Life; As It Happens: 7 - The Secret

[Cactus]

June 4, 2018, 6:41 pm
W 107th Avenue and West End Avenue
Bloomingdale, New York City

As he made his way down the dimly lit hallway of his apartment building, Edward Tough made a mental note to bring the recyclable shopping bags the next time he went to pick up some groceries. It wasn't that the grocery store was far away, but the flimsy plastic bags were both bad for the environment, and didn't tend to hold up well after being overpacked. One of the six bags in particular that he was carefully carrying looked as though it was ready to burst.

What could he say? When you get a 60% off sale on ground meat, you take advantage.

Such was the life of a student - you picked up deals where you could, made concessions where you had to. Edward couldn't wait to be done with University. His roommate was already finished, and had landed a pretty solid job only recently, so it ate away at him that he still had a couple of courses to go. True to his personality, Ed had sped through university with the same rapidity that he had high school.

Of course, there was a difference. He'd enjoyed university.

Fumbling the bags around in his hand, he grasped for the doorknob once he reached his apartment, the second-to-last door at the end of the hall. The building was old, but was in a primarily student-populated neighbourhood, so the rent was cheap and he knew he shouldn't feel threatened walking around at night. The walls looked a little grimey and the superintendent was probably as old as the building itself, but it was home. For now, at least.

Finally managing to maneuver his way inside of the apartment, Ed took note of his roommate Mike, sitting on the couch, a beer in hand. Funny, Ed had thought that Mike was laying off on the afternoon beers. Making his way into the kitchen, he dumped the bags on the counter and moved to put away the meat he'd purchased.

"Hey man, you're never going to believe the sale they had. I picked up like... probably five pounds of ground beef, some chicken, turkey... this'll last us for ages!"

Rearranging the meat in his freezer, Ed waited for a response, but got none. Shrugging to himself, he continued to pack away the groceries.

"Oh hey, did you end up finding that cable? I'm pretty sure it's in my desk drawer now that I think about it. If not, I can go find it for you..." He trailed off again, hearing only the sloshing of liquid as Mike took a sip of his beer. Maybe he was texting someone? Mike tended to fall into his own world when he was dating someone new; his eyes would be glued to the phone a lot.

"Everything going okay with the new jo-"

Ed stepped out into the living room, and saw that Mike was not in fact on his phone. Instead, he sat on the armrest of the couch, a Corona in hand. It looked as though he'd just come home from work. Mike sat, brown hair still styled up, wearing his patterned blue dress shirt and black trousers, though the shirt was untucked. He looked like a father about to discipline a son who'd gotten in trouble at school. He wore a frown that was fixed directly on Edward, his green eyes dark in an uncharacteristic display of anger. What stopped Ed mid-sentence wasn't Mike's expression, though.

A silver case sat on the table between them.

That silver case should not have been sitting on the table.

Mike should not have known of the existence of that silver case.

Oh, shit.

Seeing the emotions cycle through Ed's face, Mike chose that moment to break his silence. His tone was calm, but his words were accusatory; to the point.

"No, I didn't find the cable. I found this instead. Care to explain?"

Edward just continued to stare at the case, replaying the events of the morning in his mind. He'd gotten up, put on his clothes, grabbed his wallet and his phone, opened the safe and... oh dear. He'd gotten a phone call, and that meant he'd forgotten to close-

"No? No explanation?"

Mike's tone was slightly more aggressive this time, and he leaned forward and flipped the lid open, exposing the interior of the case. The lid was padded, but there was a cut-out spot in the foam base. The cut-out held a small yellow box - the box was still there. The other item within the case made it clearly obvious what the case was intended to contain.

The other item was a fully loaded spare pistol magazine.

The same pistol that was currently resting on a concealed holster by Edward's leg.

"How about now?"

Edward still remained silent, his shoulders slumped to his side. This was a massive breach of trust, and Mike had every right to be really, really upset with him right now. His roommate wasn't an unreasonable person, but Edward knew he'd screwed up. He was guilty of a sin of omission. He just wasn't sure how to even begin to explain.

"Still nothing, huh? Oliver, what the fuck?" Indeed, Mike had called him by his real name. His barely contained fury was evident. "How long have you been keeping a fucking gun in our apartment? More importantly, where is it?"

Closing his eyes, he let his head sag, as he reached down and pulled up his right pant-leg. Unstrapping the velcro, he removed the ankle holster and placed it on the coffee table. Oliver said nothing as he did so, but sat down as he placed the weapon on the table. Mike's eyes widened as he watched his roommate disarm himself. He hadn't wanted to believe the evidence, but here it was, sitting right in front of him. A loaded weapon, complete with spare magazine. In his apartment.

Mike tilted the bottle of beer back and finished it, setting the bottle down on the table with a dim thud.

"You'd better start talking, Oliver, and I mean now."

