“You will,” he said. “That’s the whole point.”
“But why would I not be?” I was anxious and angry. “What is there that could make me unsafe now? Hmmm… oh! I know! How about a car thief who’s too dumb to know how many people are in the car he’s stealing.”
He looked at me.
“Like I said,” his voice lowered. Something plucked the strings of my insides when he said, “you don’t know the guy I’m taking the car to. And trust me, you don’t want to.”
Now I felt a panic begin to rise. Even I could hear it in my voice when I said, “But what has any of this got to do with me?”
“I’m going to take you somewhere to wait.” My lips parted slowly. I felt my head start to slowly shake. This was confusing like a dream. A dream where you can’t tell if it’s a really good dream, or a really bad dream.
I felt more than heard a deep ‘thud’ and I didn’t know if it was a bass drum or a bomb.
“Look, I’m not going to hurt you, really. I just need to make sure that you’re safe and I’m safe. Trust me, okay? I’m a professional.”
“Architecture is a profession,” I said. “Medicine is a profession. The Army is a profession. You’re just a cheap crook.”
Under the scar that ran across his left eyebrow, his eye flinched. He didn’t look like the kind of man to be hurt by a bit of rough talk. Maybe it made a difference who called him names. A girl can dream, right?
In a rush, I said, “Wait, what do you mean, you’re late? You steal cars to order? Do you punch in at seven fifty-five in the morning? You got dental plan, health insurance? Can I get a word with your HR department?”
My heart was pumping hard. Babbling is something I do when I’m panicked. He saw how nervous I was, and he smiled so very gently, with that thrilling twinkle, that playful glint, in his eye. My breath caught as he reached back and took my hand.
When his skin touched mine I felt a shock like a thunder flash. My whole body shook so hard that for an instant, I wondered if there had been an earth tremor. Looking in his eyes, they opened so very slightly at the same moment. He must have felt it too. Surely he must have.
But after that, the panic was gone. He squeezed my hand, and for some reason, I trusted him. I even smiled.
Then he drove us through more commercial subdivisions, past vacant and decaying lots. Then through an almost deserted district of empty stores and broken buildings. I didn’t recognize my own city. These places were completely unfamiliar to me. We drove into a multistory parking garage and up the spiral ramp to the fifth floor, maybe higher.
He parked, helped me out, and slid open the side door of a black van.
“You’re going to lock me in a van?”
“I won’t be long, I promise,” he said again. I was so ready to believe him, it made me want to cry. A complete stranger steals the car I’m in, drives me to some sketchy neighborhood in the middle of nowhere, and tells me to wait in the back of a van, which he is presumably going to lock me in—of course I should trust him. A great-looking guy like him couldn’t be anything but good, obviously. What could possibly go wrong?
He held out his hand to help me into the van. I shook from head to foot. Like an idiot, I was noticing how beautifully dressed he was. His big, well polished boots with jingly silver buckles, and his lovely white shirt under the soft black leather jacket.
He said, “You have a cell phone?”
Silently, I nodded. He nodded too.
“I’ll need to take your cell phone, but you’ll be safe. I’ll be an hour. An hour and a half, at the most.”
I shook my head. I should have made more of a fight of it, I know. Even then I knew. But there’s no point starting a fight when you know your body already wants to lose it.
“I have to ask you to give me your phone.”
He held out his hand. Crouching on the van’s metal floor, I looked up at him, pleading.
“I’ll bring it back. I just need to make sure no one tracks you here.”
“Of course.” I said. “That’s you keeping me safe, right?”
His hand remained outstretched. Like he was telling a story to a child, he said, “This is what I have to do. I’ll take your phone with me, and about a mile or two from here, I’ll switch it off and take out the little SIM card. That way, if anyone tracks your phone, wherever it is that I switch it off is where they’ll look for you.”
He handed me some kind of a tablet computer, like an iPad from a Toys-R-Us in a sci-fi movie. My expertise with tech was close to zero at the best of times. Looking at this thing, I had no idea where to start. Still, he was giving me something that looked special in its own peculiar way.
Really, I had no idea what I might be able to get out of it, if anything at all. It wasn’t likely I would be able to get e-mail or make contact with anyone. It was kind of a gesture, I guessed. Like, you give me something, I give you something.
I handed over my iPhone and stroked the top of its case as I let it go.
“I’ll be back soon. I promise.” He slid the door closed, and for a moment, I wanted to cry.
Miserably I sat, crouched in the back of the cold van, thinking about what a stupid decision I’d made. Wondering if I should bang on the sides of the van, although the parking lot seemed pretty empty as we drove up.
