Enforcer (35 page)

“Like what?”

“Tits, cars, music, NHL stuff, tits,” he said.

“You said tits twice.”

He grinned. “That’s kind of what we talk about a lot.”

“Do girls really throw themselves at you guys?” she asked.

“It isn’t like we’re truly famous, like Tom Brady, Lebron, Alex Rodriguez. Those guys have women stalking them, sometimes dangerous, crazy bitches who threaten them. But there’s always a crowd at the arena. There’s always a lot of women that are either single, or single for the night. Shit happens,” he said, shrugging.

“So in a way, you’re the polar opposite of me?”

“I guess. But like I said, it’s not every night we come out of the dressing room and there’s a mob of women waiting to snatch us up. Sometimes on the road though, when we play in the big cities like Seattle or Austin, there’s enough to go around after the home team gets their pick.”

“You guys are pigs,” Jera said as the server finally showed up.

“I’m sorry, we got a little busy,” the girl apologized. Connor guessed she couldn’t be more than eighteen.

“It’s okay,” Connor said.

They both ordered, the server writing in her pad. “Is there anything else I can get you two?” she asked, already heading to her next table.

“Yes,” Jera said, making the girl pause. “My friend here… don’t you recognize him?”

Connor gave her a sour look before smiling at the waitress. “KIM!” was printed on her name tag in big block letters. Kim stared at him for a few seconds before shaking her head.

“No?” Jera asked. “Do you ever go to the hockey games? To watch the Bombers play?”

“You play for the Bombers?” Kim asked, her face going from stressful worry about her job to a beaming smile at hearing Connor might be a hockey player.

“That’s right,” Jera said, an evil grin on her face. “He’s the guy who beats up the other team.” Kim’s eyes became as wide as full moons. “And he’s single.”

Kim blushed a red brighter than her Bunny’s apron, her eyes focused on her shoes.

“Hey, Kim,” Connor said, giving her his best fan smile, “she’s just messing with you. I do play for the Bombers, but I’m not single.” Jera opened her mouth to say something, but Connor kicked her under the table, making her squeak.

Kim smiled at him in the same way countless other females had before her that ended with the two of them naked, before she headed off to turn in their order. Connor glared across the table at Jera.

“Holy shit,” Jera said, her eyes wide as well. “It’s true.”

“It’s the only way I can get them to go home with me,” Connor said with a scowl.

“Bullshit. It isn’t like you are ugly. You’re already really cute, but adding ‘pro hockey player’ on top of it suddenly makes you Brad Pitt.”

“What does that say about you women?” Connor asked, watching Kim head toward their table with drinks. Before she could answer, Kim set their drinks on the table, and flashed Connor another inviting smile. “Thanks, Kim,” he said, looking into her eyes. “I apologize for my friend here. She’s just shy because she’s into chicks, and she thinks you’re beautiful, so she hides it by telling everyone I play for the Bombers.”

This time Jera kicked him under the table, making it hard for him to keep a straight face. Kim looked over at Jera, and gave her an even more inviting smile than she had given Connor. She gave Jera a shy wink before turning red again and heading off to another table. He stifled the laugh in his hand, not wanting Kim to hear him and think it was about her.

“Jesus,” Jera said, her face a dark red as well, “you can even talk them into going for other girls just by being a hockey player!”

Connor couldn’t contain the guffaws that erupted from him. Kim was on the other side of the dining room, but a few of the late-night customers looked over at him. Jera gave him a scowl and an extra kick under the table for good measure. She refused to talk to him until their food arrived, carried by Kim, even more painfully shy than on her previous trips to their table. Connor made sure to give her a big wink, causing her to almost drop the tray after she’d put their plates down.

“You shouldn’t mess with people like that,” Jera said as she dug into a pile of scrambled eggs.

“Right. Because you didn’t start it.”

She ignored him while she ate, glancing up nervously anytime Kim came near their table, trying to melt into the booth anytime the waitress stopped to ask if they needed anything. Connor’s amusement at her antics only made her more annoyed.

“So, what do you want to talk about?” Connor asked after pushing his plate away.

“I thought we’d just eat,” she answered, picking at the last of her hash browns.

“Bullshit. You wanted to go eat somewhere, and you wanted to talk. So talk.”

“I… I don’t have anyone else to talk to. Pavel, Ovidiu, Greg, all the assholes at the apartments, they don’t want to talk. Scratch that. They don’t want
me
to talk. They want to talk while fucking me, telling me how great they are. That’s not really having a conversation,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “I don’t talk to the clients unless they want me to. But I can’t ask them the things I want to know anymore than I can ask the assholes at the apartments.”

“Ask what?” Connor didn’t want to get into a conversation about what she had to do with any man.

“How long am I going to have to do this?” Tears began to pool at the bottom of her eyes before she wiped them away with her sleeve. “How much do I owe? How much does Larry owe? Is anyone even keeping track? No one tells me ‘you’re now down to only owing six thousand dollars’ or anything like that. They just grunt and come in me, or grunt and tell me when my next appointment is before coming in me.”

“They never told you how much you had to earn to pay off Larry’s debt?” Connor asked, not entirely surprised. He would have been if he’d heard this back when Ojacarcu took her away and put her into service, but not anymore.

“No one says shit to me except ‘go here and fuck this guy’ or ‘take off your clothes and fuck me.’ You’re the only one who says anything to me that isn’t about sex or money, and you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you,” Connor said, wondering if he was sure about the statement. “You get on my nerves a lot, but I don’t hate you.”

She watched him for a few moments, trying to gauge if he was serious or not. When he didn’t smile or look away, she realized he was being honest.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I hated you when you first showed up at Larry’s. I hated watching you hit him, throw him around like a rag doll. I know he deserved it, but you know how I am. I’m all fucked up. I let him talk me into turning tricks to support our dope habit.”

