“You’re the guy. You stood up to those jerks for Kevin.” Her last words emerged in a choke, and she cleared her throat.
“I’m Boo,” I said, cautiously extending my bandaged hand. I was ready to snatch it back in case she decided to bite again rather than shake. “That’s Junior.” Junior wiggled his fingers at her and smiled.
She looked around, trying to get a bearing on her surroundings. “Where… where am I?”
“You’re at my place. Your father hired us to find you.”
“My dad?” Guilt edged her voice, and she gnawed at her lower lip. “He’s gotta be so pissed at me.”
I wasn’t sure pissed was the word, but I didn’t want to blow a load of smoke up the kid’s ass. “Probably. But I know he’s been worried, too.”
“Is he coming here?”
“He doesn’t know you’re with me yet. I don’t see any reason to rush things, but we should let him know that you’re safe as soon as we can.” Cassandra just sat there, still frozen by the sudden and violent turn of events. “Listen, do you want to come in? We can talk about all this inside.”
She thought it over, giving us both a suspicious eye.
“You know, inside? Where it’s not raining down the crack of my ass?”
Her mouth trembled, fighting a smile. “Um… okay.” I offered her my unbandaged hand to help her out of the car. She looked at the blood-soaked silk wrapped around the other hand. “Was that me?”
“Sure was.”
“Sorry ’bout that.”
“No problem. Happens all the time.” And it actually did, in my line of work.
“Boo?”
“Yeah?”
“Why is my hair sticking up?”
Chapter Sixteen
We all needed a change of clothes. The three of us were soaking wet, blood-streaked, and beat the hell up. The cuff of Junior’s pant leg also had a hole charred through it.
I switched out of my own ruined clothes and gave Junior one of my T-shirts. It was a size and a half too small for his bulk and made him look like an overstuffed sausage. The pants were the right waist size, but he had to roll up the legs. Cassie changed into an old Bosstones T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants. I figured the drawstring could make up for the massive difference in size. Junior and I waited for her in the kitchen while she changed in the bathroom.
“Going clam digging?” I asked.
“Bite me.” Junior sniffed disapprovingly at the coffee I was brewing. “Amateur,” he grumbled.
“Sorry. It’s all I got.”
“Chock Full O’Nuts? Why don’t you just drink Folger’s instant, ya faggot.”
Before I could answer, Cassie shuffled out of the bathroom, her wet clothes wadded up in her arms.
“Feel better?” I took the dirty garments from her.
“Thanks. Dryer, at least,” she mumbled. She wouldn’t meet my eyes, instead taking in the majesty of my dirty kitchen tile.
“You two chill in the living room. I’ll be right with you.” The dressing on my bite needed changing. A little disinfecting couldn’t hurt either. I went into the bathroom with a bottle of vodka and long strips of cloth I’d cut from another old shirt. I would need to buy new clothes soon at my current rate of ruin. On the other hand, I would easily be able to replace my entire wardrobe as soon as Big Jack’s check cleared.
The silk lining I’d used to wrap my hand at Snake’s was starting to stick to the wound. Slowly, I peeled away the material clotted to my hand. The bleeding had stopped, but the flesh was badly swollen. I wasn’t sure if it looked worse than it felt. The Dilaudid dulled the pain down from sharp and stabbing to dull and throbbing. Once my hand was unwrapped, I wiggled the fingers again slowly. I didn’t bother checking my own medicine cabinet for disinfectant or bandages. My rusty can of shaving cream, half box of Q-Tips, and Tom & Jerry juice glass wouldn’t do me much good.
Was that a giggle coming from the living room? Go Junior.
To unscrew the bottle of vodka, I had to use my good hand and my teeth. I poured half the bottle over the wound, keeping the cap in my mouth to bite down on. The pain hit hard and fast. I clenched down hard enough to fire the cap out my mouth like a .22 slug, sending it bouncing around the bathtub. Without the cap, my teeth decided to sink into my tongue instead. I cried out in confused pain, not sure which injury to scream about. Taking a few deep breaths, I tied the strips of material together and rewrapped my hand tightly like a boxer’s.
