Ray's Hell: A Crime Action Thriller

by Matt Rass

  Mark started to fill the waitress’s tray with drinks and she began rearranging them. “All I know is he took a call and went out to the parking lot, like he was gonna meet someone. And they were, like, calling to say they were here or something.”

  “Did he recognize the caller?”

  “He kinda had that, like, roll-eyes look on his face… you know what I’m sayin’? Like you don’t want to be talkin’ to the fool on the other end. I’d just given him his drink and he hadn’t paid his bill, so I knew he was coming right back. But he never did.”

  “Did he meet people in the parking lot often?”

  “I don’t think so. No. He would usually do his business in the back pool room.”

  “Was he here with anyone?”

  “Dominique.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “One of the girls from Fillies. OMG. You so have to talk to her. If anyone knows what happened to Sam, it’s her.”

  “You know if the cops talked to her already?”

  “The cops don’t give a shit. To them it’s just another Benson Bridge nigga gone off the reservation.”

  “Still like that, huh?”

  “Always was, always will be.”

  “I hear that. You think I can trust this Dominique to tell me the truth about Sam?”

  “I dunno, really. I’m sorry. I gotta bring these drinks, but I wish I could be more help.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Kayla,” she said.

  “Lemme give you my card, Kayla, in case anything comes up, or you hear anything out the ordinary,” Ray said, handing her his Detroit PD business card. “It has my cell number.”

  Kayla turned the card over in her hand. “You a cop?”

  “Used to be.”

  “You too good looking to be a cop.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, good luck,” she said.

  Ray picked up his suitcase. “Thanks.”

  Kayla was a doer, Ray thought. She had just shown Ray that she was the type to always have her ears and eyes open. Observing. He could use a girl like that, he thought. His first ally!

  He walked back to the oak door leading to the hotel lobby and watched as Mark’s reflection in a Detroit Red Wings engraved mirror revealed the bartender had pulled the corded phone from under the bar and was whispering into the receiver. Ray hoped he’d have at least a day to ask questions around town before people were on to what he was doing, but maybe it was better this way. Let the bad guys know he was in town right away so he didn’t have to pussyfoot around waiting for a break.

  LIVERWURST SANDWICHES

  Ray entered the hotel’s lobby and thought: What the hell am I doin’ renting a room here for? It was a stupid idea. His Pops was long dead, and the time Ray had spent here was shit to begin with.

  He’d thought his search for Sam woulda been a good way to keep busy during his suspension, but he never once worried the kid wouldn’t turn up somewhere. Whatever trouble Sam was in, Ray’s baby brother was either keeping low till cooler heads prevailed, or he had skipped out and wouldn’t return. If this was Detroit, or Chi-town, there’d be reason to worry, but this was Shitsville, population: who-the-fuck-cares. The local cops hadn’t given Ray anything—didn’t have anything, they’d said. And if there had been a legitimate beef between Sam and someone, then there woulda been a body.

  “Fuck it,” Ray said. He’d go upstairs to his room and take a look around for old time’s sake. Put the key in the door and reminisce about pulling high school pussy and listening to Tony! Toni! Toné! and the Boyz N The Hood soundtrack on repeat.

  He trudged up the crimson-carpeted, cigarette-scarred stairs, and on the second floor landing, he heard a great, big gag. Like a cat choking on a hair ball.

  “Chrissakes,” Ray heard a man say. “What kinda hooker can’t suck dick?”

  It was a rhetorical question, Ray was sure of it. But he waited to hear her answer anyway.

  “I got a gag reflex,” she said.

  A legitimate problem, Ray thought, but wrong career choice.

  “I’m flattered,” the ol’ timer said. “But I ain’t that big. Now turn over.”

  Ray was surprised they were still going at it. How long had he been in the bar? He smelled the air. They were prolly smoking rocks before getting down to it.

  He fit his key in the adjacent door’s lock and could hear the rapid start to his neighbor’s bed squeaking.

