Who's Crying Now

Just as I was about to order another drink, Ed's phone rang. He looked at the screen as pointed to it before picking it up.

"Hi, babe," he said. "...Wait, slow down. There's no need to try to find them. I'm having a drink with them right now...what? We're in the bar on the first floor of the Hotel across the street. What do you mean don't let them leave?" Then he abruptly stopped talking.

"She hung up on you didn't she?" I asked. He just nodded.

"She's upset. She doesn't know where Kevin is. I didn't tell her either. I want him and Karla to have time to have a talk at least. But now that you mention it, it has been a while."

"Not if they're uh...back together again and uh...talking," I said. Before Ed could say anything, we heard a commotion near the door. Heather was heading in our direction with at least three cops.

"Here they are," she said. "I want them all arrested, taken into custody and questioned."

"For what?" I asked.

"I can't find Kevin anywhere," she said.

"Heather, Kevin is a grown man. He doesn't need your permission to get away for a few hours. He went over to the arena to listen to Journey rehearsing," I said.

"I already checked the arena," she snapped. "The rehearsal ended hours ago. From speaking to some of the stage crew we learned that Kevin left after being confronted by a woman."

"Heather, Honey, the woman that he met was, Karla, his ex wife," said Ed.

Heather looked as if she was about to explode. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her face twisted. "How the fuck, did she find out where he was going to be?" she hissed.

"Heather, don't worry about him. He'll be fine," I said. "Karla loves him."

"Shut the fuck up you moron," snapped. "And don't even try to tell me what to worry about. Kevin is mine...I mean he's my boss. It's my job to worry about him. And that bitch Karla hurt him once already. But now that he's rich, she wants to come crawling back to him on her slime covered belly. What a fucking gold digger. How did she find out where he was going to be anyway?"

"Uhm...I told her," said Ed. "I thought that maybe I was helping the path of true love to run true. Maybe I could help to ease the pain those two are going through."

"What the hell do you know about love?" she asked. "You don't know shit about love. And you certainly don't have any idea what's good for Kevin. That bitch is the devil...you know what...you're fired. Pack your stuff and get out!"

"But Heather, you don't want to fire me," he said. "We're in love. We're engaged."

"About that..." said Heather."I've been giving that a lot of thought...and I just don't think it's going to work out." she reached down and pulled the ring off of her hand and dropped it into his beer.

She turned to the cops with her. "Okay, arrest them," she said.

One of the cops with her shook his head. "Not gonna' happen," he said. "According to both the bartender and the security cameras all three of them have been here in this bar since before Mr. Canard left the book signing. There's also the fact that we can't investigate a missing person until twenty four hours have passed."

"Whatever!" said Heather, angrily. She turned to us. "None of you had better leave town."

* * * * * *

Kevin

"Kevin, Kevin, wake up," the voice was coming from behind me. My eyes opened and either I was blind, or the room I was in, was completely dark. My head ached and the area where they'd shot me with the taser was sore too. I was handcuffed to a beam with my hands behind me. Karla was behind me too. She was probably handcuffed to the same beam. I could feel her hands just beneath mine.

"Are you okay?" she asked. I wasn't sure I should even speak to her.

"Kevin, I know you're awake," she said. "I felt you start moving around when I called you a few seconds ago. You have no reason not to talk to me. Right now I'm the only person here who's on your side. You can go back to hating me when we get out of this."

I wished with all my heart that I could hate her. The truth was that I hated myself because I still loved her.

"Kevin, I'm scared," she said.

"Relax," I told her. "The people who took us probably just want money. They'll contact my people and make their ransom demands. My people will pay it and they'll let us go. With luck you'll be home with Jerry in no time."

"That's it!" she said. "We're in more trouble than you think. They didn't kidnap us for money. The voice I heard from before. I recognize it. It's Jerry's sister."

"Why the hell would your sister in law want to kidnap us?" I asked.

"Why the hell do you think Jerry's sister is my sister in law?" she asked. "Kevin, I didn't marry Jerry. I'd never marry anyone except you."

"So you just fuck everyone else while you're married to me, huh?" I asked. "I guess that makes me some kind of super sucker."

