Partners

by D B Steward

  “Stop right there.” His voice was tired and he was tired; he did not want to have to deal with this drunken bitch. Crackheads were easily frightened off—all you had to do was flash your gun and they would scamper like human rats—but drunks were fearless. They took forever to get rid of and they would not stop talking even if you threatened them. This woman was no exception it seemed as her feet scraped unsteadily up the stairs until she was just a few feet away from him.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Kelly slurred her words and regarded him with an offended scowl. “You his friend? Where the fuck is Antonio?”

  The guard rubbed his temple with his hand and closed his eyes. “There is no Antonio here,” he said in his heavy accent. “You have the wrong house.”

  “Oh, I know this is his bitch’s house!” Kelly was loud and made sure to swing her arms wildly as she gestured toward the house. “He’s in there fuckin’! I know he is!” She leaned her body so she was yelling over his shoulder. “Antonio! Get out here!”

  He held up his hands, palms up and fingers splayed, preparing to shove her off the stairs. “Look, bitch, there is no Antonio—” He never got to finish whatever he was going to say as the blade slid into his vertebrae at the base of his skull, never knowing that his last word on this world was the name of a man who did not even exist.

  Kelly watched as Sonny held the expired man up with one arm wrapped around his chest and then slowly lowered him to the ground. This was the first time she had seen someone die and she would never forget the man’s eyes as his life fled from his body. She focused on Sonny’s face and saw grudging admiration there. “Good work, Miss King.” She rose to her feet after removing the man’s gun then taking out the clip and tossing it in the bushes. “You might be useful after all.” Sonny’s grin faded as she saw the haunted look on the other woman’s face. “Hey.” She placed her hand on Kelly’s shoulder. “You can go back to the car. I can handle it from here.”

  After a second, Kelly shook herself free from the stasis her shock had placed her in and pulled herself together. “No. I’m alright. Let’s go.” Sonny studied her eyes for a moment and then gave her a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder.

  “It gets easier.” She turned and headed toward the front door. Kelly looked down at the dead man lying nearby and then back up to Sonny’s back.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of,” she muttered under her breath.

  Sonny placed her hand on the doorknob and began to turn it but then stopped once she noticed the padlock that was keeping them on the outside. “Shit,” she whispered and then felt a tap on her back. She turned and saw Kelly dangling a padlock key on a ring.

  “Are we learning yet?” she snidely whispered.

  “T2 again? Really?”

  Kelly smirked back at her. “Shut up and open the door, Moretti.” Sonny took the key and slid it into the lock, turned it, and then removed it from the door. Giving Kelly a nod, she pulled her pistol and readied it in her right hand while holding the still-bloody knife in her left. Kelly removed the handgun Sonny had given her from her waistband and switched off the safety.

  Sonny turned the knob and cracked the door open to make sure no one was directly behind it. Then with a hard shove, she pushed it wide open and was inside the house in a flash. The front door opened directly to a living room that held plain furniture that looked as if it had been purchased from the internet where the buyer gave as much concern that could be measured in the time between mouse clicks. Sonny assessed the three men in the room automatically: two were seated, one on the couch and one seated on a loveseat a few feet from the door but his back turned away from it. The third man was leaning in the far corner against a wall, an opening behind him that lead to another room.

  The three men had frozen in place when the door swung open and Kelly reverted to her training. “FBI! Freeze!” What the hell? If they survived, she was sure Sonny would tease her about that slip. Right now, however, the assassin was all business, shooting the first man closest to the door. The loud bang of the gun going off actually made Kelly flinch and she actually felt embarrassed at her reaction. Get it together, King! The man by the far corner was pulling a weapon from his coat pocket, and although he was moving swiftly, there was a slight gleam of fear and shock in his eyes.

  Sonny used that moment to put two shots in the gunman’s chest and he went down, his eyes still looking forward in surprise. The man on the couch jumped up and shot his hands high into the air. “No! Don’t shoot!” He was screaming in fear and Kelly was on him in an instant, pointing her gun directly at him.

  “Keep those hands up!” she commanded him with a voice filled with such authority that the man stay stock still. With her gun still aimed at him, she used her free hand to pat him down, her eyes locked on his, alert to any slight twitch that might give away movement. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Sonny check both the men she had dropped, ensuring that they were dead. Then she heard Sonny call her from the doorway as she finished searching the man. He was unarmed and shaking like a washing machine.

  “I’m going.” Sonny spoke calmly and almost robotically as she glanced back at Kelly. “Stay with him.” Before Kelly could protest, Sonny was gone. She pushed the man back onto the couch, still making sure her gun was trained on him.

  “Please!” The man was sweating and pleading with her as his eyes widened to the size of dinner plates. “I-I just got here! I haven’t done anything!”

  “Did I say you could speak?” she snarled at him. “Shut the fuck up and don’t move.” Her eyes swept the room and the front door they had come through. No one was coming through from outside, so she assumed that meant there were no more guards outside. She moved quickly to the two corpses and secured their weapons, all the while keeping her eyes on the man shaking on the couch.

  “This is my first time here! I didn’t do anything yet!” He was rapidly getting on her already frazzled nerves.

