The knocks from the other side of the door startled him out of his thoughts so hard he jumped back and nearly toppled down the steps. Okay, good. Maybe his watch just needed a little adjusting. He cleared his throat and turned the old-fashioned doorknob. The hinges squeaked loudly in the early morning silence as he pushed it open, letting a wedge of sunlight into the gloom. The shadows seemed to almost scurry away from it, like a mass of beetles when someone lifted up a rock. Motes floated through the stagnant air, and he stifled a series of sneezes.
Something was definitely different this time. Instead of a single briefcase just inside the door, there were two. But there was no girl. A fountain of acid splashed up in the back of Ramón’s throat, which he swallowed back with a groan. For twelve years, he’d been bringing girls here, and this was the first time one wasn’t waiting here for him. Sometimes they were unconscious or nearly dead from the shock, but there was always a girl. Always. For the second time that morning, he found himself grasping for an alternative plan. The Madam hadn’t prepared him for this. If he was here to pick up a girl, there was supposed to be a girl, end of story.
He looked around. Ballas couldn’t have gone far. A skeletal staircase spiraled up to a second floor, but the risers were so heaped with debris, the rail and posts so shrouded with thick strands of cobweb, it didn’t appear anyone had used it in years. He looked down instead. In the dirt, he saw wheel tracks leading from the foyer to an adjacent area that looked like an equally neglected dining room. He also saw a set of fresh shoeprints that belonged unmistakably to a pair of high heels. Nina’s, he supposed.
His stomach wrenched, and he felt a sudden urge to either vomit or shit his pants. For some reason, this was worse than seeing the actual ruined girl at the end of her freakish carnival ride. These footsteps, so close to where she’d entered with hope in her heart, were the start of her descent to a place of horrors she’d never escape. Not far from here lay the source of that eventual madness and mutilation.
A very vital part of him wanted to follow those steps, see where they led, but he refused to entertain the thought of venturing deeper into the cavernous murk, not with the thing capable of ruining the bodies and minds of young women lurking somewhere inside, not without a weapon.
You’d deserve it, old man. If the freak caught you and tortured you, it’d be payback for all the lives and bodies you helped ruin. Think about all that blood.
Long ago, when he’d been a married man and only tinkering with the dark side—a few bookies here, a few mule runs there—he’d watched his wife give birth to their son Alejandro. The doctor had given her an episiotomy to ease the passage of the baby’s head, but her delicate flesh unzipped itself clear down to her rectum. It required a lot of stitches to close up and another surgery to repair her pelvic muscles. The blood flow had been enormous, and Alejandro was crawling by the time Maria could sit without a little plastic donut underneath her.
Whatever the girls had been through was worse than that, though. It was as if Ballas fucked them with a gun and then pulled the trigger. The thought was crude, even for an old thug like him, but it was all he could think of that could come close to matching it. Damn it, enough of this.
“Hello? Mr. Ballas?” he called out, expecting an echo. But his voice didn’t seem to carry far, like the air was too flat. He walked toward the dining room, following the tracks. Somewhere, on the other end of the house, he thought he heard someone humming a tune. A woman, specifically. “Nina? That you?”
A commotion came from overhead and he looked up, but the ceiling was still shrouded in darkness. Something moved in the gloom, a pallid figure like some kind of strange acrobat, but it was moving too fast for him to know for sure. Certainly, that wasn’t a person. It couldn’t be Ballas, could it?
Would you feel better if it wasn’t? Ramón decided it was probably best to shut down this line of thinking entirely. Get out of here. Just grab the cases of cash and go. Tell the Madam that this time, a girl hadn’t survived the ordeal of the Ballas house and he buried her before coming back. It was amazing they’d made it this far without a body to bury. Even if it wasn’t true, it would be true enough before too long. No way would that girl live much longer without a doctor.
Something white fluttered down in front of his face, and he leaped back with a scream, fearing it was some enormous spider or mutant moth. It took a few seconds for his fevered mind to figure out it was just a folded piece of paper attached to fishing line.
