Money Shot (Hard Case Crime) Read online

  “She wanted to get in touch with one of my models,” I told him. “Said they were friends as kids.”

  “She wanted to catch up?” the boss asked. “Reminisce about old times?”

  I shrugged or tried to. It came out kind of funny with my arms tied out to either side.

  The boss nodded, contemplating the smoke from the end of his cigarette. Then he brought the cigarette to his lips and took a deep drag. When he exhaled, two words came out with the smoke.

  “Which model?”

  I closed my eyes. Zandora was hardly my best friend. She was a shallow bimbo with more designer sunglasses than sense, but she sure as hell didn’t deserve to have this guy after her. The last thing I wanted to do was to drag her or anyone else into this ugly mess. I told myself to hold out, hanging on to the idea that I was protecting Zandora. I needed to at least try and be tough, because I didn’t want to think of myself as the sort of person that rolled over after two punches.

  “You’re thinking about being brave,” the boss said, taking another deep drag off his cigarette. “Don’t.”

  “Angel, please,” Sam said, his eyes bright and desperate.

  “Shut up,” the rhino said again and shot another curt hook at Sam’s temple.

  I said nothing. I squinted up at the boss and put what I hoped was a tough expression on my face. He sighed like a disappointed teacher and handed his cigarette to Jesse.

  Jesse cracked a huge grin and parked the cigarette in one corner of his mouth. Then he climbed up onto the bed, straddling my hips and putting his left hand around my throat. His hands were big. I felt his thumb and forefinger pressing into the soft spots beneath my ears while the wide palm leaned down on my windpipe, cutting off my air. His face was inches from mine, pretty blue eyes gazing intently into mine like a romance novel hero as he took the cigarette from his lips with his other hand.

  When I felt the heat of the cigarette moving closer to my cringing skin, all my tough-guy plans went right out the window.

  “Zandora Dior,” I said, my voice an airless croak.

  “I’m sorry,” the boss said, gesturing to Jesse to back off. “Could you repeat that?”

  Jesse reluctantly let go of my neck but stayed on top of me. He was heavy. I could feel how much he was enjoying himself. I wanted to kill him.

  “Zandora,” I said again, only a little more clearly this time. “Zandora Dior.”

  “Ah,” the boss said. He plucked his cigarette from between Jesse’s fingers and took another drag. Jesse looked like he’d just had his favorite toy taken away.

  “...but I didn’t give that girl Zandora’s phone number,” I said. “I just told her I would give Zandora her cell number but I never did. I never did.”

  I could tell I’d fucked up as soon as the words were out of my mouth. The boss’ eyes narrowed. Jesse’s grin came back, wider than ever.

  “Lia doesn’t have a cell phone,” the boss said.

  Jesse’s hand was on my throat again. He just couldn’t seem to get enough of that. I know plenty of girls that are really into that asphix shit, but not me.

  “Let’s start again,” the boss said. “From the beginning.”

  I won’t bore you with the details, but they got it all out of me. Everything. The note, the club I faxed it to, where Zandora was staying in Vegas, everything. I would have told them about the time I took three dollars from Sister Mary Francis’ desk drawer back in the second grade if they had asked. But what the boss kept coming back to I couldn’t help him with. The fucker just wouldn’t let go of the business with the briefcase full of money. He seemed convinced that I either had his money or knew where it was.

  My lips felt hot and huge and one of my teeth felt loose in its socket. I was pretty sure my nose was broken, making it extremely difficult to breathe. My eyes were blacking up and closing down fast, blurry with blood and sweat. I was crying by then and hating myself for it. Helpless, silent tears dripped down into my ears as I turned my head to the side and spat blood onto the plastic.

  “Please,” I said. “Please.”

  Someone else had arrived, someone I could only see out of the corner of my eye, conferring with the rhino. I thought it might be the weasely guy who showed up at my office looking for Lia, but maybe not. It was difficult to concentrate with Jesse in my face, pressing down on me.

  On my other side, the boss looked up and raised his eyebrows as some wordless confirmation passed between him and the rhino. He leaned in close to my ear.

  “I’m going to ask you one last time,” he said. He gestured to Jesse.

