Blood and Tears (Holler Ashby #2)

by Jamie Zakian

  Sasha followed Vinny’s pointed finger farther up the hill. There were those good ole feelings. Dread for sure, terror so strong it left a sour taste, and enough fear to ward off a six-foot biker. The big house. Its shadow fell over Sasha as she walked up the hill, cooling the area by ten degrees. The sudden chill weakened her legs, but the need to talk to that kid, hang with him, run her fingers through his thick hair drove her onward. When she got to the porch, her body froze. It didn’t seem right to just walk in, but she’d never knocked on this door before.

  She lifted her arm then ran her fingers through her hair. “Smooth,” she muttered beneath her breath, “play it off. ‘Cause nobody will notice this retarded shit.”

  Sasha stared at the door, willing it to open, and it flew open. A flinch took her back a step. She peered up into Dez’s cruel glare and willed the door to shut. It didn’t work this time.

  “Hey,” Sasha said, her smile fading as Dez’s glare deepened. “I was, umm…hoping I could hang with Tyler for a bit.”

  “He’s napping. Come back in an hour.”

  He shut the door in her face, pulling a gasp from her lungs. Dez must have thought he was big shit, playing king in her castle, using that kid as a pawn. The similarities to her dear-departed mother locked her fingers into loaded fists. If it was games that dumb bastard wanted, she was down. Dez would be sorry, though. She was schooled by the master.

  Sasha turned from the front door and there was Vinny, arms crossed, standing in the middle of the lot. From this distance, she couldn’t see his smirk but goddamn she could feel it. That bastard totally set her up for this. That was fine too. Now, he’d have to deal with her ass for the next hour.

  It was not easy, but Sasha forced her body loose and slapped on a smile. After all these years, Vinny had to know. This meant war. Sasha walked down the hill, mirroring Vinny’s defensive stance. Phase one: kill him with kindness and let his own conscience do the work.

  “The kid’s crashed out,” Sasha said, letting out a sad little sigh. “I’m just gonna chill here ‘til he wakes up, if that’s cool?” Two tiny eye bats and a gaze drop shattered Vinny’s tough guy act. It was too easy to play him and a bit too fun.

  “Yeah,” Vinny said with a shrug. “I mean, whatever.”

  Sasha looked at Vinny, catching the tail end of his frown. It wasn’t fun anymore. To top the whole shit sundae off, watching his pain through blonde-streaked hair really gave off an Ellen vibe.

  “Vinny, I—”

  “Just stay the fuck out of my way.”

  Sasha leaned back but couldn’t escape the sting of his words. Vinny headed for the clubhouse. She almost wormed away into her truck, but decided fuck that and then hurried after him.

  “Hey!” Sasha yelled, and Vinny spun to face her. As he leered at her, her brain turned to word soup. All those comebacks, harsh demands, fell victim to his hard glare.

  “You have to forgive me.” It was simple, whiny, but everything she needed to convey.

  “The fuck I do,” Vinny said, his face a ripe mixture of sorrow and spite.

  There had to be a rebuttal, yet Sasha came up blank. Vinny turned his back, walking up the clubhouse steps, and she wandered toward the back lot. A row of gleaming stacks sent a surge of warmth through her veins. Just a few minutes behind the wheel of a big rig with a joint in her mouth, and she’d be set to perma-chill. It didn’t even have to be moving. She could pretend.

  Her feet went into double-time, and Vinny grabbed her arm.

  “Where the fuck are you going?”

  “I just wanna chill inside a rig.” Sasha yanked herself free, glaring. “Mean fucker.”

  “You can’t,” Vinny said, rocking in place. “They’re busy.”

  Sasha looked at the line of semis, each wide windshield covered in a thick layer of dust. “They’re just sitting there, rotting away.” She took a step, and Vinny ran in front of her.

  “I’m not playing,” Vinny damn near growled, his face backing up his words.

  Now Sasha was way too curious to let this go. “Please tell me the product isn’t loaded in those trucks, on the property.”

  “We don’t run drugs anymore. Nobody would deal with us without you.”

  “Oh.” She hadn’t considered that. No Ellen, no Sasha, no Ashby in a stone’s throw. “I didn’t realize. Sorry.” Vinny still blocked her path, his face a bundle of nerves. “So whatcha got going on in those trucks?”

