get the hell out of here you piece of trash.” And with that, the demoralized reporter ran as fast as his damaged body could take him.
Steve waited just the few seconds it took to verify that Canby ran away from the house and not into it before he crouched down to pick up every last piece of the camera.
“Steve!” Kayla called, “are you ok?”
“Never better, baby,” he said, hopped up on an adrenalin high as Kayla slipped down off the hay. “Here, we’ve gotta take these with us,” and shoved the camera pieces into the leather pockets of his jacket.
“You must be freezing by now,” she said as she slipped the jacket off her shoulders.
“No, you’re gonna need that, we’re getting out of here.”
“So, I’m not going to Jack?” she asked with a wide smile.
“No way, Sweetness. There’s no way we’re making this mistake again. I couldn’t take it if—“
Kayla cut off the rest of his sentence with a kiss full of passionate desire. She pulled him to her by his shirt and devoured his mouth with a hunger that made it hard for Steve to see straight. She wanted him right now and was ready to crawl right back up into that hay. She wrapped her arms around him and held on tight.
“Oh, baby,” he said as he pushed Kayla back into the cart with the length of his own body upon hers. Sweetness, I don’t know what I did to deserve this,” he panted between kisses, “and I’d love to make love to you right now on that hayride.” He ran his hands down her back to push her bottom into him. “But if we don’t go right now, someone’s gonna find us. Plus,“ he gave her one last tongue-filled kiss that tasted of the wine she’d had earlier in the evening, “I admit it … I’m freezing.”
Kayla smiled. “Ok,” she said. “Get me out of here.” Then she took a beat and said, “But where are we going to go?”
Steve looked around and saw the stables. “Well, if we want hay, there’s more of it in there,” he said with a smirk.
“No, Jack will look there.”
“Back to the loft?”
“No, Jack lives there with me right now, remember?”
“Right,” he said annoyed. Then he realized something that would have been obvious if his brain wasn’t still thinking like 2009. “Yeah, but I don’t live there yet, Sweetness. Why don’t we just go to my place?”
The suggestion evoked such a strong pang to see the place again that she couldn’t wait to get there. She smiled and practically pulled him as she started off with a look over her shoulder.
Just then she stopped dead in her tracks as a voice called out into the night air screaming Kayla’s name.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “It’s Jack.”
“Shit! I knew we were taking too long!”
“What do we do, she asked in fear?”
Then he grabbed her hand as they took out through the night. “Run.”