Retribution Read online

  “Is she hurt?”

  He laughed outright at my question and the other man stalked behind me.

  “That a camera bag?” Lenny asked, tilting his head as if he didn’t know. “Let’s have a look before you go.”

  Before I could even reach to protect it, the bigger man slipped it from my shoulder, his touch making me flinch.

  “Give that back!”

  Lenny took it, inspecting it before acknowledging me. “Go home and stay there. If I see you here again, it’ll be more than your camera I take, got it?”

  I looked from Lenny to the big guy and back. I wasn’t going to win any fights tonight. Not with them. Nikki had been naive to think she could walk away. I’d been naive to believe her.

  “Got it.”

  “Would you believe it?” Lenny asked the big guy then turned to me. “She’s smarter than she looks.”

  “Everything all right here?” The voice came from behind Lenny. I’d been so caught up in the moment, I’d neither seen him approach nor registered the rumbling of his bike.

  The two men turned. Adam climbed off the Harley without a hint of fear on his face.

  “Boyfriend come to rescue you?” Lenny tried, although his laugh sounded nervous. He wasn’t a big guy, kind of scrawny, actually, but I could see the piece he carried in plain sight, and what he lacked in muscle, his friend made up for and then some.

  Adam walked solidly toward us, his gaze fixed on the men. “City needs to clean up its trash problem,” he said, sizing them up and making sure they knew he remained unimpressed.

  “Who the fuck is this asshole?” Lenny asked no one specific.

  Reaching into his jacket, Adam smiled and pulled out a piece twice as large as the one Lenny carried. I gasped, shocked, although at the same time, not.

  “Who I am doesn’t matter. I believe you have the lady’s camera.”

  “Fuck you, man,” Lenny said then gestured for his friend who took one step before Adam shifted the aim of the pistol and shot at the ground. The big guy and I screamed at the sound. Adam had shot the man’s foot.

  Police lights flashed, cruisers turning the corner.

  “Fuck!” Lenny tossed the camera at Adam and ran, the big guy limping behind him. Adam slid his weapon back into its holster tucked inside his jacket, seeming relaxed as the patrol car parked and two officers climbed out.

  I wasn’t sure how he’d explain what had happened.

  “Mr. Smith,” one officer said, smiling. “Everything okay here?” He glanced at me before shifting his gaze back to Adam.

  Confused, I watched the interaction between them.

  “Evening, Dave. Perfect timing, as usual. My friend here seems to be lost,” he said, his hand coming to rest at my lower back.

  “I see. This neighborhood is no place for a lady,” he said.

  “No. No, it’s not,” I stammered.

  “I’ll take her home. She lives in my building.”

  The officer nodded. “Good to see you, Mr. Smith.”

  “Likewise.”

  We stood watching as the officers drove away.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked Adam, finding it strange, him showing up when he did.

  “I needed to drop by one of my projects and recognized your car. I wondered, in fact, what you were doing here?”

  I rubbed my face, realizing how differently this night could have turned out if Adam hadn’t shown up when he did. “It’s a long story.”

  “I’ve got time, but we’ll do it someplace more comfortable. Let’s go.”

  “My car is—”

  “Not sure you’re okay to drive. You seem shaken up.”

  I laughed, on the verge of tears. “Well, being threatened by a pimp then watching you shoot his henchman in the foot is enough to shake anyone up, I think.”

  Adam nodded. “I should have aimed higher,” he said, turning me toward his bike. “Let’s go.”

  “I want to get my car. I don’t want to leave it.”

  “It’ll be fine where it is. I’ll bring you to pick it up tomorrow morning. Hop on.”

  My hands shook, and although I’d managed to keep it together so far, with the endorphins leaving my system, the stress of what had happened needed an outlet.

  He was right. I was in no condition to drive, but I didn’t want him to see me cry. I nodded and followed him to the bike, figuring if a tear or two slipped, he wouldn’t see it if I was behind him. He straddled the bike, and I climbed on and wrapped my arms around his waist, liking being so close, feeling safe as I held on tight when the bike roared to life and he drove off.