But what’s at the other end of that fishing line? Don’t look up don’t look up . . .
It had the words “Dearest Driver” scrawled in shaky script on the front above a pair of smudged red lip prints. He had no way of knowing for sure if they were Nina’s, but he had a feeling they were. Swallowing more acid from his tortured stomach, he snatched the paper off the line and unfolded it. More shaky lettering, in barely legible scrawls of ink.
I have bin a VERY VERY good special girl and I have desided 2 stay take the money and DON’T COME BACK
Below were more words, but someone violently scratched them out. Ramón thought he could make out a few of the letters, though. The rest he filled in with context.
Tell my mom
Ramón could imagine the sadist holding her captive catching her trying to write those words and snatching the paper away, perhaps torturing her even more for her disobedience. As dreadful and disturbing as the short note was, he realized what it really meant. She was still alive. And Ballas intended to buy her. But why?
“Get out,” something whispered only inches above his head. He hadn’t intended to look up—didn’t want to—but his instincts betrayed him, the way the instinct to breathe will eventually betray someone underwater, even if it means a painful death. He couldn’t rightly describe the face he saw as human. Too many eyes. Too many teeth. A runnel of drool dripped down from its maw as it hissed at him. Ramón’s blood turned to frozen sludge, and the only warmth he felt was the piss running down his leg.
“Geehhht ouuuuut!” it screamed, spraying his face with a hot putrid mist. That broke Ramón’s paralysis, and he stumbled toward the salvation of sunlight and money.
He didn’t really think again until the Town Car was several miles down the road. Finally, not far from the entrance to the freeway, the realization of what he’d seen back at the house finally hit him. He jerked the car over to the dirt shoulder without slowing or signaling. Someone in a red Firebird blew by him with a blare of the horn and a middle finger jutting out of its open T-top. Ramón slammed on the brakes, the car grating to a stop in a cloud of dust and gravel.
His whole body trembled like he’d been handling a jackhammer, but worse was his stomach, which gave up the fight without much protest. Scrambling for the door handle, he leaned out of the car and gave a few dry heaves before spewing up a glut of bile and that morning’s coffee.
Acid burned his throat so bad it took his breath away. He hung there for a few minutes, coughing, breathing hard, thick ropes of saliva dripping from his lips, before he finally sat back up and reached forward to grab his Tums out of the glove box. He chewed up four of them and chased them with a couple swigs of bottled water. There wouldn’t be any more coffee for a while.
His eyes fell onto the battered suitcases lying in the passenger floorboard. Normally, he would have checked them for the agreed-upon fee before even leaving, but everything about this trip had gone wrong. Fumbling for the cases, he sat them in the seat and opened both of them. His heart, which had been galloping in his chest like a Kentucky thoroughbred for the last thirty minutes, stopped cold.
It didn’t take long to count it, and he knew the amount long before he finished. There was twice the money here than there normally was. Ramón Gutierrez, who was no stranger to large sums of money throughout his long and checkered career working in the slums of organized crime, was staring at a million dollars, and he could hardly form a thought in his head.
He wasn’t sure how long he gazed at the seemingly infin
ite stacks of hundred dollar bills, but when a large semi blew by hard enough to shake the car, he closed the suitcases and pulled the car back onto the road so he could think as he drove.
It wasn’t until he was about twenty miles outside the city when he allowed himself to acknowledge the question that had been in his mind since he’d seen the second suitcase sitting in that wedge of sunlight in the house.
Are you gonna give the Madam both of those suitcases?
