I bit my lip, fighting the stupid pride that welled up about his offer to protect me and decided that it was what needed to happen. I nodded and then paused, remembering Candy, remembering T-Built’s threat to my family, to anyone with any sort of connection. I bit my lip, thinking back to T-Built’s “test” of my loyalty. He would definitely make good on his word. I glanced over at Jace, wondering just how much I could rely on him. I didn’t want to become a burden, but I couldn’t go back. Not after everything that had happened.
“It’s just…” I began, not sure how to ask. He’d already done so much
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s awful of me to ask, but…”
Jace shook his head and hurried to cross the room, taking my hand. “No, Mia. Anything. You ask it and I’ll do it.”
My heart warmed at just how worried he was for me.
“It’s just… my boss—my old boss,” I corrected myself, “said that if I ever disobeyed him he’d start killing people. My… my family, my friends… everyone. I… I don’t know how much of that is true—how much of it is possible for him—but… I know that he can at least get to Candy and my brother.”
Jace frowned and then looked away, considering this. I watched him, almost seeing all the calculations passing through his mind, and it occurred to me that, like it or not, he was very, very good at what he did. Then, as we went on thinking, I began to worry that, being as good as he was, he’d come to realize that all of this wouldn’t be worth his effort and I’d wind up—
“Okay…” he said, interrupting my spiraling thoughts. “I can send out a few guys to keep an eye on your family. I’ll tell them to be discreet, not let themselves or their purposes be known. We don’t need anybody else getting worked up about all this; not if we don’t have to. It’s still early, and it sounds like you did quite a number on that guy, so I’m guessing your boss and the Crew don’t even know that anything went down yet. As for Candy…” he shrugged, “Well, if you vouch for her than I’d be more than happy to let her stay here. I’ve got a spare room, and, honestly, I’d feel better knowing you had somebody to stay here with you if I have to go out for any reason.”
I blushed at that, smiling, and nodded my thanks. Then, realizing he’d left one person out, I said, “And… my brother?”
He shook his head, running his hand through his hair. “I can’t help him, Mia. My guys… well, we don’t have any power in the jail system. It was never something we needed to be a part of. It’s beyond my control…” He frowned and sighed, shaking his head, “But, honestly—and I hope you don’t hate me for saying so—I’m not sure I’d be willing to do anything for him even if I could. It’s his fault you’re in this mess in the first place, and as far as I’m concerned he’s just as guilty as that asshole for what happened to you tonight.”
While I wanted to feel upset at hearing that—while I didn’t want to feel like a bad sister or an awful person—I realized that I couldn’t bring myself to disagree.
FIFTEEN
~JACE~
I couldn’t hold back any longer.
I’d known almost at once what I had to do. Once Mia was asleep, I slipped away and went to action. I’d had enough of the Carrion Crew. Something had to be done; no more of this tip-toeing bullshit; no more “someday”s; no more! I snatched my jacket, shrugging into the worn, familiar leather in a single, practiced sweep, and yanked my cell phone from my pocket. I had to see Danny. Immediately.
I tried to summon my inner-ninja or shadow or whatever it would take to get me through the condo and onto the elevator without waking Mia. She’d been through enough already, and I didn’t want to worry her. That was what I told myself, at least; I didn’t want to admit that I knew that what I really didn’t want was her seeing me like this. Crazy.
Crazy or not, the stealth I was praying for was delivered. I was through the elevator and heading for my chopper an instant later, my boots screaming on the hollow emptiness of the garage. I felt like I was moving in auto-pilot, and I was almost glad for it. It made me feel like I didn’t have to be held responsible for what I was prepared to do.
Though I’d been holding my phone almost the entire time—practically crushing it in my grip—I only just then dialed Danny.
“Jace?” he groaned, answering after only one ring. “Motherfucker! Ya got any idea what time it is?”
“Yeah,” I growled into the receiver. “Time to bust some Carrion skulls!”