The emphasis on the final word finally caved the younger man's resolve, and he tried to explain.

"I've had it for a year. Since that shit on the subway."

A year prior, Oliver had been accosted on his way home and was mugged. He'd gotten away uninjured, but severely shaken up. Mike had taken him out for a couple of beers and helped him replace all of his cards and identification, but he hadn't figured that it would leave that much of an impression. People got mugged in New York City all the time. Hell, it had happened to him once. It sucked, but living in a big enough city, crime touched everyone. The fingers of injustice had no prejudices, and Mike assumed that Oliver should have known that better than anyone. Their neighbourhood was, by and large, okay, so it was generally an aberration when it happened.

"So, what? You just figure the next time that some junkie tries to rip your wallet off, that you'll just pull out your piece and blast a cap in his ass? Go and try some vigilante justice? Come on, Oliver. You're smarter than that." Mike frowned. "At least, I thought you were."

He blanched at the accusation, and his shame made way for some anger of his own. He would have assumed that his friend, of all people, would understand.

"No, of course not. But..."

Mike cut him off.

"Do you even understand how many laws you're breaking, here? You're carrying a gun on your person without a permit. I don't even want to know how you got it, let alone where. You have no license, no reason to carry it... and maybe a little heads-up conversation to your roommate would have been nice! Maybe a little common fucking courtesy!"

Mike's anger was starting to seep through his cool veneer. His voice was getting higher, more shrill, and his face was reddening. For his part, Oliver had been trying to keep himself calm and collected, but as Mike's voice got higher and louder, Oliver felt his own anger starting to rise.

"You don't get it."

He was quick to cut Oliver off once more.

"You'd better fucking believe I don't get it! Oliver - you have been keeping a loaded weapon in the apartment. What happens if I come home late one night and you get startled and shoot me as I'm coming in? What if I bring some girl home and you don't know what she looks like and pop her? Fuck sakes, man!"

Oliver's blood was starting to boil. All of the accusations, and Mike wouldn't even let him finish a sentence. So, fine. He wanted to yell? Oliver could yell.

And yell he did.

"No! No. You don't fucking get it, Mike!" He punctuated his angry retort with a punched finger towards his roommate. "You don't understand what it's like to wonder if there's a fucking spook lurking around every corner. Wondering if the guy who gave you a look on the corner is some terrorist who's looking to kidnap you. You're goddamn right, when that shit happened on the subway last year, it scared me. It terrified me. Not because I was getting mugged. Come on. I'm not a New York City amateur."

Oliver jumped to his feet, unable to keep sitting as he dressed his roommate down.

"That scared the hell out of me, because I thought that they finally caught up to me. I thought Danya had finished with one generation of the Dodd family and had decided to move on to the next."

Those words slammed Mike's anger against the proverbial wall. He'd never considered that. Obviously, once Mike had learned about Ed's connection to Survival of the Fittest - his true identity of Oliver; everything that went along with that? A lot of the idiosyncrasies that he'd wondered about his roommate over the years made sense. But to be living in that much fear? Mike understood the rationale, he even felt for him... but it didn't change the fact that what Oliver had done was downright idiotic. He scaled the tone of his next words down a notch, de-escalating the situation.

"Right. But Oliver, having a gun... that's not going to help. If anything, it's going to make you more," Mike chose his next word carefully, "apprehensive."

Oliver threw his hands up in the air, a bit more of a dramatic gesture than a real shrug, but didn't have much to offer. Mike had him there.

"It beats sitting around and waiting."

Shaking his head, Mike now stood himself, his voice projecting a business-like confidence. Oliver didn't get to get off that easily.

"Waiting for what, Oliver? That Danya guy who had it out for your brother? He's dead."

Mike let the words hang for a moment, and pulled his next punch a little. "Your brother? He's dead too. The guy who's running the show now is someone different, his son or something. I somehow doubt that the vendetta some terrorist had against Adam Dodd is going to carry through a bloodline. Think about it. It doesn't add up."

Oliver's face now expressed a modicum of self-doubt. Mike's logic was sound. Since his brother had been kidnapped again in 2007, more than ten years had passed for him without incident.

"Yeah, but..." He tried to interject, but Mike wasn't having it.

"Oliver. Dude. I think if someone was going to come after you and your family, they'd have done it by now. You're just a footnote in their history. Those bastards are more concerned with figuring out where the next class of kids they're going to kidnap are going to come from. They're trying to leave damaged survivors in their wake." Mike sat back down, the anger in the room having been sucked out.

Oliver didn't say anything, but nodded at his roommate. His actions had been foolhardy, and he was now regretting them. There was still a modicum of indignity that his friend had gone through his possessions, but Mike was right. He'd worked so hard to get through school and make something of himself, that if he ever got pulled over with a permitless concealed weapon, he'd be throwing it all away.