As a final precaution, I rolled a mouthful of vodka over my freshly wounded tongue and spit a gob of pink saliva into the sink. I poured myself a cup of (substandard) coffee and went to see what was so funny.
When I walked into the living room, I saw Cassie sitting on my couch and Junior facing her, squatting on a footstool. I froze in the doorway.
Cassie was playing with the stun gun.
Junior was explaining to her how it worked. “When you press that little button right here, BZZZZT!” Junior shook and convulsed to emphasize the results. Cassie giggled at his pantomime.
I said a silent prayer that Junior had the sense to remove the batteries. No way would he be so stupid.
Junior saw me standing there. “Hey, Boo. What was all the hollering about? You yank your plank too hard?”
I never got to answer him.
I learned two things in that moment.
1. Prayers are worthless against Biblical stupidityAnd
2. Junior is beyond that stupid.
Cassie found her window when Junior turned to me in order to bust my balls. She stuck Rosie against Junior’s neck and pressed the button—just like the shithead had instructed her to. Junior made a noise like, “Ba-GAAACK,” jerked once, and flew backward, tumbling feet over ass over head. His feet stuck straight up in the air for a second before they plopped heavily down to the floor.
“How do you like it, fucker?” Cassie yelled. She was on her feet in a flash, holding the stun gun over Junior in two unsteady hands.
I got to take one step before she turned Rosie’s business end toward me.
“You stay right there,” she said. She jabbed the air with the stun gun, arms shaking. “Give me your phone!”
“Don’t have one. It got shut off,” I lied.
“Then why do you still carry it?” She pointed the stun gun toward my hip.
Shit. The cell phone. Forgot I owned the stupid thing, much less that I wore it.
Plan B. Nice Guy. I put on my best soft rock DJ voice. “Cassie, put it down. Talk to me. We just want to help you.”
“I’ll help myself, thank you very much.” Her arms shook with the effort of holding up the stun gun. “Now give me the phone!” The kid was running on her last reserves of adrenaline, which also seemed to be all that was holding her up.
“No.”
“Give it to me!” She took a step forward and pressed the button again to show me she meant business. The electrodes crackled blue arcs.
I slowly bent over and put my coffee on the floor. If push came to shove, I wanted both hands available to me. Her having lost the element of surprise, I was reasonably sure I could disarm her before she got me. What I wasn’t so sure of was that I could do it without hurting her. “Who are you going to call?”
“I have people. I have friends.”
“Who?”
“I have people I can call.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself.
“Who?” I said a little more harshly. “The piece of shit you’ve been staying with?”
“Don’t call him that. He loves me.”
“Guy’s got one twisted-ass idea of love. You look at your eye lately?”
She brushed her fingers lightly over her shiner. “I… I have other people,” she said, all teenage indignance.
“Who? Your dad?” I pulled the cell phone out and opened it. “Shit, I’ll call him myself. Remember? He’s the one who hired us to find you. The sooner he picks your little bitch-ass up, the better.” I held the phone out to her.
&n
bsp; She froze, stunned by the rough card I’d just played. Her mouth opened and closed a couple times.
I tuned the aggression up a notch, pushing her back on the defensive. “What do you think we’re doing? Babysitting? Kidnapping?”
“I… but…” Was that a flicker of doubt that played across her eyes? The stun gun went down a notch. If I rushed her now, I’d get zapped right in the testicles instead of the chest.
“We were trying to find you. We thought that you were dead, that the fucker killed you.”
Oops.
I regretted saying the words the second they left my mouth.
With that, the flicker of doubt was gone, replaced with fury again. “You’re the animal. You didn’t have to beat him up so bad!” Then the pieces came together in her head. She realized why we thought she was dead. She shook her head. “No. Nonononono…”
Fuck it. I’d already crossed the line. It was time to plant my feet. “Yeah. We saw what he did to you. The guy who says he loves you. He fucking smacked the shit out of you and raped you.”
