BABY FOR A PRICE

by Kathryn Thomas

  I hear Steve gasp and see Sarah smile. Then Steve is walking toward me, shaking his head.

  “Oh, you’re going to fire me?” I snap, tossing my notepad onto the floor with my apron. “You think I give a shit. I’m pregnant! I’m going to be a mother, and I won’t take this shit! Not anymore! Being pawed at by freaks for a few dollars an hour, only being able to pay rent with the tips! Letting them grind against you and—and you, Steve, are the worst of all. How many girls have you forced to suck you off, you fucking pervert?”

  I turn away from him before he can answer, throw Charles a grimace which has him recoiling in his seat, and then stomp from the building, ignoring the eyes of the men. Even now, they go to my breasts, my legs. I want to slap the face of every man who robs some of this moment by leering, but then I’m out in the autumn sun, panting, fists clenched so tightly two of my fingernails snap. When I’m in the parking lot, I realize I’ve left my clothes back there in the locker, but it’s too late to go back now. I tap my pocket, where I always keep my purse just in case Sarah tries to play a prank on my locker, which is the sort of childish thing she’d do.

  I’m walking down the street to the bus stop when I see Hound’s jeep parked at the end of the road. Instantly, I feel better, so much better than I did a few moments ago. I told him I loved him and I meant it, but it’s not until this moment that it really hits home for me. If I can go from rage to smiling in a matter of seconds, there must be something here. I think about how I’ll tell him the story, how I’ll relate all the looks on their faces. I wonder if he’ll laugh.

  I open the passenger seat door and climb in. “I’m so glad you’re here,” I say, fastening my seatbelt. “This has been the craziest day. I just couldn’t handle it anymore—Wait? No! No!”

  Mac, the man with the tattoo on his forehead, grabs my arm when I reach for the door. He’s old, but he’s strong, his grip like iron. He reeks of whisky and cigarettes, but his suit is clean. He grins at me. “Let’s not be foolish, Miss Dunham,” he says. “Or you’ll have to deal with them.” He nods into the backseat and I feel like an idiot for not checking the car first. The ginger-haired twins who were with Mac when he came to watch the stripping auditions sit back there, staring with empty eyes straight ahead of them. “So please, can’t we try and be civil?”

  “I’ll scream,” I say. “I’ll scream and—”

  “And what?” Mac’s smile never once touches his eyes. I imagine this man putting a bullet into somebody’s head and then making some toast afterward. He doesn’t seem to care. “What do you think would happen? Prince fuckin’ Charming is going to come to your rescue, is he? No, you’re ours now, so be a good little girl and stay quiet, or I’ll have one of my friends here cut that baby out of your belly and force it down your throat. Don’t look so shocked, you stupid whore. How hard do you think it is to pay off a doctor?” He flashes a grin that sends worms crawling over my body. “Are you going to be a good girl while I drive us to our date, dear, or am I going to have to get one of my friends to educate you?”

  I glance back at the dead-eyed twins. They don’t look like they’d enjoy hurting me. But they don’t look like they’d refuse to hurt me, either. They look like hammers, lying inanimately until it’s time for them to act. I turn back to the road and shake my head. “I’ll be quiet,” I say. “I won’t…” Tears rise in my throat. I cough them back. So much for my big, dramatic, I’m-strong-now exit. I’ve walked out of one situation where men are the judges and jurors right into another, only now they might be the executioners as well.

  “Good,” Mac says.

  He starts the car and drives leisurely through the city.

  “We’re going to have to double back on ourselves,” he says. “I have a meeting at The Red Room, but there’s a stop we need to make first.”

  He drives for five minutes before I realize where his destination is.

  “No, please. Please don’t hurt him. He hasn’t done anything. It’s not his fault.”

