Fifteen minutes later, he stumbled out of the front door into his beat-up Buick and traveled the twenty or so minutes into the city to be at work by nine-thirty. If he arrived there early, he reclined his seat back and took a little power nap in the parking garage.
At nine twenty-nine, he shuffled onto the elevator, taking him up to the fourteenth floor where he spent eight hours behind a stifling desk piled high with papers. At exactly four thirty-five, he’d be on the elevator in the parking garage, hell-bent on being the first person out of the building, trying to beat the evening traffic. He’d fail. He made it back into New Hazle in no less than an hour and spent two hours in that same chair he sat in now. Guzzling beer after beer, shooting predatory looks at women both his age and mine.
Disgusting.
He always left the bar with someone but he never took them home and I never followed him. I always just waited for him, blending with the trees and darkness across the street until he finally made it home, always alone. Maybe the place where you murdered the woman who loved you ten years ago really killed the mood.
I didn’t follow him when he stumbled out of the bar, his arm wrapped around a woman. I needed this night to myself because tomorrow, I would make my move.
The last decade I spent learning how to use my body as a weapon would all be worth it to see Cameron Wade within an inch of his life, pleading for me to have mercy on him, and denying him that freedom. It would all be worth it. After all these years, my mom could finally be at peace, knowing he would never be able to lay his hands on another woman, knowing that I sent him on a one-way trip to the deepest part of Hell.
She would receive justice in the name of her daughter.
* * *
“Don’t you think I’ve suffered enough, Pops?” He dropped the barbell in the hook, the heavy clang echoing in my ears. Looking down at my son, sweat covering every inch of his face, I wondered how his vision hadn’t blurred. From the moisture gathered at his eyebrows dripping toward his eyelids, it looked like he dumped a bottle of cold water on his face.
I raised an eyebrow in disbelief. “You haven’t even finished fifty reps yet.”
He sighed, his arms reaching for the hooked bar to resume lifting. I towered over him, resting my hands against the machine, on alert in case he couldn’t handle it which from where I stood didn’t seem all that unlikely.
He snuck in sometime between my breakfast and my first workout. I had grown well accustomed to his early morning, or as he would say, late night, arrivals home. At seventeen years old, Samuel had the sex-drive of a porn star who wasn’t in it for the money.
I couldn’t fault him for it though seeing as how I celebrated my sixteenth birthday mere weeks before he was born. He wasn’t foolish or careless about sex. The one thing I drilled into his head since I found the magazine stash and trash can full of soiled tissues in his room.
I sat him down, nerdy brace-faced then, nothing like the smooth talker babyface he was now, and I laid down the law of women.
Respect the woman at all times.
Both of you should voice your consent. I promise it will not kill the mood.
Condom. One or ten. Your choice.
This isn’t your show. It’s hers. Remember that.
Take care of her after.
Samuel and I didn’t have the most traditional father-son relationship.
I’d often compared our relationship to food. The ingredients, the spices, the seasonings, all made up communication. You could measure them all out, mix them just right, but if you missed a pinch of something, the entire meal had to be scrapped. Samuel was all I had for the past fifteen years of his life and vice versa. It was just the two of us. Well, for a few more days anyway.
If I couldn’t find him in his room, at school, or at basketball practice, he was at his apartment. Was his own apartment smack dab in the middle of the city considered normal for a seventeen-year-old? Probably not. But Samuel wasn’t exactly normal.
I didn’t allow anyone at my house. The only people, other than the two of us, who’ve made it past the gates were family. My father, who only showed up on Samuel’s birthday, and Nolan, my best friend and right-hand man.
The Rivera name was a well-known name. It intimidated some. It frightened some. It pissed some off. It didn’t matter if I was the best kind of man. Or if I raised my son to be. Our last name was still the same and with that came a target on our backs. I couldn’t risk the safety of my family, especially raising Samuel through the years. And I took no pride in risking others’ safety.
From a young age, I taught him how to fight, knowing his last name alone was cause enough for someone to try their luck. I started with simple self-defense moves before I moved on to boxing. Samuel craved knowledge and loved being the best at everything. It didn’t take him long to conquer karate before moving on to Jitsu. At the beginning of his senior year last fall, I succumbed to allowing private shooting lessons at Philly Range.
It didn’t matter if he could bench press two hundred pounds over one hundred reps. He had the intelligence to see any threat and take them down in under a minute, regardless if his only weapon was his body.
“This fine ass woman at Philly Range last night. Older, much older. Your kind of old, but this woman was a knockout. So, me being me, I had to shoot my shot.”
I glared down at him. “You did not have sex with a woman my age.”
He extended his arm, weights and all, and smirked at me, flashing his straight white teeth and the dimples he inherited from me. “Of course not.”
I couldn’t stop the sigh of relief that escaped me even if I tried. “You’re going to kill me.”
He resumed lifting until he hit fifty reps. He slammed the barbell against the hook with finality and sat up. He wore no shirt, just a pair of basketball shorts. The same as me and yet somehow his abs were perfect. Not too much to where he looked like he worked in the gym every second of his life and not too little where you could see his body fat.
