Running On Empty: Crows MC

by Bloom, Cassandra

  “We’re hosting a fund-raiser tomorrow night, and we need”—he seemed to choke on the next word and started to clear his throat, the sound coming out as a confusing hybrid of a cough and a laugh—“pleasant displays to saunter around. There will be lots of potential business partners, clients, recruits…” he trailed off and rolled his hand on his wrist in a “and so on and so forth”-gesture, his eyes rolling in a matching-yet-contradicting “who gives a shit”-fashion. “It’s all more high-brow than I like and much more than you’re fit for, but the gears of business must be greased all the same. Normally I have a set of girls trained specifically for events like these—the sort who can suck a dick while wearing diamonds, rubies, and thousand-dollar dresses without ever posing a risk to the valuables—but they’re unavailable and I’m in something of a pinch for time.”

  “Unavailable?” Candy said, breaking the sacred silence with a worried tone. “You mean Tonya and Stacia, don’t you? How are they unavailable?”

  “You’d better not be implying that you’re unwilling to take the job, whore!” T-Built said with a snarl, turning on her with all the intent to strike her save for the raising of his hand.

  Candy winced all the same and quickly shook her head. “N-no, sir. Not at all. I’m just… I worry for the other girls—look out for them, you know?—since we’re all working together and such.”

  T-Built laughed in the same way an adult laughs at a child’s joke—not really finding any humor in it but knowing they don’t understand why it wasn’t funny in the first place. It was a humoring, condescending laugh. He slapped her then, but it was a close, patting sort of slap—still painful from the looks of things, but nothing that an onlooker would truly see as a violent act. I saw in those slaps a calculated effort to put a sting in her cheeks without bruising her or making her jaw too sore to stretch around a John.

  “Do you think I got this far by being so stupid as to believe that you cunts care a thing for one another? Or that you care what sort of money you earn for the greater good?” He slipped in, putting his lips near her ear but still talked loud enough for me to hear. The bastard even locked his eyes on me as he whispered into her ear! “You are dogs, mongrels—the lot of you—who are hungry, starving, and willing to bite anybody—myself, your buyers, and even each other—if it means you might actually get something to eat out of it. And I…” he withdrew his head enough to wet his lips without risking any contact with Candy’s earlobe, “I am the one that holds the chain around your necks. I hold it tight and I hold it high, so that all of you know that you’ll never be free from me and so that all of you know who stands where. Do not try to tell me you care for those girls, and do not try to tell me that you care about me—I’ll believe neither and, moreover, I’ll be inclined to not believe anything else you may try to tell me henceforth. The other girls—whatever their names were—saw fit to steal from me, and they paid for that effort.”

  Candy gasped, proving then—to me, at least—that she had cared for the two girls. “Y-you killed them?” she stammered, once again forgetting herself.

  T-Built rolled his eyes and shook his head. “No,” he said simply. “I didn’t have to. They helped themselves to a shipment of product that I hadn’t had a chance to cut down. I would have liked to handle them myself before they had a chance to waste it, but…” he shrugged and sighed. “It’s a great inconvenience—it really was a good batch of stuff that they offed themselves over; it cost a small fortune that I’ll never see a return on—but they’re replaceable.”

  Candy stared at him, horrified.

  T-Built didn’t seem to notice. Shrugging again, he gave her another condescending smile and said, “As it were, if you care so much for the collective earnings that your lot brings in I suppose you’d do well to work that much harder to fill their quota. Maybe get your feet involved with those ever-popular group jobs.” His face went dour and serious in an instant. “In the meantime, however…”

  He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out two envelopes, holding them out to us to take. Candy retrieved both and handed one to me, which I accepted with a shaky hand. I held back on looking inside, not sure if T-Built’s sacred silence carried over to acts of brazen curiosity. Candy, either knowingly or arrogantly, unfolded the top flap to investigate. Looking over her arm, I spotted a stack of bills.

  Both of us, shocked at the sight of more money than our “household” had seen collectively since I’d started working, looked up in shock at T-Built.