  Mac laughs at this, and then coughs violently. “Not his fault! It’s all his fault, you stupid hole. If it wasn’t for him you’d be safe in your slutty bar right now, sucking men’s balls for a ten dollar tip.” He leans across, breathing whisky onto my face. It takes all my self-control not to gag. I’m afraid that if I do, he’ll take offence to it and hurt me. “You’re all sluts in there, aren’t you? I know for a fact that one of your girls will do anything for a bit of cash, because she works at The Red Room. I’m always amazed by how far women will go for a few hundred dollars. A few hundred dollars! Not even enough to pay their rent and the sluts’ll let you put it in their asses.” He laughs again, before coming to a stop outside the hospital. “Go and get him. And you,” he goes on, shooting me a look of cold death. “If you make one more noise, I’ll cut off one of your fingers.” He takes a pair of pruning sheers from his pocket. “Try me. Go on. See if I won’t. I’m tired of you and that big hunk of fucking shit disrespecting me. You’ll both learn your lesson. I would’ve taken the money, a month ago, but let me tell you, it’d take a damn lot more money than your old man has to stop this now. I will not be disrespected.”

  The twins exit the car and walk toward the hospital. This is my chance, I tell myself, but Mac doesn’t take his eyes off me and he opens and closes the sheers, making a click-click noise that makes me wonder how easily metal can cut through flesh and bone. And before I have a chance to summon the courage I’d need, the twins are walking back toward the jeep, but without Dad.

  “Where is he?” Mac asks tightly, when they climb in.

  “Don’t know, Boss,” one of the twins answers. “Wasn’t in his bed. Nurses and doctor don’t know, neither.”

  “Your dear father has left you to your fate,” Mac says. “What a surprise.”

  “What are you going to do to me?” I ask, as Mac drives back toward The Red Room. I’m shivering now and I wish that smell of whisky and tobacco would go away so I could think. It’s too stuffy in here, too claustrophobic.

  “I’m going to have my adopted son kill the one obstacle standing between him and a long and fruitful career. I’m sure it will take some persuading. But that’s never been a problem for me.”

  And the sheers go click-click.

  Chapter Twenty

  Hound

  “What do you mean, you thought she was with me?” I shout down the phone, making people on the street back away from me uneasily.

  “She climbed into your jeep, man. Shit, the fuck am I supposed to think when I see her climb into your jeep? It’s your car, the license plate the same, all that shit.”

  “And you didn’t check? You didn’t fucking check?” I stop, leaning against a wall that smells of piss and taking shaky breaths through gritted teeth.

  “No,” Denton says quietly. “Shit. I know. Shit.”

  “It’s Mac. It’s fucking Mac. That psychopathic old fuck. I’m guessing you didn’t tail the jeep, then?”

  “No, man. No, I’m sorry.”

  I hang up the phone and roar into the sky, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  “Excuse me, mister.” The man taps my shoulder. He’s tall, around six feet, but I still loom over him. He’s standing a few yards in front of his daughter, who I guess is around five or six, and who’s staring at me like I’m an animal that’s gotten loose from the zoo. “Could you ease up on the curse words?”

  I grin at him. “You’re a brave bastard, you know that?” I say, quietly so his daughter doesn’t hear. “A brave fucking bastard. If I was the man I once was…goddamn, be careful who you approach on the street, that’s what I’m saying. Not everyone will be okay with it. But sure, I’ll stop swearing loud enough for your little girl to hear.”

  I walk away from him, opening and closing my hands, wishing Mac’s throat was in my grip so I could crush it. When I get back to my apartment building—I was at the gym around the corner, working out and thinking—I walk a block down the street and climb into my junker car that nobody apart from me knows ab
out: just a rusted frame of a car that, to look at, probably doesn’t run. But it does run, just about, and when I start the engine I guide the croaking hull to Mac’s bar.

  The place is empty apart from Nora, cleaning a glass. She looks up when I enter. “Ah, Henry,” she says. “He said you’d be by soon.”

  “The bastard left me a message, I’m guessing.”