  Jesse climbed off me, pouting like a scolded kid, and the rhino came forward, dragging Sam with him until they were both right beside the bed. I was still having trouble getting my eyes to focus, but eventually it registered that the rhino had a gun in his hand. In a weird moment of recognition, I noticed that it was the same make and model as my own, a Sig P232 that I bought after an unsettling encounter with an overzealous fan. I caught a lot of flack for choosing what several more gun-savvy friends referred to as a “girly gun.” They lectured me about stopping power and how the .380 or 9mm “short” just didn’t measure up to the standard 9, but I liked the way it felt in my hand better than anything else I’d tried. It looked like a toy in the rhino’s thick fist. I wondered if anyone ever teased him about his choice of such a “girly gun,” but all those thoughts evaporated when he raised the barrel to Sam’s cheekbone.

  “Jesus,” Sam said, his eyes huge like a horse about to bolt. “Angel for Christ’s sake, tell him!”

  “Where’s the money, Angel?” the boss asked.

  A cold spike of adrenaline flash-froze the sick, dizzy pain in my body and I was suddenly completely sharp and lucid.

  “Please,” I said. “I’ve told you I don’t know anything about your money. Why would I lie? You gotta believe me.”

  “You and Sam have been friends for a long time, huh?” the boss said. “He’s a nice guy? A family man? You wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to your old friend Sam, would you?”

  I completely lost it then. I sobbed and wailed and begged like I swore I wouldn’t.

  The rhino shot Sam anyway, lowering the gun and putting a bullet in Sam’s knee. Sam collapsed, screaming, to the floor. There is something indescribably horrible about hearing a grown man scream like that. Especially when that man is one of your oldest friends.

  At that point I’m pretty sure I was screaming too. The rhino hauled Sam back up where I could see him and shoved the stubby little snout of the gun between Sam’s lips.

  “How about it, Angel?” the boss said.

  I could not stop screaming. I wanted to lie and make up some place where the fucking imaginary money was hidden, anything to stop this madness, but it was as if the English language had deserted me. Something had snapped inside me. They had broken me and I think they knew it.

  “I don’t think she knows, boss,” the rhino said, pulling the little gun from Sam’s mouth and wiping it on Sam’s shirt.

  The boss nodded thoughtfully. The rhino let Sam drop back down to the floor. Jesse was back on the bed and I think he was groping me, but I barely felt it. I had stopped screaming then but I also stopped feeling anything. Call it shock or overload or whatever, my brain had decided enough was enough. It had simply put on a hat, picked up two suitcases, and fucked off to parts unknown. It wasn’t that I blacked out. Everything just went distant and surreal, like something on television.

  “Take care of that,” the boss told the rhino, gesturing to the sobbing heap that was Sam. Then he turned back to Jesse. “She’s all yours.”

  5.

  My hot date with Jesse Black is still pretty spotty in my memory. I only remember bits and pieces. To be honest, after the hell I’d already been through, Jesse’s little games barely even registered. I remember him shaking me and calling me a fucking dead fish. What the hell was he expecting? Double Dare 2?

  While Jesse sweated and cursed and did his thing, I floated o
ff somewhere near the ceiling. Every now and then I glanced down to see if Jesse was finished yet, but mostly I thought of Sam and Zandora and how I was going to make these fuckers pay for what they had done.

  I thought Jesse was only taking a break, but then he was stuffing a rag into my mouth and duct-taping it in place. I fought to draw air through my swollen nose, sudden panic slicing through my woozy numbness. He untied me from the bed and there was a pathetic moment where I tried to make my arms and legs move, to fight him. He just smiled at the attempt, tied my hands and feet together, and lifted me in his arms. My muscles pulled and twisted the wrong way, straining against the rope, and all my bruises and cuts pulsed hot and blinding. I guess I blacked out for a minute because the next thing I knew, Jesse was dumping me gracelessly into the Civic’s trunk and slamming the lid. A few minutes later, the little engine spluttered to life.

