by J H Leigh
Dylan, on the other hand, was oblivious and ready to blow the apartment. “Can we stop by and get a burger or something? I’m fucking starved. All this guy has is stale Cheerios and milk that’s turning to cottage cheese.”
Only a slight exaggeration.
Hicks just shrugged off the criticism, saying, “I told you, I ain’t no grand host and this ain’t the Hilton.”
Kerri shook her head, irritated with Hicks, saying, “Buy some fucking groceries, you idiot. You could use more than whiskey for breakfast, too. I’ll be back later this evening.”
She didn’t mince words or pretend to be anything other than she was and I liked that about her.
I also liked the way she stood her ground, no matter who she was talking to.
It made me wonder what would happen if Kerri came face-to-face with Madame Moirai, whoever the fuck she was.
If and when that ever happened, I hoped Kerri shot the woman’s face off.
And I wasn’t even sorry for hoping.
I grinned at Kerri, not because I was excited about a burger, but Kerri didn’t know that and just smiled back, saying, “Yeah, we can get a bite to eat before we hit the station” and I followed her out of the apartment with a lighter, if not blood-thirsty, heart.
17
We walked into Kerri’s precinct and it smelled like most cop stations — like sweat and old Lysol that hadn’t quite given up but would never truly win the germ fight — and true to her word, the place was fairly empty.
“No wonder Madame Moirai gets away with this shit…aren’t there any fucking cops doing their jobs?” Dylan muttered, pulling the hoodie more tightly around her neck to retort, “Fills me with a whole lot of confidence that we’re gonna win this fight.”
I ignored Dylan. I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or pissed that the place was empty. All I could think about was all the crimes that weren’t being followed up on when I saw the empty desks and phones ringing to nowhere.
“Why is your precinct empty?” I asked.
“Perfect storm of shit. We had a wave of retirements, some lay-offs and some firings and not a lot of heat from the brass to fill the empty seats. Always trying to save a buck. But, this is a temporary problem. Soon enough we’ll get some more bodies in here and it’ll be a madhouse as usual. In the meantime, this works in our favor.”
I didn’t argue but I was leaning more toward Dylan’s frame of mind. I would’ve rather seen a bustling precinct than an empty one, even if it meant we were at greater risk of being seen.
Nothing had been easy up to this point, why start now?
Kerri’s office gave the word “claustrophobic” a visual representation. There was a desk, crammed with case files two stacks high, a coffee cup that looked as if it hadn’t been washed in two years and an old desktop computer that probably had a hamster for an operating system.
Hard to imagine anything but Hepatitis could be found in this place.
Kerri, catching our vibe, said, “Look, don’t let the place fool you. Nothing is shiny and new but it gets the job done. Now, come around to this side and take a look at the database.”
I thought of something. “Would it be possible to find Tana’s grandmother on your database?”
Kerri frowned. “Not in this particular database but DMV search might find a person if they have a valid driver’s license. Do you have a name?”
I shook my head, realizing how stupid I sounded. “No. I don’t even remember Tana’s full name.”
Kerri’s expression changed to one of resigned understanding. “It’s hard to search for a needle in a haystack when you don’t even know what the needle looks like.”
“We’ve got bigger issues than finding Tana’s grandmother,” Dylan groused. “I mean, the woman has dementia, anyway. It’s not like she’s missing Tana or anything.”
“That’s fucking harsh,” I growled.
Dylan shrugged. “But true.”
“Maybe it’s stupid and a waste of time but it feels like the only thing we can possibly do for Tana. She cared more about your grandmother than she did herself. She wasn’t like us.”
“Disposable?” Dylan quipped with a dark look. “You have such a hard-on for that girl and you barely knew her.”
“Shut the fuck up, Dylan,” I shot back, heat curling the hairs on my neck as my hands curled into tight fists. Sometimes I just wanted to pop the girl in the mouth for the shit that came out of hers like verbal vomit. “Yeah, well, I barely know you or Jilly either. Should I just tell you to fuck off, too?”
