Bad Things (6 page)

“First one?”

“
Yeah. And I’m already dying to get two more. I have the designs all ready. Just saving up.”

“
Where’d you get that one done?”

“
Under the Needle. In Silverlake.”

“
I know Sheila there. She does good work.”

“
Do you have a tattoo?”

Xavier laughed. “A lot more than one.”

“Yeah?” Flirtatious, now. Pleasantly predictable. “Show me.”

He mirrored her teasing grin, undid the top button of his shirt, paused and cocked an eyebrow, taunting her for a moment before opening his shirt and baring his chest.

“Damn, baby! That’s gorgeous! And huge! How long did it take?”

“
We didn’t do it all in one session. Altogether, it was six four-hour sessions, I think.”

“
And it’s…” She came forward and touched his shoulder, tracing along the pattern for a few inches with her black lacquered fingertip. “It’s like armor. But organic looking. Almost like a dragon.”

“
With elements of Aztec design.”

“
That is fucking cool as hell. How far does it go down?”

“
In front, almost to my knee. In back, almost to my ass.”

“
It must have cost a fortune.”

He laughed. “Well, I own the tattoo shop, Second Skin, in Venice. So I get a pretty good discount.”

“No way. You’re a tattoo artist? Did you do that design yourself?”

“
Yeah.”

“
Well, damn, I should come to your place for the next one.”

“
You should. I’ll do it for you for half price.” Never say “free.” Free makes people suspicious.

“
Seriously?”

“
Seriously.”

“
Maybe I could do it this weekend, after I get paid. If you have an opening.”

“
Absolutely. I’ll make time for you.”

Xavier buttoned up his shirt and they threw their cigarettes in the stinking can of water, a couple dozen yellowed, waterlogged butts already floating there like corpses of drowned stowaways, and went inside. Xavier asked Carson for a mineral water so he could try to wash the ashtray taste out of his mouth. There was already a tray of drinks set up.

“Table nine,” Carson told Connie.

“
I’ll give you my number and email at my next break,” she said, shifting the tray into balance on her hand. “And we can plan a time for this weekend.”

“
Perfect.”

As she strode off toward table nine, her whole demeanor altered as she struck a statuesque pose, hips subtly swaying.

“What are you two up to?” Carson asked as he handed him a glass of water fizzing between ice cubes and a translucent slice of lemon.

“
I’m going to do Connie’s next tattoo.”

“
You’re a tattoo artist?” Carson seemed weirdly nervous.

“
Sadly it doesn’t quite pay the bills.”

“
Yeah, I know how that goes. I do some photography, and it’s more like a habit I have to support than a job that supports me.”

“
I bet. That equipment’s expensive.”

“
Ridiculously.”

“
Well, if you ever want a tattoo, I’ll give you the same deal I’m giving Connie. Half off.”

Carson let out an awkward laugh. “I’m not really a tattoo kind of guy. I mean, I like them on other people, I think they’re cool.” He was starting to ramble. “It’s just not my personal style, I guess.”

“That’s good. Now that everyone and their mom has a tattoo, virgin skin is radical counterculture.” Xavier was trying so hard to be good, but he’d made the poor guy blush. “Well, back to my post.” He downed his water and headed off to make the rounds, letting Carson off the hook.

When he got home, Xavier did some more digging through Elena’s work files. The folder from the aborted trial two years earlier was mostly full of legal briefs that were dense, rambling screeds of legalese. He didn’t learn much beyond what Elena had told him when the case had been dismissed: the bulk of the evidence that their case rested on had been thrown out, because of some issue with the warrant.

Clicking around through the various folders of evidence, he stumbled across a video file. He watched for about three minutes before he closed it and got away from his laptop. For a while he just stood there in the middle of his living room, heart hammering, lungs feeling like they’d shrunk down to the size of two dry pinto beans.

Without changing clothes, he went down to the basement and stripped down to his underwear. Put on his gloves and beat the heavy bag until he’d exhausted the adrenaline and the oxygen in his blood, and he collapsed on the mat. Xavier didn’t move until he started to shiver, chilled in a puddle of cold sweat. He didn’t want to shower down there, among all the hardware and memories of the men he’d trussed up in that tub, so he went to the upstairs bathroom, got cleaned up, and went to bed.

For the first time in almost a year, he had the dream. By chance, by magic, by force of will and the power it has in dreams but not in life, he materialized in Elena’s dorm room just as the three men were pinning her down on the floor, before they’d really hurt her. But then his will faltered. Then it was hours—or what felt like hours—fighting them, his body maddeningly weak, his arms limp, his punches soft, not even connecting half the time. Caught up in the battle, he’d suddenly realize he was only fighting one or two, that Elena was screaming under the others. The horror of trying to get to them, to tear the thrashing, grunting men off of her while another was holding him back, dragging him by his belt or a fistful of shirt, further and further from her as she screamed.

He woke up under the weight of a sadness almost as heavy as it had been nine years earlier. As if all his ideas and feelings about what the world was and what Elena’s and his life were going to be had just been twisted and torn the night before, and not a decade earlier.

