Vice

by Callie Hart

  It’s Julio.

  I was wrong. He is upstairs, after all, and he’s passed the fuck out in bed. Apparently it doesn’t matter that it’s the middle of the day. I watch him for a moment, waiting to see if he really is asleep and he’s not just faking, and then I stick my head out into the hallway, listening, trying to figure out if the four guys downstairs might be on their way up here any time soon.

  The music is still raging, though, thumping hard. They’re probably so coked out of their minds, they didn’t even hear me shoot the dude trying to get dressed. I retreat into Julio’s room, closing the door behind me.

  Hmm. How to approach this situation. I slip my bag from my shoulders, quickly hunting inside it until I find what I need, and then I climb carefully up onto the bed, collecting up the piece of clothing he’s left on top of the covers in my hand. Julio’s stomach hasn’t shrunk any in the months since I’ve seen him. If anything it’s gotten bigger. The fucker probably hasn’t seen his own dick in years. I throw my leg over his bulging waist, scowling as I straddle him, not enjoying the close proximity of my own dick to his swollen midriff. I feed out a length of duct tape and snap it off with my front teeth, and then I tap Julio on the shoulder.

  Nothing.

  I prod him a little harder, driving the tip of my finger into his fat.

  Still nothing.

  For fuck’s sake.

  I slap him. Hard. Julio’s eyelids spring open, his mouth already forming a shout, but I stuff the material I found on his bed into his mouth, smirking a little when I realize they’re his own underwear. I slap the duct tape over his mouth, forcing it closed, and then I sit back on his belly. The balisong comes back out. Julio’s eyes follow the glint and glimmer of the metal as it flashes in the dark.

  “Well, hello there, Mr. Perez,” I say cordially. “I was wondering if I might be able to buy some peaches?”

  Julio lifts his hands, but I cut him off before he can try anything. More accurately, I grab hold of his right hand and cut off his pinkie finger before he can do anything. Cutting off someone’s finger is no easy task. It’s not like slicing a hot knife through butter. It’s more like trying to cut through a raw chicken breast with a soupspoon. Julio bucks, screaming through his own soiled underwear as I get down to business. If I was covered in blood before, I am seriously drenched in the stuff now. Julio screams through his gag, and I finish the job with one final sawing motion. I hold the severed finger up for Julio to see, and his face turns a sickly shade of white.

  “I’m not really here to buy peaches,” I say, tossing his finger over my shoulder. It hits the floor somewhere behind me, and I hear it roll on the floorboards. “I need some help with something, and I believe you’re just the man who can help me, Mr. Perez. So I’ll ask nice and we’ll see how far we get, shall we?”

  Julio’s still screaming through his gag, his eyes bugging out of his head; he’s trying over and over again to jerk his hand free from mine, but I have a tight hold of his wrist and I ain’t fucking letting go. His other hand is no use to him either, since it’s pinned underneath my knee. I’m not beyond kneeling on his forearm until it breaks, should he come close to wrestling that one free.

  “Quit screaming so we can talk, Julio.”

  He doesn’t quit screaming.

  “God damn it.” I suppose this one’s on me. I should have told him what I want before cutting off his pinkie. Sighing, I fold the balisong up and put it in my pocket. Pulling back my fist to build up some momentum, I bring it down on Julio’s heavily jowled face with a sick sense of satisfaction. His nose pops under the impact, and another shower of blood sprays up at me as he huffs heavily out of his nose.

  His eyes are watering like crazy, already swelling up, but he’s gotten the picture and stopped screaming.

  “There we go. That’s more like it.” I rip the duct tape from his mouth, and Julio draws in a ragged, pained breath that sounds like a broken vacuum cleaner, on its last legs.

  “You…fucking….psycho!” He’s too mad to manage more than one word at a time. “You cut off my finger! You cut off my fucking finger!”

  “I hope you’re not going to spend too long stating the obvious, man. I get bored very easily, and every wasted minute is another wasted finger. Once we’ve run out of digits, I’ll have to move onto other appendages, and trust me…that would really fucking suck. The last thing I want to do is pop your fly and go rooting to find your tiny, shrivelled up dick, Julio. Gross.”

