More white men would be coming along shortly. And they’d be mad and outraged like a bunch of hornets knocked out of their nest. She supposes she has three bullets left, but isn’t sure and doesn’t even know how to open the noisy contraption to check. She’d been surprised when the gun fired the first time. It had been handed down from her father to her brother and then to her after Willie had been hanged. Must have been the Lord’s doin’ to make such an old device still work. She says a quick prayer of gratitude to God for being there in her time of need.
Yep, them white men will definitely kill me whenever they decide to show, she thinks. At least they’d never get grubby hands on Ernest. Standing on aching legs, she hobbles from the rocking chair to the door.
“Please, Lord, let me take a couple of ‘em to hell with me.”
She knows that’s where’s she’s going. No doubt about it.
Opening the front door, she sees her grandson sitting at the table with his bowl of beans. Almost the same way she’d left him when she went out to the porch. Except the poor boy’s face is planted in the bowl. Stone cold dead.
No, sir, Ernest isn’t going to be hung, left swinging for days in the sun under the bridge so white kids can disgrace his body. She’s seen too much of that awfulness already. Running her calloused fingers through his unruly hair, she inhales a quick, shallow breath. Just fourteen years of age, the dear boy. The child was so sweet, so honest and sincere it broke her heart when she thought about him, even on the good days.
Ernest came running to her house an hour earlier, eyes full of tears and fright. He had the misfortune of seeing the sheriff pick up a little white girl in his car a few days before. When she turned up dead this morning, he told a few folks what he’d seen, only to find out the sheriff was looking for him. Maybelle knew what was in store for her grandson. And she swore to him, invoking the name of Jesus and the Father himself, that she’d keep those white men from harming him.
Sitting the boy upright, Maybelle takes a washcloth and hobbles over to a pail. Dipping the soiled rag into the water, she wrings it out, twisting it back and forth in her gnarled hands. She hates to turn around, to bear witness to the murder she has committed, but she must. Looking at her grandson, she sees the poisonous red beans sticking all over his face.
“Oh good Lord, Ernest. Can’t you go anywhere without makin’ a mess,” she says in a tone she’d used on all of her grandbabies. “Let me wash you up. Just hold still now.”
With the cloth she pulls off a bean one at a time, dropping them into the bowl. “Now I know you’re up there in heaven, Ernest, looking down at me and wonderin’ why on earth I’d do such an awful thing to you. The only blood I got left in this world.” She exhales and starts washing up his face. “I want you to know it wasn’t easy for me to mix the poison into the pot of beans I had boilin’, but you see there just wasn’t another way. With the sheriff comin’ after you and nobody but a decrepit old ninny to defend you...”
Maybelle shakes her head, looking into the boy’s wide opened, unblinking eyes. “This harsh, evil world wasn’t designed for somebody like you. There are too many damnable jagged edges out there that’d rip a soft boy like you to shreds. I’ve lost too many loved ones to horrors, you see. My brother hanged on the word of a lying white man, your mama died in childbirth, your daddy sliced his arm on rusted plow and no white doctor’d see him until it was too late. No, sir, Ernest. You had nowhere to go. Not with an evil lawman like Sheriff Reed on your tail and the demons that’ll follow him.”
She hears an engine and the crunch of gravel in the distance. This is it. Armageddon on the homestead. Maybelle closes Ernest’s eyes and steps back. He looks peaceful in the chair. She prays to God again, but doubts He’s listening anymore considering the fact she killed her grandson. But didn’t He sacrifice His own son for a greater cause? Maybe Jesus could intercede for her. She hears voices, white, shouting in horror and disbelief.
“Sheriff Reed’s dead. That nigger boy done shot him.”
She prays for strength and the ability to kill as many of them as there are bullets left in the old gun. Swinging the door wide open, she sees three men in tan deputy uniforms standing over the dead sheriff. They look up in shock. She raises the pistol and begins firing.