Everything would have been such a waste.

A waste that the Dodd bloodline really couldn't afford.

"What d'you say we get rid of it, okay?"

Instantly, Oliver stiffened. Even though he saw the error of his ways, there was another very good reason he was glad he had it.

"I can't do that, man. I'm sorry. I need it."

"You need it? What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

The alarm in Mike's voice was palpable.

"I have a meeting next week, and... I think it'd be smarter if I came to it armed."

Mike couldn't believe the words coming out of Oliver's mouth. What was this, a totalitarian state with AK-47s on every corner? What kind of a meeting would a twenty year-old college kid need to show up to with a pistol strapped to his leg?

"Meeting? Armed? Who the hell are you meeting, the goddamn drug czar of New York City? Is Pablo-fucking-Escobar himself rising from the grave to buy you a slice of pizza?"

Oliver rolled his eyes at his roommate, his glibness almost appreciated under the circumstances.

"Funny. No, I'm..." He hesitated. "... I'm meeting up with Keith Jackson."

Mike blinked in surprise. That was not the name that he had been expecting to hear. Suddenly, the arming became a bit more rational. Information on Jackson had been kept very guarded and while there had been an initial media boom when he'd reappeared, specificities like his current location and what he'd been doing for eight years while in hiding were things that hadn't exactly been shared with the public.

That Oliver was having a meeting with this guy raised all kinds of red flags for Mike. Was he trying to put his paranoia to bed? Why would he be meeting up with someone who was involved in the death of his brother? He hadn't figured that the most recent Survival of the Fittest media coverage had stirred up that many bad feelings for his friend, but perhaps he'd been well off the mark. A trauma like that wasn't something that you just shrugged off, but even still...

"Keith Jackson... man, do you really think that's a good idea?"

Oliver shrugged, his expression impossible to read.

"Maybe. Maybe not. But he's the only one who can answer questions that I have. Things that I... I need to know. My family didn't want to know, but that's not fair. They shouldn't get to decide for me."

Mike looked at him, confused. "What do you mean, decide?"

"Last year, after he reappeared? He called my brother's house. He spoke to my dad and my brother. He tried to tell them... something, anyway. They didn't want to hear it."

The steely look of resolve on Oliver's face was one that Mike had rarely seen from his young pal.

"But I do. I need to hear what he has to say." He punctuated his next words with an accusatory finger point in Mike's direction. "Don't try and talk me out of it."

Mike held his hands up in a defensive posture. He knew what Oliver was like when he got like this. To say that his friend was stubborn would have been the understatement of the century. Once Edliver (Mike was getting so frustrated in trying to remember what the hell to call him) made up his mind about something, it was like prying the Jaws of Life apart. You just couldn't stop him.

"Fine, I won't... but look. You can't keep walking around with a gun."

Mike's shoulders sagged. He had an idea to convince his roommate to get rid of the gun, but he didn't much care for it. Unfortunately it was the only one that he thought might work.

"Tell you what? We go out, right now, and we throw that fucking thing in the Hudson. Immediately." Oliver opened his mouth to object but Mike held a hand out.

"We come back here, we have a couple of beers, because goddamn if I'm not after finding out you've been sleeping with a literal pistol under your pillow. And then when you go and have your meeting with Keith, instead of having a gun for backup?"

This would be a mistake, he knew even as the words left his mouth.

"I'll come with you. You'll have me. Strength in numbers, yeah?"

Oliver knew that this was a battle he was going to lose. Mike had made his feelings about the hidden weapon crystal clear, and while the pistol had not been a cheap purchase, he sensed that it would be within his best interests to discard it. His roommate was generally a stickler for the law, and the last thing Oliver needed was an encounter with law enforcement courtesy of his buddy. Mike wasn't a narc, but he had a point about Oliver being twitchy with a weapon around. There were a thousand reasons that Oliver could find to justify his decision to keep it, but there was one large one to acquiesce.

He trusted Mike: like he hadn't trusted anyone in a very long time.

Besides, having backup for his meeting with Keith wasn't the worst idea he'd ever heard. His roommate was athletic, and Oliver had heard stories of him being able to hold his own during long-ago hockey fights. He didn't love the idea of throwing the gun in the river like someone disposing of a murder weapon, but...

"Fine. Deal. But you'd better not bail. I don't want to go to this meeting alone."

Mike nodded, rising to his feet once more. The gun needed to be introduced with the bottom of the Hudson with some urgency. He wouldn't abandon his young friend; that wasn't the kind of person that he was. Mike Schultz may have been a lot of things, but he was a damned loyal guy, especially to his close friends. As Oliver grabbed the gun off of the table and placed it within the silver case, Mike couldn't help but wonder just how they'd gotten here.

Having his own apartment was starting to look really good right about now.



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