“No! That’s not how it happened!” Spittle flew from her lips as she started bawling. She was breaking down, caught between hysteria and denial.
“What happened, then? Was it a practical joke? What am I missing here, Cassie? Tell me!”
“He… he said it had to look real. That I had to be really scared. That’s why he had to do it that way. So they’d believe it.” She was having trouble speaking through the deep jags.
“‘They’ who?”
“The people who buy those DVDs from him. They pay a lot of money for them. Derek said he could sell just a few of them and make enough money to run away. Just us. So we could be together.”
Jesus. One of the oldest lines in the oldest book. “That was a lie, Cassandra. Derek is running a sick freak show, and you were his star attraction.” I made a quick mental note. Derek. Derek Bevilaqua. Now I had a full name along with an address to hand to Underdog.
I’d driven the knife into her heart. All I had to was twist it and she’d be broken.
I suck. I know. Fuck you.
“He never loved you. He used you.” I let the words hang.
She dropped Rosie and crumpled, wailing. I caught her on the way down and held her as she wept and beat her hands against my chest. I held her tight until she stopped struggling against it. I felt her go slack, all the fight in her evaporated. I put her down gently on the couch and sat to her side. She buried her face in my chest, crying it all out. I didn’t know what to do with her. Or my arms, for that matter. For lack of a better place to put them, I held them up over my head. I wasn’t comfortable in either my seating position or my role as comforter.
“Um… do you mind?” I fumbled for the right words. “Are you gonna bite me again if I put my arms down?”
“No,” she said softly into my armpit.
“Promise, Mad Dog?”
Surprisingly, she choked on a laugh. “I promise.”
I let my arms down around Cassie’s shoulders. We sat there until her sobs trailed off and her breathing evened into an exhausted sleep. My own eyelids grew heavy, and I let the fatigue wash over me. The last thing I heard as I drifted away was a great snore erupting from the floor where Junior lay sprawled.
It was the same snoring that woke me up. Everything hurt. I sat up slowly and stiffly, thinking of Nick Nolte in North Dallas Forty. My joints felt like somebody had dug them out with an ice cream scoop and replaced them with month-old taffy.
The sun was going down. Must have been more run-down than I realized. I’d managed to sleep a decent clip with Junior in the room. Most people have trouble sleeping while Junior’s in the same zip code. The guy snores like a Rottweiler choking on a bowling ball. I moved my tongue around my mouth and instantly regretted it. Besides tasting horrible, my tongue was still sore from the self-chomping it received.
As was my shoulder from colliding with the door at The Cellar.
And my jaw from where Sid popped me.
And my hand where Cassandra bit me.
Waitaminnit.
No Cassandra.
I jumped off the couch. “Junior!” I yelled.
“Whazza? Wha?” Junior leapt to his feet, fists cocked to ward off potential attackers. “Aaghhh! Mothercharleyfuckerhorse!” he screamed and dropped back onto the floor, clutching his calf.
I ran to the bathroom.
No Cassandra.
The bedroom.
No Cassandra.
“Shitfuckgoddamnsonofabitch,” I ranted as I tore through my apartment. How could I have been so goddamn stupid? I burst through the kitchen door hard enough to make Cassie jump even with her headphones on. She was rooting inside my fridge and munching on a piece of individually wrapped cheese product she’d found.
Cassie yipped in surprise. “Jeez, Boo. Try some decaf.”
I leaned on the stove, gasping and willing my pulse to slow down to “rumba.”
Cassie popped another piece of yellow food product into her mouth. “What do you guys have to eat around here?”
“For starters, not the cheese,” I said. After all we’d been through, I hoped a piece of ancient cheese product wasn’t going to drop Cassie into toxic shock in my kitchen. “How’s about we order a pizza or something?”