  “WHY DID THE POLICEMAN know you? And what property were you dropping by?” Elle sat on her sofa while I poured her a second glass of wine from the bottle she’d bought the other day. I hadn’t touched mine yet, too busy thinking about the night before, about what had happened in this room, on this couch. About how she’d fallen asleep in my arms, tucking herself so close she could have disappeared. About how she’d trusted me. How I’d held her. I’d liked holding her, keeping her safe.

  “SafeHouse. Where you parked. New Beginnings is one of my charities. I do a lot of work in the area, so the police know me. Your turn.”

  “You’re building a shelter for women?”

  “You seem surprised. Why?”

  She paused, as if collecting her thoughts. “I don’t know. I guess I never would have figured a guy like you would…care about something like that.”

  “You don’t know anything about me, Elle,” I said matter-of-factly, the words more true than she realized. I took a sip of wine. Tonight’s incident, although unplanned, would work to my advantage. The only part bothering me was how scared I’d been when I’d seen her with those two idiots. My heart had pounded out of my chest when I’d caught sight of them.

  “No, I guess I don’t. But it’s hard to get to know someone who up and leaves in the middle of the night after —” She stopped there.

  “After fucking?” I couldn’t help saying it. And seeing the look on her face to hear it aloud? Priceless.

  She drank another sip of wine, her attention on the glass.

  “I had an early meeting,” I lied. I had no meeting. I’d simply wanted her to wake up and know I’d left. To know I’d taken my pleasure and left.

  “Oh.”

  “You haven’t answered my question. What were you doing in that part of town?”

  “I had a meeting,” she said, her tone and body language cocky. She finished the last of her second glass and held it out for a refill.

  “I think you’ve had enough.”

  “You can’t tell me whether or not I’ve had enough.”

  “I think I just did.” I corked the bottle and set it on the counter.

  With a glare in my direction, she rose, uncorked it, and poured the contents into her glass. She was going to be disappointed if what she wanted was to get a rise out of me. I simply grinned, my palm itching to spank her ass for her childish behavior. But, then again, she was Daddy’s little girl. In fact, it was good for me to see this. Here stood the real Elle Vega: a spoiled brat used to getting her way.

  When I didn’t react, she sat back down, frustration obvious on her face.

  “Now, the meeting you mentioned…you were meeting someone to take photos? You had your camera with you. What are you up to, Elle?”

  “I already told you. I’m a photographer. What I like to do is take photographs of real people. A few months ago, I started taking pictures of the homeless then, eventually, got to photographing prostitutes. Saw how things worked, saw the men who picked them up, the men who owned them. How the women look after…after being dropped off when they…finished their work. It’s that part I’m interested in. You don’t see that when you’re driving by or not paying attention, and most people aren’t paying attention to anything but whatever’s going on inside their heads. And you don’t see it when the women know you’re looking. They’ve trained themselves to put on a mask of ‘I don’t g
ive a fuck.’ But they do. How can they not? When I snap a photo, it’s an instant in time I capture. That moment tells me more about a woman than a year’s worth of talking would.”

  I studied her as she spoke, saw how her eyes moved briefly away from mine, saw sadness there. I hadn’t expected that.

  “I met a few of the women, Nikki among them. She’s the girl I went to see tonight. It was her last night on the streets. She’d gotten a job — I guess she saw it as upward mobility — as an escort. She wanted to clean up her act. She’d told her pimp, and I know he hurt her because of it. It’s the reason she didn’t show tonight. She would have been there otherwise.”

  Sadly, Elle was probably right. “What do you plan on doing with the photographs?”

  She considered before speaking. “Send them to a paper. Expose the jerks who make it possible for the pimps to keep these women working while taking a huge chunk of what they earn.”

  “And who have you managed to photograph thus far who you’d expose?”

  “Don’t patronize me,” she said, putting her glass down hard enough that red liquid splashed onto the coffee table.

