Monster (4 page)

“I do what I'm
paid to do.”

“Such as?”

“Such as breaking
into shitty apartments above what I can only assume is the worst
tasting Chinese in the city, kidnapping the pretty girl living all
alone and drag her back to an abandoned warehouse to await further
instructions.”

“That's it? So
you're like, what, a kidnapper? That's what you do?”

“When the price
is high enough.”

“What was I
worth?”

“What?” I
asked, leaning against the wall across from her, crossing my ankles
and my arms across my chest.

“What are you
getting paid to kidnap and hold me hostage?”

Well, there was no
reason not to tell her.

“For the
abduction, ten grand. Two grand each day I gotta keep you.”

To this, she huffed out
air. “Guess I'm in the wrong business.” There was a
pause, her hand going up to run her fingers through her hair. A
nervous habit? “Well, not for long...”

She seemed so resigned.
So accepting of her fate.

I'd seen grown men,
hardened criminals, beg. Grovel. Cry. I'd seen them pissing
themselves when they realized there was no hope for them.

And here was this
chick, a nobody, just a girl... sitting there calmly realizing her
time on Earth was over and she would never get a chance to do
anything with her life... and she was calm about it.

The fuck was that
about?

“I don't suppose
I could talk you out of this?” she asked, her tone dead,
knowing there was no chance.

“No, doll.”
I would back out if I had a choice. I didn't.

She nodded, lips
pursing. “Any chance you would be willing to slip me something
right before the hand off to Lex?”

“Come again?”
I asked, brows drawing together.

“It sounds like
you know Lex,” she said, watching me. “And if you know
him at all... then you know the sick, horrifying things he does to
women. A lot of women. Random women who mean nothing. Now, imagine
what he would do to me... someone who has obviously pissed him off
somehow.”

She had a point.

Poor fucking kid.

“So you're asking
me to...” I trailed off, wanting her to fill in the blank.

“Give me
something to kill myself with. Before he gets a chance to play with
me first,” she said, her pale skin looking almost green at the
word 'play'.

“You fuckin'
serious?”

“Yeah,” she
said, her voice firm. “I don't know much about drugs. But I
think heroin is really easy to overdose on. I'm sure it wouldn't be
hard to come across some. It's cheap. It won't hurt your bottom
line,” she babbled on as if she wasn't talking about suicide.
“I've never done drugs so I wouldn't even need all that much. I
can just like... snort it, right?” She looked at me as if
waiting for an answer, but went on without it. “I don't know
you. And maybe you're no better than him. Maybe you don't give a damn
about me at all. But I don't think you're that cold. I don't think
you'd be okay with the things he would have in mind for me.”

“You want me to
help you kill yourself.”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck,” I
said, pushing off the wall and pacing the small space.

She was right. I was a
cold fuck, but I wasn't heartless. Just knowing I was holding her
against her will was chafing me, settling with a lead feeling in my
belly. It was the rule. I didn't mess with women. It wasn't a fair
fuckin' fight. And I couldn't think of a god damn thing a woman could
do to warrant what Lex would do to her.

“Is that a no?”
she asked, sounding defeated.

I turned my head,
seeing she was watching me pace, her body rigid.

“He comes for
you,” I said, walking up to her, my boots almost touching her
bright purple toenails, crouching down so I could look her in the eye
so she could see the genuineness there, “I will give you
something to end it with.”

At this, she nodded,
her eyes swimming slightly. “Thank you.”

Then I stood, turned,
and got the fuck out of there.

Four

Alex

Okay. There was no
reason to freak out. It was always a possibility. From that first day
that I sat across from his coffee shop on the steps of the museum,
pretending to read some paperback I found discarded on the subway
when I was actually making a mental note about every mannerism, what
he drank, what he ate, how many cigarette breaks he took.

From that first glance,
there was always a chance that he would find out. I probably should
have been shocked that it took him as long as it had to figure me
out. I mean... ten years. For someone as hyper vigilant and observant
as him, that was an insane amount of time. And if he had any clue how
long I had been keeping an eye on his operation, he would have felt
like every kind of fool. If there was one thing a man as prideful as
Lex Keith wouldn't tolerate, it was being made to feel foolish.

By a woman.

Shit.

A part of me was
floored that I was sitting in some abandoned train car instead of in
one of Lex's torture rooms (of which I knew three: one in a basement
at a dry cleaner, one in a shed off some abandoned piece of property,
one specially built in a storm shelter in the woods. Incidentally if
you found yourself in the first two, you would probably get the spit
kicked out of you and be on your merry way within a night or two. If
you ended up in the third one, well, you were in for a long stay. And
you probably weren't ever getting out alive).

Why was he wasting time
keeping me in someone else's custody? That just didn't make any sense
whatsoever. He had to be itching to get his hands on me. If for no
other reason than because I'm a woman. Because he really didn't need
any other reason to brutalize someone.

Was it some kind of
scare tactic? Sic the big, scary (but hot in a dangerous way) guy on
me, make him hold onto me, let me worry myself sick about what would
happen to me before he showed up?