"Kevin you have everything wrong," she said.

"Not everything," I said. "I got the important stuff right. We were married, right? And you fucked Jerry, right? Now we're not, case closed."

"It's not that simple, Kevin," she said.

"I don't need the fine details," I said. "I'm a broad strokes kind of guy. I have the general idea of what happened and that's all I need. I don't want to talk about it anymore. It's ancient history."

"Oh we're going to talk about it," she said. "We aren't going anywhere and if I am going to die with you hating me, I want you to at least have the facts correct in your mind."

"Okay then, why didn't you marry Jerry?" I asked. "That has me floored. You loved him enough to cheat on me and ruin our marriage, but not enough to marry him? That makes no sense. And why didn't you just tell me that you wanted to be with him. All I ever wanted was for you to be happy. If you had told me, I'd have been pissed at first and really hurt, but I'd have respected you for it and maybe somewhere down the line we could have still been friends of a sort. But you screwed him behind my back and from what I heard that day it wasn't the first time. You guys had been at it for years."

"Shut up Kevin," she said. "Just shut up. You have all of it wrong. In the first place I only had sex with Jerry one time. And it was the worst mistake I ever made. It wasn't fueled by passion, or love or anything like that. It was just something that happened on the spur of the moment. We were both so happy about Mary's cancer moving into a dormant stage, and so fucking drunk that we just got carried away.

I'll admit that there had been a couple of close calls with Jerry before that and maybe my curiosity had been up for a long time. Both of the previous cases were the result of us being in life or death situations. In the two previous cases, we only kissed. They weren't even good kisses and in both of the previous cases I took steps to make sure it wouldn't happen again.

The first time, I stopped working with Jerry regularly. I got a different cameraman. After the second time, Jerry quit and went to a different station. He didn't love me any more than I loved him. You are the only man I've ever loved. And you're the only man I ever will love."

"So have you told Jerry this?" I asked.

"Why the fuck do you keep bringing Jerry up?" she asked.

"Because I hate his fucking guts," I said. "He ruined my life."

"Kevin, Jerry didn't ruin your life nearly as badly as he ruined his own. You do know that he died very shortly after Mary did, don't you?" she asked.

"Good!" I said.

"Kevin, you're not that evil a person," she said. "Jerry died knowing that the woman he loved had died hating him. He died knowing that she'd been fighting her cancer with everything she had and she'd been winning until she found out about our mistake. She just lost the will to live, so in a lot of ways, Jerry died believing that he had killed Mary. That's why he took his own life. He just couldn't go on without her."

"Good!" I said again. "That bastard was supposed to be a friend and he stole you from me."

She started laughing then and her laughter morphed into crying. "Kevin, I don't smile anymore. My career is in the toilet. I'm working at a small market station as a weekend reporter and I don't care. There are so many things that I wanted to have done by now. You and I should have babies by now. I wanted them so badly. There were so many things that we were going to do and I missed most of them. You got to see Paris last year with some whore you met on one of your movies. Every time I turn on the TV there you were doing something that the two of us were supposed to do. And you were doing them with someone else."

"And Kevin you're giving Jerry something like super powers. He didn't have any super powers. He was just a guy who loved his wife so much that when he found out that she was going to live he came out of his depression, got drunk and made a mistake that cost him his marriage, his friends, his sanity and eventually his life. Neither Jerry, nor anyone else could EVER take me from you. I love you now and I always will. If you want to be angry with someone, be angry with yourself. I got drunk and got swept up in something that shouldn't have happened. If you think back to what you heard, I was crying my eyes out and telling Jerry that it shouldn't have happened.

He agreed with me. Kevin we were human. We made a mistake. I would have done anything in the world to have you forgive me. I'd have spent the rest of my life trying to make it up to you. But you never even gave me the chance to try to explain or apologize. Maybe you didn't love me as much as you claim."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"I asked. "I loved you more than anything in my life."

"Just not enough to forgive a mistake or to give me a chance to make it up to you," she said. For a while we just sat there. We were emotionally spent.