  Sasha bobbed, Vinny weaved, and she bumped him aside, hurrying to the trailer.

  “Don’t,” he yelled softly, seizing her by the wrist. “You’ll fuck up the scene.”

  “Scene?”

  Vinny’s grip tightened as he pulled Sasha from the blue truck, toward the green one. He opened the trailer’s back door, and her eyes grew wide. It looked like a dungeon. Fake stones in the corners, a rack with leather straps in the center, tables of whips and dildos.

  “What is this?” Sasha asked with a chuckle. She climbed into the trailer, scooting between two cameras on stands.

  “One of our sets.” Vinny’s eyes stayed low as he climbed onto the bumper. “We’ve been shooting pornos.”

  “Shut up!” The smile came too fast for Sasha to stop. “Are you in them?”

  “No,” Vinny snorted, creeping past cardboard cutouts of rock walls. “I’m the director.”

  His face lit up when he said that, so fucking cute. Sasha grabbed onto the leather straps hanging against the rack. “I’ll be in one. Turn on that camera, director-man.”

  “Stop fucking around.” Vinny almost toppled a camera to get out of the trailer.

  No-fun Vinny sucked. Sasha missed awesome Vinny and refused to let her weaknesses steal his light from the world.

  “Wait!” Sasha jumped out of the trailer, rushing after Vinny. She reached for his arm, clipping the edge of leather. “Vinny.”

  Vinny stopped short, turning on his heels, and Sasha skid on gravel to keep from crashing into his chest. Damn, she could’ve just crashed into his chest. Their eyes connected and he shrank back, losing his hard edge for just a second. Then it all rained back down. His hurt, anger, even hints of love clouded his stare. He probably would’ve stormed off if a pack of black sedans followed by a line of police cars didn’t tear ass up the hill and surround them.

  “Oh shit,” Sasha muttered as the click of guns loading echoed over shouting voices. She turned toward Vinny and someone gripped her neck, slamming her face onto the hood of a car.

  “Sasha Ashby,” her legs were kicked apart, arms yanked behind her back, “you’re under arrest for the murder of Federal Agent Rebecca Prescott.”

  Handcuffs dug into Sasha’s wrists, nicking bone, and she jerked her arms only to have the metal rings clicked tighter.

  “Stop!” Dez yelled, pushing rifles from his chest and barging into the crowd of pigs. “I have all the permits—”

  “We don’t give a shit about your Podunk business, Mr. Archer,” some fat, bald jizz-rag of a man practically spat in Dez’s face. “Fan out,” the man said to his group of commando wannabe men who jumped like cowboys to trample the property.

  “If you’re not here about my business, then what are you searching for on my property?” Dez asked.

  “What?” the man pinning Sasha to the hood of a hot car asked.

  “Can I see your warrant? Please,” Dez said as calmly as one could through clenched teeth.

  The clutch on Sasha’s neck tightened, and she was pulled from the car’s scorching metal. Through a crowd of SWAT, feds, and state police, she found Dez, but he didn’t look up from the papers in his hand.

  “This says you have the right to search the property for Sasha Ashby,” Dez said, thrusting the papers at the pig’s chest. “You found her. Now leave.”

  A car door opened, and the asshole fed gripping onto Sasha twisted her arm. The burn forced a cry from her chest. She lunged into the douchebag, cracking the back of her head against his nose. Now he cried out. She couldn’t help but giggle until
a solid punch replaced her grin with split lips. Blood pooled in her mouth, like gas fueling a flame. Sasha stood up straight, spitting a wad of blood in a fed-pig’s face.

  Knuckles pounded her body from all sides, and she charged forward. Her shoulder connected to a chest, and she drove it into the side of a car.

  “Sasha, stop!” Vinny shouted and Sasha froze. A knee crashed against her stomach, dropping her to the ground. Sharp rocks scraped her face as boots punted her sides. Each hit stole the air, robbing her cries.

  “I think our girl’s had enough,” the fed with the busted nose said, peeling Sasha from the gravel. She searched the sea of faces for Vinny, Dez, but only glimpsed cruel grins as she was tossed into the back of a car.

