by Anna Zaires, Pepper Winters, Skye Warren, Lynda Chance, Pam Godwin, Amber Lin
“Hey, baby. How about some sweet stuff?”
I recognized Candy as she swayed around from the back of my car and up to my window. She leaned over enough to put her tits in my face and asked what all she could do for me. She didn’t seem to know where Bridgett was, though.
“Haven’t seen her since the day before yesterday,” the girl said. “She’s got a regular john, so that’s not so unusual.”
Yeah, maybe – except I was the regular john.
“Where’s she stay when she’s not here?”
I had to give the whore fifty dollars to talk, which she slipped inside her shirt while watching Melvin out of the corner of her eye. I figured out what building Bridgett lived in by Candy’s description, and it only took a minute to drive there.
There was only street parking, so I drove around the block twice before I found a spot. The sky was pretty much dark by the time I pushed open the door, found her apartment number on the mailbox, and went down a handful of stairs to the lower level units. I looked down at the daffodils in my hand and wondered just how ridiculous I was – apologizing to the chick I paid to fuck me – but I needed to sleep before I went completely over the edge.
I knocked.
I had to physically force myself to not tap my toe on the ground, stare at my watch, or start whistling. There was no way I was going to pull off any kind of casual encounter anyway – it was obvious what I was here to do. The daffodils kind of gave it away.
I knocked again.
There was that distinct feeling moving slowly up the sides of my spine that I had rarely felt outside of combat. It was a completely irrational knowing that came from nothing other than gut instinct, but it had served me many times in the past.
It was a gut instinct I trusted.
My mind and the memories within took over for a moment, and I felt the dry, stale heat of the desert air around me. It had been mid-summer in the desert, and the heat was absolutely unbearable. I had walked around the corner of a small building to reach just a bit of shade to relax a moment and take a piss when it all started.
One hand had touched the wall of the building as I leaned against it, while the other loosened my fatigues and pulled out my dick. There had been a noise from the other side of the building that I couldn’t identify – something that didn’t sound quite right. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.
There was something very, very wrong. I was sure of it.
“Bridgett?” I called as I brought myself out of the memory and banged harder against the door. “Bridgett – open the fucking door!”
Still no answer.
I didn’t think – I just leaned back and kicked the handle. I had to kick twice before the shitty lock splintered the weak wooden doorjamb and the apartment was open to me.
I took everything in.
It was a small place – one room efficiency with a small cubby bathroom off to the side. There was a little half window with a view of a brick wall. It wouldn’t have let any light in at any time of day and was probably too small for the fire marshal to allow without some kind of bribe involved. The stove looked like it might have worked well in the seventies, and the fridge was one of those half-sized ones you find in college dorm rooms.
Despite the size, the room was neat and orderly. Everything seemed to have its place, including a small shelf with books and an aloe plant, a box for mail, and a small candle. No pictures – none at all. There wasn’t much in the way of furniture – just a card table with four plastic chairs, the book shelf, and a futon along one wall. It wasn’t pulled out into a bed, though there was a body lying across it.
I knew she wasn’t dead – there was no tell-tale smell of death, and the slight rise and fall of her shoulder made it obvious. Her back was to me, but I didn’t need to see her face to know she was unconscious. The lack of reaction to having her door kicked in was evidence enough that she wasn’t just asleep. Hesitating only slightly, I moved across the room and knelt next to the futon.
With my hand on her shoulder, I pulled her body towards me. The black and blue bruises that covered her face and shoulders were maybe a day and a half old, not much more than that. There was a cut over her lip, and her chin was streaked with blood.
As I pulled her closer to me, her arm fell away, and I could see the bruising on the rest of her naked body. Clear hand prints in purple circled her wrists, and the circular bruises on her thighs were clearly fist marks. The scent of stale semen on her was unmistakable.
“Bridgett?” I said and felt her jerk in my arms. My hand touched the side of her face where she wasn’t bruised. “Open your eyes.”
They fluttered at my order, and the lids parted. Her expression quickly moved from fear, to shock, and then to sadness. Sobs began to shake her body as her forehead pressed against my shoulder.
“Evan,” she croaked. Her voice didn’t sound right – it was rough and scratchy. I tilted my head to get a better look at her neck and saw the finger-shaped bruises there as well.
“Can you hold on to me?”
Her fingers gripped my shoulder as I wrapped the sheet back around her and lifted her up into my arms. I held her against my chest as I walked out the door, crushing the dropped daffodils as I left. I got a few looks from the bums on the street as I carried her off and lay her down in the passenger seat of my car, but no one said anything or tried to stop me. I was carrying a beat up girl, naked and wrapped in a sheet, and no one cared.
Nice fucking neighborhood.
Back at my apartment, I was a little more concerned. Since I was in the parking garage, it was easy enough to get to the elevator without anyone laying eyes on me or what I was carrying, but being in the elevator had me on edge until we got to my floor. Luckily, there was no one else around. The elevator doors opened, and I glanced quickly down the hall before carrying her to my apartment.
