Chapter 4 Zeth #2
Pain ricochets through my body like a hot, white lance.
The bullet hits me in the chest, two inches below my collarbone…
and suffice it to say, it hurts like a bitch.
Matty seems stunned that I’m still standing.
If I were him, I’d have already shot me another five times and emptied the clip just to make sure I was dead.
Fucker’s gonna wish he had. I launch over the desk and grapple the gun from him, ripping it free from his grip.
“Big mistake, Matty. Big mistake.” I smash my fist into his face with a brutal force.
The crunch of metal crushing bone, skin and muscle separating, isn’t something I ever get used to, but on occasions like this I allow myself to enjoy it a little.
Just a little. We have to try to enjoy our work, after all, and pain always awakens my dark side.
Matty’s head rolls back as I pound my fist into his face over and over and over again. My hands, T-shirt, jacket, jeans, everything is covered in blood by the time the guy falls slack. I laugh hysterically as blood bubbles form on his lips.
“It wasn’t my fault,” he mumbles. I’ve broken his teeth and his speech is distorted, but I get the gist. “You lock people inside a sealed shipping container for th-three days, they’re gonna d-die, Zeth. How is that my fault?”
The burritos I ate an hour ago churn in my stomach. What the fuck is he talking about? I raise my fist to smash it into his mouth again, but… I can’t. This is just fucking perfect. “What people?”
“The ones Charlie’s been bringing in through the docklands. Girls. Girls in con… containers.”
I let Matty go. Girls in containers? Charlie promised me two years ago that he didn’t deal in girls. Drugs and guns, yeah, but he swore no skin trade. “What’s he moving girls for?” I press my hand to my shoulder, wincing. My own pain is growing now that I’m not inflicting it on someone else.
“Why do you think?” Matty rasps. “He gets twenty grand a pop if he can prove they’re still… still in… intact.” He chokes on the blood welling in his mouth. It runs down his chin, dripping onto his ruined shirt.
“You’re lying.”
“I ain’t,” he says, and I believe him.
Fuck.
Charlie’s the one who’s been lying to me all this time.
A part of me wants to believe this is a new development, but I know my boss.
He’s got a degree, a master’s and a goddamned doctorate in lying.
Especially when it comes to money. No way he’d pass up twenty grand for a nobody kid he could have snatched off the street.
My head spins, disoriented from the pain radiating from my shoulder.
Through the mist slowing down my mind, I still think it, though.
Was I right about the girl, then? Did Charlie take the girl’s sister nearly three years ago?
The first time I saw her, she was working a night shift at the hospital.
My sack-of-shit uncle had just been eighty-sixed—badly.
The body wasn’t supposed to be found after something like that—and it had been on me to identify the body.
Well, what was left of it. I could tell Sloane was a broken bird.
Beautiful in an understated way. Luminous brown eyes.
Wavy brown hair. It was the fight in her eyes that had captured me, though.
Captured and enthralled me in the space of ten seconds flat.
We’d stood face-to-face in the corridor as she waited for the elevator, and her eyes had met mine.
I felt like I was being gutted stem to sternum, and yet I knew she wasn’t seeing me at all.
She was seeing some distant horror that I could only guess at. And I didn’t like guessing.
I’d made it my business to find out everything there was to know about her.
That was when I’d discovered her sister had gone missing.
Snatched off the side of the road, only twenty-one years old.
Sloane’s family were Christian to the core.
Promise rings, hymns every Sunday, no cursing, no drinking, the whole nine yards.
Except when her sister had been kidnapped, Sloane had stopped going to church.
Didn’t wear the cross I knew her mother had given her.
She’d given up believing because it was just too hard to keep her faith alive when something so terrible had marred her life.
And then on top of everything else, and in keeping with the truly vile motherfucker that I am, I’d taken her virginity. But that had been a mistake.
I’d found out Eli Harris was bribing her when he’d shown up to pay his dues to Charlie.
Like everyone else in Seattle, he owed Holsan protection money.
He’d been bragging about the trade he’d made with her as he’d settled his account.
The sick bastard thought it was hilarious that he was about to sell Sloane to the highest bidder—a guy I knew from reputation alone.
A guy who liked to beat his women black and blue while he screwed them.
I’d paid big to take his place. Double Eli’s month’s protection money.
Eli had told me she was no stranger to selling her body for information.
That she enjoyed it. That she’d been the one who suggested the trade.
And I had no beef with sex workers. It was the most honest trade there was.
Only Eli had fucking lied, hadn’t he? Of course he fucking had.
The woman had never even been touched by a guy before.
Eli had manipulated her into the deal, as he’d manipulated me into believing the arrangement was something it was not, and I had taken Sloane Romera’s virginity as a result.
That was on me. But it had also been on Eli… and, oh boy, he had paid for that lie.
Before he died, I’d made him spill everything he’d known about Alexis Romera’s disappearance. The pimp had said it was Charlie all along. I hadn’t believed him, but I’d still confronted my boss about it. Charlie had been mortally offended that I’d even suggested such a thing.
You know me better than that, son. I’m signed up for some questionable dealings, but I ain’t interested in pussy. Karma on that shit’s too raw, now go on. Get the fuck out of my face.
I’d had my one night with Sloane and then severed all ties.
Left her with no way of knowing what Eli was promising to tell her.
It had been harsh, yeah, sure, since she’d carried out her end of the bargain and never gotten the lead she was after.
But fuck, I’d at least made sure she’d enjoyed it.
Made sure she wouldn’t have nightmares about my face every second she closed her eyes.
I could have just walked away. Left her in that hotel room still a virgin, unspoiled.
But then again, I couldn’t have, could I?
I hadn’t known she was a virgin. By the time I’d figured that out, it had been too fucking late.
“You’re sure about this?” I tighten my grip around Matty’s neck, and his eyes damn near bug out of his head.
“Yeah, man! Yeah, I’m sure!”
Screw you, Charlie. I stoop and pick up the piece from off the floor where Matty dropped it. Desert Eagle. I don’t usually kill with guns, but sometimes, for a work of art, you’ve just gotta make an exception.
“Zeth! Zeth, man, don’t! I’m sorry, okay? I’m—I’m sorry I shot you!”
Begging makes me feel queasy. I do it. I pull the trigger and Matty’s head kicks back like a Rock’em Sock’em robot, except there’s blood. A whole lot of blood and fragments of bone, like little pieces of smashed porcelain.
“Why am I right all the time?”
I turn and there is Lacey in the doorway, the heel of her right palm pressed into her sternum. She’s soaked to the skin and panting.
“Lacey—”
“Don’t worry about it,” she tells me. “I already knew.” She stumbles into the room and looks down on Matty, eyebrows banked together, mouth drawn down in a confused pout.
I’d like to think this is her first dead body, only I know better.
She faces me. Holds her hand out. “Come on. Let’s get you to the hospital. ”
I don’t take her hand. “No. Not the hospital. I’m not going there.”
I won’t risk seeing Sloane again. Not until I hear the truth come out of Charlie’s mouth. Even if I have to beat it out of him, I will learn the truth.