  “There’s two-grand in there,” he informed us, then corrected with, “In each of those.” He paused, once again oscillating his leer between us, to let that information seep in. “Tomorrow night at nine-o’clock sharp you will arrive at this address”—he tapped the middle finger of his left hand against my own envelope’s surface, which did, in fact, bear an address across its surface—“wearing gowns and jewelry priced at no less than the contents of those envelopes. If you do not arrive, if you arrive late, or if you arrive wearing anything that I feel is remotely less than the value of those envelopes, then I will do to you what I would have liked to have done to the bitches who should have been there in the first place.” He squared himself, stretching his shoulders back and making a generally gorilla-like display with his tall, lanky frame. “I will cut you in ways that will make you useless to your profession—useless, in fact, to any man—and I will burn you until none who ever knew you would recognize you. Simply put, I will hurt you—I will hurt you a lot—and I will do so for a very, very long time until I have grown tired of hurting you. Then, ladies”—he said the word as though he meant something else—“I will kill you. And, if all of that is not enough to convince you not to take my words lightly, this will be the fate that befalls both of you,” he said, locking his gaze on Candy for a long moment before glancing back at me. “Just something to consider in case there’s any sincerity behind your claims of ‘worrying about the other girls.’” Once more, he embraced a moment of silence between the tight triangle of our bodies, letting the unknowing din of the city hum around us. Then, smiling like an old friend, he reached out, patted our shoulders with the same stinging, condescending non-violence as he had with Candy’s cheek, and said, “And, when you’re sucking and fucking tonight, I want you two to imagine you’re wearing all sorts of pretty-pretties—because, soon enough, you will be—and training yourselves not to get the mess on any of it. Because all those pretty-pretties—two-grand worth of gown and glitter on each of you—will be making repeat performances, and you’ll be disappointed if you think we’ll be paying to handle any Bill Clintons that might occur.

  After seeing Candy put her wellbeing on the line several times already and, quite frankly, getting tired of hearing in some form or another—both from others and myself—about how I was just a “stupid whore,” I surprised myself by asking, “What’s the point in buying expensive clothes and jewelry if our purpose there in the long run is just to take it off or risk messing it up? Why not just let us make the rounds at this event dressed like we normally dress? At least that way all those ‘prospective’s will know what we’re there for.”

  I more felt than heard Candy gasp beside me.

  T-Built’s hand, still in mid-slap at my shoulder, paused and started to squeeze.

  I fought against a flinch and lost.

  “Everyone knows a cheap gift when they see it,” T-Built announced, digging his fingertips further into the meat of my shoulder until my flinch escalated to an all-out whimper, “but that doesn’t mean, when you’re taking the present to a rich man’s home, that you don’t wrap it in pricey paper. Otherwise it looks out of place among all the expensive, fancy gifts.” He finally released my shoulder and stepped back, spitting at my feet like he had a bad taste in his mouth from just talking to me. “If you want to present yourself as a cheap and tawdry trinket once you’re taken to whatever private room you’re dragged off to, then that’s your decision—far be it for me to question your sales pitch provided it works—but unt
il that moment you’d better be able to convince everyone that you’re worth something. Got it?”

  “The two of us flinched as we echoed our own “Got it”s.

  And then, just like that—as though he were eager to be as far from us as possible—he was gone.

  After the previous night’s episode and how quick Candy was to hold me and help me through my own pain, I felt it only fair to offer her the same sympathy and aid. She’d tried to suffer through it alone, hurrying off to her trusty neighboring alley once T-Built was far from sight, and beginning to stifle her sobs into her hands. Following after, not sure which part of the awful man’s tirade against us had been the last straw that had pushed her to that point, I tried to decide how best to go about helping her. The interval between following and actually coming to her side gave me a heart-wrenching sight, and I decided then that one of the most defeating sights a person could ever experience was a broken whore trying her best not to ruin her makeup.

  Screw the crying clowns, I thought, nothing’s sadder than a sobbing prostitute. At least some people see the clown as a person.

