by Naomi West
I felt an almost unfamiliar tingle as I looked over the image in front of me. He was handsome, with chestnut hair combed back from his face and pale blue eyes. His beard was full, but trimmed well, and I could see how strongly defined his jaw was. Something about him just had a devil-may-care attitude to it, too. Maybe it was the way his full lips were set, almost like they were in a permanent half-smirk.
Whatever the reason, I immediately thought to myself that being a working girl sometimes had its perks. It might even be worth it to stick around one more night, if it meant I got to meet a man like the Don for once. I could leave with Rommy in the morning, just as well as I could right now. Right?
Abram must have seen the look in my eyes, because he let out a deep chuckle as he pried the phone out of my hands and took it back. “Ready for the Don when he come? Yes?”
“Yeah, Abram,” I said, crossing my arms across my chest.
He passed me and headed off to the door, grabbed the door's handle. “Good,” he said. “You my number one koshechka, Kaci. Real good girl, eh?”
“Yeah, Abram,” I said as I joined him at the door. “Number one,” I said, nodding.
Satisfied I was both alone and ready, he pulled the door open and went to leave.
“Home free,” I thought. One more night, maybe, but free after that. Now, all I needed was Abram to walk out that door, then I could push my kid brother out after him.
I took a deep breath. Home stretch. We got this.
But then, it all came apart. Romeo sneezed. There's nothing out there like a sneeze, no sound of plumbing or a fan coming on that could be mistaken for it.
Abram stopped in his tracks and released the door, letting it slam shut in only the way a hotel room door can.
My heart may have stopped in that moment. I pressed myself into him, screaming. “Abram! It's not what you think! It's just my brother in there!”
He threw me off him, pushing me back into the room. “Lying shylukha,” he shouted as I sprawled on my back on the thick hotel carpet. He reached inside his black suit coat and came back out with a pistol, a big, heavy looking automatic.
“Kaci?” Rommy asked through the door.
“No, Rommy!” I screamed.
But, hearing the commotion, Rommy came bursting out through the door.
The sound of the gun going off was like a roar of thunder, so loud and so complete, it felt like the world itself was shaking at its roots. Eyes wide, my little brother stumbled back into the bathroom. He reached back out, into view, and gripped the edge of the door frame with a bloody hand, almost as if he thought he could pull himself back to the moment before he'd sneezed, back to that instant before the gun had fired and he'd had his whole life ahead of him.
Abram, his eyes distant, followed after Rommy and stepped into the bathroom, the look on his face almost one of disbelief.
My ears ringing from the gunshot, I climbed to my feet. I didn't realize I was screaming until I'd run into Abram as he came out of the bathroom, a look of shock on his face as he dropped the pistol between us.
I reached down faster than him, and he stepped back as I brought the gun back up, both hands clasping desperately to the big pistol.
“Fuck you, Abram,” I screamed.
# # #
Micah
“Still don't think this is a good idea, Micah,” Gov said as he leaned back against the elevator wall. We were riding up to the ninth floor of the New Orleans Sheraton, on our way to meet what may have been our new man on the inside. “This Abram guy sounds like he ain't offering us anything Bradley can't.”
Gov was my best friend, my confidante, and my second-in-command of the God’s Hellfire MC. He was a real bruiser, but had as sharp a mind as any when it came to this kind of game.
“Look, man,” I said, running a hand back over my slicked back, brown hair, “this Abram guy's promising us a bigger haul from Petrov. Says he knows the routes, that he can make this a safer bet for us. Every time we go out and hit one of those trucks, we open ourselves. We get one of the drivers, though, a driver like Abram, we get a better, safer shot.”
We'd been ripping off Petrov Arms for almost the last year. We had a contact, Bradley, who worked in dispatch. They shipped the guns, we pulled 'em over. Then, we offloaded them to our contacts. Before, we'd been knocking over electronics shipments. But you just couldn't compare the price of a flatscreen TV to a clean semi-auto rifle, especially not when they hit the streets.
Between this little racket and Club Hades, we were pulling down a healthy income for me and all the members of the club. What we'd been making when my dad was in charge was chump change compared to the kind of numbers we were putting on the sheets, now.
The number on the elevator kept rising, and we followed with it as we ascended to our meeting in the sky. Gov glanced up at the numbers, at the bright digital 7 displayed, saying, “Still don't like this shit, brother. Seems too fucking easy.”
I looked at the floor and laughed, shaking my head. “Man, you got a fucked up idea of easy. You think knocking over semis full of guns is fucking easy, even if we got an inside man on it?”
“Guy’s gonna want a bigger cut than Bradley,” he said as the elevator slowed and that weird feeling of weightlessness entered my chest.
“Bigger cut of a bigger pie, though,” I said as we exited the elevator together. “Abram can have a couple more points than what Bradley took, as long as F&B is bringing in bigger shipments with less worry.”