  I gave her a look to remind her what I’d said earlier about having had enough.

  “I’m not patronizing you, but I’d like to know how you planned to go about your rather naive idea of an exposé. You do realize the people you’d be dealing with would become quite dangerous if forced into the situation you’re wanting to put them in.”

  “You mean like they could carry guns inside their jackets?”

  I had to smile. “I know the neighborhood I’m going into.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Clearly, because you seemed to be in complete control of the situation tonight.”

  She stood, stumbling a little. I rose, taking hold of her arms to steady her. Neither of us needed another incident where she’d be getting more stitches.

  “What do you care, anyway?” she snapped.

  “So should I have driven on, then? Should I have left you there to fend for yourself? Turned the other way?”

  “You know what, Adam? Screw you,” she said, trying to shrug out of my hold.

  It took all I had to contain my laughter, but when she raised her hand in an effort to slap me, any allowance on my side ended. Catching her wrist, I twisted her arm, forcing her to meet my gaze.

  “You know what, little girl? You need to realize you’re out of your league. You played with fire tonight, and you would have been burnt badly if I hadn’t shown up when I did.”

  “And how did that happen at precisely the moment I was there? Are you following me?”

  I felt my face tighten and forced myself to take a deep breath before pushing her to sit on the sofa. I leaned in close, our faces almost touching, my voice lowered to the edge of a threat. “You need to learn gratitude because all you’ve got right now is a whole lot of attitude. But I guess Daddy didn’t teach you that, did he? Why should he? All he knows is how to take.”

  Everything stopped.

  I realized my mistake instantly.

  “W-What?” she whispered, her face different, her eyes searching.

  I released her and stepped back, my gaze faltering as I ran a hand through my hair. “Just say thank you.”

  “Thank you.”

  I picked up my jacket and the gun I’d placed beneath it. Tucking it into its holster, I went toward the door, turning once, pushing the hair from my face. “I’ll take you to get your car tomorrow morning. Don’t go back there without me, understand?”

  She nodded, confusion still clear in her eyes.

  I walked out the door, reaching the elevator, pushing the button to call it.

  Shit.

  I smashed my fist into the wall. I’d let her get to me. It had been so fucking easy for her to rile me. And with my slip, she’d have questions. Time to move things along. Why the fuck did I prolong the inevitable anyway? I had one plan, one goddamned thing to do. Break the girl. That was all.

  And I was fucking it up royally.

  Before going upstairs, I remembered the camera still in the sidesaddle of my bike. I went to the garage to grab it then headed up to the penthouse. There, I poured myself a drink of whiskey and sat down, still annoyed at my slip. Still fucking irritated I hadn’t done it yet. Hadn’t even made a dent in my plan. I should have started this weeks ago. I’d been ready to, but I’d watched her instead. Like a fucking stalker. Something about Elle Vega intrigued me. Drew me in like some horny teenager who can’t stop staring at the beautiful girl way out of his league.

  Turning her camera on, I began to scroll through the photographs. She was good. Very good. So many photos, most captured from some distance away where the subjects would not have known they were being observed, would not have seen her. Girls of all ages; kids who should have been safely tucked away in bed turning tricks on the corner to eat instead; women old enough to be my mother, their faces etched with two lifetimes of shit. All used up, every ounce of anything worth anything taken from them.

  Hope was a basic human right. These women didn’t have it anymore. It had been stolen from them. And, once you’d lost hope, you may as well be six feet under because, even though your heart may beat and your lungs may take in air, you’re not living anymore. You’re dead. Just waiting for your fucking body to realize it and get on with the business of ending it all.

  We’re all so fucking scared of death. Will do anything to survive, to prolong our pathetic existence. Human nature. I understood fear of dying, get why we have it. Get why God — or whoever the fuck put us here — would make that particular fear a part of our makeup because, without it, the human race would have died out eons ago.

  I threw the whiskey back and poured another. Elle’s words replayed in my head. The part about seeing these women, really seeing them.

