Heartless

by Al-Saadiq Banks

  Just as she steps through the double doors, her Bentley cruises around the path and stops short in front of her. Luckily she has on her sunglasses because the bright rims reflect brilliantly. The red interior demands attention. She’s nicknamed the car “Bloody Murder.”

  The valet attendant gets out and holds the door for her to get in. “Thank you,” she says as she seats herself. He gently closes the door, and she cruises off.

  She thought the Mercedes, SL was the ultimate automobile until owning this one. The attention she gets in this is like the SL to the tenth power. After driving this around, she now sees the SL as an introduction to the Big League. This car here is the real deal. The Mercedes she looks at as a low-key get-around car and that is what she plans to do with it.

  What makes her feel even better about this car is that she bought it on her own. Originally she wasn’t expecting to buy it herself. The word “no” sounded completely foreign to her coming from his mouth. Him saying no to her and his cold distant demeanor is starting to worry her.

  Ever since he bailed her out, they haven’t been intimate, not one time. In no way does she believe the bail money put a dent in his savings. She believes that Tony has gotten into his head and turned him against her. She has plans of showing him that she doesn’t need him, and hopefully he will fear losing her and come to his senses.

  She now worries that her game isn’t working because he hasn’t called her not once since the day she pulled off on him at the dealership. She was sure that by now he would be calling her off the hook. Normally when she’s angry with him, he calls her back to back, trying to get on her good side but not this time. Now that her rage has vanished, she’s now concerned with his actions. She has a gut feeling that she has lost control over him.

  Storm flies along Route 280, doing more than half of the dashboard. The speedometer wavers between one hundred and ten and one hundred and fifteen of the two hundred mile per hour maximum. The music that rips through the speakers rejuvenates her soul yet has tears trickling down her face. This song reminds her of her childhood and gives her a sense of closeness to her parents and her brother that she hasn’t felt in so long. On Saturday mornings, her father would walk through the house singing this song.

  “Someone asked the question?” she shouts with Kirk Franklin. With the way she’s bopping to the beat, no one would ever expect her to be listening to gospel music. This CD is her little secret that she keeps tucked in the stash. She pulls this CD out whenever she is missing her family. This is one of the few things that she holds as a memory of them and over the years it has managed to help her get by.

  “You’re the reason why we sing,” she sings along with the chorus. She sings as if she’s a part of the concert. “I sing because I’m happy,” she shouts. “You’re the reason why I sing.”

  She peeks into the mirror and wipes the tears that are dripping from underneath her sunglasses. She’s happy she can’t see her eyes right now because she knows they are overflowing. The song and the memories of her family coupled with her menstrual period has her a wreck right now. Her emotions are all over the place. The sadness she feels in her heart is addicting. She replays the song over and over again until her face is flooded with tears.

  It takes all of twenty minutes for Storm to reach Toy and Wendy’s spot. She pulls to the back of the house and parks. Before getting out, she wipes away any trace of her crying. She gets out with a lively step that in no way reflects her true feelings today. Before she can get to the top of the short flight of stairs, the backdoor is opened partially. She slips through the entrance and the door is slammed behind her. She daps the man at the door as she passes him. He stands at his post.

  Storm has made a business decision to emulate the house that she visited where she originally bought the Mexican women from. She even has the Santeria setup at the door to make the women feel at home. Although she has no knowledge of it, she allowed them to set it up at their request. They claim they need it there for the protection of evil, as if selling sex for money is not evil in itself.

  She thought long and hard and decided that having the girls working the house in between events makes perfect business sense. It’s a way for her to keep money coming in every day. She figured, what’s the use of having access to everyday income and not take advantage of it? As soon as she opened the doors for business, they’ve been selling sex faster than candy is sold at a candy store next to an elementary school. She has no idea how the patrons find out about the house with no advertisement. The power of word of mouth has tricks coming in by the handfuls.

  The Mexican women lounge around on the leather couches looking dead tired. Their faces are worn out, so one can only imagine how worn out their bodies are from being abused by many strangers. No matter how tired they are they never complain. They just go along with what is required of them.

  In total, there are seven of them. Since the original purchase she’s added three more to her roster. Their work day ended an hour ago and now they are just waiting for her permission to retire for the night. Together they averaged about twenty tricks apiece. Some more, some less.

  She feels they’ve been short changing themselves, so she’s raised the price. At sixty dollars a trick, she makes about nine grand a day on a regular weekday. On the weekends that nine doubles. Their clientele during the week are mainly the local drug dealers. On the weekends, the Mexicans who do work for hire all week spend their hard earned money on the women. With them being so far away from home and lonely, this house serves as their home away from home.

  Storm walks past them without acknowledging them. In the dining room at the table are Wendy and Beeba. They count through stacks of money like bank tellers. She will never allow them to lower their stock and turn tricks for a lousy sixty bucks but she has other work for them.