"Karla, if it means anything to you, you," I said. She was crying softly in the background.

"Kevin, I know that I'm supposed to be a strong, independent woman and all of that other twenty-first century shit, but I'm not," she said. "I know that you have your ego and your pride and all of that but I don't have any. I'd rather have you than my pride. Can you please give me another chance? You won't regret it, I swear."

"Karla how could I..." I began.

"Kevin, please," she said. "I know what you were going to say. How could you trust me after what I did? You don't have to. I'll quit my job and just follow you around for the rest of my life. I'll never be out of your sight, so you won't have to trust me. Just give me a chance."

That was when the door opened.

There was only one of the hooded figures this time. "So my guests are awake," she said. "Good, we can begin."

"What the hell are you doing, Lorraine?" asked Karla. "I know it's you under that hood."

"Damn, that's too bad," said the woman. She took her hood down and I saw her face. I had never met her before because although I knew Jerry, I wasn't as close with him as Karla was.

She was a bigger woman with short, dark hair and the same piercing blue eyes that I remembered Jerry having. In fact, there was no missing the resemblance between them. Line for line, she had Jerry's features. She had the same craggy nose and slightly sunken chin. The same overly generous lips and she even had a hint of his mustache beneath that rough looking nose. Jerry had never struck me as being a particularly good looking guy. He wasn't the kind of guy that had women chasing him around throwing their panties at him. But the same features that made him just a guy, were brutal on a woman. She came off as looking like a guy in drag or at best bet a transvestite. If she was in the Olympics and won, every other country would be demanding a DNA test to prove gender.

"I'm really sorry this stupid bitch outed me," she said to me. "I really like your books. The movies they make from them don't ever really capture the emotional impact that the books have."

In a move that was surprising for a woman of her girth and bulk, she sat down near me. "I'm sorry Kevin," she said. "Even before he died, Jerry always spoke well of you. I had no idea this bitch was meeting you. All of my research told me that the two of you were not in contact. I had no idea you might be there tonight. You're as much a victim in this as I am."

She came closer and grabbed me by my face almost gently. "She took my brother from me. She ruined his marriage. She killed my sister in law. Kevin you weren't there. From talking to Mary before she died, I know that you packed up and left town to start your life over as soon as you fund out. You hated the bitch so badly that you couldn't stand to look at her. Surely some of that hatred still burns."

She let go of my face and continued to talk. "For you, the pain was over when you left town. I had to watch my brother humiliate himself every day. Every fucking day he went to the hospital and begged to see his wife. EVERY day, he was either on his knees on the floor begging to see her or he was thrown out of the hospital for trying to fight his way in. They had been married for more than fifteen years when he first met your bitch of a wife. They were devoted to each other. She ruined that, so she has to pay."

"But that isn't how it was..." said Karla, from behind me.

"Shut up Bitch!" said the woman beside me. "I'll get to you soon enough."

She turned back to me. "Kevin, you could help me, but I'd need some kind of proof that you were on my side. I'd need you to do something that would get you thrown in prison beside me if we were ever caught. This could be our way to get revenge against her once and for all." She looked into my eyes as if she could read my emotions there.

"Think about it Kevin," she said as she got up from the floor. "I have to go and get things ready. One way or another I'll be out of here in two hours. I'm heading for a new life, just like the one you built Kevin. I'll have a new identity in a different state and even a new face to go with it. We could both have our revenge against this bitch." As she walked towards the door I heard the sound of a fist hitting flesh and Karla screamed.

"That's just a sample, whore," said the big woman as she walked to the door and slammed it behind her.

"Karla, are you okay?" I asked.

"Let's see, my eye is already swelling up, and according to Lorraine, I won't live long enough for it to turn black. But surprisingly, yeah I'm fine. I'm actually happy," she said.

"Karla, are you crazy?" I asked. "Did your head bounce off of the beam when she hit you? Why the hell would you be fine? I'm not fine. I am so far from fine that it's..."