  ***

  Sasha sat handcuffed to a metal table, staring at the wide mirror on the wall. She wasn’t looking at her split lip. That rainbow of a bruise on her cheek was pretty, but didn’t hold her gaze. She was looking beyond the glass. She couldn’t see the group of men gawking at her, but she could damn near smell their frenzy.

  The door squealed open, and the pigman whose nose Sasha had cracked walked into the small white room and sat across from her. A young, black woman brought up the rear, shutting the three of them inside.

  “Don’t I get a phone call?” Sasha asked. The feds glared with their hard stares, their cocky smirks flinging her way. “A lawyer? Cigarette?”

  A file slid across the table. Sasha tried not to look, strained to keep her head high, but the gleam of blonde hair snagged her attention. She stared at a picture of a woman she never expected to see again. Misty, the girl who never was.

  Sasha veered her gaze to the man sitting across from her. Other than the lovely purple mark she’d left on the bridge of the man’s nose, his face was as empty as the wall behind him.

  “Where is she?” the man growled.

  “Who is she?” Sasha asked, sliding the file away with one finger.

  “We know you picked her up at a rest stop outside the city, on your last run.”

  “Last run.” Sasha leaned back, snorting. “You must have me mixed up with someone else, Pigman. I’ve been out of commission for a while.”

  “Before the coma, five years ago.”

  Sasha let out a huff, shaking her head. “That was a long time ago. A lot of shit’s happened since then.”

  “Are you saying you don’t remember what happened before your accident?” the woman fed asked from the corner.

  “Oh no. I remember just fine,” Sasha said. Her cuffs scraped the solid bar welded to the table as she glanced at the woman behind her. “I remember picking up a girl who sort of looked like the woman in your file, but more…what’s the word, rough. Ratty clothes, dirty hair, not fancy like this bitch.” She gestured to the file but didn’t look, couldn’t risk breaking her poker face.

  “Then what happened?” the woman asked, lighting a cigarette and handing it to Sasha.

  Sasha sure did love the good cop routine. She needed a few puffs of a smoke, because goddamn she was fucked.

  “This girl, the one I picked up,” she said, nice and slow. She wanted to drag it out, so she could get a few more drags on her cigarette. “The chick kept trying to get me to do drugs. I don’t fuck with that shit, so I dropped her at a rest stop.”

  “Bullshit!” The man crashed his fist on the table, the bang circling the small room.

  “I swear to fucking God.”

  Good cop plucked the cigarette from Sasha’s bloody lips, crushing it under the tip of her boot. That was quick. Must be time for another beating.

  “Let’s go,” the lady fed grumbled. She unlatched the handcuffs from Sasha’s wrist, but the sting left by the jagged metal remained. The man who fancied himself Howdy Doody pulled Sasha from the chair, and the bitch fed slapped the cuffs back on.

  “I think a night on the top level would do you some good,” the man sneered, slamming Sasha against the wall beside a closed steel door.

  ***

  Dez

  Dez stood in the doorway of the parlor, watching Tyler bash toy trucks together. The kid was playing it cool, only looking out the window every other minute. Poor little guy was waiting for Sasha. The endless wait was a pain Dez had become numb to, one he’d hoped to protect his son from.

  Otis slammed the phone to its receiver, and Dez turned toward the kitchen. It was hard to gauge Otis’s expression. The man grew stiff, turned pale, when Dez had asked him to call New York and it hadn’t worn off yet.

  “So?” Dez asked.

  Otis lit a cigarette and leaned against the counter. A slight tremble ran through his fingers as he lifted the butt to his lips. It scared the shit out of Dez. He’d never seen Otis so rattled, so full of hurt. The plague of Sasha held no bounds. There really was no end to the misery she spread, and no stopping the compulsion Dez felt to help her at anybody’s cost.

  “Tony said he’ll send a lawyer on the first flight out,” Otis said, staring at his smoke lingering on the ceiling. “To tell Sasha to hold tight and stay quiet, if we can get to her.”

  “She’s gotta be at county lockup by now.” Dez took a step back, peeking into the parlor. Tyler had abandoned his trucks to stare out the front window, his little hands leaving marks on the glass.

  “I’ll go first thing, try and see her.” Dez looked at Otis, struck by the levels of fear in the man’s eyes. “I’m sorry. I know how hard it must’ve been to make that call.”

