“That’s not too nice, you keeping her all to yourself,” DeFranco said.
“T-Ten…I’m s-sor-ry…” Chela said. Her teeth were chattering.
“My grandmother would say you’re all balls, no brains,” DeFranco said. His gun waved casually in his free hand as he spoke. He could shoot Chela without a thought. Cops can always shoot you, if they come up with a good story.
DeFranco went on: “There we are sitting at Norma’s, and we see you and your lady friend. We decide to see what you’re up to. We follow her back here—and who’s by the pool but Chela? We’ve been talking about his lady friend, haven’t we, Chela? Turns out, Chela doesn’t like her too much.”
Chela’s eyes darted away again.
“Funny story, really,” DeFranco went on. “Chela here, she always had a little crush on me. Didn’t you, girl? You know you did.” He pinched her cheek, hard.
“Let her go,” I said.
“Shut up and let me finish,” DeFranco said, all mirth drained from his tone. His eyes dared me to move or speak, and I didn’t defy him. “I mean, she was a little scared when she saw me at first, thinking Glaze was mad at her. I had to set her straight and tell her Glaze ain’t pissed at all. Fact is, he’s still waiting for her. He wants to move her into his beach house with him, just like he told her.”
Chela stared me in the eye at last, her bottom lip trembling. Like a schoolgirl in the worst trouble of her life. I’ll never forget that look.
“So she’s out at the pool looking hot as hell, and I said I’d buy her a drink. You figured out yet this girl’s crazy for rum and Coke? I said, ‘Hey, let’s chill out in your room, raid the minibar, and then Glaze will rescue you from this shit-hole and put you up in real style.’ And by the way, since Glaze was busy doing his video, we finally had a little private time to get to know each other like she always wanted. But I guess that part goes without saying.” He leaned over and held Chela’s face to kiss her on the mouth, his gun carelessly against her head. Chela gagged, pushing at his chin.
Every muscle in my body wanted to knock him off Chela. Pound him through the wall. I was trembling. I thought my legs would collapse.
“Tranquilo,”Lorenzo whispered to me, raising his gun to aim at my head. He had a madman’s eyes. “Don’t have an accident.”
Hewanted me to spring. It was Lorenzo’s deepest desire.
DeFranco finally moved his hairy lips away from Chela. For the first time since I had known her, there were tears in her eyes. “So now we’re all gonna go pay Glaze a visit,” DeFranco said, winking at me. “He wants to seeyou especially. Whaddya say, Ten? We heard a rumor you like to do it for money. Kinda like Chela here, huh? If Glaze shoves a twenty down your throat, will you bend over and take it up the ass?”
I barely heard him. I couldn’t think about anything except Chela standing in front of me. Every man wonders what his breaking point is, and that day I came closer than I ever want to come again. For all I knew, I was about to watch Chela get raped and killed. She might have been raped already.
DeFranco pushed Chela into a chair and circled behind me. I felt a sudden sharp pain as he kicked the back of my right knee, driving me to the carpet. I braced my hands to stop my face from smacking into the rug, and looked up at Lorenzo.
“You got me, man,” I said. “But this is between us. Leave Chela out of it. You wanted me to beg? I’m begging. She’s only fourteen, man.”
DeFranco laughed.“Fourteen? In dog years, maybe.”
I ignored him, focusing on Lorenzo. DeFranco was the big talker today, but Lorenzo was the Alpha. And somewhere inside all that rage and madness, I thought I saw a man I could talk to. “Man, she’s akid. You said your kid is three years old. You wouldn’t want your kid to end up like this. Let her go. Let her find a family.”
Time skidded, then iced over. In some ways, time has never moved on. I still have nightmares about it: I’m being held at gunpoint, and Chela, helpless, is wide-eyed in that plush chair. The dream ends ugly. Always. And I had brought Chela here. This was the worst moment of my life; the first time I was willing to die to fix something.
“You want to kill me? Maybe I earned that. But leave her out of it. You don’t want to do this to a kid.Please.” Yes, I have spoken those words. Chela looked at me in horrified confusion.
“If we leave her, she’ll call the cops,” Lorenzo said, shrugging. If they were afraid Chela would talk to the police, she would never leave M.C. Glazer alive.
