by Renee Strong
I scanned the crowd. There were a few good guys there, men we had worked with for a long time, but a few I didn’t know well enough to trust. Usually, for a big job like this, I went along just in case shit went south. It didn’t feel right to blow off work but I needed to see Lexi.
As if reading my mind, Bobby said, “Go on, get out of here. We’re all good tonight. It’s routine. Shipment’s at eleven and Uncle Carlo’s paid off everyone at the dock. There aren’t gonna be any problems.”
I looked to Tommy and Vince. Vince caught my eye and nodded. I relaxed a bit. Neither Vince nor Tommy would let anything happen to Bobby if they could prevent it. They were loyal to a fault.
“Okay then,” I said after a beat. “I’m out of here.”
I ran a hand through my hair.
“Tell Marc Anthony to try not to get shot. Or do, whatever. Just make sure if he does get shot, he doesn’t do by it playing with his own gun, or Sal will be up your ass forever.”
Bobby snorted. “That kid tries that shit again in Ma’s house and I’ll shoot him myself. Now get out. I’m sick of your handsome face.”
He slapped my cheek twice in that annoying way of his. I flipped him the bird and left to hop into my car.
Chapter 6
Lexi
My eye socket stung like a bastard. I’d woken up to the pain of it radiating through my cheek and the tang of blood in my mouth.
I licked my lip tentatively. That stung too. I must have cut it on my teeth on the way down. I flicked my tongue over it gently a couple more times and frowned. I could feel it start to swell.
This is what you get for thinking you’re hot shit, Lexi, I thought darkly. The start of a shiner and a fat lip.
As much as my face stung, my humiliation, pent-up frustration, and shame hurt more.
The one time I decide I’m some Hollywood princess or some shit and someone decides to knock me down to size, I thought bitterly. How typical of my shitshow of a life.
The knocking me down to size part wasn’t unexpected. People had been trying to do that to me literally and metaphorically my entire life. The speed at which someone had done it this time was new though.
I blinked pointlessly against the darkness around me. There was something over my head—a cloth bag or pillow case, I couldn’t tell which.
What a fucking cliché, I thought in irritation. I’d quickly figured out from the bumps and shudders underneath me that I was in the trunk of a car.
My mind was struggling to make sense of the situation. This stuff did not happen in real life. This was the stuff of movies.
What the hell would anyone want with me anyway? I wondered. I was just some nobody who worked in a bar.
The car hit a bump and I cursed the driver as the vehicle came back down hard onto the ground.
Could this have something to do with Dominic, I wondered. But how could it? Nobody knew about us.
The car rumbled to a stop and I waited, not making a sound while I waited to see what was coming next. I heard footsteps on gravel and then the click of a lock and the door of the trunk popping open.
“Is she awake?” a man’s voice said. The voice was local sounding—American. And young. Maybe a guy in his early twenties.
“How the fuck should I know?” The second voice was gruff, deep, and with the hint of an accent. Eastern European, I thought: maybe Russian? “Am I not looking at the same thing as you are?” he continued and I caught a touch of a lisp on the “s” in “same.” “How do I know if she’s awake when she has a bag on her head?”
“Oh yeah,” the American said. “Sorry.”
I heard the other guy inhale deeply through his nose, a big exasperated sound, and it took another second before he spoke again.
“Just get her out,” the Russian guy said irritatedly. “She doesn’t look like she’ll be too much trouble. Just another brainless gangster groupie.”
I felt a breeze on my leg as the end of my skirt was pushed up.
“Though I’d like to give her a go,” he continued. “She’s got those curves where I like them.”
My stomach churned and a nervous prickle ran down the back of my neck. I was in real trouble here. I urged myself to stay calm.
Don’t say anything, Lexi, I told myself. Stay as still as possible until the right moment.
Two strong arms encircled my waist and dragged me upward. I waited until I was out of the car—the blast of a breeze on my bare arms—to move finally.