  The drive seemed endless, a jerky stop-and-go nightmare of huffing fumes and banging my head every time loverboy stomped on the brakes, which seemed way more often than necessary. My entire body felt deeply bruised and full of needles and knives. My hold on consciousness was tenuous at best. I tried to hang on to random fragments of sound, a helicopter, music, a dog barking, anything that might hint at where I was being taken, but the whine of the engine swallowed everything. Or maybe it was just the nauseous buzzing in my head.

  Eventually we pulled to a stop and the engine died. I heard the car door open and shut and then boots on concrete, coming around to the trunk.

  I squinted up at the rectangular widescreen view as the trunk opened. Jesse was standing there, backlit by a jaundiced sodium halo. He had on a t-shirt now, black with the lurid logo of a band I’d never heard of. His face was shadowed, his posture tense and nervous. He had a gun.

  There are few things more terrifying than a nervous man with a gun. He pointed it at me, then at the ground, then back at me again, wiping his lips with the knuckles of his other hand. Finally he sucked in a long breath and spoke.

  “End of the line, bitch,” he said.

  It was clear that he had been rehearsing that snappy little piece of tough-guy dialog on the drive to wherever the hell we were. If I were directing the scene, I would have asked for another take.

  He pointed the gun at me again, holding it foolishly sideways like some rap video badass. My heart felt like a trapped bird inside my chest. My bloody eyelids were swollen down to sticky slits but I wasn’t going to make it easier for him by looking away or closing my eyes. If he was going to have his big gangsta moment and pop a cap in my bitch ass, it would be face to face, looking me in the eye.

  In the end, it was Jesse who looked away. He turned his face to the side and squeezed his eyes shut, gun arm sticking straight out like a child about to get an injection. Then he squeezed the trigger.

  The noise alone nearly gave me a heart attack. I’d always worn ear protection at the range, and although everyone knows guns are loud, you have no idea how loud they really are until someone less than six feet away is shooting at you in the trunk of a car. Ears ringing, I felt the third or fourth shot connect somewhere along the right side of my chest and under my right arm. The pain and shock of it was bright and brutal and scary as fuck. Microscopic newsboys ran through my system shouting Extra! Extra! We’ve been shot!

  They always tell you not to panic, not to move if you’ve been shot. That you should lie still and wait for help. That getting all nuts just kills you faster. I knew that was the best thing to do, even thought it as a clear, rational sentence in my head:

  Better lie still and not panic.

  Of course, that only works if the person who shot you has stopped shooting.

  Jesse was still randomly filling the trunk with lead, firing blindly in my general direction. I felt another bullet clip my thigh like a lash from a single-tail whip. My body duly noted my brain’s helpful suggestion about staying calm and then proceeded to flip completely out. I must have bumped my head flinching and flailing around or maybe I just passed out from pain or shock because the next thing I remembered was coming to in the dark trunk and fighting to piece it all back together and remember where the hell I was. That’s where you came in.

  6.

  So once I figured out I was in the trunk of a car, I remembered the blue Civic and from there it was a swift re-connect the dots back to Jesse and Sam and the girl with the briefcase.

  I also remembered that I had been shot, or thought I had. It obviously hadn’t been by a very good shot, since I was still around to worry about it, but it did seem fairly pressing that I get some sort of medical attention. I felt like someone was digging a fork around in my right side just below the armpit and it hurt like hell if I took a deep breath. I thought maybe my right arm was also hit, as there was a hot nasty pain on the soft underside of my triceps. Moving my right hand made the pain in my arm crank up from ugly to excruciating so I yanked and twisted my left again and again until I was able to work the knots loose around my wrists. It was fairly easy. Jesse was a lousy rigger.

  Once I had my hands loose, I was able to rip the tape off my mouth. I spat out the crumpled rag and the meager contents of my stomach immediately followed. It was mostly sour old blood. I managed not to get too much on myself, which was pretty impressive in such a small space.

  When I was able, I used my awkward left hand to free my ankles. My feet were icy numb and howled with sharp needling pain as the blood started to flow back in. You’d think there’d be a point where so much of your body hurt so badly that it would hang a sign on the door saying NO VACANCY and refuse to accept any new pain. Apparently not.

