Bad Things (23 page)

“
Or who play stupid when they understand things perfectly well.”

Xavier grinned. “Fair enough, Max.”

“You ask a lot of fucking questions.”

“
I like understanding things. Knowing how things work. What’s going on around me. I guess I have an allergy to feeling stupid.”

Max went still and quiet and locked him in an appraising gaze. Then he asked, “And so? What have you learned?”

Everything teetering in precarious balance. If he lied, even if he pretended to be more ignorant than he was, Xavier was damned near sure Max would know he was full of shit. And that would be bad. That might damned well be the end of this conversation, and any possible future conversations, while he was at it. And if he told Max what he knew? Then what the fuck was going to happen?

“
I have a pretty vivid imagination,” Xavier said, hedging his bets.

“
Mmmmhmmm. And what fantasies have you concocted about this place?”

Xavier laughed, channeling his real anxiety into an alchemical mask of self-doubt. “I’m going to feel like a total idiot if I’m wrong.”

A slight edge, a warning in his tone, Max said, “Xavier. I’d bet my left pinky you’ve never felt like a total idiot in all your life.”

“
I think the club is some kind of front.”

“
For what?”

“
I think the girls, the canvases, are prostitutes.”

He could see Max’s focus honing. “And why do you think that?”

“A few small details, added together, put the idea in my head.”

“
Such as? You’re making me work awfully hard for it, Xavier.”

Puta cabron
, it was weird shit, being on the other side of this conversation.

“
What the men are paying for the show. Even for this crowd, it’s hard to believe they’d shell out a grand to watch a couple hours of body painting.”

“
And how do you know what they’re paying?”

“
A customer was a bit tipsy, one night, and let it slip while he was outside having a smoke.”

“
All right. What else?”

“
You’re paying everyone too much. You’re not trying to keep us classy. You’re trying to keep us loyal. So if the cops come sniffing around, we’ll be thinking about the nice cars we bought, the leases we signed, counting on a fat paycheck every two weeks, and keep our mouths shut.”

Interesting, watching someone else deploy his tried and true technique. Lob a few reasonably easy questions, watch them thinking about how to answer. Find the highs and lows of their lies and truths. Strange being the one under the gaze. That cool aqua gaze, no visible flare of irritation or anger. Just collecting and analyzing the data.

Why, of all times, did Xavier’s brain suddenly switch, in that critical moment? He was alone with him. Maybe Max had a gun, but he was so close, if he reached for it, Xavier could have him in a hold before he could reach it. Choke the fucking life right out of him.

But that would be it. He’d go to prison for murder and the rest of the syndicate would close up the missing link in their chain, and business would carry on as usual. It wouldn’t do one fucking thing for the girl in the video, or any of the others.

Xavier tried to push the screams, the red, tear-streaked face of the girl in the video out of his mind. Unhear her screams. Her sobs. Unsee Max flipping her over. Turning her around. Fought to silence the whispering thrum of the blood coursing through Max’s carotid, to ignore the anticipatory sensation of that beating pulse under his fingertips in the second before he crushed the artery and watched the life drain out of those aqua eyes. Watching those brightly reflective mirrors dim, then go dark so he’d never have to see himself in them again.

“
What’s wrong, Xavier?”

“
I get the feeling I fucked up. That I crossed a line, and you’re not happy about it.”

“
You’re right. I don’t appreciate people sticking their thumbs into my plum pie.”

“
I guess I’ll understand if you decide to fire me. I hope you won’t, though.” He took a chance on a slightly playful grin. “I do have my mortgage and my sweet ride to think of.”

Max grinned back, but it was a cold, calculated grin. “In my experience, firing a nosy employee is just one of three possible solutions.”

Not terribly eager to hear the answer, Xavier asked, “What are the other two solutions?”

“
Bring him even further into the circle of trust. Or cut him into tiny pieces and throw him to the sharks from the end of the pier.”

“
Chumming is illegal here,” he said, taking another risk, fairly confident that Max would like this far better than Brian’s brand of tail-wagging, belly-yielding obsequiousness.

Max actually laughed. Genuine lines radiating out from the corners of his eyes.

“I like this, Xavier. People are all so boring. So soft and gray and fucking scared all the time. It’s so nice to find a man who is hard and colorful and doesn’t piss himself as soon as I look at him.” He took two steps forward, until their faces were just a couple inches apart. “Of course, a little laugh, a little human conversation isn’t worth everything I’ve spent the last fifteen years building.”

“
No. I wouldn’t think so.”

“
But I’ve been keeping an eye on you for a while now. And I think I can trust you.”

Puta Jesus Cristo
. Was that what Carson’s tragic spy mission had been about? Vetting him for the ranks of the goon squad? Or was Max just trying to lull him into believing he wasn’t under suspicion of being some kind of cop?

“
Can I trust you, Xavier?”

He made himself mean it. He belonged to Max. “You can trust me, Max.”

“We’ll see. Here is what we are going to do. I am going to give you a small test. Try you out with something. If you do it well, you get solution number two. You come a little closer into the circle. And if you fuck it up, we forget about option number one. Brian fires people. I don’t fire people. People who disappoint me, I feed to the sharks. I never cared so much about obeying what the Pigs of America tell me to do.”

Suddenly it wasn’t so hard to see how Carson had ended up between Scylla and Charybdis. Except he hadn’t ended up between. They’d both gotten a piece of him. Max the inescapable vortex sucking him down from the reasonable calm sea of a dull but safe life, and Xavier, the rock that had smashed that sullied but still intact life to pieces. Suddenly, with Max’s cool gaze digging into him, Xavier was hit hard by the thought that Carson might have been even more innocent than he’d let himself guess.

