“I don’t like people digging into my business. I like to be left alone.” The girl snapped the answer, apparently far more defiant than she should be in her current position.
“You also don’t like showering if the way you smell is anything to go by.” Stark’s tone was petulant, and when the kid jerked her head back to glare up at him, the wool hat covering her head fell off and rivers of long black hair fell down around her dirty face. I saw surprise flash in the other man’s face and soon a red flush was vying for the title of brightest color on his neck amid all the ink that swirled there. The man had been robbed and knocked around by a girl that probably weighed less than half of what he did.
“I don’t like people in my business either and this kid you helped infiltrate my operation has cost me enough money and enough time. The only option you have here is to tell me who I’m after. I think you know that and I think that’s why when you heard one of my people was looking for you, you made yourself easy to find.”
“It’s easy to disappear on the streets.” Her tone was cold but I could see a sharp intelligence shining out of her dark gaze.
“It is. It’s also easy to go missing from the streets and have no one realize you’re gone.”
The girl bit down on her lip and looked up at Stark like maybe he would be her lifeline. The tattooed hacker touched the mark on his forehead and muttered, “You’re a goddamn girl” while shaking his head. Seeing that Stark wasn’t going to be any help, she turned her attention back to me.
“Look, I’ve been living on the streets and on the run since I was just a kid. I know the rules in a place like this and the top one is look out for yourself first. When I heard Nassir Gates was looking for whoever helped someone get inside his new club, I knew enough money and big enough threats were going to get passed around that my name was going to come up. I just figured I would have some fun on my way here.”
Stark grunted. “You stole all my shit.”
She tilted her head back at him and grinned and I could see that she was probably a stunner under all that dirt and grime that covered her from head to toe. I could see that Stark saw it as well. Suddenly he took a step back from the chair like the girl occupying it was toxic.
“You had great stuff. There’s nothing like a guy that knows his processors.”
“If you were going to come in to see Nassir anyway, why did you jump me? Why did you punch me in the face and hit me with a lamp?” Now Stark sounded like a petulant kid.
She lifted up her shoulders and let them fall. I tried not to grimace at the cloud of dust that her move released. “You grabbed me. I don’t like to be touched.”
He barked out a swearword and his entire face flushed red. “You broke into my home and hijacked all my stuff. Of course I grabbed you.” He sounded so exasperated that the entire thing would’ve been hilarious if I had more time and any kind of patience at all. “You don’t need me anymore, do you, Gates? I need to get out of here.”
I shook my head and told him to go, which left me alone with the girl. Her demeanor changed when we were alone but there was still a defiance about her that reminded me of my favorite ex-stripper. This girl was filthy. She smelled bad. She was obviously trying to downplay her gender, and yet she couldn’t help but radiate confidence and her own kind of feminine power. It was the fight that always appealed to me.
“Tell me who the guy really is and I’ll make it worth your while.”
She snorted at me and scooted to the edge of the chair. “Are you kidding? The stuff I jacked from your tattooed friend will feed me and put a roof over my head for a few months. I just want you to leave me alone and forget what I look like and any part I played in Tyler messing with your club.”
I leaned back in my chair and considered her for a moment. “Agreed . . . and you called him Tyler. Is that his real name?”
She threw herself back in the chair and I tried not to wince. I was going to have to hose the thing down when she was gone or maybe even burn it.
“Yeah. He’s a friend of a friend. I know a few squatters and some gutter punks that like to come in and out of town on the trains, and one of them tracked me down saying he had a friend that needed help. I only mess around for people that really seem to need it. Kids on the run from shitty parents. Kids getting bounced from foster home to foster home because the dad had grabby hands. Occasionally I get a rich kid a fake ID, but that’s only if I’m in dire straits. Anyway, my buddy says he knows Tyler from some shows and the kid has it really rough at home.”
She was talking so fast it was almost hard to keep up with her, but I noticed she’d referred to my interloper as a kid, making me wonder how old she was. She looked like she couldn’t be more than sixteen or seventeen.
“The dad’s a bully and the mom’s long gone. My buddy says Tyler has a couple sisters at home and the dad has been creeping on them in a totally unparental way, so he asks me to help the guy out. Says the kid just needs a decent job where he can earn some money and move himself and the sisters out of the house. So he brings the kid around so I can make him an ID. Only when he brings the kid around, I realize real quick that he isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. If I made him documents with a different name, he was gonna get busted in five seconds, so I found someone with a similar name and borrowed their identity for him.”
“Tyler Finch is his real name?” I was a little confused by her story, mostly because she told it like the words couldn’t get out of her mouth fast enough.
She shook her head and the stench of unwashed human and the sour smell that simply was the Point, which permeated anyone that survived on the streets here, hit me right in the nose. I must have made a face or indicated my distaste in some way because she grinned and it was all kinds of twisted and sharp.
