Текст книги "Tank"
Автор книги: Carmen Jenner
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 16 страниц)
I wake to darkness. My head pounds, and from head to toe, I ache all over. There’s a body lying next to me. I take a deep shuddering breath and shift as quietly as I can. And then I feel them—the course fibres around my neck. It’s not suffocating, but tight enough to remind me that I need to stay put. I’m tied to the bed the way you’d tie up a dog to a post. And the message is clear: I own you.
A strangled cry escapes my throat and the mattress dips beside me. He rolls over and then there’s a little click, and the room is flooded with light. White hot and searing, it pierces my eyes, but the scream that tears from my throat belongs to him. He owns that scream, just like all the others he coveted throughout the years.
He sits on the bed, the lamplight bathing his black curls in a golden halo like some twisted dark angel. “Shh, you’re home now, Daddy’s girl.”
Home. Back in the house of horrors I grew up in, down in the basement that became my bedroom the day I turned twelve and Lochie, the boy across the road, kissed me in the middle of the street, in front of all of his friends. In front of my father. That kiss, that small, fleeting thing had been a prison sentence.
Though the lambs are faded, the same flannelette pink sheets adorn the bed I’d called mine. The same posters are on my walls. Not the ones of boys in bands that I’d wanted, because he didn’t let me have those. Instead, I had My Little Pony pictures and stuffed animals strewn around the room, right up until the time I was seventeen. It’s as though he hasn’t touched this room since, but has instead made a shrine out of it. Just waiting for the day I would return and occupy it again.
The horror of it becomes too much and I scream again, choking out a gruesome wounded animal sound as he slaps his hand over my mouth and shoves me up against the brick wall. My head smacks off the cinder block and my mind swims, the room sways, and the last thing I see is the wicked red scar trailing his face. The scar I gave him when I left him bleeding out in this very room.
He’d been a strung-out junkie then too, and he’d been careless. It’s funny then that it took me getting clean to become just as careless.
This time when I wake I’m strapped to the chair. Pain sears through me and my father kneels at my feet, between my legs. I’m naked and he’s holding a scalpel to my tattoo. Blood trickles down from the wound he’s creating. I scream around the gag in my mouth, and tears stream down my cheeks.
“You know, if you hadn’t covered this up I wouldn’t have to do this all over again. You’re mine, Ivy. You belong to me.”
I whimper and shake my head, attempting to squeeze my legs together. My thighs slip on the slick chair beneath me and I jolt forward. The scalpel sinks deeper and all the breath is squeezed from my lungs.
“Damn it. Look what you made me do,” he says, and picks up a wet washcloth that’s already soaked with blood. He pries my legs apart and cleans the blood from off of my thighs, the chair, and my lower abdomen. It hurts like a bitch, and I let out another gasp of pain. “Now, open your legs for Daddy and let me finish this. Afterward, if you’re a good girl, I may let you have ice cream.”
I close my eyes and roar my frustration behind my gag, but my father just stares up at me as if I’m three years old and throwing a temper tantrum over not being allowed a new toy. I never threw tantrums. I was always too afraid of the punishment.
He shoves my legs wider and bows his head, blowing on my burning flesh. I flinch and attempt to move my hips further away, but he reaches up and slaps my breasts. The sting is tempered slightly by the bloody handprint left in its place.
“I do love what you’ve done to your body though, Ivy. It really is a fucking masterpiece now that you’re a grown woman. I love it all, but this …” He trails off, tracing his fingers over the tattoo on my lower abdomen. It’s a skull, cracked open at the crown, and all around it are roses shot through with arrows. It spans from one hipbone to the other and then down to my pelvic mound, covering the scars that he made years ago—or it did. He edges his index finger across the ruined image, playing with the freshly tortured flesh. I sob. He’s not finished. Not by a long shot, but he sets down the scalpel and admires his handy work.
“Shh, Daddy’s here,” he says, and he buries his face in my groin.
When it’s complete, he wets the washcloth in a bowl sitting nearby. Blood taints the water, creating swirling patterns, like the licking flames from a bonfire warring with the first few drops of rain before a downpour.
My skin is on fire. My body is on fire, and I’m spent from both pain and fear.
He unties my hands and I shoot up from the chair, adrenaline bursting through my bloodstream. I lash out at him, but I make it three steps on shaking legs before my head swims and I hit the floor, hard. He stoops over and lifts me, as though I weigh nothing, and then he carries me to the bed and lays me down. My father ties the rope around my neck as I struggle, yanking it so tight that he cuts off my air supply, and my efforts turn from fighting him to fighting for breath, clawing at the rope with slick bloodied hands that do nothing.
