Rogue (In the life of the Rogue Book 1) (7 page)

“If you were not a nigger,” he said, “you would run this family. I see it in your eyes. I see what makes a Rogue in your face.”

“Fuck the Rogue,” I spat.

I saw stars when he slapped me so hard my bottom lip tore from his rings.

“You will not take this family’s name and trash it. Do you understand me?”

My mouth swelled with blood. It dribbled down my chin and unto my already bloody shirt. I had been securely beaten silent and Papa took my silence for compliance.

He cleared his throat. “Nobody is going to give you anything in this world. Not even your family. We’re your worse enemies and we are your blood, Tristan. You remember that, you hear me?”

I said nothing, and, again, he took my silence as compliance.

The whore slipped her hand over my stomach. “You have a nice place here.”

I huffed and glanced around the tight, shitty hotel room. It wasn’t nice with its faded carpet and dirty drapes, but I figured it was miles better than a street corner with Johns driving down the road checking you out. When Zander and I first started out, we were in nicer, separate hotels rooms. Between the whores and drinking, we slowly declined. Now we were sharing a room with one bed because it was all we could afford. We would alternate to who would get the hard floor and who would get the bed day after day.

As if sensing my very thoughts, she corrected, “Well, it’s better than the corner me and her work.”

The change in her accent – the broken English switched for full sentences that didn’t end in
Papi
– wasn’t lost on me. Somehow, the hooker lifted the veil of grimy Latina working hooker, to a woman who happened to have a day job that consisted of blow jobs and sex with a person she may not want standing near her, but allowed in her body. There was no need to continue with the façade. I had lost my own role at the paying John looking to blow off steam when I hadn’t had an orgasm and she had.

The warmth in her body eased me. My hand slipped from her shoulder, slid between her arm and waist and found its home on her hip. She nuzzled closer, her head resting on my chest, her mouth just inches from my nipple.

But, yet, our movements weren’t sexually stimulated.

My fingertips played at the skin. It was a wonder to me how a woman, no matter how hard life had been or was, could still have skin that was smooth and velvetly to the touch. I felt her heartbeat against my side and breathed slowly, my chest collapsing as the exhale escaped. And as I exhaled, she wiped at her eyes as if the closeness, or lack of, had touched a very deep place and it didn’t sit well. I refused to look down to confirm if she was crying or not. It was fear that if I saw those tears it would bring my own. I looked up to the cheap, crumpling ceiling, my cigarette clenched between my teeth. I hissed as I inhaled a lung full of smoke and blew it out.

We were in repose from our adventure on the floor and we had found a common ground that was rare and neither one of us was ready to allow the moment to slip by talking over it and mucking it up. We were both in deep thought. We were skin to skin but worlds away at the same time. Maybe she was thinking of her life that ended with her needing to sell her body. My mind glided to the woman I had met on the balcony with a dead man leaking in the tub not to far away. Seeing Dominique’s face, seeing those gray orbit pools that made up her eyes, was like a lighting bolt and I jumped slightly. I couldn’t help but remember the way her skin creased slightly as a smile was about to erupt and burn anything in its path. Her face sliced brutally at my mind and my heart burned in response.

The hooker’s hand drummed against my chest. Then her fingers stopped drumming and the index pointed to the cigarette burning softly in my hand. I stubbed out the dwindling cigarette, placed another in my mouth and lit it, intending it to be for her.

And that’s when the screaming began from the bathroom.

Zander was nude, hunched over on the toilet, with his eyes halfway up in his head. His face had gone to an ashy white. His hooker, her face contorted in just plain ole’ disgust, mingled with rage with a dash of hate, reared her hand back and slapped him.

“You son of a bitch!” Her accent too had changed. “You took all of it!” She was screaming at him.

It was then that I saw the needle poking out of his forearm and the blood cascading down, making a pool in his upraised palm.

She cocked her arm again like a thumb would cock back a hammer on a glock. “You fucking bastard!”

The slap against his cheek was so loud it sounded like a shot and I jumped, pulled out of my stupor. She reared again for another shot and I was on her, pulling her arm and pushing her away.

My hand hovered over the needle in Zander’s arm. Not a drug addict, unsure of just what to do. I had the puerile thought if I withdrew the syringe then he would inflat like a balloon that lost its air.

I turned to look at the hooker. “What did you give him?”

Her head jutted up in defiance.

I bared my teeth and my body coiled like a snake all too happy that she had given me her neck for easy ripping. She caught the look, the dangerousness in my face and wilted – she was ready to flee in terror and reached for her purse but I was quicker. I snatched it off the counter, overturned it and dumped the contents out on the floor. Make up, rolls of condoms – the cheap kind - and crumple up dirty bills fell out, followed by syringes and a little baggie with white residue inside it.

“What is this?” I demanded.

My whore was standing in the doorway watching the events. She shook her head disapprovingly at her friend. “That was for us. What were you thinking?”

“He said he pay me double for it,” her friend whined back.

I huffed and tossed the baggie down on top of her trash from her purse. “With what money? We gave you what all we had.”

My words settled into a deep dark place with the bitch. She cut her eyes, glaring angrily at my cousin who I swore was dying right in front of me while I played twenty questions. She lunged for another round with Zander as if someone had rung a bell for the fight to commense again.

I took her arms and wretched them behind her back. “Now you listen to me, whore. What the fuck did you shoot my cousin with?”

She turned her head and spit in my face. “He shot him ownself up. And it was heroine.”

With her spit sliding down the left side of my cheek, I closed my eyes doing the best to keep control and not choke her till she was limp in my hands. I pushed her out of the bathroom, sending her colliding into her friend.

“Get the fuck out!”

“You owe me,” she argued.

