by Lake, Keri
Oh, fuck.
Was it my apartment? Or was I hearing the apartment above me?
After slipping into sleep shorts, a bra, and a T-shirt, I grabbed my knife and pressed my ear to the bathroom door. As I caught the creak of footsteps, a rush of adrenaline surged through my blood, and as my body prepared for fight, or flight, only one thought spun in my head—they'd found me.
How? How could they have found me? My ID didn’t have my address. I wasn’t listed in the phone directory, either, at my mother’s insistence. I’d spent three days comforting myself with those facts. Yet, someone had found me. I’d hidden the camera, just in case, but from the sounds of thumping, they’d undoubtedly find it.
Maybe they’d leave me alone, if they did. Maybe they only wanted the video.
Stupid, Lucy. As if they’d waltz away from someone who’d seen what they’d done and could potentially report it.
Call the police. Any normal person would, but in any normal situation, a police officer wouldn’t have dumped a body, either. Just my luck that calling the police would be like sending up a smoke signal for their reinforcements.
In a quick mental rundown, I came up with two choices. Stay in the bathroom, where there was no window, no means of escape, and wait for however many of them were out there to corner my lone knife and me. Or make a run for it. I knew how to throw a punch and wield a blade, but I also knew that adrenaline seldom worked in my favor. My best bet was getting out of the apartment.
Through a crack in the door, I peered out into the hallway for any sign of movement. Seeing none, I stepped out of the bathroom and taking light steps, slid along the wall.
A creak from behind startled my muscles, and as I jerked to the side, arms came from behind, a hand gripping tight around my mouth.
“Hello, baby. Bet I know where you were two nights ago,” he whispered.
I knew the voice. Recognized it from Sphinx. Larry Peepshow McBryant. Jolana had told me the guy was the slimiest, most vile creature she’d ever had to dry hump for cash. He was known for copping a feel, and frequently used the VIP rooms as some kind of hook up for threesomes.
Trapped in his grip, arms vised at my sides, I reached between his thighs behind me and gripped his nuts—hard—then twisted them until he fell forward into my back.
“God fucking … fucking bitch!”
A wicked anger burned in my blood, and at a visual flash of that body getting dumped into the drain, my instincts to not be chopped into small parts kicked in.
I spun around and brought my knee into his chest, then followed up with a fast punch to his carotid artery that left him on the ground and gasping for breath.
Half of me didn’t even know what I was doing. The other half just prayed whatever I’d done had worked.
I’d taken a few self-defense classes to get me out of sticky situations. I’d have never accomplished that on a stranger, but knowing it was Peepshow had just pissed me off. My technique was a combination of what I’d been taught, and what I figured was actually effective in a real attack, sprinkled with a little fear that had me throwing punches at random. Just my luck that they happened to connect, though not through any real talent on my part.
Freed from his grip, I twisted on my heel to make a run for the door, but something swung in front of me, right before a thin band of rope cinched my throat and trapped the air in my neck.
I clenched my teeth to tighten my neck muscles and spun downward into the stranger, until he stood flush to my left side, then blindly swiped my blade across his stomach. The whole scene must’ve looked ridiculous, but when my knife connected with his flesh, I spotted the gun at his hip, and my head warned me to get the hell away from him.
“Motherfucker! Fucking cunt!”
The tether loosened around my throat, and I slid from beneath him, but pain blasted the back of my head, creating circles that floated in front of my eyes and had my field of vision narrowing.
The blade fell out of my hands, clanging to the hardwood floor.
Confusion had me lurching forward, hands outstretched to keep from falling on my face. My head wobbled, eyelids heavy. Nausea gurgled in my stomach, and I gained my balance enough to stand erect for only two seconds before stumbling backward.
No. No. Don’t pass out. No!
Larry chuckled. “Stupid cocksucker. You don’t fuckin’ dance with ‘em.” His voice weaved between loud and soft, with a tunnel-like echo that chased each word.
