Page 23 of Freaks
My smug attitude curdled a little when I realized what she would be watching me do very soon. She probably wasn’t going to admire how easy I madethatlook. I opened the driver’s door for her and gestured her inside. Her perfectly arched eyebrow rose upward toward her hairline.
“You want me to drive?”
“The cops aren’t likely to pull over a couple in a shitty four-door. They’re evenlesslikely to pull over a couple in a shitty four-door if a woman’s driving. Statistically, anyway. This time of night, they’re gonna assume I’ve had too many beers and my girlfriend’s pulling designated driver duty…”
“Pretty sexist if you ask me. I could be a getaway driver.”
“Sorry, Angel. I don’t create the stereotypes. I just use them to my advantage.”
“Hmm.” She didn’t look impressed, but she got into the car. I got in on the passenger’s side and bit my tongue while Sera fidgeted with the mirrors and adjusted the seat.
“Youcandrive, right?”
She stopped what she was doing. “After all the shit that’s happened recently, you really want to die becauseIkilledyoufor being a jerk?”
I held my hands up in mock surrender. “Pretend I didn’t say anything.”
“That might be for the best.”
New Yorkers were used to driving in the rain. Traffic didn’t normally ease up just because the heavens opened, but tonight it seemed as if people were keeping off the streets. Definitely worked in our favor. I directed Sera which lane to take, which left or right, and at some point she figured out where we were going.
“Won’t he be expecting you?” she asked under her breath, as she swung the car through a right-hand turn.
I grunted, thumbing the small plastic object in my pocket. “Probably. But I can’t stay away. There has to be a price, Sera.”
She didn’t say anything, but a vein pulsed in her temple. If it were up to her, we wouldn’t be doing this. We’d be headed somewhere quiet and out of the way, and we’d stay there for the rest of our lives. She wasn’t a part of this world, though. She didn’t know how it worked.
People assumed the criminal underworld was an anarchic, lawless place, and maybe it looked that way from the outside. Truth was, the circles I moved in, the same circles Rabbit moved in, were bound by very strict laws, and they were policed far more stringently than the rules and regulations of regular society.
If you broke your word, you were blackballed. If you cheated, backstabbed, or stole, you were gonna end up in the hospital. No way of avoiding it. And, in my world, if you betrayed someone and tried to get them killed, you’d better hope you were successful, otherwise you were gonna end up in the fucking ground yourself. Therewasan honor amongst the thieves, gangsters and assassins of New York City, and Rabbit had sacrificed his honor.
About a mile out from Rabbit’s place, I asked Sera to pull into a parking lot and I got out of the car, dodging the persistent rain as I ran into Starbucks. Only took me a couple of minutes to pick up a couple of regular black coffees. I got back in the car, and Sera gave me alookout of the corner of her eye; she knew the second coffee I’d bought wasn’t for her.
Unlike the night of Rabbit’s party, there were no body guards standing sentry outside the church when we arrived. The pillar candles that had all been lit, perched on the broken headstones in the graveyard, were now all guttered out, their waxy hollows overflowing with rain water. No lights shone from within the building itself.
Sera followed close behind me, quiet and watchful as I strode up the broken flagstones toward the entryway. She looked relieved when I tried the handle and it was locked. She’d obviously forgotten how quickly I could pick a lock. The door was open in no time. She still carried the coffees I’d asked her to hold. The wet soles of our shoes squeaked against the stone floor; the only other sound that broke the deathly silence inside the church was the electric buzz and whir of a security camera, following us as we made our way down the aisle, and past the pews.
“How are we going to get past the security door,” Sera hissed. “There was a keypad, remember.”
Oh, I remembered all right. I might not have been able to hack a computer, but I was fucking smart. Smarter than Rabbit, any day of the week. I was the kind of guy who paid very close attention to the smallest of details. Often, those ended up being the most important details. The last time we’d come here, Rabbit had walked ahead of us and he’d plugged the code into the keypad, opening up the security door. And I’d been standing right behind the fucker.
Opening up the door to the rectory, I stabbed a series of numbers into the keypad, fighting the urge to roll my eyes.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sera groaned. “Sixty-nine, sixty-nine?”
“I can guarantee that piece of shit’s never had a girl sit on his face his entire life,” I added, as I hit the pound key and, soundlessly, the security door swung back. “Probably never fucking occurred to him to pleasure a woman while she had his cock in her mouth.” Rabbit was a good enough looking dude, but he thought paying for sex was some kind of badge of honor, preferred to pay for it over getting laid the good old-fashioned way. And because it was a business transaction, he boasted constantly about the lack of effort he put in between the sheets. The women were there to make him feel good, so why the hell should he go to any great lengths to make it a pleasant experience for them? I’d never understand his warped, fucked up logic. Not that I particularly wanted to. I’d never fucking paid for sex. And the most erotic part of fucking a woman, as far as I was concerned, was watching her fall apart as she came.
Down we went into hell. The lights might not have been on upstairs in the main body of the church, but they were certainly lit up down here. The same obnoxious sign glared bright red in the narrow stairway as we descended into the church crypts. Music, much quieter than it had been at the party but still thumping and driving, bounced around the low-ceilinged space. A group of guys dressed in black suits stopped talking when they saw Sera and I appear at the foot of the stairs.
A guy with a shitty man-bun squared his shoulders. “Who the fuck are you?”
“The guy you shouldn’t have.” I walked past him, making sure to keep Sera on the other side of my body. The guy grimaced, his face contorting in anger. He reached out and grabbed the top of my arm.
“The guy I shouldn’t have what?” he snapped.
“The guy you shouldn’t have laid your fucking hands on.” A second later, my left fist was buzzing with pain and the asshole was on the floor, lying on his back, nursing his broken nose with both hands.
Sera cleared her throat disapprovingly.
