9. Ivy
NINE
IVY
Blood.
So much blood everywhere.
That’s what happened when you beat a man to death with a reproduction Mickey Mantle wooden baseball bat in the middle of the night.
I studied my handiwork from every angle, knowing I had an hour max before someone stumbled along and found him. I had to make a statement, one beyond the mangled and bloody state of the target for the night. I had to let them know who did it, so they’d know.
They knew now that I knew them.
Or of them, at least.
They knew someone was following them . . . watching them . . . taking their jobs out from under their noses and rubbing it in with every single one.
Like bleeding someone to death, one tiny cut at a time.
The hints had been dropped. Now I wanted them looking over their shoulder every time they fucking sneezed. The shadows needed to contain their doubts, fears, and secrets they only hoped to uncover before it was too late.
I didn’t just want to end them anymore. No, that would be too easy. I wanted to torture them til the last minute. I wanted them to hurt, to second-guess themselves, to doubt every move they made from here on out. I wanted the confident, cocky assholes to become a mockery of themselves. Doubt, confusion, hesitance. I wanted them to take a contract and wonder if I’d get there first. Wanted them to know what it felt like to have a reputation that didn’t mean shit anymore. Wanted them to know the kind of fear that gripped me for the first three years of my life after they took my father from me.
I needed them to feel what I’d felt.
Make them suffer like they did you.
Make them bleed in more ways than just the physical.
I closed my eyes and saw my dad in my mind, like he was before he’d been unjustly killed in his own home, on his own lawn, in his damn bedclothes. He was a vibrant man, so full of life, always doing something. And they’d just snuffed him out like a candle that was no longer needed.
They’ll pay, Daddy. They’ll all pay.
When I opened them again, I got back to work, no hesitation in my steps. Because, after all, there was no time to waste.
I still had a shift tonight to work.
“Awe, come on, princess, just one more drink for ole Charlie?” His hair had begun to shine in the dimmed UV lights above the bar from the oil on his hands, which he’d run through his hair a million and one times already while flirting with anything that had tits. “I swear I’m good for it.”
I shot him the fakest, plastic Barbie-doll smile I could muster as I shoved a towel into the highball glass I just cleaned. “It’s not your money I’m worried about, Charlie. It’s your ability to drive home to that wife of yours who you think I don’t know about.” I glanced pointedly at his left hand, where the telltale pale shape of a very much missing ring still circled his second to last finger.
He had the decency to blush as he tossed his card on the bartop and mumbled things he thought I couldn’t hear.
Fucking bitch.
Buzzkill.
Interfering whore.
He’d just as soon kill me as tip me if given the chance, but Charlie and I had an agreement of sorts. I didn’t open my mouth about his extracurricular studies in the bar, specifically the one-on-one sprints he ran in the bathroom with whatever floozie was desperate enough to get railed ten feet from a urinal. And in return, he didn’t hassle me when I cut him off .
He knew better than to try that shit with me. The other girls might put up with it, but he knew what I was capable of.
He used to haunt the Devil’s Lair, about two miles further downtown, back when I worked there. That is until I stabbed a man through the center of his fucking nasty ass hand when he dared to grab me over the bar and try to take what wasn’t his.
Working at Sinner’s Slums on the Dread River wasn’t too taxing. The clientele wasn’t the upscale shit I was used to, but their money was good. I didn’t care who paid me. As long as they kept their hands to themselves and paid their tab at the end of the night.
Charlie didn’t linger at the bar when I handed him back his card. He signed it without arguing about the automatic gratuity I added to the bill, too. And when another man sat down to take his place, I started the same old song and dance all over again, fawning over them, supplying them endless drinks, playing therapist to some of the most fucked up individuals I’d had the misfortune to ever meet.
Sometimes, even the darker clientele came in and sat down at my bar.
Tonight, one such man sat alone in the corner of the bar, his back against the wall, facing the room like he was preparing to fight his way out of a den of snakes. Those sharp eyes were dark and ominous, but I’d bet they didn’t miss a thing. He scanned the crowd while he sipped on the only drink he’d ordered that night–a boring-ass bottle of beer. Not even an import, either. It was the sort of swill you saw rednecks drinking at mountain parties when they were seventeen and had to pool summer job money to buy as much beer as possible to impress their friends.
Though his clothes and the way he carried himself didn’t suggest he lacked for cash.
“Hey,” a voice yelled from my left, startling me out of my deep thought, “another beer here and a margarita for the lady!”
I turned around, back to playing wind-up circus whore for these drunken trash pandas, and plastered on my fake smile once more, letting the strange, mysterious man slip from view.
Thirteen million drinks later, we closed up shop, and I slung my bag over my shoulder and trotted up the steps and out the door. Good thing about working this new job was that people didn’t seem to mind when I slipped out unannounced after closing. As long as I got my shit done and nobody complained, they let me be.
After my second shift, I wasn't even assigned a barback. The boss figured out I knew what I was doing, so he gave me what I asked for: autonomy and peace.
And now, it was time to recharge and repeat it all over the next day.
