Meantime, Part 5
5 – This Love
“Rico was picked up by a john last time you saw him?” Holden asked, not sure if he should believe him.
Newt nodded, taking a deep drag off his cigarette. “He wanted some rock. I didn’t, I mean, what the fuck would I want rock for? Last time I used it I thought my skin was gonna fall off, you know? Besides, I was fine with coke and X, which pretty much does the same thing when you use ‘em together, ‘cept your skin doesn’t feel like it’s gonna fall off.”
Holden nodded, like that made perfect sense. He actually wanted to get up and punch him, but how would that do any good? Besides, he wasn’t sure why he was losing his temper with him now. Had the pot finally wore off? “Where does the john come into this?”
“Well, we were near the bus station, you know? We were both broke, he’d spent his cash on a bottle of tequila, and we had no way of getting any more right then. I had no interest, I had all the drugs I wanted, but he couldn’t live without some rock. So he figured what the hell, do a trick, get some cash. It wasn’t too long before he got picked up. He was supposed to meet me back here, but he never showed up.”
“Do you know who picked him up?”
He shook his head, exhaling a stream of smoke. “Nope.”
“You see what he was driving, what he looked like?”
Newt gave him a half hearted shrug, paying more attention to the television screen, where someone was wiping down a stove top to the utter amazement of an easily entertained audience. “Just a beaten up white pick up truck.”
“What make?”
“You mean type? I dunno. Probably a Ford.”
Great. This was as good as no information at all. “Never seen him before? Not a regular?”
He shook his head and shrugged, too stoned to give a shit. “Dunno man. I haven’t done a street job in a while. I’ve been working as a mule.”
“Did you recognize anyone working the strip that night?”
Newt finished the cigarette, smoking it down to a nub no bigger than a Tylenol. He stabbed it out violently in the top of the Coke can. “Wasn’t a lot of people out there then.” He paused briefly, considering his surely fragmented memories. “Maybe Jewel was there. Across the street.”
“Maybe?”
“It was dark, I didn’t pay much att -”
Newt’s answer was cut off by a scream from a neighboring room, full of the kind of ragged pain and terror that made them both jump.
Automatically, Holden jumped up to his feet and headed for the door, shoving the spool aside and getting pissed off at Newt’s pointless paranoia.
Out in the parking lot, he found a guy with bad skin and prison tattoos trying to haul a bloody, screaming woman back into his unit. She was wearing the mandatory hooker uniform of a miniskirt and a halter top, and he wondered if this asshole was a pimp. He had the greasy look of one. “Shut up, bitch!” he snapped, like the classy guy he obviously was. “I told you not to fuck around with me -”
Holden stormed across the lot, something ugly welling up in his gut. He hated pimps. “Get your hands off her, motherfucker!”
The guy looked up with a deep, murderous scowl, his eyes like bullet holes in a corpse. He had the woman – a girl really; she probably wasn’t older than seventeen, a junkie newbie recently turned out – by the hair, his fist tangled in it like a net. “Fuck off, faggot.”
Holden was barely aware that Newt, still standing in the doorway of his room, snickered. “Oh man, yer gonna get it now.”
Roan would probably have advised him not to make a move first, as Roan seem to prefer people commit to a plan of action before he showed them how utterly stupid it was, but he was too angry to be logical or even care. As soon as he reached the guy he threw a punch. The guy must have seen it coming, but he was too drunk or stoned to move fast, and Holden clipped him on the jaw. It snapped his head back, but the guy threw the girl into the nearest parked car, which she landed against with a sickening noise, and kicked Holden.
He was going for the groin but came up short and kicked him in the thigh instead. It still hurt, still made him stumble back a step, and the would be pimp stepped up to deliver a punch of his own, which connected squarely with Holden’s left eye.
This wasn’t his first time at the rodeo, though. He already knew the punch was coming, and decided to take it, because it gave him an opening. While he was throwing his punch, Holden decided to kick him. So while he landed the punch, Holden kicked him in the nuts at almost the same exact moment. And he was kicking a fucking field goal.
While the force of the punch made Holden reel back and see stars, followed by amorphous blobs of dark spots dancing in his vision, the pimp let out a short, sharp shriek, almost like a little girl, and grabbed his balls, doubling over and slumping back against another car. Even though his vision was still blurry, Holden forced himself forward and took advantage of the pimp’s doubled over state to grab him by his greasy head and ram his knee straight into his ugly face. Holden did it a couple of times, feeling a pain in his knee as well as a warm rush of blood down his pantleg as he knocked a few of the pimp’s teeth out. Holden then shoved him to the asphalt, ignoring the pain in his leg, and gave the pimp a kick in the ribs. “Beat on someone your own size, you ugly fuckhole.” He spit on him, just for a good measure of contempt.
The pimp was panting hard, but he managed to roll up to all fours, and spit out a mouth full of blood before saying, “You’ve made a big fucking mistake -”
Holden kicked him in the head, sending him collapsing to the parking lot. “No, you have, motherfucker.”
“No fights!” Sivan exclaimed, waving a large handgun as he came charging out of his office. “No fights here! You take it away!” At the sight of Sivan with a gun, Newt disappeared back into his room, and Holden couldn’t blame him.
Holden held up his hands, dipping his head in acknowledgment. “It’s cool, it’s over. I’m gonna go, okay?”
Sivan nodded his head like his neck was a spring. “Fine, you go then. No fights.”
“No fights,” Holden agreed, backing away. He looked at the beaten girl, and said, “I know somebody who could help you escape from this bastard. Wanna come with me?”