“Down there, right?” Gov asked, pointing down the hallway. “923?”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. We headed down that way.
“Still don't like it,” Gov mumbled.
“Said the same shit when I first proposed this,” I reminded him. “And look where we are now? Same risk, more reward. Just remember who the boss is, here.”
“Nah,” Gov said. “I get it, Micah. You're the boss, man. Ain't nobody said different.”
“We'll make it work, man,” I said, my voice as confident as I felt. “We got this shit on lockdown, man. Trust me. Ain't no way we ain't coming out on top with this.”
We stopped outside 923. It was just a room in a hotel, same as every other room in this joint. Gov looked one way up the hall, and I looked down the other.
There was the sound of a gunshot on the other side, then a scream, a long, pained scream. I took a step back, reaching for the gun I had beneath my vest. Beside me, Gov did the same. We locked wide eyes.
“Shit,” Gov whispered.
“Shit,” I whispered back, nodding.
Another gun shot.
Gov took another step back, tucked his pistol away, back beneath it. “I say we book it.”
“Good idea,” I agreed. “This shit's tits-up on arrival, man.”
I tucked my gun back in my jacket, and we both turned to leave.
Room 923's door, though, came flying open.
A bare slip of a woman, not much older than her early twenties, ran out of the room on heels almost bigger than her, auburn hair flying out behind her. Her eyes were wild, scared, angry, in shock.
Before I could get out of the way, she slammed right into me, almost barreling me over, her handbag slapping me in the shoulder and side of my head.
Instinctively, I wrapped my arms around her and held her close. “Hey, hey,” I said my voice calm and soothing. “Chill out, lady. Everything's going to be okay.”
She looked up at me with terrified dark brown eyes that peered out from a ring of heavy mascara and dark eye shadow.
Something about those eyes, they did something to me. I didn't know what, or why, but they just looked right into me.
“Are you,” she started to ask, licking her lips in the most enticing of ways, “are you the Don?”
“Uh,” I said as I looked at Gov, and he looked back at me, both of us shocked, “how'd you know that?”
Chapter Two
Kaci
“Please, please, please,” I babbled, “you gotta grab Sydney,
too.”
“Ain't grabbing your fucking dog,” the Don said as he dragged me by the arm to the stairwell. Guests were spilling out of their rooms, the looks on their faces more concerned and confused than anything else.
“She's not my dog,” I protested as he threw open the door for the stairs and pulled me along behind him. “She's one of the other girls. When the cops find Abram, they're going to connect him back to her through the hotel. Then, they'll connect her to me and you! We gotta get her out of here!”
I wanted out of this hotel, badly. If I didn't get out of here, and I went up for killing Abram, I'd never get a chance to take my shot at the man holding my arm in a vice grip. It didn't matter if he was even sexier in person than he had been on Abram's phone, The Don was my real owner, the one ultimately responsible for Rommy's death. Abram had just been a hired lackey.
But, if the cops got hold of Sydney, she'd fold like a house of cards. There wasn't any sense in betting on her doing anything else.
Besides that, Sydney was my friend. My only friend really. She and I were roommates, co-workers, confidantes. But she could be real soft, real sensitive. Like a flower that had to ask permission to bloom.
“Look,” I said as the Don started to drag me down the stairs behind him, “I saw the way she handled Orleans Parish Jail. She ain't gonna last if the cops start asking her questions.”
The Don and his friend stopped in the middle of the stairs, their breath heavy and their eyes searching around desperately for a clue as to their next step. They exchanged glances, and the Don nodded to his buddy. He looked back to me. “What room?”
I gave them Sydney's regular room number, the one Abram normally got her up on the eleventh floor, two above us.
“Meet you at the car, man,” the Don said.
Don's buddy took off, up the stairs, but stopped a few steps up. “Hey, you,” he called to us. “What's your name, girl?”
“Huh?” I asked, eloquently.
“So Sydney knows I'm on the up-and-up.”
“Kaci,” I said. “Tell her Belle says to get the fuck moving.”
The Don gave me a weird look, and I just shrugged back at him. “Inside joke,” I muttered as the other guy went sprinting up the stairs to retrieve Sydney.
We, though, scrambled down the opposite way as fast as my heels would carry me without snapping in two. And, the whole way, I repeated my silent little mantra: Act normal, Kaci. Act normal, Kaci.
# # #
Micah
I wasn't sure what to think about the whore beside me in the front seat, or the shit that was babbling out of her mouth. And she wouldn't stop fucking calling me “Don.”
We sat there for a few minutes in the nondescript sedan we'd brought for the meeting, my hands wrapped in a death grip around the steering wheel as my eyes searched back and forth for signs of Gov and this new girl, Sydney.
“Where we going after this?” she asked as she touched up her garish red lipstick in the mirror. I noticed her hand shaking, just the tiniest amount. She must have caught it, too, because she immediately snapped her lipstick back together and put it away in her purse.