“When you sleep under a bridge or behind a Dumpster, people treat you like the rest of the discarded trash that litters the ground. When you look like shit and smell even worse, the probability of anyone grabbing you and trying to make you do things you don’t want to do goes way down.” One of her feathery eyebrows winged up in a haughty look. “And no, his name was close, but I can’t remember it exactly. It sounded like Finch. I can’t tell you where he is because I don’t know. I did my job, took the two hundred he paid me, and forgot about him until I heard you were looking for someone that manipulated an ID to get a job in your club. I knew it had to be Tyler.” She held her hands up and shrugged at me. “I obviously don’t own a computer, so it’s not like I could have scanned his info in a file I can just e-mail to you.”
“Your friend said he had a bad home life. He mention where the kid’s family lived?”
She shook her head. “Just here in the city somewhere. Said the dad had been deep in the gutter for a long time. Apparently he was a user and liked to hit up all Novak’s action.”
I was racking my brain trying to find a link, any kind of connection that could have the kid desperate enough or angry enough to take on the devil in his own playground.
The girl cleared her throat and reached for her hat. “For what it’s worth, he seemed like a nice enough kid. He just came across like he really wanted a job to help his family out. Your name didn’t come up until after the fact because if he had mentioned wanting to get into business with you or any of your crew, I would’ve told him it was a bad idea. Men like you don’t make things better. He didn’t seem malicious or anything. He really didn’t seem smart enough to put one over on you.”
The slight dig was there but I let it go. The kid had messed with me using schoolyard tactics when I was used to outright warfare. We were fighting different kinds of battles, but if I had learned anything from the desert and my life there, it was that the most unassuming person could be the biggest threat. Killers didn’t come stamped with a big letter K in the center of their foreheads. They more often than not came with disarming grins and a friendly handshake right before they put a bullet between your eyes or a bomb under the front seat of your car. I wasn’t going to und
erestimate the kid no matter how harmless or dumb he came across.
I needed to figure out what his deal was with me and I couldn’t do that unless I tracked him down.
“The friend of yours who brought him to you in the first place, where can I find him?” She balked and started twisting her fingers together. She obviously didn’t want to rat her buddy out to me. “You don’t have to tell me, but then, when I send all my guys to rattle every squat and shake down every hostel they can find, I’ll make sure they let all the street kids know you were the one that sent them.”
Life was hard on the street. It was even harder when you were a woman. If I went and rattled enough cages and dropped her name when I did it, we both knew it would be a veritable death sentence for her unless she took the money she was gonna earn from the stuff she jacked from Stark and hit the road. The understanding of what I was telling her was clear in her gaze.
“His name is Squirrel. And that is seriously all I know him as. When he comes to town he likes to hang out at a bar down by the docks called the Blue Ribbon. They let a lot of metal and punk bands play there on the weekends, so the crust kids like to hang out there and drink cheap beer.”
I had no idea what a crust kid was but it sounded like I was going to find out.
“How does one identify a young man named Squirrel?” I asked the question in complete seriousness, but she seemed to find it hilarious. She started laughing until she bent over and grabbed her stomach. When she looked back up at me, her cheeks had streaks where her tears had washed away the dirt.
“Kids get their names on the street for a reason. Look for a kid that looks like he could be smuggling food in his cheeks. He also has a tattoo on the back of his neck of something that looks like it could be a chipmunk or a squirrel. He’s not going to want to talk to you. Those kids are going to scatter when they see you coming.”
The cell phone lying on my desk started to ring and we both took that as a cue that our conversation had run its course. I picked it up and put it to my ear, and watched the girl slip silently out of my office. She was an interesting one, and I had a feeling even though I promised to forget she ever existed, I hadn’t seen the last of her.
“Are you looking at the monitors?” Chuck’s question was barked in my ear and I turned around in my chair, tapping the keys on my computer that turned the bank of security video feeds on behind my desk. Since it was the afternoon and nowhere near working hours yet, I had left them off while I talked to Noe.
When the screens fired back to life, it took every speck of self-control I had not to throw my cell phone at the monitors. At least twenty men wearing black tactical gear with the word “police” across the back were storming through the front doors of the club with weapons raised.
Luckily, there were no customers crowding the dance floor or cluttering the bar area, but the employees that were milling about were all frantic as I watched the raid happen in front of me like it was a TV show.
“What?” I couldn’t form any more words than that as I watched one of the cops approach Chuck, who still had his phone to his ear. The cop stopped in front of my head of security and I heard him ask where I was. On the video feed I saw Chuck hesitate for a second, but because I recognized the deep voice when the policeman spoke, I told Chuck to go ahead and bring him on up to my office while his cohorts continued to poke their noses and guns into every nook and cranny of my club.
I couldn’t face the cop sitting down. Not when what I really wanted to do was take the automatic rifle he had in his hands, and turn it on him and demand he leave me and my business alone. He stripped off his protective face gear and glared at me just as hard as I was glaring at him.
I don’t know how Titus King found himself on the right side of the law when he had every single characteristic that should have made him a man like me, terrible childhood and a parent that preferred death and brutality to loving nurture included.
“Why are you raiding my club, cop?” I put my hands on the edge of the desk to avoid pummeling him in the face.
Titus narrowed his eyes and I swore his hatred of me and what I did to keep this city alive blazed out of his gaze like the blue flame of a blowtorch.