I worked out two, sometimes, three times a day. I could lift what Samuel could handle with one hand and somehow his body still was in impeccable shape. He wiped the sweat from his face with a towel and walked toward me, snatching the water bottle out of my hands. He drained the entire thing in a few gulps. He handed the empty bottle back to me and his fingers twisted over the towel hanging loosely from his shoulder.
“I see the look on your face, Pops.”
I frowned, confused. Samuel shook his head, patting my shoulder gently.
“You look good. Not as good as me, but still good.”
I gritted my teeth like every time he started with one of his smart ass rants.
“Sex cures everything. You should try it sometime.”
I felt a growl climbing up my throat but I crammed it down because it only made him gloat. Instead, I quickly grabbed for the towel across his shoulder, twisted it up and slapped it across his chest.
He grabbed his chest in mock hurt and I threw the damp towel in his face. He caught it effortlessly. “You know some women like being whipped. I know a few if you’re interested.”
I didn’t even bother to acknowledge he said anything. I left our home gym in favor for the kitchen.
Ever since Samuel and I made a collective decision about college, if and where he would be attending, he had been relentless about my love life. Or lack of it.
In the seventeen years of his life, he never saw me with a woman. Because I hadn’t been with a woman long enough to bring her into his life. The last woman I fully gave myself to was his mom. She was my first and my only. The girl who I thought I loved, who I thought loved me. But at sixteen, you barely know who you are or what you want and it turned out that we both were unsure of that answer.
I couldn’t regret her. I couldn’t even hate her for wanting to leave me. She gave me the biggest blessing of my life. The reason I wanted to wake up each morning. She gave me my son. And I spent each day thanking God she gave me that much.
I sti
ll kept in contact with her. I knew she lived in Los Angeles, remarried to some hotshot lawyer and a mother to two more kids. I’d been waiting for Samuel to ask about her, to want to get in contact with her. Anything. But he was mute on the subject of the woman who brought him into this world. If he didn’t keep a lone photograph of me and his mother on the day we brought him home from the hospital on the desk in his room, I would have thought he didn’t think about her at all. Every time I brought her up, he seemed less like himself and more like me.
Guarded. Aloof. Not wanting to have this conversation, ever.
“I’m going to shower. Think about what I said,” Samuel said, walking backward and smirking at me all the way from the kitchen until he reached his bedroom. Before he turned around, I flipped him off. His booming laugh bounced off of the walls as I cracked a couple of eggs open and transferred them into a glass.
My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. Digging it out, Nolan’s name flashed across the screen. I accepted the call and put the phone up to my ear. “Yeah?”
I gulped the eggs in two swallows, waiting a few minutes in silence before I knew Nolan would start talking. “Boss,” he stammered, his breathing ragged. I said nothing in return, well accustomed to Nolan seeing as how he became a permanent fixture in my life in elementary school.
“Matt Panini.”
I barely held back a groan. What the fuck could he want?
The young kid and I had a bit of a standoff a few years ago, ending me with a flesh wound and him with a dead father.
Victor Panini’s family business didn’t rake in enough money as the greedy bastard liked, so he decided to start his own business. Making nightly trips to Bottoms Up, a strip club in the city that I co-owned, luring young women out of the club with promises that they’d never have to take off their clothes for money again if they worked with him. What he didn’t include in the fine print of his promises was that they’d never have to strip willingly, but forcingly. He set up Philadelphia, my city, to start his vile business of sex trafficking.
Girls were disappearing faster than I could blink. There were missing reports coming in at every precinct in the city. Mothers crying, brothers and fathers raising hell. They looked to me for answers when the police, as they often did, failed them.
I would have never caught on if Katya, a young girl who worked at Bottoms Up, didn’t see Victor every night talk to the youngest dancer only for that same girl to never show up again. I asked Katya if she would help me take him down and she instantly agreed. I had everyone’s schedule switched around so Katya would be picked by Victor.
Like clockwork, he strolled in just when the performances started and as soon as Katya climbed off of the stage, he made his move. With my pistol tucked into my waistband, I followed them. He took her to Elite, a club by membership only. He didn’t take her through the front door where two bodyguards stood. He led her to the back of the bar, to the basement door. I followed as stealthily as I could.
Victor paused at the top of the stairs, looking over at Katya. “Welcome, sweet girl. Your life is about to change forever.”
She smiled timidly at him and before I could even react, he caressed the side of her face before grabbing a handful of her hair and throwing her down the steps with all of his strength. He walked down the stairs, taking each step at his leisure. I slunk out of the darkness and looked down at the dim cellar. I couldn’t see much, but what I did see twisted my stomach and broke my heart at the same time. Girls naked, shivering lying on the cold cement floor. Some were chained up like animals. Bruises on every inch of their skin. Sniffles and sobs filled the room.
With each step Victor took, I took one as well. Katya’s unconscious body sprawled across the bottom step. He paused, looking down at her. He shook his head and muttered one lone word, “Bitches.”
He stepped on her as if she was an added stair instead of a human being. I pulled my gun out of my waistband before sitting on a step as I watched him take in his work. I didn’t look at any of the girls but those who were lucid, I could feel their eyes on me.
