Page 362 of Devil’s Disciples

I stood. “Let’s hope this Crip fucker knows someone or something.”

Reno chuckled. “If anyone knows how to get rid of a dead body, it’ll be him. He’s left a pretty long trail of ‘em over the last few years.”

I had no idea who “Crip” was, but my experience told me if he’d talked about it to others, he was full of shit.

I glanced at what was left of my brotherhood and hoped, for once, that I was wrong.

131

Ally

Bridgeport, Connecticut wasn’t brimming with options for a mate. The city of 150,000 was filled with construction workers, fishermen, and factory workers. The average income of the area was twenty grand a year, which fell well below the national average.

Sifting through the population to find someone that was open-minded enough to accept me wasn’t as easy as one might think. The latter years of my adult life was spent with my dying father. What little time I had left I consumed by looking for a mate, but demographics and my taste in men prevented me from finding anyone suitable.

I was left spending my weekend nights searching in the city’s outskirts. Clinging to the hope that my dick donors wouldn’t encounter me during the normal course of a day, I bounced from one remote seedy bar to another—and from man to man—satisfying my sexual urges, but never landing a single relationship.

I knew Bridgeport, nor its inhabitants, were for me. When my father passed, I moved to where the men—and the money—were aplenty.

Now, my life was much different. My days—and nights—were spent thinking about one man. It seemed my only concern was when I was going to see him again. Organizing those meetings through a dry erase board was nothing short of awesome.

“It doesn’t frustrate you that you can’t just call him?” George asked.

Holding my chilidog mere inches from my mouth, I paused. “Not at all.”

He sat down across from me. “Is there a good reason you don’t have a phone? Before you say you can’t afford it, remember, you spend six hundred a month in here alone.”

“The main reason?” I bit one-third of the hotdog off and ate it. “I think they get in the way of people living life. Everyone’s so concerned with them that they don’t pay attention to each other. It takes away from our ability to be human.”

He seemed satisfied. After a moment of thought, he lifted his chin slightly. “You said main reason. Do you have other reasons?”

I was so hungry I felt faint. I’d been up nearly all night looking at random stuff in the dark with my night vision goggles. “The police can track your movement through you cell phone’s GPS system. I don’t like that.”

I took another bite. And another.

“Why would something like that bother you?”

Still clenching the remnants of the chilidog, I stared at him as if he was nuts. Chili oozed along the backside of my hand, and onto my arm. “That serial killer they caught a few weeks ago? Through DNA? They hoped to prove he was at two or three locations on certain dates, so they could charge him with two recent murders. So, they downloaded his phone data from the satellite. It provided a trail of everywhere he’d been. A highlighted line on a map. They found out he was right where they hoped he’d been on the dates in question. If he didn’t have a phone, they wouldn’t have known where he was. He could have denied it. I don’t like the thought of anyone being able to trace today’s steps six months from now.”

He rubbed his chin. “What have you got to hide?”

I finished my chilidog and contemplated my response. I couldn’t tell him the real reason. The reality of my concern, however, remained the same regardless.

“My life,” I responded. “Everything about it. It’s nobody’s business but mine, and whoever I choose to let in. It’s definitely not the business of the police.”

“I suppose not.”

I wiped the chili from my arm with a napkin. “I wish I was born in 1920 or 1930. Things were so much different then.”

“Life was easy back then,” he agreed.

The chilidog I’d eaten was the same basic chilidog my father ate when he was a boy. His father—my grandfather—loved chilidogs, too. My grandfather’s love for the concoction was passed on to him through his father, who loved them even more. For roughly a hundred years, the chilidog remained unchanged.

My chilidog proved that a century-old way of doing things was adequate, even today.

“All those old movies I watch? I want life to be just like that. No cell phone, no computers. Just people living life. Can you imagine Breakfast at Tiffany’s if Holly Golightly was on her phone all the time, texting or updating her Facebook? If she was Instagramming pictures of her outfits, or her food? Posing for and posting selfies?”

He laughed. “People take pictures of their food in here all the time.”