“Oh?” Danny’s voice was alert and ready in an instant; while his tone was questioning he didn’t sound the least bit surprised. “What happened?”
I was on the chopper, setting Mia’s helmet down on its original space at my feet. “I’ll tell you,” I said, holding back on starting the engine, “but not like this. Meet me at the shop.”
“Sure thing, boss,” Danny said, past the point of sleep, concern, and fully immersed in business-mode.
I hung up and started the engine. Then I was off. I sped down the streets, glad to see that due to the time, the streets were mostly empty. The night air hit my face and I briefly closed my eyes against it, working to concentrate on what had to be done:
First: Mia’s friend. Candy. She’d be the first target the Crew would order a strike on when they couldn’t track down Mia. I had to find her before they did and take her back to my place.
Secondly: Mia’s mom. It shouldn’t be too difficult to track her whereabouts. I had a few favors owed to me back at the PD—a few detectives who were willing to provide information provided they weren’t implicated in anything too heavy. And what could possibly be heavy about wanting to send a friend’s mom some flowers? It was just an address, after all. Then I’d be able to get some boys headed out that way; couple of the young, reckless punks with their bat-outta-hell crotch rockets—the ones they insisted on keeping the needle rested at a steady one-fifty half the time—and with their fanciful whims of being action heroes. Yeah, they’d jump at a job like that in an instant, even if it did mean sitting around and doing nothing but eating fast food and chugging boxed coffee for a few days.
That’d only leave the Crew with Mia’s brother to take out their anger on, and wasn’t that just A-okay with me. My only real regret was that I wouldn’t have a chance to take a shot at him, as well.
Oh well. There was no shortage of faces for me to break.
Which brought me around to the third task on the list: find and finally take care of T-Built. This, however, was a task that, in and of itself, demanded its own list of steps.
First things first, I reminded myself as I ran a red light.
The sight of Mia from earlier, standing in the pouring rain in clothes that seemed just as eager to run as her, still haunted me, making me crazy. I saw her now on every street corner; crying and running, terrified, and caught in a downpour that seemed to follow her and only her. The rain had stopped—the streets still slick with the phantom moisture but the city otherwise over the storm—but every corner that I saw that ghostly image occupying seemed once more caught in a torrential downpour. I could practically hear the rain as I passed yet another mental replay of the scene; could almost feel it slapping me in the face.
I roared, screaming so loud I wondered if my chopper’s engine felt envy in that instant, and howled around the corner. I skidded, hydroplaning, and leaned into it at a nearly suicidal degree; letting the heel of my boot slip out and kick at the road as it came up to bite me. The chopper pitched, wavered, and I kicked out again, righting myself and the bike and getting the tires to find hold once more on the street.
“Not tonight, you bitch,” I scolded the bike. “Tonight you take me where I need to go. Tomorrow you can dump me, roll me, and come crashing down on me for all I care. But”—I cranked the accelerator, punishing the girl for fighting—“not tonight!”
The chopper screamed, but she seemed to be screaming with me in that instant. And why wouldn’t she? She’d seen Mia just as I had.
She had to be pissed, too.
I rode on, intent on beating Danny to the shop, but as I rounded another corner I came screeching to a halt—one of the only other cars on the road at that time honking and swerving around me as I planted myself at a dead-stop in the middle of the road. The driver screamed something through a slightly parted passenger window, and I thought I caught a glimpse of a finger pointed in my direction, but I didn’t care. I was too focused on the seedy motel sign glowing ahead of me.
Had I meant to drive here? I thought I was headed for the shop?
Before Mia had fallen asleep, she’d told me where all that ugly shit had gone down; where the asshole had taken her to…
To…
I pulled the chopper into the motel’s parking lot, parking it at the far side. No flashing reds and blues, no yellow tape, no nothing. A girl had run, screaming and bloody and nearly naked, through their lobby and nobody had even bothered to call the cops. I gave myself a mental note to torch this place so far into the ground that survivors would have to dig just to find the ashes.
