I gazed eastward, towards Baytown, my birthplace, and back to him. Dark memories inundated my mind. Twenty years ago, I found her, dead.
Needing to pee, I woke up. After using the bathroom, I realized that Mama wasn’t home yet. She should have been by now. Worried, I left my brother asleep in bed. The bar was only two miles away so it didn’t take me long to walk. The front door was locked.
I went around back and that’s when I found her. Mama was lying on the ground, blood everywhere, her dead eyes staring at me. She had been stabbed in the belly.
There were no witnesses. To this day, Mama’s murder was still an open case.
Our father had skipped out years before, before Henry’s birth. My little brother, Henry, and I ended up in the foster care system.
We ended up with the Parnell’s: Kenneth and Miranda Parnell.
The foster care lady told me and Henry we should consider ourselves lucky, because it only took a month to find a foster family that took us both. There were kids who waited years to be selected, and a few who were never chosen.
Kenneth turned out to be a monster.
One of my burners vibrated on the counter. I walked over and picked it up. I scanned the name on the screen and answered it. It was a guy I did jobs for now and then, whenever he needed someone dead. He supplied me with most of my work.
A boss of a criminal organization, a crime boss. I worked as an independent contract killer.
Staring eastward, I tried to suppress the dark memories of the monster. “Good morning.”
“Rose, I need you to come by Bunny’s so we can talk about a job specially for you.”
Chloe Creed is my real name.
Melanie Rose was my main alias, the name most people knew me by. Most people who knew me, called me Rose. Only a few called me Chloe. Those who hadn’t met me, but knew of me, called me the Rose.
I rolled my eyes.
I wanted to leave for a few days, escape this icebox. I’m a Texan, born and bred, I avoided the cold like a kid avoided eating Brussels sprouts.
“I was thinking about taking a few days off before I accepted another job.” I wondered where I had put my bikinis.
“This is an important job. It pays three figures.”
When Lukas spoke of money, I knew to double it. Three figures really meant six figures. A hundred thousand dollars!
Thinking about my vacation, I figured it wasn’t that cold. Mexico was not going anywhere.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yes, and that is until lunch time.”
‘Until lunch time’ was code, meant one hundred grand up front, then an additional one hundred grand after the job was completed. A standard method of payment, half down, half when the contract was complete, but not a standard fee.
This amount of money meant something big. Mexico could be a nice place to hang out after the job.
“Okay, I’m listening.”
“I just got out of a meeting with the client and I’m heading back to Bunny’s,” he said.
“So, you want to meet now?”
“I need you, Rose.”
I could sense something in his voice, desperation maybe. Weird to hear in a real-life madman.
“Okay, meet you there, Lukas.”
Chapter Fourteen
Son And Father
“Pop, I don’t understand why you want to give this job to that wacko psycho bitch and not to me!” Stan whined, biting into a microwaved burrito.
Lukas had learned a long time ago to delegate certain jobs to the people with the appropriate skill sets. This helped to limit the risk, helped the chances of making money, and helped to stay out of jail. Lukas loved his son, but he knew that Stan wasn’t capable of running the business yet.
“This kind of job was a delicate one, and not suited for him. If he needed a leg or an arm broken, he would be the first person he’d call,” Lukas said, his face reddening.
“But—” Stan coughed before his father stood, the back of his legs moving his chair from underneath him, and crashing into the wall.
Stan’s eyes bulged.
“Shut the fuck up! Goddamn it Stanley! I swear to God Almighty if you say one more word I will personally put one in your head!”
“Alright, Pop. I’m sorry,” Stan said, hands out, palms up.
Chapter Fifteen
An Offer
I parked, and turned the engine off.
Stepped out of my car, I stood for a moment, eyeballing my immediate surroundings. Nothing looked fishy. When one was a contract killer, one had to be aware of his surroundings.
I wore deep brown contacts, and had a long bleached blonde wig with red streaks that was braided down my back. Black metal spikes peeped through my boot laces, which made my boots look as if they were small, tough animals, hunting for their prey. My custom black leather jacket hugged my upper body like a second skin.