I dropped the sheet in the hallway, figuring I’d come back in a bit and throw it out. It stank of sweat, beer, and semen.
“I’m going to get you cleaned up, okay?” I said as I carried her through the bedroom door and into the master bathroom. “Can you stand on your own?”
I took off my jacket but couldn’t seem to get my shirt unbuttoned while I kept Bridgett from falling, so I ended up taking her into the shower with my clothes still on. She kept her arms wrapped around my neck as I filled my palms with liquid soap and ran them over her skin.
When I washed between her legs, she flinched and started crying again. I ended up holding her for a minute, not having any idea what I was supposed to do. Eventually, she steadied enough for me to finish.
Once she was rinsed, I stood her on the bathmat and tried to dry her off, but it wasn’t easy with one hand holding her up.
“I can do it,” she said with a scratchy voice.
I steadied her as she ran the towel around and then rubbed at her hair.
“Do you…um…do you have a hairbrush?”
I laughed and ran my hand over my closely cropped hair.
“I guess you wouldn’t, huh?” She smiled a little, but it seemed to hurt her busted lip.
She sat on a towel at the edge of my bed, wrapped up in my robe as she ran her fingers through the strands of brown hair. Her hair was a lot darker when it was wet, and I tried to force thoughts of another woman from my head for a while, but it didn’t really work.
It never did.
I peeled off my wet clothes and hung them over the shower door. Once I was dry, I pulled on some clean ones and grabbed my phone.
“I could use a little help at my place,” I said into the phone.
“You get shot?” the voice on the other end asked immediately.
Franklyn Johnson might have been a doctor once, and he might not have been. No one ever called him Doc or anything like that – just Franklyn. Still, he knew how to take a bullet out of a leg, stitch people up, and do a lot of other emergency room kinds of procedures. He did stuff like that when Rinaldo’s people were hurt, and a hospital visit wo
uld end up causing questions.
He wasn’t expecting a beat up hooker at my place.
“She’s been through the wringer,” Franklyn said when he left the bedroom. He reached up behind his head and scratched at the overgrown, graying mop there, which reminded me of Christopher Lloyd’s character from Taxi. “I sedated her and gave her a morning after pill, but there isn’t much else I can do.”
“Anything more serious?”
“What, aside from the multiple rapes? What else do you think she needs?”
His eyes shot daggers.
“I found her, asshole,” I growled, and his look towards me softened a bit.
“Nothing permanent,” he finally said. “Well, not on the outside. I doubt she’ll ever be the same on the inside. No broken bones, no internal bleeding. Dehydrated a bit – make sure you get some more water in her when she wakes up.”
He left, and I went back inside to see how she was doing. She was asleep, and Odin was right there beside the bed, watching her.
“Are you finally going to make yourself useful as a guard dog?” I asked him.
He sneezed and then peered up at me through curly white hair.
“She’ll be okay,” I informed him, though I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to do so. Odin dropped down on the floor next to the bed, and I moved around to the other side to get in.
As soon as I lay down, the exhaustion hit me. My mind didn’t race from one horrific image to another but focused on the sweet scent of the woman beside me. I reached out and carefully wrapped my arms around her, making sure I didn’t cause additional pain.
With Bridgett nestled against me, I finally got some sleep.
* * *
It was hours after I woke up when Bridgett finally came down from the sedative, but she fell back asleep almost immediately afterwards. I made her drink some water before she dozed off again and then just watched her for a while. When she woke up the second time, she seemed a little better, even with her black eye and bruised cheek.
“Do you know who it was?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Was he a regular john? Someone you’d seen before? Can you describe him? Or…um…them?”
Again, she said nothing.
I watched her carefully as the edge of her eye constricted a little, and her lips pressed together tighter. She knew who it was – she definitely knew. Why wouldn’t she tell me?
There was really only one possible answer.
“It was him, wasn’t it?” I asked. “That pimp of yours.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said quietly.
I brushed a bit of hair off her forehead and was pissed off at her reflexive flinch from my touch.
“It was him, wasn’t it?” I pressed. “Who else?”
“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I never saw them before.”
I shoved myself off the bed, found a pair of jeans, and hauled them up over my hips.
“Evan, what are you doing?”
I didn’t answer. I grabbed a T-shirt out of the drawer and pulled it on over my head. My boots went on my feet without socks, and I didn’t even bother with my watch or anything like that. This was going to be a short trip.
“Evan!” Bridgett called out.
I glanced back to see her sitting up in the bed, her bruised face making her nearly unrecognizable from the girl I was used to seeing there. Before she could say anything else, I walked out of the bedroom and out the door.
I could hear her calling my name and telling me to stop, but I ignored her.
The pimp was easy enough to find – right there on the street corner with his bitches all around him. He reached into a car window, pulled out some cash, and then shoved one of the girls in the backseat. There were at least three guys in the car, and they drove off with a screech of tires.
My fingers tightened around the steering wheel, and my teeth ground together. There wasn’t any actual parking on the street, and I wasn’t about to go find a garage, so I pulled right up over the curb and onto the sidewalk. I got out of the car, leaving it running, and headed right for him.
