by Bryan Smith
John stared at her in silence for several seconds. His smile had vanished. “I’m afraid I can’t do any of that.”
Keely’s heart sank and her eyes filled with tears.
Shit.
She wanted to scream. The cruel motherfucker had been toying with her the whole time.
“Please don’t cry, Keely.”
She sniffled. “I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize.”
She wiped at her cheeks. “It’s just…you said you took my allegations seriously.”
“I do. Very much so.” He smiled, but this time it was chillier, a ghost of previous smiles. “But what we’ve got here is a she said/she said situation. It’s your word against hers. Without witnesses, you can’t prove a thing. For all I know, you’ve got some kind of unrelated vendetta against my old friend and this is your way of getting back at her.”
Keely started to protest, but he held up a hand to silence her.
“Now I’m not saying that’s the case here. You could be telling the truth. So let me run something else past you, see what you think. How would you feel about a position of your own within my inner circle?”
Keely gaped at him, temporarily unable to speak or believe what she had just heard.
John Wayne laughed. “You look thunderstruck. I reckon I can’t blame you because I know what you’re thinking. No one advances up the ranks that fast. Am I right?”
Keely could only nod in response.
“You’re absolutely right. We have a hierarchy in place for good reason. Trust has to be earned. Loyalty has to be proven. And these things happen only after careful evaluation over time. But I’m prepared to make an exception for you, Keely.”
Keely finally found her voice. “But…why?”
The sunniness of John Wayne’s smile surprised her, given the previous direction of their conversation. “Exciting times are ahead for the Order. A revolution is brewing. A great time of cleansing is on the horizon. We’re going to shake the world, Keely. Do you believe me?”
Listening to the rising thunder in his voice made Keely’s own spirits soar. She again began to feel like she was in the presence of true greatness. “I believe you, John Wayne.”
He beamed at her and clapped his hands together. “Good! Then believe this. When the time comes to wipe this rotten world clean again, I’ll want all my best people—all my favorite people—standing with me. And, Keely, I do believe you have what it takes to be one of those people.”
“Holy shit.”
“Holy shit, indeed. This is a righteous time and we are righteous people. And as part of the inner circle, you would no longer be under Susan’s authority. In fact, you would be her equal. You will work harder than ever before, but the rewards will make the work you put in more than worth it, I assure you.”
Keely still didn’t much care for the idea of hard work, but she loved the idea of not being under Susan’s thumb anymore. She also found the notion of rapidly vaulting up the ranks so alluring it verged on intoxicating. All the other initiates would be so jealous of her.
“What do I have to do?”
“Take off your clothes.”
It should have disappointed her, but it did not. John Wayne eyed her slowly up and down. His expression was very similar to the way Susan had looked at her that day she was dragged into her office. The difference was she didn’t mind this kind of scrutiny from John.
Keely rose from the chair and began to slowly remove her garments, teasingly drawing out the process for his pleasure.
She believed in John again, but knew he was still a man with a man’s needs.
And she would do anything for him.
Chapter Twelve
Dez: An Origin Story in Three Parts
1
Things started going to shit in my life long before I got sent away for a few years. Saying I come from a dysfunctional family is like saying the motherfucking Nazis may have had some issues with the Jews. It’s like, no shit, you know what I’m saying? Listen, I’ve got this idea for a new kind of dictionary. A picture dictionary. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. On second thought, don’t do that.
Anyway…in the picture dictionary, the only words in it are the ones you’re looking up. But instead of using more words to describe those words, there’s just a picture of the one thing in the world absolutely everybody understands defines that word. Like, for instance, you look up the world “evil” and there’s just a picture of Hitler. And right away you get it. You say to yourself, “Yep, that’s evil. I understand what that word means now.” And then you close the book and put it away because you are fucking done. Your intellectual curiosity has been satisfied. Same deal with my family. In the picture dictionary, there’s just a picture of them next to the word “dysfunctional”, because where I come from everybody and their motherfucking mother knows the Morgan clan is the foulest, twisted, most fucked-up and batshit crazy bunch of inbred, sibling-fucking, dope-peddling, dog-kicking, cornholing, mush-brained, necrophiliac contract killers you could ever hope to never meet.
By the way, the reason I was in the bathroom so long before was because I was doing a lot of cocaine. So, you know…fair warning.
My dad was gone from the time I was ten. If you want to know why I hate men so much, you gotta start with him. He spent the last twelve years of his life sitting on death row for killing a federal judge. Damn shame about the slow way our legal system works. At least he went away before I got old enough to grow boobs and attract the wrong kind of attention from his sick ass. My sisters weren’t so lucky. You’re probably wondering where my mother was while all that was going on. Well, I’ll tell you. She was in on it with him. She’d take pictures of that shit and sell them to her pervert friends. This was right before all the freaks and sickos figured out they could get their filthy contraband online for free.