Junior came hopping into the kitchen. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Junior passed on dinner, opting instead to head back to his place to shower and change into clothes a little more dignified. He complained that my shirt was cutting off circulation. Since Cassandra was a vegetarian, we ordered half-pepperoni, half-plain. The pizza arrived and we sat down at my kitchen table and ate in a strange and heavy silence. Cassandra didn’t look at me, just stared at a space hovering in the air over the pizza. After half a slice, her eyes started to fill with tears.
“I was so scared,” she said.
“Hmmm?” I mumbled, mouth full of hot mozzarella.
“On the video. Derek rigged the knife with a blood pack. He squeezed it, and the blood squirted out.” Drops fell from her eyes onto my lucky plate. “Some got into my mouth when I screamed. It tasted like blood. I thought it was my blood.”
“It sure as shit looked real.”
“I was so scared. I didn’t know. I thought it was real.”
“We did, too. That’s why we freaked out and went to town on Derek.” I filled my mouth with pizza so I wouldn’t have to talk anymore.
“He lied to me, didn’t he?” She was speaking through sniffles. “He didn’t… he couldn’t have loved me.”
Jesus. I opened my full mouth but said nothing. I didn’t know what I could say.
“Did my dad see the… did he?” She didn’t have to finish.
“No.”
She nodded and stared back into the empty place.
I pulled a piece of pepperoni from my slice and chewed. “Far as I’m concerned, he’s never going to.”
Her lower lip trembled and tears dropped onto her plate. “What if…”
“What if what?”
“What if he finds out?”
“Well, now that me and Junior are done with the job of finding you, we’re available for any new gig that might come up.”
Her face scrunched up. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”
“You could hire us to get back any DVDs that Derek might have already sold.”
“But… I don’t…”
“How much money you got?”
Cassie opened her little purse and pulled out one crumpled ten, three fives, and more crumpled singles. I grabbed the singles and stuffed them in my pocket.
“Done and done,” I said and tore off a piece of crust. “You need a receipt for your taxes?”
She sniffled and shook her head. She was smiling, but it looked like she might bawl. She looked up at me with the same eyes that had troubled me a little more than a week ago. There was so much hurt still there. That unsettling maturity remained, but I could see a spark of the kid had surv
ived.
I smiled at her. “Theater camp is your own goddamn problem, though.”
Cassie laughed through a mouthful of pizza, almost spitting it onto the table. “God, I hated that crap.”
“No shit. Eat your pizza.”
It would be over for the kid soon enough. It wasn’t over for me and Derek yet. Not by a long shot. He needed to hurt some more. I needed to hurt him some more. I swore to myself, when all was said and done with Cassie, he and I were gonna dance one more time. And I was being paid four dollars for the privilege.
The phone picked up on the third ring. “Kelly Reese.”
I pinched my nose and spoke in a high register. “Hi, my name is Fitz Benwalla. I’m calling from the Boston Phoenix. We’re doing a piece on Boston’s sexiest tough guys.”
“Excuse me?”
“Rumor has it you’ve got one of the most eligible, sexiest, smartest, and hunka-hunka burnin’ love bachelors in town knocking at your door at all hours. Also that he’s super manly. And did I say sexy?”
“Don’t believe all the rumors you hear, Boo.”
“Okay. That hurt.”
She laughed, and I felt a goofy smile play across my face. “Get over it, tough guy.”
“Too bad. I was going to ask you out for a very expensive dinner just as soon as the check from your boss cleared.”
Silence.
“You still there?” I knew she was, but I was savoring her surprise.
“Ohmygod! You found her?”
“Got her.”
“Ohmygod!” she said, her voice rising an octave in excitement. I liked the sound of it. The receiver clunked painfully in my ear. I think she dropped the phone. After some quick scrabbling sounds, “Where was she? Is she okay?”
“She’s a little banged up emotionally, but otherwise seems okay.”
“What happened?”
“You know, guy stuff. She was staying with a guy. He wasn’t what she thought he was.” And that was the cleanest and most biblically understated way I could put that.
“Aw, poor kid.”
“Yeah. We boys sure can suck.”
“Maybe I should come over and talk to her? Maybe I could help her, girl to girl.”
The Hard Bounce Page 17
