The Vigilantes Collection

by Lake, Keri

  He polished off the rest of his drink. “I’m glad you came back. When they attacked your house, man. I felt like things went to fucking shit. Got into fights. Busted Rhys’s face up pretty good.” He sniffed and swiped at his nose. “You and Reed … you were the only family I had left.”

  “Now, don’t get all fucking cuddly on me, asshole.”

  He snorted and stood up from the bar, dropping cash beside his shot glass. “Just know, if shit comes up, and gets bad, I’m here. I’m right here, and I got your back.”

  “I know, Brother, you’ve always been there.”

  He gripped my shoulder, giving a squeeze. “Always remember that.”

  I offered a hand, and he shook it, pulling my fist to his chest, and gave a pat to my back. “See you around.”

  As he made his way out of the bar, I waved Talia over for another drink.

  I wasn’t ready to go back to the apartment yet.

  30

  Lucy

  I’d managed to scrounge ten bucks from a pair of Jase’s jeans, and I threw on one of his zip-up hoodies, swimming in the thing, and a pair of his boots that I'd had to string around my calf to keep them from sliding off my feet.

  The click of the apartment door as I closed it behind me meant no going back. I’d never known the feeling of not having a home. Even when my mother died, I'd had a place to stay, until I couldn’t afford the house and settled for a shit sale, robbing her years of investment. Jase hadn’t wanted me to stay with him in the first place, so kicking me out was a no-brainer for him, I was sure.

  The sting of tears threatened, but I refused to cry. Not for him, and certainly not for the fact that I was leaving. How mentally whacked of me to cry over a man who’d tied me to the bed for almost three weeks and threatened to stab me with his grisly hunting knife.

  Jesus, how many people had he killed with that knife? The blade must’ve been a breeding ground for Hepatitis and God knew what else.

  Idiot. It was easy to chide myself as I made my way down the sidewalk. How stupid to have let down my guard. I’d spent years closing myself off to feelings, avoiding the shit. For good reason. Men were unreliable, aside from those, like Craig, who happened to be connected to their feminine side. The closest Jase would ever come to connecting with a feminine side was if he happened to have his dick in it for a minute. The man was one hundred percent domineering male and equally confusing.

  I hated myself for being attracted to him. For making myself momentarily vulnerable.

  He was right. Whatever fantasy I’d conjured in my head, whatever memory I’d had of the boy he’d once been, didn’t exist in the man he’d become. Still, even as I pummeled myself with my own stupidity, I couldn’t deny that he had a hold over me. The humiliating truth was, I’d go back in a heartbeat. Maybe that made me a masochist, weak. A disappointment to all womankind. The man had my mind scrambled to shit, and me doing things I didn’t ordinarily do, like heading out into the city’s streets after dark, seeking out public transportation, without a cellphone or pepper spray.

  I waited at the bus stop on Washington Boulevard, beneath a glass dome where ‘Eat Pussy’ had been spray-painted in black. After a harrowing ten minutes of my twitching at the slightest noises, the bus finally arrived, and I climbed aboard, dropping cash into the fare box before plopping down two seats behind the driver.

  It’d only be about fifteen minutes by bus to get to Jolana’s apartment, off Forest and Van Dyke. Not the greatest area, when compared to where I stayed downtown, but I had to see her. Just to tell her I was okay. She might’ve been crazy and a little fucked up, but she was all I’d had for the last two years.

  Beyond the bus window, downtown morphed into abandoned strip malls and stretches of overgrown plots of land spilling with weeds and garbage. As I watched it all roll by, the abandonment of Detroit struck me with a startling parallel to my own life. The unanswered questions in the half-crumbled husks left behind. The resentment in the graffiti that painted the walls. Tiny glimpses of the beauty buried beneath the rot and decay …

  A noise wakes me out of bed, and I tiptoe down the staircase in my slippers, careful to avoid the edges where the wood croaks. At the bottom of the stairs, the sound of running water is much louder, and I round the bannister, toward the kitchen. The house is dark, but the light over the sink stretches into the hallway, where I hide in the shadows.

