Page 32 of Hurt for Me

“Do you know who the father is?” Viv asked.

“Clint.”

Viv covered her mouth with her hand.

Rae told her about how Clint said he couldn’t get another young girl so fast, and he and Bobby were making plans to leave California, although he didn’t indicate where they’d go. At first, he didn’t say what he was going to do with Rae or Maria, the other woman still in the house. She was older than Rae by a couple of years, but she looked a lot older. Then Clint changed his plan. He made Maria clean up, gave her a nice outfit to wear, and made her do her hair and makeup. Then he sent her out to the Santa Monica Pier with one goal: find a girl, lure her with ice cream or whatever worked, and bring her back to the house. If she failed, he would kill Rae. Rae had never prayed so hard for someone to fail at something, but Maria came back with a child younger than Beth. The little girl had springy caramel curls, and she couldn’t have been older than five. After some prompting, Rae learned her name was Katelyn.

The day after she brought Katelyn to the house, Maria died from what Rae hoped was an accidental overdose. As much as Rae wanted to join her, she couldn’t. She needed to help the girl escape and somehowget her back to her family. She’d failed to protect Beth, but she wouldn’t fail again. She also thought about the child possibly growing in her, and it gave her strength. So, she waited until Clint left the house. Bobby never left unless Clint was there to keep watch. Rae couldn’t find Clint’s stash of hard drugs, but she did find nine sleeping pills hidden between the mattresses in Maria’s old room. She tried not to think about why Maria had been hoarding pills as she crushed them up into a fine dust and carefully funneled them into a bottle of beer she offered to Bobby. Fifteen minutes later, he was passed out on the couch.

She searched again through Clint’s room, more thoroughly this time since Bobby was knocked out. There was an odd, heavy smell in the room, sickeningly sweet, and she wondered if it was from how dirty the space was, the scent of body odor hanging in the air as well. She grabbed Clint’s gym bag, quickly emptying it out. She found a roll of cash hidden in his sock drawer. She didn’t have time to count it, so she shoved it into the duffel bag. She didn’t know when Clint would be back, so she hurried to her room to collect what clothes she could and stuffed them into the gym bag.

Katelyn was scared and reluctant to move from Beth’s old room, the one with a little TV and a few stuffed animals, but Rae told her she knew where her mommy and daddy were, and they had to leave now to see them. Her words worked because Katelyn jumped off the bed, but not before grabbing one of the stuffed animals, a purple teddy bear.

That’s when Rae heard the front door open, and her stomach bottomed out. She told Katelyn to stay in the room with the duffel bag. Quietly, she inched down the hallway until she saw Clint attempting to wake up Bobby.

“Get up,” Clint said, smacking Bobby’s head. “You get into my shit again, you motherfucker? Fuck.”

He turned around to see Rae watching him.

“What the fuck you looking at, Echo?”

The longer she stood there, fully dressed with tennis shoes on, the quicker he appeared to realize what was happening, that she was going to escape.

She stood for what seemed like a lifetime, not sure what to do with the fear and anger rolling inside her, but her body screamedCHARGE, so she did. Clint probably had about eighty pounds on her, but she slammed into his body with the force of a linebacker. She shoved him enough to make him fall backward onto Bobby’s slumped form on the couch. Frantic, she searched around the living room for something she could use as a weapon. There was nothing heavy, so she grabbed Bobby’s empty beer bottle from the side table and smashed it over Clint’s head. It dazed him for a second but didn’t knock him out, so she ran to the kitchen.

“You fucking bitch! I’m going to kill you!”

Her heart was pounding in her ears as she quickly found a paring knife in the sink. Clint was coming up behind her as she turned around and jabbed at him, missing. He tried to grab her hand holding the knife, but she dodged him and landed a blow to his thigh. She didn’t have enough strength to pull the knife out to strike him again, so she backed up fast as Clint looked down at his injured leg. He yanked the knife out with a howl and went after her, pulling out the handgun he had tucked in the back of his jeans.

She ran toward the front door, away from where Katelyn was waiting for her in the back bedroom, but she knew she wouldn’t make it without getting shot, so she hit the floor, her bare knees burning as she crawled on the rough carpet to Bobby’s passed out body. She ran her hands along his jeans until she found the semiautomatic she knew he had on him. She had never shot a gun, but she held it in her hands like she had and aimed it at Clint. He stopped dead.

“Put the fucking gun down, Echo,” he said, his voice strangely calm.

She had to use her whole palm to pull back the slide, but she heard the satisfying click and knew the gun was ready to shoot. “I’m leaving, and I’m taking Katelyn with me.”

“The fuck you are. Put the gun down, and we’ll forget any of this happened.”

She shook her head, the gun unsteady in her hands.

“I’m serious. We can forget about all of this. I love you, Echo, you know that.”

Laughter burst from her; she couldn’t help it. Clint loving anyone but himself was the biggest joke.

“You had nothing before you met me. An addict father, a mother who didn’t give a shit about you. But I didn’t leave you like they did. I took you in and fed you, kept a roof over your head. I took care of you.”

She steadied her hand. “Just let us leave. I won’t say anything to the police if you just let us leave.”

“You know I can’t do that.” Clint’s face turned hard as granite, and he smiled. “You know, you never were bright. Bet you didn’t know how often your dad came running to me for his shit. It’s too bad he got a dirty batch. And now you get to join him.”

He raised his gun, aiming for her head, and she didn’t think. She pulled the trigger. She heard a bullet whiz by her head, missing Bobby’s body and blasting the plastered wall behind her. Then she saw bright red spreading across Clint’s upper right shoulder. He dropped his gun, pressing his left hand to the bullet hole, his face bone white as he slid down the opposite wall to the floor.

She stood up and went over to him, kicked his gun out of his reach.

He looked up at her, sweat dripping from his face. “You stupid bitch, you don’t know what you just did. They’re going to find you and kill you. That girl’s worth a hundred grand to them.”

She took the butt of the gun and slammed it against the side of his head, and he was out. He was going to die anyway, she was sure, and she hoped it was slow, especially after she was able to process what he hadtold her. Her father got drugs from Clint, drugs laced with something bad, something that instantly killed him.

She looked around the living room. Her fingerprints and Katelyn’s were all over the house. The police would come here and find a dead body and Bobby, who would then be awake and tell them it was Rae, that she was the one who had done everything. There was no Maria still alive to corroborate what had really happened in the house. She didn’t even know where they’d put her body after she’d overdosed. She didn’t know where any of the women had gone when they’d left the house, but her gut told her they were all dead. Used and drugged and killed. Her rage boiled up again.

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