“Fine. I’m sitting. What happened?”
“Roxanna has an ex who is far from a decent person. That isn’t a surprise. You don’t wind up at our shelter unless you’re escaping dire circumstances and unwholesome people. Roxanna has been with us for a while, and things had been calm until that point, even though what she left was not calm at all. But apparently, her ex, Mario, has taken to drinking, and he’s decided, in his infinite, drunken wisdom, to take ‘his property bake’ to use his exact phrasing. And that the best way to do so would be to round up some of his friends, seek out our shelter, break into it, and try to abduct Roxanna from her room. He dragged her by her hair out of her room, kicking and screaming, and we didn’t manage to separate the two of them until they’d already gotten to the communal lobby. The television was damaged in the scuffle.”
“The fucking small-cocked piece of shit,” Adriana says.
“He is,” Susan says. “The police only gave Mario a warning when they arrived. The two officers seemed more than a little sympathetic to a man trying to ‘win his woman back’ and it took everything I had not to draw on them and shoot them somewhere that might teach them a little empathy. But that’s not the worst of it. We’ve seen Mario and his friends lurking around the shelter since then. Driving by, hanging out on the sidewalks in front, doing just enough to make their presence known. I worry. I’ve seen this situation play out too many times,and men like him rarely come to their senses once they’ve made up their minds.”
I realize I’m not sitting anymore. I haven’t been for a while, I’d guess. My fists are clenched, too. There’s a vein pulsing — throbbing — in my neck. “Do you want me to take care of him?”
“I couldn’t — “
“No, I’ll do it. I want to do it,” Adriana says, cutting Susan off. Then, to me, she says, “You’re injured, Ricky, you’ve been through a lot of shit, and you stand out. Mario would spot you from a mile away and know you’re up to something. But men like him? They won’t spare a second look at me. Or if they do, they’ll be too busy staring at my tits to realize I’m about to hand their ass to them. I’ve dealt with worse men than Mario when I was in high school. And since I took on the badge, fuck, the men I dealt with would beat that small-cocked malfeasant shithead into the dirt without breaking a sweat.”
Susan blinks, then looks from Adriana to me. “Where did you find her, Ricky?”
“She tried to kill me at the casino the other night,” I say.
“I believe it,” Susan says. “I like her, Ricky. But, Adriana, are you sure you want to do this? This is a lot to ask.”
“Legally, you’re not asking. I’m just telling you I’m insisting on having a personal conversation with Mario and I’d like to know what he looks like, where he hangs out, what car he drives, and if you have any other relevant information for him — an address, place of employment, a favorite bar he likes to drink at — tell me, so I can have a very peaceful, very non-violent, very serious conversation with him that’ll leave him in tears because he’ll regret every shitty thing he’s done. It also may fill him with such regret that you, and everyone else he knows, never hears from him again.”
“We have a file I can send you. We log every incident at ‘Never Again’ in case things ever take a legal turn. Let me seeyour phone.” Adriana passes Susan her phone, and a few swipes later, she hands it back. “That should be everything.”
Adriana frowns as she scrolls on her phone. “It’s a start. And that’s enough. I’ll figure out the rest.”
Susan hands her the keys. “The apartment is yours for the next couple of days. I wish I could give it to you longer, but we’re going to have need of it soon. There’s a special case we’re working on that could get difficult. Adriana, will you let me know when Mario’s been taken care of?”
“With pleasure.” She gives me a look, then with a crook of her head, beckons for me to follow as she starts for the door. “You coming? Or are you just going to hang out here and, fuck, I don’t know, watch TV while I take care of business?”
“You’re not doing this alone,” I say.
“No, I’m not. And that’s whether or not you come with me.” I follow her into the hallway, and she already has her phone to her ear.
I crook an eyebrow at her, but she doesn’t respond.
A muffled voice answers her call.
“Yeah, it’s me,” she says. “I know. It’s been a while, and I left a fucking mess. But I need to call in one of those favors you owe me. I’ve got a real shithead to take care of — some creep who’s been terrorizing his ex and assaulted her at a domestic violence shelter — and I need you to keep this one between us, OK? And cover your tracks, because this one is going to get messy.”
Chapter Nineteen
Reaper
What sits down the block in front of us has no right to call itself a house. It wears more condemned notices than the shingles that sit on the roof that sags with the weight of shame, and the front door looks like a repurposed shower curtain. As if that place even needs a barrier to entry — just looking at it would be enough to keep even the bravest cockroach away. The yard is a collection of dust and withered grass so yellowed that only a pack of radioactive dogs pissing on it for a year could cause it. Sitting on the patchy, piss-rotted grass and the rust-colored dirt are the hulking, cinderblock-supported remnants of two cars that, if someone were a skilled mechanic with a Frankenstein fetish, they could piece the two, rusted wrecks together to make one giant, rusted, unsalvageable piece of shit.
There are two men lounging out front, one on a wicker chair that’s been painted a shabby gold color, like a throne for the world’s biggest asshole, and the other on a camping chair that looks like it desperately wants to return to the wilderness to die. One has a shotgun resting in the space between his fat gut and his fat thighs. There’s a forty in his hand. His face is ruddy, and his hair reminds me of scarecrow stuffing. The other is skinny, unarmed, also drinking, and just looks like a dick.
“I’m going in there,” Adriana says as she exits the car. She doesn’t wait for me; she just starts walking.
I get out and follow.
“Just going to walk in, huh?”
“Yup.”
“And if they shoot you?”
“They won’t.”