A punch to my face exploded in my cheekbones and rattled my teeth, sending me flying onto my back.
Above me, two faces stared down. Larry and a complete stranger.
“Night, night, princess,” the stranger said, and a flash in my periphery bashed the lights out.
9
Jase
Gun drawn and mask down, I entered the apartment, following the sounds of laughter that led me to a hallway.
Around the corner, the girl from the club lay passed out on the floor.
Standing over her, Peepshow unfastened his pants, pushing them down to his thighs, and dropped to his knees between her splayed legs. “Get our fuckin’ money’s worth outta this bitch first,” he said.
A second guy stood off to the side, looking at a Nikon. “She takes a lotta stupid pictures. Check this out.” He angled the camera toward Peepshow, who paused in yanking down her shorts.
As he looked up, I trained the Glock on him and emerged from the shadows, gaze on both Peepshow and the stranger. Slow and deliberate, both men reached for their sidearm, and I shook my head. “Wouldn’t do that.”
Only Peepshow hesitated, before throwing his hands in the air. The other guy got as far as resting his hand on the grip of his weapon, before I shot a bullet in his shoulder.
He dropped the camera, just missing the girl’s face, as his screams pierced my ears, taunting me to silence him with another bullet.
“Back the fuck up,” I commanded, keeping the gun between Peepshow and his wounded friend.
Peepshow scrambled to pull up his pants, while the other guy held his bleeding shoulder, backing to the end of the hall.
“Motherfucker! Who the fuck are you?” A stripe of red crossed the front of the stranger's shirt, as if his stomach had been sliced, and despite that, and the bullet in his arm, the asshole reached for his gun again.
Before he could so much as take aim, I shot him in the chest, dropping him to the floor.
Peepshow kicked himself back against the wall, and I strode over and crouched in front of him. Swapping bullets for blade, I propped Betty beneath is chin.
“Who sent you here?” I spoke low, keeping the knife lodged against his gullet.
“Fuck you.”
Clenching my jaw in frustration, I twisted the large blade in front of him, ensuring he could see her in all her fucking glory. “Say hello to Black Betty. Want to know why I call her that?” When he didn’t answer, I continued, “Named after the old bitch who used to live down the street from me as a kid. She’d chase after us with a big black frying pan if we so much as walked through her yard.” I moved the serrated knife to his nuts, which still hung out of his half-yanked pants. “I call my blade Betty because she will fuck you up if you cross her. Now, who the fuck sent you here?”
“Conall!”
“Who’s Conall?” I lifted the blade higher, pushing into his nut-sack, inciting a pathetic squeal of pain.
“He’s an enforcer.”
“For whom?” At his silence, I slid Betty across his sensitive skin, not enough to cut through, but enough to have the bastard throwing up a quick prayer. “For whom?” I repeated.
“Viktor, maybe? Owner of Sphinx.”
“Where do I find Conall?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know, man. He hangs out at Sphinx, sometimes. Fucks some of the strippers. Ask them.”
I lifted the mask, finally revealing my face, and his eyes saucered before narrowing in suspicion.
“I know you.” His lip curled with repulsion. “We …
sold you to those Slovakian fucks. They … had a bounty out on you. You fuckin’ confessed, man. All we did was cash in that night.”
“You did a lot more than that.”
Reed’s bloody face, blasted by a set of knuckledusters, raged through my brain.
“Go to hell.” Reed’s voice is calm and resolute as he sits tied to my grandmother’s kitchen chair. The same chair that as a baby, I watched him hold while he took his first steps. The same chair we’d push to the edge of the counter and climb, to sneak cookies out of the jar. Once an aid to freedom, now an anchor, to which he’s tethered.
The man standing before him smirks, and my stomach sinks, because the glint in his eye is pure evil. I know. I recognize that sadistic lift of his lip, as though he’s just been given permission to unleash hell. I’ve done the same to countless bastards, and maybe this was my penance. Maybe hell on earth did exist.
