Hot Chocolate and Redemption

Tammy's words stunned Ryan into silence. They'd had three good dates, and now this was her reason why she wouldn't go out on a fourth date. She'd been nothing but awesome, and this seemingly irrational rationale for rejection had him curious.

"I've seen you do nothing bad. You've been great with me." He leaned back in his chair, and took a sip of the coffeehouse's mocha hot chocolate. Her expression had hardened in a way he'd never seen before.

"That's because I don't let you see that side of me, Ryan.  Listen, you were really sweet and persistent which is why I went out with you, but I'm cutting this off before it goes too far.  I don't want to hurt you, and this will hurt less than you finding out what I'm really like." He noticed her hardened expression and flat tone shifted slightly during the last sentence, and they both showed him some pain.  He decided to play the card she'd just handed him.

"If you're so horrible, why be nice and try to spare my feelings from the future hurt?  If you're so terrible, why not just use me until I'm no fun anymore?"  

Her pale skin, contrasted to an extreme against her black hair and blank tank-top, flourished in a pinker tone as though she were somewhere between embarrassed and mad.  "I said I was a bad person, not a horrible person.  Dammit, Ryan, why can't you just trust me? Just let me go."

Ryan put down his coffee cup and made a gesture of open hands.  "I'm not holding you here, Tammy."

"It's not your hands, Ryan.  It's your heart.  Get me out of there before I break it." She leaned over the table and took one of his hands in hers.  "Ryan, you are a good person. I have seen so much bad stuff in this world that I know the difference between good people and bad people better than you ever will.  Trust me, I am bad for you."  With that, she stood up from the small wooden table, released his hand, and exited the coffee shop coolly.  Ryan had to wait to pay the waitress, and he realized Tammy had known he would wait.  She'd used his decency to make her escape.

When he made it back out the street, he could not find her anywhere.  It didn't matter much, though. He knew where she lived and where she worked, and she had no car.  She worked at The Virginian Casino and Hotel which was five blocks south of the hotel where he was staying.  She lived in a boarding house near the university about five blocks north of his hotel.  Finding her would not be a problem.  Deciding if he wanted to find her again was the issue that weighed on his mind as he made his way back to his hotel. 

Contemplating the conversation as he took the elevator up to his room on the twenty-second floor, he found himself getting angrier and angrier that a young hotel bartender in this fairly seedy part of this almost seedy city had declared herself wiser to the world, and wiser to his inner workings, than he.  If she was twenty one, he had ten years on her and a ton of life experience. He'd been in the Middle East driving trucks for military contractors in volatile areas, and he had worked as an EMT in a very dangerous part of Detroit for a few years.  He had seen the dark side of life, and her judgement of him as "too naive" for likes of her ate at him as did the general feeling of rejection.  

He spent way too much in the casino that night, but recovered most of it by the time the action was cooling down at the tables.  He felt a little recovered in the morning from the blow she'd dealt him, and he decided that what he wanted to do was to find out if Tammy was as bad as she claimed.  

Winter had begun had settled in over the dry, mountain city, and morning was cold.  He waited in the parking garage of the hotel, sipping over-priced hot chocolate, until she passed by.  He waited until she was a block away and started walking behind her.  He wasn't fifteen steps on his journey when he saw her shake hands with some guy on the street.  Ryan didn't like the looks of him, but she shook his hand, gave him a little hug and kept walking.  The guy kept walking the opposite direction and then turned right.  Ryan figured maybe this was a co-worker from the casino.  

A block later, there was a police car. She bounced right up to it, leaned in the open side window and gave the cop in the passenger side a hug.  When her top half emerged from the vehicle, the cops were smiling.  Ryan held back a block and pretended to look at the menu of some Vietnamese restaurant while she chatted with the men in uniform.  She waved to the cops, and they took off leisurely down the cross street.

Tammy continued down the street, and was maybe only two blocks from work, when the guy she'd hugged earlier appeared ahead of her.  Ryan was putting it all together in his head now.  The guy had gone one block over and gotten ahead of Tammy while she talked to the cops.  Now here he was again.  

Instead of hugging, Tammy flicked something from her hand down on the sidewalk ahead of her.  The guy did the same thing.  As she walked by, she picked up what he dropped and he picked up what she dropped.