Maybe you’re wondering why nothing ever got done about this shit. What you don’t understand is how feared my douchebag daddy and all his shady brothers and cousins were in that town. They ruled that area through terror and intimidation. They did things that would make those Al Qaeda motherfuckers say, “Perhaps you are going a little too far there, my white devil friends.” These guys were a real redneck mafia. It was a big deal around those parts when it all came crashing down. Only reason my mother got spared was because she worked out a deal to testify against dear old dad.
My sister Janine killed herself after he went to the penitentiary. Just blew her fucking brains out. She was finally free of him, finally safe, and she offs herself. Crazy, right? Took me a long time to realize it was maybe because she realized she’d never truly be free. She was gonna live with the memories of the things he’d done to her the rest of her life and it was just more than she could handle.
Candy, my other sister, took off a while later and was never heard from again. That really tore me up. She was the one person in my whole rotten family who ever gave a shit about me. She tried to shield me from some of the worst shit, even though that was pretty much impossible. But, hell, at least she tried. Jesus. I still miss her.
Mom took to whoring herself out to anyone with a few bucks to spare. It’s not like she had any other marketable skills. She was nothing much to look at after so many years of sucking down the PBR, but there’s never been any shortage of desperate men out there willing to pay for rundown pussy, because even rundown pussy is better than no pussy at all, right? It didn’t take long before some of the creeps who came by started taking note of the way I was blossoming. By the time I was sixteen I was well on the way to becoming the fabulous Dezsexual bombshell you see before you today. And so came the day when my wonderful mother asked if I’d like to make a little extra spending money by having a threesome with her and this toothless fat fuck named Lowell.
I knocked that loathsome bitch out and got the fuck out of there. After that, I caught a bus to Dallas, where I hooked up with some older friends who gave me a place to crash until I had my shit figured out. W
hich didn’t take long. I got a good quality fake ID and landed my first stripping gig inside of two weeks of hitting town.
Those next couple years were the best of my life to that point. I was still around a lot of shady people, but they were a better class of shady, if you know what I mean. I wasn’t surrounded by creepers all the time, despite working in a strip joint, and the whole thing just felt safer than where I’d been. Some of the other girls figured out I was underage and became very protective of me. I got lucky on that count.
There was a lot of partying, though. A lot of sex. A lot of drugs. Even some rock and roll. One time this famous heavy metal band made a tour stop in Dallas and stopped in at the club the night before the show. The owner closed the place to the public and had us put on a private show for the band and their entourage. Some of us got invited back to their rooms at the Ritz-Carlton. Long story short, I wound up banging the shit out of a famous rock and roll singer. I was having a high old time in general. Looking back, I should have known I was heading for a fall.
Then came the night I got all fucked up and went on a late night joyride with some friends from the club. We took my car. I still think about that a lot, how things might have turned out a different way if anyone else had been driving. I ran a red light and hit another car head-on at three in the morning. The girls riding got hurt pretty bad. Broken limbs, a broken collarbone, fractured skull, you get the picture.
But a dude in the car I hit was killed on impact. I was the only person to walk away from the thing with barely a scratch. If I’d been thinking clearly, I might have walked my ass away from there and skipped town before the emergency responders could get there. But I was in shock, so I didn’t do that. Those next several hours were the worst of my life. All the endless talking with those cops was so fucking tedious. So was pretending to be grief-stricken about ending the life of some guy I’d never met before. Bad as all that was, it was just the beginning of a long goddamn ordeal.
I got convicted of involuntary manslaughter and they sent me away for a few years. My court-appointed attorney told me I was lucky to get off as light as I did. They could have charged me with vehicular homicide and put me away even longer, but they took into account my age and the fact that, believe it or not, I had a clean prior record.
With my background, I was kind of a hard-ass bitch already, but by the time I got out of prison, I had reached a whole new level of hard. I became the kind of bitch you don’t ever want to fuck with, not if you hope to keep on breathing.
So I set about making up for lost time. I started stripping again, only now I was a grown-ass woman instead of a kid in over her head. I was a whole lot better at working that pole and working all those drooling idiots who came to see me dance. Didn’t take long before I was a real star attraction. It was a different work environment this time, though. A lot of the other girls weren’t happy about all the attention I was getting and I did not give the first shit about their hurt little feelings.
But one of the girls, a smoking hot blonde who went by the name Anya Overdrive, turned so resentful she hired a guy to kill me. The irony is this girl was one of the few who stayed friendly with me the whole time my star was rising. After my years locked up, I should have been wise to her game from the beginning. In prison you learn to be wariest of the people who cozy up to you the most. This may come as a huge shock—or maybe not—but prison is ass-deep in duplicitous motherfuckers. You can’t really trust anyone. Later on, after her hired killer fucked up the job, I was all pissed at myself for not seeing through her shit sooner. But I made her ass pay for that shit, you can believe that.
Anyway, this guy was lying in wait for me one morning after I returned from my shift at the club. The plan was to make it seem like a stalker, some obsessed fan no longer content with worshipping me from afar, tracked me down and had his way with me before killing me. Yes, rape was a part of the plan Anya hatched. She told the guy he should feel free to do any sick thing he wanted to me before turning my lights out. I know all this because he told me.