The man slips a set of knuckledusters over his fingers, stretching each appendage out in front of Reed. Another man, solid as a freight train, stands behind him, cracking his knuckles in threat.
Two men hold me down, their fists pressing into my shoulder blades, as they keep my hands bound behind my back. My heart beats hard inside my throat, throbbing with the agony ripping through my chest. “No! No!”
Reed’s head kicks to the side, and a spray of blood fires outward. His eyes roll back, and I can just make out the flap of loose flesh at his cheek, where his skin has burst open.
Another punch has him facing away from me, and his head finally falls forward, like it’s too heavy for his neck.
“I don’t know … anything.” The calm voice from before has gone weak, frail, in a matter of seconds.
The two men take turns, knocking his head back and forth like a tetherball.
“Let him go! Motherfuckers!” My tears hardly register, as they stream down my face while I kick against the floor. Pain strikes the back of my skull, pressing my cheek against the cold linoleum, and I breathe hard through clenched teeth. My animal instincts kick in, ready to attack. All I need is to be cut loose. “I’ll fucking kill you!”
I can’t see Reed, but I still hear the punches against his body, his quiet grunts, and the wet slosh that follows. They’re beating him to death. My only brother. The one I’ve spent most of my life protecting. The one I swore I’d never let anyone hurt. The frail one—who suffered from the day he was three months old, and my mother shook him because he wouldn’t stop crying. I snuck in his room later that night and held his hand through the bars of his crib until he finally fell asleep.
Against the pressure at the back of my head, I glance up, to see him slumped over, not even moving as the stranger continues to beat at his body—and I know.
I fucking know, he’s slipped through my hands.
And I don’t even know why.
Still holding Peepshow propped against the wall, I broke from the memory and stared into beady, almost black, lifeless eyes. “You killed my brother.”
“He wouldn’t talk. Wouldn’t tell us a fucking thing!”
I ground my teeth, squeezing his throat until his face turned red. “You didn’t give him a chance. You didn’t give either one of them a chance.”
“We were paid to do a job. It was business. Nothin’ personal.” In spite of the pressure at his neck, he sneered. “He wasn’t no saint. Ever watch the bastard’s videos?”
“Where’s the auction?” I gritted out while heated pulses of fury beat through my veins.
“Auction?” A flicker of confusion danced behind his eyes and he shook his head. “I don’t know about any auction.”
“Who paid you for the hit on my family?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who. Fucking. Paid you?”
“I swear, I don’t know!” His eyes popped, as I sliced the first cut across his balls. “I don’t fuckin’ know! Stafford … he told me about it! He got me the job!”
Marlon Stafford, another of the men who’d broken into my home that night, according to the file Roman had provided. The one who’d killed my grandmother.
I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the fucker.
“Where do I find him?”
“He runs the dogfights. Old junkyard in Del Ray. I swear, that’s all I know!”
“Old junkyard in Del Ray,” I echoed. “Dogfights.”
“Yeah. Fenced in plot, back in the woods. Can’t miss it.”
“My brother, Reed, used to say any man who harms an animal doesn’t have a soul.” I tilted my head, catching a lift of his brows, perhaps a beam of hope. “That’s what you are, Peepshow. An animal. You and your boys. Nothing but filthy fucking swine.”
“You … you sayin’ you’ll let me go?”
As a grin stretched across my face, his withered to trembling lips. “I’m saying I don’t have a soul.” I stabbed Betty into his stomach, twisting once, before yanking the blade out.
His mouth fish-gaped, eyes so wide the bastards should’ve popped out of his skull. A bloodied chunk of meat hung from the gut-hook, and I tapped it off into his lap.
Raising two shaky hands to the red splotch saturating his shirt, he choked, expelling a wheeze of air. A ghostly pallor crept across his face, swallowing up the blood in his cheeks.
I rose to my feet, tucking Betty back inside the holster, and tugged the phone from my pocket, dialing a number I knew from working for Bojanskis. The only place I’d trust to know I was alive.
“Fosters Aquarium,” a deep, familiar voice answered on the other line.