His gloved hands tightened on the wheel. There, it was out. He would allow himself to at least consider the idea. It had a tempting shimmer to it, not unlike the one that came out of Nina’s mouth the night before when he was driving in the opposite direction. The Madam might already know about the second suitcase, but it was unlikely. Ballas only ever communicated with the brothel in writing, so unless he’d managed to have some courier jet down to Brooklyn with a letter in hand informing her that he’d intended to buy Nina with an additional half-mill, then there was no way the Madam would know. She would have told me. Unless, of course, this was some kind of sick test she was staging to see if he would take the money. But that didn’t seem much like the Madam. In thirteen years, she had never done such a thing, and he’d given her no reason not to trust him. If anything, she was too pragmatic, too insistent that she got her money and everything went strictly to plan with these Ballas deals. As far as Ramón could tell, he was the only one, other than the Madam herself, who knew about them, which meant she was likely staging something with the proceeds.
Which means it’s yours for the taking, old man. She won’t even miss it.
“No!” Ramón yelled aloud, silencing the young street hood he once was, the one in wife-beater shirts and pegged jeans and pointy boots still living in his head and popping up from time to time like that opportunistic “friend” who only came around when he needed money or a favor. The kind of “friend” he used to be when he was a kid. This was the second time in less than a day the temptation of money and escape was dangled in front of him. Ramón wasn’t a very religious man, but he was still a Catholic, still inclined toward superstition. He just had to decide if it was good superstition or bad, if God had presented him with a key to his escape, or a test of his faith and endurance of more hardship. Because if he took the money and she found out . . .
This time it’s different, hombre. She don’t know about the money. You give her the one suitcase of bills, but you keep the other, maybe put it somewhere safe. Bury it, if you have to. Then tell the Madam the girl died and you buried her.
No. No, not that. That would be a very bad idea. She might ask for evidence of the burial or for other details you’d have to make up on the spot. Best not to open yourself up to more lies and stick as close to the truth as possible. Say Ballas wanted to keep the girl, which was the truth. Even show her the note. And if the Madam wonders why Ballas didn’t pay her more, let her take it up with him.
It wasn’t his problem. He planned to be long gone by then.
And that’s half a million bucks you don’t have to split with nobody, too. Don’t forget that, old man. You can buy a whole new you with that kind of money, and have plenty left over for Baja.
For the next fifteen miles, he turned that thought around and around in his head like a piece of meat on a spit slowly browning and glistening with juices. He decided to make one more stop before going back to the Willow, this time to a particularly abandoned stretch along the river in Red Hook. This had been his turf as a punk kid slinging dope. Later on, in his early days as a grunt for the Cassini family, he’d dumped a few problem children off a few rickety piers along here, where the ghosts of industry past bowed at the feet of the enormous harbor cranes that stretched into the sky like strange god-like flamingos.
The street was dead empty at this time of day, when most of the hookers and dealers had only been in bed a few hours after their nocturnal shifts. At the end of the avenue stood a squat brick building whose windows had been covered with boards since Ramón was a young man. Before that, it was a small bottling plant for a regional soft drink no one remembered.
He pulled into the weedy lot, killed the engine and stepped out. The whine of machinery and shouts of the dock workers in the distance gave the day an injection of reality it had previously been missing. After making sure no one was watching him, he walked around to the passenger side door, his polished shoes digging into the grit, and grabbed one of the money cases. His freedom, heavy and solid in his hand.
There was a pile of old wood and other scrap behind the building, near the water. Ramón didn’t feel great about hiding the money here, but there were some nasty nails and other shards of old metal just waiting to give any greedy souls a tetanus kiss. He didn’t think many people would be rooting around in here.
You better hope not, old man. If you come back here and find someone got that case, you might as well just find someone to put a bullet in your head straight out. You don’t wanna be here when Madam starts asking questions.
He wasn’t worried, though. It was an existential sort of knowledge, but he just knew the money would be here when he came back for it, the same way he knew Nina was going to try to get him to run away with her, like all the other girls had. It was the rest of it, what was going to happen after he started running, the universe was refusing to show.
