Money Shot

5.

My hot date with Jesse Black is still pretty spotty in my memory. I only remember bits and pieces. To be honest, after the hell I’d already been through, Jesse’s little games barely even registered. I remember him shaking me and calling me a fucking dead fish. What the hell was he expecting? Double Dare 2?

While Jesse sweated and cursed and did his thing, I floated off somewhere near the ceiling. Every now and then I glanced down to see if Jesse was finished yet, but mostly I thought of Sam and Zandora and how I was going to make these fuckers pay for what they had done.

I thought Jesse was only taking a break, but then he was stuffing a rag into my mouth and duct-taping it in place. I fought to draw air through my swollen nose, sudden panic slicing through my woozy numbness. He untied me from the bed and there was a pathetic moment where I tried to make my arms and legs move, to fight him. He just smiled at the attempt, tied my hands and feet together, and lifted me in his arms. My muscles pulled and twisted the wrong way, straining against the rope, and all my bruises and cuts pulsed hot and blinding. I guess I blacked out for a minute because the next thing I knew, Jesse was dumping me gracelessly into the Civic’s trunk and slamming the lid. A few minutes later, the little engine spluttered to life.

The drive seemed endless, a jerky stop-and-go nightmare of huffing fumes and banging my head every time loverboy stomped on the brakes, which seemed way more often than necessary. My entire body felt deeply bruised and full of needles and knives. My hold on consciousness was tenuous at best. I tried to hang on to random fragments of sound, a helicopter, music, a dog barking, anything that might hint at where I was being taken, but the whine of the engine swallowed everything. Or maybe it was just the nauseous buzzing in my head.

Eventually we pulled to a stop and the engine died. I heard the car door open and shut and then boots on concrete, coming around to the trunk.

I squinted up at the rectangular widescreen view as the trunk opened. Jesse was standing there, backlit by a jaundiced sodium halo. He had on a t-shirt now, black with the lurid logo of a band I’d never heard of. His face was shadowed, his posture tense and nervous. He had a gun.

There are few things more terrifying than a nervous man with a gun. He pointed it at me, then at the ground, then back at me again, wiping his lips with the knuckles of his other hand. Finally he sucked in a long breath and spoke.

“End of the line, bitch,” he said.

It was clear that he had been rehearsing that snappy little piece of tough-guy dialog on the drive to wherever the hell we were. If I were directing the scene, I would have asked for another take.

He pointed the gun at me again, holding it foolishly sideways like some rap video badass. My heart felt like a trapped bird inside my chest. My bloody eyelids were swollen down to sticky slits but I wasn’t going to make it easier for him by looking away or closing my eyes. If he was going to have his big gangsta moment and pop a cap in my bitch ass, it would be face to face, looking me in the eye.

In the end, it was Jesse who looked away. He turned his face to the side and squeezed his eyes shut, gun arm sticking straight out like a child about to get an injection. Then he squeezed the trigger.

The noise alone nearly gave me a heart attack. I’d always worn ear protection at the range, and although everyone knows guns are loud, you have no idea how loud they really are until someone less than six feet away is shooting at you in the trunk of a car. Ears ringing, I felt the third or fourth shot connect somewhere along the right side of my chest and under my right arm. The pain and shock of it was bright and brutal and scary as fuck. Microscopic newsboys ran through my system shouting Extra! Extra! We’ve been shot!

They always tell you not to panic, not to move if you’ve been shot. That you should lie still and wait for help. That getting all nuts just kills you faster. I knew that was the best thing to do, even thought it as a clear, rational sentence in my head:

Better lie still and not panic.

Of course, that only works if the person who shot you has stopped shooting.

Jesse was still randomly filling the trunk with lead, firing blindly in my general direction. I felt another bullet clip my thigh like a lash from a single-tail whip. My body duly noted my brain’s helpful suggestion about staying calm and then proceeded to flip completely out. I must have bumped my head flinching and flailing around or maybe I just passed out from pain or shock because the next thing I remembered was coming to in the dark trunk and fighting to piece it all back together and remember where the hell I was. That’s where you came in.