Predators
Marie S. Crosswell
Los Angeles
2014
It’s a little house tucked into the middle of Montecito Heights in the hills of East Los Angeles, nondescript enough that anyone would drive past it without noticing it there. She parks her black ’69 Chevy Caprice up the street a ways and walks to the front door in her undercover costume: skinny jeans, a tight-fitting cropped tank top that shows off her muscular abs, A-cup bra with almost enough padding to stop a bullet, and a shoulder-length blonde wig made of human hair. She hopes to God that the men peg her for an early twenty-something or like her looks enough not to care about her age.
She knocks instead of ringing the doorbell, gentle as the part she’s playing. She’s got a gun in her oversized handbag—her Colt Government Model .45, not some bitch piece—but she’s still nervous. She wants to turn around and look for Detective Blythe’s unmarked sedan across the street somewhere, but she doesn’t.
Somebody cracks the door open, peeking at her through the screen door mesh.
She tries to smile. “Hi,” she says, raising the pitch of her voice. “Are you Dogfish?”
Black eyes gloss over her face. “Martina?” the man says, his voice rough and deep.
Gabriel nods, forcing a fake smile.
The man slides the chain lock and holds the door, standing inside the darkened house. The screen creaks when she goes in, her stomach jittery as he shuts and locks the front door behind her.
A white man sits on the ratty living room sofa with a lit cigarette in his fingers, looking at her as she stands in the foyer across from him. Even in the dimness of the house, Gabriel can see he has pasty skin and snake eyes: narrow and flat. He must be Gerald Lee Kitchen, convicted sex offender in the state of Louisiana and the brains behind this sex trafficking operation. His accomplice is Santos Escamilla, an ex-con with a record in Albuquerque and Vegas, the one in charge of finding johns for their prisoners.
Detective Blythe and his partner, Detective Quincy, work the LAPD’s Human Trafficking Unit. They’ve been tracking Kitchen and Escamilla for almost a year, building a case against them. The two men have rotated through three different sets of slaves since the beginning of the investigation, holding them prisoner and pimping them out to men they’ve done business with before and strangers they solicit in the right bars and clubs. The detectives figure that Kitchen and Escamilla replace their slaves every few months to keep their client base stimulated and willing to pay a consistent rate. They dump the girls with nothing but the clothes they have on in random public places, usually gas stations or street corners. Not one of the ex-victims voluntarily filed a police report prior to Blythe and Quincy approaching them. Some still won’t talk.
Gabriel isn’t a cop, but she is a private investigator, bounty hunter, and a friend of Blythe’s. Three weeks ago, she agreed to help him. She posed as a nineteen-year-old interested in a one-time hook up for cash, in a phony ad on Craigslist. Kitchen took the bait. They’ve been emailing and texting ever since, holding off on meeting in person until Blythe and Quincy got their strategy straight.
Kitchen grins and sucks on his cigarette, looking at Gabriel’s face. She resists the instinct to run, feels her muscles tense and her stomach churn but faces her opponent with a cool exterior, something she’s spent years practicing in the bareknuckle boxing scene.
“That’s Dogfish,” Escamilla tells her, looking at Kitchen along with her.
“I didn’t know there was going to be two of you,” she says, doing her best to sound juvenile.
“My friend José likes to watch,” says Kitchen, his voice like skinned knees on gravel road slick with blood and whiskey. “Ain’t you a tall thing. Come here, baby.
I want a closer look at you.”
Gabriel takes cautious steps into the living room, stopping at the wooden coffee table. Kitchen’s eyes travel down and up her body. She can feel Escamilla appraising her backside.
“They make em good in California,” Kitchen purrs.
“So, you got the money?” Gabriel says. “I’m ready to go as soon as you give it to me.”
“There somewhere else you have to be?”
“No. Not for the next few hours. But this isn’t a date, right?”
“It’s sure not,” Kitchen says, leaning forward to tap his cigarette into the ash tray on the coffee table. “But we don’t have to rush things. You want something to drink?”
“Bottled water if you have any,” says Gabriel, anxious to find her way to the bedrooms before either one of the men realizes she’s a hell of a lot older than nineteen.
“Sorry, we don’t. How ‘bout a little something else, help you relax.”
“Like what?”