I crossed the street and walked to Bunny’s door, a cabaret owned by Archie. Pulling the door open, I walked inside. A big goon, Louie, one of Lukas’s inbred losers, was leaving Bunny’s. The champion at life appeared to be in his mid-twenties, not tall, but built like a mini tank. Probably a football hopeful, pumped himself full of steroids in high school, but couldn’t make the cut at college level.
We didn’t say anything to one another, I turned to look in his direction and caught him staring at my ass. I wasn’t sure if he remembered me or not. He smiled, but I didn’t, wanting him to think I was a stuck-up employee of this fine establishment. I didn’t mind his eyes on me. Men had impulse control issues most times when it came to staring at my ass and tits. I could relate, because I had been told on occasion that I had anger management issues. Long my temper at times. Impulse control is a bitch.
As long as Louie didn’t talk nasty, and wasn’t dirty to me, or didn’t try to touch me, his face was safe.
He said nothing and I kept making my way to the meeting.
The lights were turned off, saved for a couple above the bar. I went down the path towards the back game room, glanced at the tables and chairs, where later, men would be drunk and hard, wasting their money.
Going through the door to the clubhouse, I saw him.
My left hand went up immediately, covering my sunglasses, shielding my eyes. “Oh, my fucking God! My eyes, please stop hurting my eyes!” I lowered my hand, my grimace turning into a grin.
“About fucking time! What happened? Had to douche?” Stan chuckled at his joke.
Stan’s sleaze factor demanded a twelve on a scale of one to ten. He beat his girlfriend for getting pregnant. She ended up losing the baby. She dumped him, but not until after I paid some Mexicans gang members to kick his ass. It made me and her feel good.
“God, damn it Lukas, who let this short-bus motherfucker in here? He knows grownups have to talk, doesn’t he?” Stifling laughter, I crossed my legs.
“Screw you, Rose,” Stan said.
“Oh yeah?” One of Archie’s girls told me that Stan roughed up a couple of them last week.
Killing Stan would make me happier than a U.S. Marine in an Asian whorehouse on payday.
He screwed his face at me. “What the fuck are you looking at bitch?”
“I just figured, looking like you do, you would’ve committed suicide by now,” I said. “That’s all.”
Archie laughed. Spinning a cell phone on the table in from to him, Lukas smiled.
“Bitch,” Stan said.
The holstered pistol rested on his side. He barely knew how to use it. “Call me that again and I’ll punch you in your ovaries.”
Lukas rarely carried a handgun, but Archie always kept a pistol on his person, and he knew how to use it.
“Stop fucking around. Son of a bitch, y’all are like little kids.” He glared disappointedly at Stan.
I sat down and glanced at Lukas, as I placed my hands in my lap, happy that I got my jabs in.
“Rose, me, and my men have an opportunity to make some money, real money,” he said, holding a ma
nila folder. “We need these two guys taken care of today, and it needs to look like an accident, because of who they are.”
He placed the folder on the table and slid it towards me.
I glanced at him and at Archie. They wore somber faces, not out of the ordinary.
“Oh yeah?” I placed my hand on the file.
Lukas pointed at it. “Open it.”
I did, and saw a file with data, and two small pictures clipped to the corner. My heart immediately shot into my throat as I read the names of the two marks to be killed. My left hand trembled. I read, Occupation Homicide Investigator for each mark. “But these are cops?”
Lukas blinked, and then shrugged.
My face heating up by the second. Usually my emotions were kept under wraps, but I couldn’t help myself. “We don’t accept jobs on cops, period, Lukas!”
“In this case we do Rose!” Lukas said. “And there’s more. The client, Mr. Norman White, needs our help in shipping merchandise on our existing drug routes to the North.”
Norman White is his name.
Stan pointed. “And don’t forget that blond guy, Carter!”
My eyebrows shot upwards. “Who the fuck is Carter?”
