Money Shot

27.

We walked Jesse down the fire stairs and into the parking lot. I kept my arm around his waist as if he were my boyfriend, gun pressed into the small of his back under his t-shirt. Malloy was close behind.

There was nobody around as Malloy unlocked the new rental car and popped the trunk. Using a white plastic zip strip from Home Depot, Malloy swiftly bound Jesse’s hands behind his back.

“Get in,” I said, jabbing the muzzle of my gun into Jesse’s kidney.

“You gotta be kidding,” Jesse said.

“She’s not.” Malloy said.

“Come on now, Jesse,” I said. “This is plush next to that damn Civic.”

Malloy kicked Jesse in the back of one knee and his legs buckled. He fell face first into the trunk.

“Mother...” Jesse cried, but Malloy tossed Jesse’s legs in after him and closed the trunk on fucker.

“Let’s go,” Malloy said.

Another long, silent drive, this one punctuated by rhythmic thumping and muffled curses from the trunk. I put on the radio and tuned to a classic rock station to drown Jesse out. Our destination was a place Malloy knew. A place out in the desert between Needles and nowhere. I didn’t want to know why he knew about that place, but I was glad he did. It was perfect.

When we got there, we spent a couple of back-breaking hours digging deep into the stony, unwilling ground. The desert night was beautiful, cool blue and full of stars, a thousand stars serenely indifferent to what we were about to do.

Malloy muscled Jesse out of the trunk while I fetched a metal folding chair and a roll of duct tape from the back seat. When Jesse saw where he was and the freshly dug hole, he bolted, tripping and staggering and kicking up dust. Malloy chased him down easily and escorted him back, gun jammed up under his right ear. Malloy sat him down and I quickly duct taped him to the folding chair I had set up next to the hole.

“You’re not gonna get away with this,” Jesse spluttered, his face crimson and eyes wide.

“Start at the beginning,” I said, showing him my gun again in case he’d forgotten about it.

“What?” he asked.

I slammed the butt of the gun into his left cheekbone. He yelped like a girl and almost went over backwards but Malloy caught the back of the chair with one hand. A thin trickle of blood ran down the side of Jesse’s nose.

“Start with the briefcase full of money,” I suggested.

“Okay, okay,” Jesse said, looking down at the hole and then back up at me. “Fuck.” He swallowed and licked his lips. “The money belongs to my uncle. It was payment for a new shipment of girls. Vukasin had the case and was supposed to bring it to the pick-up, only that little cunt got under his skin and managed to steal it while his pants were down.”

“Vukasin?” I asked, remembering the unusual name from Lia’s note.

“Vukasin, the Croatian guy who went to your office looking for Lia,” Jesse said. “The short one. The one who isn’t dead.”

I nodded. So the weasel was Lia’s “boyfriend.”

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me about this pick-up.”

“Every six months or so, my uncle meets these guys at a warehouse near LAX. They give him six new girls and take six used up ones.”

“Used up ones?” I said, exchanging a glance with Malloy who hung back, smoking. “What do you mean used up?”

“I mean the ones who don’t look so good anymore,” Jesse said. “The ones with HIV or Hep C, the ones that can’t earn their keep anymore.”

“Jesus,” I said. “What happens to them after they get traded in?”

Jesse shrugged and smirked.

“They get to, like, go frolic and play in beautiful green fields,” Jesse said. “Along with all the other little kitties and doggies and whores who can’t work anymore.”

I punched him in the face. I should have used the gun butt again because it hurt like hell, but I was pissed and didn’t think it through. I just hit him.

“Fuck!” Jesse spat. “Fucking bitch. You want to know what they do? They sell them for cheap down in Mexico. Maybe they make tacos out of them. Or glue. How the fuck should I know what happens to a bunch of useless old skags?”

“Useless old skags?” I said, shaking out my hand and opening and closing my fingers. “What are they, nineteen? Younger than you, Jesse.”

Jesse shrugged, sullen.

“Whatever,” he said.

“How did you get involved in this?” I said.

