The Deal

by Sarah J. Brooks

  “What? Briggs? Oh, my God,” I said as tears started down my face.

  There weren’t many times in my life where I had actually felt hopeless. Usually, I felt like if I worked hard enough, I could figure a solution out. But at that moment, I felt everything being pulled from me and didn’t have the ability to think clearly. I wasn’t in charge any longer, and that was a place I wasn’t used to being in.

  Being in charge was how I made myself feel better. I could make a man love me, and I could drop him just as quickly when I didn’t need anything from him any longer. Of course, I hated that I hurt people, but I was much better at hurting others than I was at letting myself get hurt.

  “Listen to me, Abigail. Briggs is just like any other man. You hear me? I know you can deal with him.”

  The way Nicole looked at me made me see her in a whole different light than I had seen here before. It was like she knew I had been manipulating men all along, even her husband. She had a look of knowing in her eyes as she held onto my arms and shook me back to reality.

  Women and I didn’t get along much. Isabella had been my only true female friend since I had arrived in New York. But Nicole was like me; I saw it in her eyes and felt it in her hands as they held onto my arms. She wanted to help me, and I needed to listen to her.

  It is weird, how in moments of sheer panic, you can hone in your own body’s ability to function. Suddenly, I felt in control and more able to handle the situation. Knowing that there was at least one other human being that was with me and on my side made everything seem much less hopeless.

  “What should I do?” I asked urgently.

  “Your sick thing is good. Use that again, but can you make yourself actually vomit?” she asked.

  There was no time for games; I couldn’t pretend not to understand what she was talking about. Surely, she already knew that I had pretended to be ill so I wouldn’t have to sleep with her or with Aldo. At that moment, I felt an alliance with her that was so unusual, yet so pure.

  Whatever Nicole had been through with Aldo had put her in a position where she wanted to help me. Sure, it was probably purely because she felt they might be arrested, and she wanted it to look good that she had made some sort of effort. Or maybe she really did have a sister alliance with me and wanted to help me, but it didn’t really matter to me at that moment. She was all I had.

  “Yes, I can.”

  “Then do that. I’m going to have to be on Aldo’s side. But if something happens, and there are police, please get me out,” she said with a longing in her eyes. “I was like you once. I thought I could handle this life. But if I can get out, make it happen for me.”

  “I will do anything I can,” I said, and I meant it.

  Nicole didn’t have to come into that room and warn me about what was going on. She didn’t have to give me that small moment of hope. So if it came to something down the road where I could offer her help, I would do my best to make sure I helped.

  Women needed to stick together, at least, the ones who understood my way of thinking and looking at the world. I was willing to bet that Nicole hadn’t gotten to the place she was in life without living a little outside of the norm. I was willing to bet that she was much more like me than many of the women in the world. Aldo probably had sucked her into his life, just like he had sucked me in. She put on a strong persona and pretended to be in control as a way of protecting herself. I knew what that was like very much.

  “Thanks,” she said as she hugged me and then left the room.

  I stood there in total awe as I tried to soak in what had just happened and what was about to happen. I could only hope that whoever Theo was coming with was indeed the police and they were going to be there before Briggs came for me. The horror stories that Briggs himself had told of what he liked to do to women was enough to make my blood go cold. I really didn’t know if I could fend off a man like that.

  Quickly I looked around the room for anything that I could use as a weapon and hide in my bag. The room was pretty much emptied out with only the basic furnishing still around, but I remembered watching a crime drama where the woman had stolen a spring from under a bed and killed her captor with it. Certainly, I hoped I wouldn’t have to kill anyone, but I laid down and looked under the bed frame to see if there were springs there that I could use.

  Sure enough, there were long nine-inch springs under the bed. I had to pull with all my strength to get one of them free, and as I did, it collapsed on my finger and sliced it opened. The cut was big and the blood started dripping all over, so I held the finger against my chest in an effort to get the bleeding to stop.

  There was a knock at the front door, and I instantly felt like I was going to pass out. It was either Theo with whoever he was coming to the house with or it was Briggs, coming to get me. I slid down into the corner of the bedroom and waited to see who it was.

  The talking in the living room made me instantly think that it was Briggs and not whoever Theo had planned to come to the apartment with. Certainly, Aldo wasn’t going to talk with Theo when he arrived.

  As the footsteps toward my room got louder, I felt myself getting dizzier and dizzier. I could hardly breathe from anticipation and fear as the doorknob to my room opened, and I saw Briggs standing there.

  “She’s all yours,” I heard Aldo’s voice say from behind him.

  Briggs shut the door and locked it behind him. He had a disgusting look on his face and a smile that spanned across his crooked teeth. I wanted to scream but was afraid to. I wanted to run but knew there was no way out of that room. I was stuck, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  “Now this is going to be fun,” Briggs said as he yanked me up from the ground and threw me onto the bed.

  “Please, I’m sick. Please, let’s go back to your place. I promise to do whatever you want,” I pleaded with him.

