Ballistic (A Vigilantes Novel)

by Keri Lake

  Unless he’d been playing me the whole time. In that case, he’d come to understand the true meaning of getting screwed over.

  20

  Dax

  There was a fucking joke amongst my friends, that I couldn’t go anywhere in the city without running into someone I knew. And wasn’t that the goddamn truth. Sat inside my car, staking out the decrepit, pay-by-the-hour motel that was somehow even shittier than the one I’d stayed in with Nicoleta, I blew out an exasperated breath and sank down in the front seat, as Weasel strode up with a grin.

  “Dax? ‘The fuck you doing here, man?” He glanced around inside my car, as if looking for someone. “You got a bitch with you?”

  When he came to a stop right in my line of view, I leaned to the side to realign my sights with the junker parked in front of one of the rooms Jasper had disappeared into seconds before Weasel walked up.

  With a shake of my head, I leaned farther to the side, looking for any sign of movement behind the curtain covering the motel room window. “Here on business, brother. What brings you out this way?”

  “Pawning my mama’s ring.”

  That made me pause, and I glanced up at him. I’d known the kid’s mom for years. One of those rare and beautiful souls in the world, who’d made me feel welcome, when every other house I’d bounced around to couldn’t wait to get rid of me.

  “Yeah. Need the money. Just found out my girl’s pregnant. Gonna take her down to the clinic and get it taken care of.” He cringed as he said the words, and it was no mystery as to why. His mama was a devout Catholic. No way she’d have wanted an heirloom pawned to pay for an abortion.

  “Ain’t no way I’m letting you pawn your mama’s ring. How much you looking to make off it?” I didn’t have my wallet with me. Not that I’d have given him cash to pay for his irresponsibility, I just didn’t want him hocking off the ring his mother had worn for years.

  “Couple hundred.”

  “As in two?”

  “Three should cover it. Mikey said his bitch got the abortion pill for three hundred.”

  Shaking my head, I fished beneath the driver’s seat, nabbing the extra Glock I’d stored there, and glanced up at the motel room again. “Y’all need to keep your dick tied to a leash. I’m all for freedom of choice, but it ain’t right when you’re out there breeding the whole goddamn city.” Asshole had a different girl every week, somehow. Baffled me, considering he looked like a wet rat, with his buckteeth and crack addict build, which had earned him his nickname. I popped the mag out, handed him the gun, and swiped the ring out of his palm, stuffing it into my pocket. “Take it to a gun shop. You’ll get a couple hundred for it. I’ll hang onto this until you get your shit together. And quit calling females bitches. It’s disrespectful.”

  “Thanks, man. I owe you.”

  “Get the fuck outta here. And buy a pack of fuckin Trojans while you’re at it.”

  Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have handed over a gun like that, but I had to get rid of the nosy bastard, since shit was about to go down with Jasper. I’d learned a long time ago, after having been blackmailed, to avoid witnesses. As soon as Weasel’s beat-up Taurus rattled off down the road, I exited my car, glancing around the empty streets as I made my way toward the motel room.

  A faint scream coming from inside the room tightened my muscles, and on instinct, I hammered my boot into the door. Once. Twice. Three times cracked it open, splintering the wooden frame, and I pulled my gun, aiming it square at Jasper’s head.

  Pants pulled down to his knees, cupping himself, he stood behind the young girl with a four-socket lug wrench dangling from his hand.

  A tight and furious rage spooled inside my chest, spinning with razor blade edges that had me seeing red.

  “Drop it.” The words hardly slipped through my clenched teeth as I rounded the bed toward him.

  Keeping my eyes on the little prick, I reached out for the girl, and the second she grabbed hold of my hand, I yanked her toward me. “You okay?”

  Through sniffles, she removed the washcloth he’d stuff inside her mouth and nodded. “I’m okay.”

  “Get dressed.” I strode toward Jasper, who countered my steps, backing himself into the corner with his hands up. “You like to hurt little girls?”

  His jaw quivered and his throat bobbed with a swallow, but he didn’t bother to answer me.

