by Gabi Moore
“There’s not going to be a new shipment.”
“Boss?”
“I’m speaking to some people. Our old connections. We’re going back to coke.”
This time the grumbles around the table weren’t confused, but angry. I leant back in my chair and smiled to myself as I waited for their bickering to die down. I liked watching it dawn on them that they weren’t in Kansas anymore. Coke worked. Coke was cheap, it sold itself, and we already had the network in place to distribute. My father’s squeamishness about it had been hampering the organization for long enough.
I wasn’t in the mood to argue though. The meeting tussled on for a few minutes more but then we adjourned, and I made a mental note to make sure a little accident befell rat-faced Jerry. The details weren’t important here. My first move was to make sure everyone understood that I was the one calling the shots. That I wasn’t my father, and they should thank their lucky stars I wasn’t. I could wrangle the admin later – for now, I wanted to make sure they all understood that things had changed, and they sure as hell better change too, if they wanted a place in the new order.
They ambled out and left me with my expensive new desk. I tried leaning back into my chair and putting my feet up onto it. They would come around. Every last doddering old fool. They had no choice. So why did I feel so on edge?
Evie. She kept popping into my head. Yes, it was a pity. Yes, I wish she had come to her senses and taken me up on my offer to manage the new lines I was setting up. I will never understand how whores like Evie will turn down someone like me, but willingly fuck losers like that John asshole for nothing. Her loss though.
I mean, it was a pity, but it was mostly her problem. Women like her were hard to come by. But I still had options. I flopped my feet back to the ground and grabbed my phone. I dialed some numbers.
“Mellissa? How are you baby? I miss you.”
I listened intently as the silky voice came through the phone.
Melissa was young, and a little naive, but she had a pair of tits that could convince any man to do something stupid. Melissa was no Evie. She was a Spanish beauty pageant drop out with notions of marrying a wealthy drug kingpin. But she was cute and knew what she wanted out of me, and what I wanted out of her. Within fifteen minutes I heard her car pull up outside.
She came inside wearing one of those pink tracksuit bottoms with the diamonds on the ass cheeks spelling out words. And heels. And big dangly earrings and fake pink nails and a little tank top that was one size too small and pulling too tight over her belly. The whole getup was tacky as hell but whatever, she was still fucking hot. I buzzed her in, and she shut the door behind her, and was now just standing there waiting for me to tell her what to do. Good. I liked that.
She opened her mouth to speak.
“Your shoes are filthy, Melissa. Take them off,” I said to interrupt her. She did, taking her time to set aside each glossy pink patent pump with the heels turned to the side so they wouldn’t scuff the new floors I just had installed. She was short without her heels. A good little mafia girl, asks no questions, knows her place.
“Now take off the rest of it.”
She gave a self-satisfied smile and began to slowly peel her shirt off, lifting up her flat-ironed hair with it and then tossing the tank top aside. Like a stripper.
“Not like that, Melissa. Not slutty. Have some fucking class,” I snapped at her. She didn’t bat an eyelid. Like a switch had been turned on, she suddenly became demure, moving more slowly now, more hesitantly.
“Like this, pappy? This is OK?” she said in her best schoolgirl voice.
I hated myself for being so fucking predictable. I was a man who had impeccable taste. I liked good whiskey and expensive cars and fine tailoring. But god damn if I didn’t like my women cheap as they came. It wasn’t the fact that she was playing innocent. I didn’t care about that shit. I just wanted her to obey. I liked seeing her like that, completely subservient to me. Very nearly humiliated.
Evie would have told me to shove it. No way in hell she would be writhing around in front of me right now, pouting and squeezing her tits together for the promise of cash. It was so easy to degrade women like this, when they went so far along the way to do it themselves. But I didn’t want it to be easy. I wanted to deserve it. To win it.
“Stop dancing around and go to the corner.”
“Pappy…?”
“Just shut up. Go stand in the corner and bend over” I said. The brief look of fright on her face instantly had me hard. She padded over to the corner and stood there like a naughty child, looking over her shoulder at me.
“Bend over,” I said slowly.
She dutifully leant forward, lifting her bubble ass up and towards me, exposing a thin band of cropped black fuzz between two full cheeks.
“Spread yourself.”
She obeyed.
In that moment I felt a crushing sadness. Evie was gone. Gone before I could have her. A waste. A missed opportunity.
“Evie,” I whimpered.
She twisted her head around to see if she had heard correctly.
“Don’t look at me!”
My cock felt almost painfully hard. I unzipped and let my trousers crumple to the ground.
“Evie, I’ve wanted to do this for such a long time,” I said.
I could tell Melissa was uncomfortable, but she held her tongue.
“I knew that this is what was always meant to happen. I knew you always wanted me, didn’t you?” I said.
She took a moment.
“Yes, Joseph. This is what I’ve always wanted.”
I stroked my stiff cock idly, and stared at that cleft raised up to me. I grabbed each of her ass cheeks and stroked the tip of my dick down then slowly up through the damp slit, tasting her body, feeling its soft, silky crevices.
“Shhh, I know baby, I know what you want, and now the time has come and you’re finally gonna get it…”
I leaned forward and breathed down onto the back of her neck, smelling her hair and the warmth of her skin.