I pulled my leg back and buried my stiletto heel as hard and heavily into the first bit of flesh I found. The heel made contact and got stuck.
“Jesus Christ!” the American guy screamed out. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
I dropped like a sack of potatoes onto the ground as he dropped me.
“She kicked me, Serge. The fucking shoe is stuck in my leg.”
He was beginning to hyperventilate.
“It’s fucking stuck there!”
I started to crawl as quickly as I could away but in just a moment, I felt a couple of hands scoop me around the waist and lift me up. I kicked my legs again but I just thrashed at the air. Whoever was holding me now—“Serge,” I figured—was smart enough to hold me vertical so I couldn’t injure anyone.
His grip was tight around my waist, pushing the wind out of me.
“You fucking pussy,” Serge shouted and it took me a moment to figure out he wasn’t talking about me. “A little boo boo and you yell out my name. What the fuck is wrong with you?”
He jostled me. I’d gone as limp as possible. I wanted to make myself too heavy to carry. The guy was obviously a lot stronger than most though. His breathing was still steady and calm, like the exertion was nothing to him.
“Open the fucking door, asshole,” he snarled and I heard a heavy door clang ahead of me.
“I’m sorry, Serge,” the American said and I hit the ground suddenly as Serge dropped me. I landed hard. Great, now my assbone felt bruised along with the split lip and black eye. This was exactly how I envisioned this evening going…
I heard the thwack of a hand making contact with skin and the American whimpered pathetically.
“You are one stupid motherfucker,” Serge said. “Really, I don’t know why I agreed to do this with you. I told you about names a thousand times. And now, because of you, this poor girl is going to have to die.”
The other guys blustered a little.
“You shouldn’t talk to me like that,” he said. “You know what my family can do to you.”
Serge gave a loud laugh.
“Don’t even threaten me with that. Because if they figure out what we’ve done anytime soon, we’re both fucking dead men.”
Someone picked me up again and carried me kicking and screaming inside.
Splintered wood lay all over the threshold, in big and small shards. Lexi’s thin door was in pieces.
I’d had to pay one of her junkie neighbors to let me in the front door of the building when Lexi hadn’t answered her buzzer. Though I told myself that maybe she was busy getting ready, I knew instantly something was wrong.
Standing at her shattered door, I stared down at my cellphone while I figured out my next move. I was finding it hard to think clearly. I gave myself a second to get my shit together and tried again.
I couldn’t ring Lexi. For a start, I hadn’t even gotten a cellphone number for her; it somehow hadn’t come up in all the time we’d talked.
Besides, wherever she was, I doubt she’d been allowed to take her phone anyway. There were a few small drops of blood leading to the door—from a small cut or busted nose I guessed. Wherever she’d gone to, I doubted she’d left of her own accord.
I pulled out my cell and dialed my brother’s number.
“She’s gone, Bobby,” I attempted to say when he answered. My mouth was too dry to get the words out properly. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Lexi’s gone, Bob.”
There was a crackle on the other end of the line, and the sound of a seagull squawking and guy
s calling instructions to each other.
“Wait, Dom,” he said after a pause. “I gotta get somewhere quieter.”
I tapped my foot agitatedly as I waited for him to come back on the line. When he did, the noise in the background was more muffled.
“Hang on a second, Dom. What do you mean ‘she’s gone?’?”
I let my temper fly, my words coming out hot and accusatory.
“I mean she’s fucking gone, Bobby. Someone’s taken Lexi.”
I stepped over the threshold, looking for any sort of clue or indication as to what went down. There was a bottle of gin on its side in her tiny kitchen, the small blood drops, and the broken wood at the door, but that was it.
I went to my waistband and fingered my gun. One of her scumbag neighbors had to have seen something. I’d get it out of them soon enough.
“Calm down, Dominic. Don’t let your temper get the better of you,” Bobby said, cutting into my visions of making someone hurt.
