I flipped on my back and bounced my legs into a deep splayed V, then arched back up to my feet as the song ended. If that motherfucker wanted blood, he was going to get it.
I gathered up the bills and clothing without turning away from Ridgeway. His eyes never left my crotch. His face had gone dumb with lust. I had him.
I slipped the trench coat over my g-string and deftly dodged several amorous suitors, heading directly to where Ridgeway sat.
“Would you like to get to know me a little better, honey?” I asked, pitching my voice low and whisper-sexy, sliding my body catlike against his.
The goons, seeing their boss was otherwise engaged, moved away to give him some privacy. The messy-haired guy started chatting up the tired-looking waitress while the bald one headed for the john. After all, what kind of danger could a 115-pound bimbo possibly pose?
“I’d love to,” Ridgeway replied, running a sweaty hand over my thigh. “But I’m afraid I’ve got a prior commitment.”
“You can’t spare even ten little minutes,” I asked, brushing my bare breasts against his chest. “I swear I’ll make it worth your while.”
“I don’t like pushy women,” he said, mouth a tight line and suddenly chilly.
“You’ll like me,” I said, putting my arm around his waist and pressing the muzzle of the gun into his belly through the pocket of the trench coat. “What do you say?”
He said nothing but his body language told me he had finally recognized me. The messy-haired goon’s back was turned. The bald goon was still in the bathroom. I could see Ridgeway’s pulse ticking in the soft spot beneath his ear. This was where it could all go to hell in a heartbeat.
“All right,” he finally said, getting slowly to his feet.
He let me lead him back to one of the two available champagne rooms.
Despite its classy name, the champagne room was actually a dingy cubicle with a cheap futon on a folding metal frame that looked like it had been scavenged from the trash outside a college dorm. I didn’t even want to think about all the bodily fluids that soaked into that futon over the course of any given shift. Luckily, there would be no couch dances tonight.
“Pull the curtain,” I told Ridgeway.
He did what I asked in hostile silence. There was a dull, monotonous rhythm of thumps and groans filtering through from the next cubicle.
“You’re not going to get away with this,” he said.
“That’s funny,” I replied. “That’s what your nephew said right before I killed him.” I tossed him the cuffs. “Sit down and cuff your hands around that.” I gestured at one of the futon’s tubular metal legs.
He caught the cuffs against his chest and fastened them around one wrist, eyes never leaving mine.
“You can’t get out of here alive,” he told me as he slowly lowered himself onto the futon. “You shoot me, everyone in the place will hear it.”
“Other wrist,” I told him. “Put the cuff through the edge of the frame—no, behind that piece. That’s right. Now cuff your other wrist.”
He did what I said, eyes narrow. This left him slouched down with his cuffed wrists locked between his knees, trapped in place by the frame of the futon. He wasn’t going anywhere.
“Why are you doing this, Angel?” he asked. “Why didn’t you just run with the money?”
“You don’t get it, do you?” I asked. “This is not just about me. It’s about Didi. About Malloy. About Sam.”
“Sam?” He shook his head. “Please. Sam sold you out, Angel. He set you up to save his own ass. You ought to be glad he’s dead.”
Ridgeway was just fucking with me, trying to get me to make a mistake.
“Bullshit,” I said. “He told me you had Georgie.”
But then I thought of seeing Georgie on the news, flanked by cops. I’d wondered then what had really happened and I was wondering now. Was it true? Had Sam set me up?
“People say all kinds of things,” Ridgeway said. “I bet Malloy said he would love you forever, right? Until he took off with the money. Or tried to, anyway.”
Malloy had never promised me anything like that. Ridgeway was grasping at straws, blindly groping for buttons to push and missing.
“You don’t know shit about Malloy,” I told him. “Or me.”
“Maybe not,” Ridgeway said, speaking casually like he didn’t have a gun pointed at his face. “But I know plenty about Sam. I know he loved girls with big tits. I also know he threw money at girls with big tits. A lot of money. Bought them pretty things, paid all their bills. Sam was in over his head when I offered to help him out. He just helped me out in return. Nothing personal, Angel.”
Of course I didn’t like hearing it all spelled out like that. It hurt to know that someone I’d thought of as a friend had sold me out. That I had been betrayed yet again. For money. Always for money.
But Ridgeway failed to realize that I had been hurt so much, so often, in so short a span of time, that in that particular moment, I couldn’t feel a thing. Later, when this was done and I had time to go over and over it in my head, I knew it would hurt plenty. Sam, Malloy, everything. But right now I felt weightless and ice cold. I had nothing left. I was finally the avenging angel I’d wanted to become all along.
“Alan,” I said. “No more talk.”
I traded the gun for the roll of electrical tape.
When I had a few layers of shiny black tape wrapped around his head from chin to upper lip, I paused. For some reason, I had never noticed the color of his eyes before. They were blue, like Jesse’s. Scared like Jesse’s. I looked into his eyes, smoothed the tape over his mouth with my thumb and then continued wrapping the tape around his head.
When I covered his nostrils, he went wild on the futon, bucking and twisting as he tried to wrench his hands free of the cuffs or the cuffs free of the metal frame. Next door the thumping sped up, moans louder now and heading into the home stretch. Ridgeway’s desperate struggles didn’t sound all that different.
I stepped back and watched the kaleidoscope of emotion in his wide eyes until the show was over.
32.
Ridgeway was dead for nearly a full minute before the action next door reached a noisy crescendo. I pulled my gaze away from where he lay, cuffed and slumped over, his face purple above the electrical tape. I squeezed back into the vinyl dress and got the hell out of there.
When I left the champagne room, Ridgeway’s two thugs were back on the rail. They didn’t look away from the stripper they were watching. Nobody noticed me as I slipped out through a side door.
I dumped the red wig in a bucket that had been designated for cigarettes but was rarely used, judging from the number of butts on the surrounding ground. The cool night air felt good on my sweaty scalp.
From where I stood, I could see through the chain link fence to the warehouse next door. There was a van parked in the warehouse lot. The windows were tinted but it didn’t take much to picture the girls inside. The outgoing girls. The ones Ridgeway had used up and planned to dump like unwanted puppies that had outgrown their cuteness.
I thought again of Lia. Of everything she had gone through to stop what happened to her from happening to her little sister. That little sister, Ana, was probably in that building next door right now, waiting to be purchased like livestock. If Ridgeway no-showed, the men who’d smuggled Ana and the five other girls into the country would have no trouble finding another buyer.
This was not my problem. I was done. I’d had my revenge and Malloy was wrong. It wasn’t empty. It was strange and scary but still sweet, just like I’d wanted it to be. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life now and frankly, I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. I’d won. No one had believed I could do it, not even me, but I had. I’d beat that bastard and made him pay for what he did to me. I was free. I had one hundred eighty thousand dollars in the trunk of Vukasin’s car. So why couldn’t I stop thinking about Lia?