“But once I start, baby, I’m not going to stop. If you scream, I’m going to have to kill you, do you understand baby?”
“Yes Joey,” she mumbled, and bent even further forward.
Chapter 14 - Jack
I knew Mickey was a key player. Not muscle and not admin, but the guy who coordinated it all.
I had some idea of how the organization liked to stack people like him, and I knew that it was only a matter of time before his underlings started noticing that their boss wasn’t answering his calls anymore. I didn’t know how long I had till they found out he was gone. But I knew that even when they did, it would take them some time to organize to send a task team after me. Little Joey Valenti was ruthless, but he belonged at Paris fashion week, not heading a nation-wide covert network of drug traffickers. I barely knew the guy and even I could tell that he wouldn’t respond well to having an important person like Mickey picked off.
In any case, I had to get to her as soon as possible. They would be hunting her down right this instant, and I didn’t have a moment to spare. I had to stop them before they realized Mickey was dead and knew to expect me. There might easily be three or four of them; the element of surprise might be the only thing I had in my favor.
I thought it was strange that they saw her as a threat. The woman had run off halfway across the country to start a new life. She had put daffodils in her window boxes, for Christ’s sake. I didn’t see how she was a threat to the organization’s stability any more than that asshole kid Joey, but what do I know. She must have some pretty juicy intel.
I sped along the highway, arms outstretched on the wheel and the sun in my scowling eyes. I picked up my phone and dialed a number.
“Hey buddy,” I said to the voice that picked up. An old friend, one of the few in this snake pit I actually trusted. He was ex-military, a reformed killer who now had a family and a Labrador. He was the bravest man I knew. And having the balls to a
ctually quit the organization was the reason I thought so.
“My man. Long time,” he said.
“Mike. I need your help.”
The line was silent.
“Where are you? I’ll come meet you.”
I gave him the address of a diner I knew I’d be hitting in an hour or two. Mike had all kinds of useful connections. He would be able to tell me whether Evie’s car had passed through the massive tollbooth on the interstate or not. He had eyes and ears all over. He had bugs and trackers and kids who would hack things for weed money. But when he told me he had men on the ground who had seen Evie just a day earlier at a gas station a few miles out from where I was, I nearly swerved the car off the road.
Mike and I had done a few hits together back in the day. I’ll never know why he was always so keen to help me out of a spot when he had long since retired, but he did, and I wasn’t about to ask any questions. She was tough, I knew that, but she was also pregnant. I didn’t even want to think about the danger she was in.
By the time I arrived at the diner, I couldn’t suppress a grin to see him standing outside in the parking lot. I parked, but he was already climbing into the passenger seat.
“No cherry pie?” I said.
“Just drive,” he said with a mischievous smile. God, was I glad to have someone like him in my camp.
“She’s probably at an old farm house a little West of here, an old place that used to belong to somebody’s cousin or auntie or something. Your guys are on her tail. We don’t have much time” he said. I was flabbergasted.
“How the hell do you know all that?”
He smiled and shrugged.
“Let’s just say I’ve been waiting for little Evie to come to her senses for a long time now. I’m glad she’s broken away from those people at last. You’re not the only one who’s been following her…”
“I don’t understand.”
“Evie knows something. Something important. If she’s not going to put that intel to good use, doesn’t mean I can’t, right?”
“But you’ve left the business, too,” I said.
He tapped the side of his nose with his finger.
“Just keeping a lookout for opportunity, that’s all” he said and laughed. “Anyway, I might ask you the same thing, but I have a feeling I know the answer.”
I tightened my fists on the wheel.
“She’s pregnant, Mike.”
He gave a low, long whistle and shook his head.
“Jacky, my boy, you surprise me sometimes,” he said at last. We drove on in silence for a while.
“Take this left here, it’s coming up in a second. We need to find her and run. If they’ve sent who I think they’ve sent, they won’t think to look here for a while, but still.”
Mike had clean blue eyes, an uncomplicated face and a thin, serious mouth. He didn’t look much like an angel, but he sure as hell felt like one in that moment.
“You uh, you try some of this new stuff kicking around? This Pink Kisses?” he said as I steered the car off the main road and into a side street that was shaded over with trees.
“Christ, Mike, I thought you were retired from all this,” I laughed.
“Just following the news, man. Used to be the Valenti’s ran the tightest ship in this country. Now the people on their corners are dropping like flies and they’re selling some hippy sex drug or something? Man I feel old.”
“It’s no big deal,” I said, and leaned forward to navigate the road’s bumps and sudden turns. It didn’t look like anyone lived out here, but I trusted Mike. “And it’s not a hippy sex drug.”
He turned completely in his seat to look incredulously at me.
“Aw hell. You have tried it.”
“Have not.”
He began laughing.
“See what I mean? It’s always a surprise with you, always something I never expected. Evie gave it you?”
Just the sound of her name seemed like a magic code word that activated a sore spot right in the center of my chest.
“Just forget it, you know me, I’m not into that kind of stuff—”
“Dude!” he slapped his knee. “You have to get me some.”
