Dying for Her: A Companion Novel (Dying for a Living Book 3) (11 page)

12 Weeks

C
aldwell left me the picture. I spend the rest of the night in front of the big open window in the kitchen overlooking the city, watching the night fade to dawn and then catch fire with daylight. I stare at the image of Jesse in Caldwell’s arms and try to decide what to do.

It could be a trap.

Taking this picture to Gloria might very well set us on the path that leads to this. Or doing nothing could be our downfall. I’m not a god. How the hell am I supposed to know which choice is best?

I stuff the folded page into my pocket and go out to the cold Impala. I drive across town to a little squat house overgrown with weeds. The kitchen light is on when I pull into the gravel driveway and I marvel at that for a moment. Jackson has a tendency to walk from dark room to dark room long after sunset.

Then I see the hearse in the driveway.

I creep up to the back of the house and let myself in. I hear Kirk’s voice for only a moment before the front door slams shut. I don’t have to creep. I could say hello. After all, Kirk is one of the few to know I am alive. But I’m not in a chitchat mood. I slide through the house toward the kitchen and find Jackson there alone. She reaches up and turns off the light.

“What’s going on?”

She grabs a Coke from the fridge and offers me a beer. I turn her down. “He believes someone has been stealing Jesse’s clothes from the funeral home. He can’t be sure, so he’s going to wait awhile. He asked me to check on her.”

“So what will you do?” I ask and sit opposite her at the table.

“I’m not a goddamn Magic 8 Ball,” she says. “You can’t just shake me and find out what will happen.”

The picture in my pocket grows heavy. She takes a long drink and then puts the can down to look at me. Her face scrunches.

“Why are you here?”

“I would never take your gifts for granted,” I say, realizing I’m completing my internal train of thought rather than answering her actual question.

Her face hardens. “Did he come see you again?”

I pull the folded sheet of sketch paper from my pocket and hand it to her. With a furrowed brow I’ve seen many times over the last decade, I watch her open it up and smooth it flat with her hand. Her expression punches a hole in my chest.

“Micah drew this,” she says, softly. The tenderness is unmistakable. I nod.

She studies it the way someone might study the Mona Lisa or a Van Gogh. Her finger touches some of the lines as if they are butterfly wings. “He’s good. See how clearly he draws the shadow and the light. The chiaroscuro—I taught him that.”

“I’m sorry,” I tell her.

“No,” she says. “Thank you. I’ve always wanted to see his work.”

I tell her about Caldwell’s visit.

“You’re still dreaming about the boy?” she asks.

I snort. “I don’t think that’s the most important thing I just said to you.”

“You have to forgive yourself for that. It was a direct order.”

I snort again. “A direct order.”

“We’ve all received an order or ten that we didn’t agree with. It doesn’t mean we had the power to refuse it.”

“Do you think Sullivan would have done it, if she thought it was wrong?”

A smile quirks in the corner of Jackson’s mouth. “No.”

“No,” I agree. “As much as it irks me, I love that about the kid. I could tell her to kill someone and she’d tell me to put my foot up my ass. You’d never get her to do something wrong unless you convinced her it was the right thing to do.”

“You believed it was right,” Jackson says. “If the bomb had been real, it would’ve killed a lot more people. You acted on what you believed to be right.”

She drinks her Coke and looks down at the sketch lovingly as if it had been drawn for her by her own children—if she’d ever had any.

“How is Jesse’s training going?” she asks.

“Slow. She argues more than she listens, but maybe that’s a good thing. She’s got the lockpicking down. Her aikido is getting better and her Shotokan is pretty good. She gave me a kidney shot the other day that brought tears to my eyes.”

“Is she ready for the Lovett job?”

“She’ll do all right.”

She looks up at me then. “Is she ready for him?”

I see Jesse defenseless in Caldwell’s arms. A trick or not, it’s there in black-and-white.

“I don’t know if she’ll ever be ready.”

Saturday, March 29, 2003

I
showed up at Chaplain’s fifteen minutes before 9:00 P.M. to scope out the scene. I considered calling Jackson. She was good with a gun and had an instinct about her. There were worse people to have as backup. Besides, the deeper we went into this, the more I trusted her. She seemed the only one willing to do what was right—whatever the cost.

I decided to go in alone.

For ten minutes, men filed into the large house near Beckett Park. Both sides of Page Street were filled with parked cars, arranged horizontally along the curb. Some cars had a single soul. Others had four or five.

