As soon as he rubbed, Nikki’s big eyes flew open and her body quickly turned onto its back. When she saw that Louie was in her bedroom; that the building’s superintendent was in her apartment, she was, at first, confused. She couldn’t get her brain to accept what she was seeing. What was he doing in her apartment?
But Louie smiled when he saw the terror in her eyes. This was going to be a piece of cake. He had her exactly where he had envisioned she’d be.
But something clicked in her brain, and she began kicking the covers completely away and was about to scream a blood-curling scream.
But Louie readjusted, too, and came hard at her with that ether-filled cloth in his hand. He attempted to smother her nose and put her out so that he could have that uninterrupted pleasure he’d been lusting for.
But Nikki wasn’t thinking about his pleasure. She saw a man capable of ending hers. And she fought for her life. She wasn’t going out like this! If she allowed him to put her to sleep, it would be over for her.
She kicked at him and kicked at him and moved her face, her nose, away from his aim. He grabbed the back of her head, to try to hold her in place long enough for the drug to connect with her nostrils, but she was grabbing his hand with both of hers, and she was moving her head side to side to get away from him.
Louie was strong, but he wasn’t fit-strong, he was just man-strong. She could handle man-strong. She just had to get on her feet first. And she struggled with him, and she struggled with him, until she had her foot in just the right position: partially hanging over the bed. She wasn’t on them as she would have preferred, but she had to make it work.
She took the bottom of her foot, her heel, and kicked Louie as hard as she could in his groin. It was just enough force to cause him to react. And his first reaction was to drop that cloth and bend over, with both hands covering up in protection of his now pained manhood.
But it was enough. Nikki rolled over and got out of bed on the opposite side of the bed, giving herself room to maneuver. Then she really got busy. She grabbed any and everything she could find and threw it at him. He ducked and dodged as high heels, a lamp, an antique phone sailed past him. But he was once-bitten. He wasn’t allowing anything to hit his balls again. He kept one hand in that compartment, and he warded off all comers with his other hand.
But he was stunned by the level of madness he was encountering. He knew she was a feisty bitch. He knew she would put up a fight. But damn, he thought! He never dreamed it would get this out of control!
But Nikki wasn’t done yet. In her mind, he’d already violated her. In her mind, if she tried to make a run for it he’d run her down and overpower her. And no telling what he’d do then. That was when she eyed the knife.
It was on the dresser near the bedroom door, sitting beside a freaking rope, and she knew that was her only way out.
But Louie saw what she was eyeing, and he knew what she was thinking. And both of them made a run for that knife. Both of them had to have that weapon of war! But Louie was closer to their target, which gave him a great advantage.
But Nikki knew she had to have a backup plan. And she had one.
As soon as Louie rushed for the knife, a knife he expected Nikki to run for, too, Nikki jumped up on the bed, ran across it, and jumped down onto the floor. She grabbed that ether-filled cloth Louie had dropped and ran for Louie just as he grabbed that knife. She jumped onto his back and tried to smother him the way he had tried to smother her. But it was no use. He flipped her over, causing her to crash into the dresser, spewing everything on it, and he swiped that knife at her, barely missing her. Nikki knew she was in a hole. A knife versus a cloth was no contest.
She had to use the only advantage she had, and that was her speed. She jumped off of the dresser when he tried to swipe at her again, and she ran. She ran out of that room.
With that knife still in his hand, Louie angrily ran out of the room after her. He knew he had to run her down. He couldn’t let her get to that front door!
But Nikki knew the front door would take too much time to open. She knew a knife could sail faster than her feet. She wasn’t running for the front door as Louie had expected, but she, instead, had planted her back against the wall just outside of her bedroom door. And when Louie ran out of that door, she took that ether-filled cloth and smothered it over his nose. It had to work, or she knew she’d be done for.
Louie began to wobble and stagger backwards as he attempted to reach up and remove her pressure on that cloth. But it was too late. He was losing strength, not gaining it. And then he almost fell to his knees.
Nikki tried to take advantage of his weakened state, and take that knife, but Louie almost cut her. She, instead, tried to get away from him.
But Louie was a big man. It was going to take more than the amount of ether on that cloth to knock him out. He was weakened, but still awake.
Nikki ran. Louie was wobbled, but he ran after her. He wasn’t going to catch her. In his weakened state, he wasn’t going to catch her. But he knew he didn’t have to catch her. He just had to have an aim. And he did. He stopped and aimed that knife, ready to throw it and hit her squarely in the back, when she made a sudden change of course. He was blindsided once again!
Instead of running out of the apartment, as he just knew she was trying to do, and therefore was aiming in that direction, Nikki ran into her kitchen. But he smiled. He’d already removed all of her knives out of sight. He had her slick ass cornered now!
The ether still had him slowed, but not enough to ever stop him. He hurried toward the kitchen, to finish the bitch off even though it was going to interfere with his own plans for pleasure. But he had no choice now. She had to go!
He ran toward that kitchen, and he crossed its threshold just as Nikki was coming out. But she wasn’t coming by herself. A gun, a little A-frame pistol, was in her hands. And she was pointing that motherfucker like she aimed to use it.
