Enforcer (47 page)

“Even after he started hitting you?” Connor asked, unable to imagine the slimy, mouthy little man as anything but the person he’d known.

“Yeah, even then. At first I was making excuses for it. I blamed it on the dope. I blamed it on me not being good enough. I blamed it on the men I fucked to make up the money that we were short on when
your
men came to collect. Then I blamed it on you and Petre. Fucking Frankenlurch and his pretty, gay boy-toy. I wanted to kill you both, but especially you. You were too smug, too eager with your fists.”

“You’d think that would have been a turn-on for you,” Connor said, the words slipping from his mouth before his brain could stop them. He cringed, but her arms and legs curled tighter against him.

“You’d think, right?” she sighed. “That’s how fucked up I was. Am. Still am. But I kept remembering that even though you would beat Larry mercilessly, and you treated me like shit, you always acted like you genuinely cared about me… about me having to wear a collar.”

“I was always genuine about it. No one deserves to be forced into a collar. Or prostitution. Or a beating.” Connor tensed, his words full of anger.

“I wore that collar willingly,” she said. “For a while anyway. You ranting about the collar, you threatening to beat him into a coma if he let anyone hurt me anymore, that stuff stuck with me. I hated you more for it, for infecting me with it like a virus. When you told me that you’d arranged for the guys at the gas station to call you if I showed up, I almost begged you to take me with you when you left.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I still hated you. I wanted to rush at you with a knife and stab until you were dead in a big pool of blood on that dirty floor.”

“That’s pretty dark,” he said, pulling away from her to look into her eyes.

“I told you, I was really fucked up inside.” Jera closed her eyes and nuzzled her face into his neck.

“What did they do to you?” Connor asked.

She knew what he was asking about. “They made me watch him lose a finger,” she said, barely audible.

Connor felt her shudder at the memory, most likely crystal clear in her mind the same way Travis’ face would always be second-sight for him.

“They made me sit five feet from him while Dracul tortured him. The guy was ruthless about it, enjoyed it I think.”

“He definitely enjoys it,” Connor said. “He’d love nothing more than a Christmas present of being given free rein to do it to me and make you watch.”

“He’s sure you robbed Larry. That’s all Larry ever told him. Over and over, no matter what that monster did to him, Larry screamed that it was you. He was sure of it. Dracul is sure of it.” She propped herself up on an elbow to look down into his face. “I’m sure of it.”

“I…” he trailed off, his mind a blur of conflicting instructions of what to say. “I didn’t intend for him to be killed.”

“So you did do it,” she said, her eyes hard, a small frown forming at the corners of her mouth.

“Yes.”

“Why, Connor?”

“I had to.”

“You had to get him killed? He wasn’t a threat to anyone anymore!”

“No, I had to rob him. I needed the money.”

“Needed the money for what? Do you have a dope habit I don’t know about? Or are you a secret gambler? Maybe whores
are
your thing? Just not me?”

“I needed the money to pay off your debt. So you could be free of
him
. I thought they’d just send someone like me to beat him up again, maybe break something as a final warning.”

“How could you not think they’d kill him?” she asked.

She wasn’t angry, but he could sense her need to understand what had happened.

“Because he’d been in serious debt before,” he said. “Even before Petre and I showed up. You had to have known.”

“I knew he was behind sometimes. He’d get scared and make it out to be my fault, make me go turn tricks with his friends for whatever money they had. I blew this fat fucker for three fucking dollars once just to keep Larry’s fists from getting too intimate with my face. But he always claimed he was only a grand short, or a couple hundred dollars.”

“He was twenty-five thousand in the hole when we took over,” Connor said, making her clutch him tight in surprise. “We ‘helped’ him get back on the right track, but it was only a matter of time before he screwed up again. And he did. And we didn’t even beat him for that one. Gave him an extra couple of days to make up the money. I figured that with all of the times he’d fucked up, the worst he’d get was a beating from a guy like Dracul, who would make me look like Mickey Mouse.

“So I robbed him, knowing how much money he would have on hand the day the collectors came. I timed it almost too close, just a couple of hours before they would be knocking on his door. He was choking your replacement when I surprised them. I gave him a light beating, gave his new whore all of his dope, then took all of his money. It was a lot more than what he should have had. I guess I must have known at that instant that there’d be more than a beating in store for him.”

“Why?” she asked in a whisper.

“Because he had over a hundred thousand dollars in cash. And probably a couple pounds of meth and some other shit. Weed. Maybe some heroin, I don’t know. He could have paid off Ojacarcu easily with that amount. Instead, for some reason, he was holding back. Taking a beating for it every so often.”

“Jesus,” Jera said.

“I know,” Connor said. “But at the time, I told myself that I’d lucked out. It was him or us, and I’d already decided that it was going to be us. He would be able to make it back, even with a couple of broken hands. Dope sells itself. In the meantime, I’d have enough to pay off Ojacarcu. Enough left over to send you wherever you wanted to go, to get you as far away from here as possible and have something to help you get your new life started.”

Connor couldn’t help but think of Dana and what Petre had done to her.
For
her
, he reminded himself, still feeling a small, white-hot pinpoint of hate at the Romanian for doing it.

“Why? Why would you do this for me? You hate me.”

“Because I love you,” he said, his voice steady, brain flaring in anger for saying it out loud to her.

He spent the next hour telling her the stories of Ilinca, Helen, and Petre.

*****

He woke with Jera still curled around his left side, her bare skin pressing into his. He felt wetness on his neck, and was surprised to find that it was drool that had slipped from the corner of her mouth. Connor was sure it would be from more tears. She had started to cry in the middle of Ilinca’s tale, and was an emotional wreck by the time she heard Helen’s fate.