“Cops? No way,” I said. “Her record would send her to juvie. Tell them, Chela.”
“I hate cops,” Chela said. She sounded like she was three inches high.
“Chela has money,” I said. “She can jump on a bus and you’ll never see her again. Man, please—let her go.”
“No way,” DeFranco said to Lorenzo. “Glaze wants her back, and now I know why. Let Glaze figure it out.”
Lorenzo blinked once. Twice. He made up his mind.
“The kid stays,” he said. Almost as if he’d been planning to leave her all along.
Thank you, God. Thank you, Jesus.
Lorenzo leered at me, seeing the relief on my face. Maybe I had made the mistake of smiling for Chela’s sake. “You feeling good about yourself, asshole?” Lorenzo said. “You feel all warm and fuzzy inside ’cause you think you saved a soul?”
“I didn’t kill your friend.” My voice cracked midway through.
But I knew what was coming next—the real reason Lorenzo and DeFranco tracked me to my hotel—and there’s nothing you can say to your executioner.
Lorenzo strode to where I knelt, swung his leg, and buried his foot in my gut, just below the place where the ribs come together. My diaphragm spasmed, and all air rushed from my lungs in a fear-soured cloud. Like a piston, he kicked me again. Harder.
I hurt too much to make a sound. I crumpled on the carpet, craving the womb. I might have heard Chela cry out, but I hardly had awareness of anything except how desperate I was for even a spoonful of air. Without breath, any pretense to composure was gone. It felt like he had taken a hatchet and sliced off everything below my ribs, leaving me to bleed to death on the hotel floor.
“There’s only one soul you need to worry about today,puta.”
I managed to gulp in a half-breath, and then wasted it trying to explain. “I didn’t kill your—”
The back of my head seemed to shatter to pieces.
And then everything was gone.
I opened my eyes in time to see a blinding burst of white afternoon light.
Then, awhump, and complete darkness. I was in a sweltering, airless tomb.
My hands were chained behind me. Metal handcuffs, by the sound and feel. Other than that, I was lying in a fetal position on a flat surface with my face pushed against wiry carpet fibers that tickled my nostrils. I tried to sit up and slammed my head into a low ceiling. I’m limber enough to work handcuffs around from behind my back—but there was no room: My back was pressed against something hard and grooved. I smelled gasoline and air freshener, but I couldn’t think straight because of my throbbing head and the raging pain in my gut.
Where am I?
The sound of a car engine and a sudden rocking motion told me I was in the trunk of a car. The object behind me, then, was the spare tire.
On my way to die. That’s where I was.
The horror of the realization made the air in the trunk thinner, compressing it like a plastic bag over my face.How much oxygen is in here? I blinked into the dark, trying to find enough light to see by. The only thing worse than the heat was the darkness.
If it was 90 degrees outside, it felt like 150 in the trunk. All they had to do was park somewhere secluded, and I’d be dead by dark. But I’d known that from the moment I’d stared down the barrel of a Glock in Chela’s doorway.
My heart tried to squeeze into my throat. Trying to escape my doomed body.
Think. Think. Think. Think.
Panic was ready to take over as soon as I ran out o
f logic. Believing in a solution was the only thing that kept me from screaming in that trunk, even if I should have been screaming a long time ago.
Muffled thumping resonated from inside the car. Music. M.C. Glazer’s “Pimpin’ Paradise” vibrated against my back.
I knew it then: I was in hell, or it was just around the bend. To this day, the sound of that song makes me sick to my stomach. The bassline nearly smothered my thoughts. Sweat drowned my eyes in the salty sting. It was torture to breathe, to fight the impulse to gasp at the air. But somehow, I had to…
Think. Think. Think. Think.
Forget about the fantasy they’d spun for Chela about taking me to M.C. Glazer: They thought I had killed their friend. They were going to drive me out into the desert. If they let me out of the trunk at all, they would pump me full of bullets. If I was lucky.
My only chance: to convince them I hadn’t killed Jenk. The only way to do that—and even that was a long shot—was to tell them whohad killed Jenk and make them believe it. It would be the acting job of my life.