“Hey, it’s Jase. I need clean up. Campus apartment. Woodward. Two tanks. Apartment three-oh-four.”
“Got it. Be there in ten minutes.”
I glanced back at Peepshow, where he still squirmed on the floor in a pool of his own blood. “I’d give it twenty.”
“Will do. Take care, Brother.”
“Same to you.” I hung up the phone and, twisting toward where the girl still lay knocked out, lifted the fallen camera.
How fucking lucky was I? Not only was I one step closer to Pasák, but I had a pretty good idea that she had ratted me out to Tesarik the night Dax, Reed and I had stolen those guns. She was the reason a bounty had been put on my head. The reason Peepshow bothered to turn me over, instead of killing me alongside my family. Even if Tesarik wasn’t in on the murder of my family, she was responsible for the shit I went through afterward.
Maybe she worked for Pasák. Maybe it was Pasák’s men who’d turned her images over to Tesarik. I didn’t give a shit.
Either way, she owed me, and it just so happened, I got to walk away with two victories for the night. Her ass was mine. At the very least, she’d give me the information I needed on the Seventh Circle.
Besides, two of their men still waited outside, and it’d only be a matter of time before they’d come looking for Peepshow, if they hadn’t already. Whatever they wanted with her might prove to be a valuable trade later.
Kneeling beside her, I pushed a stray hair from her face. “Hello, black bird. Welcome to your new cage.”
Her black lace panties still showed, and I pulled up her shorts, to keep from taking a peek while she lay passed out. Slipping my hands under her, I hoisted her up over my shoulder and strode through the bedroom. The south window faced the next-door building, separated by a narrow alley and the fire escape. Sounds of traffic from Woodward sharpened when I opened the window and climbed out onto the landing of the escape.
As I rounded each flight of stairs, the chick’s hands bounced against my ass, and it took until halfway down before I heard thumps and slams coming from above. I reached the bottom of the landing, just as the first bullet pinged off the metal, and looked up to see one of the men firing at me through the window.
Breaching the corner of the building with the woman, I dashed across Woodward Avenue. I threw back the passenger door of my car and slid her onto the seat, buckling her in, then rounded to the driver’s side and fell into the seat beside her, setting the camera
on the floor behind us.
The engine roared, as I flipped the key and hit the gas. In the rearview mirror, I watched the two men fly out of the building toward their car, and I cut across Woodward Avenue and up Chicago Boulevard, with the black Lincoln trailing behind me.
Making a sharp left took us down a side street and back onto Third Avenue. At a cross street, I blew the stop sign. Catching a flash of headlights to the left of me, my heart lurched, as I hit the gas and narrowly missed a semi barreling down the service drive.
In the rearview, the Mack slammed into the Lincoln, dragging the sparking metal skidding across the road, until the vehicle caught flame and the semi veered off to the side.
Blowing out a held breath, I wiped my brow, and slowing the car to the posted speed limit, I sent up a silent halle-fucking-lujah.
10
Jase
I glanced to the side, where the girl lay slumped in the passenger seat, held up only by the seatbelt strapping her in. I’d cuffed her other hand to the car door, and her head lay against the window. A wave of October heat gave her flawless olive skin a light sheen, broken up by dark purple bruises along her thigh. Bruises also marred her arms, where the men had gripped her too tight.
The mere sight of her dragged a darkened visual from its vault, one I tried to forget.
I open the door on where Reed sits curled up in the corner of the bedroom we share, shivering in the dark. He’s twelve years old, but his scrawny frame makes him look no older than nine, or ten. Bruises and cuts darken his shins, and the large purple gash from a baseball bat still turns my stomach whenever I catch sight of it. No doubt, Robert broke a bone this time.
Watching him suffer the beatings kills me every time, but are nothing compared to when he was little and they’d lock him in a closet, starving him, forcing him to piss and shit himself for days at a time. That’s when I’d dream of stealing Robert’s gun. Killing both him and my mom.