“There’s only one bitch in this room.” My voice echoed through the basement. Victor turned around at the sound of my voice, his eyes wide with alarm.
“Rivera,” he breathed shakily. I smiled at the fear I could hear through his voice and the look of it I saw in his eyes.
I hated Victor Panini with a passion. He was one of the biggest influencers in and around Philadelphia and instead of helping kids out of the bad neighborhoods and lifestyles they grew up in, he did his best to keep them there. He let kids learn how to shoot at fifteen years old as long as they swore their allegiance to him. He had people as old as me still under his thumb. If you were with Panini, you were with him for life. He was responsible for so many deaths but the news outlets always blamed it on the drugs, on neighborhood violence, on the parents.
I’d been killing since the day I turned eighteen. It was my job to protect this city. I didn’t like it. I didn’t enjoy it. It came with my last name, passed down. If there was a legal way to see justice served, I always went that route. If the justice system failed, I didn’t.
But that was before Victor Panini targeted women. Young girls. No amount of justice could be served for the things he did to them, things I couldn’t and didn’t want to imagine.
“I hate you,” I told him. He reached for the gun that he wouldn’t find since I taught Katya how to strip him of one. “You are the poster boy for what a scumbag looks like and I will sleep better tonight knowing your kind of evil can’t hurt anyone else.”
I raised my gun, aimed directly in the middle of his forehead, not sparing him one more breath, and shot it. I tucked my gun back inside my jeans at the sight of his lifeless eyes and slipped my phone out, dialing Nolan.
“I need women’s clothes and first aid kits.” Together, Nolan and I worked side by side as we cleaned up the girls’ cuts and bruises. Let them call family if they had any or shipped them off to a nearby hotel for the night. I told them they still had a job at Bottoms Up if they wanted it. After that, I worked with Katya who was a bad ass trooper, to set up a free therapy group at a church in New Hazle, just outside of the city.
Matt Panini was a different story entirely. He was a good kid, nothing like his father. His mother essentially raised him on her own so he remained innocent, oblivious to his father’s ways. The day after, before the police recovered his body from the basement at Elite, I paid Matt and his mom Karla a visit.
I wasn’t sure what their reaction would be to finding out I killed the man in their life but I knew I had to let them know before the media got a whiff of Victor’s death. Karla burst out in tears and thanked me. She was finally free. It turned out young girls weren’t the only ones Victor liked to use and abuse. Matt remained quiet throughout the whole process. Listening to each word I said and absorbing it. He offered to walk me out and I accepted. Next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital with a flesh wound the size of a banana beneath my ribs.
I survived, just barely and I never heard from Matt again. I didn’t pay him a visit. I didn’t seek revenge on him. He lost his father. If someone killed my father, a stab wound wouldn’t be enough for me. Nolan handled Samuel’s lessons to Philly Range and Matt and I called a silent truce. Until now.
“What does he want, Nolan?”
“He needs a favor from you. His exact words were, ‘If you do this for me, I’ll owe you my life.’”
I sighed heavily, slamming my now empty glass on the bar. So much for spending the last few days I had with my son peacefully. “Text me the details,” I told Nolan before hanging up. A beep sounded a second later and I stared down at a picture of a younger woman and a simple request from Matt. Protect her.
I wanted to know what she needed protection from. Or who. I’d learned long ago not to enter a rescue mission blind but for some reason unknown to me, I slipped my phone into my pocket with a silent promise to look into her later.
* * *
Tonight marked the seventh straight night I spent sitting in this exact booth at Hank’s. Nothing but Cameron Wade and my glass of water to keep my attention.
Tonight felt different. It felt like the last page of a chapter with the next chapter peeking through the thin layer of the pages.
I wouldn’t be heading back to my hotel room once Cameron got cut off by the bartender tonight. I’d follow him into a home I hadn’t stepped foot in for ten years. I’d step back into my childhood with no assurance of how the night would pan out, only with the knowledge that my life would be altered forever.
Once the sun rose with the promise of a new day, I hoped for a dead Cameron Wade and me making it past security onto my booked flight to Mexico tomorrow morning. The place where I would ditch Annie Miller in favor of Olive James, a girl with no past and an unwritten future.
Underneath my calm, cool, and collected exterior, my heartbeat thumped so fast and hard against my chest, the sound an abrasive echo against my eardrums. I could feel the heaviness of the knives that I had tucked in my black pair of Vans and I could feel the sleek coolness of the gun tucked into the waistband of my jeans.
Tonight, I would take a life.
Tonight, I would become a killer.
Murder had been on my mind for a very long time. While kids my age were getting ready for dates and proms, I spent my every waking moment dreaming of the day I would make him pay.
When Cameron Wade decided to kill my mom, he was whisked away by the police for questioning and I was thrown into the system. I spent the first few weeks without my mother a shell of a kid. I couldn’t wrap my head around my new reality. I was thrust into a group home while my social worker stalled on trying to find me a new home in case I would have to testify.
As it turned out, I did have to testify. His statement to the police painted my mother as the villain. She hurt him. She violated him. She tried to kill him.
Hijacked Page 3