Everywhere I ever stripped, I did a pretty good job of creating a buffer between myself and the customers. But you’re in the same biz, so you know the score. Always use an assumed name, never provide any personal details unless they’re highly fictionalized, be sure you’re never followed from the club, and so on. The guy who came after me, the fucking hitman, was a goddamn amateur. Anya should have consulted my father. Motherfucker would have hooked her up with a real pro.
But I’d gone so long without any kind of incident I guess I’d become kind of complacent. I had my head down and was digging my keys out of my purse when this big fucker jumped me. He was sloppy and I almost slipped away from him, but he knocked me woozy and dragged me into my apartment.
He got my clothes off and wasted no time doing what Anya told him to do. It needed to look like a straightforward sex crime, the kind of thing that would never track back to any of my co-workers. After the motherfucker finished shooting his nasty DNA all over me, he roughed me up some more, but he took his time with it, toying with me, letting me get up only to knock me down again. This went on for a while. It was awful, but the time he took wound up saving me. Stupid cocksucker should have finished me off right away.
After letting him knock me on my ass I don’t know how many times, I faked being too weak to get up again. It was a calculated risk. I knew the fucker wasn’t done having his fun with me. And when he knelt over me to haul me to my feet again, I sank my teeth into his neck like a fucking vampire. Motherfucker screamed like a little girl. After all I’d been through, that scream was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard. I tore off a piece of his flesh and spat it in his face. There was a lot of blood. Little pussy rapist fainted. His eyes rolled back and he toppled over, three hundred pounds of deadweight that shook the floor like a motherfucking earthquake.
You can bet I didn’t waste any time getting that son of a bitch tied up. My original intent was to call the police and have them come fetch the fucker, like any good law-abiding citizen would do. But I was angry. The motherfucker had raped me. I was seeing red. I had murder on the brain. Calling the cops got eliminated as an option the second I started cutting on him. And the cutting was just the beginning. I did some messed-up shit. But he deserved it. Right?
Of course he told me all about being hired by Anya to rape and kill me. I didn’t want to believe him at first. At that point I still thought of the bitch as my only real friend. But once the whole story was out, it just made too much sense to deny.
Did I say I was seeing red before? Well, now I was a fucking volcano. The rapist had a gun on him. I guess he’d meant to put a round in my head after he was done playing with me. Instead I used it to march him out to my car and put his fat ass in the trunk.
Then I went over to Anya’s place.
Knocked on her door.
And shot the whore in her goddamn face.
Anger and a shitload of cocaine led up to that moment. But once it was over, panic replaced the anger. I freaked the fuck out. It was almost dawn by then and I’d just shot a bitch dead. And I had another half-tortured-to-death motherfucker in the trunk of my car. Neighbors were poking their heads out to see what the commotion was all about. I stood there paralyzed while maybe a half-dozen people got a good, long look at me. Finally I snapped out of it. I got in my car and took off. I didn’t know where the hell I was going, but I knew I had to get out of town as fast as possible.
So that’s what I did.
And so here we are.
Now you tell me…what’s my next move?
So that was Dez’s story.
The one she told Echo before they left the bar and went to work on the man she called Stu. Much of the story was true. Dez did have a long-lost sister named Candy. Her late father had been a professional hitman. She did do time and she did have sex with a famous rock and roll singer. However, a few important elements of her tale were entirely fabricated.
2
What Real
ly Happened was This…
It was past four in the morning by the time Dez arrived home from her shift at the Boom Boom Room. She was looking forward to a relaxing bubble bath and a glass or two of champagne. Her current lover—a Starbucks barista named Shandi—occasionally teased Dez about her fondness for the bubbly, suggesting it would be more adult to drink wine. Well, maybe that was so, but nothing stirred her libido like a bottle of champagne. When Dez strongly hinted she might not be as amorous without the aid of her favorite liquid aphrodisiac, Shandi stopped teasing her about it. Good thing too, because the girl was an extraordinarily imaginative and athletic sex partner.
Thinking about that soured Dez’s mood a little. That bubble bath would be so much nicer shared with her girlfriend. Shandi, alas, was fast asleep at her place in another part of town. She would be rising shortly to prepare for her early shift at Starbucks. Dez hated the frequent schedule conflicts caused by their very different jobs. Her sexual preferences aside, Shandi was very much a denizen of normal society, an early to rise and early to sleep daylight dweller, while Dez was a confirmed creature of the night.
The thing that most bothered Dez was that Shandi didn’t have to work. She brought in more than enough money to comfortably support both of them. And there would be even more of it soon. As a rising star in her field, she had been in discussions with some promoters who were going to get her established as a national touring attraction. She was set to appear in several classy videos with some of the top names in porn. The high-profile videos would give her the boost she needed to become a top national draw. And once that happened, her income would skyrocket, maybe even make her legitimately rich. She would be able to move out of this place and buy a nice house in one of the classier parts of town. Who wouldn’t want that?