I recognized a few—drug peddlers and pimps—and marveled at what classy company Chaplain kept. But there were plenty of faces I didn’t know, and some of the men were far too polished to be anyone’s Eastside pimp. And why they were here, filing into the large, dark house on Page Street, I really wanted to find out.

It wasn’t until I saw Fizz climb out of a car with two other men, all three of them with unnatural hair colors: pink, orange, and green, that I made my move. First, I watched them approach the front door, then pause on the porch to present what I assumed was the admission fee.

I took a breath and made sure I had a boot knife and my loaded Beretta before I climbed out of the Impala.

I came up behind two men trying to enter the house. I hoped the door men would assume I was with them, grouped together with more familiar faces, I wouldn’t look so suspicious. I also watched their actions carefully so I wouldn’t fuck up. They handed over the money and then were patted down. I realized then my gun was a mistake even before the large man to the right of me placed a beefy hand on it.

“No guns,” he said. He had a big neck, little head. Not the most flattering combination.

“Shit, I forgot,” I said. “I’ll put it back in the car.”

“No,” he said. “I’ll take it.”

I hesitated and saw his feathers ruffle. Fine, I’d give up the gun if I had to. “Sure, hang on to it for me.”

$500 lighter, I stepped into the dark house. A soft music seeped in from somewhere I couldn’t see.

Speakers might have hung from the ceiling or were tucked into dark corners, but there was simply not enough light in the room for me to tell. Louder than the music was a soft murmur of excitement.

The electricity of anticipation charged the air. I followed the crowd in, and found that seats had been arranged in rows like a small theatre. I took an empty seat at the end of the second row. I wanted a clear shot for the door if I needed to make a break for it, but I also wanted to be close enough to the “stage” to see what the hell was going on. A velvet rope cut the room in half, the kind used in theaters to queue lines.

On this side of the velvet rope, which hung between two brass posts, we had uncomfortable metal folding chairs. They were despicably low to the ground, and my knees bent up comically when I took a seat. The sounds of grit or sand scraped against the wood floor underfoot. On the other side of the velvet rope, a bedroom—or the replica of one—waited.

A fluffy white duvet was thrown over a mattress held up by a brass bed frame, the bed itself empty and waiting. Overhead lights burned down on the scene, the bed, the night tables, the old rug, dusty and neglected beneath the bed. Definitely a set for play.

When I glanced up to identify the source of the light, I saw the speakers and the cameras. But the cameras weren’t trained on us. They showed no interested in the men filling the metal chairs on this side of the velvet rope, the shuffling and anxious men. Those black eyes were oblivious to the low, excited voices. The men sat on the edge of their seats, their necks craning stage left, eyes trained on the dark door for the first sign of—what?

What was coming? Whatever it was, that’s what the cameras cared about.

The anticipation broke when a girl bounded through the door crying.

Her cheeks were tear-stained and her long white gown the parody of innocence. A man came through the door after her. He was in street clothes. His jeans were faded at the knees and he wore a battered pair of Rugged Blue work boots.

He followed her into the room as she tried to escape, her eyes wide, blue, and wet. But there was nowhere to go. There was only the bed and us beyond the velvet rope. Her blond hair was long, tousled.

“Please,” she screamed. She rushed the rope. “Please.”

Men in the front rows, who I had not seen until that moment because they blended perfectly with the shadows around them, stepped forward. They pushed her back into the spotlight, into her attacker’s arms. Someone—more than one person—laughed.

I grew tense in my seat, having a sick feeling that I knew where this was going and what was I going to do about it.

He lifted her kicking and screaming and threw her onto the bed. She was so light and the force of his strength so great, that she bounced on the mattress, her legs going wide for a moment and her mouth opening in surprise. She tried to roll off the other side, but he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her across the mattress to him.

She screamed.

He hit her hard across the mouth and she stopped struggling. I’d moved to stand without realizing I’d done so until a hand was on me, pulling me back into my seat. The hand gripping my arm tightened and pulled me down without letting go.

“He hasn’t even gotten started,” Fizz said. His eyes were shiny in the dark. His bright hair muted in the shadows. “You wanted to know what he does with the special girls. Then watch. And you are seriously outnumbered, man.”

I didn’t mention my lack of backup.

“That isn’t your girl anyway,” he said.

He was right. Even if they’d dyed her hair blond and added extensions, the girl’s heart-shaped face didn’t match Rachel’s angular one. If I busted open this place now, and Rachel was being held somewhere else, they might kill her, dump her, or sell her to the highest bidder.

“Just watch,” Fizz said again.