What an idiot, I thought. How could I let him do this to me? Thoughts of him, pictures of him curled around in my brain like smoke. Had I given in so easily, hoping for something? Could I really be that dumb myself?
He was the kind of man you’d see at the dark end of a bar, hunched over a double shot of bourbon. Tall, pretty, long-legged girls would flutter around him, primping, posing, and giggling.
Seeing him over the top of your stupid candy-colored cocktail, you’d think, What does it take to get a man like that? You’d know that the answer would be something bad, and something you probably either couldn’t do or couldn’t bring yourself to do. Something you maybe wouldn’t want to or even be able to do. Or you’d tell yourself you didn’t want to. He was the kind of man to give a girl bad thoughts.
Or maybe the kind of girls that guys like him went for were in a league apart. Maybe they really were a different species.
In high school, I remembered the cheerleaders, the preps, and the pouting wild things all the jocks ran after. Most of them weren’t so great.
If you saw them without all of their makeup on, a couple of days out from the salon maybe, they didn’t even look so great. But they dressed well, meaning that they wore the most up-to-date and expensive designer labels, and they all had a supreme air of confidence. And they made the most of what they had.
They had a way of looking bored. Bored so that guys wanted to come and entertain them. A permanent, slack look on their faces that said, Come on, what can you do to amuse me? And the boys would line up to show them.
Plus they dressed to emphasize their assets. Their milkshakes brought all the boys to the yard, because they presented their tits with every physical support aid they could find. Push-up bras, tissue stuffed underneath, bras that were too tight across the back, tops pulled down to emphasize their cleavage. They’d have had red, flashing, neon arrows pointed at them, if they could.
In high school, that certainly was the common denominator. If you showed some heaving cleavage, you had your pick of the boys.
That high school prom, when I rocked the plunging neckline, push-up bra, and for good measure, added a few drips too many from mom’s most expensive perfume—that brought all the boys to the yard. They only wanted one thing, but I knew that. That night, I only wanted one thing too. At least, when I went out it was what I wanted.
Seeing the looks on all those boys faces, plus remembering how they looked at me just the day before in class—even after all the sweet, sticky drinks they all bought me—even seeing their stupid tongues lolling out—it made me think again. I remembered them sniggering behind their hands. Heads bent together as they shared their nasty little jokes. I kne
w they’d line up for what they wanted, but then I knew they’d just have had a whole new punchline.
When it came down to it, just because I could get them to like me more didn’t make me forget what assholes they’d been to me all that year. It didn’t make me like them any better. I left the prom early and went drinking with my cousin instead.
Guys like the car thief, he was a different story. He wasn’t putting on an act. He wasn’t trying to impress anybody.
I poked aimlessly at the screen of the tablet. It asked for a password. Obviously, I didn’t know one.
I slid my fingers over the button that said “cancel” and the screen flashed.
Then my picture appeared.
Chapter Five
Ryan
THE BMW’S TIRES SQUEALED and smoked as I shot it out of the parking garage. An aged Saturn swerved and a bus sounded a honking horn as I blazed across the three lanes of traffic.
Getting the car to Gregor any later would have been another complication I didn’t need. So, I wanted to keep the slave girl safe, and that’s what I would do. Probably just long enough to fuck her.
Hey, why not? After that, most likely I’d forget about her and be thinking about the next girl. Or just waiting for one to cross my path.
In the meantime, she was a smoking piece of ass.
About halfway to Gregor’s garage at a stop light, I took out the slave girl’s iPhone in its colorful beaded case. For a moment I felt it and thought about her back in the van.
Somewhere I had an iPhone tool, but there was a paperclip in the console. Straightened out, that did the job. I drove with one hand and jammed the end of the paperclip into the side of the iPhone.
The little SIM card slipped out and I dropped it in my pocket, then switched the phone off to be sure.
Now whoever might be trying to track her would be looking a long time through camera footage from that busy intersection.
The RAV4 was among the pickups outside Gregor’s garage as I skidded to a stop, so I knew that Tynie was there. The shuttered door was stiff and it rattled as I shoved it up and ducked underneath, into the long, semi-dark, clanging workshop. I yanked the door down noisily behind me.
At the back of the arched brick shop, Gregor’s head barely lifted, but I felt the sharp gleam of his scowl all the same. Gregor was about two hundred and forty pounds of muscle. Bent over the guns and ammunition clips on the metal table, talking with Seb, the Romanian driver, his eyes barely slipped in my direction.