It took a little bit of doing to clear away enough of the debris to fit the suitcase. One rusty nail got hold of his jacket cuff and tore a small hole, but luckily it didn’t nick the skin. After sliding the case into the little nook he’d opened up in the debris pile, he covered it back up again as best he could and headed back around the side of the building and into the car. With any luck, he’d return to get it tonight.
Chapter 3
Madam’s Family Ties
With one final thrust of the Madam’s hips, the bronzed guido below her blew his wad in an unaffected bug-eyed grunt. She uttered the requisite amount of ecstatic moans to mingle with it, the kind that displayed ample gratitude for the dubious gift of a man’s seed. It was theater a smarter man would have undoubtedly seen through, but smarter men almost always avoided places like this.
Although she had at least broken a sweat, the sensation of the act didn’t penetrate beyond the outermost shell of her mind. Over the course of her long career in the world’s oldest profession, she’d seen no fewer than five thousand men, and nearly all of them had identical daffy expressions at climax, reminding her of someone choking to death on a piece of food. If only that had been the case for most of them, the world would be a better place.
She dismounted with the smooth grace of an old cowboy and took to her side of the bed. By the time she was a third of a way through her customary smoke, the guido was finished with his post-coital panting and sighs. Why they all got so winded, the Madam didn’t understand; she always did most of the work.
He was new to the Cassini organization. Some cousin of a cousin of Victor’s. The Madam wasn’t sure of his name, but what was the point? He was a clause in a verbal but nonetheless ironclad contract between her and Victor. The girls entertained the men and associates of the Family free of charge, and if necessary, the Madam—who stopped seeing incoming clients about five years ago—would also make herself available. The Cosa Nostra types wouldn’t tie up the business too much, but one or two weekends a month, at least half the beds in the brothel’s ten-bed house were filled with one particular brand of Dago meat. Of course, almost none of them tipped.
This weekend, they were running a full house, and none of the other girls were available when this particular guido punk arrived in the wee hours, smelling like cheap body spray and Jagermeister. The duty was left to the Madam. It was supposed to be a quick pump and go, but the kid had surprising staying power and had since overstayed his welcome, especially for a freebie. She’d have to talk to Victor about this.
None of this would have happened had she not sent the Nina bitch up to the Ballas place, but there had been little choice there. When Ballas s
ent word, you acted. There was too much money on the line to dilly-dally. Unfortunately, if the girl came back like the others had, she was likely to be out of service for at least a month, if she could be put back in at all. She didn’t even know why she kept taking the girls back, as they almost always had to be put out to pasture once it was clear their sexual functions couldn’t really be restored. Luckily, Ballas was often willing to assume complete ownership of some of his favorite girls, though at a slight discount from the original service. It saved the Madam from having to dispose of a body. She did have one man for that who worked independently from the rest of the family, and he kept quiet. Victor didn’t need such details getting back to him. It would only complicate such things, and he was ever after his cut of the pie.
The problem was Ballas had grown more and more brutal with the girls over the years, and the Madam didn’t always have a new replacement girl at the ready. Oh, there were always wayward young saleswomen trolling the streets, and most of them were former employees of the strip clubs Victor ran, but it took a special type to work for the Willow. One with the right combination of goods and desperation, and preferably without a family or someone who might complicate the Madam’s life if they came looking for their lost lamb. But Victor’s men were now on the lookout, and she hoped to have a replacement for Nina tomorrow night. In the meantime, she had to entertain this thug, with his sprayed-on tan and eyebrows waxed with almost robotic precision. A thug who was better at being a woman than she was these days.
The train of her thoughts halted when she felt his sweaty body press against hers in an attempt to snuggle. “Oh man, that was so damn good,” he muttered, kissing her shoulder. The Madam recoiled, pushing herself away from him. She had never been one for cuddling after the act. From the time she was seventeen, it had been a simple transaction and nothing more, and most men were okay with that. Some wanted to pretend they had a real girlfriend for the night, but she was upfront with them from the beginning. You came to her for the greatest fuck of your life, and then you got the fuck out.
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