20. Jezebel

CHAPTER 20

JEZEBEL

T his wasn’t my first interrogation, and it wouldn’t be my last. But it might be my most satisfying.

While T-Rex was still groggy, Tulsa and I had shackled him to a St. Andrew’s cross left behind by the previous occupants of the Cathouse, and just for fun, I’d stripped him down to his underwear. I’d considered removing the boxers too, but I figured I might be there for a while, and I didn’t need to see his spaghetti noodle and meatballs bobbing around in my line of sight.

He gave a low groan, and I couldn’t blame him for that. His nose was a mess. I’d kicked him hard enough to crack my cast—which meant another visit to Doc Martinsson tomorrow morning—and the bridge was decidedly bent. It wouldn’t stop bleeding, so we’d shoved a couple of light-flow tampons into his nostrils to prevent him from making a mess on the floor.

“Wakey, wakey. Rise and shine.”

Now I sat on a wooden chair and stretched out my legs as his eyes flickered open.

“How are you feeling? ”

He sucked in air through his mouth and mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like, “Fuckin’ bish.”

Good. He wasn’t too badly concussed.

“Here’s how this is going to work. I’m going to ask you some questions about the circumstances that led you to put your hands on me in a bathroom stall at the Sunrise Diner earlier today, and you’re going to answer them.”

“Fuck you,” he spat. Literally spat. The glob landed woefully short.

“If you don’t feel like cooperating, I’ll have no further use for you. In that case, I’ll shoot you up with enough fentanyl to kill a dinosaur and dump you in a shallow grave, then hope the next asshole to come after me is more talkative.” I crossed my legs at the ankles. “What’s it to be?”

The guy struggled, testing the shackles, but they held. To give Dick Steele his credit, he’d always invested in quality equipment.

“If it would help, I could leave you here for a day or two to think about it?”

Nothing.

“Did you know that, on average, a human can survive three days without water? I’m not sure how that changes if you’re in Vegas and you turn off the AC, but it would be fun to find out, don’t you think?”

He deflated. Sagged forward, head slumped. For a moment, I thought he’d fainted, but it turned out he’d merely realised the seriousness of his predicament.

“Fuck them too. I never signed up for this.”

“Who’s ‘them’?”

“I don’t know, man. I just got hired to do a job.”

“Who hired you?”

“Are you deaf? I said, I don’t know.”

“Then how did they hire you?”

“Through Amber Road. It’s?— ”

An online marketplace, the dark web’s equivalent of eBay. Except instead of selling secondhand furniture and cheap Chinese widgets, it specialised in the less legal end of the market. Guns, drugs, people. The guy who ran it was called Ivan the Magnificent—Mag for short—and according to Echo, he was as trustworthy as a man got in that line of business. Payments were made in Bitcoin or Ethereum and held in escrow until both parties confirmed the transaction was complete, so presumably, T-Rex hadn’t even been compensated for his broken nose.

Hmm. Bitcoin again.

“I know what Amber Road is. I thought it just sold stuff?”

Asking simple questions built rapport. Stupid people always tried to prove they were smarter than you.

“There’s a ‘wanted’ category.”

“So you browsed for a ‘threaten a woman in Vegas’ gig and hit ‘accept’?”

“It wasn’t as if I had to kill anyone. Like, I hardly touched you.”

“How about the woman you tried to run down in the parking garage at the Galaxy? She wound up in the hospital.”

“What woman?” T-Rex acted shocked, but I was ninety-five percent sure he was faking. “I never went to no parking garage.”

“The person who hired you has done this at least twice before. You’re telling me the guy in the parking garage just happened to be driving a car the same make, model, and colour as yours?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“So? Not my problem.”

“Oh, you think? From where I’m sitting, it looks to be very much your problem, because you’re the one we caught. Alive, I mean.”

He turned a shade paler. “Look, lady, all I got hired to do was give you a message and scare you a bit.”

“And so far, you’ve failed on both counts. What was the message?”

A sigh escaped his lips, or maybe it was a hiss of pain? “You’re supposed to tell your boyfriend to pay the money he owes.”

“What else?”

“That’s it, I swear.”

I shook my head sadly. “Then you were set up, because he doesn’t owe money to anyone.”

And he wasn’t my boyfriend either, but I wasn’t about to get into that with this prick.

“Like I said, I was just hired to do a job.”

“It never occurred to you at any point that it might be a bad idea?”

The only person winning in this was Mag, because he took his twenty percent commission whether the sale was completed or not. T-Rex shrugged, but not very successfully because his arms were stretched pretty tight.

“I need the username and password for your Amber Road account.”

“No way, man.”

“Woman,” I corrected. “And I hope you don’t need the bathroom any time soon.”

I rose and headed for the door. It hadn’t quite closed behind me when he called out.

“Anarchy37. That’s my username. Just let me take a piss, okay?”

Tempting though it was to watch urine trickle down his leg, he’d been reasonably compliant, and I wanted to foster that spirit of cooperation.

“Password? ”

“M-a-r-v-e-l-1-2-3 with a capital M.”

“That’s a terrible password.”

“Screw you, lady.”

“Do you want to use the bathroom or not?”

“Sorry, I’m sorry, okay?”

“If these details check out, I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. You can hold it until then.”

Good thing Echo barely slept. While I navigated my way through the real world, she was more comfortable existing digitally. At Blackstone House, she’d been happiest tucked away in her little room in the basement, surrounded by computers, and even now, she didn’t go outside much. Strange that she liked to travel the world, only to experience most of it through the windows of a hotel room or rented villa. Chase, her Man Friday, made sure she ate, and he also ran whatever errands were required.

No, he wasn’t her boyfriend, just a close friend and employee, chosen because he was very, very gay. It was he who answered the phone when I called.

“Is Alexa there?”

When we formed the Choir, we’d agreed to drop our real names in favour of nicknames in order to protect our privacy. Not among ourselves—we had no secrets—but because we often interacted with outsiders. It was easier to avoid slipping up if we stuck with the same names all the time.

But I’d known Alexa for over a decade, and when it was just the two of us or Chase, we often reverted to our old ways.

“Her shoulders were aching, so I convinced her to get a massage.”

“How’s that going?”

“She’s hating every single second.”

“Go put her out of her misery. I have an urgent job for her. ”

“Life or death?”

“If I don’t get an answer in fifteen minutes, a jackass is going to piss all over the holding cell, and nobody wants to clean that up.”

A pause. Then, “My darling, you’ll have to finish that later. Just wipe off the oil as best you can.”

The next voice was Alexa’s. “What do you need?”