BABY WITH THE BEAST

by Naomi West

  Around eleven p.m., we ride out toward the docks, thirty of us in a line of bikes, growling through the summer’s night, cutting a wide line around Sunnyside proper and the Scorpions’ clubhouse. We can’t let them know we’re coming. They have no reason to suspect we’re going into San Diego to mess with them, anyway, unless Yazmin really is a plant . . . The idea bothers me more than it should. She’s my prisoner. That’s all. Sure, she’s got some nice tits and some nice legs and an ass that needs to be spanked, but that doesn’t mean I’m about to lose my head over her. I’m not a love-at-first-sight kind of guy.

  But as we near the city, the lights rising out of the darkness like never-ending fireworks, I know I’m bullshitting myself. There’s something about Yazmin. I get a feeling of dread in my belly when I consider that she may be lying. If she’s lying, I’ll have to kill her. I won’t have a choice. If she’s managed to work her way into the Vipers and lead us into a trap, she has to die. I swallow, nervous like I haven’t been since I was a kid. I don’t want to hurt her, I realize, not like that.

  We stop a good half mile from the port, everybody climbing from their bikes and checking their weapons. For a few moments, the night is filled with the click-click-click of guns being checked and loaded. Then we’re walking through the city in packs toward the docks, five to a team, using different streets so we don’t draw attention to ourselves.

  “I’m going to kill these bastards,” Knuckles says, gripping the spiked knuckle dusters that give him his name. “I’m going to kill every goddamn one of them.”

  “Not if I get there first,” I mutter, my rage growing larger by the second. I think of the scorpion in the jar, the dead men the Scorpions have left in their wake, the pain in the ass they’ve been over the past few months.

  When we get to the port, standing in crowds along the perimeter, I nod to one of my men and he goes forward with the bolt cutters, clipping the gate, making a hole big enough for all of us to crawl through. All along the perimeter, men are doing the same. Even if the guards happen to pick one or even two or three groups up, there’s more of us. That’s the benefit of having so much manpower to hand. It gives you power.

  I take out my pistol and jog across the parking lot toward warehouse fifteen, its number visible in the streetlamps which light up the lot, a low-lit blue sign. As we get closer, more men join us, more and more until there are thirty men with their backs to the warehouse, waiting for my command. We’re all completely silent, listening to the night. The docks are deserted except for the sound of the waves and then, rising slowly and becoming louder, the sounds of Scorpions unloading the shipment.

  “Good stuff, this,” one man says.

  “It better be,” another man replies. “Standing out here in the middle of the goddamn night.”

  “Don’t let Boss here you talkin’ like that.”

  “Do I look like a fucking idiot to you?”

  “You hear about the boss’s daughter?”

  “Yeah, I heard. Ran away, I reckon. What else?”

  “That’s a damn shame. One more week of sitting around on her ass and I swear, man, I swear boss was gonna let us take turns on the slut.”

  Hearing this shouldn’t make me angrier than anything else, but it does. I imagine five Scorpions standing around Yazmin, all taking their turns to steal pleasure from her. Closing my hand around my pistol so hard it hurts my palm, I send word down the line. It’s time to hit these bastards.

  I stalk to the edge of the warehouse, peeking around. From my hiding place I can see five men standing at the edge of the water, smoking cigarettes, and watching as other men unload the shipment. I don’t know how many men are unloading; I can’t see, so I have to assume there’s at least a few more.

  “Okay, send word. We’re firing.”

  Twenty-nine men whisper, “Boss.”

  I aim my pistol at a big fat man with a goatee and a shaved head, a tattoo between his eyes which might be a dagger, but in the darkness could be anything. Maybe even a target.

  I remember the first time I saw what a bullet could do to a man’s head. I was using a twelve-gauge shotgun. It was like seeing a watermelon dropped from twenty stories, the sinews and bone and skin and flesh and cartilage which hold a man’s head together coming apart as though in slow motion. I remember feeling sick, disgusted. It wasn’t that I was emotionally moved—the man deserved to die, there was no question about that—but there so was much blood, so many fleshy chunks.

  Pistols are cleaner.

  The man makes a stifled coughing sound and then falls backward into the water. At the same time, his friends are riddled with dozens of bullets, all falling back as well. I sprint down the warehouse toward the corner so I can see the unloaders. It turns out there are just two teenagers there, spotty-faced, not wearing the Scorpions jacket. Pledges.

  “Wait,” I call down the line. Thirty Vipers emerging from the darkness would be enough to make anyone piss his pants, I reckon. So I don’t blame the rake-thin teen with the jet-black emo cut. I lean over them, keeping my gun trained on their heads. “Tell Snake Spike says hello.” I smile savagely. “Tell Snake his days of fuckin’ us over without retribution are done. Run along.”

  The pledges sprint away, panting girlishly.

  “Knuckles, Danny, Justin, Red-Eyes. Do the honors.”

  Four flip lighters hiss yellow in the darkness. Four flip lighters spin over and over into the boat. Four flip lighters start four raging fires.

