Then his life flashed before his eyes and when he thought he was going to have it all, start a new life with this woman he knew as the enemy but turned out to be a modern woman seeking a prize in the end, a win to her struggles. Just when he thought he was going to make something of himself this time, really change his ways of behavior and attitudes toward the world and the little things that mattered to him.
Just when he thought he was going to marry Madeline and forget about his life as a con gone wrong and only needed when he was called upon to do a dirty job. And he always hated doing the dirty work and never getting the attention or respect he’d deserve. For sometime he wanted to change his luck into realism and make something with his life, and he had plan to once he got his money from Cougar, then he was going to take a one way ticket to any destination. Any plane to any town and start anew.
He had thought all this through, and now with a leading lady to follow him in those steps back to redemption, he thought he had it all.
But those dreams, those memories, those times of thinking he could succeed were slapped away right before his eyes and just as the new love of his life dropped the engagement ring in her hands to the cement sidewalk lining a back alley in the streets of Rio, and the three foreign paramedics hustling around him, trying to bring some life back into the once hard female detective, Casey was on the brink of losing his mind.
“Call it,” he heard a paramedic with straight black hair say.
The paramedic kneeling directly in front of him released a frustrated breath of air and looked at his wristwatch. “Time of death 1:20 a.m.”
Two hours later after the paramedics took Madeline’s corpse with them to Rio’s country coroner and after all the on-lookers left the scene of the crime, Casey hid away from the place of death where his Madeline, the female detective he met on purpose, ran into on accident, and found falling in love for without regret or reason was dead.
How could have this have happened, he asked himself time and time again in the late hours of the night. Steam from the sewers brushed by him and the cold moon stilled above him, staring down upon him like a bug it wanted to squish.
He closed his leather jacket around him tighter, took a deep breath full of toxic air he knew still smelled fresh from Madeline’s blood. He released the breath, then looked down at his feet and closed his head close to his legs, inside his jacket opening, and softly cried.
He was in a strange country, with strange people all around him, with a love lost, and soul desperately begging to escape. And he was alone.
“Isn’t this what you always wanted?” a stranger from the shadows asked. A woman, from the sound of her voice, Casey figured out, but could not see her face.
“For this woman to die? Never,” he answered.
Cheri walked out of the shadow under the street light, enjoying the night air and her smokes. She had one hand in her tight leather jacket, holding the soft pack of her cigarettes tightly in that hand and her tall hiked boots laced all the way up to the knee just below her sleek miniskirt.
Her beauty caught his breath but he was too turned off and emotionally detached to inflict any kind of feeling towards that beauty standing close to him and her deep soothe voice sure wasn’t helping either.
“Why not, Mr. Woods? You have the million dollars. You have the money and no one else to use it on but yourself.”
She took her time walking, taking in the bright lights and the fresh air in her home country of Rio. She smiled to herself as a whisk curl of her dark red hair tickled her face and she brushed what she could from the blowing wind back behind her shoulders.
“It’s not about the money anymore.”
“It should be. People always change over large sums of cash. It’s called greed, and you have it just as much as anyone else does. And once you take a smell of that fresh money you know is yours, there’s turning back.” Cheri said then took another drag of her cigarette. She slipped her other hand out of her pocket with the pack of cigarettes, “Want one?”
Casey looked at her hand, trying to suck down tears, then slowly took his hands out of his pockets and took the single cigarette that stuck out amongst the others. Cheri threw him her lighter and he lit it then took a long, soothing drag, then released the smoke. God it felt good to smoke. The only thing he could relax with.
“You’re not one for getting hitched, having babies, just the settling down type.” Cheri shook her head, her curls bouncing around her face and she took another drag. “No, you’re not like that all. And whatever happened here exactly, you should forget in a week’s time. No need to grieve over someone you knew for so little time.”
“How can you say all this? You don’t know me. You’re just a foreign whore who knows nothing better than I do.” Casey rubbed his eyes and shook his head hard to get rid of anything and anyone who bothered him now. “Just leave.”
Before Cheri could say another snippy comment Casey looked up at her with his green eyes red from crying, his hair a messy blond, and his cheekbones darkened from the five o’clock shadow. His looks caught her rude and carefree personality off guard and she quickly turned away from him to down at her feet in a way showing him she was sorry.
He had that trait to make any woman melt, Cheri gave him that.
“Get over it.”
Casey looked away from her sleek body build and down at his hands deep into his pockets. “Get out of here!”
“Oh, Casey, I really wish you knew what you were saying. Your kind doesn’t grieve like this. They don’t care. They have no heart. Buck up. This little accident that just happened was just a minor problem of your big future. She was a cop. We don’t respect cops. You weren’t in love, and you never wanted to marry her. She was just a good fuck, wasn’t she?”
Casey wanted to spring to his legs and strangle this bitch who thought she knew him, and knew he wasn’t capable of change. She had no right to say these things to him.
“Small time news like this little death wouldn’t even make eleven o’clock news.”
“Don’t know why it would be on the news anyway. We’re not from here.” Casey mumbled.
“Another reason to forget and get home and spend,” Cheri said.
Casey looked at her again with a fresh batch of tears he knew he couldn’t let free. “Sick bitch.”
Cheri suddenly felt uncomfortable, and especially with the way he was looking at her. “Should I take that as a compliment?”
“You tell me.” He said then found enough strength to stand to his feet but as soon as he did he felt a felt pressure on his shoulder and was forced to sit down again.
“People lose their interests easily once the person’s dead but they always have to dig into what actually happened. Nobody can just die in peace anymore unless you’re in a fucking nursing home.” She said. “Stop grieving for the enemy. People die all the time at any age at any time and anywhere. We can’t stop death from coming, you should know that. You’re fuckin’ American. Don’t you people always kill each other without reason? Why are Americans always at war with someone personally or worldly?”
“Do I even know you?” he yelled out, so angry and bemused with this woman he could hardly stand looking at her beauty.
“No, but I know you.” She teased, then lit another cigarette. “People like us, Casey, don’t know how to change. We were born to do the jobs we perform. We were placed in this life to succeed in the wrong defense. We were brought here to have fun doing what we do. So, just enjoy yourself.” She stepped in front of him, then moved between his legs. “You thought you were in love, you thought you wanted a wife, a family, but tell me something…how long did you think you were going to last in a life like that?”
Casey swallowed down his gut in his throat and pushed aside the woman. “Doesn’t matter what my life would be like in the future. I loved that woman. And now she’s gone because of a damn drunk who couldn’t control his steering wheel! She survived rain clouds full of bullets and threats and car chases. She survived. And now I have to survive her.”
Cheri shook her head, “Pity, Casey, because you and I could have really shared something.” She dropped the near gone cigarette to the ground and stepped on the leftovers. “Now we will never know, but as cruel and harsh and heartless I may be, I won’t take away what you have left of the enemy. I’d spit on you, hurt you, and torment however possible way I could, but I will not take away what you feel.” She walked up to him, brushed back a piece of loose hair across his brow, and kissed his cheek. “Go grieve, boy. Go cry your eyes out. It’s all you have left to live for.”
Cheri looked into Casey’s green eyes, feeling nothing for him. She wanted to smack him and make him snap out of it, but she couldn’t no matter how hard she may come to be.
She walked around him and whispered out over her shoulder she said, “What a waste.”