“He is White’s number two guy,” Archie said. “He called Carter ‘his assistant’.”
Stan’s eyes narrowed. “They seem like a couple of faggots if you ask me.”
“It’s a good thing nobody’s asking you then,” Lukas said.
White and Carter wanted to kill HPD cops and sell drugs up north. Why? “What is it? Heroin? Meth? Ecstasy?”
Stan grinned, as if he were a demon who’d just stole a baby’s soul. “It’s not drugs.” He glanced over at Lukas and his father nodded for him to go on. “We’re going to take kids and women for rich pervs, up in the North.”
Shaking my head, I chortled. “Y’all shouldn’t joke around about that, it isn’t funny.”
Nobody laughed with me.
“Seriously?”
“Yes, Rose,” Stan answered. “You just need to pop the cops, and we take care of the rest.”
In that moment, Lukas’s hair seemed a bit grayer and a few more worry lines appeared on his wrinkled face.
Putting aside killing cops, I had a zero tolerance policy when it came to hurting children. Children posed no physical threat to adults. None. “Why are you doing this?”
“Rose, I understand you have issues, but I have lost too many men, and I had to pay out a shit load of money. I am still paying. I didn’t plan on so many of our guys getting locked up. This new deal with Mr. White is what I need to get my organization back up and running to full capacity,” Lukas said, fiddling with his cell phone.
Steam was coming from my ears. “You forgot to do some financial planning, and two cops must be whacked, and you’re going to help sell children to pedophiles?”
Lukas shook his head. “Rose, come on,” he said, “it’s easy money, we don’t have to do anything really.”
Anger crawled up my neck. “What do you mean that you don’t need to do anything?”
Lukas said, “We use our drug routes. We put a kid or a woman, or both with the driver. The driver drops them off at different points along the routes.”
I truly believe that every single human born was born free and innocent. Nobody owes anyone anything because they existed. That meant no one owed me anything, nor I them. I owed future victims nothing, but something in me couldn’t let this happen. I cared virtually nothing for the women who got themselves caught up in the shit, but they were adults. But the children, nope, I just couldn’t allow it.
A slight tingle moved across the surface of my face. “So, because the job is easy, you think it’s okay to make kids and women sex slaves?”
Nobody answered.
“You guys are fucking sick!”
Lukas didn’t answer, he pushed the manila folder towards me. “This is what we have to do before Mr. White accepts the deal.”
I would kill all these men before I signed off on killing any cops or selling children into the sex trade. “What do you mean?” I inspected the file again.
An idea crept into my mind, a bloody one: Just kill everyone in this room! I needed to find Mr. White and I’d bet my last dollar that wasn’t his real name. If it was his actual name, which there was probably a million ‘Norman Whites’ in the US, there was no way, given what he did for a living that he had an internet presence. I could find him through the cops, see what they were working on.
The problem was there was a time constraint. The hit was to be completed today. It meant these cops were about to arrest someone important or would eventually arrest him. There were other contractors Lukas used, cheaper than me, but I was fast and good at my job. I needed a way to find White quickly.
I couldn’t speak to him, or let Lukas or the other two know, because it would be too suspicious. A long time ago, Lukas and I agreed that I would never speak to principals. Degrees of separation were important in this business.
Stan was behind me, stepping closer. “Yeah, all we have to do is kill these two douche bag cops.”
White wanted them dead? I didn’t understand the reason, but I didn’t need to, because it wasn’t going to happen. “Why these cops?” Barely able to remain seated, rage clawing away my restraint. Autopilot took over when a hand touched my shoulder. I moved fast, grabbing a knife out of the pocket on my leg, and slicing my hand.
“Ouch! Fuck, Rose!” Stan brought back his hand, holding it with the other as if a rattlesnake had bitten it. “You are a fucking psycho, you bitch! Why did you cut me?”
Archie reacted, going for the pistol inside his jacket. But didn’t pull it out. Lukas didn’t react at all.
It told me what I suspected. Lukas wasn’t packing, but Archie had a weapon. “You touched me!”