But under that crushing, ugly hurt and rage there was a thought, small, shiny, and smooth as a glass marble. The coasters. The coasters were the key. More important than the hieroglyphics Connie and the other artists painted on their living canvases.

Frustrating as fuck he didn’t have a shift that night. At the shop, he had a frat boy, tan, muscled, chest waxed bare, under his needle. It was like fucking kismet, or something, this guy like a reincarnation of Elena’s assailants, coming in now when Xavier was already feeling walled in by the past. Caged like a wounded panther.

So he’d stop thinking about Elena, he thought about the club. About Brian and the four guys higher up pulling his puppet strings. Driving the ink into that smooth, golden skin, embellishing that taut, muscular pec with the crest of the house he’d pledged to, Xavier imagined having Brian on his table. Heat blossomed in his chest, thinking of Brian suffering under the bite of his needle as he branded him with the face of each one of the girls he’d helped the cartel sell to those flabby, balding gin-swilling assholes telling their tales of conquest before the conquest had even happened.

Surprisingly, when he texted Detective James Porter, he agreed to come over. James was one of the randiest fucks Xavier had ever had. That’s what you got, with repressed, in-the-closet lays. A few halfhearted protests, a limp refusal or two because kissing and getting on their back and spreading their legs made them feel too vulnerable and totally fucked with their stupid ideas about manhood and masculinity. But then ten minutes in they’d be bucking and thrashing and howling beyond anything you ever got with the guys who paraded around at Pride in nothing but a tight pair of briefs showing every vein on their cocks, their chests painted with “Love is love,” “NoH8,” or, Xavier’s personal favorite from the summer before, “Your Bottom.”

Just like last time, James scurried into the bathroom to shower the gay off as soon as they’d finished their three rounds of fucking. Afraid James might disappear on him if he went down to the basement to shower, too, Xavier wiped down with a towel, got dressed, and carefully made the bed to spare James a confrontation with any proof he’d spent the last couple hours sucking and fucking him. Because Xavier wanted him to stay. He wanted him to answer a few burning questions that were at least half the reason he’d texted him in the first place. Not that the pretext of needing a fuck was any kind of sacrifice.

Predictably, James tried to talk his way out of staying for a round or two of tequila. But with one manipulative and slightly cruel crack about Porter only being interested in him for one thing, Porter surrendered and sat down at the dining table to put half an hour of conversation between writhing under Xavier’s body, and going home to his wife.

“
So, how’s that case going? The one you and Elena are both working on?”

“
She tells you about her cases?”

“
Not much. Not the particulars. Mostly she just tells me how pissed she is that some judge refused to issue a warrant, or that they can’t get authorization to send anyone in undercover, because of how the trial fell apart two years ago.”

“
Yeah. It’s a frustrating job, sometimes. You know shit’s going on. You know which fucking assholes are doing it. And you’re pretty much helpless because a bunch of lawyers got the police handcuffed with all their rules, instead of the criminals.”

“
How do you know who the criminals are?”

“
Well, in the case of this human trafficking ring your sister and I have been trying to dismantle, we’ve known who the players are for years. I mean, we had all the evidence. Made the arrests, went to trial. Just, there were chain of evidence issues, and some other problems. Like, one of the strongest pieces of evidence we had was hours and hours of video footage of them with the girls. Breaking them in, you could say. Basically raping and torturing them into submission, so they’d be obedient enough to send out to clients. Fucking horrific shit, I promise you. But the court threw it out, because…well, I won’t bore you with all the technical minutia of how the law works, but those hard drives with the videos on them weren’t covered under the warrant that we had. So even though you could see three of those fuckers at the top of the L.A. food chain doing shit that would put them behind bars for the next thousand years, they got to walk free.”

“
How do you know they’re still around?” Xavier asked, because he needed Porter to tell him some things he already knew, before he could ask the really critical question.

“
Brazen mother fuckers just went and opened up another club. Like they’re not even afraid of the law.”

“
So why can’t you get a warrant now, and do it right?”

Porter laughed bitterly and poured himself another shot of Avion Añejo. “Because. You can’t even use the evidence they threw out of the trial, to show there’s a reason for a warrant. So you have to start over from fucking zero. Except now, those Ukrainian fuckers know our tricks and they switched everything up, so we can’t get to them.”

“And so, what? At the club, everyone working there is in on it? And the girls are like the ones from the video? The ones they trained?”

“
Probably not. No. The club is their public face. If they’re smart, they keep it as legit as possible. They’d want employees without records. Girls with no prostitution busts.”

“
Complicated shit,” Xavier said, playing dumb and tossing back his third shot, though he kept pouring his short. “So what if just a regular employee stumbled across something. Like that video you were talking about. What if…I don’t know…their accountant clicked on a wrong file on the computer and saw that shit, and called the police. Would the video still get thrown out?”

James downed his third shot and let out another bitter laugh. “No, see. That’s the crazy thing. That’s probable cause. Some average anybody stumbles into our evidence by accident, we can use that to get a warrant and go in and tear the place apart.”

Even after their marathon fucking session, when James left, Xavier went to the basement and did a half hour on the bars, and another half hour with weights. He wanted to be sure to get a decent nights’ sleep, and not lie awake until morning in anticipation of getting back into the club the next night.