  By the time we’re jogging away from the port back to our bikes, the fire is kissing the sky, turning it orange and red. I try and imagine Snake, the weasel-looking bastard, when he finds out about this. But thinking of Snake brings something home. Snake is exactly the sort of man who would let us burn a shipment if it meant getting a mole into our organization. Snake is exactly the sort of prick who’d let us kill dozens of his men if it meant he could trick us into believing his daughter has switched sides.

  Back at the clubhouse, the men drinking like men do after bloodshed, I go through Yazmin’s bag in my office, spilling the contents out on my desk. There’s nothing incriminating, just makeup and clothes, nothing to indicate she was doing anything other than running away.

  I join the men for a while, grinning when they grin at me, taking a few drinks and smoking a cigar, but I can’t stop thinking about Yazmin. Maybe it says a lot about me that I killed a man tonight but the only thing I can think about is a woman I barely know, but there it is. After an hour of going over and over this, I reckon there’s only one thing to do.

  I have to talk with her. Before I go down, I disable the cameras. I don’t want anybody watching us.

  Chapter Nine

  Yazmin

  The basement room isn’t exactly five-star, but it’s a room and that’s something. I try and sleep, but I’m too aware of the camera watching me. There’s no curtains or room dividers or anything like that. It’s all open plan, the kitchen connected to the bedroom connected to the living room. The only thing that’s separate is the en-suite, but I’m not about to sleep in the bathtub. There’s a clock on the wall, an old yellow-colored relic that reminds me of my time at school. I watch it religiously, knowing that when it hits two a.m. the Port of San Diego is going to get way livelier than Dad’s men bargained for. I feel guilty at that thought for a while, but then I remember what I would hear the men discuss. I made a habit of listening without seeming to listen, hence all my information.

  “She was threatening to tell my wife, for fuck’s sake,” I heard one man say once. “What else was I supposed to do, ask her nicely? Leaving her in that ditch was a favor, anyway. She wasn’t doing anyone any good.”

  “I wish he’d let us at her. I’d tear that asshole apart.”

  “You won’t believe it.” The man was showing off his new crossbow in the bar. “I just pulled up to the red light and blew this kid right in the face, as an experiment, you know. His head fucking exploded.”

  On and on and on, Dad had created a cultur
e in which the more evil you were, the more respected you were. He didn’t care about what happened to the victims of this culture. Even his own daughter was fair game.

  At one in the morning I go to the fridge and see what the men left me. Typical, they’ve left me exactly what men can be trusted to leave, nothing that requires cooking. Not that I’m much of a chef, but I’d think if you wanted to keep a prisoner alive that leaving them more than cheese and crackers would be a good idea. Still, as I sit on the edge of the bed watching the clock tic in slow motion toward two, I’m glad to have something to eat.

  At half past one, Georgia knocks on the door.

  “Hello,” she calls.

  I go to the door, which is bolted from the outside. On this side it’s just smooth metal. “Hey, Georgia.”

  “You can call me G if you want.” She sounds nervous. Maybe she doesn’t have many friends.

  “Gee! Can I?”

  That gets a small giggle out of her.

  “What are you doing here, anyway? Oh, wait, I know. You’re here to let me out. You’ve decided that you can’t stand idly by and let them keep me here anymore. You’ve decided that standing by would make you just as evil as these evil, evil men, and you can’t stand it!”

  “Wow,” G says. I can hear her shaking her head. “You really are something else, Yazmin.”

  “Call me Y!” I blurt.

  “Is that what your friends call you?”

  “You’re my only friend and I’m asking you to call me it, so, yeah.”

  “Okay, Y. I’m not here to let you out. Sorry. I’m here to check that you’re doing okay. The boss asked me to before he left.”

  “The boss.” I let out a laugh, though it’s somewhat forced. The last boss I knew was Snake. “Do you mean Spike?”

  “Yes, Spike. You’re okay, then? I better get going.”

  “Wait.” I check the clock. It’s two o’clock now, which means whatever’s going down is going down right now. “Wait a sec, G. Can you tell me something?”

  “Um, depends what it is. I’m not going to tell you how to break out of that room, if that’s what you’re going to ask.”

  “No, it’s not that. I was just wondering. Spike, is he a good man?”

  G pauses, and then says, “It depends what you mean by a good man.”

  “A good man is somebody who never hurts innocent people. If he does bad things, he only does them to people who’ve done worse things. A good man is somebody who won’t cause harm if he can help it, I guess.”

  “Spike’s a good man, then, as good a man as a one percenter can be, anyway.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “Why do you ask?” G’s smiling, I’m sure of it, smiling like we’re teenagers at a slumber party discussing boys.

  “No reason.” I return the smile through the door. “Just wondering.”

  “Right, okay. See you later.”

  “Talk to you later, you mean.”