She looked at him suspiciously, through bruised eyes. “Who the hell are you?”
“A man whore who hates pimps. You comin’ with me or not?”
She still seemed dubious, but her options were non-existent, so she trailed behind him as he walked back to his car. Well, limped. His knee still hurt, his face hurt, and he thought he might have tasted blood. But other than that, he felt fantastic. Jessie mostly dealt with kids trapped in sex slavery, but he wasn’t one hundred percent sure this girl was legal. Either way, Jessie would help her.
Maybe that was the only good thing he could get out of this whole situation.
****
Although Fiona knew what to expect, she was still kind of surprised.
Rainbow had called her that afternoon. Calls to MK Investigations were being forwarded to her number since Roan was “indisposed” (that was the official line for now, even though Fiona thought it was somehow Edwardian in its vagueness), and a nervous Rainbow asked if she could come by and talk, as she wanted to talk about something she wasn’t comfortable discussing over the phone. She thought that was weird, but since Roan had always said Rainbow couldn’t be more harmless if she was a declawed kitten stuck up a tree, Fiona gave her her address. It might not be her address for very much longer anyways.
Tank had asked her to move to Boston to be with him. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Tank, because she did, more than she thought she would. He was a bit crazy, but in a good way, not in a “I’m gonna kill all of you!” sort of way. He didn’t even mind her being a dominatrix, nor did he expect her to bring her work home with her either. He spoke a lot of French, but you couldn’t have everything.
She just couldn’t picture being a hockey girlfriend, or the girlfriend of any pro athlete really. She wasn’t a blonde supermodel type, she didn’t have fake breasts and she wasn’t skinny, nor was she the type to stay at home while he was away fucking groupies. But to be fair to Tank, that kind of woman didn’t seem to appeal to him. If you couldn’t hold your own in a bar fight, he didn’t want to know you, and that pretty much held for women as well as men. That left him a small pool of women to draw from, and supermodel types just couldn’t make the cut. (Well, maybe Naomi Campbell, but she was probably the only one.)
And it wasn’t like she could just pick up and move to a city where she didn’t know anyone. Okay, she could … and she wasn’t without skills. Beyond her dominatrix gifts, she still had her programming skills, and she could always go back to doing some web designing.
But if she left now, she’d feel like she was abandoning Roan, and she couldn’t do that. She would have liked to talk this over with him, but he actually was “indisposed”. He hadn’t regained consciousness yet, as far as she knew. Which reminded her, she needed to drop by the hospital tonight, maybe drop Dylan off a sandwich. He probably hadn’t eaten since she last saw him.
Nine o’clock sharp, there was a meek knock at her door. Rainbow was essentially the hippie stereotype, in a lilac peasant blouse, a long rainbow colored skirt, and a dark blue knitted shawl. (Hand knitted? Maybe.) Her dark hair was curly like a grown out perm, and she had it gathered behind her in a ponytail as thick as a horse’s tail. There was something homely and fragile about her, and you instinctively wanted to protect her. She could see why Roan always had a soft spot for her, even though she was one of those kitty cult people.
She sat Rainbow down, gave her some chamomile tea, and slowly pulled the story out of her. It had to be pulled, as it was disjointed, and she had a tendency to wander all over the place. But from what she could gather, Rainbow was worried that the Church’s new leader, James Campanelli, was doing something terrible.
Since Eli’s death, it seemed like there had been a revolving door of leaders for Divine Transformation. James had only recently taken over, as the old one had died during his last transformation. Rainbow was not a fan of James’s aggressive style, and there were rumors that he had a cabin up in the woods, and that certain members were invited up there on certain weekends, and he had a side internet business connected to it. Rainbow was nervous and vague, and it was all Fiona could do to get something concrete she could work with.
Apparently the rumors had it as some type of “fight club” for cats. Only these were generally fights to the death. She wouldn’t have believed that was true, except one of James’s assistants showed up at the church one day with a bandage on his ear. Apparently, the earlobe had been ripped off, but he told several different stories about what happened, and none made any sense.
She didn’t want to go to the police for several reasons: she didn’t trust them, what if word got back to James, what if they raided the church and people got hurt? She wanted none of that. She was hoping Roan could check it out, find out if there was any truth to it, because if anyone was going to find out the truth, it was Roan. Fiona had to give her that, because few were better at it.
She didn’t have a web address for her, but that was okay, because as soon as Rainbow was gone she did her own search to see if she could turn up any domain names or sites owned by Campanelli. She found two, one which wasn’t being used yet, and another you needed a credit card number to enter. Which didn’t bode well.
Holden was the assistant investigator, and she could hand it off to him, but she was reluctant to do so. This was cat business, and as tough as Holden was, he would be fucked going up against some angry transformed all by himself. (A gun would help, but he’d still be at something of a disadvantage.) Roan was the king of the jungle, and he should have no problem subduing cats; it was what he did, sometimes without intention.
But he had to regain consciousness to do it, and she didn’t know if he ever would. So what should she do?
She decided to crack Campanelli’s site and find out. She’d let whatever she saw on there guide her to her next move. She just hoped it wasn’t fetish porn … although Holden would probably be good at handling that.
It suddenly occurred to her how weird an agency MK Investigations was – run by a cat guy, who employed a part time dominatrix and a hooker who fancied himself a vigilante. In that case, there was no one better to handle this kind of shit.
Again, as long as it wasn’t fetish porn. That would suck.