  Julio tries to sit up, to lean closer to me, but he only manages to heft his weight a mere inch or two from the bed. “You’re so fucking dead,” he hisses. “You’d better pray I can get that finger stitched back on, or I’m—”

  “Or you’re what?” I tip my head to one side, arching an eyebrow. “You’re gonna have me killed? You’ll take your anger out on the Widow Makers? Go after Rebel? Do you honestly think you’re in a position to be making threats like that, Perez? Rebel’s given me the go-ahead to put you the fuck down. You’re only going to walk out of this room alive by my mercy, and I’m not feeling very merciful right now. That could change, depending on how you answer my questions, though.”

  “Save your breath, cabron. I know why you’re here. I know what you want, and I can’t fucking help you.”

  “Well, that really is a shame.” I locate my balisong again, flicking it open, perhaps with a little more show than is truly necessary. Julio eyes the blade with fear in his eyes.

  “I can’t help you, because I don’t know where they took her. I don’t know where she’s been. I don’t know anything.”

  “Where did the photo come from then, asshole? How did Rebel speak to her on your phone in that hotel room? He said she was alive.” I grab hold of his ring finger with my free hand, making a show of holding the blade to the base of it, and Julio starts shaking his head.

  “Look, a guy came out to the compound one night. This big fucking hot shot. Stacks of money in briefcases. He wanted to spend the night with three girls. I said sure. Fine. Who would he prefer? He said he has this huge thing for redheads. He picked my own girl, Alaska. I would normally have told him to go fuck himself, but he paid a hundred grand for one night. The next morning, he comes to me. He offered me a trade. He wanted to keep Alaska. Showed me these profiles of a bunch of girls he had back in Chile or Columbia. I can’t remember where.”

  I grind the edge of the blade into Julio’s skin. “This is a really long story, man. My attention is starting to wander.”

  “Shit, Preston. Back up. I’m trying to tell you, ese!”

  “Get on with it,” I growl.

  “So she’s there. Your sister is there. I recognized her from the pictures Rebel showed to me a few years back. I took copies. I’ve been looking for her, too.”

  “Why? Why the fuck would you be keeping an eye out for my sister?”

  Julio squirms, a big, ugly grub on the end of a hook. “Why do you think, cabron? If Rebel wants something that badly, I am going to try and get it first.”

  “So you said you’d trade Alaska for Laura?”

  “Yes.”

  I punch him as hard as I can in the throat. Julio makes a gurgling choking noise as I lean down, shoving my face into his. I am all he can see, hear or worry about. “That was a seriously shitty thing to do,” I tell him. “You should have called me. You should have called Rebel. Where the fuck is my sister now, Julio?”

  “I told you, I don’t…know!” he chokes out. “He took Alaska when he left. He said he’d send three men back with your sister in a few weeks. He left another three hundred thousand as security. His men answered the phone when I was in that hotel room with Rebel, they let her speak to him, but that was the last time I heard from him. He never showed up with her, and he never came back for his money. He must have wanted to keep both of them.”

  “Or you freaked him out when you put her on the phone with Rebel. You’re a stupid son of a bitch, Julio. Fuck, I should just kill you right now for being such a cunt.”


  Julio opens his mouth, is about to say something else, but I clench my fist over his head, implying what will happen if he even dares to breathe one word. Whatever he was planning on saying dies on his lips.

  “Who was he?” I demand. “This guy who showed up out of nowhere, wanting to fuck your girls?”

  “I don’t know. I swear, I don’t fucking—”

  I punch him in his throat again. He coughs, rattling, wheezing, and I lean back, sighing as I wait for him to sort his shit out. When he’s done, I continue. “You don’t let anyone through your gates unless you know exactly who they are, what they had for breakfast and how many shits they’ve taken since they woke up. So you had to have known who he was, Julio.”