“Where are we going?” I repeated back. “Bus station, maybe? You got somewhere you can hide out, get clear of town?”
She shook her head, pressed her lips together. “Nope, no place.”
There was something about the way she did it, too, that gave me a faint stirring in the front of my jeans. Sure, she was a sex worker, but I didn't really care about that. Long as she was clean, right? But, there was just a small part of her that I just couldn’t quite place my finger on. Something just purely sexual about her, like she had no concept of what it would be like to be uncomfortable with her sexuality, with her body.
She turned to me, smiled just the smallest amount. “You really gonna send your little investments away that fast, anyways?”
I blinked, shook my head as I laughed a little. “My . . . investments? What in the hell's that supposed to mean?”
“Means, you got your property back in one piece, Don.”
My mouth dropped open in surprise, but I remained silent. This sweet little thing had just legitimately stunned me into silence, mainly because the words coming out of her mouth were so damned crazy. F&B may have done a lot of unsavory shit in our times but, unless I was missing something pretty big here, we'd never run girls before. That was a little outside our wheelhouse.
Before I could respond, though, I heard Gov herding along the other girl through the garage, towards us. “Come on,” Gov said, his voice exasperated. “Car's up here.”
Kaci's friend was a real looker, too. She looked like she was a couple years older, maybe, but with all the makeup on both of them it was kind of hard to tell exact ages for sure. She moved with less sureness in each stride of her high-heeled leg, though, like she was less certain about what life was going to throw at her, and more wary of the various ways it could downright screw with us all.
“Swear to God, if Kaci ain't here with y'all,” said the girl in a higher-pitched voice, “I don't know what I'll do.”
I laughed a little, despite the situation, at how ridiculous that statement had been. I mean, we were all in that “I don't know what I'll do” boat. At least she honest about it, right?
Soon enough, though, Gov had her stuffed in the backseat. “Got her,” he said, almost conversationally, as they both settled into the backseat.
I started the car up and pulled us out of the parking spot. The girls immediately began talking, but I just tuned them out as I ran through the drastic change of plans that had just been forced onto me and Gov.
Not only were we not able to find a better connection, now we had two real Pros dropped in our lap. And, maybe, just maybe, a murder the cops could involve us in. Great.
But, still, I knew we could overcome our problems. Sure, it was a setback, but just a minor one. After all, we had our regular leads in Petrov. So what if we had two girls on our hands? They were only wrinkles in the big scheme of things. Besides, the one who was riding shotgun with me had legs for days.
As we pulled out into the noise and traffic of a New Orleans night, with all its lights and humid heat, I turned slightly to Kaci. “Alright,” I said. “Talk. What the fuck happened back there?”
“Yeah,” Sydney asked from the back seat, her voice almost quavering, “what the hell happened back there? This guy pulled me away from a client.”
I watched as Kaci tentatively licked her freshly-painted lips, as her eyes searched carefully around the car. “Okay,” she said after a moment, before getting up and half-turning in the seat so she can address all three of us. “I was in the room with a James, right? Then, Abram bursts in on us and starts trying to shake the guy down, okay? Abram's getting real mean with the guy, talking all sorts of crazy Russian shit to him, then my James pulls out a gun. Then, next thing you know, my James and Abram, they've shot each other, and I'm just standing there.” She turned to me as she finished, her eyes boring into the side of my head, like she was checking for my reaction to her story.
I'd been glancing her way while she spoke, trying to get a bead on her. Something about this whole thing didn't add up. I'd only heard one shot, but we'd just arrived on the scene. Clearly, we hadn't heard the whole thing, because we hadn't been there long enough. So, there was that.
I chewed on the inside of my mouth. All we had to go on was the word of his hooker we'd just met fifteen minutes before. But, despite my misgivings, there was something about her. Something about those cupid's bow lips, about those big brown eyes of hers, and the swell of her hips beneath that too- tight skirt.
It occurred to me then, as I followed the line of one long leg up to the hem of her skirt in the peripheral of my vision, that I didn't know anything about them. I shook my head, wiped a hand down my face.
“Alright,” I said, “first thing's first. I'm Micah, Gov's my buddy. Now, Sydney, where can we take you?”
Before Sydney could open her mouth,
though, Kaci was already interjecting. “We ain't got nowhere, like I told you,” she said. “We're yours now, Don.”
I shook my head and Gov just guffawed. “Ours? Y'all girls ain't ours!”
“Well, Abram made it seem like you were!” Kaci said. “He said you were the Don, and that we were supposed to listen to you. That you were our new owners. So, now we're your problem. You want the police to get hold of us?”
“Hey, Kaci,” Sydney started to say, her voice worried, “I don't-”
“We can't go back to the apartment, Sydney,” Kaci said, cutting her friend off. “You wanna go back to Parish Jail again?”