  “You seem to forget my dear. I don’t like to make my women happy. I like to make them scream,” he said as his fist hauled off and hit me across the jaw.

  For a moment, I thought I was going to be alright, but then I felt the room go dark. The pain hurt in a throbbing and pounding sort of way as I opened my eyes and tried to get my bearings to what was going on. I expected that Briggs would have been on top of me or assaulting me in some way, but instead, he was just sitting in a chair watching me.

  The blood from my finger had covered the sheets, and my lip was dripping blood as well. But I didn’t scream. I knew better than to give him that satisfaction. If there was anything I could do to prevent it, I wasn’t going to scream for that bastard. I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure.

  There was a loud bang that sounded like it was coming from the front door, and Briggs jumped up to go see what was going on. He opened the door and then quickly shut it again and locked it. I had also jumped up by this point and moved back to the corner of the room where I slid down to the ground and watched as Briggs started piling things up in front of the door. Whoever had come through that front door had scared Briggs enough that he no longer cared about assaulting me, and instead, was hiding in the room with me.

  “What’s going on?” I asked as we heard Aldo screaming.

  “I’m going to kill you bitch. You aren’t going to testify against me,” Aldo screamed at Nicole.

  Briggs ran into the bathroom and shut the door, leaving me alone in the bedroom as the gunshots continued. I stayed low on the ground in the corner and just hoped that none of them would fly through a wall and hit me.

  I heard Nicole screaming for help, and I don’t know what came over me but I jumped up and opened the door. There I was face to face with Aldo. He had Nicole in front of him and was holding her hair in a fist with a gun in his other hand as he looked toward the front door. Something came over me at that moment, and I looked at Nicole and knew what I had to do.

  Chapter 28

  THEO

  Agent Stone had tried to tell me I couldn’t go with him t
o the raid on Aldo’s house. But at some point, he finally gave in and allowed me to stay downstairs. I wasn’t just going to stay at my apartment while they took Aldo down, not after what he had put me through. I wanted him to know that I was the one who had put him in jail. I wanted him to understand that I wasn’t just some jerk kid that needed him to lead him for the rest of his life.

  Sure, I was willing to own up to the mistakes I had made so far in my life. If that meant I had to do jail time, then I was going to do it. But I didn’t have to let Aldo control me at all. Life was too short to keep living his dreams. I had my own dreams, and I didn’t care any longer if there was money in my hands while I went after those dreams.

  “I swear to God you need to stay here; if you leave this damn vehicle, I will shoot you myself,” Agent Stone said to me as we pulled up to Aldo’s building.

  “Go, go, go,” came the call over the radio in his SUV while I waited.

  I couldn’t hear everything that was going on but only the radio communication that went on among all the federal agents that were involved. It was like listening to a crime show and trying to figure out what was happening without being able to see it.

  Nothing in my life made any sense at that moment without Abby. All I knew was that these agents needed to get her out of that house, and I wasn’t going to be okay until that happened. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest with the anticipation of what was going on, and I even said a little prayer in hopes that Abby was going to be released without Aldo hurting her.

  I knew Aldo well enough to know that he would panic as soon as the police arrived. He would try to kill Abby and maybe even his own wife if he thought they would turn against him when he got arrested. Although Aldo had the ability of being extremely charming, he was a deadly guy who would only look out for himself when things got messy.

  As I sat in the SUV and tried to be patient and wait for the whole thing to be over, I got a horrible pit in my stomach. It wasn’t something I could just forget about. Abby was in danger, and I didn’t want to just sit in a damn vehicle and hope that someone else would save her.

  “Shots fired, shots fired,” a man said over the radio.

  “Man down, believed to be suspect. Man down,” another voice said.

  “I hear a woman screaming from the back room; I’m going to check it out,” a third voice that sounded like Agent Stone said.

  There was silence and then someone pressed their button to open up the communication channel and I could hear a woman screaming. The scream was so soul wrenching that I jumped out of the vehicle and made my way into the building. It was Abby, and I knew it; I had to get to her. I had to do whatever I could to save her.

  They had turned off all the elevators for their raid of Aldo’s place, so I had to use the stairs to get up to his floor. I couldn’t stop myself as I flew up the stairs two and three steps at a time. I didn’t’ get tired and couldn’t imagine stopping for anything. There was only one thing on my mind, and that was getting to Abby.

  In my heart, I knew that Aldo would try to kill her so she couldn’t testify against him. I knew he was smart enough not to leave witnesses alive. Even if he knew I had turned him in, he wasn’t about to leave Abby alive to agree with my story. My stomach felt like it was being ripped in half as I got to the top of the stairs and heard the deafening woman’s scream.

  When I opened the stairwell, two men quickly pointed their guns at me and forced me down to the ground. One of them had their knee on my back and was screaming at me before I could even get a word out of my mouth.

  I had been arrested before. But I knew, from working with Aldo, that most of the time it was the suspect who gave the officers the information they needed to make a case. Over the years, all the times I had been arrested were dismissed after I refused to talk to them at all.