“Mister Arden!”
Ignoring his words, I walked up to him quickly, grabbed him by the collection of gold chains around his neck, and shoved him backwards into the alley. Two of the girls started screaming, and a blonde one grabbed my arm. I flung my fist backwards, and she hit the sidewalk with a grunt and her heels in the air.
Melvin the pimp clawed at my hand, drawing blood. It didn’t even register in my head that I was bleeding – I was far too focused on getting him off the street where we could have a little private moment. The most convenient place was the alley right next to his usual hangout, so that was where I dragged him.
I stepped around a foul-smelling puddle next to a dumpster and shoved Melvin up against the brick wall on the other side. He gasped and grabbed at his throat.
“Mister Arden,” he croaked.
“Do you think being polite is going to help you right now?” I asked calmly.
Moving forward, I pushed my forearm across his neck, pinning him to the bricks and partially cutting off his air supply. Again he clawed at my skin, but I just leaned forward and stared him in the eye until he stopped struggling.
“You scratched my car,” I said quietly as I stared into his widened eyes. “Maybe it was a rental car, but you still scratched it. Now when I drive it, it just won’t quite be the same.”
I used my free hand to punch him in the face.
“I-I-I…” he stammered. “I didn’t touch your car!”
I shook my head slowly at the asshole’s ignorance and then punched him in the gut twice. He struggled to breathe as I shoved him up against the wall again. His skull knocked against it, and his eyes rolled for a moment before he could focus again.
“Okay! Okay! You mean that bitch…that girl of mine you like – Bridgett.”
“Aren’t you clever?” I replied coldly.
“I thought you were done with her!” he exclaimed. “You hadn’t been around…she’s been acting up and not bringing in her worth, ya know?”
“I have no idea,” I said, “but I know little boys who don’t take care of their toys end up losing them.”
“I’m sorry, man,” he said. “I didn’t know…I didn’t know you still wanted her…”
I stopped listening to his blather. My hand reached behind to pull my piece from the back of my jeans, but it wasn’t there.
I’d left so quickly, I hadn’t even taken a gun.
Mario was pretty good at beating people to death when it needed to be done. There were several ways – collapsing the trachea could do it, and you could always punch someone in the head enough to cause brain damage. I could have strangled him as well, but that took a lot longer than it looked like in the movies.
If someone were to ask, I’d probably admit to being a lazy killer.
“You have a piece on you?” I asked.
He blathered nonsensically until I punched him in the face again, busting his nose and spraying my shirt with his blood.
“I said, do you have a gun on you?”
“Y-y-yes!” he cried. “It’s on my right ankle!”
“Raise your leg up,” I instructed.
He obeyed, and I kept a good grip across his neck and chest with one arm while reaching for his pistol with the other. I pulled it out and put it in his face.
“You don’t take care of your things,” I told him bluntly. “I don’t think you deserve to have them.”
“It was just business!” he cried out. “They paid good money!”
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “How much?”
“A grand for an hour!” he told me. “You pay that for the whole night! You can have her right now – all night! No cost!”
I hummed and tilted my head to one side, lowering the gun a bit.
“Yeah, all right,” I agreed. “I think I will take her tonight, no cost to me. Tomorrow, too.”
“Anything you want!�
� he promised with a quick nod of his head. Sweat poured from his temples and down his neck.
“I think she’s gonna keep the money from that last trick, too.”
His brow creased, and for a moment he looked like he was going to argue. He thought better of it, though, and agreed with me.
“Whatever you want, Mister Arden,” he said. “She can have it.”
I nodded.
“Whatever I want, huh?”
“Anything!” he confirmed.
I nodded again.
“Okay.” I raised the gun, kicked back the safety, and blew his brains into the bricks.
Several feminine screams came from behind me, but they were lost in my own personal disgust at the blood and tissue that sprayed back at me. I hated close range shots like this – as if that actor dude hadn’t been bad enough. At least I had the manhole cover as a shield then. I hadn’t thought enough about this one to avoid the mess, and I hated the mess. I needed to kill someone from a distance again. All this up close and personal shit didn’t settle well with me.
I tore off the bottom of his shirt as I let him fall to the ground and used a bit of it to wipe off my face. It was better than nothing, but only barely. I threw the torn cloth to the side, skipped back around the puddle, and headed out of the alley past the hysterical whores.
One of them grabbed at me like she was going to be able to do something to stop what had already happened. I looked her in the eye, and she stepped back away quickly. Running around to the other side of the car, I jumped into the driver’s seat and sped off without another word.
Bridgett was still lying on her side in my bed when I returned. Our eyes met, and I knew she had been crying. I didn’t understand that, though. I didn’t understand why she would cry for that shithead of a pimp.
I glanced down at my blood-covered hands and shirt.
“I’m going to take a shower,” I said quietly.
Her eyes watched me, but she said nothing. I took off my bloody clothing and dropped it on the bathroom floor before stepping into the shower. I hoped it would clear my head a little, but it didn’t work. I was just as tense as I had been before, and my head was full of…of…what was this?