  “Yes.” She sighs. “Please be careful about this, Henry. I know you want a different life, but you can’t have a different life if you’re not alive.”

  “You’re a good woman, Nora. I wish you were my mother. But I have to do this. What did he say?”

  “Mother!” She giggles. Again I see the girl she was, pressing through the wrinkled skin. “Grandmother, more like. But yes, the message. It was that twin, Ripper, who told it to me, and he was very solemn and mean-looking as he said it, I don’t mind remarking. He said: Tell that big hunk of shit to meet us where the walls are blood.”

  “The walls are blood,” I repeat, and then nod. “The walls are blood. The Red Room. I just fucking passed there. Goddamn it.”

  “Be careful!” Nora calls after me.

  I drive the junker to The Red Room, sprint across the sun-kissed parking lot, and then slam through the door, roaring at the top of my lungs, “Daisy! Daisy! Where the fuck is she?” I’m angrier than I’ve ever been on a job, but I have the same itching sensations in my fists, the same desire to punch and do harm, the desire that once brought me pride and then shame and then, when I was dead to it, nothing at all. But now all I feel is an overwhelming protective urge. “Daisy!”

  I charge into the main room where the auditions were held. Red lights shine all over the place and it looks eerie when empty, as it always does, without the women strutting at the poles or circulating and laughing, dead-quiet without the pop music. But the stage isn’t completely empty. Mac stands on it, just in front of Daisy, who’s tied to a rickety old wooden chair, the rope digging into her legs and arms. She’s been crying and blood trickles from the corner of her lip from where someone—I’m guessing Ripper—has hit her. Mac smiles when he sees me.

  “Hound!” He claps his hands like we’re pals meeting at a barbeque, like he doesn’t have the love of my life tied up right where I can see her. “I was wondering when you were going to show up. Old One-Arm really is good, isn’t she?”

  “Mac.” I talk to him, but I keep my eyes on Daisy. I try and tell her with my eyes that everything’s going to be okay. I try and tell her that I’ll get her out of this. But I can tell she isn’t convinced; maybe it’s because I’m not convinced myself. “Why have you got her up there like that? Let her down, Mac.”

  “Let her down, he says.” He looks back at the twins, and then to me. “You need to let her go, Hound. You’ve become soft, weak. You’ve let her legs and her ass and her cunt hypnotize you. I don’t blame you. I really don’t. If we had more time, I would sample them myself. But you can’t let a tight hole rule your life. Only weak men do that. I never thought you were a weak man. Even as a boy, you were stronger than this.”

  “No,” I say. One word, but it’s the most I’ve ever openly defied him.

  “What did you say?” He tilts his head at me, as though one second he’d expected to see the obedient teenager and the next he saw me, the real me, the man who’s tired of his shit.

  “I said no. I said fucking no, Mac. Let her out of that chair. Let her live her life. You want to cause some harm? Fine, have a field day. String me up, bleed me out. I don’t give a damn. Just let her go.”

  “You’d really die for this cunt,” he mutters. “That’s interesting. I knew you were whipped, but I didn’t think you were that far gone. Listen.” He walks almost to the edge of the stage. I feel my predator’s instincts primed and ready. Ripper and Hitter are close to Daisy, but Ripper and Hitter are tools, have always been tools; they won’t act without their boss’s say-so. Their boss’s…it hits me heavily, the realization that Mac, after all these years, isn’t my boss but my enemy. “That’s incredible. I’ve been with my fair share of women—some of the girls in here still call me a lady’s man—but I’ve never lost my head like that. She must be one tight hole.”

  “You’re right,” I say, hating how my voice takes on the Old-Hound sound, the proud sound, the sound of trying to please this bastard. I lean in conspiratorially, hoping that will make him inch forward. It does. “You’re right,” I go on. “She is. I reckon she’s got to my head. Did I really just fuckin’ ask you to let her go? Let me tell you something, Boss.” Call him Boss, lean in, make him take one more step forward.