  I got that. I knew the look she meant. What I saw in these photographs wasn’t new, not to me. What she captured on these images had been burned on my fucking brain, and I saw it more clearly now than I had in years, managing, somehow, to suppress it. I saw Alessandra when she came back to us. I saw her face. Her eyes. Dead eyes. Not long afterward, she’d been dead, too.

  We’d been born in Mexico City. Our parents smuggled us across the border when I was four, my sister fourteen. The age difference between us spoke to the fact I’d been a surprise. Much loved but unexpected. They worked hard to raise us in a ratty apartment barely big enough for two in East LA. At my age, Mexico City or LA — it hadn’t made a difference, not to me. The sun still shone, and I had my family. I grew up American for all intents and purposes. Alessandra struggled, though. Her accent gave away her roots, and she always felt ashamed of where she’d come from. Of how we came here.

  It wasn’t until ten years later that it happened. We’d celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday a few weeks earlier. My sister was pretty, very pretty. Everywhere we went, people turned to look. She had something special too, apart from being physically attractive. Something from inside drew people like moths to light because that’s what she was: light.

  At fourteen, I was a big kid, and, more than once, I made sure no one touched her. She never liked the attention from boys or men. Ultra-shy, she felt more comfortable on her own, hidden in a corner, reading. But her attempts to keep to herself hadn’t worked out for her because she’d caught the eye of Manuel Vega. Or, at least, one of his goons. Didn’t matter which, they would all pay. They abducted her a block from our house, at a bus stop. A witness said it happened in the blink of an eye. One minute she was there, the next, a white van pulled up and, poof, she’d disappeared. Alessandra had screamed before they’d knocked her out, but a five-foot-two, one hundred pound girl couldn’t fight off the men who’d been sent to take her. If I’d been there, like I should have been, it wouldn’t have happened.

  We used to go to the stop together. She worked a few blocks from my school, and we rode the same bus. That day, though, I’d played sick. I hadn’t felt like dealing with some shit g
oing down, had wanted one day off from the teasing. Our parents had enrolled us at a school outside of our community to get us a better education. A white education. They worked their asses off to afford the shithole of a school. Most kids left me alone, but a few didn’t. I’d had enough of being called Mexican trash, but one more fight, and I faced expulsion. All my parents’ hard work would have been for nothing. So I’d given myself the day off. Of all days, I’d chosen that one. Although, who knew? Maybe they’d been watching for an opportunity all along. And maybe I was fooling myself thinking a fourteen-year-old kid would be any match for Vega’s men.

  Manuel Vega hailed from Columbia and cocaine was his and his brother, Eduardo’s, main source of income. At least it had been coke before Manuel immigrated to the States. There he’d added arms and flesh trade to the family business.

  Six weeks after her kidnapping, police had found her wandering a street in Park City, Utah, nearly naked, incoherent. How she’d gotten there, no one ever figured out. She didn’t talk much once she got home. Stayed in her room instead, lying in her bed, staring out the window. Nothing we did could get her to come out. Nothing. It broke my parents, watching her, imagining the terrible things she must have endured, not wanting to think of how the marks she wore all over her body, cuts and bruises likely to turn to permanent scars, got there.

  She slit her wrists in the tub a few weeks later. She did it when no one was there, when no one would be there until too late. She bled out in the bathtub.

  She died alone.

  They’d tried to keep me from seeing her when I got home, but I forced my way in. Stepped in the blood collected on the floor where her arm had fallen over the edge of the tub. I still remembered the slippery feel, remembered the print of my boot in all the thick red, her cold, lifeless body. Her eyes were closed, and I knew I’d never see them again, even if they had died long before she’d taken her life. I’d needed her. I’d just gotten her back, and she’d died. It wasn’t fair. She hadn’t deserved what had happened to her. Nobody did.

  Nobody?

  I stood, and, with a roar, smashed the camera against the far wall. Watched it crash and explode into pieces, taking all of those faces with it.