by B. B. Hamel
At the bottom of his sock drawer, I found pictures. I leafed through them, frowning. I guessed the woman in them was his mother, but I couldn’t be sure.
Finally, I found a cell phone tucked under a book in his nightstand. I turned it on and was surprised when it got a signal.
Without thinking, I dialed the only number I knew.
“Lou’s Diner.”
“Lucy?” I asked.
“Oh hey, Emma,” she said. “What’s up?”
Lucy was one of the girls who worked with me at the diner. I liked her and she was always nice to me, but I wouldn’t call us friends. We were friendly coworkers, and with my life the way it was, that was about as close to friendship as I really got.
“Uh, not much. How’s it going?”
“Oh, you know, boring as always. We never have many people in around now. Hey, are you calling out?”
My mind moved fast. “Actually I am,” I said. “I’m going out of town for a while.”
“Really? Where?”
“California. Sick relative.”
“Sorry to hear it. Want me to tell Lou for you?”
“Yeah, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Can’t say he’ll keep you on if you’re gone too long.”
“That’s okay. I get it.”
“Okay. Well, hope everything is good with you.”
“Thanks, Lucy. See you.”
I hung up the phone, turned it off, and put it back.
I sat down on the bed, staring down at my hands.
That felt like a clean break from my old life. That job was all I had left. Maybe it would still be there when this was all over, or maybe I was really walking away from everything I’d ever known.
The thought terrified me and excited me all at once.
I woke up with a start. I didn’t remember falling asleep, but I must have sometime while Brooks was still out. The television was on, and I barely remembered lying down on the couch to stare at it.
Most of the day had passed by the time Brooks opened the door and stepped inside. He had a large duffel bag slung over one shoulder, which he dropped on the ground as he shut the door behind him.
I sat up, rubbing my eyes. “Surprised to see me?”
“A little bit, yeah,” he said. “But glad you stayed.”
“What did you get for me?”
“Most of what you had on the list.” He unzipped the bag and reached inside. “I had particular fun picking these out for you.”
He lifted up a pair of sexy black panties, smirking at me.
I got off the couch and ran over to him, trying to snatch them away. I was angry and embarrassed all at once.
“Those weren’t on the list,” I said.
“So what? I couldn’t help myself when I saw these. How often do you wear them?” He smelled them. “They seem clean.”
“You’re so gross,” I said, trying to snatch them away again. He was too tall and fast for me, though, and my hands just swiped through empty air.
“I’d rather you let me put my nose up against the real thing, but picturing you in these is close enough.”
I stepped back, flustered. “Did you only get me black panties, or are there real clothes in there?”
He nodded. “Clothes, shampoo, soap, all that shit. I couldn’t find everything, but I improvised.”
I looked through the bag, nodding. He tossed the panties down and walked into the kitchen. He got most of what I had asked for, though I saw some stuff was missing. All in all, it was pretty good.
I picked up the bag. “I’m going to shower and get changed.”
“Feel free.”
“How was it there?” I asked, a little tentatively. “I mean, my dad?”
“Gone,” he said. “Mob sent in guys to take care of him. As far as the world is concerned, your father vanished last night.”
I nodded, biting my lip. “Okay. Good.”
“Good?”
“I wouldn’t want him just lying in there.”
“I thought you hated him.”
“I did, but he was still my father.”
He gave me a strange look. “Yeah. I get that.” He turned back to making himself some food. “Go shower. And lock the door. I can’t promise I can control myself around those sexy panties.”
I rolled my eyes and left. I shut the bedroom door behind me, and, after a moment’s hesitation, I locked it.
Brooks didn’t seem like a bad guy, a killer and a cocky asshole, true, but he could have taken me at any time.
Still, I didn’t trust him. It was going to take more than just nice words to make me really believe in him.
I had to take care of myself above anything else right now.
7
Brooks
The girl fucking cleaned up nice.
It was the first time I saw her showered and dressed. She emerged from the bedroom a few hours later, clean as could be and wearing a pair of short jean shorts and a long white T-shirt that dipped down low in the front.
She looked fucking gorgeous, even sexier than I had realized when she wasn’t wearing my sweatpants or staring at me with terror in her eyes.
The sun had set hours ago, and I was mentally preparing myself for the job. I had to leave soon, even though this was the last fucking thing I wanted to do.
She sat down on the couch with me. I knocked back a drink and held the bottle out to her. She accepted it wordlessly, sipping straight.
“I got a job tonight,” I said.
She nodded. “Okay. What kind of job?”
“Security. I’ll be late.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Sit around here. Keep looking as fucking sexy as you do right now.”
“I take it you don’t have any better idea how to help me yet?”
“Not yet,” I grunted, shaking my head.
She lapsed into another silence.
“But I will soon. You just have to sit tight.”
“Yeah. Sit tight and hope some stranger can magically save me.”
I stood up. “Pretty much.”
