Chapter 58 What Comes Next
What Comes Next
Blanca glowered at him.
B-Roll was lingering by the dead-bolted front door, not really guarding it but not not guarding it either.
He was still trying to play it casual ’cuz it was more fun when they went along with it.
Plus he didn’t like forcing them, like really forcing them, and Mikey had run outta fentanyl from Dirty Pete so their options were limited.
She was sitting on the floor way across the room from him, back to the wall, arms crossed. Some of her makeup had smeared but that was okay. They could have her touch it up before they started filming.
Her chin quivered. Her eyes were glazed.
“You don’t have to be all mopey,” B-Roll told her. “We can still just chill, have a good time.”
He was sweating so he took his shirt off. Maybe she’d like what she saw and that would loosen things up some. Didn’t seem to. He remembered reading somewhere that chicks were less visual, maybe that was it.
He paced some there in front of the locked front door. He didn’t like being stuck here with her just waiting while she stared at him.
“It’s just fooling around some,” he told her. “That’s all. No biggie.”
She kept on with that blank stare. She’d pulled her sweater over her knees, stretching it thin since it was a crop-top cut.
“You don’t have to be such a bitch about it.” He was getting aggravated, wasn’t sure why. Maybe how she was just looking at him. At least when they fought back you were fighting and you didn’t have to pay attention to them guilting you.
“You can just relax and enjoy it,” he said. “It’s not like you’ve never done it before.”
Where the fuck were the boys? What was taking so long? He’d done his part. He’d reeled her in and set up the cameras and the pillory. Foreplay was over. It was time to go. Not to sit around staring at each other. It was so uncomfortable.
“Don’t act like you didn’t know,” he said, getting angrier. “You flirted right back with me. You knew. You knew what it meant to come over and hang out.”
She just glared at him. Man, did she look angry.
At last there came a knock at the door.
“About fucking time,” B-Roll called out, backing up, groping behind him for the dead bolt. He didn’t trust her enough to take his eyes off her.
He fumbled and turned the doorknob, heard the creak of hinges as it swung in behind him.
Something rippled across Blanca’s face. Surprise? Relief?
When he turned there weren’t three forms standing in the doorway.
There was one.
The man stepped inside. He wasn’t particularly big but he was coiled tight, menacing and calm, and his presence was unsettling as fuck.
“I’m here to help you,” the man said to Blanca. “Are you okay?”
She shook her head.
He said, “Perhaps you’d like to wait for me outside?”
She nodded.
The man stepped aside, made a slight gesture toward the door with his hand, inviting her to leave. “I’ll just be a moment.”
B-Roll was between them. He felt frozen, helpless to respond. He couldn’t catch up to what was happening.
Blanca walked right past him. He let her.
He didn’t know what the man would do.
He didn’t know how to react.
She walked past the man and out into the hall.
The man closed the door behind her.
He threw the dead bolt.
B-Roll felt the thud deep in his chest.
He tried to speak, to reason, to talk his way out of things, but he couldn’t find words. He never couldn’t find words. But his throat was knotted up and he was having trouble breathing.
The man stepped forward. Shark eyes.
B-Roll took a step back.
The guy stepped toward him again. Cold and steady, nearly void of life.
B-Roll eased back.
He bumped into something, gave a little yelp.
The pillory.
Nowhere left to go.
The man stopped.
They were about three feet apart.
The man did not seem to blink. He did not seem to breathe. He did not seem real.
“Brandon Burke,” he said. “Are you ready for your close-up?”
One wrist had snapped in the process, but that happened. Wrists could be fragile.
The jaw had broken, too, because, let’s face it, it was hard to get the locking bar down when the subject was still trying to fight. It had taken a few whacks to hammer everything into place.
Now B-Roll was ensconced in the pillory, wrists and neck secured.
The camera was to the side so it could capture his face.
Evan stood behind him, texting Templeton the address and sharing Taswell’s last location as well.
B-Roll struggled violently but there wasn’t anger in it, not anymore.
Now it was just desperation. He’d been fuming and screaming himself hoarse but no one really cared about screaming in a place like this.
Cottony saliva had gummed in the corners of his mouth.
Panic tended to dehydrate. He hung there, wilted.
The apartment wasn’t so much an apartment as a den. Mattress on the floor, sloughed-off socks scattered like snake skins, a funk of pot and cigarette smoke and unwashed sheets. Parchment-colored blinds thickened the light.