“When you can behave, I’ll remove the rope,” he snaps, and when I still he loosens it a fraction. Not enough to get out of, but enough so that I can breathe again, and then the thing that occurs to me—as he ties it off in several knots and then leaves the room without another word—is that I could have ended all of this. Right then and there. I could have fought harder, and he might have choked the life right out of me. I would have been free.
But I didn’t. My instincts kicked in. I fought to survive.
And I hate myself for it.
I think of Tank, and I know that he’d be proud of me. But for what? For staying, surviving? Chained up down here like a dog?
I wonder what Tank will do when he finds the gory signs of our struggle. When he finds that Butch was another casualty of my father’s determination to get me back. I wonder if he will come looking for me, or if he’ll simply decide that he’s better off. That last thought twists my stomach. Will he look for me? Will he avenge me? I don’t know. But I know without a doubt that I won’t be walking out that door again.
When I was little, my father worked as a courier, though from the muffled snippets of conversation I’d overheard through the floorboards above my head, I’d suspected for a long time that he’d gone from delivering packages to a much more expensive and precious form of cargo.
The first time I’d escaped I was fourteen. He’d been called away on a job and left me alone for two days. It had taken me a good twelve hours to bust the lock and flee this room. I’d stuffed my face with as much food as I could find in the house and then I’d climbed out the window of my old bedroom upstairs, because the rooms downstairs had security screens and the front and back doors were dead bolted and locked with a key I didn’t have. Lochie had found me and hid me in his tree house.
I should have run. I should have stolen someone’s purse and taken a bus to anywhere. But I was scared and alone, and Lochie had seemed to think that no one would find me there.
Lochie was wrong.
He found me.
And he’d dragged me home and locked me in the basement again, this time ripping down the boards and the soundproofing foam covering the roller door of what used to be our garage and walling it up from floor to roof with grey cinderblocks. He’d replaced the door I’d broken with a new one, and added more locks, sealing me in my prison. Ensuring I couldn’t escape again.
Lochie had been found in his tree house days later, surrounded by the contents of his stomach, an empty box of paracetamol lying beside him. He’d died from a drug overdose. My father had told me this. He’d found delight in my tears as he told me how he’d waited until Lochie’s parents weren’t home, and he’d climbed into that tree house, finding the boy with a set of binoculars pressed tight to his face as he looked across the street at my empty room. My father had laughed when he’d told me how he’d held a knife to Lochie’s throat, handed my friend—the only friend I’d ever had—the pills and forced him to eat them all. He’d watched as Lochie had foamed at the mouth, and his body had convulsed, and eventually his brain had switched off. That was the price of getting too close to me.
The last time I’d escaped I was just two months’ shy of my eighteenth birthday. This time, I had stolen someone’s wallet. And I had hopped on a bus to Sydney. I’d turned tricks for money, I’d lived on the streets, and then I’d found Gwen. She’d made living under a bridge bearable. Gwen and heroin were good friends, and she’d been kind enough to reintroduce me.
A couple of months after that, I’d met Tank. Even then, he’d been a gentleman. Sure, he’d had me suck him off, and he’d fucked me over the back of his bike a handful of times, but he was the first guy to bring me food and pay me well for my services. You’d think he was handing me the keys to a fucking Lamborghini what with the way that Gwen had raved about him, and I’d given her shit about her crush on him, but inside I’d been dreaming of the fairy tale right alongside her. It wasn’t so much Tank that I’d fantasised about—it was what he represented, what the cut he wore represented. Protection. If I could get him to see a future with me, more than just having me suck him off once a week, I’d be safe from my father. I’d be protected not just by Tank, but by his club too.
Only he’d stopped coming, and my future had looked more and more bleak every day. So I’d taken matters into my own hands. I’d worked my arse off—literally—turning tricks every day for months, and then I’d gone and bought some new boobs, had my hair done, and got myself a nice new tattoo, and I’d strutted into that MC as if I belonged there.