  Finally, more for my sake than hers—unable to bear the sight of her crying like that—I moved in and threw my arms around her. Like a child clamoring against their mother after a bad scare, she blindly worked to embrace me back, still sobbing and working to protect the night’s “masterpiece” of her made-up face. The whole struggle made me think of somebody juggling priceless artifacts while trying to flee for their lives from some murderous beast that was hot on their heels—you wanted so badly to see them cast aside their limiting burden, but knew that to do so was to threaten the life they’d be working to save. Candy was, like me, only a prostitute, and T-Built had just made a fresh note of carving that fact into our minds. And to go on and risk marring her face—a part, in essence, of the product we were there to sell—was to risk marring the night’s earnings. Then she’d be a failing prostitute. And we’d just gotten a very good idea of what T-Built thought of failing prostitutes; hell, I’d gotten a very good idea of what T-Built thought of successful prostitutes. It wasn’t that unlike the difference between what some considered “good” cheese and “bad” cheese: the dividing line was determined solely by its worth, because, either way, it repulsed most and stank to high heaven.

  Mia, I thought sarcastically to myself, you are a poster child for positive thought.

  And so I held Candy, as she’d held me the night before. Just two bricks of ugly, stinking cheeses set out on display in a window to represent a possible sour taste in the mouth of some poor potential buyer.

  Then, eventually—finally—she began to talk: “I-I… I st-still c-c-can’t be-lieve i-i-it…” she stammered. “D-dead! They… they’re dead! T-Tonya and… and Stacia! Dear god… F-fucking Christ, Mia, they’re really… they’re really dead? Fucking ODed on some of that… that… god, oh god! They were two of his… Mia, they were like his prized whores! I… I’d have thought he’d trade a hundred like you and me—thousands like you and me—for just one of them! They were the crown jewels of the girls that T-Built waved around when he wanted the big money to roll in and they… and he…” she was shaking her head. It was the frantic, desperate shaking of a person trying to convince themselves that some fresh terror they’d just witnessed wasn’t real—a person in the grips of a terrible haunting trying to remind themselves despite the howling specter floating before them that ghosts weren’t real. “Mia, they’re dead and… and he cared more about losing the drugs they ODed on. You saw him, Mia; you saw him! He didn’t even bat an eye at the mention of them. He was more upset that he couldn’t have done it himself! I think I saw him choke up a little over the mention of the drugs, but Tonya and Stacia…” she shook with the mention of their names. “Dead. They’re dead… they’re dead… they’re dead…” Her mouth parted, seemed ready to come unhinged like a snake, and a silent wail yawned up towards the sky as her eyes welled and flooded with tears. All her prior efforts had been in vain; her mascara was beginning to run. “The crown jewels of whores,” she repeated, whimpering her words once more, “and their deaths meant nothing to him. What are we then, Mia? What are we?”

  Those were the words she said to me in that desperate instant—“What are we?”—but what I heard was a question—the question—that another, more casual asker had presented the night before:

  “You a whore or not?”

  “No,” I said, answering the wrong question and, in turn, earning a confused look from Candy. Her non-words from before—what I’d heard in her voice when she squeezed my hand: “Your survival is how you fight.”—echoed back to me, and I finally answered her question:

  “We’re survivors.”

  But I’d be damned to understand just what I meant by that.

  Part 2

  Crossed Paths

  Chapter 7

  ~Jace~

  I was making a catalogue of immediate personal miseries:

  It was (still) ungodly hot out. The night was humid enough to make my balls feel like a monster-hosting swamp. Everyone around me was either speaking too loudly or too quietly—seeming either to be shouting and making me nervous or whispering and making me paranoid. The drinks were overpriced and under-poured, the bartenders skimping a full finger’s worth of the good stuff. The food all looked pre-chewed, and I was smart enough—or at the very least cautious enough—not to give it the benefit of the doubt and try a taste test. This last misery fed the next: I was starving. And that misery fueled half of one of the priors: when I got hungry, I got anxious; anxiety plus paranoia multiplied by the time-honored Presley male patience equaled a brewing shit storm of biblical proportions.