“Girls, we don’t have time for you to fight about shit we can’t control,” Kerri interrupted firmly. “Let’s get back to the task at hand.” To me, she offered, “I’ll see if I can ask around. Maybe contact a few in social services and see if I can connect some dots. Sometimes the world is a lot smaller than we think.”
It was the best she could do and I accepted. She was right, we had enough on our plate. I shouldn’t add more but Tana’s ghost rode on my shoulder each night and her memory haunted me when I couldn’t sleep.
Of course, now Jilly was there, too.
I blinked back tears. Now wasn’t the time to start crying, either. I sniffed back the moisture and refocused. “Okay, let’s do this, then.”
Kerri opened up a database of registered sex offenders and had us look at page after page of predators that started to blur before my eyes. Frustrated, I said, “The perverts paying to be part of the auction aren’t going to be on your database of average run-of-the-mill pervs. These people are protected by their money and connections. There’s no way they’d ever end up with a record of their crimes.”
Dylan agreed with me, snorting, “This is a waste of time.”
“Indulge me,” Kerri said, continuing to flip through pages. “Not everyone starts off rich and connected. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“Have we met?” I shot back with derision. “Luck and I have never lived in the same house.”
Kerri chuckled at my black humor. “Kid, you and I must’ve been born under the same star.”
I smiled. There was something about Kerri I liked, even wanted to trust but after everything that’d gone down, there was always that niggling voice that warned me not to let my guard down for anyone.
If I wasn’t careful, I’d end up as closed off as Dylan.
Suddenly, Dylan stiffened and pointed to the screen. “That person…I recognize her.” She looked to me for confirmation. “Remember? She’s the ugly-ass bitch who gave us the enema.”
My eyes widened in agreement. “Holy shit. Dylan is right.” I peered a little more closely to read her legal name. “Regina Baker. The name’s too unassuming for a bitch like her. She was a monster. Now that I think about it, I think she enjoyed the pain we were in.”
“I’d remember that face anywhere.”
“Yeah, she was easy to remember.”
“How so?” Kerri asked, interested.
“Because the rest of Madame Moirai’s staff were…I don’t know, like us, younger and good-looking.”
Dylan nodded. “This woman looked like she hit the broad side of the ugly truck.”
I nodded, adding, “And she was meaner than a junk-yard dog.”
Kerri clicked on Regina Baker’s details and read them out loud. “Regina Ann Baker, 43, of Brooklyn Heights, convicted of lewd and lascivious acts with a minor under fourteen. Sentenced to Bayview but released for good behavior after only a year.” Kerri frowned, clicking her tongue against her teeth in thought. “That’s some bullshit.”
“So child molesters get passes for good behavior?” I asked, disgusted. “People who fuck with kids are the worst manipulators.”
“And the prison justice system is full of fucking cheats and liars,” Dylan quipped.
A thought came to me. “What if Madame Moirai pulled some strings to get Regina out early?”
“But why? Like you said, she doesn’t seem to fit the profile of those who work for The Avalon,” Kerri said.
&
nbsp; I snapped my fingers, remembering, “She hired guards, too. Real sons-of-bitches with a cruel streak. Maybe that’s the qualification she was looking for in Regina. You gotta have mean-ass dogs to guard your property, right?”
Kerri liked where I was going. “That’s a pretty solid theory,” she said, moving out of the predator page and into a different database. “Baker’s criminal history should be here, too.”
She accessed a file and it bloomed on the screen. “She’s got priors for disorderly conduct, assault, drugs, theft…Jesus, she’s a real peach. Habitual, career criminal with a side of deviant.”
“Sounds about right,” Dylan muttered. “She was a real bitch.”
Kerri wanted to know more. “What else do you remember about the guards? Were they wearing any kind of identifying company uniform?”
Dylan deferred to me, saying, “I didn’t get a good look at them. I was locked in my room the whole time but Nicole got more face-time with them.”
