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 off 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.