I didn’t want to watch. The man was raping her, right there in front of everyone. The bed squeaked in a terrible sickening rhythm. Regardless of her unconsciousness, I looked away, but couldn’t block out the noise. “You can’t expect me to watch this and not do anything.”

“That’s exactly what you’ll do,” said Fizz. “Unless you want to die. You can’t escape here with your life and hers.”

My mind raced for the options of how to walk out of here with the girl. I couldn’t leave her here. I also couldn’t die and leave Jackson alone with the burden of finding Maisie.

My thoughts were interrupted by a low hissing and boos from the crowd.

“What’s happening?” I asked and sat up to see over the heads in front of me.

“They’re bored,” he said.

I wondered if I looked as horrified and sick as I felt. “Isn’t this what they came to see?”

“No,” Fizz said. “We can see girls getting fucked anywhere. Porn, hotel rooms. Why pay to see a dude beat his nuts soft while we sit quietly in our seats?”

A man appeared on the side lines wearing dark cargo pants and a black T-shirt. I recognized him immediately.

“Chaplain,” I whispered and for a moment I saw his dark eyes turn toward mine as if he heard me over all the commotion caused by the viewers, cramped together in the dark.

When our eyes met, I felt strange. A shiver ran over me and my hands relaxed.

Fizz had also gone very still beside me, but I observed this as if from a great distance. Chaplain broke our locked gaze then and turned to the man who still had hold of the girl, but was no longer thrusting his dick into her. As Chaplain stared at the back of the man’s head the man lifted the unconscious girl’s long slender arm as if to consider it. He took it in both of his hands almost delicately. Then he snapped the arm.

The girl came awake, screaming. Her eyes wide and bulging. Her scream was that of an animal’s as her arm bent back unnaturally at the elbow. The mechanical way in which the man moved, the lack of passion or interest that he’d held for the girl just moments before, I didn’t understand it until much later.

He slipped a large, calloused hand, definitely a working man’s hand, under the pillow and when he removed it, a shining blade caught the overhead lights and gleamed.

Gripping the handle tight, he thrust the blade down into the girl’s chest—again, and
again
, and again. Every time he pulled out the blade, bright red bursts blossomed on her white gown, the blood pooling and spreading until it sprayed from her mouth in desperate coughs.

She was crying, her face screwed up in pain, but no sound was coming out. I saw all of this, and every time I started to get upset, or react, something in me relaxed. Then the man let go of the knife just long enough to wrap both of his hands around the girl’s neck. He choked her, squeezing until her wet, red face, bulging with veins relaxed.

She was dead.

She was
dead
. Something inside snapped awake.

“They come to watch them die,” I said. I looked up to the cameras trained on the scene and knew the truth of Chaplain’s operation. “The NRD girls are murdered for the films. Snuff films.” I’d heard of them. And as long as they don’t damage the brain, they have an endless supply of fodder. “Fizz, have you seen a girl with dark features—Fizz?”

People were leaving, but Fizz was frozen in his seat. His eyes forward. I nudged him but he didn’t respond.

I felt eyes on me and looked up. Chaplain stared at us from the spotlight until someone came up to ask him a question.

“We will get it in editing,” he replied to whatever the concern was.

“Fizz, we need to go,” I said because I’d realized we were the last two in the house, with Chaplain staring hard at us if in deep consideration. A man came and collected the girl’s body, carrying her back through the dark door as if she’d never been there at all—save the bright blood stain left on the white bed. Another man stripped the sheets to reveal stain on top of stain.

How many girls had died here in this bed? How long had these shows been going on?

“We really need to go,” I said again, because I needed to assemble a team. I needed to come back, tonight even, and burn this hellhole to the ground.

Yes, I should go home. Don’t worry about the girls. The one I’m looking for isn’t even here and the ones that are want to be. Paid actresses. They love dying. Much like the girl who loved to tell her death story, these girls are also proud of their talents. And think of how many innocents who die for such horrible films to fill such horrible needs—they are practically obsolete now. Safe.

No one here is unhappy or hurt. No one.

I stood from my seat and turned toward the door. I felt heavy, on the verge of sleep. I turned back to Fizz one last time but he still sat in his seat, staring silently ahead as if watching a show only he could see.

He’ll be fine. Probably doesn’t want to be seen leaving with me anyway. Go on. I need lie down. I’m so tired.

I walked out into the night. The March air hit me with just enough force that I came awake, alive again on the steps of the Park Street house. I felt like I’d walked into a room, but had forgotten what I came here for. I looked across the street and saw the Impala waiting. So tired, with a headache blooming behind my eyes, I made my way to my car. Then I got inside and went home, having completely forgotten about my gun.