“We got an anonymous tip that you received a delivery of cocaine and that you were sitting on it for one of your suppliers. The source sounded credible, so the lieutenant in charge of the drug unit decided a surprise takedown was in order.”
“Why are you here, then?”
Titus grunted and I saw his black-gloved finger twitch where it was resting on the trigger guard of the gun he was holding.
“I’m here because it’s no secret my very pregnant girlfriend works for you, and for some odd reason actually likes you and her job. I told the sergeant in charge of the tactical team that I wanted in just in case there was dope stashed here. I told him I would like nothing more than to lock you up and keep you away from my family.” He glared at me even harder and a tic started working in his cheek. “I also told him that you’re a sadistic bastard and if we did find anything illegal here, you wouldn’t be above using innocent patrons as leverage in order to escape a drug bust.” He snorted. “You’re welcome.”
If he thought I was going to thank him while my club was being ripped apart, he had another thing coming. I lifted my eyebrows at him and gave him a speculative smirk. “Does Reeve know you’re here?”
He grunted his answer, which clearly meant he hadn’t told her that he was coming to raid her boss’s club. I bet that was going to go over really well when he got home from work. Reeve was a spitfire and she also carefully kept one foot on the right side of the law and the other hovering just enough over the edge of the wrong side to keep things interesting. She was an asset to me and my enterprise. She was also not going to like her man messing in my business, but more than that, she wasn’t going to like that he kept her out of the loop because he knew she did have threads of loyalty attached to me even though Titus had tried to snip them time and time again.
“There are no drugs here. I don’t have my hands in that stuff. The guys that move it and sell it answer to people in other countries, and I don’t like the lack of control that gives an operation. I also let Keelyn and Race sink a ridiculous amount of money into this place to get it up and running. I wouldn’t play around with their investment like that. I’m a businessman first and foremost, cop. I don’t do things that endanger my money or my partners.” I could get my hands on any illegal substance I wanted at any time, but that didn’t mean I needed to have my fingers in the honeypot. Drugs were a hard line for me. When I first came to the States I’d dabbled here and there, testing the boundaries of my newly minted freedom. I realized very quickly how easy it would be to find myself tied to another kind of owner and I refused to risk it. I didn’t want my business anywhere near people who so effortlessly corrupted and owned the weak and the desperate. I stayed away from the lure of narcotics, but the people I often found myself dealing with didn’t. In order to keep my finger on the pulse, I had to know who dealt what, who imported what, and how they all managed their business, but I didn’t consider them my colleagues.
“The source said that you keep the stash in a private room in the basement that is only accessible by private elevator.”
The lightbulb went off and I swore in Arabic as I shoved my hands through my hair. “Was the source a woman?”
Titus’s own dark eyebrows shot up until they almost touched the band of the black, knit cap covering his forehead.
“Why?”
I sighed and moved around my desk. I walked past him without saying anything but heard Chuck tell him to follow me.
“I had some problems with a woman and her husband. She didn’t want to play by the rules, so I kicked her out.” I punched the code in for the basement of the building once we were all in the elevator. I shook my head a little. “First I kicked her out of the club, then I kicked her out of the Point. She’s mouthy and unstable. I should’ve known she would pull something l
ike this.”
I was regretting getting soft and letting her have an out. Being a real boy was bad for busniness.
“The basement is the security holding center for anyone that doesn’t want to behave. Sex makes people crazy, makes them do things they would never ordinarily do in a million years.” I leered at him and saw his jaw clench so hard I was surprised his teeth didn’t break. “You know what I’m talking about, cop.”
He didn’t respond to the verbal jab but he did talk into the radio headset he was wearing to let the rest of his team know he was headed to the basement. Someone must’ve barked back that he needed to wait for backup because he coolly replied that he had the situation under control and would report back once the area was cleared.
Once the doors opened to my concrete prison, I saw Titus’s eyes get wide and his irritation grow. He cut me a hard look as we stepped from the elevator into the barren hallway.
“You’re a sociopath. You do know that, right? What kind of person builds their own jail under a nightclub?”
It was my turn not to respond. He did business his way, and I did it mine. I told Chuck to go ahead and let the cop wander through all the empty rooms, and stood back and watched his fruitless search. Even if I’d been inclined to keep a stash of dope on hand, I would never be stupid or simple enough to leave it in a place that would be so easy to find.
Titus was meticulous. He picked through each and every room, turned over tables and chairs, tinkered with light fixtures, and knocked his knuckles along the solid surface of the walls. If there had been drugs in my dungeon, the cop would’ve found them. He was at the last room, finishing up his thorough search, when all of a sudden ice-cold water started to rain down on us from the ceiling. All three of us barked out different swearwords and I looked at Chuck, who was on his phone screaming at his guys.
The water continued to cascade down from the ceiling, so there was no use in trying to wipe it out of my eyes or shake it off of my clothes. Titus was shooting every dirty word that existed at the ceiling and I knew we were going to have to hike out of the basement using the stairs because the elevator wouldn’t work if there was a fire.
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