  The two of them run the house and keep track of the finances. She moved Beeba and Wendy into her old apartment. Toy now has her own apartment. The Mexicans live in this house but upstairs. Storm paid the tenants upstairs to relocate, so she can have access to the whole house. At first she was hesitant about leaving them alone, thinking they would escape, but just as Esto promised, she’s never had a problem with any one of them making a break for it. They have too much at stake to even consider it.

  Wendy stacks the money into a bag and hands it over to Storm. “Today was a good day. That’s eleven grand.”

  Storm nods her head with satisfaction. “Very good day.”

  He’s listened detail by detail to the adventure that Angelica calls her life. He’s mind-blown to say the least. “So, let me ask you,” he says while looking over the table at Angelica. “With you being a woman, you had no compassion for these women? Holding them captive and forcing them to sell sex for your selfish gain?”

  “Honestly, I really didn’t see it like that,” she replies. “I only saw it from a business standpoint, and besides I treated them better than they were being treated. If you ask me, it was a blessing for them to be working for me as opposed to those other guys,” she says with sincerity.

  “You see, this was nothing new to me. At a young age, I was appointed to being the overseer of a bunch of girls. My job then was to watch over the money,” she says while staring into space. She thinks back to her childhood and the vision plays clearly in her mind.

  “It was a rainy summer day in 2003 and me and three other girls from the church were hanging around in the house of our preacher. We weren’t there with him. We hung there with his daughter while he and his wife were at work. She was seventeen and we all looked up to her like a big sister.

  “I was the youngest, and I was only eleven. The other girls were already twelve years old, but I was more advanced than them, so she made me her second in command, like her lieutenant. Her dad left at three on the dot for work every day. No matter what we were doing at three-ten p.m., we made our way over to their house.

  “She
told us if anyone ever asked us what we were doing over there, we were to tell them we had to work on our project. No one else was allowed to come with us. She explained to us the importance of trust and how she trusted us. We were honored. We never really worked on a project though. That was just the secret code for what it was that we were really doing.

  “When I think back to those days, I can still hear the thunder roaring loudly as if I was there. The house was dark and the only source of light was coming from the floor model television set. The moaning coming from the television was so loud it was like the porn stars were in the room with us. All eyes are on me, not the porn, and I’m the center of attention.

  “While I was sitting back on the couch, with both feet sinking into the cushions, Valerie, the preacher’s daughter is on her knees. I was the project that she was working on at the time. She worked on me with her hands and her mouth and sometimes both. She knew all the spots to hit to make my ‘water fall,’ as she called it.

  “It was with her the first time I ever squirted. I was too young to know the difference at the time, but she always told me I would be special because I could do something that most girls could not. In my mind all I did was pee on myself and was embarrassed about it. She told me I was her favorite because I could do that special thing but that didn’t remove the shame. She worked on all of us one by one every day and no matter what she tried the other girls would never squirt. “It brought out jealousy in them toward me that eventually led them to ridicule me.

  “Two hours would pass, and just before it was time for her mother to come home from work, she would let us all shower. She said what we were doing was top secret and we had to clean any trace of it. After every one was all showered, it was my job to supervise.“Valerie would ask. ‘Angel, did everybody wash their money?’

  “The money was code word for the private parts. Sometimes she would call it money and other times she would call it ‘our pocketbook.’ My job was to watch each girl as they showered and make sure they cleaned their pocketbooks good. She told us grown folks could smell that fragrance a mile away. She also threatened us if anyone found out we could all go to prison for life. With that in mind, I made sure all the money was clean.

  “So, none of this is new to me. As a kid I was taught that the woman’s private part was equivalent to money and I have never seen it otherwise.”

  He looks at Angelica with water in his eyes after hearing such a heartbreaking story.

  Storm hands Wendy and Beeba their weekly pay of two thousand dollars. They accept it graciously. She pays Mud and his friend two thousand a week as well. Their jobs are to stand at the front and back doors all day as security. The hardest part of their job is roughing up a Mexican dude who has had way too many beers to drink and may have gotten unruly.

  She makes her way into the living room to pay the girls. She pays them weekly as well. Giving them four thousand in one shot at the end of the week seems so much better to them than receiving sixty dollars a trick. It seems to take forever to build up four grand, sixty dollars at a time. So happy to have so much money in hand, they don’t realize that their turning many tricks for free.

  Storm’s weekly expenses total at thirty-eight thousand after paying everybody. After it’s all said and done she’s left with a minimum of forty-thousand for herself on a slow week. Last week was her best week of the three, wherein she profited fifty-five grand. The monthly rent for the spot and the utilities only set her back another two grand.

  As Storm is handing Araceli her pay, the sound of loud voices at the back door startles her. She runs to the kitchen and peeks at the backdoor where Mud is standing, blocking the door. The image of another man trying to get past him is alarming.

  Mud pushes the man with all of his might, and the man doesn’t even budge. “Fam, I told you we closed!”

  “Fuck that!” the man shouts. “Where my fucking wife at?”