I quieted my head. I beat back my panic, searching for stillness.
Think. Think. Think.
In the darkness of that trunk, I hallucinated that I could see a faintly glowing outline floating in my vision; a man’s face. He was the Murderer. Could be a She, but I had to forget about Tyra. I already knew she didn’t fit, and these two cops would, too. If I started spouting off a theory they knew was bullshit, I would be dead.
Who had killed Jenk? Why had he died?
Because he killed Serena,my mind suggested.
That was possible, I thought, gulping at the air, trying not to pant, because I wouldn’t be able to stop.The high school flame never stopped burning. Serena decided to break things off with Jenk for good and remake her life—Life Anonymous—and he wasn’t ready to let her go.
But that wouldn’t help me. It would look like I killed Jenk for vengeance. Besides, Jenk wouldn’t have called me if he had killed Serena. What sense did that make? He would have stayed as far away from me as possible.
Another possibility burrowed up from my unconscious:
Maybe Jenk died because he KNEW who killed Serena.
The heat in the trunk was cooking my face, chafing my lungs. I realized I wouldn’t last an hour, never mind a day.
Still, I struggled not to lose my train of thought:Jenk called me the day he died because he knew M.C. Glazer hadn’t killed Serena—and he knew who had. I could hear it in his voicemail message, the strange inflections that had intrigued me at the time. And the way he’d stared at me when I started asking about Serena at Club Magique.He knew.
If Lorenzo and DeFranco did it, why else except at M.C. Glazer’s bidding? And if not Glazer or Tyra, then who else could have done it?
The car jounced wildly, turning off the paved road at a high speed. My head slammed against the top of the trunk, waking up the old pain. White spots filled my vision. For a while, my mind was only soup, thoughtless.
I’m going to get my Bronze Man,Serena whispered in my ear.
Think. Think. Think. Think.
“Who killed you?” I said aloud, to anchor my thoughts to my own voice. “If I can say who killed you…I can figure out who killed Jenk.”
Who benefited from Serena’s death?
Not M.C. Glazer.He had his own empire, and Serena wasn’t even competition: She’d been more an actress than a rapper for years, ever since Shareef died.
Not Tyra.Her only livelihood, as far as I could see, was pretending to be her sister. Now that Afrodite was dead, work would dry up. And as stormy as the sisters’ relationship had been, Tyra couldn’t bet on inheriting much from Serena. Tyra was nothing without her sister.
Not Devon Biggs, whose investment in Serena had bottomed the moment she stopped breathing. Even if Biggs turned out to be the big winner from Serena’s estate, wouldn’t she have been worth more to him alive than dead? Unless…
What about JENK? You have to tell them who killed JENK.
The car jounced again, and my body was assaulted by pain. The back of my scalp felt damp and heavy, and I didn’t know if it was blood or perspiration. The throbbing started at the back of my head and traveled through all my nerves to my gut, which answered with a sour throbbing of its own. I was racked in the cycle of pain.
That time, I couldn’t pull myself out of it.
Think. Think. Think. Thi—
In that last second before I passed out again, I realized how wrong I had been.
At last, I knew.
Ice-cold liquid on my face woke me up with a yell.
Sour beer dribbled into my mouth. I couldn’t see anything for all the light.
“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” Lorenzo said in that same measured monotone, dousing me with another swing from his beer can. My whole body jumped at the shock. “We’re not finished with you just yet. Not by a long fucking way.”
Finally, I saw Lorenzo above me, bathed in light. A crowbar on his shoulder.
He had promised me a painful death. I remembered that. Just my luck to finally meet someone in Hollywood who keeps his promises.
“Man,I didn’t kill your friend!” I said. “I can prove it. Just let me—”
“Time to be quiet now,” Lorenzo said. He sounded bored.
My body braced for a blow from the crowbar. When Lorenzo grabbed a handful of my hair, I tried to thrash my head away. The next thing I saw was a leather gag with a red plastic ball, something from a sex shop.
My words were my last chance.
I struggled, kicking in the trunk.“I know who—”
My tongue was stilled by the weight of the gag, my mouth pulled wide and useless by the two-inch rubber ball. Lorenzo yanked the strap hard. My mouth was so taut it hurt. My lips and tongue felt like they were being ripped apart.