  She giggles again and then leaves. I go to the dresser drawers and check for a change of clothes. There are women’s as well as men’s underwear, sweatpants and shorts and T-shirts for both sexes and a variety of sizes. I guess they can never know who they’re going to be keeping down here. I take a shower, washing away the smell of the woods, the dirt and the leaves, and the sweat of being tied to a chair for hours. When I’m dried and changed, my running gear in a heap at the end of the bed, it’s half past two and I can barely keep my eyes open.

  I let them fall closed, dreaming my first happy dream in months. Mom and I are at the park, Mom pushing me on the swing. I’m screaming at her to push me higher, higher. I can almost touch the clouds. Then I fly out of the seat and up into the sky, flying through the clouds. I wake to another knock on the door, this time heavier. The clock tells me it’s half past five in the morning.

  “G?” I whisper, still groggy from sleep, still half-believing that I’m flying through clouds.

  “It’s Spike.” His voice is heavy, gruff with whiskey and smoke. “I’m coming in.”

  It’s not a question. I step back as the heavy door swings open and Spike steps in. He’s wearing his leather, boots, and jeans, his hair mussed up from his helmet. He closes the door behind him, smiling at me sideways. “Maybe you’re thinking that since the door ain’t locked, you’ll make a run for it. I’d advise against that. There’s a guard posted on the first floor.”

  I flash him my cockiest smile. “You’d advise against it, would you?”

  “Yes.”

  We sort of dance across the room, Spike walking at me and me walking backward until we’re in the miniature kitchen, next to the tiny table and chairs. We sit at the table and watch each other for a moment.

  “You were gone for a while,” I say. “I’m guessing my intel turned out good.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “It turned out good. It turned out perfect, in fact. It turned out so good, so damn perfect, that it’s got me thinkin’ if I’m the biggest asshole in the world for trusting you. Maybe Snake told you to feed me this intel. Maybe he was ready to sacrifice those men.”

  “You think I’m lying.” I sigh, shaking my head. “Spike, come on.” As I say it, I realize that ‘Spike, come on,’ is something somebody who’s known him for a long time would say, somebody he’s intimate with would say. But sitting close to him in this private room, the party upstairs a distant din, I feel close to him. My pussy tingles, my nipples ache. It seems Spike has the ability to make my horny no matter the circumstances. “Don’t forget that I didn’t come here and offer myself. You kidnapped me, and I’m making the best of the situation. If I’d skipped up to the clubhouse and offered my intel, that’d be one thing. But that’s not what happened, is it?”

  He flinches, and I know I’m making sense to him. But then his face hardens and his eyes go cold. A man like Spike, I’m learning, doesn’t trust easily. I wonder why that is. I wonder if something horrible happened to him just as it happened to me.

  “What do you want from me?” I say, when he just stares at me.

  “I want you to convince me that you’re not lying and you truly want our protection in exchange for intel. I want you to explain why.”

  “I told you!” I snap. “He killed my mom! What else do you need? Do you want the details, is that it? Do you want to know how I came home and the door was squeaking on its hinges and I was laughing at first, thinking Mom had kicked the door down because she’d forgotten her keys? Mom always forgot her keys. Once when I was a kid, she kicked the door down. She was stronger than she looked. So as I went into her bedroom, I was laughing. When I saw that her bed had turned red, I was laughing. Is that what you want to hear?”

  His face stays hard. “That doesn’t explain everything,” he says. “If you hated him so much, why did you go to him?”

  “I had nowhere else,” I mutter, but his words are getting to me. I feel rotten, dirty. I feel like something you leave out for the trashman.

  “Sure,” Spike says. “But that doesn’t really explain it, does it? If he killed your mom, you wouldn’t care about being homeless. You’d hate him anyway. You’d rather be homeless than go and stay with her killer—”

  “How do you know?” I say, spite in my voice. “You know nothing about me. How the hell would you know what I was feeling? Do you think people are that simple? Do you really think it’s just black and white? I hated him, and I wanted him to be my father, okay? Ever since I was a kid, I dreamed I’d find my dad, and I did, and I thought I could make it work. I thought one day he might break down and apologize for killing her. Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s screwed. You want to know why I want revenge, why I want to work with you? Because after everything, he wants nothing to do with me.” I explain to him about Dad’s ultimatum, stripping or marriage. I fight back tears. “So maybe you can call me selfish if you want, but there it is.”

  We’re both silent for a time as I get a hold of my emotions. When I’ve calmed down—or maybe it’s because I haven’t really calmed down at all—I
look over Spike again. There’s no question about it. He’s the sexiest man I’ve ever laid my eyes on.

  “I’ll earn my keep,” I say, my voice taking on a sweet note. I can’t help it. My mind may be confused, but my body isn’t. My body knows exactly where it wants this to head. “It wasn’t Dad wanting me to be with someone that pissed me off so much. It was Dad trying to force me to be with somebody without giving me a choice. If I had a choice . . .” I eye him suggestively. I see the moment understanding clicks into place. Animal lust fills his bright green eyes.

  “Maybe this is part of the plan,” he says stiffly, but his voice is heavy. I can tell he wants it as badly as me.