I knew he was speaking sense; I didn’t want him to be though. Like I told you before, I’m the calculating one. I take my time and assess a situation before I make a move. But standing at that threshold, all I wanted to do was to rip someone’s head off. Anyone’s.
“Who could have done this, Bobby?” I demanded. “Who’s got a grudge against the family and is stupid enough to do something like this?”
Bobby huffed into the phone in thought.
“Shit, Dominic, there are plenty with a grudge. But enough to declare all-out war like this? There’s no one that crazy I can think of.”
I paced back and forward. Could it be someone with a grudge against Lexi? I shook my head. That made no sense. There was no reason I could see that anyone would target her.
Unless that skidmark boss of hers had lost his damn mind.
“Tell Vince to meet me at the G-String, Bobby,” I said, latching onto any sort of possible lead. “I’ve got a dickhead to deal with and I might need his help.”
My back was against a hard wall. The ground was uncomfortable under my butt: besides my bruised assbone, I was sitting on what felt like bits of gravel. I shuffled back to get more comfortable.
My hands were tied at the wrists and Serge and the American had bound my feet by the ankles, too, so I couldn’t kick anyone again.
I listened out for some clues as to where I was and what was going to happen to me. The only thing I knew for certain was that Serge was gone.
He’d yelled some more at the American guy before leaving a few minutes ago. I’d breathed a sigh of relief when he left. From their conversation, he sounded like the infinitely more dangerous of the two—smarter, more calculating, and more vicious. Now he was gone, I was left with the dumb-ass one, which was a bit of a relief.
I was sweating under the bag.
“Hey, kid,” I tried. “Can you take the hood off me? I’m really hot here.”
I could hear him wearing a line into the ground close by as he walked back and forward.
“What?” he said, sounding startled.
“The bag,” I repeated, keeping my voice calm and pleasant. “Can you take it off my head? I’m starting to feel a bit faint with the heat.”
“Oh,” he said, the rhythm of his steps increasing. “Oh no, I can’t do that.” His voice was polite, apologetic even. He didn’t strike me as the grizzled criminal type. He sounded like a kid who had been caught with one hand down his pants and a free underwear catalog in the other. Sad, scared, and a little too innocent to be in that situation.
I needed to appeal to his better nature, I decided, so I said what I didn’t want to say out loud. It was my only bargaining chip.
“Serge says I’m dead anyway.” I made sure to emphasize the word “Serge” to remind the American guy of what he’d done wrong by revealing his partner’s name. “It would be nice to be comfortable before I go.”
The room echoed with silence for a few more moments. Then suddenly, I was blinking against the light as the cover came off my head.
I gasped in fresh, clean breaths by the lung-full.
I blinked a little more to let my eyes adjust and then turned to look at my captor. I’d been right about him. He was young—very young. Twenty or twenty one at the most, I guessed.
“Thank you,” I said, smiling sweetly. “What’s your name?”
He shook his head. “No, I can’t tell you that.”
I looked sad, working the damsel look I’d perfected in my youth. “But it doesn’t matter anyway. Not if I’m going to die.”
I wondered if I could squeeze out a tear or two to make it really convincing but I didn’t need to.
“Jules,” he told me with a heavy sigh and I had to stop myself from laughing from the ridiculousness of this whole situation. What sort of a thug name was Jules?
“Thank you, Jules,” I said, my voice as sugar plum candy-sweet as I could make it.
“It’s okay,” he said. “But if the other guy comes back, I’m putting it on again, got it?”
I nodded. “Yeah, of course. I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble.”
He gave me a funny look, not quite sure of what to make of me, and nodded once solemnly. Then, he turned and walked away to the other side of the room.
As he took out his cell phone to make a call, I scanned the room. It was a big warehouse, probably not used in a while. The long windows were filmed and gray with dirt so only the barest light got in from the weakening evening sun outside.
But there was enough light to take a good look around the room—and to take a mental inventory of what might come in handy.
Chapter 7
Dominic
“I don’t know!” he screamed. His stupid, turd face was still swollen and purple from our encounter the day before.