Lorenzo held his hand up to his ear, leaning over. “You were saying?”
Domination. Humiliation. Lorenzo wouldn’t just kill me: He would enjoy it.
Where was I? I tried to see around me, but the sun and beer attacked my eyes. I was half-blind. I was running out of reasons not to panic. All I had left was my dignity.
Lorenzo and DeFranco grabbed me, and I bucked and flailed as they pulled me out of the trunk and tossed me on the ground. The left side of my face skidded into rubble. I tasted bitter dirt in my mouth. I coughed, and my tongue’s paralysis made me feel like I was choking. I writhed on the ground, gasping for air.
Panic always comes, in the end.
“Oh, yeah, it’s gonna be a long day for you,” Lorenzo said. He swung his leg around again, and it sank into my abdomen.
I could forget about breathing. I bit into the ball, my gasps muffled.
“I knew Jenk since I was nineteen, you piece of shit,” Lorenzo said. I heard him walking around me, out of my spotty vision. I tried to crawl away from him. “He was the best man at my wedding. I’m married to his stepsister. Did you know that?”
“Stupid fuck,” DeFranco said.
Two armed men, my hands behind me, and I was already disoriented. But even if you die, you have a choice of dying fighting and scheming and trying to take the bastards with you…or you can cry and beg and plead. I had hoped words might mean something, that I might live if they knew I hadn’t killed Jenk. But that option was gone. There was no option except death, now. But I wasn’t going out like a punk.
They were going to remember Tennyson Hardwick.
As Lorenzo raised the crowbar, I arched my back, bucked up, braced my shoulders and cuffed hands on the ground, and thrust my right heel squarely into his balls. I felt the contact, didn’t need to see the reaction, because I was already pivoting, tearing the flesh on my hands, kicking at DeFranco. He could have shot me, but instinct forced him to drop his free hand to cover his groin. Unfortunately for him, it was a feint. My left foot hit his right knee, skidding that leg back so that he pitched forward. My right foot, fresh from Lorenzo’s groin, caught him squarely, beautifully, on the side of the head.
It was the kick of a lifetime, and his eyes crossed, the switchboard in his brain momentarily short-circuited.
Now Lorenzo was dropping to his knees, gagging. DeFranco reeled, looking for balance. This was the only moment I was going to have.
I rolled to my knees and sprang forward, head-butting Lorenzo in the face hard enough for my vision to explode with stars. He tumbled over backward, sprawling in the sand, his split lips a gory mess. Tightening my stomach muscles, I exhaled all the air I could, making my midsection as tiny as possible as I slid my cuffed wrists down over my hips, then over my heels…
Bound or not, my hands were in front of me now. Despite the pain, I felt the corners of my mouth bend up into a feral, humorless grin. Any chance is better than none.
I rolled back to my knees and looked up in time to see DeFranco swinging his gun at my head like a club. But the game had changed now. I rolled with the blow, caught his wrist with the chain between my wrists, and twisted out and down. DeFranco screamed as his arm torqued at the shoulder, and he drove face-first into the ground.
And now, we were both holding that damned gun, our fingers tangled together. I knew five ways to wrest it away from him. Another second, and I’d have the gun. I could see the moves in my mind: I would tear it from his hands and pivot, shooting Lorenzo.Back to DeFranco, and drop him. Find the cuff key, the car key—
Lorenzo rose, dazed. I watched the sick shock in his face as he realized that despite the fact that he and his partner had held all the cards, he was too late. I had him, was dragging DeFranco’s arm and pistol up to aim—
And that was as far as I got. The very chain that had ensnared DeFranco’s wrist kept him tangled to me, his dead weight slowing my turn. I cursed into my gag, yanking at him, but some barely conscious part of his cop mind understood the implications of a perp disarming an officer, and he clawed and clung at me. I pulled DeFranco in and smashed his face with my knee, then turned—
Or tried to. I heard athwump sound, and my back exploded in pain, a gash ripping across my shoulder blades. I yelled and rolled away. My hearing faded. I only heard my heaving breaths, struggling past the gag. My nostrils pinched shut.
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