  My father stands at the sink with his back to me. At first I think he’s talking to himself, but I creep closer and realize the sounds I hear are … crying?

  I must be dreaming because I’ve never heard my father cry.

  I tiptoe toward the sink, coming to a stand beside him. Red stains his fingers, and it doesn’t seem to matter how much he scrubs, it sticks like the markers in art class. He buffs the bar of soap, coated in a bubbly pink fuzz, and scrubs at his skin, not seeming to notice that I’m standing beside him.

  On the counter, his gun rests against the white tiles, upon which pink drops drip beneath the barrel. I know all parts of a gun. My father taught me when I was only seven.

  As he sets the soap on the edge, his eyes fall on me, and that’s when I notice tears, odd against his rough skin, and the long scars across his cheek and throat. He looks sad and weak, and it scares me, because my father is the strongest, toughest man I know. I once saw him slice the tip of his finger clean off while using a table saw in the garage. He hardly made a sound, while my mother and I drove him to the hospital, where he had it sewn back on.

  “Daddy? Is everything okay?”

  “Go to bed, zlatko.”

  I never usually protest, but his tears have my heart beating fast and my head filled with all sorts of questions I know I’m not supposed to ask. “Is it your blood?”

  He stops rinsing his hands, and his shoulders drop. His fingers curl into fists, and the dark pink soap drops into the sink. “You’d do best to listen.”

  So I do. I return to my bed, where the images of my father's tears keep me from sleep.

  The bus jostled me out of the memory, as we slammed into a pothole, and I blinked the images away.

  My father had left the next day. No word. Not a single note, or clue, as to why he’d gone. Though my mother had scrubbed the tiles clean of the blood stains, I saw them years after. Knew exactly where his gun had sat on the counter, and could smell the soap he’d worn on his hands.

  I'd gotten through the murder of my best friend and the untimely death of my mother, but nothing left me so adrift as the sudden exit of my father. Could’ve been that I was so much younger, and my child’s mind was so less forgiving. I’d spent most of my adolescence blaming myself, particularly when my mother refused to take any blame.

  The bus stopped at Van Dyke and Forrest, and I hopped out onto the sidewalk.

  A dark-skinned woman regarded me with a purse of her lips, as she sat on a weathered bench in front of a real estate ad, and I glanced down.

  A few drops of Jase’s blood dotted my white shirt, and added to that, the oversized boots of his must’ve made me look like an escaped mental patient.

  Shit. Zipping up my jacket, I walked along the sidewalk toward Jolana’s apartment at the corner.

  A dilapidated fence lined the perimeter, and weeds had grown up through cracks in the asphalt of the parking lot. Rusted beer cans and garbage lay scattered about, and black splotches on each of the apartment balconies, some of which had bowed and warped, showed where rot had settled.

  The heavy beat of rap pounded from one of the apartments above me. Hard to believe Jolana could concentrate on her studies, living in the shithole. I still couldn’t believe the woman I’d seen strip nude and ride another woman’s face on stage, while popping pills and getting drunk, would eventually be writing prescriptions for pills.

  I climbed the staircase to the second floor and knocked on the door.

  “Fuck off!” she shouted from the other side.

  Rolling my shoulders with impatience, I knocked again.

 
“I said, fuck off!”

  “It’s me!” I cleared my throat, tucking my hands into my pockets, and glanced over my shoulder. “Lucy.”

  “Lucy?” Her voice carried a high squeak, as if on the verge of tears, and as the door swung open, I recoiled.

  A ring of purple and yellow dipped below her eye, with a red streak that extended from the top of her nose and down across her cheek that'd bruised like a plum. A thick split had peeled her lip apart, and she sucked it into her mouth, calling my attention to the fact that I’d been staring.

  “Oh, my God.” I reached out to touch her and hesitated, tucking my hand into my pocket instead. “What happened to you?”

  Her eyebrow lifted, and she took a drag off her cigarette, blowing a lazy plume of smoke into my face. “You care?” Leaving the door open, she spun around and sauntered back to the red leather couch across the room.