  The room had the same boring-ass qualities Ray had known twenty years ago: sunken iron bed, a single three-drawer dresser, and yellowed walls. If the dresser had an old box tv on it and a Sega Genesis attached, he’d think he was back in 1992. He smiled and pantomimed his former self: inviting his honey into the room, taking her hand, holding her close and singing “Just Me and You,” a Tony! Toni! Toné! classic. “Ooh, baby… Just Me and You. Just the Two… We don’t need nobody else.” He felt hollow inside. Empty. Weak.

  The old timer next door began to hack and cough as his lungs failed to keep pace with the action that continued next door. The hooker was beginning to put on a show, but to Ray her “Oohs” and “Aahs” sounded a bit too much like those in a cheap ’70s porno. And then she shouted, “Oh shit! My knees, my knees!” There was a loud bang. As if the ol’ timer had fallen off the bed, or was dumped from it.

  “Listen, bitch,” Ray heard him say, “I’m paying you to fuck like I want you to fuck.”

  Ray heard a great, big slap. It was an open hand, full palm WHACK. Was it across the chops or against the ass? Ray listened.

  “You hit me in my goddamn face, you bastard.”

  That settled that. “You come one step closer,” the hooker continued, “and I’ll tear that skinny, white pecker right offa you.”

  Ray covered his mouth, trying to sound like a honky redneck and hammered his fist against the wall. “Shaddap. I’m tryin’ ta sleep in here ya no good, sons of bitches.”

  Ray trained his ear on the opposite room. The hooker mumbled something, and then he heard another heavy slap.

  Interruption time.

  He threw open the door to his room, and with a long, right hook with his big, black fist, Ray punched the ol’ timer’s door off its lock.

  The old timer was straddling the unconscious hooker in the far corner of the room. He was as saggy as a square of wet toilet paper, and his pecker hung between his curdled thighs like a thin chicken sausage. “The fuck?”

  “C’mon, that’s it,” Ray said, waving the man over. “Party’s over.”

  The ol’ timer scooped up a jackknife from his nightstand and sliced the air between himself and Ray.

  “Don’t do it old man,” Ray said. “Put the knife down and let the girl up.”

  “This ain’t got nothing to do with you, you cotton-pickin’ nigger.”

  Ray cringed. “I’m gonna give you two seconds to toss that blade on the bed ’fore I stick it up the end of your skinny dick,” he said.

  “Come at me boy,” the ol’ timer said. “And we’ll see where this blade ends up.”

  Ray took two fast steps forward, his outstretched hand passing over the swish of the slow blade, and gripped the ol’ timer by the throat. He rapped the other man’s head once, twice, three times against the soft wall then let him crumple unconscious to the floor. The hooker woke to the limp body falling across her. She screamed and batted the air, twisting to get out from under his weight and avoid Ray’s reaching hand. She scrambled to push herself against the bed as if avoiding the mouth of a shark, and looked up at Ray.

  “The fuck you doin here?” she demanded.

  “I’m here to help you,” Ray said, folding and pocketing the ol’ timer’s knife. “He was ’bout to lay into you.”

  “Bullshit. I don’t need your protection. You’re gonna try and rape me.”

  “What? You batty bitch. I wouldn’t fuck you with your dick and this guy pushing.”

  “My man’s outside right now, and all I gotta do is holler and he’ll come up he
re and bust your ass.”

  “That the same dude who let you piss in the parking lot? I watched him ditch your ass as soon as you stepped inside.”

  “Bullshit. What you know and what you think you know is two different things, motherfucker.”

  “That’s a good one. You hear an adult say that to you before?”

  “Shut your mouth. Where my clothes at? Don’t you look at my titties, you bastard. These ain’t for you.”

  “I’d sooner wash my face in battery acid.”

  She pulled the spotted, wet sheet off the bed and wrapped it around herself. A half-broken fan turned in the corner, pushing around stank sex air. Ray followed her with his eyes as she rounded to the other side of the bed and gathered her clothes.

  As she pulled on her shirt, she rummaged through the old man’s pants and wallet. “He ain’t paid me my money yet…”

  Ray didn’t believe her, but he let her go through the man’s stuff without saying a word. She deserved to take something extra for the two slaps across the face. Her lip was bloody and her eye looked as though it was beginning to swell. She had less trouble redressing here than she’d had in the parking lot.