I’d made a deal with the Prez. I’d make myself available to him and his men if he let me stay there and gave me his protection. Jett had agreed, though he’d wanted proof he wasn’t getting the raw end of the deal. He’d fucked me all night and well into the early hours of the morning. And over time, he’d begun to trust me. He was good to me. I liked Jett. I liked the rest of the club brothers, too. I remember thinking that being a club whore was something that I’d have to endure to stay safe, but I hadn’t counted on liking it. I hadn’t counted on enjoying being used by these men, and I certainly hadn’t counted on falling in love with any of them.
But I had, and now … what did it matter? I knew I was never getting out of here. Because my father always finds me, he always brings me home. And this time he isn’t ever going to let me go.
The last thing I expected when I walked into the clubhouse this morning was to be called out on a fuckin’ job that would have me sittin’ in a blacked-out van parked on the side of the road as I watched another fuckin’ miserable warehouse.
I have déjà vu all over again, but this time instead of listening to Kick blabbering on about Ivy, I have some dumbarse shithead flickin’ a fuckin’ Zippo lighter over and over again. I snatch the lighter from Crazy and toss it out the fuckin’ window. He glares at me. “Dude, what the fuck? I need that fuckin’ lighter.”
“Bullshit. You got so many of those fuckin’ things you change them more than your goddamned clothes. Remind me to beat Prez’s head in for pairin’ you up with me. Woulda been better comin’ alone.”
“Hey, I resent that, man,” Crazy says, and he turns, raking his hands over his jeans repeatedly.
“You fuck this job up and you’re gonna resent more than a few harsh words, you got me?”
“Yeah, I fuckin’ got ya,” Crazy says, and kicks the dashboard with his boot. “This is bullshit. When are these bastards gonna show up?”
“They’ll be here. Get your feet of my fuckin’ dash,” I say, and he mock salutes me with the finger. “So, how’s Ivy? You know there’s no hot arse left to fuck since you took her aw—” I punch him in the side of the face. I don’t even think about it; it’s simply reflex. “Ow, fuck. What the hell, man?”
“You don’t speak about my old lady that way,” I warn, leaning back in my seat. The stupid little prick rubs his cheek.
“Jesus Christ. You’re really a goner for that bitch, aren’t you?” Crazy shakes his head and whistles. “First Kick and now you. The two of you are like chicks on the rag; ‘we even fall in love at the same time’. Fuck me.”
“Unless you want me to cut out your goddamn tongue, keep your fuckin’ trap shut.” I turn my attention to the empty street. We’re concealed at the end of the alley across from the warehouse, far enough that it won’t draw suspicion and close enough to still see who’s coming and going. We won’t get a visual inside, but that’s not what we’re here for.
“Something’s happenin’.” I tap my hand on the steering wheel and tilt my chin toward the trucks approaching the building. The security gate opens, and they drive through, backing up to a loading bay. Men in plain clothes remove packing crates while Ryzhanov and his bodyguard climb out of the vehicle and approach the other two Russians. They argue animatedly amongst themselves, but it isn’t long before the conversation turns heated and Ryzhanov pulls his gun and just shoots the two sorry fucks point blank in the head. The men slump to the ground, but none of the workers bat an eyelid; they just continue to unload the crates from the truck while Ryzhanov pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes what I assume to be blood splatter from his face.
“Holy shit. He didn’t even fuckin’ care that the gates weren’t closed,” Crazy says. “That is one blue-balled, brazen motherfucker.”
A limo emerges from the warehouse and Ryzhanov pulls one of the workers aside and signals to the body on the loading bay, and then disappears into the waiting vehicle. They pull out onto the street, and I wait.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
“What the fuck are you doing? Go!” Crazy says.
I give them a moment longer before starting the van, and then we pull out onto the road. “Jesus, no wonder Prez doesn’t send you out on stakeouts. There’s a timing to this shit. You can’t just pull out and run them off the road.”
“Why not?” Crazy pouts.
“Because that would draw a lot of fuckin’ attention and bring the heat down on the club. Thanks to Kick’s new bitch, there’s already enough heat baring down on us. We don’t need the Russians fuckin’ shit up too,” I say, feedin’ Prez’s bullshit words to Crazy. I feel like a traitor for even sayin’ it out loud. Like Ivy will somehow find out and hate me as much as I hate me for not bringin’ that fucker to his knees.
I’d finally made that call to my contact last night. She’d done a little diggin’ and I had me a name and an address, but sittin’ on this info about Ivy’s father is killin’ me. And this mornin’, as she said goodbye after I fucked her over my kitchen bench, I came so close to tellin’ her that I know where to find him, and that I wanna ignore my Prez’s orders and rip that fucker’s head clean off his shoulders.
