Now, years later—after dismantling the twisted prostitution ring and outright ending the illegal sex trafficking work that the Carrion Crew had been operating—I was aiming to reboot what my father and those pioneering women had started. And now, with “Mistress Candy” raring to get her old comrades off the streets and “playing the whore-game right,” I was forced to race to keep up with her. This, however, I couldn’t even begin to mind—it was, after all, why I’d wanted her to take the job in the first place.
As I dragged my cramping hand through the process of yet another signature, I wondered if my dad had ever found himself as intimidated by his brothel-running colleagues as I felt with Candy. She was sharp as a razor, funny as hell, and the best friend Mia could ever hope for, but she was intense!
“You get me those papers, big boy,” she’d said over the phone earlier that morning, “or Mia’s gonna need a boat and SCUBA gear to take you on your next date!”
Sure as I was that Candy wasn’t about to be taking things to a Medieval point anytime soon, the fact that she saw fit to issue such threats was motivation enough to ride out and handle the business. I finished up the last of the signatures and began itemizing various lists and documenting various phone numbers and email addresses so that various permits could be assigned (or *ahem* reproduced). A man who called himself Robert even though we both knew that wasn’t his name prattled on about how much he’d enjoyed working for my dad and then how much he’d enjoyed working for my brother. He was in the middle of explaining how much he was enjoying working for me—though, after the last of this work was settled, the bulk of his ongoing business would be going through Danny—when my phone buzzed with a new text message. I passively retrieved it, expecting either something Crow-related from Danny, cute and-slash-or sexy from Mia, or twisted and threatening from Candy.
I was wrong on all guesses:
FROM: UNKNOWN NUMBER
meet me on the
conrer of church
annd lyle in 29
mins. com alone.
IMPORTANT!!
re: mia
Though I wasn’t sure how long I’d been frowning down at my phone, it was obviously long enough for not-Robert to finally glance at the message and inject a nugget of wisdom:
“Someone can’t spell for shit, can they?”
I pressed the power button on my phone, casting the screen and the message on it into blackness, and slipped it back into my jacket pocket. “Someone can’t mind their fucking business, can they?” I rebutted, shooting him my best “I’m the big boss here”-glare. Then, knowing how to put the scare in guys like this, I added, “It’s not too late for me to void those checks and take my business elsewhere.”
Not-Robert’s eyes widened in an instant of telling terror, then narrowed to dagger-like slits. He grinned, a forced gesture if ever I’d seen one, and wet his lips before saying, “And you think you’ll fair better with anybody else?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” I admitted, giving a casual and very not forced shrug. “But you’ve got more at stake if you lose the Crow’s protection than we’ve got if we lose your business. Especially with the news we’ve been getting regarding your little back-and-forth with the Feds.”
Not-Robert’s chest swelled with a panicked gasp, then he held it. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to look tough or if he was just holding his breath and hoping to bribe a witty response from his oxygen-deprived brain. In either case, neither worked for him. “And if I decide to take my business to the Carrion Crew instead?” he asked, challenging me with the only real ammunition he had at that point.
I issued a sincere laugh at that and leaned back, folding my arms across my chest. “Then I guess I’ll need a rowboat and some SCUBA gear to find you the next time we meet,” I said, hoping Candy wouldn’t mind that I borrowed her threat. “Since I’m pretty sure that some loose lips might let it be known that you had some very direct involvement in issuing phony docking permits to prevent any future attempts at shipping in any future product,” I said, holding up a few of the topmost contracts I’d just signed. “Guns, drugs, girls,” I recited a portion of the list of things that the paperwork would help prevent the Carrions from sneaking into the city; three of the things that had, up until that moment, represented the Carrion’s biggest cash crops. Then, tsking him, I added, “How do you think they’d react to a man who’s taken such steps against their business immediately showing up at their door and asking for work?”
Not-Robert gulped and looked down, turning bright red.
I nodded, made a show of gathering up the stack of papers and setting them out of his reach, and laced my fingers together in front of me on top of the table. “So, yeah, Robert, I’m not sure how well the Crows would fair if we had to take this business”—I gave the stack a casual pat with my left hand—“to somebody else. But I’m pretty sure we’d fair better than you if we did.” I re-laced my fingers and gave a shrug, admittedly a very juvenile and arrogant breed of shrug, pairing it with a smile to match. “So, what do you say, Robert,” I challenged, “you liked working with my old man and my brother, right? Who’s to say you won’t like working with me… provided you mind your fucking business and watch your fucking mouth.”
Not-Robert paused then, making an obvious show of sizing me up with his eyes and cocking a brow. “You packing, Presley?” he asked, sounding skeptical.
“Just a small-caliber and a big dick, Rob,” I answered with the straightest face I could manage. “And I’m a lousy shot with both; keep getting bitches in the belly when I try to aim at their face. Trust me, that gets messy. You don’t want to get messy, do you, Robert?”
We held each other’s gazes for a long, awkward time then.
The old-fashioned, crooked clock on the wall ticked away the moments, working in time with a throbbing vein in not-Robert’s throat.
And then we were laughing.
