Page 33 of Anthem of Love and Loathing

He shrugs a jacket on over his flannel. “Ready?”

“Did you get the address?” Bronx asks him.

“Yeah. Let’s go.” Kodiak pulls the hood attached to his flannel over his head.

We take the elevator down to the parking garage and pile into the truck Bronx ordered.

Kodiak leans into the space between the front seats and gives the driver the address. Some place in the seedy part of town. “Picking up supplies?”

“Something like that,” Bronx focuses on staring at the headrest in front of him.

Kodiak on the other hand has a smug fucking look on his face. It lasts the whole distance from our hotel to neighborhoods that have seen better days. He grows tense as the buildings become dirtier and more dilapidated.

The tension in the car expands. The driver starts to fidget and look around more. A gaunt man stands on a corner with his hands in his pockets, looking shifty.

A couple of women in tiny dresses and a full face of makeup shiver on the following street. They smoke cigarettes while waiting for their next John to swing by.

Bronx starts to grind his teeth, creating a drum beat of sorts.

We pull up outside a tall gray apartment block with bars on the windows and a man huddled in the shelter of the stairs.

“Fucking hell.” Kodiak cranes his neck to look around, almost as though he is searching for the person who is going to step out and rob us at gunpoint.

“I could have gotten you anything you wanted without leaving the hotel,” I say to Bronx.

“No. You couldn’t. Now come on.” He climbs out and so does Kodiak. I follow suit and head into the building with them. It’s dark and musty inside. The old stairs creak under our weight as we climb several flights.

I side-step a patch of vomit. It stinks and makes me want to heave.

My bandmates both wear their mouths in grim lines; their shoulders hunched to the sky.

“What the hell are we doing here?”

Kodiak stops in front of a door with an eviction notice tacked to it. “We’re picking up Kelsey’s stuff.”

She lives in this dive.

“No fucking way.” They dragged me here for this. No wonder they didn’t tell me where we were going. There’s no chance I would have come. I don’t give a shit about her stuff. “I’ll be in the car.”

Bronx grabs a fistful of my shirt and presses that fist to the center of my chest. “I get it. You hate her for what she did to you. I can get behind that. But she has nothing. We’re going to go in there and take what we can.”

“Unless you want to see her wandering around in my flannels all the time,” Kodiak taunts.

“She did look mighty fine in one of my tanks the other night,” Bronx meets his eye. “The way it skimmed her mid-thigh.”

“Those legs are fucking sexy.” Kodiak grins at me, no doubt enjoying what he sees as my discomfort.

“Fine. Fuck it. We’ll get her stuff.” Just so I don’t have to hear them go on and on about how she’s cunt-matized them both. Idiots. “Should we call the super?”

“Of this building?” Bronx raises an eyebrow. He takes a tool out of his pocket and uses it to pick the lock.

The door swings in with a gentle shove.

The tiny living-bedroom-whatever space is scantily furnished. There’s a mattress on the floor. A ratty curtain hanging over the window has fallen on one side, letting in a triangle of light.

“Fucking hell,” Bronx says, probably remembering the much nicer, and furnished apartment she had the last time any of us had seen her. This place is a long way down from her previous one.

“She has like nothing,” Kodiak says grimly.