Escamilla moves behind her, disappearing into the kitchen and coming back to sit in the recliner adjacent to the couch, on the other man’s right. He’s got a blunt in his lips and lights it up. The smell of marijuana fills the room when he exhales a long stream of smoke.
“You can have a drag on that,” Kitchen tells her, nodding at Escamilla. He reaches into his shirt pocket and holds out his hand, two red pills in his palm. “Or you can have a taste of this. Make you feel real good.”
Gabriel glances at Escamilla, then rests her eyes on the pills. Is that how these guys capture their victims? None of the girls Blythe and Quincy spoke to mentioned drugs, but it’s possible they kept it a secret or never knew they’d been slipped any. Maybe these creeps keep their slaves dosed up the whole time they’re in captivity, regardless of how expensive it must be.
“No, thanks,” Gabriel says.
Kitchen sticks the pills back into his pocket. “Suit yourself.”
A moment of silence passes, the two men staring at her as they smoke.
“Could I use your bathroom?” she asks.
“Down the hall on the left,” says Kitchen, lifting his chin toward her.
Gabriel turns around to look at the dark corridor behind her, across the foyer. She can see another door that must be a second bedroom. The girls might be in there.
Pearl Simon and Kayla Green, fourteen and seventeen-years-old, have been prisoners in this house for the last three months. They showed up on surveillance a week apart. It took six weeks for Blythe and Quincy to ID Pearl, another two for Kayla, both of them listed as missing persons. Pearl Simon disappeared in Park City, Utah, where she lived with her family. The detectives aren’t sure how she ended up in Los Angeles. Kayla Green is a runaway from Bakersfield who likely came to LA on her own. She left home a couple months before turning up here in Montecito Heights.
Gabriel heads for the bathroom, feeling Kitchen’s eyes on her bare back, passing the shut door of the second bedroom as if she doesn’t notice it. She closes the bathroom door and finds the lock in the knob busted. She stands still and listens for noise on the other side of the wall but doesn’t hear anything.
Gabriel takes her business phone out of her handbag and texts Detective Blythe: Both targets present. No sighting on vics. Weapons status unknown.
He replies in seconds: Secure payment and proceed with plan. Standby ten minutes.
She checks the cupboard under the sink and the bath tub but doesn’t find evidence of violence. There’s nothing that could be used as a weapon: not a knife, a nail file, a pair of scissors, or cleaning agent. She looks at herself in the mirror, at the make-up she never wears and the blonde wig, her face belonging to a feminine woman in her late twenties instead of the masculine thirty-five-year-old she is.
She jumps when someone knocks on the bathroom door.
“Ready when you are,” Kitchen says on the other side.
Gabriel takes a deep breath, flips the light switch off, and opens up. “You have condoms, right?”
Kitchen licks his lips, looking at her. “Sure do. A girl shouldn’t have to worry about that.”
He steps aside to clear her path to the master bedroom, and she follows the cue.
“What about your friend?” she says, as he shuts the bedroom door behind them.
“He’ll join in later,” he tells her, pupils blown with animalistic lust.
Gabriel puts her handbag down on the bed and stands facing him, reactive fear beginning to seep into her brain like lake water finding the cracks in a car. “I’d like my money before we start.”
“How much did we say?”
“A hundred.”
He reaches into the back pocket of his jeans and pulls out a few wrinkled, folded bills. She half-expected him to blow her off and start pushing for the sex, but maybe he’s smart enough not to give a girl reason to distrust him this early on. He offers her the money, and she counts it before sticking it in her purse, glimpsing the gun inside.
Kitchen unbuckles his belt and unbuttons his pants, as he steps up to Gabriel. He grins like a child’s nightmare, stained teeth glinting. She resists the urge to lunge for her Colt and smiles back at him. She doesn’t shiver when he rests his hands on her bare shoulders and dips his head to kiss her, his mouth landing on her neck when she turns her head away from him. She can taste bile in the back of her throat, but she starts lifting his shirt up as he inhales the scent of her skin, some girly perfume Gabriel would never wear as herself.