“You’re like your pops, Presley,” not-Robert boasted, giving me a few sharp slaps on the shoulder. “Biggest balls in the city and bronzed to a blinding shine!”
All in a day’s work, I thought, forcing the laughter to roll on as I let my mind wander back to that mysterious text.
****
Not-Robert, nosy prick though he might have been, had made a good point. Whoever had texted me couldn’t spell for shit. Worse yet, in their obviously sloppy and likely rushed typing process, they’d either mistyped “twenty” as “twenty-eight”—It’s just so hard when the zero’s that close to the eight, right, dumbass?—or they were operating on a strict half-hour schedule and had adjusted for a two-minute lag between when the message was sent and when I’d eventually read it. Considering that little “re: Mia”-bit, though, I wasn’t taking any chances one way or the other. I broke close to a dozen traffic laws and probably more than a hundred general codes of courtesy in the process, but I made it to the corner of Church Street and Lyle Avenue in under fifteen minutes.
Even if the mystery sender hadn’t mentioned Mia by name, that they were having me meet them at this corner—Mia’s corner!—would’ve made the subject obvious enough.
Except that it wasn’t Mia’s corner. Not anymore. She and Candy had been stationed there, sure, but Mia’s days as a prostitute were over and Candy would never have to work a street corner ever again. Now it was just a random intersection; another corner of concrete and lights with a little extra nugget of sordid history haunting the alleys. Now it was nothing. But then, at the same time, it would never be nothing—not to Mia or Candy, and not to me. That much was evident from the whirlwind of thoughts storming about my skull as I pulled up the corner and killed the engine to my chopper.
I was early.
I was early, so I couldn’t be surprised that the only people there seemed shocked to see me pull up as aggressively as I did. Their bewildered, nervous faces were evidence enough that they weren’t expecting a leather-clad biker to rocket up to that corner like a kamikaze pilot who’d traded in his plane for a set of wheels so he
could wage a personal street war on them. Once certain I wasn’t about to go on a killing spree—What a stupid thing to stand still and wait for, I thought—they hurried along and left me and this nothing-yet-everything corner of sidewalk alone to our business.
Only our business was on hold until our mystery sender, the one responsible for “reuniting” us, finally showed.
In the meantime, I began contemplating the possible sources.
Though a good number of them might have known about me and Mia—might have known about Mia’s history as a prostitute for the Carrion Crew—it was unlikely that many knew the corner she worked. Moreover, anyone with the Crow Gang would know better than to get cryptic like that with me. That ruled out any of mine. However, on the opposite side of the gang-related coin…
It wouldn’t be unreasonable to deduce that the mystery sender might be a part of the Carrion Crew. A great number of their members had started off as Crows; hell, the “founding fathers” of the Crew were mostly comprised of some of the original Crows—men who’d worked directly beside my father before deciding to betray him and everything the Crows represented. Almost every day the Crows lost a few members, folks deciding that we were a sinking ship and that it was either hop aboard the SS Carrion and keep on sailing or sink into the icy waters. That being the case, there were plenty of Carrions, new and old alike, who’d not only know about me and Mia, but have access to the details regarding her work with the Crew.
Except that there wasn’t a single member of the Carrion Crew who wouldn’t have missed the chance at issuing a direct threat while sending me a text message. And, at that point, why bother texting me at all? It wasn’t their style to set up shady meetings with an enemy like this; not when they could arrange something more… personal.
The memory of Anne’s and my old house, littered in cop cars and bathed in their flashing lights, and the aftermath of T-Built’s attack on my old life jumped up, and I just as quickly buried it.
No…
Not Crow, but probably not Carrion, either.
But who the fuck did that leave?
“I’m guessing you’re Jason,” a voice that was trying very, very hard not to sound terrified chimed behind me, accompanied by three gentle taps on my shoulder.
I worked to keep my motions slow and threatening as I dipped my head back in the mystery sender’s—now the mystery speaker’s—direction. “Somebody who knows me would know that touching me is a good way to never touch anything ever again,” I said.
“Wonder what that says for my sister’s future,” the now-mystery speaker said, sounding a bit more bold this time.
Sister…?
Back on our first outing—it hadn’t been so much a date as it had been a ‘thank you’ meal for helping my dumb ass slip free from a Carrion Crew “fundraiser” with my skull intact—Mia had explained that her brother had been indirectly responsible for her predicament. Though the details were vague, it seemed that he’d gone and gotten himself in a hefty amount of debt with the Carrion Crew and, after getting himself arrested and imprisoned, was issued an ultimatum: find a way to pay what was owed or meet a painful end. Given that either option had to take place behind bars, this obviously set the degree of difficulty in both raising funds and being murdered a great deal higher than usual. I imagined the only thing harder than making decent money in jail was dying a decent death in jail. Though the “how” from that point to the next was a bit skewed—I wondered if even Mia knew the details regarding that part—the Carrion Crew decided that Mia would be the best means to pay off the debt. Needless to say, while Mia might have viewed her hellish “employment” as a noble means of keeping her brother alive, I wasn’t particularly keen on the man.
And here we’d only just met.