“You understand why this is hard for me to swallow, right?”
“I get it. Never said you didn’t have a right to be angry. You didn’t deserve this.”
She lapsed into another silence as I went into the kitchen and got my gun. I checked it, loaded it, and slipped it into my pants. I went into the bedroom and strapped on my bulletproof vest, pulling a shirt on over it.
Once I was done, I walked back out into the living room.
“Don’t use my phone again,” I said to her.
She stared up at me. “How’d you know?”
“You moved it.”
“I put it back where it was.”
I grinned at her. “I’m very observant.” I walked over to the door.
“Fine.”
“Do me a favor. Put those panties I like on.”
She shook her head. “Not like you’ll see them.”
I grinned at her. “Maybe, but I sure as fuck do like thinking about you in them.”
I turned the knob and left before she could respond.
Fuck she was driving me wild. I could barely keep my thoughts straight as I headed down the stairs. That was bad, because I needed to have a clear head for this job.
But the thought of Emma in nothing but a T-shirt and panties, like the night I first found her, made me fucking hard.
I met up with Dante and a few others back in the deli not long later. From there we took two large black SUVs out toward the edge of the city, out toward the old industrial park. We stopped outside a large abandoned warehouse.
Our footsteps echoed as we got out of the cars and walked inside. The place was full of men already, mostly muscle just standing around, smoking or checking their weapons.
I knew about half the guys in there, most of them hired goons. There weren’t any other hit men like me, which was surprising. I guessed Gian only specifically requested me for this, which meant I had
to be on top of my game.
“Ready for this?” Dante asked me.
I turned and looked at him. He grinned at me, wearing his bulletproof vest. He had an oversized gun with a silver inlay handle tucked into his track pants, and he looked totally ridiculous. The man had probably never fired that toy gun in his life.
“Sure,” I grunted. “Ready as I can be. What’s the plan?”
“We meet the girls here soon. Then we transport them to the club. Easy.”
“If it’s so easy, why do you have so much muscle? I mean, shit, Dante, there’s like fifteen guys here.”
He laughed. “It’s overkill, but we lost a shipment last month, and the boss wasn’t happy about that.”
When he said “shipment,” the fucker meant a bunch of women escaped slavery. He said it like it was a bad thing.
To men like Dante, these women were nothing but money. They weren’t human at all. They were just the potential to make money. These girls came from mostly Eastern European counties and were incredibly poor. Sometimes their families sold them into slavery and sometimes they sold themselves. Sometimes they were simply stolen off the streets, though.
But once they were taken, there was nothing they could do about it. Nobody gave a fuck how they ended up in the slave trade, only that they shut their fucking mouths and did as they were told.
They were trained like fucking dogs from the moment they were captured. More often than not, they were also forced to get hooked on drugs just to have something else hanging over them. They were transported illegally into America on cargo ships in horrible conditions only to get shoved into some sex club, fucking hundreds of guys a week.
Needless to say, their lives were short and miserable. Very few of them ever earned their freedom, and the ones who did were so scarred and broken from their experiences that they ended up dead or arrested soon after.
I wasn’t a fucking saint. I killed and I killed often, and sometimes I fucking enjoyed killing. I liked putting a bullet in some dirtbag’s skull, and I even liked hunting down those dumb fools who decided to run or fight back.
But at least I had a code. I didn’t hurt women, and that was it. The fucking shitheads that worked in the brothels and in the flesh trade were heartless monsters, the sort of bottom-dwelling scum I despised the most.
Unfortunately, we worked for the same bosses. I didn’t like it, but I shut my fucking mouth and dealt with it like everyone else did. I wasn’t some hero, some dumbass cowboy who was going to ride off and save all the poor hookers who got caught up in this nasty business.
I put my head down and concentrated on keeping myself alert as we waited. Nobody was talking, and there was a strange, heady sense of anticipation hanging over the group, like everyone there knew something was going to happen.
Dante smoked cigarette after cigarette, staring off into the distance. I sat down on an empty barrel near him. “Anything else I should know about this?” I asked him.
“What? No. Why?”
“Just that everyone here seems on edge,” I said. “We have big numbers, so it’s a little curious.”
He sighed. “Fuck. Well, there’s one small detail. See, every time the Spiders attack, they don’t leave survivors.”
“What?”
“Yeah. They kill everyone, except for the girls. They steal the girls for themselves.”
“Shit man. No wonder everyone is on edge. They think there’s a chance we all might get slaughtered.”
“See? That’s why we need people like you.”
I shook my head, annoyed. “You should have told me sooner.”
“Why? Risk you not coming?”
“No, you dumb fuck. I would have brought a bigger gun.”
He laughed and stubbed out his cigarette. “Too late for that. Here they come.”
I followed his gaze and saw a semitruck pulling down along the road and angling toward us. The container on its back was big and white with no markings at all.