  “I didn’t.” He winces, screwing his eyes shut, anticipating my next blow. I decide to give him a second to finish his sentence, though. “He came with one of my regulars. Manny. He’s my brother, ese. I allowed him to bring people in with him all the time.”

  “Bad business. Very bad for business,” I say. “Where’s Manny now? Back in the States?”

  “No. No, he’s dead, okay? He was shot in Downtown LA.”

  “Convenient.”

  “Not convenient for me,” Julio gasps. “If I could send you off after him, I would. Then you wouldn’t be here, messing up my shit.”

  “I suppose that’s true.” I stop leaning quite so heavily onto his neck. “Describe this guy to me, then. What did he look like?”

  “South American, olive skin. Brown eyes, brown hair. Fuck, Cade, I don’t know. Wait, he was really thin. His shirt and his pants looked like they were a size too big for him or something.”

  “Did he speak Spanish when he was with you?”

  “Of course! Why the fuck would he have been speaking in English?”

  I want to pistol whip the motherfucker for being rude, but I don’t think I can hit his head again without him losing consciousness. “Any recognizable scars? Tattoos? Any other defining features?”

  “No. No, nothing! He looked…”

  “He looked what?”

  “He looked like an accountant or something. He wore nice clothes. Glasses. He wore glasses!”

  Glasses? Strange, but then again what’s to stop a kidnapper and probable rapist from having bad vision? I shift my weight over Julio, scowling. “You have three seconds to tell me something useful about this guy, Julio, or I’m burying this knife in your carotid artery and I’m watching you bleed the fuck out. Do you understand what I am saying to you right now?”

  “I don’t know…damn it, Cade. You’re gonna suffer for this, I promise.”

  Ignoring his panicked chatter, I hold up three fingers, and then I tuck the first into my palm. “One.”

  “I can’t tell you something I don’t know!”

  The second finger goes down. “Two.”

  “Isn’t this enough? You’ve already taken my damned finger…”

  “Three.” I’m bringing the knife down, fully intent on following through with my promise, when Julio shouts, stopping me in my tracks.

  “WOLVES!”

  The tip of the balisong stops, less than a milimeter from penetrating his skin. “Wolves?”

  “Yes! Yeah, that’s right. Wolves. Manny kept talking to him about wolves. They were whispering together about a house for wolves. It didn’t make any sense to me, and this guy was spending a lot of money—I didn’t want to ask too many questions.”

  “A house for wolves?” My incredulity colors my voice. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know. I seriously don’t know. But they talked about it for hours. That’s all there is, Cade. I promise you. I swear it.”

  Pity floods me. Julio, a thorn in the side of the Widow Makers MC for years now, looks like he’s about to burst into tears. There’s nothing more pathetic than watching a fat man cry. I nod my head, letting out a deep breath. “Okay. All right. I believe you. I suppose this means our conversation is at an end, then.” I sit back on my heels, releasing the pressure of the knife’s blade against Julio’s throat.

  A visible tidal wave of relief washed over the man underneath me. “You really are going to regret this,” he snaps, anger returning to his eyes. “You’d better find my fucking finger, before I—”

  I plunge the knife forward, sinking the metal into his neck, watching all four inches as they disappear into his flesh. Shock registers on Julio’s face, his eyes growing wider and wider as he realizes what I’ve done. And what that means.

  “But…I….told…” he splutters. Blood pumps out from between his fingers in thick, powerful spurts, almost strong enough to hit the high, grimy ceiling overhead. Julio scrambles with his four-fingered hand, trying to scoop the vital fluid back into his body, but the truth is there, written all over his face; he knows he’s already lost.