Seeing red and hearing only a shrill, high-pitched whine that I knew to exist only in my head, I lost track of a few seconds after that. I remembered being on my bike, turning my head to face the mystery speaker, now known to be Mia’s brother, and then there was a slideshow of still-shot views. Nervous face, panicked face, terrified face, pleading face, pained face. Then…
Click!
“Welcome back to the present, Mister Presley. We hope you enjoy your stay.”
The man squirming in my grip was all wire and sinew. I might have been disgusted if I weren’t so damned pissed. It was like someone had aimed to make a man-shaped thing out of pipe cleaners, realized the dumb thing couldn’t stand on its own, and started patching up the weak points with strips of chicken gristle. His clothes hung on his scrawny frame like melting candle wax. Cropped blond hair and too-pale skin only reinforced my theory that this thing was more built than born. It was his eyes, bright blue eyes that regarded me as a child might regard the monster under the bed when he finally decides to make his grand appearance, that had me convinced he was even remotely human. He and Mia had the same eyes.
“You’d better have a very good fucking reason for me not to rip you apart right here and now!” I snarled in his face.
My hands had him by the collar, partially choking him as I held him, pinned, against the wall of the nearest building. Because of this, his voice was strained as he said, “I can… give you… three… excellent… r-r-rea-sons…”
The last word of this started to break as his face began to turn blue, so I let him go. Ignoring the small crowd that my violent outburst had earned, I said, “Start listing, asshole.”
He panted, sucking in a few hearty gulps of air, seeming, in my opinion, to stall for time. Then, moments before I was about to bring my hands back into play, this time outright around his throat, he croaked out, “First:” he punctuated this with a raised index finger from his left hand, “it wouldn’t be worth it to commit an act of assault on a waste of skin like me. It’d just be unnecessary trouble for you. While I’m certain you’ve got ways of making it an in-and-out process with the local authorities, I’m sure you’d agree that it wouldn’t be worth your time. You’re an important man—a king!—and why should a great and powerful king waste his precious time wiping his hands of a peasant’s blood?”
I sneered at that, knowing a blowhard’s pandering drivel when I heard it. “You’re other two reasons better be a lot better and a lot less soaked in bullshit,” I warned.
He nodded, seeming to understand that I wasn’t buying his self-deprecating routine for a moment. “Second:” his middle finger rose to meet the still-raised index, “I believe that you care about my sister, and while I’ll get back around to that fact I feel it’s worth pointing out that it’d only hurt yourself in the long run if she found out that you beat up the brother she’s already endured so much to protect.”
My sneer deepened into an outright scowl, but I wasn’t about to call “bullshit” on that as much as I would have liked to.
“Sounds like he was quite the charmer,” I’d said after hearing about her predicament regarding him. “And you’re still doing all this for him?”
Her response was as noble as it was irritating: “Like I said: he’s family.”
“And the third reason,” I demanded through clenched teeth.
He nodded, seeming eager to get to that. So eager, in fact, that he outright dropped his hand, raised fingers and all, and followed it shortly after with his head, which dipped downward in a solemn, almost apologetic bow. “It’s… well, it’s like I said: I believe you care about my sister. Now, you seem like a smart guy—and that’s not me just soaking things in bullshit like you said; I’m being genuine here—and smart guys don’t typically go around liking girls and buying them all sorts of nice things if they don’t believe that the girl in question likes them back. I mean, guys go to great lengths to impress girls who wouldn’t give them the time of day all the time, but I don’t think either of us would call a guy like that ‘smart,’ right? ‘Desperate’ and ‘love-struck,’ sure, maybe even just cut to the chase and call them ‘horny,’ but still not ‘smart.’ I don’t think you’re doing all this for my sister because you’re desperat
e or love-struck, and, horny or not, I don’t think you snatched up Carrion Crew property just so you could fuck her.”
I felt myself tremble with rage at his words and began to advance, my right fist raised and hungry for a crunch to sound under its knuckles.
“WHOA! WHOA! WHOA!” he held up his hands, palms out, and I just barely managed to hold myself back. Satisfied that I wasn’t about to start swinging, he said, “I’m not trying to piss you off here, Jaso—er, Mister Presley. Whichever. I’m here for you, remember that. I’m just saying that if this was just about sex… well, she was working a street corner, right? It would’ve been a lot easier to get your rocks off with her without all this gang war business if that’s all it was about. That’s all I’m saying, right?”
I didn’t answer.
“Right?” he pressed further.
“Get to the fucking point,” I said, my voice barely even a whisper at that point.
“Right…” he said again, this time in resignation, with a sigh. “The point’s this: I think you care for Mia. Whether that means you have a decent enough crush to trouble yourself this far for her or if you’re head-over-heels in… well, you know—it’s none of my business one way or the other.”
“You got that right,” I said.
“But that all means that you’re probably thinking she likes you, too. Again, whether you’re under the assumption that she’s returning your crush or if you think that she, too, is head-over-heels, it stands to reason that you believe she cares for you, too.” He sighed and shook his head, “And I only thought it would be fair to warn you in advance that, if you’re looking for… that, that you’re looking in the wrong place. Not to get your blood pressure up all over again, but you are dealing with a girl whose entire livelihood has revolved around selling herself.”
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