  All of which was very, very not good. I’d come here to end a life. I was fully aware, if not marginally willing, to have that life be my own, but a life was a life and I intended to have one snuffed out before the night’s end. A shit storm brewing in the mind of a man whose endgame is death is a recipe for disaster.

  Worst of all: I was trapped—no better word for it, “TRAPPED!”—in a three-piece monkey suit that was tight where I needed it loose and loose where I needed it tight. This was, without a doubt, the absolute greatest and most pressing of my immediate personal miseries. I could have gone an entire night with heat, swamp-nuts, noise pollution, and shitty food and drink—hey, I’d been to my fair share of shindigs in the past; you been to one you been to them all—but throwing Jason Presley in an Armani suit when he’s geared to commit murder is a good way to motivate a full-on Carrion Crew “fundraiser” massacre.

  Case in point: my catalogue of immediate personal miseries were rapidly culminating into the sort of situation that would likely end in a very public misery.

  I’d gotten in easily enough. There were suits of all makes, models, and years coming and going. Bodyguards were as plentiful as the pearls draped around the guests’ “plus one”s necks, and, from the looks of things, the number of goons you had shadowing you seemed directly proportional to your personal sense of self-worth. It occurred to me, in a near laugh-inducing flash, that the men attending this event actually seemed to view burly men the same way women viewed diamonds and rubies. The idea of two of these self-righteous blowhards “retiring” to the bathroom to gloat about the protection they had in their entourage replacing the otherwise time-honored tradition of measuring dicks was, on its own, almost enough to have me doubling over with laughter.

  “Ah, yes, my good man. Impressive. Very impressive. But—BUT!—one of my own—yes, that large fellow with the rippling pectorals and meticulously oiled abdominals—was once, get this, an underground street fighter for the Russian mafia. Dreadfully brutish, I agree, but he hums like a Rolls Royce when he’s sliding that three-thousand dollar an hour pecker of his right up my—”

  And so it was, with all that importance-reflecting protection surrounding and shambling after all the moneybags that the Carrion Crew had invited, I had an easy in. I just sauntered myself up to a particularly high-and-mighty looking fe
llow with three men—all looking just as grumpy and uncomfortable as myself—and made his trio of bodyguards into a quartet. The doorman, who everyone knew was actually a well-armed guard and in no way a simple “invitations please”-dweeb, checked for the guy’s envelope, offered what was barely a glance in our direction, and with a simple “they’re with me” from my unknowing host, I was in.

  That none of the other three bodyguards even seemed to notice me did not speak highly of their services.

  Once in, I followed a similar pattern. Not wanting to spotlight myself as a solitary figure, knowing that would be a quick way to have someone recognize me, I kept close to whatever wandering group I happened by without leading on that I was actually trying to pose as one of them. A few times I was forced to nod an awkward greeting, and on two occasions I had to go so far as to bullshit my way through a phony dialogue to keep up appearances:

  “Oh my! Look who it is! How you been, you old so-and-so? Have you been working out? Well you’re looking good! Keep it up! And tell the family I said “hello,” would you? Good man. Good man!”

  Then, leaving them feeling bewildered and likely a bit violated, I made my leave, feeling phony and more than a little nauseated for it.

  I strolled alongside busboys carrying empty trays. I made a show of adjusting the tablecloth and place settings at a few of the tables. Then, scooping up a discarded catering menu, I scrutinized over the same three entrees for an absurdly long moment so that I could cross a vast and uncomfortably empty length of floor that should have been used for dancing. Then, partially proud but mostly astounded that I hadn’t been identified and killed, I started for the stairs. I was far from searching for a needle in a haystack; if anything I was hunting that same needle among a mountain of AIDS-infected hypodermics. Danny hadn’t been bullshitting when he said that this was a dangerous move—one wouldn’t be crossing any lines or daring any argument to say it was a flat-our stupid move, too—but the needle in question was T-Built, and that meant I had a better chance of sneezing around that metaphorical haystack and blowing away everything but that famously elusive length of metal.