That
might have worked. If there wasn't something about Breaker that
said
he was just as unhappy as I was about the whole situation. Given that
he was like... contract muscle, that said something. It said that
maybe he wasn't down with the way Lex operated. With what he did to
girls.

Breaker had obvious
issues with his assignment.

Which scared me
(marginally) less.

He was still going to
go through with the job. Leaving me to wonder if maybe Lex wasn't
just paying Breaker. Knowing him, Lex had some kind of backup plan.
Lex always had things lined up. If plan A didn't work, there was a B,
then a C. So on and so forth.

Maybe Lex had something
on Breaker that was making him compliant.

But he was still going
to help me off myself.

So he had my
everlasting gratitude. Even if he was keeping me in a filthy,
bloodstained train car that was freaking freezing. I cursed my choice
of pajamas savagely as the shock wore off and I felt the cold sink in
through my bare feet and into the thin material of my yoga pants and
tee. If this was the worse torture I was going to go through at Lex's
command, well hell, it wasn't that bad. I would live through it. Or
catch a cold and die. Either one was fine by me.

No matter what, I was
going to die.

I wish I could say this
revelation was met with heartbreak. That I had so much to live for.
That I had hopes and dreams. That I wanted to meet a man, fall in
love, have two-point-five kids and live in a safe neighborhood. That
I wanted to see Paris at night. That I wanted to have espresso in a
cafe in Italy. That I needed to dig my toes into the sand of a
tropical island. That I wanted to publish a book. Or create art.

But that wasn't me.

That wasn't the life I
led.

My life had been taking
care of my mother. A mother who had always been fragile. Delicate.
Emotionally unstable. A mother who cried if I was five minutes late
walking home from school, terrified that something horrible had
happened to me. A mother who had never been well enough to hold down
a steady job. So our cabinets had mostly been empty. Our lights went
out every other month- leaving me doing my homework outside sitting
under a streetlamp.

There had been no such
options as dreams. Just the promise of never ending hard work.

I vaguely remember when
I was young having a wish to sing. Always secretly wanting to learn
to play guitar, but knowing I never could because we could never
afford lessons.

But that desire got
squished when I walked in from school that afternoon and found that
my mother had finally given up whatever battle she had been fighting
my whole life.

Then the desire got
replaced with a need for vengeance when I learned the truth.

Every second of my life
since that day was full of that goal. To avenge my mother and the
hell she had been forced to live through.

So my only regret in
life was not accomplishing that goal.

But it was a hollow
kind of disappointment.

In the end, I might as
well have not even existed.

That sounded depressive
and pitiful, but it was the god's honest truth. No one would miss me.
No one would grieve because I didn't share their air anymore. Death
was only sad when there were people left behind that cared that you
once lived.

No one cared about me.

And no one had for over
a decade.

There was really
nothing to be sad about.

I'd take whatever drug
Breaker promised to bring me, suffer through whatever kind of
experience an OD was... then drift off into nothingness.

I wasn't of the mind to
believe in a after life. To put faith in the idea of floating up into
a place of no pain, only peace and happiness. It seemed the stuff of
fairy tales. Something to spoonfeed scared children. Something to use
to convince people that life was some magical experience dreamed up
by some all-seeing God.

But life was shit. Life
was pain and sacrifice and disappointment. It wasn't a test to pass
or fail. It was a swirling mass of time where the lucky few knew a
little happiness, but most lived in fear and pain and emptiness.

No God would allow
that.

At least no God I would
choose to believe in.

Soon, and there was no
telling how soon, but soon... I was going to not exist anymore. There
would be no afterlife. There would be no reflecting on the life I
led. Or reincarnating to try again (what a cruel freaking concept
that was).

One minute, I would
breathe and think and feel.

The next, I would stop
breathing, stop thinking, and stop feeling.

Case closed.

But there was no reason
to sit and wallow about that.

I got slowly up off the
floor, my bones aching from the cold. I moved around, trying to shake
some warmth into my limbs. Trying to shake the cold out of my soul.

It was hard to live
with the weight of knowledge on your shoulders. To know what was
really going on around all of us daily. To know that there were men
out there who stole girls off the streets, good, sweet, innocent
girls, and raped, mutilated, and discarded them. And never got
caught. Never got punished. It was impossible to not feel your
shoulders slump with that. Or to know that there were men who stole a
man's family, slicing off fingers of children to get his way –
and not feel like the world was an awful, twisted place to live.

I didn't get the chance
to see the sun. Because I lived in the fucking gutters.

There were times that I
wanted to leave it behind. Nights when I would lay in bed, staring at
my wall, feeling tears stinging my eyes. Wanting nothing more than to
pack my stuff and take off. Go somewhere else. Anywhere else. Get a
real job. Find a good man. And maybe he would ignore me during
football season and I'd have to bitch at him to bring out the trash.
But he would call me pretty and kiss me like he meant it.