Chapter 7 Zeth
Zeth
Charlie left England back in the eighties, But thirty years hasn’t dampened his cockney accent. It took me a long time to figure out what the hell he was saying when I first met him, but now, I understand him perfectly.
“D’you need me to clear out your ears for you, boy? I ’ate ’avin’ to repeat myself. My import-export business ain’t any of your concern.”
Sitting behind his imposing monstrosity of a desk, it’s easy to see how he scares the crap out of the younger guys.
Even the older guys. He looks like a pumped-up Robert De Niro, except his presence is far more intense.
He’s in his late sixties but the guy still fucks anything that moves, still snorts anything vaguely white and powdery, and still kills anybody who looks at him sideways.
He brought me into this world of violence, though, so it’s not in me to be intimidated by him.
It’s been three weeks since Matty. Three weeks since I had a slug yanked out of my shoulder by some bumbling moron who was too scared to even look me in the eye. Three weeks that I’ve had to recover and do a little snooping.
“I didn’t even know you had an import-export business, Charlie. Thought you bought your product from the Locklands. The Black Talons when you had to?”
He opens the drawer to his desk and pulls out a small wooden box with a fleur-de-lis engraved into the lid.
That box is a childhood relic to me. Charlie used to sit me on his knee and teach me how to roll smokes for him.
He’s always kept his stash in that box. He hasn’t asked me to roll for him since I was ten, though.
Twenty-three years have passed since then.
“There are plenty of things about my business you ain’t privy to, Zeth.
That ain’t your fault, I know. When I took you under my wing, I watched you for years, thinking to myself, where will this small boy fit best into my organization when he sprouts hairs on his balls? I watched. I took note, d’in’ I?
“If you’d displayed even the slightest scrap of business sense, I would’a ’ad you involved in that side of things, and you’d know all about my side projects.
Everything else pertainin’ therein. But that ain’t what I saw in you, Zeth, is it?
I saw that you were a savage little shit wiv a nasty temper, and I found other uses for you.
Other uses that have funded your escapades for quite some time now. ”
The message is clear: Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
Charlie’s always liked idioms. Don’t shit where you eat.
Never look a gift horse in the mouth. You get the picture.
I keep my voice low when I respond. “I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, Charlie.
You know that’s not what this is about.”
He finishes rolling his smoke. Popping it into his mouth, he purses his lips, drawing it out and sealing the handmade.
When he lights it, the sickly-sweet stink of the Mary Jane he laces his tobacco with clouds the room.
He holds the smoke in his lungs before exhaling, fixing me with razor-sharp, ice-blue eyes. “Then what exactly is this about?”
“It’s about girls. Kidnapping and selling girls, taking them from their homes.”
“I never had you pegged as the sentimental type, Zeth.”
“Not sentimental. Just not a monster.”
That puts a shit-eating grin on his face. “We both know that you are, in fact, a monster.”
Maybe that’s true, but even I have boundaries. Selling girls for sex most definitely crosses the line in my book. “Just tell me the truth. Was Matty for real when he said you had a fucking shipping container of dead girls roll into harbor?”
Charlie plucks a flake of tobacco from his tongue. Flicks it away. “If you insist on knowing the truth, then yes, okay. Seventeen dead hookers. I had to pay off the port authority to make them disappear. Very messy business.”
Even though I’d known it was true before he’d confirmed it, a small part of me had hoped otherwise. I explode out of my chair. It kicks back and falls to the floor with a clatter. Charlie watches my reaction with a blank expression.
“You fucking lied to me.”
“Am I beholden to you, Zeth?” He asks the question so calmly.
I clench my jaw. “No.”
“Do I owe you anything at all?”
“No.”
“Then why do you presume that I would submit to this kind of questioning? From you? You weren’t right in the ’ead when you asked me ’bout the girls last time.
You had that fucked-up”—he waves his hand in my general direction, grimacing—“bloodlust in your eyes that you only get when there’s something stuck a mile up your ass. ”
“You had a girl kidnapped. A girl from Seattle, two and a half years ago. Where is she now?” I brace myself by my fingertips against Charlie’s desk.
I’m doing everything in my power to hold back the wild creature inside of me that’s just begging to mess him up.
Charlie smiles a benevolent smile, like my anger is endearing.
Like I’m a puppy baring his teeth. Fucker.
“I don’t take locals. And I don’t shit where I eat, you know that.”
See.
“I thought I knew a lot of things about you. Looks like I was wrong.”
“What d’you care ’bout some fuckin’ girl that got snatched two and a half years ago, anyway?” He flicks his cigarette into the crystal ashtray that forms the monstrous centerpiece of his desk.
“She doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“But she means something to someone else, right? That little slut you been shacked up wiv the past little while?”
He knows about Lacey, but he’s never mentioned her before. She’s too far below him to even be on his radar. “No. This has got nothing to do with her.”
Charlie grunts. “Well, either way, I can’t ’elp you, son.
I don’t know nothin’ ’bout some missin’ hooker.
I’d forget all about ’er if I were you. Sounds to me like you bin carrying this ’round wiv you the past two years.
You carry it ’round much longer, I think maybe you and I are gonna develop a little bit of a problem. ”
I tilt my head to one side, considering the dangerous look on Charlie’s face. Oh, we’ve already developed a problem. He just doesn’t know it yet.