I leaned over him with my metal baseball bat, tapping it against the floor so that it clanged loudly.
“I don’t believe you, Mikey boy,” I said in a sing-song voice. “You’re making me angry.”
Vince loomed behind me, cracking his knuckles for dramatic effect.
“It’s not a good idea to make him angry,” he said in a cautious tone.
I pulled the bat back, swinging it hard through the air. Mike winced as it sliced the air as it swung back in his direction.
In case you think I’m a monster, this hadn’t gone from zero to nuts in a short time. The bar had been closed when we got to the G-String. When Vince managed to pick the lock to let us in, we’d found Mike asleep on the bar.
Dragging him to the back and tying him up was all on Mike. When the old rummy roused, at my slapping him in the head, I asked did he know where Lexi was.
I have an in-built lie detector so when he said “no” immediately, I could tell just from his expression that he was bullshitting me.
So, I really had tried to do it the nice way. It was Mike wouldn’t play ball. When I asked him again where Lexi was, he’d gotten lippy with me—told me he didn’t care where that whore was and to get the fuck out of his bar.
Damn, that guy learned slowly. You would think he would know how far my patience extended after I had split his face open only one day before.
But even after a fresh crack to the side of the head when he’d refused to tell us where she was, Mike wasn’t in any more of a talkative humor. We’d had no choice but to drag Mike into a back room, where we’d tied him to a chair with a length of rope we’d found lying behind some boxes.
Interesting that he had that, I’d thought with a shudder. What would a bar need with lengths of rope? This guy was getting skeevier and skeevier to me. How Lexi had been able to put up with him was beyond me.
Now, in this back room, his bravado had evaporated. He looked close to pissing his pants now that he’d sobered up enough to assess the situation he was in. The fresh bloody nose I’d given him and the laceration to his cheek had probably helped. Still, his lips didn’t look any closer to flapping and giving me the answers I needed.
“Tell me what you know, Mikey,�
� I said one more time, so close to his face I could smell his shitty breath. “Tell me who has Lexi.”
Mike shook his head furiously and I felt the dam holding my temper back start to break. I pulled the bat back and swung it into his knee.
He howled out and I straddled him to grab a hold of his shirt.
“This doesn’t get any easier, Mike. I’ve got a lot of patience and this bat won’t break.” I leaned nose to nose with him. “Your bones might though.”
I stood up straight again and stepped back.
“Feeling readier to talk?”
Mike spit in answer, the glob landing on my shoes. My jaw clenched with tension and my fingers twitched over the bat. If I could kill this fool I would. I might still when I found Lexi.
“Oh hell no!” Vince said behind me and I swiveled to look at him. He had a gun held out in front of him, his hand shaking in rage. “I’m going to waste him, Dom. Let me waste him.”
The look on his face told me that Vince was deadly serious. He was ready to put a bullet in Mike’s head. This wasn’t a ploy. We’d pulled the tag team act before to break people but this wasn’t part of the routine. Vince wasn’t someone who could let that kind of disrespect lie.
I turned to put my hands up to placate him.
“Vince, put it down.”
Vince’s hands shook around the handle of the gun. If I couldn’t calm him, there was a chance he’d fire without thinking. His finger was quivering on the trigger.
“Don’t waste this guy, Vince. Put it down.”
Behind us, Mike had started to shout. “Is he going to shoot me? Tell him not to fucking shoot me!”
I turned to Mike quickly and leveled with him. “It doesn’t look like it’s up to me. You’ve pissed him off.”
I looked at Vince. “Don’t shoot him. I need him alive if he knows where Lexi is.” I pivoted back to Mike with a sly smile on my face.
“Although…” I licked the corner of my mouth and pretending to be thinking, looking off into the distance.
Mike started rattling in his chair, shaking it so it inched forward. This guy is an idiot on top of being a hothead, I thought. Who, when faced with a jumpy guy with a gun, makes any sort of noise to antagonize him?