He pulls back to finish taking his shirt off and flings it away. His skin looks stretched over his rib cage, his chest hair thin and sparse, faded tattoos on both upper arms, his left pectoral, and covering his right shoulder. He has a scar about three inches long high on his left side; whoever did the stitch job wasn’t concerned about how it would look healed.
“Your turn, dirty girl,” he says, voice deeper now and rough.
Gabriel tries to make a flirty face. “Why don’t you help me out?” she says and turns around, giving him access to the zipper in the back of her cropped tank. She eyes the handbag on the bed as he unzips the top, her muscles twitching with restrained fight moves. She slips the top off and drops it on the bed. Blythe has about two minutes before she breaks character and kicks this sicko’s ass.
Kitchen presses his naked chest to her back, wraps his arms around her, and inhales. Her whole body clenches. She can feel him getting hard. He starts kissing her neck, swirling his tongue against the corner of her jaw, left hand groping at the padded cup of her bra as his right hand flicks the button of her skinny jeans open. “You wet for me?” he says.
He’s going to stick his hand down her pants, and she’s about to jab her elbow into his face.
There’s a loud banging on the front door, Detective Quincy bellowing, “LAPD, open up!”
Kitchen pushes Gabriel away from him, and she falls forward onto the bed, bracing on her hands.
“Shit,” he says, hissing. He zips up his jeans, buckles his belt, and dashes out of the bedroom shirtless.
She takes a deep breath, shoulders shaking, and composes herself. She rips off the blonde wig and the wig cap trapping her dark pixie cut, pulls the gun from her handbag, and slinks into the corridor. Quincy bangs on the front door again. She lingers behind the wall, out of sight, and eyes the door to the second bedroom. She waits to hear the detectives enter the house.
Blythe and Quincy come in. Gabriel darts to the bedroom door and tries the knob.
Locked. From the outside.
She goes back into the master bedroom for her snap gun in the handbag, brings it to the second bedroom and busts the lock open. She hears the men talking in the living room, the detectives just getting warmed up.
She slips into the bedroom and shuts the door behind her, sticking close to it like she’s cornering a dangerous animal. One messy mattress and no sign of the girls. She eyes the closet and says, “This is Gabriel Kidd talking. I’m a bounty hunter, private eye. I’m here with the cops. I’m looking for Pea
rl and Kayla. If you’re here, it’s safe to come out. You’re not in trouble. I just want to get you out of this place.”
She pauses, waiting for a response.
One of the closet doors slides open enough for someone to poke their head out. A girl’s face slowly emerges from the darkness inside, green eyes full of fear and surprise and hope. Her natural blonde hair’s pulled back into a ponytail, smooth over the top of her head. She’s iconic California beach babe pretty.
“Kayla?” Gabriel says, because the girl looks seventeen.
She nods.
Gabriel holds her gun behind her, wanting to appear as nonthreatening as possible. “You got Pearl in there with you?”
Kayla hesitates, then nods again.
Gabriel nods back. “I want you to stay in here until the cops get you or until I do. Those creeps who hurt you are about to be arrested. You’re going home. Just sit tight.”
Most of the fear melts out of Kayla’s face. She slides the closet door shut again.
Gabriel steps out of the bedroom in time for the men to look her way. She meets Detective Blythe’s gaze and nods.
“Hey!” Kitchen yaps. “What the fuck are you doing in there?”
He glances at the two detectives, then back at Gabriel. She can see him taking in her real hair, the gun in her hand, realizing she played him.
“You bitch!” he shouts and sprints toward her.
Blythe throttles him from behind, the two of them hitting the floor. He pins Kitchen to the tile, wrenching the other man’s right arm behind him and sandwiching it between their bodies. Kitchen writhes underneath him, glassy snake eyes rolled up to look at Gabriel’s feet in the corridor ahead of him.
Detective Quincy orders Escamilla to lie face down on the living room carpet with his hands behind his back. Escamilla stands frozen with his hands raised in the air, an old pro at the arrest show. He stares at Quincy like a dumb cow clubbed over the head, about to take the cattle gun shot. Quincy tells him over and over to get on the floor, his back to Blythe and Kitchen.
Shotgun Honey Presents: Locked and Loaded (Both Barrels Book 3) Page 5
