15. Messiah

When I get into my car, I start the engine and turn the radio up loud enough to drown out my thoughts. I grab the camera from the passenger side floor and click it on. It isn't a fancy piece of equipment. I open the SD slot but it is empty. Fuck.

If Angel was the one that was last with Corey that means there is a video of her floating around somewhere. A video other men are likely to jerk off to, and I'd be damned if anyone else is going to be seeing my girl in that way.

I make the drive back to the scene of the crime. Thankfully, the penis has been removed from the door. The body is no longer sitting on the couch. The street is quiet except for the utility van sitting in the driveway. The cleanup crew is still wiping down the smears of blood all over the place. They pause when they see me appear and the guy leading them – some big brute in a tracksuit – narrows his eyes at me.

"What ya want?" he asks.

"SD card. Seen one? Maybe even portable hard drive."

He shakes his head and I wave my hand to dismiss him as I walk back through the house. I check the room where I found the camera but nothing is there. I check the clutter on the kitchen counters and all the drawers throughout the place. Nothing. Did one of his buddies take it? Oh, I'll fucking put a bullet in their brain myself.

Scanning the notes in my phone about the group of victims, I see if I wrote down where it is I might be able to find Joe. I have nothing. Since he works for Charles – albeit far down the totem pole – I make some phone calls and am able to get his location through the other Disciples that frequent the neighborhood.

I make my way a few blocks north to the house and stomp up to the front door. A woman comes to the door with a baby perched on her hip. Damn, this fucker has a family.

"Joe," I growl through the screen.

I glance at the kid and he looks back up at me with dark eyes and a drool covered face. The woman turns and calls for Joe. A few moments later, the fucker appears from around the corner. He narrows his eyes at me and I nod my head toward the porch.

Stepping away from the door, I wait for him to walk out of the house and close the door behind him.

"What you want?" he asks.

"I'll make it simple," I tell him. "That shit you pulled this afternoon, with the video, where is the footage?"

"I don't know," he answers, looking me over.

He must be checking for weapons. He knows of me, and I am guessing he thinks that I am here to end him. It was a thought as I made my way here, but I am not about to shoot a man on his front porch while his wife is a few feet away. I'll wait to pop his ass on the streets.

"Don't give me that," I growl. "The footage wasn't in the camera at the house and there were no SD cards or hard drive."

"Corey kept the cards. Once he was done with them, I don't know where they went. I didn't take it. I don't know where the fuck he put it."

"Who was the girl?" I snap.

My fingers are twitching. If this fuck put his hands on my Angel, he was going out the same way his buddies did.

"She said her name was Sara. Corey said she was a customer of his. A regular."

"What did she look like?"

"Blonde hair. Skinny. Like all the other chicks walking around here." He glances nervously back at the door. His wife must not know about his extracurricular activities.

"Any other marks? Moles? Freckles? Tattoos?"

"She had a bird tattoo on her hip," he tells me.

"Where did you drop her off?"

He gives me the address and I type it into my phone. Without another word, I stomp off the porch and toward my car.

The house is empty when I get there. Given the state of the neighborhood, I can't even tell if anyone is home or if the house is just completely abandoned. I wait around for a bit, slowly smoking a cigarette as I take note of the street. A dog is barking somewhere. Usual city noise drifts through the dark trees lining the backyards. No one comes to the house.

Maybe it wasn't her. The longer I sit there, the more convinced I am. Angel doesn't have a tattoo. Her skimpy outfits and my exorbitantly priced dance showed me enough of her body to know there was no tattoo. It wasn't her. The chick they filmed was just another junkie. Once I convince myself that this has to be the case, I turn on the car and crank up the music on my radio as I drive back to my apartment.

The next two days are nothing but frustration and boredom. If another one of these assholes dies before I have any answers for Charles, I am guessing that it is going to be my dick nailed to a fucking door. And Charles is the type of guy to do it while I am alive. I am too fond of my dick to want to endure that.

Using the information I got from Joe, I dig more into Holden's computer. He has a dark web browser and it is the one thing on the whole fucking laptop that has a code I can't break. I am good with coding, but I am not a fucking genius. I have been debating whether or not I want to take this to a ghost to hack into it. I found that he had an account on one of the regular adult websites. His videos were the usual amateur porn clips with blurry images and bad lighting. It also took me all of thirty seconds of scrolling to realize that I was really tired of seeing this guy"s dick.

Joe appeared in some of the videos. Mikel was there as well. The same empty mattress I saw at Corey's place is the location of most of the videos. I scan through the girl's faces but none of them are my Angel. However, I do find some messages in the comments suggesting Holden had another page. A darker page. But I can't fucking access it.

To give myself a break from trying to hack Holden's computer, I kept an eye on Joe as he worked the street. One time he saw me and when he realized I wasn't there to talk, he started ignoring my presence. He tried to change street corners a few times but it didn't work. His area wasn't very broad and following him required so little effort it was a bit disappointing.

Part of me really wonders if he thinks I am the one taking out his friends. I don't see Angel in the area. Either she is managing to slip by when I am not here or she actually listened. In which case, good girl. I haven"t had a chance to go see her. It is starting to wear on me.

Day three, and I am spending my morning sitting in the car watching as Joe walks down to his usual corner. The fact that they go to the same place every day is annoying. There is no excitement in hunting them down. Anyone with any real idea of who they are and what they do could find them in about ten minutes. Charles should start tightening the hatches when it came to the Disciples and Militants under his watch. Such predictable moves were going to cause someone to get caught.

I had the privilege of hunting down the last dealer Charles had that ended up getting caught. Fucker took whatever drugs he had access to and ran. I caught him in Ohio. Fucker pissed himself when he saw me at his motel door.

I can only tolerate an hour of this mundane torture before turning the key in the ignition and driving away.