Ryan was stunned.  He knew what this was. He'd seen something like it in Detroit.  He'd just watched Tammy take drugs from the dealer guy in the hug, then watched her pass it to the cops in the car, and she took the money the cops gave her and dropped it on the sidewalk back to the dealer guy who then dropped her something in return. What she picked up was either her own share of the drugs or a little bit of her percentage for being the delivery girl.

Amazed at what he'd just seen, Ryan almost missed her going into the hotel for work.  He couldn't figure out why she'd do this, unless the cops couldn't be seen with the dealer so she made some extra money just being the clean mule that the cops could be seen with.

Ryan went back to his hotel room, grabbed a sandwich from the deli on the way up, and went back to his room to do research on her on the internet.

He found nothing.

She had no social media presence, and there were no arrest records on her in this county.  She was clean and anonymous.  He found her birth certificate from a town out in the mountains, but that was it.

He blew two hundred dollars playing roulette, took a nap, and got ready for his night surveillance.  

Night time in this city meant sparser foot traffic, so he put on a winter coat, hat, and a scarf.  She walked out of the hotel at 9:30, and cut over two blocks from the main drag instead of walking directly home.  Intrigued, but fearing being seen by her on the side streets, he kept far back from her.

He thought he'd lost her when he got to the second block, but then a noise got his attention. He heard glass break up the block, so he turned and cautiously made his way down the street of older, dark, wood-framed houses. She emerged from a driveway two houses ahead of him carrying what looked like a laptop bag.  She walked casually, and he hid behind a tall shrub until she had gotten further away before resuming his trailing.

She walked back over the Interstate to her boarding house carrying the bag over her shoulder like she owned it.  Ryan got hot chocolate from the gas station across the way and waited, but she didn't reappear after half an hour.  He went back to his hotel, and contemplated that he had just witnessed her breaking and entering a house and the stealing something.

Under the covers in bed, he rationalized that he didn't know that the glass breaking came from that house. "Maybe she was picking up the laptop from a friend who'd left it on the back porch for her," he thought, knowing that it was unlikely someone would leave a laptop on a porch in that neighborhood. 

The next day wasn't as bad.  At the crowded convenience store that morning, she filled her own travel mug with coffee from the self-service area and snuck out of the crowded store without paying.  Then, when she went to work, she would "recycle" used drinks the waitresses brought back into new drinks that they took back out the players.  He watched her reuse half-consumed alcohol in clean glasses all day while he played a slot machine at obscure angle to the back bar area.  She never saw him, and he saw what she was subtly doing. Her bosses must have known, but it was saving them money as long as she never got caught.  People playing casino games at this hotel were drinking other people's backwash all day.  

When the waitress came to his slot machine, he asked for bottled water.  After three hours of watching her, he was miraculously up $130 and decided to cash out.  He took in this quarters to the cashier and walked out richer while feeling poorer.

That afternoon, he walked the streets of the city.  

The air was dry like the Middle East where he'd spent the last few years driving trucks for a private military contractor.  They'd hired him because he had a CDL and was a certified EMT.  He'd driven in convoys all over the war zone, bring military supplies through danger zones, making more money than he ever could have in the U.S. as an EMT or as a over-the-road trucker.

When his fourth year was up, he'd come back the States with over three hundred thousand dollars in the bank.  But he hadn't gone home.  He'd come here to figure out what he wanted to do with his life and enjoy himself a little.  Instead, he found himself less in touch with himself than he had been overseas.

Tammy had deemed him "too good," but he didn't feel that way.  He knew that, yes, he wouldn't leave the table at the coffee shop without paying the bill, but there were things he did overseas that bothered his self-concept.  As a contractor, his employer ordered Ryan not to use his EMT skills for anyone but his fellow employees.  He had been ordered to never stop to treat anyone who was a citizen of those countries.  Any natives there looking injured on the side of the road could just be pretending to be injured to lure him in and set off a bomb or kidnap him.  If he saw any injured Coalition soldiers, he was allowed to radio it in but wasn't allowed to stop to help them.

He'd passed so many injured people that it hurt him each time.  Children would reach out towards his truck from the side of road.  They were starving, or suffering from wounds, and Ryan wasn't allowed to stop.  

He had radioed in a U.S. military Humvee that had hit an IED on the of the road.  Rumor reached him later on that one guy had survived because Ryan had called it in.  But Ryan had always felt that, if he had stopped, he might have been able to do more.