“What? No. That shit’s dangerous.”
“You’re fine.”
“Yeah but…”
“So you did take it, huh?” he said, laughing again.
I’m six and a half feet tall and have made my living terminating some of the most dangerous men that have walked this town’s streets. When I’m on a detail, my life and the life of those on my job depends on me never doubting, never wavering, not even for a second. But something about fucking Mike always made me blush like a schoolgirl. I couldn’t help but smile.
“I hear it can make you fuck for hours,” he said.
I was beginning to wish we’d get to the house already.
“Does it? Did it make you like, super empathetic? Come on, don’t be bashful.”
The truth is I didn’t know what to tell him. The trip I’d had with Evie was drifting off into the past one day at a time, and yet it still glowed in my mind’s eye like it happened yesterday, like some kind of lynch pin on which everything else turned.
What could I say? That sometimes I had dreams that we were psychically connected somehow? That I just knew somewhere inside me that our child would be different, because of what we’d done together? That I wasn’t addicted to the substance itself, but to her perfect, heavenly, mind-shattering, totally game-changing cunt? No, of course not. So I said nothing.
“Hold up, OK slow right down here… see those houses on the hill? She’ll be in the fourth from the left,” he said and pointed to a dilapidated line of row houses, all abandoned and overgrown with grass.
My heart sank.
I hated that she had to do this. Come out here in the middle of nowhere. My mind flashed to her window box of daffodils. Was she afraid? I leaned over the dash to peer up the hill as I drove slowly into a clearing and tried to make out any signs of life.
“Looks dead to me,” I said. He nodded.
“Park here.”
The car tires crunched over the gravel, shot through with grass and weeds, and I listened to the silence after I shut the engine off. The fourth house from the left was partially boarded up, and painted in a chalky green paint with crumbling bannisters. The wind was so still the trees just hung there like that, like faded paintings.
I tucked my weapon into my holster and took a cautious step out of the vehicle. No fresh tracks on the ground, from either car tires or feet. No sign that anyone was here at all. Mike and I stood staring at the building, then we walked up, flanking the sides of the staircase to the main entrance, our eyes scanning the other houses. No open windows. Hell, one of them didn’t even have front steps anymore.
Mike gestured for me to go ahead while he trailed behind me. It was like old times, when we still worked together. With cat-quiet feet I took the stairs one at a time and peered inside. The glass of the front door was completely shattered through, but it was so dim inside I could scarcely make anything out. My eyes adjusted. An empty, dusty front room leading into a kitchen. I cracked the door and stepped inside, Mike guarding me close behind.
We both pricked our ears as the tiniest creak came out from the other room. Then I saw her. Like an eerie, slow-motion ghost, she walked out from the other room, and stood square in front of us both, both arms at her side, a gun in one hand and only a torn silky bathrobe knotted over her full breaths. I had never seen any woman with that facial expression before. Her hair was hanging loose and wild, and she stood tall and fierce looking, like she might spontaneously combust at any second. Her pupils were so big the color of her eyes disappeared completely.
“Evie? Oh god, Evie, are you OK? We have to get out of here,” I said, but her stare shut me up instantly.
It was like she was boring right into my soul. Like we were back in the container again. A deep shudder went through me. Out the periphery of my vision I strained to
make out the plump bulge of her breast, the shape of her legs under that flimsy robe. I would have given anything to fuck her at that moment, right there and then, on those dusty floorboards with that untamed look on her face.
“Upped the bounty on my head, I see,” she said quietly, but her whole voice seemed to fill the room.
“It’s not like that, Evie. They’ll be coming after you. Joey wants you dead. You’re not safe here, you have to come with me.”
“And am I safe with you?” she snapped.
I took a step closer. I just wanted to put my arms around her. To hold her again. But even in the dim light I could sense her finger tightening around the trigger.
“Evie, there’s no time, please, I can protect you.”
She stared stony faced at me. I took another step towards her and she drew her weapon higher, filling the distance between us.
“Drop it!”
I spun around to see Mike charging through the door towards Evie. She took aim at him but he grabbed her wrist, twisted it violently to the side and sent her skidding towards him. He clutched her tightly and jabbed the barrel of the gun into her ribs. She screamed as he yanked her hair back to pin her closer to him.
“Sorry, buddy, I hate doing this man…” he said.
Fuck. No. This couldn’t be happening.
Before I could understand what was unfolding before my eyes I heard car doors slam outside and ran to see three men leaping out of a car parked beside ours.
“You fucking asshole! You set us up!” I hissed. He had Evie pinned in front of him as hostage, and I couldn’t have made a clear shot if I wanted to. I heard footsteps clattering up the front steps and took aim at the three who came tearing into the room.
“Step back! Step the fuck back!” I yelled.
The three tried to take a hasty appraisal of what they were seeing. In a heartbeat I turned to see Evie and Mike scuffle, and like magic she had twisted back and down to the side, pulling out of his clutches and elbowing him back up into the nose. He cried out but held her firm, and she delivered another blow. Everyone broke out into confused screaming. But Evie had already wormed her way free and had gained control of his weapon, still in his hands. When he finally squeezed the trigger, it went ringing out.
