Rating: NC17 for violence, murder, gunplay, adult themes. For safety’s sake, this will apply to ALL chapters. There will be no smut in this fic. There will be references, but references only, to rape, murder, mutilation in places
Copyright © January 2007 xxxevilgrinxxx
Ch 14
I didn’t trust Carl to lose the thug and I wasn’t about to wait right outside the back door in the dark where anyone could take a shot at me. I didn’t know what would come out of those back doors at me, or even if it would. A short distance away I stood hidden behind the reek of the dumpster, rotting chicken wing bones strewn across the ground, to wait.
The night air was close and stagnant, claustrophobic, and it jacked my nerves up to a high-pitched whine. Jarred and on edge, I watched the back door of the bar for any sight of Carl, getting pissed off at the thought that he wouldn’t show up.
Deep breath, I close my eyes for a second and try to let go of the nerved up tension. Cold, I need to be cold. The 9mm presses its steel reassurance into my back and time slips. I was 16, and it wasn’t a government issue 9mm but a piece of shit Saturday night special on a night that changed my life. Two roads diverged. I was taking a cut across country back to that path.
Everything in me tightened and flexed, and I loosened the joints in my neck, my body remembering a fluid street fighters’ grace that the agent in me wanted forgotten. I looked around, at the trunk of my car jutting out from the bushes where I had left her, at the black slab that was the rear door of the bar. I didn’t see Marcus anywhere but I knew that I wouldn’t see him anyway, unless he wanted to be seen. I felt him though, a tickling at the base of my spine that made me want to find a better place to hide. If I was anyone else I would have.
The wait was an annoyance but it gave me the time I needed to get my thinking straight. I thought about Danno, and all those women, and wondered. Did Danno know what Anna Maria was? Had he paid her for her time? Had he paid all of them? I had once wondered what sort of woman would tolerate him; it appeared I had my answer. It didn’t shine a nice light on Danno at all, but there was a huge difference in paying for it, and killing for it.
That was the cold realistic answer, the answer right on the surface. I also saw another side of Danno, the side that loved every single one of those women, even if he wasn’t a good enough man to love just one of them right. Another man might laugh, but I knew that I was a romantic; I believe in love, always have. It just doesn’t always come the way the movies tell you it does. Maybe Danno, a new guy in town, paid for those women’s time, but I think that by the end he loved at least one of them. So much so that it got him killed.
A sick yellow light spilled out as the black hole at the back of the bar opened, just enough to let a shape slip out. It was Carl, and he was alone. He had said he would lose the gimp and I guess he had, although I didn’t trust it would stay that way. I stayed where I was and watched him dodge puddles as he crossed the parking lot but no one else followed him out.
Carl’s head darted from side to side as he searched for me. A small circle of light from my penlight flicked across the ground and Carl startled, his head swiveling back to the doorway before he scurried across the distance to stand beside the dumpster with me. His feet shuffled across the gravel as I swung him around out of sight of the bar. Carl shrank at the sound of my voice; no more being polite. “I’m not going to fuck around with you Carl, I don’t have the time.”
Carls’ voice shook as he worked up a hollow outrage I would have laughed at on any other day. “What the fuck do you want, ‘Danno’.”
My hard smile unnerved him; Carl was fat, old and afraid. I had something on him and could lean on him pretty hard; there was a lot that Carl probably didn’t know. A finger stabbed hard into his chest and shut him up. “You should be more worried about what I’ve got on you.” His eyes narrowed into slits; I could be just one more person with a piece of him, or I could be something even more dangerous. Carl went with the second option and all of the fight went out of him in a heartbeat. He swallowed and waited for me to lay out why I had called him out here.
“Danno was a DEA agent, did any of you dumb fucks know that when you killed him?” My question, my implication of Carl, was deliberate. I wanted to tie him into whatever had happened here; the drug charge alone wasn’t likely to frighten him too much, although a return to prison likely would. Carl was a little old to be fighting off rape in the showers.
Carl reacted as I expected him to. “I didn’t…!” I spun Carl off balance and slammed him into the stinking dumpster, my fist knotted in his greasy shirt and my gun rammed in his face.
“You want to keep your voice down, Carl. I might be able to see to it that you spend the rest of your life as some big Mexican’s bitch in prison, but I have a feeling that those fuckers you sling drinks for might have different plans for you. So you’re going to shut up, and you’re going to listen to me. When I’m done, you are going to answer me.” The muzzle of my gun traced patterns across Carls’ pale face as he nodded. I felt nothing but cold, as a lifetime of experience came flooding back to me, everything I had run from.