  But this moment was different; I couldn’t hold back and began desperately trying to explain who I was and why I was there. I didn’t have time for them to arrest or detain me; I needed to get to Abby.

  “My girlfriend is in there,” I yelled at them. “Let me see her,” I begged.

  There were no more gunshots going off, but there was plenty of commotion and that woman’s voice still screaming in the background. The screaming was much calmer now, though, and I suspected it wasn’t Abby any longer. For some reason, I felt like I knew what Abby’s scream would sound like. It was weird, and totally not based on any facts, but my gut at that moment told me that the screaming belonged to someone else.

  “Let him up,” I heard a man say. “So I can shoot him.”

  I looked up to see Agent Stone standing over me. He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the living room where I saw Aldo’s bodyguard dead on the ground. The room was destroyed, and I looked around to see where the woman was who had been screaming.

  The woman’s screams had died down and were now cries and a sort of wailing, and they were coming from the back room. It still made my heart ache to hear a woman crying like that, and I was desperate to make sure it wasn’t Abby.

  Despite the business I was in, I loved women. Many people thought it was the other way around, and that I couldn’t possibly like women if I ran an escort business. But I did love them. I wanted them to have the money and success they dreamed of and knew how to help them get it. Of course, I also did my best to ensure their safety as much as possible. Up until recently, I had strictly researched anyone who wanted to date one of my girls. But as the business had grown, my ability to research everyone had declined.

  What happened to Kimberly had been an eye opening event for me and not something I took lightly. I certainly wouldn’t have killed the guy like Aldo did. But I made sure he understood that that sort of violence against my women wasn’t allowed.

  “I really should shoot you,” Agent Stone said. “But I’ll leave you to deal with these two for now.”

  He opened the door to a back room where I saw Nicole and Abby huddled together and covered in blood. Nicole was the one crying and seemed to be covered from head to toe in blood. Her hands were shaking, and Abby had her arms wrapped around her.

  “Are medics on the way?” I asked Agent Stone as he walked away.

  “No need for medics, everyone’s dead. But yeah, we will take the ladies in to get checked out.”

  “Are you okay?” I said to Abby as I stood in the doorway and looked down at her.

  She was remarkably calm as she held Nicole in her arms. It was clear that Nicole had been the one who was screaming but certainly not clear what had made her scream so much.

  “We are okay,” Abby said calmly. “Briggs is in the bathroom hiding, though, get an officer in here to arrest him.”

  Abby nodded toward a door near her, and I went to grab one of the agents. They quickly broke the door down and dragged Briggs out of the bathroom. He was crying like a little boy and shaking. It struck me as funny that such a rotten man had such a big fear of being arrested.

  A medic team came in and pushed me out of the way as they went right to Nicole and Abby. Although Abby’s hands were covered in blood, Nicole’s whole body had it on her. The team pulled her away from Abby and quickly started to look her over.

  “I’m alright,” Abby said as one of the medics talked to her. “Take care of Nicole, I’m alright.”

  “I’m sorry,” I mouthed to Abby from the doorway as she dealt with the medics.

  There wasn’t anything else I could say at that moment, and I couldn’t get close enough to actually talk to her. I stood in the doorway and peeked down toward the other back room where all the officers kept coming in and out of.

  My curiosity got the best of me, and I took a few steps down the hallway and saw Aldo laying on the ground with what looked like a bed spring right through his eye. There also appeared to be a gun only a few feet away from his hand, and he had multiple gunshot wounds to his chest.

  When I looked back at Abby, she just shrugged her shoulders at me and then mou
thed something that I wasn’t sure I understood. She had a smirk on her face that threw me off and didn’t seem to fit the moment at all, and I swore she said something about lemonade.

  “I made lemonade,” Abby said.

  “Lemonade?” I asked louder so she could hear me.

  “Remember, life isn’t about the lemons, it’s about the lemonade you make,” she said with a sly grin, loud enough that I could hear her.

  I did remember that saying, and it seemed odd to me that she would bring it up at a time like this. My gut told me that Abby might have been the real one who had killed Aldo but that Nicole was taking the rap for it. On the other hand, Nicole was the one covered in blood, so who was going to argue with the idea that she had done it.

  As I looked at the two women, though, I noticed that Nicole’s hands weren’t covered in blood at all. Her body had it all over, but her hands were clean. My mind thought through all the possibilities of what had gone on when Abby and Nicole were left with Aldo. I couldn’t know for sure, but my guess was that one of those two had murdered him.

  “Ma’am, did you stab your husband with the spring?” an agent asked Nicole.

  She was still shaking and crying, but she looked up at the officer and calmed down just enough to answer him. Nicole had always struck me as a woman who knew exactly how to get what she wanted from someone. She wouldn’t have lasted as long as she did with Aldo if she wasn’t like that.

  I did feel bad for her, though; the whole life she had built was gone and she was a lawyer who would probably never work again in her life. Or at least, not work with normal clients again; it was highly likely that other underground clients were going to want to be involved with her.

  “He had a gun to my head and was going to kill me,” she said calmly.