  “What?” Mac says, smiling that perverted old man’s smile. Behind his eyes, I can see what he’s thinking, and it makes me sick.

  “She’s the best piece of—” He steps to the edge of the stage.

  That’s when I make my move.

  Even now, when he has my woman up there against her will, even threatening to make me kill her, he’s surprised when I strike. I grab his ankles and yank, making him tip backward, his head smashing into the stage. As he falls, I see the look in his eyes, the same look I must’ve had in my eyes that day Mom turned me away from her place in California: wounded shock. Even now, the old psychopath thinks we can be friends, thinks I’ll be his son. I jump up on the stage, everything foggy, hardly thinking, meaning to stamp his head into the wood, get Daisy, and get the hell out of here. But then Mac is on his feet, way quicker than I would’ve thought an old man like that could move, and Ripper and Hitter are at his side. Hitter doesn’t look awkward or apologetic now. He looks deadly. At least they’re not standing near Daisy anymore. Behind them, I see Daisy trying to work her hand out of the bindings, scraping her skin on the rope.

  “That was—that was foolish.” Mac dabs at his head; his hand comes away carmine, his fingers bright and colorful. “That was a mistake, boy.”

  “Boy,” I repeat. “Boy. Call me boy and send me to slaughter dozens of men. Call me boy and send me to intimidate old weak men. Call me boy and soak me in blood. When are you going to learn, you old moronic fuck, that I’m not your boy?”

  Mac smiles, a sick sense of pride in his eyes. “You’ve grown up. I’m surprised. I never thought you would.” He pauses, and then says, “We’re going to kill you now, Hound, and then the three of us are going to rape that whore. I bet she likes it in the ass. She looks that sort. A real fucking slut.”

  I’m on them, fists swinging, my mind heavy and weighted, weighed down so that the only things I feel are my fists and the blood. Ripper dodges my hook and gives me a couple in the gut with his knuckle-duster. I grunt, dance back, and then dodge Mac and Hitter, letting them run past me, before grabbing Ripper’s head in both my hands, holding it in place, and smashing my forehead so hard against his nose I feel the crunch of the cartilage. I hit him again and then pick him up by his head and toss him like a rag doll off the stage. He crashes into a table snapping it in half and then lying in a mess of wood and blood on the floor.

  Mac and Hitter come at me again, Hitter shouting in anger because even if his brother’s a prick, he’s still his brother. He lands a blow on my jaw by feinting at my belly and then ducking and weaving. I reel back, Mac landing another on my forearm, would’ve been my face if I didn’t lift my arm to block it. They push me back to the opposite side of the stage, past Daisy, and then off the stage. I land with a thump on the floor, the wind going out of me for a second, but then I roll over and jump to my feet, grabbing the closest thing at hand. The chair lifts Hitter off his feet and sends him flying into a table like his brother, where he crashes and groans and then lies still, breathing weakly.

  I’m about to charge at Mac when I see the panicked look in his eyes. I know what he’s going to do before he does it, but by then it’s too late. He’s across the stage and standing over Daisy whilst I’m still clambering up after him. He has his pistol out and pressed against the back of her head whilst I’m still walking toward him. Then I have to stop, because he pulls back the ham
mer and I know he’ll do it, blow her brains out right in front of me. I see a red spray and for a second think he’s already pulled the trigger, but then I wipe the blood away from my eyes—mine? somebody else’s?—and look at Daisy, who’s teeth are chattering in fear.

  “If you kill her, you die,” I tell him.

  He grins. “Maybe. But if I kill her, she dies. There’s no maybe about that.”

  I’m clenching my jaws so hard my teeth are throbbing, feel like they might shatter. I watch as Daisy closes her eyes and mutters something and then opens her eyes. Suddenly her teeth aren’t chattering. Suddenly she’s calm. “Make him suffer if he kills me,” she says, eyes locked on mine. “Don’t let it be quick. Make him hurt.”