“Yeah,” I said, remembering the psychopath who most definitely would’ve raped me if his guard buddy hadn’t stepped in to stop him. I tried hard to remember details. “One of the guard’s name was Darryl,” I shared. “I overheard a conversation between the three guards in the kitchen when I was sneaking around trying to free the girls.” I swallowed at the memory, wincing. “Darryl wanted to rape Dylan but the other guard stopped him, saying, his DNA couldn’t be found on the body, implying that they knew all along that Dylan and Jilly weren’t leaving.”
“That fucker,” Dylan muttered with barely concealed rage. She knew exactly who I was talking about. “If he would’ve tried, I’d have bit his fucking dick off.”
I nodded. I would’ve done the same. “They didn’t expect Dylan to make it through the night. They said the last girl who came in as injured as Dylan, died before morning. She bled out.”
Kerri looked at Dylan with fresh concern. “What were the extent of your injuries?”
Dylan shrugged. “I dunno. It’s not like I had a doctor looking me over. I was pissing blood for a few days and I think I got a few toes broken and possibly this finger,” she said, as she tried to bend her pinky only to immediately stop with a wince. “Yeah, still hurts like a bitch but I’m not pissing blood anymore so that’s a good sign, right?”
“Likely kidney or liver damage,” Kerri mused, shaking her head as she gestured for Dylan to let her check her pinky. After a quick look, she agreed, “It was broken but it seems to be healing. However, unless you can get a doc to break it and reset it properly, it’s never going to bend right.”
“I got bigger problems than a fucked up pinky finger,” Dylan said.
Kerri agreed but said, “If you start peeing blood again, you tell me. Got it?”
“Yeah, sure,” Dylan answered with a noncommittal shrug. She wasn’t used to people giving a shit about her well-being, even more so than me. Gesturing to the computer, she asked, “So, now you have a name. You gonna go pick her up or something?”
“I don’t have anything to charge her with but I can drop in and ask a few questions.”
“What do you mean? She knows Madame Moirai is killing teen girls. Bring her in and make her tell you how to find that awful bitch,” I said with a scowl. “Torture her or something. Make her talk.”
“Contrary to what you may think, cops aren’t allowed to torture potential suspects,” Kerri responded dryly. “Not that we haven’t been tempted…but yeah, really frowned upon by the higher-ups.”
“Fuck them,” Dylan said, stabbing a finger at the screen “that cunt tortured us and enjoyed it. And, now that I know she’s a fucking pervert, too, she probably jacked off after having her grubby hands all over our pussies.”
I shuddered, feeling a little sick. Dylan wasn’t wrong, though. Madame Moirai would’ve had to hire people who had a vested interest in keeping their mouths shut. What better way to hire from the cesspool to ensure protection?
For that matter, Asshole Guard Darryl hadn’t been able to get his hands on me but who’s to say he hadn’t put his hands on some other girl when his boss wasn’t looking?
“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to pay her a visit,” Kerri said, setting us straight firmly. “Look, there’s protocol for a reason. Baker is small potatoes. Squeezing her prematurely isn’t going to do anything but scare away the real players. Baker is a nothing day player, if you catch my drift. Let me see what kind of pressure I can put on her and then we’ll go from there. In the meantime, let’s keep looking through the database and see if you see any more of Madame Moirai’s employees.”
It seemed an innocuous word for the henchmen and women Madame Moirai employed. They were rotten to their core, oozing pestilence from their soul. Maybe that was Madame Moirai’s gift, she could sense the corruption or the weakness in another human being, giving her an advantage when needing to refill her ranks.
“I set fire to the auction house. There should be a record of the fire, somewhere. The house was huge. It would’ve taken a full fire department to put it out,” I told Kerri. “Maybe you could ask around the local departments upstate. We were about an hour from the city.”
“How do you know you were an hour?” Kerri asked.
“Because that’s how long it took to get back once we boosted a car.”
Dylan shot me a glance as if to say, shut the fuck up about the crimes we committed, but we had to start trusting people if we were going to beat Madame Moirai. To her credit, Kerri didn’t flinch at the admission.