Mia said she’d hurt the guy. Put a good hurt on him, too, from the sounds of it. I doubted she’d managed to kill him, though; something she was terrified had been the case. If the stabbing hadn’t been enough to put him down, then I doubted a kick to the chops was going to go and finish the job. He’d be hurting, no doubt—and good on her for putting him through that—but, far as I was concerned, he wasn’t hurting enough.
I started inside, hoping that he was at least hurting enough to keep his sick ass planted in the shit-nest he’d set himself up in for the night.
Gotta nurse those wounds, don’t you, shit-bird? I thought, strolling past the counter.
The guy behind the desk looked pale, nervous. I guessed he’d been the one to witness the scene earlier. I thought about putting a good hurt on him, too. Then I thought better of it. Last thing I needed was to give him a reason to finally get the fuzz rolling in. Not yet, at least.
The guy called after me as I started past him and down the hall. I’m sure he saw trouble when he saw me, and I’m sure he thought I’d be demanding a room number or something of that nature. Plenty of assholes took plenty of pieces of tail here; maybe I was an enraged husband who’d just discovered his wife was cuckolding him, or maybe I was a livid pimp coming to handle a wayward trick who’d tried to skip out on a payment. Who knew what he thought? And who cared?
Perk of a seedy motel? When it’s raining and you’re trying to track the source of a bleeding, scared victim, there’s likely to be a trail.
Because who has the time to clean a tile floor in the middle of the night?
The drops of blood were drying—little brown-red blobs that you’d almost think were candle wax if you were a complete fucking moron—and spattered in a serpentine path that led straight to a door.
It’d be locked. No doubt. Guys like this were cowards through-and-through. He’d want to have privacy to lick his wounds; he’d feel safe with the bolt set and the latch in place.
Too bad for him these shit-shacks are built of cheap wood and spit.
My boot landed squarely beside the knob, and the entire door folded at the center like a piece of paper being prepared for origami. I stared for a brief moment, stunned by the effect. Had I known the door was that cheap I would’ve saved myself the pulled calf muscle and just shouldered through. There was a startled squawk on the other side of the door—louder through the gaping crack that networked up the door—and this was enough to motivate me to finish the job.
A man with greasy hair and sunken eyes looked up from his spot on the bed. Half his face looked like a special-effects makeup test, purple and swollen; something viscous and not tear-like at all seemed to be oozing from his left eye, and I wondered with a delicious satisfaction if Mia had actually managed to leave the guy half-blind. There was a heap of once-bleach-white towels packed against his side, the gore-splotched rags telling me that he was having trouble stopping the bleeding.
The guy was stammering, his words garbled through his half-mouth; the other half more stretching than actually opening. I wasn’t sure if he was pleading, threatening, or ordering a hamburger. He moved to stand, the good side of his face grimacing as he did, and I realized he was heading for an impressive piece of kitchen cutlery on the nightstand.
“Bad night, I hear,” I called over to him. “‘Bout to get a lot worse. Though it’ll be substantially better in the long run if you don’t do what you’re thinking of doing.”
The guy paused, turning back to me with a skeptical look on his face. “You the whore’s pimp? I thought T—”
“DON’T YOU CALL HER THAT!” I roared, clearing the distance in an instant.
He was staggering and falling back before I’d even reached him, the stab wound impairing his reflexes and making his already sloppy effort to evade an all-out stumble. He toppled, caught the corner of the mattress with his right shoulder, and was bounced in a half-circle to his left. He thunked to the floor on his belly, and, judging from the hiss of pain, took most of the impact squarely on his bad side.
I actually caught myself cringing at the sound.
Then he was moving, heading once more for the nightstand and the knife waiting atop it, and I was on him. Knocking his outstretched hand away, I yanked him around, forcing him to face me.
“I hope you’re ready to learn,” I growled down at him, “because I’ve come to teach a lesson.”
Then, bringing the heel of one booted foot against his still-bleeding side and the toe of the other snugly between his legs, securing him below me where it’d hurt him most, I went to work on him.
