“Oh My God, Seri, are you serious?” Quill asked, sitting up with chills running down her spine and arms.
“I am,” Seri replied sitting up too. “Want to burn one?”
“Uh… Yeah,” Quill replied.
“Lock the door, and don’t you dare tell Monica on me,” Seri demanded as she moved to her bag. She instantly regretted her decision to let Quill smoke weed. She knew she shouldn’t. She knew she was enabling her. Just because she used it as an escape didn’t mean she should be teaching Quill her bad habits. She knew exactly why she did it. She thought of Quill like she thought of Monica. She didn’t see her as a 17 year old child. See saw her as a friend, a very good friend.
“Tell me what happened next,” Aquilla requested, taking the joint from Seri.
Seri laughed. “I don’t know what happened next. I told you I was two. I don’t remember any of that. I wouldn’t remember my mother had my grandma not had pictures. We went to live with her and she raised us.”
“How old was Lakota when she died?”
“She was twenty two,” Seri answered, hitting the joint.
“I have a feeling this is the part where you are going to tell me how you got involved with the FBI,” Quill assumed.
“I had just gotten my two year degree in criminal justice and was in police academy for maybe two weeks. I knew she was messing with drugs a little. I wasn’t too worried; I didn’t think she was into anything too dangerous. It was the people she was hanging with that should have had me worried.”
“Why?” Quill asked, intrigued with Seri’s story.
“They used her to pay off a debt.”
“What do you mean?”
“The leader of the pack, Felix Lopez, he owed a bunch of money for some cocaine that had gotten seized before he had a chance to disburse it and get the money. Lakota was beautiful. I swear that girl didn’t have one flaw.”
“You’re kind of beautiful,” Quill offered, still smoking on the joint.
Seri smiled over at her. “Thanks. Anyway, Lopez didn’t have the money to pay and offered my sister in exchange for half the payment.” Seri stood and walked to the window. “They fucking gang raped her and left her for dead. The authorities didn’t give a shit. They probably thought the world was better off. They made her out to be some street walking whore. She wasn’t, Quill. She was in college to be a nurse. She just ran into the wrong guy at the wrong time.”
“And you went after them?”
Seri nodded, hiding the roach in her bag. “Monica and I, both. I continued to go to police academy and she continued to work on her phycology degree. We spent every free minute we had learning these guy’s every move. Lopez was into more shit than either of us thought, kind of the same thing your father was into. He had mass quantities of drugs being brought into New York on an almost weekly basis.”
“When we finally had enough to go to the authorities, they laughed at us and sent us on our way. I wasn’t giving up. I wanted the little fucker to pay.”
“Is that what the vengeance means on your tattoo?”
Seri nodded and sat back on the bed with her.
“Did you kill someone, Seri?”
“Lots of someone’s, Quill, and I didn’t care. I didn’t and still don’t feel one ounce of remorse for what I did. I was going to make sure they never did to another girl what they did to my sister.”
“But how did you get Lopez? Did you kill him too?”
“No. I didn’t want him dead. I wanted him ass fucked in prison for the rest of his life. It only took a little over four months to get inside his apartment. That was crazy too. The guy lived in the hood. His apartment building looked like it needed to be demolished, but when you got to his eight floor apartment, it was fucking amazing, like you walked into a different world.”
“But how did you get to him? How did you end up in his apartment? I know how those guys work, remember? I lived with two of them. They don’t do the dirty work. They have lots of little gatekeepers keeping people like you away.”
“Aquilla…You just told me I was beautiful,” Seri said, batting her eyes.
Aquilla laughed. “And you used it,” she replied with more of a statement than a question.
“Yeah, it was cheesy as hell. I couldn’t get to the guy to save my ass. I knew his every move. I knew what times, what days, where he ate, when women came and left his place. Hell, I even knew when and where his shipments were coming from, but I couldn’t get to him. I couldn’t go through any of his followers, they never really got to him either, and I had already disposed of most of them.”
“I feel like I’m watching a movie. My nerves are going crazy waiting to find out how you got to Lopez.”
Seri smiled at her. She freaking loved that girl. WHY? That was the question she couldn’t answer. “One afternoon, I was on his turf, wearing a hoody and dark sunglasses. I was leaned against a pole, pretending to be on my phone right in front of the bistro table that I knew he sat at every day. I listened as he made a call.
“Yo, bring me some pussy later on.”
“Seven.”
“I don’t give a fuck as long as she’s hot. I don’t want no skanks.”
“He was smart. He never stayed on the phone long enough to trace a call. Monica and I were smarter, well Tina was the smart one.”
“Tina?”
“Yeah, she was another friend that wanted no part of Monica’s and my revenge. She used my laptop at a public library and got into more records and illegal shit than I’m sure anyone could. She was the one that got the call trace down to forty five seconds. That is unheard of. She’s a freaking computer genius. If anyone can split atoms, it would be Tina.”
“Does Tina work for the FBI now too?”
“Yes, behind the scenes of course.”
“Did she help find my father?”
“She did,” Seri answered truthfully, wishing for the first time that she was never involved in finding Romano Chavez.
“If you’re so good at investigating, why didn’t you know about me?”
“I couldn’t get in that house to save my ass. I didn’t know about your father’s little chattel business. You didn’t come out of that house, or if you did, I never saw you.”
“How long were you there before it all went down? How long were you watching my house?”
“I was only there a couple of week’s right before we closed in.”
“I probably never came out then. When my father was nervous about something, he wouldn’t let me leave. That was the first day I was out of the house in weeks. He thought whatever was going on had died down and let me go.”
“Tina was the one to find about the chattel industry. She took some pictures of me and sent the application in from a small village in Romania.”
“Are you Romanian?”
“I have no fucking clue. My grandmother is Mexican and who knows what my father is.”
“Sorry, finish,” Aquilla said, wanting the rest of the story.
“Finish the story about Lopez or getting into being a chattel for your father?”
“I want to hear about Lopez, but I have one more question about that.”
“Okay.”
“How did Agent Dick Face get in there to be the one to pick you up?”
“Tina.” Seri offered. “He just magically appeared on there to be the one to buy me for three months. Julius didn’t like it. He ran him through a million questions in your father’s office. He was pissed that your father let an outsider come to your house. Of course, we knew where your father was and he wasn’t taking any calls. We knew Julius wouldn’t be able to talk to him and ask him about the man that he had no clue was in his home.”
“Did you fuck Agent Dick Face too?”