Max didn’t waste a fucking minute. He stuck Xavier in a car, driven by a silent man named Gyorgy who possibly didn’t speak any English. A half an hour later, the car pulled up in front of a nondescript zero star hotel, and another man mumbled a few words in Russian or Ukrainian to the driver, then a girl—not a woman, but a girl of fourteen or fifteen got into the back seat. Natasha, Max had said.

She wasn’t what he expected. She was wearing a simple dress, not too short, not too low-cut, her dark, straight hair pulled back in a neat pony tail. No makeup, or the kind of makeup done to seem like she wasn’t wearing makeup.

She didn’t have the terrified expression of the blond girl in the video during the early sessions where she was repeatedly raped, but she didn’t have the other girl’s hollowed out gaze when she mutely, passively let the group of men manipulate and use her, as if she’d been erased, either. She looked poised. Determined. Almost proud.

Xavier breathed. In. Out. Holding each breath when he’d pulled in as much air as his lungs could hold. Letting the air out slowly, counting to ten, then waiting another count of five before allowing himself another breath.

It was a test. He knew damned fucking well it was a test. That Max probably wanted more than anything in the whole wide shitty world, for Xavier to pull something, just so Max would have an excuse to hunt him down and relish the sweet pleasure of slicing bits and pieces from his body and chucking them into the Pacific from the end of the Santa Monica Pier. Keeping Xavier alive as long as possible and making him watch the orgiastic frenzy of sharks, if Xavier wasn’t wide of the mark in guessing his particular brand of psychopathology.

His rational mind understood all that. But his lizard brain didn’t give a flying fuck. His lizard brain wanted to wait until they were at a red light, and snap the driver’s neck. His rational brain agreed it would be easy. And it would be easy to shove his dead weight over into the passenger seat, and drive off into the LA night, take the girl to any random bar, relay a call to Elena through James, and save her.

Breathe.

He could. He could save her. A hundred percent doable.

But to snatch that one girl out of Max’s neatly manicured hands, he would be throwing away the chance of helping however many others were caught in his net. What were the odds of saving them? Fifty-fifty? Nowhere near that, probably. Ten percent? Five percent? More likely, the whole operation would fade away before his eyes, Elena’s eyes, the myopic surveillance of the FBI and the LAPD, and this girl and all the rest—whether there were five others or five hundred—would go on suffering until they were too used up to be worth more than the cost of their maintenance. And then what? Did Max feed them to the sharks, too, when he was done with them?

He could still his mind in the face of anything. He could. He could.

Breathe. Breathe. In. Out. Deep. Slow.

The car pulled into the taxi drop zone of the Beverly Hills Montage, and the driver handed Xavier a piece of paper. A room number, nothing more. Xavier got out, then opened the rear door. As stoic and silent as she’d been through the entire ride, the girl got out of the car, and followed him into the hotel as if no other option had even occurred to her.

Mechanically, still weighing his options, he headed toward the elevators. She stuck so close by his side, as if they were a couple, he wondered if Max or one of the others had trained her to do that, the way they’d trained the girl in the video to do everything demanded of her without question, without complaint.

As the elevator doors slid closed, Xavier was tempted to say something to her. But before he’d even attempted a simple sentence of basic words to let her know he was on her side, he reprimanded his own stupidity. For all he knew, she was on Max’s side. This whole errand was a test. Max had come right out and said so. Maybe Max had offered her something—money, freedom—or threatened her with something. Maybe she was going to report his every move and every word to Max when the big black car with the silent driver took her back to wherever she’d come from.

But if that was it, if she was a piece of cheese in Max’s elaborate mousetrap, wouldn’t she be looking at him? Baiting him with an expression of helplessness? Of hope? Not just walking and standing alongside him like an empty automaton?

The elevator doors opened. Like a well-trained dog, she heeled, waiting for him to take a step, her signal that it was time for her to move.
Puta Madre Maria
, he wanted to push the button for the lobby. No, the first floor. Then they’d take the stairs and slip out a side entrance, out of sight of Max’s driver. Xavier would hail a cab, call James, take her to safety.

His body carried him forward, and she drifted along in tow. Silent. Compliant.

He knocked as soon as they got to the room, because he’d already hesitated once, and couldn’t risk her reporting back to Max that he had cold feet. A middle-aged man opened the door. Except for his perfect manicure, expensive suit, and immaculate shave, in every way he was nondescript and forgettable; average height, a bit soft around the middle but not fat, his face slightly puffy, slightly lined and droopy. Dark blond hair starting to thin.

Disconcerting. Not even a faint twitch of fear or anxiety when he looked at Xavier. Even Max had at least taken his measure. But not this guy.

“Come in.”

The girl obediently stepped inside.

“What? Do you need to stand guard in the hallway?” he said when Xavier hesitated.

“
No. Not if you’d rather I come in.”

“
I think it’ll be a bit more discreet if you do,” he said sarcastically.

It was a massive suite. Almost as big as his house. Hopefully Mr. 701 would take her into the bedroom. No amount of deep breathing and meditation or thinking about all the unseen others he was hoping to help would save Xavier from beating the guy to death if he tried to fuck her in front of him.

When Xavier glanced at Natasha, it was like looking at a different girl. Instead of the resolute, stoic young woman who made him think of Joan of Arc, a martyr who believed in some cause that maybe no one else understood or even knew about, now she had the aspect of a wide-eyed, naive child. Gazing around her as if she was utterly awed by the luxurious surroundings and, above all, by the man they belonged to, at least for the night, or the week. So Natasha was an actress. Either playing the role of the stoic martyr in the car, or of the doe-eyed ingénue in the hotel. Or maybe they were both just parts she played, depending on what the circumstances called, and Xavier hadn’t glimpsed her real face yet.