Bella and the Black Book: Chapter One

I really hope he doesn't mess up my hair was my first thought. My second was, he has a gun barrel pointed at my head, he's going to do a lot worse than mess up my hair. 

Those two thoughts circled once before I thought I saw his hand move, it was a blurry motion to my eyes, but the sound of him pulling back the slide made me shut my eyes and do something I haven't in a while: pray.

"Where's the money?" 

He had a heavy smoker voice, the two seconds from a stoma from throat cancer kind, but he was very clear. The only problem: I wasn't.

"What money?" 

The gun pressed harder into the side of my head leaving a round indention in the hair and skin there no doubt and he leaned in closer. I held my breath, almost afraid the sound would excite him into actually shooting me. He paused there, his exhalation a mix of cigarette, fried chicken, and sickness. Throat cancer for sure. 

"Jimmy's money," he whispered in my ear.

Jimmy. There was a name I hadn't heard in quite some time. Pretty much not since he had gone to jail four years prior. Funny how often he was coming up in my life lately though. I had only attended his funeral yesterday. Or maybe it was the day before, I lose track without someone to remind me. Not that him telling me really helped. Jimmy had been, on his best day, a secretive bastard, making it almost impossible to get the answer to any question in a timely fashion. This made his last gift to me, a notebook written in a cipher, particularly poetic. It wouldn't take me forever to translate, but more than long enough for the answers I found to be useless by the time I found them.

"I don't know about any money." Oh, shit, now he's really gonna shoot me. I immediately started praying again, hard.

"You were his Bella. His confidante. His sweetheart. You mean to tell me you don't know about his money." I sat very, very still even as the pain mounted in the side of my head to something scream worthy. I really didn't want him to shoot me.

"He," I gulped for air. "He left me a notebook."

"Get it!" He snatched me up off the couch and slung me to the floor. I gasped in surprise and started to get up. "No," he grunted. "Crawl."

I crawled across my living room floor aware of how some of his smell changed as I did. I almost wanted to sneeze to get the tickle out of my nose. Jimmy had never smelled like that, no matter how excited he got. I would have sneezed, but the awareness of that gun was enough to keep me playing straight. The door to my bedroom was open and I creptthrough. He followed me across the floor and grunted as I knelt by the bedside table and picked up the black notebook there. He snatched it from me and began to flip through it.

"What is this shit!"

"A cipher." I was amazed at how calm I sounded while down on my knees with a man with a gun behind me out of my line of sight. "Jimmy was nuts about them." I put my hands behind my head and laced my fingers together like a prisoner. "I haven't started translating it yet."

A beat of total silence. I could hear Mr. McGuffy shuffling down the hall and my nose was picking up the rank cabbage in the half-closed black bag he was carrying. Then the gunman spoke.

"Get up. We're going for a ride."

 In the movies, this is where the mob takes you to a different location and puts two in your skull. I didn't even know yet how true that thought would turn out to be.