  “You said it yourself,” I tell him, watching with a blank look on my face. “That’s all there is, Julio. That’s really all there is.” It takes just a few moments for a man to die like this. I sit on top of his chest, enjoying every single one of them. Maybe that’s wrong of me. Perhaps I’ve become unhinged. A normal person wouldn’t stab someone in the neck and observe with cold, disconnected interest as their life force flowed out of them and they died. On the other hand, Julio should never have told me he knew where my sister was and he planned on obtaining her for his own purposes. That was a pretty big fucking mistake. What was he going to do with her, if this glasses-wearing accountant had made good on his deal and sent Laura back to him? Taunt and bully Rebel, for sure. But he would have taken his pound of flesh before he struck any kind of bargain with Jamie. He would have taken more than he should have from her, and for that he deserved to die.

  He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone…

  It’s not often that quotes from JC himself play out in my mind. I’m not a religious guy, and I don’t often find myself in situations that lean themselves toward righteous thinking, however covered in the blood of the lives I have just taken, I find myself feeling pretty fucking pensive. I’ve judged Julio and found him short. I could have just gone, taken the small fragments of information he gave to me and left him, injured and squealing like a stuck pig in his bed. I didn’t, though. I doled out the punishment I saw fit for his crimes.

  One of these days, someone will judge me, and I will fall short of their expectations. I’ll gladly accept whatever penance they decide to serve upon my head when the time comes.

  Until then, I’m going to keep on doing what I have to do in order to get my sister back.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MR. AMERICA

  The woman with the needle hanging out of her arm is dead. I want to bury her and the dog in the back of Julio’s yard, and I also want to finish off those four coke heads in the downstairs living room, but I have time to do neither. I have to get on the road; I have to hit Santa Clarita before dark, and the sun is already bobbing lower in the sky than I like. I duck low and weave my way through the long grass back toward the scrambler, planning the next step of my journey: ride for six hours, find somewhere to wash properly, store the scrambler somewhere safe, and get my ass on a plane.

  I may have feigned ignorance when Julio started babbling about a house for wolves, but I do know what it means. Or at least, I think I do. Not a house for wolves. The House of Wolves. Villalobos. The Villalobos family aren’t like other cartels. People don’t shake in their boots when they hear the name whispered down dark alleyways across the United States. There aren’t many people who would even have heard of them in the first place. Like most cartels, The House of Wolves deals in skin, coke and heroin, but they only deal with their own contacts—in motherfucking Ecuador.

  They are the top of the food chain, a great white shark in the sea of narcotics and sex trading, and they don’t bother themselves with small fry. The only reason I even know of the family is because of the constant trawling for information that’s carried out at the Widow Makers’ clubhouse. Ja
mie’s not your average motorcycle club president; he’s heavily invested in bringing down as many sick fucks as he can. If you deal in skin and you’re stupid enough to try and sell girls online, or in any sort of bidding community, then you’re basically fucked. It’s only a matter of time before we find you. Our hackers are good. The Villalobos family have been whispered about for years, but no one has ever given us solid information on them. And without solid information, the risk of a full-frontal assault has just been too great.

  Until now.

  So. A flight out of Mexico. A small dip into the stack of money I’m carrying with me, but well worth it if it leads me to Laura.

  I take off my leather jacket and then the black tee I’m wearing underneath, using the sweat and blood soaked shirt to wipe down my jacket, and then I rifle in the small bag I have stowed under the scrambler’s seat, hunting for something clean to wear. A gray ACDC shirt? Perfect. I throw it on, bundling up my leather and jamming it into the small compartment under the seat, along with the bag, and then I wheel the Yamaha back to the road. Just as I’m about to start the engine, shots ring out behind me, from the direction of the Perez farmhouse. I can just about make out two guys running from the house, their muffled, indecipherable shouts carrying across the fields. One of them raises his hand and another gunshot rings out, snapping through the air.

  Looks like it’s time for me to get the fuck out of here.

  ******

  Getting a plane ticket is easy. There are plenty of security checks in Mexico, especially if you’re a white American trying to fly to another country and not back into the States, however this isn’t my first time at the rodeo. I pay five hundred bucks to a toothless old garage owner on the outskirts of Santa Clarita, telling him if I’m not back in a week he can keep the scrambler. I make sure to tell him, in no uncertain terms, what will happen if I did come back in less than a week and the motorcycle isn’t there, too.