  Storm looks closer and realizes that the man is Beeba’s husband, Jay. She rushes to the door. At her heels is Mud’s buddy, the other enforcer. He’s coming to Mud’s aid.

  Jay spots Storm, and with rage, he forces Mud out of the way. He rushes her like a mad bull. “You bitch! Where’s my fucking wife?”

  His hands are already clenched ready to wrap them around her neck. Just as he gets within arm’s reach of her, Mud’s buddy steps in between them with his gun drawn. He strikes Jay across the forehead with his gun and he falls flat on his back. The man dives on top of him, sitting on his stomach. He places the nose of his gun right in between Jay’s eyes.

  Right before he squeezes the trigger Mud pushes him off. Mud aims his gun precisely. The tug of war over who pulls the trigger is all due to Storm. She’s informed them that they get a bonus of five thousand if they have to shoot someone in the line of duty. If by chance they have to smash someone, meaning kill them, that’s an automatic bonus of ten grand. Both of them have been hoping for this day and want their hands on the ten grand.

  Beeba and the rest of the women come running into the room due to the uproar. When Jay sees his wife accompanied by half-naked women, he becomes livid, forgetting all about the gun that is aimed at his head. They fight to restrain him.

  Beeba races over and lays flat on top of her husband like a shield. “No!” she cries. “Please! No!” she pleads.

  Both Mud and his buddy aim around her, trying to get a clean shot at his head. “Don’t shoot,” Storm says. She has no sympathy for the man, but she doesn’t want Beeba hurt in the process. Also she doesn’t want them to murder him in here and blow up her spot. The last thing she needs is the cops shutting her business down and her getting another murder charge.

  “Don’t shoot,” she commands as she pulls Beeba from the floor. Both of the guns are still aimed at his head. Beeba is crying like a baby as she tries to get away from Storm. “Rough him up and teach him a lesson,” she instructs as she leads Beeba away.

  The abuse can be heard from the other room. Beeba cries harder with each whimper she hears from her husband. She feels responsible for all of this and the guilt is unbearable. She wonders how he knew to find her here.

  Not once does she think that the OnStar navigation on her truck is what led him here. She misses her husband dearly but was having the time of her life, so she never went home to him. They would talk on the phone throughout the day and that only made her miss him even more. She finally admitted that she was with Storm but never mentioned any of the other details. He begged and begged her to come home and after no success he finally made his way here.

  Storm walks back into the kitchen and stops the beating. Jay lays there a bloody pulp, both eyes closed shut, the same way Beeba’s eyes were when she rescued her. She stands over Jay, who looks up to her helplessly. “The only reason I spared your life is because of her,” she says, pointing to Beeba.

  “If you ever come near my business again I will let them loose to do what I should’ve let them do tonight.” She helps him onto his feet. “Now leave before I change my mind.”

  Jay looks to Beeba with desperation. “Come on.” His eyes are glassy, but the blood that’s leaking from them conceals the tear buildup.

  Beeba stands in confusion. A part of her wants to go, but she fears the ass whooping she will get once he gets her home. Storm looks to Beeba. “You going with him?”

  They all eagerly await her answer. She shakes her head from side to side. “Not right now, Jay. Just go home and calm down first.”

  “Let’s go,” Jay demands. The tears are now trickling down his face.

  “You heard her,” Storm says. “Now go!”

  Mud and his friend grab the man by his arms and shove him toward the back door. Mud places his gun onto the man’s temple. “Get the fuck in your car and get the fuck outta here. Cause any more ruckus and she not gone be able to stop me,” he threatens. Mud opens the door and they shove the man down the flight of stairs and s
lam the door shut.

  Jay sits around for a few minutes wiping the bloody tears from his eyes. They watch from the window as his Porsche cruises out of the backyard. It’s now etched in stone that he’s lost his bitch to another bitch.

  69

  May 28, 2012

  Traffic is tight on Route 280 East. The very first car leading the traffic is Toy’s Audi. At a speed of ninety miles an hour the next car in line is twenty car lengths behind it. Toy maneuvers the Audi like a skilled racecar driver.

  Loud engine roaring sounds off causing the traffic to veer over into the middle lane. As the Bentley speeds along the highway, swerving in and out of the lanes the only thing the drivers can see is her personalized license plates from the back. They don’t know who “Storm” is, but they all agree she is most definitely showing off. Evidently, she’s having the time of her life right now.

  Storm stomps on the gas pedal, sitting on the edge of her seat. The only thing in her sight is the white Audi. She has the fast lane to herself except for the one car that is up ahead. She sings along with Jay-Z and Jermaine Dupri’s “Money Ain’t a Thing.” “In the Ferarri or the Jaguar, switchin’ four lanes. With the top down screamin’ out, money ain’t a thing!” Storm shouts out with determination in her eyes.

  Beeba sits in the passenger’s seat, head glued to the headrest with her eyes shut tightly. She’s gripping the seat, both hands. She’s scared to death at the way Storm is driving. She holds onto the seat for dear life, like she’s on a roller coaster.