“Do you think you would remember how to get back to the place where you stole the car?” she asked.
I shared a look with Dylan before slowly nodding.
“Good. Then, tomorrow, we’re going on a field trip.”
I swallowed, overcome with an irrational urge to start crying. The auction house was gone. I burned it to the ground.
But the idea of going anywhere near that place…made me want to shit myself.
Fuck, some bad-ass I turned out to be.
18
The next morning, I threw up and had diarrhea. I exited the bathroom, feeling shaky and weak, to find Dylan regarding me with knowing commiseration. Running away from the scene of the crime had been easy, returning felt like walking into the flames of hell.
“We don’t have to go,” Dylan said.
“If we don’t want to keep running and hiding in the shadows, we do,” I countered, wiping my mouth. “I’ll be fine. I just needed to purge my system.”
Dylan nodded in grim agreement. “I was up before you. I don’t have anything left in my system.”
Hicks exited his bedroom looking like warmed over shit but at least he was sober. Or mostly sober. He ignored us and went straight to the coffee pot, poured a hot steaming cup and started drinking. We were starting to understand his routine. He drank himself stupid until night, crashed hard, and then the next morning jumpstarted his engine with hard-core black coffee that tasted like it’d been scraped off the bottom of a jet engine and then, he started in with the booze by mid-morning.
But today, he’d have to go without his crutch because Kerri didn’t tolerate his bullshit. She wanted him sober if he was going with us and she didn’t mess around with excuses.
He also didn’t argue with her.
“Be ready in five,” he said, his voice thick with morning gravel, then disappeared back into his room with his cup of joe.
“The man will be dead within a year or two if he doesn’t change his lifestyle,” Dylan said. “Have you ever actually seen him eat food? He lives off coffee, cigarettes, and booze. Recipe for a heart attack or stroke.”
I agreed. Unlike Dylan, who felt little empathy for most people, I felt bad for his daughter. His addiction had stolen a father and a husband, who, at one time, might’ve been a really good guy.
I’d never known my dad. Dylan’s dad had been a sick fuck. Jilly hadn’t shared much about her parents but they must’ve been pretty fucking bad if the state had cut off all legal ties to Jilly when the
y were small. The system was overloaded with kids in need of homes. If they could keep the kids with the parents, they did. Even if the parents were pretty much shit.
So that goes to show just how had Jilly’s parents had been.
My eyes watered. Goddamn it, don’t think about Jilly. Now wasn’t the time. Sniffing up my clogged sinuses, I wiped at my face and said, “Maybe he can turn his life around. You never know.”
Dylan chuckled as if I were stupid, saying, “Yeah, sure. And I fart rainbows.”
I knew for a fact, she definitely didn’t fart rainbows. I chuckled despite her dry remark. “As always, keeping it real, right?” I said.
“Always and forever, baby girl.”
At that, I laughed. It was absurd and hilarious at the same time but I needed the laugh.
Hicks opened his door, fully dressed and looking semi-human. “Let’s go, Kerri is waiting downstairs.”
“Shotgun,” Dylan called out.
Hicks didn’t even break his stride as he walked down the hallway, saying, “The fuck you are” and Dylan grinned because she liked nothing more than to be a pain in Hicks’ backside.
An older black SUV idled on the curb, waiting for us. Black vehicles gave me the heebie-jeebies now but as I approached I saw Kerri wave to us and I relaxed. Just as I knew she would, Dylan tried to push past Hicks to the front passenger seat and Hicks grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and moved her aside in a smooth movement to the backseat.
“Fucker,” she muttered around a half-hidden smile and climbed inside next to me.
I started to smile at Kerri but the expression on her face didn’t bode well for good news. “What?” I asked, apprehensive.
“Seems someone is interested in finding you,” she said, pulling a piece of paper with an outdated picture of my face and my details. I took the paper between nerveless fingers, shocked at seeing myself listed as “missing.” I looked at Kerri. “Who filed this?”