And now, here he was, three weeks back in the country, and he hadn't even contacted his family.  His father had a bad heart, his grandmother probably had less than year to live, and he was just here gambling his earnings and chasing after a twenty one year old bad girl.  He didn't know if he was really any better than she was.

By the time the sun started to set, Ryan found himself sitting at a river side park, staring at the water as it drifted by and swirled darkly around the gray rocks that poked up through the current.  Tammy always got off at 9:30, so Ryan went to her hotel to get a good deal on a steak and fries that was advertised everywhere in town. He avoided the bar, and chewed without tasting.

He followed her on her way home, and she took a different track this time.  She walked south, and then east toward the river.  Away from the lights of the hotels, she walked over the 2nd street bridge and into the parking lot of the police department.  She disappeared among the rows of parked squad cars for a while, and Ryan circled the lot from a distance.  He saw the windows on one car fogged up, and he hung his head.

When she walked back over the bridge, he was there.  She stopped about ten feet from him, her breath streaming in the night.  She smiled at him, and then walked closer.  

"Walk with me." She motioned for him to join her.  He did.  

They were silent for a few minutes, walking up Evans Avenue past the bus terminal and some bars.

"Ryan, I overestimated and underestimated you. I guess you're not as good of a person I thought you were, but you're also sneakier than I imagined.  You've been quite good at following me.  If a friend of mine hadn't seen you and tipped me off, I wouldn't have known it."  She smiled at him in the neon, red cast of the bar signs, and she somehow looked more alive to Ryan with her pale blue eyes showing even paler in the glow. She looked more interested in him now than she had during their dates.

"How am I not as good?"

They entered a neighborhood of mostly dark houses.  A few blocks ahead, there came the sound of the Interstate that ran under Evans.  

"You didn't try and stop me, Ryan.  You didn't try and save me.  You didn't even report me to the police or anyone. And, to be honest, l like that.  I don't want to be rescued.  I just want to have some fun and then meet someone who will inspire me to be better. You let me be bad."

They walked on, and as they got to the overpass, she motioned to him to follow her to a gap in the fence.  She sat down on the side of the steep, dirt embankment overlooking the speeding traffic.  He sat down beside her.

"So, I think that maybe I was hasty to dump you.  Maybe this could work." She gave him sly smile.

"Do I inspire you to be better?" He knew his tone was flat when he asked the question.

"Well, to be truthful, not yet. But I know I can trust you now, and that's what matters. I can enjoy being me knowing that you'll stick around." Her smile remained, and he focused on the shape of her lips.

It took him a moment, but he responded. "What makes you think I'll stick around?"

She laughed a bit.  "Ryan, you just watched me go down on a married cop in his patrol car purely for the thrill of it and you're still here talking to me."

"So, that's why you do bad things? The thrill?"

"That's one of the reasons.  Sometimes I just don't like playing by the rules, and if I don't get hurt breaking the rules... then..." She shrugged.

They watched the traffic for a few minutes.  She moved herself a little closer to him, and then she leaned forward and turned her face towards his.  "What do you want? Do you want to hang around with me? Do you want to inspire me to be better?"

Out of the red neon lights, her eyes looked more fiery to Ryan now.

"I want redemption.  I want redemption for what I've done wrong."  He felt his chest lighten with this revelation escaping his throat.

"And how do you get that?"

"I thought about that all afternoon, and I realized that maybe, maybe I could get it by making someone else stop being bad."

Her smile got wider at hearing his plan, and she turned her head even more toward him by leaning further forward.  

"So, you're going to get redemption by making someone else act better?  I think I like the sound of that."

He watched her lips again, and thought about what really lied behind their facade. He though about the words, the lies and other things that had passed through them.

"No."  He looked down at his legs for a second, and then looked up at her eyes. "I don't have time for that. I'm just going to gain redemption by stopping the bad.''  Ryan almost didn't recognize his own voice as he uttered the words.

He reached an arm behind her and pushed.  Already leaning forward to look at him, she went immediately head over heels down the semi-frozen embankment.  She landed in the shoulder of the highway, tried to stand up, and dizzily stumbled into the right traffic lane.

He went back up the hill, got some hot chocolate at the convenience store, and waited for the warm feeling of redemption.