I’m battling with my emotions as the brunette comes back with the needle to stitch me, and she brings a bottle of alcohol.
“Well, well, now, looks like I’ll have my hands on you after all,” she purrs. “What have we got there?”
I extend my arm as she opens the bottle of alcohol.
“It’s a nick from my girl,” I growl. “She doesn’t like it when I don’t call.” I don’t want to remember how she was sobbing and I wanted to rip off that hood . . . and do what? Reveal myself to her? Can’t do that.
The girl pours the alcohol over the wound and I bite back my reaction, gritting out, “Make it nice and tight. Small.” I tear a piece of my T-shirt and bite down on it and don’t make a sound, watching as she sews me up.
“She did good. For a princess,” C.C. tells me.
I’m in pain, and I’m still fucking fuming. I clench my teeth around the cloth.
A redhead comes and sits on my lap as her friend bandages me. “Oh, Z, we were so worried.” She licks her lips. “What do you need?”
“Mindy,” I say, spitting out the cloth. “That’s your name, right?”
She nods eagerly.
“Mindy, I’ve been teaching my girlfriend how to shoot her new gun. I don’t think she’d appreciate you sitting here.”
“Oh.” She eases off me.
“Come here, darling, I’ll give you a long, slow petting now.” C.C. edges his legs open and makes room for Mindy, eyeing me. “Girlfriend, huh? She know about it yet?”
“I’m informing her tomorrow.” I turn my attention to my best friend now. “C.C.—this could be coming from the Underground. This could have something to do with that fucking debt.” I tighten the bandage just a little more. “I need her name scratched off ASAP and I think I know how.”
“Well, you can’t let Slaughter know you so much as thought to buy her a paper or he’ll fuck with you, man. He’ll make her disappear just like he did Lana.”
“Don’t you think I fucking know that? No. I need her to have the means to pay without her ever sensing it.”
Stalking to the small bar, I pour myself two fingers of whiskey and drink, gazing at the path of my own blood on the floor. She’s too good for this, but now she’s involved. Now she’s more than a name on my list. She’s on somebody’s blacklist and I am one pissed-off motherfucker here.
“Whoever it is, they fucked with the wrong girl.” I toss back the whiskey and pop some Vicodin back with it.
“Ah, god, I’m vastly entertained by the look on your face. I’m almost sorry for our guest.”
“Take me to him.” As I follow C.C., I ask him to get me a plane ticket to my apartment in D.C. for early morning. “Make sure I’m back by six so I can make the wedding.”
? ? ?
THERE ARE THREE types of knives for throwing. Blade heavy. Handle heavy. Or balanced. Grip and angle are most important. Long range, you keep your wrist unbent when you throw so the knife won’t turn too much in air. Mine hardly turns, it shoots straight ahead. I used to practice on cardboard cereal boxes, then willow, birch, pine slab, hanging in the wind. Now there’s a man before me and I know exactly how to shift my weight from my dominant leg to the other to create momentum, how to swing my forearm, elbow straight out on my release. It’s not about strength, but about finesse. Little force is needed. The knife gathers strength on its own.
If you hit with the butt, you don’t change the force, only allow more or less rotation by standing back or forward. I have all this science behind my technique and I’ve never been more ready to apply it.
He’s tied to a chair, at a small corner room in the warehouse. One light flares bright over his head. He’s bleeding and swelling, but the sight of his blood isn’t enough to give me satisfaction.
He looks at me, I look at him.
His trembling increases, and it pleases me. Immensely.
I start approaching, keeping my voice low. “Who hired you?”
“I’m n-not talking, like I told your ff-friend.”
I pull open my knife roll and shoot, grazing his temple. He yelps, and I keep throwing until knives are stuck into the wall all around him, outlining his asshole face. Then I aim for the center of his thigh. It hits.
“Fuck! Another crazy fuck? I thought you were the good one!”
“I’m sorry to break it to you, but you already met the good one.” I don’t even fake a smile, I feel nothing for this motherfucker. Not even pity. I pull out another knife and test its tip. “I’m the guy whose girl you just fucked with, so I’m making this extra painful. I’ll be taking a little piece of your skin, one throw at a time. One ball at a time, a piece of your dick at a time. I’ll draw it out, make it slow and painful, until you tell me who hired you.”
I hit him in the tip of one finger, pinning him there. He cries out. I smile and pull out my next knife.
“Was she a surveillance?” I ask.
A lot of contracts begin as surveillance and end up as something else. I hit his next finger. He cries out and stains his pants.
“Was this ransom, kidnapping?”
He’s choking on sobs. I hear the faint sounds of traffic outside. I hear her, my big dreamy green eyes, sobbing under a fucking black hood and I clamp my jaw and send one knife that lands straight in the center of his palm. “WHO’S YOUR BOSS?” I demand.
The blood’s pouring now; but I won’t stop until the words start pouring too. Just when he’s falling asleep, numb from the pain, I quietly command C.C., “Music please. We won’t be sleeping tonight.”
? ? ?
Four hours later
I DON’T HAVE a name.
I have a shitload of anger, a ton of fucking frustration, no sleep, some pain. But no fucking name.
We don’t know if she has a mark on her, whose target she is.
I need her off that list, and fast.
How will your pride take it if I give you the money, princess?
Will you throw it back at my face?
You will, won’t you?
Hell, I know you will . . .