He backed up quickly.
“What you wanna do now, Louie?” she asked him angrily as she aimed and moved toward him. “What you wanna do? What your bad ass wanna do now!”
“Put that gun away,” Louie was saying as he backed up. “What’s wrong with you? Why you acting like some crazy bitch for?”
“I got your crazy.” Nikki didn’t normally hate, but she was hating on him. “I got all kinds of crazy in each and every one of these bullets. Just try me motherfucker. I want your ass to just try me!” She was trembling with rage.
And Louie, no fool, kept backing up. But not to get away. His fat ass couldn’t outrun a bullet! But to get in position himself.
“Okay, you got me,” he said, and lifted his hands in surrender.
But as soon as he lifted his hands, the one hand still containing that knife was ready. And he threw it toward her with a force that, if it connected, would kill her instantly.
Nikki leaped out of the way of the coming knife, but not before she fired one shot of her pistol. Just one shot.
When she landed further over, and the knife hit the kitchen floor, and Louie fell to one knee, she realized that one shot was enough. He had tried to take her life. She, instead, took his.
At least that was what it looked like. Her shot landed in Louie’s chest. He looked at her as if he still couldn’t believe how wrong his plan had veered. He was so methodical. He was so careful. But how could he plan for this kind of crazy? How could he plan for this level of feistiness? She had more fight in her than most dudes he knew!
And then he fell to his other knee, and then he fell over.
Nikki was shaking, and angry, and terrified too. She’d done it now. She’d killed a man! Her black ass was going to spend the rest of her life in prison, if not on death row, if they caught her!
Her brain was going nonstop. What was she going to do? They might believe it wasn’t her fault. They might understand that he was in her apartment without her permission and had brought that ether cloth and that knife to do her harm.
OR . . . t
hey might choose to believe the fantasy of it being a sadistic love night gone wrong, and she decided to kill the man she slept with and still owed rent money to. It wasn’t rape, they could claim. It was a woman trying to get out of paying her debt.
She could stay and tell her story, hoping they’d believe the truth. She had a fifty-fifty chance of them believing her.
OR . . . she could get the hell out.
Life had taught her one thing in her thirty years on this earth: the odds were stacked against her.
She quickly stepped over Louie’s body, ran to her bedroom, put on a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, and tennis shoes, grabbed her phone, her keys, and whatever money she had in an apartment that now felt like a deathtrap. And with the smoking gun hidden on her person, she did what she came to believe was the only real option for a struggling, powerless woman like her.
She ran.
She got the hell out.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Nikki was a block away from her apartment, at an all-night diner on the corner. The night air had calmed her down enough that she wasn’t shaking anymore, and she didn’t look too desperate among the desperate people who spent their time in all-night diners. But even though she didn’t look the part, she was the part. She was as desperate as she had ever been in her entire life.
So desperate that she actually called her father.
She knew it would have been easier to call Donald Trump and ask for a favor. That was the kind of relationship they had.
And then, over her phone, she heard his voice.
“What?”
No hello daughter. No how are you daughter. Nikki knew it was going to be hard. But damn. But she knew her father. She cut to the chase. “I need your help.”
“I needed yours, but you still snitched on me.”
Nikki leaned her head back. Talk about a soul who’d been misunderstood! No, she thought. Not misunderstood. Lied on! Falsely accused! Judged to have done something that she would have never, not if her life depended on it, do! “I didn’t snitch on you.”
“If you wanted to divorce Damon, all you had to do was divorce him. But oh no! Not Miss Self-Righteous! You had to take him down first. You had to tell the Feds everything he was up to. And that got them snooping.”
“I didn’t snitch on you. I didn’t snitch on Damon. I didn’t snitch on anybody. It wasn’t me.”
But her father was unforgiving. “You know what, bitch: tell it to the Feds. You talked your ass off then. Talk to them now! I spent five years in prison because of you!”
“Because of me?” Nikki remembered how even as a little girl that man used to hide in big freezers the money he got from pimping out hookers who lived on their block. How she used to have to lie for him. How she became a badass big mouth by covering up all of his crimes. And he was blaming her? “You spent five years in prison because of what your ass did,” she shot back.
But, as she knew would be the case, he ignored her truth. That little fact was too inconvenient for him to admit. “Five long years,” he declared. “One thousand-eight-hundred-and-twenty-five days. This time of morning, and I still remember that number! My wife died while I was in that prison. I lost everything! And you need my help? You’re calling for my help? Fuck you, bitch! Fuck you!”
And he ended the conversation.
Nikki closed her eyes. Why oh-why did she call that fool?
But that was what desperation did to you. She thought about that prison she could spend the rest of her life wasting away in. Pride was no longer an emotion she could afford to have.
That was why she called another fool: Damon Tarver.
Damon was her ex-husband. He’d been her father’s righthand man for years, and the guy who would transport hoes across state lines for him. But by crossing state lines, their little local prostitution ring became a federal offense. The kind of offense that got the Feds’ attention. Her father had been paying off the local cops to keep quiet. He couldn’t pay off the Feds.
