Page 13 of Bronx

The line is quiet for a moment.

“Hi,” she says softly.

“Who are you?” I ask abrasively.

“I called because I need your help.”

“My help?”

I’m thinking she may want to hire a professional fixer, but that’s not what I do. It’s what my grandfather did and what my father still does, but not me. Since I’ve been on my own, and refuse to take my parents’ money, I make a living as a bounty hunter, which is a lot different than what they do. They clean up messes for slimy CEOs and coked up celebrity clients and their jobs sometime take layers of effort and weeks to complete.

My job is much more simple.

Find the criminal who violated his bail bond contract, knock him around a bit, bring him in, and get paid the bounty. Pure and unadulterated justice.

The great thing about what I do is that I don’t have to take many jobs, but the ones I do accept pay well and allow me to live in the style that I’m accustomed to. While I realize that my ability to get high paying bail bond contracts may be partly due to the legend of my last name (a fact I can’t control), I’m also good at what I do and it keeps the darkness inside of me at bay.

Doing what I do means that I’ve had to hurt some people. I’ve beat them upside the head a bit and even pulled a gun on many of them. And while I understand that the people I’m searching for are not necessarily guilty of a crime (yet), if there’s something I’ve learned in my time on earth is that all the good people are gone, anyway.

There're only monsters left.

So I’ve made peace with it.

“If you want to hire someone for a fix, you’ve called the wrong Masterson, sweetheart.”

“No, I think… I mean, you’ve misunderstood.”

“Misunderstood what?” Now I’m getting impatient.

“My name is Karma.”

She says her name like it’s supposed to mean something to me.

“Did we fuck in high school or something, Karma?”

She exhales heavily on the other line. “No, but we have a person in common.”

“And what should that mean to me?”

“He told me if I ever needed serious help and couldn’t reach him to call the number he stored in my phone, and so that’s what I did.”

“Who told you to do that?”

“My brother.”

I take another puff of my smoke to take the edge off.

“We’re going in circles here, lady. Who the hell is your brother?”

“He told me to tell you to remember your promise… college boy.”

I go dead silent.

After I was found and rescued six years ago, I wrote down and gave my father everything I could about where I was held… well, almost everything. He didn’t involve any official agencies in the search for me, not when he knew that it was probably an act of revenge by the Consortium. But when he and my uncles found the cabin, the only thing they discovered was the dead body of the pot-bellied asshole and not the second man.

I had mixed emotions about their discovery. On one hand, I was glad that at least one of them wasn’t drawing breath anymore, but on the other hand, I didn’t have any closure. The days and weeks of recovery that followed my injury were brutal. I was in excruciating pain and I dreaded waking up in the morning. I wanted them both to be found and made to suffer for what they did to me, because you never realize just how much your voice is a part of your identity until you lose it.

There was no sign of the watchdog who sliced my neck and then oddly allowed me to escape (a minor fact I failed to mention to my family). While he did help me in the end, he wielded the knife that took my voice, and that is a truth that I will never be able to let go. I always knew that if we ever found the second attacker, he was a dead man, and after what he and his partner did to me, it should be me that ends his life.