  “Hurry up,” Ray said. “This guy wakes up, I’m gonna leave him to deal with you.”

  “Wait a second. Don’t leave me. I need to find my money.”

  She lifted an iPhone with a Detroit Lions protective case.

  “You a baseball fan?” Ray said sarcastically.

  She looked at the phone. “My man gave me his old phone.”

  It wasn’t her phone, but Ray let her lift it anyway. She then bent down and pulled something from her purse. Ray stretched out his leg and pulled open the nightstand drawer with the toe of his boot, looking for weapons. The lamp on the nightstand wobbled. The drawer was filled with porno mags. The ol’ timer squirmed and the hooker charged toward Ray. At first, he thought she was coming at him, but as he turned he saw she was zeroing in on the ol’ timer, a needle poised like a dagger in her hand.

  Ray snatched the hooker by the wrist and pressed his thumb into her tendon. She yelped and the needle dropped. It was filled with a bronze-colored liquid. Ray stepped on it and it broke.

  “What’re you doin’?”

  “He’s s’pose to take that. You don’t understand. He’s diabetic!”

  Ray pulled her up by the arm and her flailing legs kicked the nightstand lamp onto the floor. “You tryin’ to stick that old man with a hot shot, you crazy bitch,” Ray said. “I’m bringing you in.”

  “Let go of me, you sonuvabitch,” she screamed.

  Ray struggled to push the hooker out the door, holding onto her wrist as he went back to his room for his suitcase, and then yanked and pulled her back to the top of the stairs. She slapped and clawed at him to let her go, calling him every vulgar name found written on toilet stall walls, but he kept a firm hold of her with one hand and blocked her kicks with his suitcase in the other.

  Old, gravely voices from the other rooms rasped behind closed doors to “Shut the fuck up.”

  “Fuck you!” she shrieked.

  Another old, dying-looking sonuvabitch craned his neck out his door and asked, “What’s goin’ on out here?”

  “Get back in your room,” Ray ordered.

  The hooker’s claws came close to Ray’s face, and he forced his thick thumb into the top of her hand. She bent back in pain.

  “Aah,” she screamed. “Let go of me, you bastard. Let. Go. Of. Me!”

  Ray bounced her off the wall. Her head bucked against the plaster and recoiled into his heavy chest.

  “Sonuvabitch,” she drawled just before her jaw went slack and her eyes fluttered closed.

  Ray carried most of her weight down the stairs as the dude from the parking lot entered the lobby. Ray stopped halfway down the staircase. The other man turned his body profile just enough that Ray could see the butt of a gun inside his suit jacket. He was young, mid-thirties, military build. The dude in the crawler, Ray realized. FBI? He acted too cool and was too well-dressed to be police. Whoever he was, Ray wasn’t about to add one problem atop another.

  He raised his suitcase to chest height—a shield if the younger man fired his weapon—and stood in front of the hooker, keeping her from falling over with his other hand. She was still dazed, her mouth smacking as if it was filled with peanut butter. Ray and the buzzcut dude’s eyes never left each other’s. On the landing, he could hear the Chinese desk clerk exit her room and tell the man, “No more room.”

  As the dude began to address the clerk, Ray turned and tossed the hooker onto his shoulder in one quick motion and carried her back up the stairs. He could hear the other man start his run and begin to take the stairs two and three at a time.

  Ray ran toward the far fire exit and as he reached the door, stuck out his foot and plunged down the handle. The hooker was spooked awake by the blast of hot air up her skirt. She lifted her head and saw the well-dressed white guy level a gun at her. She closed her eyes.

  THE PARKING LOT

  Ray set the hooker down on the cracked pavement of the parking lot. She teetered then tottered as he looked up at the hotel’s second-floor window.

  The overturned nightstand lamp cast a shadow of the buzzcut dude against the ceiling. The silhouette of his gun appeared and then the light went out. “Sonuvabitch.”

  Ray then turned and spoke to the hooker face-to-face so as to try to sober her to the situation. She was still drunk from the concussion. “What’s your name?”