  “Shut. Up.” Shots rang out and she looked at the empty doorway of the living room, concern spreading from inside her. Above her head, she heard a shout and then more shots followed by loud thumps from the ceiling. Her heart leapt into her throat when it suddenly became silent in the house. The sweaty man on the couch was beginning to whimper and Kelly was sure he would wet himself soon. A moment later, Sonny appeared in the doorway looking as calm as she had been before they entered the house. “Sonny,” she muttered under her breath, feeling the relief course through her system like life’s blood. There was something in her eyes that Kelly had never seen before; it looked like a burning flame. Kelly began to realize then that Sonny was furious. She strode toward Kelly and reached into a pocket on her black tactical pants, producing a plastic zip-tie that she handed to the ex-federal agent.

  “Tie him up.” Her voice was as frosty as her eyes just then, looking at the man with disgust. “Bring him along. I want him to see this too.” Without a word, Kelly jerked the man to his feet and bound his hands behind his back as they followed Sonny out of the room.

  Chapter Thirteen

  They passed through a gutted-out kitchen, with a dirty stove, a tired-looking sink that had a stack of dirty dishes in it, and a refrigerator that appeared to be on its last legs. All of the cabinets had been ripped out, leaving clean shapes on the dirty, peeling wallpaper. No table or chairs on the cheap linoleum floor that buckled and curled. A solitary lightbulb hung from a hole in the ceiling dangling from a wire, the fixture that once lit the room long gone. There was a doorway with stairs leading up along the back wall. They took them single file with Sonny in the lead, the terrified man in the middle and Kelly bringing up the rear. Once she turned the corner of the little stairway, she could hear the man whimper in fear, and once she reached the narrow hallway, she saw the object of the man’s anxiety. Another guard lay dead in the hallway and his large frame made it necessary for them to step over his corpse. Kelly had to shove their nervous friend in the back with her gun to get him to move and he gingerly stepped over the
body, keeping his eyes locked on the low ceiling above them.

  “Go on, boy,” she drawled in a southern accent. “He ain’t gonna bite you.” Without turning or breaking her stride, Sonny called out to her in a flat and emotionless response.

  “Platoon. Tom Berenger.” Damn! Kelly was constantly being impressed by the other woman’s knowledge of movies and her amusement momentarily distracted her from the house of horrors they were walking through. At the end of the hall was a cracked door with a lock that had been shot off. Sonny stopped in front of it and turned back to Kelly, ignoring the cringing man between them. “Brace yourself,” was all she said as she opened the door and stepped inside. Kelly tried to imagine what Sonny could be warning her about as she walked into the room, but what she saw inside was something she could not have expected in her worst nightmare.

  The room was painted jet black and the windows were boarded up like all the others in the house. The walls were lined with chains, restraints, and diabolical torture items that made Kelly shiver. There were so many of them, and more than half of them were tools that she didn’t even want to think about what they might be used for. Whips with nasty-looking metal barbs hanging off the leather straps, wooden paddles with tiny little needles, and long leather straps like the ones used to sharpen straight razors. But what chilled her like she was trapped under ice with frigid water filling her lungs, were the blades. Shining silver seemed to glisten from every wall and corner, the light from the two industrial lamps sitting on poles reflecting off them like mirrors from Hell. Sharp implements of different sizes, some as short as steak knives, others as long as swords, just waiting to be used for things that were too horrible to speak aloud.

  With a small feeling of satisfaction that would contradict her feelings in regard to the value of human life, she looked at a man’s dead body lying face down near the center of the room. He was naked from the waist up and his pasty back was decorated with two bleeding circles near his heart. He was thick around the center of his body, a ring of fat was sitting near his hips, and his ring of hair on his bald head was mostly gray with brown streaks. He wore boxers and expensive wingtips with black dress socks on his spindly little chicken legs that somehow supported his pear-shaped upper body in life. His arms were splayed out and one hand held a bloody scalpel that was still locked tight in his death grasp. There was no pity for the man in her heart because of what she was looking upon now, unable to comprehend the madness that he had orchestrated.

  A metal ring had been screwed into the ceiling and two long, shining steel chains were linked to it, effortlessly bearing the light weight on their ends. Two slender wrists were showing purple bruises on pale white skin from the unyielding metal cuffs pulling them skyward, the fingers touching together as if praying for the release that had finally, mercifully, been granted.

  She could not have been older than eighteen years old, and Kelly wanted to cry or scream from the injustice of it all. This young woman had died in a horribly violent way and her life had barely even begun. Her lifeless eyes were partly veiled by her wet and matted brown hair, its long spindly strands dripping with a mixture of sweat and blood, glassy eyes that would never see another sunrise and whose last vision was one of absolute terror. Her cheeks were wet from the tears that had poured from those haunted eyes, tears that had most likely begged for her life and been denied. Her face had been left alone, untouched and unmarked. Kelly thought that the girl—because that is what she was in fact, just a girl—would have been pretty, possibly even beautiful, if her life had not been hijacked into this nightmarish existence.