Tynie was working on a black Honda Civic. He hunkered down under the hood as soon as he saw me. When Tynie arrived before I did, Gregor would definitely have asked him what happened. How we got separated.
How Tynie and me did our business was none of Gregor’s, but he always wanted to know everything. For a big, tough guy like him, that seemed pretty sneaky.
Whether Tynie saw the girl in the back of the BMW, I had no way of knowing. We were a little ways apart when she started banging on the windows.
But whatever Gregor asked him, Tynie would have given away everything he knew for sure. Tynie was unable to lie, or even to conceal anything whenever anyone questioned him.
I remembered a few times when we were teenagers, he asked me if I could teach him. He wanted to do things and not always have his dad know what he was up to. I tried. How I fucking tried.
Tynie couldn’t say anything that wasn’t true without making it sound completely phony. The worst of it was the way that his head went down and to the side and his body shrank away. Then he’d look back up to see if you were watching him. You’d ask a question, he’d just close up. Straight away, you could see that he was trying to hide something.
It was pretty funny. Any child would sniff the truth out of him in no time flat.
Whatever Tynie had seen, Gregor would have gotten it out of him and I had to be ready. Gregor would have something to say about it, but if he wanted to make a beef out of it, fuck him.
He got his car, my part of the deal was done. I wished I had a way to let Tynie know that it was okay and I understood. But there wasn’t and he’d have to cope.
“The car’s outside,” I told Gregor. He straightened up and put his hands on his hips as he looked at me. His eyes narrowed and he breathed in, teeth tugging at his lip.
His years in the dirty tricks squad of the Serbian military and his fast work rising through the local crime networks here in the US made Gregor a tough customer, and a rough prospect.
Each and every time I saw him, he gave me a cold chill deep in my stomach. Every time it made me wish that the last time I saw him, I’d told him that I didn’t want to work with him anymore.
Now he just stared at me and waited. The look in his eye, the way that he stood there was a challenge. Like always. Like he was daring you.
I called over, “You want me to bring the car inside?”
As he looked at me, Gregor’s head tilted to one side just slightly and his eyes flashed. Still looking at me he reached out and slapped Tynie’s shoulder with the back of his hand. “Go,” he said, and flicked his fingers forward without looking at Tynie. “Bring us the car.”
It came to me again that whatever happened, I wouldn’t let Gregor know about the slave girl. I would protect her from him if I had to, but I really didn’t want to have to. A surge started deep down at the thought.
He was one of those guys where the first time you meet him, you start thinking about how it would be. What you would do. What might work. What wouldn’t.
And you go on thinking about it, because the possibility never goes away. No matter how much time passes, you know it could happen. And you know, whatever you do, you won’t be ready. Not as ready as he is.
The first time I ran into Gregor I felt it and every time since. One day, one way or another I knew we’d have to get into it. There would have to be a reckoning. A trial of strength.
Whatever happened, it wouldn’t be pretty. I’d be an idiot to hurry it along, but when it came to it, I’d be ready for him.
Tynie walked by and his eyes wouldn’t meet mine. I wanted to tell him it was okay, but conversations with Tynie about things like that were always a lot more than a couple of words and usually ended up in a misunderstanding. They got complicated, and sometimes they got difficult. Anyway, Tynie was going to be okay. I’d see to it, somehow.
Gregor’s voice was like a hammer. “What you waiting for?” He looked at me some more. He stood by the metal table, the top of it covered with guns. Half a dozen short barrel, pump action shotguns, Glocks, Uzis. Some big automatics. Gregor and the three guys were going to be armed up like a special ops group. The sight of them unarmed was scary enough.
“Get over here.” Seb backed away as I approached. Gregor’s face opened and split with a big smile as he reached his hand out toward me. He pulled me close for a hug. His grip was tight. Gregor liked to hug a lot.
He pulled me to him. Patted me all down my back. Like you might pat someone if you were looking for a wire or a concealed weapon. When Gregor did it, it was like he was hunting for your concealed intentions. He put his hand on your ribs. Felt your spine. Held your shoulders. All the while, trying to feel what was inside you.
“The car’s got a Buddha inside,” I told him. “It’ll bring you bliss on the job.” Gregor held me by the shoulders. Pulled back and peered in my eyes. Still with the big grin. “So you had a blissful ride here, Jacker?”
He liked to call me that. He had nicknames for everyone. Most of them seemed to have a double meaning, and usually it was uncomplimentary.
Dirty Driver: Dark Crime Romance Page 4