Arguing was stupid and it took time that I didn’t have. I ignored the whores arguing as they slipped from English to Spanish as they called me names from nigger to bitch ass nigger. Zander was breaking out into a sweat. His body shivered violently. I heaved him up by his waist and settled him in the tub under the spray of water. I shut off the hot water and yanked the knob hard to get it as cold as it could be – I had seen it in a movie once when an idiot had overdosed. Calling the cops seemed out of the question. It was the bad part of town and they wouldn’t be here in time. No. If I wanted my cousin to live, I would have to do it myself.

I pulled down on his chin to open his mouth and pinched his nose closed. C.P.R. would have to do and I hated the thought of our lips touching.

“Fuck!” I screamed and did the unthinkable.

I breathed air into my cousin’s mouth.

Zander coughed violently but opened his eyes. I breathed easier but as soon as I did, I realized I had an even bigger problem. My cousin had happily slipped off the wagon. The warning signs were there. I had ignored them, hoping my cousin wouldn’t be dumb enough to make the same mistake twice when the consequences would mean his life. I should have known better because I was just as guilty.

You were unbelievingly blind to the things you chose not to see…

He blinked slowly. His breathing finally evened out. I saw his dilated pupils and the drool that lingered around his mouth.

“This is fucked, Zander.”

He swallowed, hard. His Adams Apple jerked violently down in his throat then bobbed back up.

His eyes slid towards me. “I know, man. I just needed to escape.” His voice was extremely tight and horse. “I just needed to escape.”

Escape… You only used the word when you needed Freedom that you just didn’t have. I would escape, too, if I could. I just needed to find the door that held me in.

The night had been a bust. I let the water hit my hand, watching the way the water slipped through cracks of my fingers and thinking that this was what my life was like. Just in the palm in my hand but falling through the cracks, and what I lost, I would never get back. I was too busy reacting to life than actually living it. Zander wheezed and coughed but breathed all the same. If he wanted to talk, he didn’t utter a word and neither did I. I withdrew my wet hand and rubbed the cold water on my face, wiping off the whore’s spit. Breathing seemed hard. My mind working, thinking of ways to handle the drug problem wasn’t found in the burrows of my mind. And, to be real, my selfishness wouldn’t allow me the extra room to think of a way to save someone other than myself.

The Katie incident rained anew all over again and I still haven’t learned.

The self-pity was thick and cloaked me like a black cloud, but not so thick that I didn’t hear the door handle, to the room, move as if someone testing the lock. I instantly thought of the two very pissed whores that had left at some time during my breathing exercise with Zander, trying to get back in because they left something in their haste. The scrape of metal after the handle test outside the door made me think of a maid, whom I had yet to see, and by the condition of the room when we first step foot in it, and not to mention the obscene late hour for the imaginary maid to be working, was letting herself into the room with a master key card that had missed the slot on the first try. Yet when I heard the scrape again, and the lock clicking home, I knew someone was breaking in.

The door creaked open and I waited behind it, ready to strike at any moment. The barrel, screwed tightly to a silencer, of a glock dipped into the flickering light from the television as it pushed further into the room. I waited until I saw the exposed wrist that led to the hand holding the gun. My left hand wrapped around the wrist, holding it from the base and pushed the arm up, while my right hand slammed down on the hand. The gun fired, the bullet hitting the floor between my feet. With the silencer it was like
pfft!
Then the gun dropped to the floor. I kicked it out of the way as a man stumbled through.

He was too surprised and I was too quick to captilize on it. My hand was around his throat. He grabbed with his free, uninjured hand to loosen my hold. My heel kicked at the back of his legs and he fell, losing his footing and sinking into my choke. His eyes were wide. He opened his mouth to speak but I only tightened my hold to choke the words right out of his mouth. He would be dead on his feet. He knew it and I damn well knew it. A chuckle eased its way to my throat.

I could be a killer, I thought. I was thrilled and terrified how easily I was ready to keep choking until he went limp. Then I heard a click as a hammer had been thumbed back. The barrel soon followed afterwards and touched my skin. The gunman hadn’t been alone, and I hadn’t checked to see if he had backup.

“Let him go,” said the man with the gun to my head.

I shrugged innocently and squeezed even tighter. I refused to even greet the partner who had the gun to my head. As far as I was concerned, he didn’t exist. He had me at a disadvantaged, so I built on my strength. My strength being that I had one of the duo seconds away from killing over.

Then I got a surprise.

I heard the click of a hammer being put back in its place and gun was removed from the side of my head. Only then did I loosen my hold but not by much. The guy getting choked gasped at some of the air I allowed him.

I smiled as the gunman’s glazed eyes met mine. Only now that the immediate threat was put away, I glanced at the man standing beside me. He was an older gentleman with hard eyes. Not a thug but a man who did dirt but had class with the work he did. Fortunately being part of a Family, I could recognize Family hired thugs when one crossed my sight. I let go of the guy I was choking and backed away. He slid down to his butt and took a large healthy breath.

“Let’s start over, okay?” I said, starting the conversation.

I sank to the bed and snagged the cigarette I had intended for the hooker before the night went from thinly fine to fucked up. The move had put me closer to my gun inside the drawer lieing right beside the bible every shitty hotel had, like the people who took residence here had a need for divine soul searching.

I took a hard pull on the stale cigarette. “Who sent you?”

The gunman, who I hadn’t choked because I hadn’t known he was there, finally put the gun in his holster just inside his jacket.

“Rogue,” he answered.

I chuckled and pulled again, tasting the stale smoke. “Give me the phrase then.”

He laughed. I figured he was thinking that even if he did know the code phrase used when addressing a member of the family whom you never met before but needed to talk business with, he didn’t have to give it to me.