  Free now but still stuck in the puke-stinking trunk, I needed to figure a way out. The Civic had been built before anyone thought to put safety latches on the insides of trunks. The only way out would be by kicking down the folding back seats. I had a long discussion with my legs about the idea of kicking anything. At first they were having none of it, but once I explained how difficult it would be for them if my heart stopped beating or severe blood loss eventually caused the cessation of all brain function, they reluctantly agreed to do their part, though not without a lot of surly grumbling.

  For a piece of shit, the latches on the Civic’s back seats were annoyingly well made and solid. I had to brace my back against the rear of the trunk and push with all the strength left in my legs. The strain of it made my head fill with dizzy red spangles, but eventually the seat on the passenger side flopped down, letting a weak wash of yellow light into my dark little world. It hurt my eyes and made me feel like a Morlock as I wiggled out through the gap.

  Now that I could see where I was, I still had no idea where I was. Rundown industrial wasteland like this was all over Southern California. All over the country, even, but the drive had felt like less than thirty minutes so I figured I must still be in or near the L.A. area.

  The Civic turned out to be parked at the far end of a lot behind a large empty warehouse with mostly broken windows. I thought I heard a train somewhere close, but couldn’t see any tracks. The sodium lights illuminating the scene sat atop graffitied poles around the warehouse next door, which was apparently still in use. On the other side was a weedy vacant lot.

  I had been so focused on the series of tasks required to get myself out of the trunk that I had almost lost track of the bigger picture. Now that I was loose and alive, the cold fury that had taken second place to basic survival suddenly moved up to center stage. I was so angry, it felt almost like love. Angry for being made to feel helpless and scared. Angry for having my nice comfortable life torn open and savaged and left bleeding. Angry for getting the shit kicked out of me and Sam too, all for something I didn’t even understand. I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to find Jesse and the rhino and their boss, that fucker with the bland everyman face. Find them and kill them.

  I slowly pushed open the Civic’s passenger-side door and put my bare feet on the grimy concrete, high on beautiful, full-color action movie fantasies of dishing out. 44-calibe
r vigilante justice. That’s when I realized I was naked.

  I’m about as far from shy as you can get, but walking around a neighborhood like this in the altogether was the dictionary definition of a bad idea. I figured I needed to table the whole vendetta thing until I could find something to cover my girly bits.

  There was nothing in the car at all, not even a map or an old burger wrapper. I thought about trying to tear the vinyl off the seats but it was too tough and my right arm was throbbing and I just wanted to get the hell out of there. I scanned the narrow lot, searching for anything that I could use to cover myself. Nothing but a single torn black trash bag, more than half full of stuff I didn’t even want to think about. I shook out the contents onto the cement and turned the bag inside out so that the wet side would not touch my skin. The smell was appalling. I tore open the bottom all the way until I had a sort of skirt-shaped thing and stepped squeamishly into it. Instead of tying it at my waist, I pulled it up to just above my breasts, like a towel. The bottom of the bag covered the cheeks of my ass but only if I stood completely straight. It was bad, barely better than naked and much, much stinkier. Breathing shallowly though my mouth, I limped around to the front of the warehouse.

  The faded sign on the building’s rough brick hide gave away nothing. HW Equipment Ltd. I saw an address spray painted above a heavily barred door. 23202. No street name.

  The warehouse was near the dead end of a desolate block of ugly industrial buildings. It felt like a marathon just to make it to a cross street. When I finally found one, my eyes had trouble focusing on the signs. East 37th and Saco Street. I didn’t recognize either one. I could have been anywhere.

  I found a rusty shopping cart at the intersection. It was full of swollen, moldy phonebooks and an eclectic collection of glass jars containing, apparently, urine. There didn’t seem to be an owner nearby. In fact, there were no humans anywhere that I could see. No homeless, no hookers, no junkies, not even cars. Nothing, like I was the last girl on earth and had somehow missed out on the apocalypse while I was in the trunk. There was, however, a shirt in the shopping cart. It was plaid, stiff, and only slightly less repugnant than the garbage bag, but I was thrilled to have it. I slipped my arms into the ragged sleeves and pulled the trash bag down to form a longer skirt. Now if only I could find some shoes, I’d be set.