  “See, we have something in common, you and me.” Gun pressed to his temple, I smiled at the vein popping out in his neck that pulsed with fear. “I like hurting, too. Only, I hurt piece of shit pedophiles like you. You’re gonna pull your fucking pants up, so I don’t have to stare at your miniature dick anymore, and you’re going to do everything I say. Clear?”

  Sweat glistened across his face, as he kept his back stiff and bent just low enough to lift his pants up onto his hips.

  “Y-y-you can c-c-call the cops. I won’t resist arrest.” His face twitched with the trembles I could see wracking his body.

  “Oh, no. I don’t like getting the cops involved. Complicates shit, you know? ‘Sides that, I’m guessing you’ve got a buddy on the inside. Probably looks out for you. Lets you keep doing what you do, so long as you don’t make too much of a mess.” I rolled my head against my shoulders in a piss poor effort to calm the urge to watch his brains spatter all over the yellowing walls behind him. “No, I’ll handle this one myself. That way, I know you’ll be properly punished.”

  “I wasn’t gonna hurt her. I was just playin’ with her. Just trying to scare her a little. I wasn’t trying to—”

  “To take a twelve-year-old to a motel to fuck her?”

  “She … approached me.”

  “She approached me, too. But that’s the difference between the two of us. I’m not a lowlife piece of shit.” I let a smile break through the grinding of my teeth. “I like to scare my victims, too, though. So let’s have some real fun, shall we?”

  Hand on the open trunk door, I stared down at Jasper, who lay hogtied with a sock stuffed inside his mouth, sealed with duct tape. His eye had begun to swell where I’d punched him a few times. At his scream, I shoved a half-smoked cigarette into my mouth and slammed the trunk closed.

  Rounding the back brought me to the driver’s side door, where I slumped into the seat.

  “You’re not a cop?” the girl asked beside me, wrapping my borrowed hoodie around her body.

  “No.” I took one last drag from my cigarette before flicking it out the window, and fired up the vehicle, ignoring Jasper’s screams bleeding from the back of the car. “Where’s home for you?”

  “Orangelawn.”

  “No. Before you ended up on the streets. Where’s your mom, or dad? Your family?”

  “I’m not going back to them. They’re the assholes who kicked me out.”

  Damn. So young to get kicked out. Then again, I knew some kids who’d hit the streets based on some stupid misunderstanding. Shit said in the heat of the moment. Used to piss me off, because at least they had someone to go back to, if things got too rough. All I’d had was my wits and a damn good right hook to get me through the hard times. “Well, I’m not dropping you off on a corner somewhere.”

  “Then, I’ll get out here.” She set her hand to the door, and I nabbed her elbow, but quickly let go when she jerked her arm.

  “I can’t run from them. Do you know what happens when we run? They burn the bottom of our feet with an iron.”

  “So, you stay their prisoner forever?”

  “At least I have a place to stay. And food. And clothes. Whatever drugs I want. And someday I won’t have to work the floor.”

  “Someday, you’ll be dead. I know a place you can stay.”

  “If it’s at one of those stupid soup kitchens, forget it.”

  “It’s for teens. And it’s run by a good friend of mine.”

  “Not going to some teen ranch, either. I don’t need someone preaching to me, or making me sit through some stupid group therapy like I got head problems,
or something.”

  “No therapy. And no preachers. I promise. She came from the streets herself.” I nabbed a pack of smokes from the drink holder beside me and lit up another.

  “They’ll find me, you know. Why d’you think they give us these pretty bracelets?”

  “We’ll get that off you. But I want you to lay low. You have a choice. You don’t have to go back there.” I put the car in drive and headed toward the shelter, about two miles west.

  She jutted her chin toward my cigarette. “Can I have one?”

  “You take one, I won’t look.”

  The girl didn’t look right, puffing on a cigarette as she lit it up, but she hadn’t looked like a normal girl all night, so what the hell did it matter?

  “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Isabel. Everyone calls me Izzy.”