****
I walked out of the room with the man’s bag of toys secured under my arm. There was muffled sobbing coming from behind me. I’d decided, after making him promise over a dozen times to never even look at a woman again, that he likely meant it. All the same, I didn’t see him reflecting on his testicles with any fondness for the next few months. Assuming, of course, I’d left him any testicles to reflect over. The pitch of his voice certainly a great deal higher. Heaving out a sigh of satisfaction and letting the numbing thrill of the moment start to wash away, I was suddenly very aware of a dull, throbbing pain in my right hand and, upon inspection, I discovered a broken piece of tooth embedded between the knuckles of my ring and pinky fingers. Sneering, I pulled it out and cast it aside.
Just another bit of mess for the morning crew to mop up, I suppose.
The guy at the front desk was (finally) on the phone with the cops. I guessed he’d heard the commotion and decided he couldn’t do nothing any longer. Walking up to the desk, his voice began to come out in a stammer.
“—coming at me! Oh god, he’s coming—”
I caught him in the jaw with my left fist, not wanting to put another tooth in my right. He collapsed in a heap, already crying and cupping his face in his hand. Satisfied, I tossed the bag of toys at the man’s feet and nodded towards it.
“When the cops get here, tell ‘em that’s what the guy over in seventeen used to attack that girl you ignored earlier tonight. You got it?” I said.
He whimpered and nodded.
“And try to have a good night,” I called over my shoulder as I headed out the door. “Change is in the air.”
****
“I’m hoping that ain’t yer blood,” Danny said, staring at me as I strolled into the shop.
“Not unless we’re talking about this boo-boo,” I mock-whimpered as I held up my right hand. This, I realized, offered no real indication of the small puncture between my knuckles—both of my hands were pretty thoroughly caked in blood. “Well, you’ll just have to take my word for the boo-boo, I guess.”
“So who was da’ lucky fella?” Danny asked with a smirk.
“Some prick who decided to take things too far with Mia,” I said, letting myself fall back into a worn-down sofa that Danny sometimes napped on.
Danny scoffed at that. “So this is a jealousy-thing? Some John slip a few too many finge
rs in your new squeeze and—”
“He nearly killed her, Merc,” I interrupted. “Had a bag of sex toys that looked more like torture devices. And a fucking knife. Not some little switch number, either; no, some fucking cleaver-like shit. Damn thing looked like it just came off the rack at a butcher’s shop.”
“Oh…” Danny nodded and settled in beside me. “Then, yeah, I’d say he took things too far. You leave any for me?”
I shrugged. “Probably not,” I admitted. “Mia stabbed him and turned half his face into hamburger meat. I left him with more teeth on the floor than in his head, a nutsack full of guacamole, and… and… shit, I can’t really remember now,” I laughed at that and shook my head. “But, short of wasting the guy I don’t think there’s much left you could do.”
“Fair enough,” Danny said with a disappointed frown. So, what’s going on?”
I nodded, glad to see things moving forward so quickly. I explained the situation—everything I needed and everything I planned to do. As I did, I tried to hold back the anger that wanted to find its way back. It oozed over me and I forced it away, knowing I needed to have a clear head for what came next.
“Okay…” Danny said with a sigh once I was finished. “Well, I can get in touch with Detective Bakeman, get an address for yer girl’s mom; probably best to send Andy and Cheesy on that one. They’re hotheads, but they’re not the type to be gettin’ crazy ‘less the need arises. An’ it sounds like ya got things with Mia’s buddy handled, right?”
I nodded, already planning to pick up Candy after we’d wrapped up our business here. “And then I’m gonna start hunting for T-Built,” I said.
“Well that might be easier than ya think,” Danny said with a smirk. “Word on the street is the trouser-stain’s gone an’ put himself in a bad kinda mood—‘crazed’ bein’ a better word for it.”
I looked over at that. “Huh? T-Built? But isn’t he supposed to be Mister Super-Elusive?”
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