"You're not fine because you're worried about me," she said. "Kevin while you were asleep I had time to think. I think they gave you more of the stuff that knocked us out than I got. I think, like she said that they weren't planning on there being two of us. So they only had enough of that stuff to knock out someone of my size and weight. They probably used a bit more than necessary for me, to be sure. So it was still enough to knock you out. I got a much smaller dose so it only made me woozy."

"Goody for you," I said. "That probably means that you don't have this headache, right?"

"That probably means that I've had some time to think," she said. "Kevin, do you remember what you said before they took us? Your exact words were, "What are you doing to my wife?" You said, "My wife." You didn't say, "That evil bitch who ruined my life," or "That whore who cheated on me." You didn't say, "My ex," or "Karla," or even just, "Her."

"It was the heat of the moment," I said. "I wasn't thinking."

"That's my point, Honey," she said.

"Why are you calling me Honey?" I asked angrily. "We're divorced because you cheated on me and ruined my life. I hate you Karla."

"That's what you say when you have a chance to think," she said. "But deep down inside you still love me. That's why when things get complicated, I'm your wife. In your mind I'm still your wife." I could hear the joy in her voice despite the situation.

"Karla why are you so happy? This psychopath is probably going to kill both of us," I said.

"Because I'm not Jerry," she gushed. "Kevin, do you know what the greatest tragedy in all of this is? Jerry died knowing that Mary hated him. We're all human, Kevin. We're all flawed and we all make mistakes. But Jerry died knowing the one person that he loved most hated him and that he had probably contributed to her death. Now I know that if I die today, you don't hate me. That makes me happy for the first time in a long time."

"I DO hate you," I spat.

"No you don't," she said. "Kevin you're just holding on to your hate, because you think it's the only connection you have to me."

"Karla, are you high?" I gushed, laughing at her.

"Kevin, you keep saying that I ruined your life. You're a rich successful writer, with millions of dollars in the bank. When we were together, we did okay. I mean we weren't living paycheck to paycheck. We both had good jobs, but we were nowhere close to what you make now. I saw your house on TV. You live in a neighborhood with movie stars and Justin fucking Bieber. Most people would be kissing my ass in gratitude, because leaving me was the best thing you ever did. How did I ruin your life?" she asked.

I remained silent.

"Kevin, we're divorced. You had several little flings over the years that were all well publicized. I forgive you for all of them, okay? You have all kinds of women throwing themselves at you. You even have your own, big fake tittied, Dominatrix Barbie, who would suck your dick on the street in front of the National Enquirer's offices if you wanted. Why haven't you remarried?"

"I've been busy," I said. "And they're real."

"The bimbos you were screwing all over Europe are real?" she laughed. "Kevin, Honey even though it hurt me to think of you fucking them, I saw through it. Those women never had a chance. That was just you acting out. You were trying to get over what you thought I had done. You didn't feel anything for any of those women. It's the same as what happened with Jerry. I was drunk and got caught up in the emotions of the situation. You were pissed and trying to strike back. We're even."

"No we're not," I said.

"Kevin, how did I ruin your life?" she asked again.

"You..." I started. But I couldn't actually say anything.

"It's okay, Honey," she said. "You think I ruined your life because even though you have all of that money and the rest of it. We're not together. I ruined your life by not being in it, right?"

There was no fucking way I was going to admit it so I didn't say a word. Then luckily the door opened again. Lorraine came back in. She held a gun in one hand and a tray in the other. She placed the tray down on a counter near the door.

"You need to keep your strength up," she said. "You're going to need it." She slowly walked over to me. "Kevin do you see the closet on the other side of the room?" she asked. I nodded.

"Do you see the doorknob on the closet door?" she asked. I nodded again. "Look at the wood trim on the left side of the doorknob," she said. Then she raised her gun and fired. The nine millimeter bullet took a size able chunk out of the wood exactly where she said.

"Why didn't you just shoot the doorknob?" I asked.

"The doorknob is metal, Kevin," she said. "A ricochet could have killed me, or you."

"Or Karla," I said.

"That bitch is dead anyway," she laughed. "So that wouldn't have been a great loss."

Her actions told me two things. The first thing it told me was that she was a hell of a shot. And the second was that she was crazy, but she was still smart.