  “I’m Dax. How’d you end up working in a sleazy club?”

  Shrugging, she blew a lungful of smoke out the window beside her. “I was starving, you know? All I could think about was food. All the time. And I ran into this guy. Thought he was trying to pick me up, or something, so I got in the car with him, thinking maybe I could make a couple bucks.” She talked like a street kid, hard and cynical, like she’d seen just about everything in her twelve years. “He took me to some Chinese restaurant, let me order whatever I wanted on the menu. Started asking me about my family. My friends. I wasn’t stupid, so I didn’t tell everything. He told me he knew of a place, just like the one you’re telling me about now.” A quick glance showed the doubt in her eyes, as if she didn’t trust me all of a sudden. “First couple nights were cool. They let us hang out, drink, gave us some clothes, a shower. Food. There was so much food, all the time. I couldn’t imagine going back on the streets after that. So, when they gave us a choice, whether, or not, to leave, I stayed. I figured I’d have a better chance of surviving, and the girls there didn’t look like they were hard living.” Cigarette tucked between her fingers, she picked at her nail, eyes cast downward. “Wasn’t until the first night I was made to work the floor. Some guy … business suit. Clean cut. He tried choking me.” Her jaw shifted as if she was trying to stave off tears, and she turned away from me. “’Swhen I realized, everything’s too good to be true.”

  “This place … my friend. It’s not like that. She’ll take care of you. And you can leave whenever you want.”

  “Is it true what you said back there? About hunting pedophiles?”

  “Yeah. It’s true.” In my spare time, I’d picked up on a game of luring them in and beating the shit out of them. Something I’d started out doing in an effort to track down Nicoleta that eventually morphed into a way to kill the hours.

  “You won’t find all of them. They’re everywhere. Walking around in business suits, looking like everyone else.

  “I don’t need to find all of them. Rats know when the hawks are watching.”

  “And they hide underground, where the hawks won’t go.”

  I blew the smoke out the window and glanced back at her. “This hawk will.”

  21

  Nicoleta

  Parked on the cement floor of the apartment balcony, I stared up at the moon through the scattering clouds that danced around it. I could just make out the rounded edge that disappeared into its dark half, and wondered what it must be like to live on that side. The endless void of space and its unapologetic emptiness. Hard to believe anything could be hidden so adeptly, with as bright as the moon shone in the night, but perhaps, like some of us, its dark side had been born out of necessity.

  I looked up from the spreadsheet laid out on the accountant’s desk, having already compared it against the one on screen, and twisted around in the chair. “Looks good.”

  Dmitry stood behind me, arms crossed, and gave a nod. “Good. I’ll let Samson know everything balanced correctly.”

  Twisting back around, I closed the laptop and stared down at the names Marty had handwritten on the paper beside it. “Did you kill him? Marty?”

  “Do you want the truth? Or would you prefer I lie?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. I’d felt responsible for whatever had happened to him, as it’d been my comment that’d drawn Dmitry’s attention to his work. “The truth. I guess.”

  Hands behind his back, Dmitry paced a few steps in my periphery and paused. “How’s this? You tell me about the mark on your arm. The one you’ve hidden behind the sweatshirt you’re wearing. And I’ll give you the truth.”

  A jolt of panic climbed up the back of my neck, and I snapped my head up to see the serious expression on his face, eyes directed toward my sleeve.

  “It’s nearly eighty degrees outside.”

  “It was cold this morning.”

  “Perhaps you’d be more comfortable in one of the T-shirts from the closet upstairs.”

  I turned away from him again, staring down at my sleeve, which hid the cuts I’d carved into my skin. Cuts that’d curbed the urge to stab my mother’s boyfriend. “No, thank you.”

  “Someone hurt you again.”

  Frowning, I gripped my wrist to keep the sleeve over my arm, as if he’d yank it down for a look. “I hurt myself.”

  “We only hurt ourselves when we feel helpless.” He sighed, and a rich smoky scent, like burning fall leaves, filled the room, telling me he’d lit up a cigar. “I hurt myself a few times, until I realized the futility in that.”

