My plan, such as it was, was a simple one. I was going to plug Ridgeway as soon as I saw him. I didn’t care if he had snipers secretly covering him. Let them shoot me after I shot him. At least the son of a bitch would beat me to hell.
Just before I got on the freeway to head downtown, I opened up the duffel bag on the seat beside me. My blue cup was broken into three pieces. The little robot was broken too, its smiling head and one arm detached from the dented body. My own little stack of cash was gone, probably still sitting on the nightstand at the Palmview where I’d left it. All I had left now was the Lakers t-shirt I didn’t want to wear because it reminded me of Lia, the gun I used to kill Jesse, and Ridgeway’s money. In a way that seemed weirdly fitting. I threw out the broken things in a 7-Eleven trashcan, traded my current garbage-stained t-shirt for the Lakers shirt and stuck the gun into the waistband of my jeans.
I got to the abandoned warehouse an hour and fifteen minutes early. There was no one there. I parked Malloy’s car over near the mercado and then cautiously walked back to the meeting place. The money was way heavier than you’d think just money would be, but the walk was still much easier than the last time I’d traveled this route.
There was still nobody in sight. The run-down industrial neighborhood was just as deserted now as it had been on the day Jesse shot me, but I still felt like I had a neon sign over my head that read I HAVE A BAG FULL OF HUNDRED DOLLAR BILLS!!!
I made it to the lot without incident. No one else was there. So I waited. In a way, the waiting seemed almost worse than getting shot. All the second-guessing, the doubts, all the bullshit running through my head. But I wanted so badly to be that badass avenging angel, so there I was. Waiting.
In the end, it wasn’t Ridgeway who showed up. It was the weasel. Lia’s boyfriend. Vukasin.
“What the fuck?” I said to him as he rounded the corner into the lot. I pulled out the gun and drew a bead on the center of his chest. “I told your boss to come alone.”
“Hello, Angel,” he said, smiling. He was wearing an expensive, new leather trench coat over yet another awful shirt. “Nice haircut.”
“Fuck you,” I said. “You get your boss on the phone and you tell him the deal is off without him.”
“I would,” Vukasin said, talking a smiling step closer to me. “But you see, I forgot to charge my cell phone. How stupid of me.”
“Stay the fuck away from me,” I warned.
“You really will shoot me now, won’t you?” he said, cocking his head and stepping back. “Our little girl is all grown up, eh?”
I caught a quick flicker in his gaze as it darted to my left and then back to my face. Alarms went off all through my body and I spun to the left just in time to meet something hard and heavy slamming into my temple. The smug and mocking thought that chased me down into blackness was... some avenging angel.
30.
I came to in another trunk. This one was much nicer than the Civic, better than the Sebring even, but it still sucked. I was bound and gagged, again. My head hurt worse than it had ever hurt before and I felt a drowsy kind of spinning sickness that made me wish I were already dead.
What the fuck was I thinking, trying to be some kind of badass tough guy? I was a porn star for Christ’s sake, not a Green Beret. I could almost see Malloy shaking his head, smirking and making some deadpan comment about the shit I’d gotten myself into now. I hated him in that moment, for making me need him and then leaving me.
The car I was in eased into a slow stop. Footsteps came around to the rear and I cringed as the trunk lid sprang open. There would be no hesitation from Vukasin if he decided to pop a cap in my bitch ass.
But the person who opened the trunk wasn’t Vukasin. Presumably it was the man who had cold-cocked me back in the lot behind that warehouse. I figured he must be the replacement for that blonde redneck thug Malloy had killed back in Vegas. This one was younger and better looking, his dark hair meticulously gelled into trendy dishevelment. The body under his basic black outfit was built more like a model than a power lifter but he lifted me out of the trunk and slung me over his broad shoulder easily and without comment.
Hanging upside down with my cheek pressed against the thug’s back, I saw that the car whose trunk had been so nice was a slick black Chrysler 300. I was getting to be a regular trunk connoisseur. I made a mental note to request the Chrysler 300 for all future abductions.
I also saw that we were behind one of those awful, trashy post-war apartment complexes that fill the low-income neighborhoods of the northern Valley. Grimy stucco. Chipped paint. Indistinguishable from hundreds of others throughout Southern California.
Vukasin was there, holding my duffel bag and talking on a cell phone.
“Yes,” he said into the phone. “I’ve got her and I’ve got the money.” He looked over at me. “Yes, I understand.”
He ended the call and gestured to the man holding me.
“Boss says we meet him at Sneaky Pete’s on West 98th by LAX,” Vukasin said, putting the duffel bag into the trunk in my place and slamming the lid. “He said it’s right next door to the meet. You load up the outgoing girls, drive out to the meet, park the van behind the warehouse and then go over and meet the boss at Pete’s. I’ll deal with Angel myself.”
“But I thought the boss said he wanted her included with the outgoing,” the thug said, adjusting me on his shoulder.
“She will be,” Vukasin said. “Only she and I have a few things we need to discuss together first.”
He caught my eye and winked.
The thug carried me through a security gate and up some stairs and then stood in front of a unit on the second floor. The place was a standard low-rent garden apartment complex, all the units facing a central garden if by “garden” you meant a single rickety bench and some weedy dirt. The interior was not visible from the street. You could do pretty much anything you wanted here and no one would see it.
Vukasin unlocked the door. Inside wasn’t a normal apartment. It was a crummy little dungeon. Bad fake stone pattern painted on the grubby walls. Rickety wooden equipment slopped thick with matte black paint. A large X bolted to one wall and studded with eyelets. A thinly padded bench with locking steel cuffs dangling from each of its four legs. Cheap, skinny floggers and flimsy paddles hanging from nails driven unevenly into the far wall. There were stains on the carpet that I didn’t care to study. I thought of Ulka and her classy set-up and wondered what she would have thought about this place.
“Just put her down anywhere,” Vukasin said.
The thug obliged by dumping me on the carpet at the foot of the X and quickly making himself scarce. One of the stains that I didn’t want to think about was now an inch from my nose.
I wondered, were all the other units in this grim complex done up as cheesy fantasy sets like this one? Was this where they shot all the Naughty Teens videos? Did the girls turn tricks here too?
Alone with Vukasin now, I quickly assessed my situation. I was lying on my side. My hands were bound behind my back with a single short piece of nylon rope. Ditto my ankles. I was tightly gagged with a knotted handkerchief that dug deep into the corners of my mouth.
Vukasin hung his leather trench coat on a hook by the door and then squatted down beside me and pushed up my Lakers shirt, exposing my breasts. I had not had time to bind them down when I bolted from the Palmview and anyway at this late date it had seemed kind of beside the point to continue with the drag charade.