The endless overpass outside rumbled, headlights and horns blaring through the battered blinds. Three stories up, they were still sunken, vehicles swooping overhead. The city sounds were abrasive, set the teeth on edge. It was hard to think in here.
B-Roll lurched and bellowed, but there was very little give in the stock. It was well designed. He could see nothing behind him. “Where are you?” he scream-cried, his words blurred through his unhinged jaw. “What’re you doing?”
His manicured beard, his manscaped chest hair, his gym-toned eight-pack, they all seemed so silly. A puddle of blood-laced drool on the floor beneath his face dilated, shimmery like mercury.
“You may have heard,” Evan said, “that RedLite experienced an unfortunate disruption. But that’s okay. They are going up again tonight. Right now, in fact. Live streams only.”
“You can’t, man. You can’t do this.”
“But I am,” Evan said.
“Wait! Wait, okay? You can’t leave me here like this. How’s anyone gonna find me? I’ll be here forever!”
“Don’t worry,” Evan said. “The cops will get here. Eventually.”
“Hang on. Just—”
“Live in three … two … one.” Evan clicked to start the live feed.
Brandon bellowed and squirmed in the pillory. Staying out of the field of view, Evan walked around the makeshift stage, moving toward the door.
“Wait! Just— Wait! I’m sorry, okay? Don’t leave me! Please! Please, don’t leave me like this!”
Evan stepped out.
The closing door muffled B-Roll’s complaints. A few steps down the stairs and Evan couldn’t even hear him over the roar of traffic.
Despite a decent afternoon sun, Blanca shuddered as Evan walked with her along the sidewalk. She’d refused his jacket.
He’d just finished explaining to her how she could repay him. He needed someone to carry on the unbroken tradition and that person would not be Kenzie, whom he’d freed from extortion over the nude selfie she’d sent. Nor would it be Anca, who looked to a higher judgment.
“So just find someone else who needs help?” Blanca said. “Anyone in bad trouble? And give them your number? 1-855-2-NOWHERE?”
“Are you willing to do that?”
She scrunched up her face, lips pooched, brow furrowing. “Hell yeah, I will.”
As she walked, she hugged herself at the stomach. Her sweater was stretched out, billowing low, and she’d tugged the sleeves down over her hands. A pretty girl, still a kid.
For a time, they walked in silence, navigating the flow of pedestrians.
“It was so scary,” she said. “I was so scared.”
“I know,” Evan said.
“That guy? He just didn’t care. Didn’t care about anything.”
Evan said, “I know.”
“I hope he rots in prison.”
“He will,” Evan said.
She nodded and then nodded again, as if reassuring herself. “Well, that’s something.”
“Yes,” Evan said. “It’s something.”
They’d reached the mouth of the subway stop. Blanca hesitated, peering at the stairs falling away into shadow. For a moment, Evan saw it as a gaping maw, vomiting people up from the underworld and sucking them down.
She started to cry.
He stood with his hands loose at his sides, unsure what to do.
“What’s the point?” she said. “The world is so mean. It’s so mean.
” She swiped her eyes. She was still crying.
“My parents suck, and school sucks, and there’s never enough money, and I haveta take care of my sister, and what’s the point?
What’s the point? What am I looking forward to?
This?” She waved her hand around, indicating B-Roll, the building, the city.
“What am I supposed to do? With people like him out here? What do I do when you’re not around next time? ”
“It’s not just me,” Evan said.
“What?”
“There were so many people before you. Who looked out for the next person who needed help. And the next person. And the next. All of them led to you.”
Her lips were trembling, her mascara smeared. “I’m not anything.”
“You’re sharp. And tough.”
“You have to say shit like that. You’re an old-fashioned adult. You don’t know anything. You don’t know what it’s like to be me right now.”
“I have a … niece kind of.”
“A niece kind of. Okay.”
“A bit older than you.”
“Okay. So?”
“You remind me of her.”
“Hope that’s a compliment.”
“The biggest,” he said. “I see what’s inside you. And who you find next? Who you reach out to help? They’re gonna see it, too. It’s what’s gonna let them know that it might be okay. That they can make it. You’re it now. You’re what comes next.”
Her chin dipped and she took a tentative step forward and then she hugged him. A clumsy embrace around his arms, pinning them to his sides so he couldn’t hug her back. In a way it was a relief; he’d been caught off guard and wouldn’t have known what to do.
Letting go, she turned without looking back and moved down the stairs into the belly of the city. Standing at the top step, framed by a circle of sky, he watched her until she disappeared.