  “What do you want me to do? Kill him? It’s against the law!” I hissed, blinking away the tears I couldn’t stop as they blurred the names on the sheet below me.

  “Tell me his name.”

  “What for?”

  “Just tell me his name.”

  “Tell me the truth first. Did you kill Marty?” I kicked my head to the side just enough to see him sitting at his desk, looking like the Godfather, or something.

  “I did.” The lack of hesitation, or remorse, in his voice was both disturbing and fascinating.

  I swallowed past the lump in my throat and peeled back the sleeve of my sweatshirt to the practice cuts along my arm. Ones I’d been too scared to deepen with the blade. And before I could stop myself, I said the first name that popped into head my.

  My mother’s boyfriend. Pigman.

  With a cigarette in one hand, I stared down at the faint skinny white line on my forearm, while rubbing my hand over the short crop of hair atop my head. It’d begun to grow back slowly, but still served as a reminder of my time spent with Tesarik.

  How Dmitry hated his rival. Of course, I hadn’t learned of Dmitry’s business dealings until much later, hadn’t known those meetings held in his office had often been some poor sap’s death warrant. He’d long plotted the day he’d take down Tesarik’s entire empire.

  If only his pride hadn’t been his one damning flaw.

  As for my mother’s boyfriend, he’d shown up at our trailer a week later with grisly burns to the entire right side of his face, where Aleksey had held his cheek to a stove. Another of Dmitry’s confessions.

  Headlights sliced through the darkness, and I peered over the balcony to see Dax’s car turning into the parking lot. Scrambling to my feet, I ignored the hum of my pulse, the war drum beating through my bones at the thought of having Jasper laid out beneath my blade. I shuffled back into the apartment and paced, biting my nails between drags of my cigarette. Seconds ticked off as Dax climbed the staircase. He didn’t look at me, while he pushed through the door into the small, studio apartment.

  Eyes spacey and distant, clearly troubled in the way his brows dipped above them, he ran his hand through his hair. He’d seen exactly what I’d warned him about.

  I gave him a moment to gather his thoughts and took a seat beside the door to the balcony. “You got inside.”

  “Those girls … they don’t choose to be there. Some of them may go home after, but they’re not free.”

  “They’re not.”

  “And what’s to keep me from going back into that place and gunning it down? Blowing a
way every one of those motherfuckers.”

  “Because you’ll die doing it. And for now, we know where to find it. We have a way in.”

  “I have a way in. Do you have any idea how that feels? It’s like carrying the keys to hell.”

  I didn’t even realize my hands had begun to tremble until I lifted the cigarette for another drag. “Where’s Jasper?”

  “Somewhere no one will find him until I figure out what the hell to do with him.”

  Shaking my head, I ran my tongue along my back teeth, treading carefully with my words, so as not to piss him off. “The deal was, you tell me.”

  “How about you start telling me some things, huh? How ‘bout you fill in the blanks a little, so I’m not walking around with my head up my ass.”

  Fuck. I knew he’d have questions after. Had anticipated he’d be troubled after what Lucy had told me about him and his thing with abused women. I just didn’t anticipate he’d use it against me.

  “What do you want to know, Dax?”

  “I want to know about this girl. How’d she get caught up in this shit?”

  22

  Dax

  In the underbelly, I’d seen some shit I wished I could’ve erased from my brain, like the visual of Jasper holding that lug wrench, playing on loop inside my head. If I’d needed a reason to kill him, all I’d had to do was imagine what would’ve gone down in that motel room if I hadn’t barged in on him. Instead, I’d left him chained up in a small building along the river, where he could scream all damn night and no one would hear him. But walking away from him with that visual stuck on repeat had to have been one of the most trying moments of my life—right up there with the first time I’d set out that bottle of fentanyl on the shelf.

  The urge to go back and cut him open, belly to chest, tugged hard, as I sat on the bed across the room from Nicoleta.