  Her eyes floated like two dead fish in a bowl before she latched onto his tenderness. “Dee-Cee,” she replied.

  “DC. You have any more needles or weapons on you?”

  “What? No.”

  “We gotta go now. Can you walk?”

  “Yessss,” she purred.

  “Good, girl. Let’s go.”

  Ray slipped his hand into hers and they marched towards the Caddy. Ray squinted to try to read the plates on the white dude’s car, but there wasn’t a plate on the front. He opened the passenger side door and secured her with the seat belt.

  “I did a bad thing,” she said.

  Ray patted her shoulder. “I’ve seen worse,” he said.

  As Ray walked around the front of the car, he looked up to the old timer’s window and saw the buzzcut dude staring down at him.

  Ray slid into the driver’s seat of the Caddy, but before he closed the door, he saw his discarded wedding ring still lying there. He picked up the ring, slipped it into his pocket and closed the door. He started the ignition, shifted the Cadillac into drive, punched the gas, and squawked the tires, heading for the strip club.

  ST ANDREWS

  St. Andrews—where Ray was presently—encompasses the lakeside and northern beaches, the newly created city square, as well as the government buildings, hipster restaurants, and luxury pet stores. Benson Bridge proper is inland and contains the mostly shuttered “old” downtown, vacant industrial parks, public housing, and dilapidated store fronts.

  The Caddy sped along the freshly washed streets, the small city buildings cast like empty shelves in a bare closet.

  DC moaned and tossed as if in a drunken nightmare.

  “Wake up, girl,” Ray said, nudging her awake. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You ain’t fine. What did you try to stick that ol’ timer with?”

  “I don’t wanna talk about none of that stuff. Just drop me at the corner.”

  “You must be cracked out of your mind. Do you not remember me saving your ass up there?”

  “I don’t even know that dude.”

  “You think they know you? You think maybe they out looking for you right now?”

  DC looked at him sideways. “The fuck are you anyway?”

  “Open the glove box and take out the picture,” Ray said.

  DC did so and saw a Detroit detective badge. She slipped the picture out from under it.

  “That’s my baby brother, Sam.
You ever seen him before?” Ray asked.

  DC stared at the picture and shook her head.

  “We’re headed to a club he works at called Fillies. You know it?”

  “I don’t know him,” DC pouted. She then looked out the window as the sky lit up with heat lightning followed by its first clap of thunder. The city seemed as if it were holding its collective breath as the gathering storm stretched across the horizon and threatened to envelope it in fire. “I was just doin’ what they told me.” She began to sob. “I’m always doin’ what everyone tells me to do.”

  Ray watched her try to stifle her tears with shaking hands, but it looked as if someone else had turned on the water and she couldn’t find the tap. She began to hyperventilate.

  Ray put his hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay. You’re safe now. I ain’t gonna ask you to do nothin’ you don’t want to.”

  He had seen it a hundred times before. A battered woman with no hope. A hooker with no home.

  Ray’s eyes darted up to his rearview and he double-checked the side mirrors. A tail. A black SUV roared over the hill, the GMC on the grill reading like a watch for falling rocks sign. Warning. Ray punched the gas, and turned hard left. The GMC SUV almost went up onto two wheels making the same turn. The vehicles raced down a straight stretch of lakeside blacktop. When the GMC would nose up to the Caddy’s bumper, Ray would pull the wheel left and double back and the two vehicles would jockey for position up the parallel street.

  Ray directed the Caddy like a snake charmer; positioning it on the left of the SUV, behind, to the right and then, finally to the front. Full-circle.

  Through the gaps in the wall of buildings Ray could see the flashing lights of a fire truck heading their way on the opposite street. He pointed the Caddy in its direction. The whole time DC wore the sick feeling of doom on her face. Her eyes periodically closed, fearing imminent collision.

  The Caddy bounced, skidded, and almost nose-dived into the front end of the fire truck tearing wide around the corner with its sirens blaring. The Caddy fishtailed and narrowly missed the fire truck’s front bumper before angling into an underground parking garage. Out of the rain.