  “Is Viktor here?” Trailing behind her, I closed the door and scanned the apartment for any sign of the bastard. He wore the same tattoo as the men who’d broken into the motel room, and I wasn’t stupid enough to think he couldn’t possibly be in on the attack.

  “No. He’s not. But he sure has taken a fucking interest in your whereabouts, so perhaps you could fill me the fuck in?” Jolana fell onto the couch, her bare legs sprawling across the coffee table from beneath the black Sex Pistols T-shirt she wore—her only clothing.

  “What interest does he have in me?”

  She gave an exaggerated shrug of her shoulders. “Beats me. Oh, yeah, he already did.”

  “He beat you? What for?” I crossed my arms over my chest, refusing to be drawn in to her cryptic bullshit. Had I known I’d be guilt-tripped, I’d never have come.

  The scrutiny in her eyes, as she glared back at me, told me not to say a damn word about Jase. Not to tell her anything about where I’d been, or who with.

  “Well, see. That’s the thing about Viktor. Sometimes, he doesn’t give me a reason.” Her eye squinted with a deep hit of her cigarette. “So, maybe you could throw a girl a bone and tell me where you’ve been.”

  “I told you that night. The lap dancing, it just messed with my head. I needed to get away for a few days.”

  “You’ve been gone over two weeks, Lucy. Two fuckin’ weeks without a call, without a note. Without any goddamn trace that you were even alive.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just having a hard time right now. Been thinking a lot about school.” I sat down on the couch beside her. “I mean, you’ve gotta be chompin' at the bit to finish and head off to med school next year.”

  Her jaw shifted, and she snapped her head away from me, tapping the cigarette hots into the ashtray. “Yeah. Can’t wait to get out of this hellhole, and then its wealthy fuckin surgeons and Beverly Hills for me.”

  “Yeah, and guess where I’ll be. Right here.”

  She huffed a laugh. “I’ll hire you as my personal bitch, how’s that? We’ll be lesbians and tell anyone with a penis to go shove it up their asses.”

  I faked a chuckle, hoping to keep the conversation light.

  She glanced back at me and sat forward, before her arms wrapped around me, and the scent of cigarette smoke and the cheap perfume she bought at the drugstore crinkled my nose.

  I happened to think she’d chosen to live the shit lifestyle as a way of flipping her former life the bird, because no way the daughter of a highly respected doctor would’ve been caught dead in Jovan vanilla musk.

  “I missed you. Don’t ever fucking scare me like that again. You could’ve called.”

  “I accidentally left my cellphone behind.”

  “Right.” She slid out of the embrace and reached for a pink pill on the coffee table, popping it into her mouth. “We going out for a birthday drink tomorrow, or what?”

  “I can’t.” I watched her tip back whatever she had in the coffee cup in front of her. “What’s that?”

  “Something Viktor gave me. He knows a guy who produces this shit. Best high in the world, but it makes me horny as fuck.” Sliding her hand over her crotch, she rubbed herself against the leather. “I’m telling you, next time you decide to bounce on some laps, take one of those. Makes work a whole helluva lot more fun. Lose your damn mind on this shit.”

  “That’s not happening again.” My hands fidgeted in my lap, unsure of what she’d say to the next thought bouncing around my head. “Jolana, are you and Viktor …”

  “Broke up?” She lit up another cigarette, her hands trembling, either from the drug kicking in or the tears coming on. “Guess so. Caught him fucking Talina on his desk. Bastard did it on purpose. He called me up for a meeting, and I found him pounding into that fat bitch in the same spot he fucked me earlier in the day.” She sniffed and waved her hand. “I don’t do sloppy seconds. Especially that dirty cunt.”

  I bit the inside of my lip, contemplating the next thing I wanted to tell her. Jolana could be tricky at times. Probably a bit of bipolar, or something, because one second she could be down with a plan, and the next biting my head off for bringing it up. “You got somewhere to stay?” It was my subtle way of getting her to stay the hell away from him. Lucky for me, I had a big ass reason staring back at me.

  Her face pinched to a frown. “Why would I need a place to stay?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because your boyfriend bashed your face up?”