“I want to know where you fit in. I want to know where the cage is, and what the procedure is for taking the women out. Lastly, I want to know how the women are selected.” I didn’t leave any room for debate. We might be standing in the festering reek of a dumpster but as far as Carl was concerned we were in a chilly interrogation room downtown.
Carl stayed quiet for a moment as he thought through his options. He had none, and he knew it. “I didn’t fucking know it would get this bad.” He whined, and I had to restrain myself; I wanted to shoot him right then and there. “It was just broads at first, I mean, that’s not such a big deal, right? They got into the US, and they paid for it, no big deal. I don’t know when it went wrong, what the fuck happened.”
He ran his hand over his face, full of remorse, not for the women that ended up dead, but for his own implication in it. I stored up the hatred I felt for him in that moment; I would need it, and poked him in the chest with the 9mm again. “I’m just the bartender; I don’t have anything to do with anything else.”
“The rest, quickly.” I didn’t know how much time I had, but I didn’t think Carl could go long without being missed, someone would come out looking for him, and I didn’t want him exposed if I could use him.
“The cage is a barred room off the corridor beside the johns. The women there aren’t allowed out on the floor anymore, they’re just used for strippers at that point. A van picks them up out back.” My jaw muscles clenched and I lowered the gun before I just shot him. A hard look, I had one more question I wanted an answer to. “Rodr….there’s a guy that comes around every few days and takes pictures of the new girls.”
Everything in me went ice cold. Those pictures. Whoever they sent in would sell a few, to give him legitimate cover to take a lot more pictures. Those picking out the women would never even have to come into the bar. Carl had let slip Rodriguez’ name. He would likely collect the pictures and those would be used by whoever was behind this to pick who would be next.
It was all so cold, so distant. These women, someone’s daughters, meant nothing to these monsters. When I was a kid there was a girl on our street that had been raped. I never forgot that timid look that she had from that moment on, nothing but a hollow shell left, destroyed from the inside out. My hands clenched in fists and I fought not to scream out the hate I felt, as I fought not to blow the back of Carl’s head all over the filthy dumpster.
I tightened my hold on both Carl and the gun. I wanted to kill him. To just empty the clip into him, but I had to keep Carl quiet. My voice dropped low and cold as I fought to not do bloody murder. “You’ll go back to the bar. If you say a word, if I even think you have, prison will be the very least of your worries.” Carls’ eyes widened as he took in my expression and knew that anything I did to him would be worse than what those he worked for could ever do.
I let him go and he ran, stumbling, back to the bar. He wouldn’t say a word about this; anything he said would get him killed, and with me there was a slim chance that he would live. Carl was stupid, but he wasn’t that stupid; he would do whatever would save his skin. He would be quiet.
I stewed in my hatred for a little while longer, and watched the back door of the bar. Carl had just gone back and I waited to see if the thug would come out. There was no guarantee. I didn’t think Carl would talk, so I had to wait for something else.
The wait is hard, but paid off, as the back door opens again and the lone thug stepped out to light a cigarette. I looked past him, at Marcus as he stepped out from behind one car and vanished behind another. If he hadn’t intended me to see him, I wouldn’t have; I take it for the signal it is and creep forward along the line of scrub brush behind the dumpster. I don’t know where Marcus is now but I don’t need to know. Everything is crystal clear.
Marcus moved between cars once more, openly this time, close enough to startle the thug by the door. Before he has a chance to turn back to the closed bar door at his back I clip him at the base of the neck with the butt of my gun and he goes down in a boneless heap. A gun appeared in Marcus’ hand to finish him off but I wave him off. His eyes narrowed in suspicion for a moment until he realized that I wasn’t going soft, I just had other plans. As Marcus locked eyes with me, I saw fear in his, for just a second. On another day I’d have time to think about what he saw, but not yet.
The thug took a hard ride in the trunk of my car, down through dark streets, into the warren of abandoned warehouses. We said nothing. The thug didn’t put up much of a fight until I pushed him across the warehouse floor, where he fell in a fetid pool of water and shook himself fully awake. He made a run at me, and maybe I could have just shot him. That would have been faster, it would have been cleaner, but I didn’t want fast and clean. I wanted someone to pay.
All of the hatred I had bottled up all night I let loose. A lifetime of seeing shit nobody should ever see, of seeing people hurt and abused. No court of law could ever make these people pay enough. It would never be enough. My fist smashed into his throat and I saw Danno crying. I hit him again and saw those women, and kept seeing them with every hit.
He landed a few punches but I felt none of them, as I proceeded to beat him to death, possessed of a furious righteous anger. Marcus didn’t intervene; he kept his own weapon out while he watched the door. I left him there, to rot in the fetid water, just as all the women had been left there, and drove Marcus back to the diner, where he went his own way.