  “No, you really don’t.”

  Otis bumped Dez’s shoulder on his way out the kitchen. He listened to the sound of Otis’s boots stomp through the house, ending with the slam of the front door.

  “Fuck.” Dez slumped against the wall, fishing a pack of smokes from his pocket. Otis was right. He had no idea what that call meant to the man. All he knew was Otis and the Lazzaris were connected, somehow. He should’ve asked his friend to make that call, instead of demanding it. But Sasha had crept under his skin, setting off a tidal wave of destruction once again.

  “Where’s Uncle Otis going?” Tyler asked.

  Dez looked down into eyes he’d kill for, into the stare that drove his irrational decisions. “To work.”

  “No. He got in his truck and left.”

  “Oh.” Dez crushed out his cigarette, straining to keep the sadness from showing in his stare. “He probably just went to the store for something.”

  “Is Mommy coming back soon?”

  Tears welled inside Dez’s eyes. He couldn’t break, not in front of his boy. “Yes. She has to take care of some important shit before she can come live with us.”

  “Awesome!” Tyler ran into the living room, returning to the window. “Uncle Vinny’s here!”

  “Great,” Dez said, his sarcasm coming off as a weak version of enthusiasm. He strolled to the fridge, grabbing two beers.

  “Where’d Otis go?” Vinny barked, storming into the kitchen.

  Dez held out a beer and got a sneer before the bottle was snatched from his grasp.

  “I asked him to call New York, make the Lazzaris help Sasha.”

  “I…can’t believe you did that.”

  There was that look again, shock. Only this time, it colored his brother’s face in shades of white.

  “Fuck, man!” Dez popped the cap off his beer, leaning against the counter. “Nobody tells me shit. I didn’t know it was some kinda big thing.” He killed half his beer, waiting until Vinny’s stiff body thawed. “How is Otis connected to them, the Lazzaris?”

  “There used to be three Lazzari brothers. The oldest one, Stefano, ran it all until he turned up dead. The other brothers split up the turf, but nobody knows what happened to Stefano’s son, Othello. Some people say he was killed. Others say he went underground.”

  “Otis?”

  Vinny shrugged, downing his beer. Dez would follow suit, but he’d become too nauseous for drinking. He’d just made the long lost heir to the mafia throne ask for a favor from the people who killed his father.

  “You’ll
throw us all away for her,” Vinny said, almost to himself, “won’t you?”

  “Hungry,” Tyler yelled from the living room over the TV’s blare.

  “Not him.” Dez patted Vinny on the arm, heading to the fridge. “Or you.”

  Chapter Seven

  Sasha

  Sasha couldn’t stop her hands from twitching. Today had been a fucking picnic. She’d been stripped, probed, blasted with a hose of burning chemicals, and left handcuffed to a wall for hours, all without a single puff on a joint. Now some inbred fuck in a prison guard uniform was marching her down a platform. Steel grate rattled under her feet, showing hints of the floors below. One of the many hands reaching through the bars on her right snagged her arm and she pulled back, only to be shoved from behind.

  “We put the worst of you sick fucks on the top level,” the guard behind Sasha said, practically shouting over the jumble of catcalls. “Murderers, child rapists, baby killers…the feds wanted something special for you, and I got just the thing.”

  They stopped in front of a cell and a large, bulky woman rolled off the bottom cot. A buzzer sounded, making every one of Sasha’s muscles flinch. The bars slid open, and she was pushed into a chest twice as wide as her entire body, looking up at a woman double in size.

  “Here’s a special treat for ya, Martha. No holds barred.” The cell slammed shut, and the guard laughed as he strolled away.

  “Nice.” The woman cracked her knuckles, which seemed bigger than the normal man-sized knuckles that usually pounded Sasha’s face.

  “Hey, Martha. I—”

  “You’re in my cell now. That means you’re my bitch.”

  “Oh,” Sasha said, taking a deep breath. This was gonna be painful, for the ugly cunt in front of her. She scanned the tiny space, searching for anything sharp enough she could stab Martha with, something heavy enough to swing.

  “You’re gonna give me a piece of your sweet ass, or I’m gonna take it.”

  Sasha took a step back, curling her fists. “You ain’t taking shit from me, you oversized nasty bitch.”