“How did you end up letting him put a collar on your neck?” Connor asked.

“What is it with you and the collar?” Jera countered. “You’re like, obsessed with it.”

“It’s a sign of slavery,” Connor growled. “Anyone with a collar like that belongs to someone else. A collar means you are property, not a human being.”

“At first it was part of sex. He liked seeing me with a collar on. I didn’t mind it, whatever got him off. I even got off on wearing it for a while. It was kinky, hot. But then it became something else. Larry started injecting, and he started slipping off the deep end. He got me to do it, which was no big upgrade. I’d been smoking the stuff for a year before I even met him.

“It got to the point he couldn’t get hard unless he’d just taken a big spike, and after a while, not even then. The only thing that got him hard was to hurt me. Not ‘sex games’ type of hurting, like bondage or shit like that. But real pain. Between that and his temper, which was getting out of control, I started getting hit a lot.

“He stopped wanting sex when he couldn’t get it up anymore, but then he’d fly into a rage over something stupid and hit me, and it would get him off. His little rat brain finally put it all together, and he’d find reasons to get pissed off so he could hit me. Not that he really needed a specific reason, and when he started hitting me, making me scream and bleed, he’d get rock hard and… and you can figure it out from there.”

“I’m not sure I really needed to hear all of that,” Connor said, uncomfortable at her story.

“Yeah, well, I’m sure I needed to tell you all of that,” she said before going on. “We were doing too much dope, more than he was selling, so he threatened me if I didn’t turn tricks to help pay for the dope. His ‘friends’ were all fucking creepy, sweaty, stinky meth heads. Maybe some were homeless, because some of them looked and smelled like they lived in a dumpster.

“He started telling them that if they paid extra, they could hurt me. Word got around and some real sick fuckers started paying the extra. I’d scream in pain, beg them to stop, but that would only egg them on to push just a little further, I guess to see if they could reach some magical threshold of inducing pain on me without me passing out or dying.”

“And you just stuck around for all of this?” Connor asked, unable to believe someone would willingly put up with such abuse.

“You’ve never smoked crystal, have you?” she asked. He shook his head. “Then you’ve never shot it up with a needle either. Imagine a game-winning shot. Now imagine that times a thousand. That’s taking a good hit from a pipe. Now imagine that times almost infinity. That’s what shooting it up feels like.”

“And you can’t quit?” He’d never been addicted to anything except hockey, but his mind was unable to make the leap from hockey to methamphetamine injections.

“You can, but not while you’re living with a guy who gets the best shit in the state on a regular basis.”

“True. But don’t you want to get out of all of this?”

“Sure I do. I
know
I should have walked away when you came and got me.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I couldn’t. I hated your guts even though you always made sure to tell me that I could escape with your help. But you constantly beat the shit out of my boyfriend. He had a lot of dope, all the time. You didn’t have any dope. I wanted revenge. What I wanted more than anything was to get high again, and I knew Larry would take me back. There’s no way he’d let me go, not if I was willing to let him beat me, willing to let him charge others to fuck me.”

“And now you’re in the same position.”

“Not as bad, I guess. I shower regularly, brush my teeth regularly. I have to. If a client complains, I get in a lot of trouble. They’ve told me what they would do to me if I couldn’t perform, if I can’t make money for them. The clients are a lot cleaner, though a lot older and a lot uglier or fatter.”

“And you aren’t all fucked up on meth anymore,” Connor assumed.

Jera didn’t answer, wouldn’t look at him.

“You’re still… they give it to you?” he asked.

“We have to pay for it. But I have to have it. It isn’t something I need now to feel good, to drown my shitty life in. I have to have it or I can’t make money. If I had to have sex with all of these men without getting high…”

“Show me,” he demanded.

“Connor, ple—”

“Show me,” he demanded again, loud enough this time to make Kim turn her attention to them. Connor waved her off. “Show me where.”

Jera began to cry. Connor felt her foot slide up the inside of his shin, then onto the seat. He looked down, seeing a black sock. He glanced up at Jera, her face a mask of tears, before looking back at her foot. He reached down, removing the sock, frowning at first. When she spread her toes, he saw the dark purple and black bruises between them.

CHAPTER 29

Niklas passed the syringe to Travis. Connor looked over at the two girls, Dana dead, her mouth covered in a dried foam of saliva, blood, and vomit, Jera in the midst of a seizure. Travis tapped the needle. Connor watched the single drop of liquid fall to the bench. The dead man jammed the needle into his neck and pushed the plunger until it could go no further.

“Man, that’s the shit,” he said, pulling the needle from his neck and passing the syringe to Connor.

“I think your girlfriend is dead,” Niklas said, crawling to Dana, dragging himself along on his palms, his legs a mangled wreck of flesh and bone.

“She’s just having a seizure,” Connor heard himself say before jamming the needle into his neck. He pushed down on the plunger and felt a warmth spread through his head down into his groin.

Connor woke from the nightmare curled into a ball, pillow gripped tightly in his arms. He felt the light touch of delicate fingers on his side and almost screamed. His disorientation lasted a few more seconds before he remembered he was in his own bed, in his own apartment. He straightened his body out, lying flat on his back, working to get his breathing under control and the nightmare cleared from his memory.

Jera draped her arm over his chest. She mumbled something into his neck while her hand slowly moved down his side to his erection. He had a moment of horror at the thought of being aroused by the nightmare before her grip turned his horror into desire. His breath grew shallow, coming faster and faster as she increased the speed of her hand’s movement. He grabbed her arm and pulled her into a sitting position on top of him. Jera’s head tilted back as she let out a soft moan when he entered her, a beam of moonlight reflecting from her dark skin making his pulse quicken.