But Damon, like her father, insisted it wasn’t their actions, but Nikki’s big mouth, that got the Feds interested. It was her need to punish him for fucking other girls that caused her to snitch on him and take him down, and her own father down, too, while she was at it. She was steeling herself for another bad conversation.
But it never happened. Damon, unlike her father, had the good sense to block her number. Damon had the good sense to not even try to bother with her ever again. She sat her cell phone down and closed her eyes. She was running out of options.
She had to consider her situation. She had the body of a white man, a man the cops would declare was a good, respectable gentleman, inside her apartment. A body that might, or might not, be dead. Daybreak would emerge soon enough, and Louie might be missed right away. The cops might be called. They might search each and every apartment. Some insomniac might have heard her and Louie arguing over rent when she first came home earlier, or the racket they made in her apartment, and he might tell the cops. Her apartment could be the first one checked!
She called the one man she had wanted to call after she first fired that shot. But it would be like calling a movie star and asking for a favor just because you liked his movies. It was a fool’s errand, in other words.
But she knew a gangster when she saw one. Her father peddled sex, but he had to have gangster tendencies to peddle it. Her ex was a sex trafficker, too, with similar gangster ways. Teddy Sinatra was just gangster. And at a time like this? Full-blown gangster was what she needed.
She picked back up her cell phone and decided to torture herself one more time.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was six in the morning, Philadelphia time, when Teddy finally made it home. Home: a spacious ranch-styled retreat perched high up on a hill, with floor-to-ceiling, panoramic views in every room of the house, on exclusive Lake Cosimo. And when he got home, he removed all of his clothing, leaving them where they fell, and got in the tub and stayed there. He leaned back, his muscular body aching from too much exertion, and relaxed.
He couldn’t remember the last time he was able to sleep, undisturbed, an entire night through. Something was always popping off, and he was always the one, the only one besides calling in Pops himself, who had the authority to handle it. And his stupid ass once begged to be his old man’s number two. Begged for it! He wanted in just that bad. Now he was begging, inwardly at least, to get out.
His cell phone began ringing. Fuck it, he thought. If it wasn’t the Boss himself, he wasn’t answering. Joey, and any other of his lieutenants, could kiss his ass with any new shit. He grabbed his phone off of the stand behind the tub, and looked at the Caller ID. When he saw that it was Gloria Sinatra, his kid sister and best friend, he couldn’t help but smile. Okay. Not just his old man. He always answered Glo’s calls too.
“What up what up?” he asked when he answered.
“You’re awake?”
“Not on purpose! I had to go out.”
“Out? Out where?”
“Come on, Glo.”
“You can’t even tell me that?”
“Dad told me to keep you out of this side of his business. You’re on the legit side of his corporation, and he told me I’d better keep it that way. I can’t tell you shit.”
“You always do what your old man tells you to do?” Gloria asked jokingly.
“Hell yeah. You?”
“Hell yeah!”
They laughed.
“But for real though,” Gloria said. “You okay?”
She cared about him, and that was refreshing. Sometimes Teddy wondered if anybody truly did. “I’m aw’ight,” he said. “Joey’s slick ass giving me fits again, but I’m okay. What’s up?”
“Dad called me this morning.”
“This early?”
“That’s what I said! But yeah, he called and told me to contact you and Joey and tell you two knuckleheads - my word, that he wants all three of us at his house tonight, eight pm sharp, for a meeting.”
�
��No shit?”
“None.”
“Did he say what it’s about?”
“Get real, Teddy! He demoted me, remember? I’m now an assistant to his assistant to his assistant! And all of us are assistants to Blair Witch, his chief assistant. You think he’s going to give me the inside scoop?”
Gloria was Mick’s favorite, although Teddy’s siblings would declare that he was. But Teddy knew his father better than both of them.
“So, no, in answer to your question,” Gloria continued, “he didn’t tell me what it’s about. He just told me our asses better be there. Or, at least, that’s what I interpreted what he was saying. You know how Dad communicates. A cave man used more vowels. He sounded upset, though.”
Teddy closed his eyes. The old man, apparently, had heard the news already about what went down with Boss Bovenconti’s kid. Somebody told already!
“What’s wrong, T?” Gloria asked. “Your silence always speaks very loudly.”
“I’m alright. Just . . .”
“Just not alright?” Gloria asked.
Teddy opened his eyes. Gloria always had a listening ear. But shit he needed to talk to somebody about wasn’t shit he could talk to anybody about! He was second-in-command of the Sinatra Crime Family. Mick the Tick’s number two. What was he going to say? He was lonely? He was tired? He was scared??? “No, I’m good,” he said to her. “Thanks for passing the word. Anything else?”
“At six in the morning? No, brother, I think that’s it.”
“Okay, Glo, see you tonight.”
“Peace out,” Gloria said. “Be good,” she added. And they ended the call.
Teddy laid his head back again. The last thing he wanted was for his father to get wind of what happened at that club last night. But he had to be crazy to think it wouldn’t eventually get back to him. Mick’s ass had spies watching spies in their world. He just didn’t expect him to get the word this soon, before he could even digest it himself.
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