“Bitch!”
I turned to Lukas, and asked, “Cops? I’m not killing cops! Too risky!” I shook my head like a Rottweiler with a Chihuahua in its mouth.
“Damn it, Stan, you knew better than to touch Rose, she doesn’t like to be touched. You’re lucky she didn’t do more damage. And Rose, stop hurting Stan.” Lukas grinned. “Look, I understand your stance on this. I’ve turned down a lot jobs because they were too risky, involving not a cop, but a relative or a friend of a cop. I understand your concerns, I do, but I need this deal to go through, beggars can’t be choosers.”
“What? You aren’t starving! You probably have property worth several million. Sell it! We don’t kill cops, we don’t sell or transport kids and women into slavery!”
Lukas blinked, shrugging.
Before I completely lost it and started a murderous rampage, I needed to get information. “Why does he want these two cops dead?”
“Fuck! Rose, I’m not sure why! He didn’t say. He just said to make it look like an accident.”
“I don’t kill cops or do business with a man like this! You shouldn’t either Lukas!”
He looked around at his son and Archie. His head dropped a little. Then he glanced up at me. “Rose this is my decision and if you don’t want in on this, I understand.”
I thought I saw a hint of him giving up on this job. I wanted White’s cell phone number, so I could set up a meeting, and kill him on the spot.
Shrugging, he spun the cell phone again. “It only means I’ll have to give this job to Stan.”
Stan’s face lit up. “Really?
Lukas nodded, handing the file over.
Stan opened the file and said, “I think I’m going to kill this Henry fucker first. I don’t like his face.”
With those words my hope to save the cops and killing a vile sex trafficker went up in smoke. Things were about to get bloody.
Chapter Sixteen
Like Yesterday’s Trash
Creed and Mitch went to Ben Taub General Hospital to speak to Art.
“Hey buddy, I’m back!” Creed shouted.
Mitch walked over to the other side of the bed, next to the hanging
privacy curtain. Inspecting all the tubes hooked up to Art, gave him phantom pains. Shivering, he rubbed his own arm.
“Wow, that was fast. Who’s the new guy?” Art queried, peering at Mitch.
Mitch eyeballed the man in the bed.
I am so glad you don’t have long to live you piece of shit.
Art’s arm seemed like a strange sea animal, living in a white tubular shell, and his fingers jutting out like tentacles. Mitch was thankful for the gown Art wore, covering up his ugly parts.
“I’m his partner, Sergeant Mason, Homicide Investigator.” He stopped, taking a deep breath. “We found the girl’s body,” Mitch said smoothly, stepping closer.
“Good, now her parents can give her a decent burial,” Art whispered, vaguely smiling.
“You throw away a little girl like yesterday’s trash and you say good?” inquired Mitch sourly.
He ignored the comment.
“We have some questions Art,” Creed said robotically.
“Sorry, I don’t have any answers,” Art cautioned, holding the TV remote, changing the channel.
Mitch sighed, reached into his jacket and pulled out a pen. He held out the pen between his index finger and thumb. He glanced over at Creed. “If I stab him in the eye with this pen, will you back me up partner? You know, ‘I don’t know, he just went crazy and attacked me. I just defended myself, ask my partner.’ Or you know, there’s the, ‘Oh my God! Why did you stab yourself in the eye, Art?’”
Creed always played good cop, because Mitch liked playing bad cop.
“Yeah, go ahead.”
“Give me a name Art or you’re about to stab yourself in the eye,” Mitch said.
Art chortled. “Guys, I survived six years in Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York. After dealing with those Aryan bastards and black bastards you two are as scary as a couple of pink Chihuahuas. Go ahead and stab me in the eye, I don’t need it anymore. The docs will give more drugs, and I’ll be high when I die. Not to mention my mother would sue your asses and she would get a nice payday.”
Creed and Mitch didn’t give up easily, their bluff had been called before. They kept at it, asking Art other questions, trying to wear him down. He never asked for a lawyer so they kept asking questions.
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