He stared at the ceiling, listening to her soft, intermittent snores, wondering if he’d made a mistake by telling her he loved her. He hated himself for falling for her, hated that he’d replaced Dana already. Connor was also fearful that somehow Ojacarcu would know, would be able to see it in them, and do everything he could to exploit it to his advantage.

After she had cried herself out, Jera let him know she felt the same about him, which brought another round of tears. They held each other for a long time, then moved slowly into light kissing before being unable to hide their desperate need to remove each other’s clothing and become a single entity. Connor’s mind had been too occupied to worry that he was just another lover for her, one who didn’t have to pay.

After, his brain sought revenge, and he’d had to work through the conflicting emotions of being in love with a prostitute, a dope addict. He nearly screamed when his imagination ran wild, showing him vivid images of the clients he had met, of Larry, and the faceless johns that Larry had pushed her onto. Connor focused on the Jera who stood out in his mind the most: the dirty, verbally abusive whore with a collar around her throat. She was the Jera he’d fallen in love with, the one he’d risked almost everything to rescue when she didn’t really want to be rescued.

He couldn’t allow himself to think about all of the men she serviced. They were business, a job that had to be done. Those men couldn’t be denied. Anytime one of her clients or any of the other faceless men she might have lain with tried to slip through his defenses, he would clutch at the memory of the first time he saw her, or his newest vivid memory of her naked body in motion with his, the way her back arched as she cried out before collapsing on top of him.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked, tracing her fingers across his stomach.

“That you drool when you snore,” he said, accepting a hard pinch and a laugh as punishment.

“I’m being serious.”

“I am too. The pillow was stuck to your face and my neck, and your snoring in my ear woke me up.”

Jera pinched him again, this time lower, making him flinch.

“Connor…”

“I was thinking that it was a terrible idea,” he said, turning on his side to face her.

“Was it that bad?” she asked.

“No, I don’t mean the sex. The sex was great, but this is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” she frowned.

“I’ve kept my feelings to myself for a long time,” he told her, “because of what Petre said. Because I made this same mistake once already, and someone else had to leave. He was right. We aren’t allowed to feel anything. It only gets used against us, and here I am right back where I was a couple of months ago.”

“What do you mean someone else had to leave?”

“I was… with someone else. Ojacarcu started sniffing around, and Petre made her leave. Middle of the night type of shit. I get a call from her two days later and she won’t tell me where she is. Poof, just like that she’s gone.”

“Jesus, Connor. That’s where you were going all the time. I knew it. And they threatened her?”

“No,” he shook his head. “Ojacarcu never found out who she was. I had to tell her everything, then Petre had to tell her more, had to tell her enough to make sure she bailed without looking back. I don’t know where she is, but it doesn’t matter. She hates me for it.”

“I’m so sorry,” Jera said, her eyes wet again as she tightened herself around him with a hard squeeze. “At least she was able to get away before getting caught in the web.”

“Yeah, at least there’s that.”

CHAPTER 39

Connor had always felt that getting back on the ice after his accident had been the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. As he tapped the Lincoln’s steering wheel in time with AC/DC, he realized he’d never in a million years have been able to imagine that seemingly endless wait being trumped by waiting for Jera to finish with a client. Time after time, he had to stop himself from bolting from the Lincoln, giving a heavy cop kick to the front door, dropping a load of fist bombs into the surprised client’s face, the snatching Jera and making a run for it. To where, he had no idea, and that was the reality check he had to face each time his hand reached for the door handle.

Ojacarcu hadn’t made a big deal of his tantrum. Yet. Connor knew it would eventually come time to pay that debt. His first night back on the job, a note had been left for him when he dropped off the night’s earnings. A simple “Welcome Back!” from Ojacarcu. His boss had neither signed it nor had he even written a single word on it, but Connor knew who it was from. He also knew the subtle meaning being conveyed.
Glad you made the right choice. Don’t test me again.

The second hardest thing he’d ever had to do was turning out to be not paying off Jera’s debt immediately. One of the biggest faults of his plan to rob Larry had been Connor’s assumption that he’d only net thirty thousand, maybe as much as fifty, and combine it with his savings to make the payoff quickly before the weekly interest put it back out of his reach. He’d have to pay within a day or two, and by then, Larry would be screaming his head off about being robbed. It was far too suspicious, but Connor’s depth of thought on the matter had never delved further than the figurative collar around Jera’s throat.

A hundred grand in cash and fifteen in savings gave him a much better window to work with. He decided to wait a couple of weeks, easily giving up a few thousands dollars in interest just to keep Ojacarcu’s suspicions at bay. Connor was sure Ojacarcu already knew that Larry had been telling the truth, but had forced him to kill the junkie as a test. The answer to the test, as far as Connor could determine, was that he was now in even deeper, responsible for an innocent man’s death directly.

Light spilled out from the client’s front door, interrupting Connor’s train of thought. He watched Jera lean in and give the man a light kiss on the cheek before turning to walk away. The client’s hand shot out and gave her a playful swat on the ass. Connor felt himself tense with sudden rage when she let out a giggle accentuated by a sultry pout, as if she were sad the hour was already up. The urge to rip the Lincoln’s door off and hurl it at the man was barely held in check by his fear of what Ojacarcu would do to him. Connor wasn’t sure if he was ever going to be okay living with the knowledge that Jera fucked other men for money and him for love.

He thought if she was a stripper, that wouldn’t be so bad. Sure, she’d jam her tits in the faces of countless men all night long, rubbing her crotch on their various parts, fending off hands and fingers that were a little too friendly when the bouncers were looking elsewhere. That was leagues away from actually having sex with multiple men every night.