  “I told you we’re done.”

  “Done to you, and done to Viktor, mean two different things.” I scratched the back of my head. “I just don’t think he’s safe … after what he did. Is there someone you can stay with?”

  I already knew the answer, that she’d undoubtedly tell me no, but the truth was, she did. She had a much safer place to stay than the shithole she’d chosen to call home. Unlike me, Jolana had a family. A successful family of doctors and teachers, and just because they’d pissed her off at some point, it didn’t mean they wouldn’t take her in. Her father still paid for her tuition, and her mother sent her the occasional gift basket of goodies, which she so often passed along to me out of spite.

  “Nope.”

  “You do. And I think you should get away for a couple days.”

  “What is this? The Lucy fuckin' Novaková guide to dealing with shitty days?” She threw her hands up. “Boyfriend beat your ass? Get away for two weeks! Assholes trying to cop a feel? Get away for two weeks!”

  Knowing that she had no idea what I’d done, or what I’d been through for the last couple of weeks, I capped the snarky comment parked at the back of my throat. “I think there’s something more to Viktor than you know.”

  “Oh, you would know, wouldn’t you? He told me about the deal he made with you that night. How’d you manage that? Offer to give him one of your world famous blow jobs?”

  “Fuck you, Jolana. I’m just trying to help.”

  Her eye flinched. “You want to help? Let me stay with you, then, if you’re so adamant about me getting out of here.”

  I shook my head. “I would … but I can’t.”

  “Why?” She sneered. “Oh, you have to run away again?”

  “Because I don’t know what’s going on with my apartment right now. I might not be living there.” Christ, it was no secret that I was having money problems.

  “Then, stay here.”

  Hell, no. I shook my head. “Just give me a few days and maybe we can work something out, okay?” I set my hand on her knee and leaned in to get her attention. “Please, just leave this place? And … stay away from Viktor.” I brushed the hair away from her face. “He never deserved you, Jo. And he never will.”

  Tears welled in her eyes, and her lip trembled, but she frowned, looking away from me. “You think it’s so easy. There is no getting away from Viktor. He’s everywhere in the city. He has connections—the mafia, the police, fucking judges and politicians. I’d never get far, if I ran from him—doesn’t matter where I go. I’m better off staying here.”

  “In that case …” I rose from the couch and bent forward,
giving her what ended up being an unreciprocated hug. I'd tried. “Take care.”

  “Take care? So, what—you ride off into the sunset of your perfect life now?” She popped off the couch, forcing me to take a step back. “Where the hell are you going again? It’s after dark, Lucy. You’re just going to roam the streets all night?”

  “I told you. I got stuff to take care of.” I had no idea what I was doing after that. “I’ll call you when I can.”

  She waved a second time and shoved another pill into her mouth. “Get the fuck out.”

  I wanted to ask if she was going somewhere, with the pills she swallowed, but that’d leave me open to some bitchy remark, so I left it alone and walked out.

  31

  Jase

  No idea how I managed to get home in one piece. On staggering up the stairs, I fell back one step, and placing the heel of my hand to my temple, I shook my head, trying to stamp out the extra set of walls that had me seeing double.

  Shit.

  It’d been a long time since I’d hit the whiskey that hard. Sadly, the only thing that'd kept me drinking at all had been thoughts of Lucy in nothing but my T-shirt and a pair of high heels digging into my spine, as I spread her thighs.

  Inside the apartment, I reached the bedroom door, my dick on the verge of popping through the seams. I plowed into the room, tripping once along the way, until I reached the bed.

  Empty. Damn. I needed her. Now. Had waited too damn long, while suffering her teasing and those playful mind-fuck games that women liked to reel men in with.

  Her flowery scent hung on the air, as I stumbled my way toward the bathroom. The world tilted on its axis a moment, and I grabbed hold of the doorframe to steady the rush to my brain.

  “Lucy!” I winced at the echo of the word bouncing against my skull, and laughed as the name reminded me of the old television show that Maria liked to watch. “C’mon! On the bed!”