“My uncle,” Jesse said. “He’s the boss. He owns the business with the girls. He owns all kinds of stuff. Real estate. Restaurants. He got me into doing movies, too. I did some on-camera work for him once and then I started getting calls from other directors who liked what I had and wanted to hire me. Next thing you know...” He shrugged, still full of himself, even with a gun to his head.

“And when did you start turning tricks to supplement your income?”

“Sex for money is sex for money,” he said. “We’re all whores on this train, Angel. You oughta know.”

I refused to let him get a rise out of me. My knuckles hurt enough already.

“This uncle of yours,” I said. “That’s the guy with the bland face, right? The guy from the phony shoot who was asking all the questions.”

“Yeah,” Jesse said.

“And he’s the boss, the one in charge of this whole sex slave racket? He’s the one who framed me for Sam’s murder and planted that kiddie porn on my computer, right?”

“Right,” Jesse said.

“Tell me his name,” I said.

Jesse squinted at me.

“I’m gonna find out eventually,” I told him. I gestured toward the hole. “Better to just get it over with.”

Jesse looked away like a petulant child. I bit my lower lip and kicked his chair over sideways. He tumbled face-first into the pit.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” he hollered, twisting his face to the side and spitting sand.

He was still taped to the chair, only now the chair was up on his back like some kind of weird turtle shell, its legs sticking straight out behind him. His ass was in the air, bound hands squirming and dark purple. His weight rested on his cheek and knees.

I picked up one of the shiny new shovels from the Home Depot and dumped a load of pebbles and sand on top of him.

“Alan!” Jesse said, sputtering and coughing. “His name is Alan Ridgeway! Alan Ridgeway!”

“He must be pretty pissed at you, huh?” I asked, squatting down beside the pit. “First you couldn’t get it up to shoot me right like he told you to, and then you send those idiot friends of yours to get me instead of handling it yourself.”

“Get me out of here,” Jesse said, thrashing from side to side. “Fuck, get me out of here! I can’t breathe!”

“Sucks, doesn’t it?” I asked, letting him have another shovelful.

“Come on, Angel,” he said. He tried to make his panicky voice softer. “I never meant to hurt you. It was my uncle. He made me do it. He planned the whole thing. He’s the one you want, not me.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “I’m gonna get him too.”

Jesse kept on saying the kind of desperate shit men say when you’ve got them cornered. I didn’t even bother to respond. I was thinking about what the hell I was going to do.

I had fantasized about this moment for so long. Dreaming of what I would do to Jesse once I got my hands on him. I had lulled myself to sleep at night with visions of choking him to death with my bare hands, burning him with cigarettes, making him feel violated and torn open like he made me feel. Now that I had my chance, I felt cold and strange.

I thought of how easy it would be to just keep on shoveling until I couldn’t hear him anymore. It was a bad death, the kind of death a piece of shit like him deserved, but I found myself thinking of the way he had squeezed his eyes shut before he shot me. How he hadn’t had the balls to look me in the eye. I didn’t want to be like him. I wanted what happened between us in the end to be just as intimate as what he had done to me in that empty house in Bel Air. I wanted to look in his eyes when I did it.

I glanced over at Malloy and saw that he had gone back over to the car, still smoking and looking up at the stars. I guess he knew I needed to be alone for this.

I took a step closer to the edge of the pit and looked down at the gun Malloy had given me. It was a slightly older sibling of the Smith and Wesson I had used to plug the rhino. I tucked it into my jeans and slid down into the pit with Jesse.

He was crying when I landed beside him. It was hard to right the chair with him taped to it, especially in such a cramped space and with him outweighing me by fifty pounds at least. But I had a kind of hot, crazy focus that made me strong. When I got him upright he immediately started blubbering and begging me not to kill him. His face was muddy from snot and tears mixed with dirt. He looked so young, like a little kid who’d just gotten beat up in the schoolyard. I had to squint to make myself see the cocky bastard who’d had so much fun choking me until I passed out over and over again. I slid the gun out of my waistband and took his gritty, scraped up chin in my hand, looking into his beautiful blue eyes. He looked terrified, desperate. I didn’t even know I was going to say anything until the words came out of my mouth. My line reading was way better than his had been.

“End of the line, bitch,” I said.

Then I shot him.