I waved at the bouncer as I slipped out the front door and onto the still-busy street, headlights bathing me in a constant on-again, off-again glow of white, yellow, and occasionally blue. A few straggling people kicked out of bars for last call meandered drunkenly up and down the sidewalks, mostly keeping to themselves as they tried to find another place to serve them, or their homes. A few even tried hailing cabs that would never come. It was too late to get a sane person to take you home in the River District.
Only place worse than this was South End.
But I wasn’t scared. I knew enough to survive in this little slice of the world. After all, this was where I ended up when I left home and turned my back on everything I’d ever known.
“Your father’s been dead for a year now, Ivy. It’s time to move on.”
I stood in my father’s study as men my mother had paid filed in and out with his belongings, one after the other, giving no care to anything he’d ever loved or cherished. It was as if they were erasing him, taking him away for good, and with his things went memories that I’d never get back.
I clung stubbornly to a book he’d often left sitting on his desk, next to a notebook filled with strange symbols and words that didn’t make sense. I found the notebook in the fireplace the night he died and stuffed it under my mattress. And now, my mother was determined to take the rest of him and make it disappear, too. The book was one he used to read to me at bedtime—A Little Princess. It told the story of a girl who came from riches and lost it all, only to find, years after her life changed, that she’d been wealthy all along. She went on to help people lesser than her with her wealth and never forgot those who stayed with her in her lowest moments.
I used to tease him, insisting that he’d never lose his fortune. That I’d never have to worry about that kind of life because he would never leave me.
And now look at us.
He was dead, and I was alone, save for a mother who didn’t give two shits about her child now that she was grown. I could stay or leave; she’d likely never notice the difference. It was all the same to her once she started to drink.
“You’re not taking this book,” I spat at her, determination scrunching my facial features as I fought her the only way I knew how. “It’s mine. I’m keeping it.”
She stared at me for a long moment before deciding that it wasn’t a battle worth fighting and turned her back to me, pointing things out to the men across the room who awaited her orders. “Take the old stack of encyclopedias and the globe in the corner. I want nothing left of that man when you’re done.”
He’d built his empire from the ground up, and now my mother was determined to slowly but surely turn it into something unrecognizable. She would run it into the ground in her quest for pretty things and fake friends who admired all the ‘things’ she had.
I wanted no part in it.
When she went to bed that night, I put a few changes of clothes, the book and notebook from my father’s study, and a few necklaces in a backpack. I emptied the spare cash reserves–not that she’d left much in there to steal in the first place, just a couple grand in twenties and tens. And I walked out the front door, ditched my whole life, and started over on the streets.
My first night out there, I got robbed. Lost the cash and the necklaces.
By the end of the week, I was in desperate need of a shower and some filling food.
By week three, I was debating my unavoidable return home with my tail between my legs.
But something kept me from giving up. And eventually, I managed to claw my way up from the bottom, to where I was now.
I didn’t even have to whore myself out to do it, either.
After hearing some of the horror stories of the other street girls, I had my doubts that I’d be given a choice. Somehow, though, I managed to avoid it entirely. Picked up quite a few skills that made me an invaluable tool on the streets. Learned trades that the more civilized crowds never bothered with.
And soon, I was warm, fed, and somewhat safe.
Then, the planning started.
A week ago, I’d proved I could get close enough to slip one of them roofies in their drink. Tonight, I was going to prove I could beat them at their own game. They thought they were taking extra precautions, enough to keep whoever was stealing their kills from finding out their next move.
But I’d been watching. And I had an ace up my sleeve–the wiretap bug I’d planted on the bat I returned to their dorms the night before last.
As far as I knew, Jackal hadn’t figured out yet that his suddenly reappeared weapon was a trap. He stuck it lovingly in the corner of their living room and it had been providing me with a wealth of knowledge on them ever since.
I knew their schedules now, knew their patterns, their habits, even how they interacted with each other.
Dingo was sort of in charge, his calm demeanor and rationality making him the obvious choice for the role. Jackal was flighty, obsessive, and always verging on a psychotic break. He liked to push buttons, frustrating the other two. And then there was Coyote. He didn’t talk much, but when he did, the other two listened. If he hadn’t been so antisocial, his obvious understanding of the people around him would have made him a prime leader. But to be the leader, you had to speak up, and half this guy’s vocabulary was grunts, groans, and sighs. I was beginning to think he didn’t know how to speak, but his occasional lone read-aloud in the living room when the other two were asleep hinted otherwise.
He liked to read classic fiction and poetry.
I hadn’t met a man since my early days in college who read with the eloquence that he possessed. His every word made me hesitate when it came through the bug, and occasionally, I knew the passage he was reciting. Once or twice, I caught myself reciting it back, as if he could fucking hear me.
And then I’d slap myself in the face and shake the stupidity from my bones.
I had no business being attracted to a man I planned to kill.
Even if his voice was insanely attractive when he read old English as if it were his first language.
The sooner I did away with these men, the better.
And yet . . . I found myself settling into my sheets with a sigh and a wistful expression, thinking of easier times when I also studied Shakespeare late into the night, as his voice reverberated through my headphones, lulling me to sleep.