  As an FBI agent, Kelly had seen crime scene photos, images of bodies shot, burned, crushed, maimed, but they were always just images. When she had seen actual corpses, they were on a slab in a crime lab, their dignity covered with a thin sterile sheet. There was always a feeling of detachment, that she was only looking at a puzzle that needed solving. This was personal, this was intimate. She could see the bruises around the girl’s abdomen shaped like fists, an ugly mix of purple and yellow. Then there were the slashes, and the cuts, and the scrapes, and the wounds all weeping scarlet streaks of blood. They were on her legs, her arms, her chest, even her privates had not escaped the blade. Finally, underneath the small bare feet that dangled inches above the floor with their toes pointed down like a ballerina, a plastic tray. A fucking plastic tray. A tray to keep the blood from staining the worthless, worn-out, filthy excuse for a carpet.

  It was the blood. It was the blood, she told herself. That had to be the reason, the sane reason, the only reason in an unreasonable world. It was the blood, it had to be; otherwise, how could her vision be so fucked up? How could it be that all Kelly could see was red?

  Her hands flexed and fisted and her brain slowly registered that there was a gun in one of them. She gripped it hard as fury shot through her muscles and she had a fleeting thought that she might break her hand with how hard she was squeezing it. The world came back into focus and she remembered she was not alone in the room. Sonny was standing by the doorway, unmoving like a statue. Her face showed no emotion at all, her eyes were focused on Kelly, watching her, waiting for what she would do.

  Then Kelly turned her head to the man. He was shaking and sweating, shifting on his feet nervously as his eyes bounced between Kelly in front of him and Sonny standing behind him. Kelly drew her gun up and pointed it at his chest and despite the rage she was feeling, the barrel remained rock steady. The man saw the anger in Kelly’s eyes and he shook even harder as a dark spot began to spread on the crotch of his tan pants.

  “Do what you have to do,” was all Sonny said as she nodded to Kelly and then left the room, leaving Kelly seething at the man.

  Kelly motioned at the body of the girl with her head as she kept her eyes and her gun trained on the man. “What the fuck is this?” she growled at him and hated herself because her voice was shaky, not from sadness but from the frightening emotions burning inside her. “Tell me, asshole!” She was yelling now and she shoved the barrel into his sternum hard enough to bruise and make him wince in pain. “What. The fuck. Is this?”

  “It’s what he paid for!” He was a blubbering mess, tears mingling with his sweat and rolling rapidly down his vibrating body. Kelly had to shake her head to make sure she heard him right.

  “What?”

  “It’s what he paid for! These guys! I mean, they don’t always pay for sex! And they let you do whatever you want to the girls! You pay them enough, you can do anything! They don’t care! They just bring in more!”

  The bile rose in her throat while she continued to hold the gun steady. It would be so easy, she thought, so easy to just squeeze the trigger and there would be one less walking pile of shit in the world. She closed her eyes and she saw her, hanging there, and she knew then that she would see the girl for the rest of her life. Her eyes opened and looked at him and suddenly her anger was gone. All she felt now was a resolve as strong as steel. She resolved that she would do right for the girl. Maybe she could not get justice for her, maybe she could not get revenge for her, but there was something she could get for her. A reckoning. She would get a reckoning for her. The men responsible for this would know this girl had lived and they would pay the price for her death.

  “How does this work?”

  His face twisted in confusion. “What?”

  She waved her gun around the room angrily. “This! How does this work?! How do you know about it? How do they get their clients?”

  He swallowed hard before he talked and Kelly started to smell the urine coming from him mixing with the smell of the sweat and the blood in the room. “You have to be referred by a member.” He stammered out the answer, seeming to wrestle with each syllable as it slipped past his lips. “A member refers you and you get a call that tells you where to pick up a business card. This business card just has a phone number on it, you call it, and you give the name of the guy that referred you. They send a car for you and you give them the money. Price starts a
t five thousand and then the sky’s the limit. I told you, if you have the money, they will let you do anything.”

  “Give me names.”

  “I don’t know any!” She pushed the barrel into his chest again, harder this time. “Okay! Okay! There’s a lady that runs thing! A foreign woman, she’s like old or something! Her name’s Amina, I think! Please don’t kill me! I have a family!”

  “Give me your wallet.”

  He looked at her like she had grown a second head. “Give. Me. Your. Wallet.” Clumsily, he rummaged through his pants and with a shaking hand, he held out his wallet for her. Kelly snatched it and looked for his ID. Finding the card, she took it out and tossed the wallet to the floor. She looked at it and then met his eyes with hers.

  “George Silver.” Her eyes narrowed at him. “I’m keeping this. When we leave here, you are going to call the police and wait for them. If you don’t, I will find you and kill you. If I find out that you are doing something like this shit again, I will kill you and burn your house to the fucking ground. Do you understand me?” He nodded his head like it was on a spring, like a deranged Jack in the Box as Sonny entered the room again.

  “You should see this.” She motioned with her thumb behind her back and turned, exiting the room. Kelly followed her and grabbed George Silver by his collar, pulling him along behind her. They made their way to the basement and the first thing that Kelly noticed was the stench of the stale air and sweat. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, her eyes went wide as she beheld the nightmarish scene before her.