The other men all reacted. Some went to open up the doors of the trucks we had with us and some got their weapons out. A few were sent to scout out the perimeter, make sure nobody was out there watching.
This was a fucking death trap. The Spiders were slaughtering us and I was sent to be a part of it. I couldn’t decide if it was because they thought I could help or if they wanted me dead. But if Dante was here as well, it couldn’t be because they thought we’d all die. He was too important to waste on something like this.
No, if Gian requested me, he hoped that I’d be able to help.
So I kept my head on a swivel. While I didn’t know the guys around me, that didn’t meant they weren’t trustworthy. The mafia didn’t employ men for these sorts of things who weren’t good with a gun, and these men all looked hardened and like they knew what they were about.
No, it wasn’t going to be brute force that I brought to the table. It was going to have to be something else.
The truck slowly pulled up closer toward the warehouse. The outer fence was opened up and the truck drove straight toward us. The men made room as the truck drove straight in through the enormous steel doors and stopped right in the middle of the warehouse itself.
I stood off to the side as men opened the large back doors of the truck.
“Here we go,” Dante said. “The pussy train is coming.”
Ignoring him, I watched as, one by one, young girls began to climb out of the back of the truck.
There must have been thirty or forty of them, way too many for the trip to have been anything resembling comfortable. Those container trucks were hot and sticky, not to mention rough. I could imagine them huddled together, barely able to breathe the humid, stifling air.
They looked thin and hungry. Sunken eyes, dirty clothes, and the occasional track mark from needles getting shoved into their arms defined the group. Some of them were beautiful and some of them weren’t, but it didn’t really matter. There was some sick fuck out there for each and every one of them.
The men began to herd the women toward the trucks. I watched as they were piled in, and soon every one of the cars were full of these young, half-dead women.
“When do they usually come?” I asked Dante.
“Now,” he said. “They attacked just as the truck pulled in last time.”
The warehouse seemed silent. The men who were scouting had returned, and it seemed as though everything was going well.
Dante got up and clapped me on the back. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get moving before the pussy train pulls out without us.”
I grunted and followed him toward our car. We got in and fell in line in the caravan as the group of cars, the women in the middle, began to head back toward the city.
I couldn’t help but think about the girls shoved into those trucks. Young and stupid, they had no life ahead of them, not while they were slaves to the mafia. I didn’t love that my people did things like this, but I knew they had to if they were going to compete. Our operation was nothing compared with the Russians; they imported thousands of girls a month to our hundreds. The Latinos were pretty bad themselves, bringing girls up from South America, nice and addicted to Colombian heroin.
The club we were headed to was in the middle of a seedier neighborhood on the edge of downtown. The city flashed past the window of the truck as we moved, heading farther and farther into the city. I kept expecting the Spiders to hit at any second, but all was quiet.
The caravan eventually made it to the club. We pulled down an alleyway at the back of the club. It was a tight squeeze getting all of the cars in there, and there wasn’t much space to maneuver.
“Whose decision was this?” I asked Dante as we stopped and got out.
“What do you mean?”
“This alley is a fucking death trap.”
He gave me a look. “Shit,” he said.
The girls started to get out of the trucks up ahead. We had some room to move around, but not much. The trucks and cars were parked bumper to bumper, a
nd there was no way to get out unless the cars on the ends moved first. Basically everyone was boxed in with nowhere to go.
The muscle got out and stood around, looking uncomfortable. I couldn’t tell if they were thinking the same thing, but this was bad. There were too many people jammed into this small space. Back when it was just three or four trucks bringing the girls in, this drop-off was probably fine, but now it was jammed with men standing around with weapons.
I wasn’t surprised at all when the gunfire started.
It happened fast. As the first group of girls got out of their truck and moved toward the back door, bullets started raining down on the trucks. Men scattered and started yelling orders as I found cover behind our truck.
“Fuck!” Dante yelled. “The roof!”
I looked up, and sure enough there were men up there in black masks firing down at us. The girls were screaming and scattering all over the place.
“The girls!” Dante yelled.
I watched as a group of thugs tried to round the girls up, but they were gunned down as soon as they moved.
“We have to move the trucks,” I told Dante. “Come on!”
“Fuck that,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
That fucking coward. I moved fast, heading toward the last car in the caravan. I felt bullets smashing all around me as I moved, but I kept my head down and stayed close to the cars. Soon I was pressed up against the last car.
I flung the door open. The driver was dead, a bullet in his skull. I dragged his body out and got in, starting the engine. Bullets instantly exploded all around me, but I threw the car into reverse, flying out of the alleyway.
I stopped and dove out, running low back into the alley. More bullets, but this time the other men on my side figured out what I was doing. They began to return fire, causing the men on the roof to back off as I got into the next car and pulled it out.
The next two cars drove out as well, clearing space in the alley. I dove back in, keeping close to the walls, picking my way up toward Dante.
“We have to get the girls in the cars,” I yelled.
“No way. We’re pinned down!”