“Seems to me like they’d get what they deserve,” Crazy says.
I glance at him a moment before slowing for the corner. The limo is about thirty metres up ahead. I still have a perfect visual. Not that I really need it. I know exactly where we’re going. I just gotta make sure Ryzhanov doesn’t wind up in the same place at the same time. “What’s your story anyway?”
“I don’t have a story, I’m just a crazy fucker who likes to play with fire.” Unfortunately, he isn’t joking. Fucking lunatic. But there’s more to his story than that, and I have a hunch that’s the whole reason he’s here.
“Bullshit. A lot of idiots come to the club looking for trouble, but you’re not one of them.” I shake my head. I’m good at reading people. It’s a part of what I do, and I’m fuckin’ good at what I do.
Crazy twitches. He covers by sniffin’ and wiping at his nose with the back of his hand. It’s one of his tells. Punk-arsed little fuck doesn’t even realise he’s doin’ it. “Doesn’t Prez make you check into all of our backgrounds before he’ll let us patch in?”
“He does. But I wanna hear it from you.”
“No story. I got no family, and no one else to put up with my shit,” he says, glancing out the window at the city flying by.
“What happened to your family?”
“They died.”
“Obviously,” I say, and my patience is in fuckin’ short supply with this arsehole today. “I want to know how.”
“Don’t you know this shit already?”
“I know what the paperwork says—that they died in a fire. I’d think that someone who lost his entire family in a fire wouldn’t have your little penchant for open flames,” I say evenly.
He shrugs. “What doesn’t kill you—”
“Makes you a suspect.”
“I didn’t kill my family,” he says through gritted teeth. Finally, we’re beginning to get somewhere.
“Then who did?”
“I don’t know. But someone set them alight in their sleep. I had a pizza delivery job. When I turned down my street, I saw the trucks parked outside on my front lawn. I dumped my bike and ran past the barricades and do you know what I heard?”
I don’t answer; I just keep my eyes glued to the road. In my experience, people are so much quicker to divulge their secrets when I keep my mouth shut.
“I heard my mother screaming. And the fire roaring all around me. It was like music. I was convinced I was made of it, and that it wouldn’t hurt me if I just stepped into it. So I did. Only the firemen who weren’t doing jack fucking shit to help my family because the flames were too intense to breach? They pulled me back. They took away the music. Now the only way I get any piece is when my Zippo sings to me again.”
I swear to Christ, the more I get to know people, the more I like my fuckin’ dog.
He’s lying. He knows who killed them. I do too. Crazy wants Ryzhanov’s right-hand man, Lagransky, and Prez needs his head checked for agreeing that Crazy should tag along on this job. And this excuse about not bein’ able to spare anyone else is wearin’ real goddamned thin. That bitch of Kick’s better be fuckin’ worth it.
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ. I need a goddamned therapist after listening to the shit you boys go on with,” I say, playin’ along. That little cocksucker’s gonna screw me royally if he moves from this van.
“You asked.” He shrugs, and points to the limo. “They’re turning.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” I say, and take the same exit. I ease on the brakes, because there are only two cars separating us now, and the maniac riding my arse is giving me the fucking shits. Tailgaters make me fuckin’ twitchy.
Twenty minutes later, the limo pulls up to a ritzy whiskey bar owned by Ryzhanov, and we continue driving through Mosman. The houses are huge and have big wrought-iron gates. Nice to look at, but not much help in really keeping people out. Especially not people like me.
We pull to a stop outside a house next to the Cold King’s mansion. Crazy and I don our special blue caps, and I roll the window down and press the buzzer for the intercom, declaring that I have a package for the Robertsons. People really need to stop putting their family name on the front gate of their fucking house. The gate opens, and I give the security guard posted outside the Russian’s residence a salute and drive on through, pulling up in the circular drive in front of the house.
The gates close and I get out in my navy blue and red Fast Send uniform and pull an empty cardboard box from the front seat. I even shaved for the occasion.
We’re not hitting the Russians; we’d need a lot more firepower than me and the geriatric fire bug for that. We’re only gaining access to the Robertsons’ property so I can plant a couple of cameras and survey the Russians’ backyard. We’ll only hit a joint once we know we can get in and get out and that there are several escape routes as a last resort.
“Stay here,” I say to the crazy fucker occupying my front seat.
His dark eyes narrow. “Where the fuck do you think I’m gonna go? Have tea with the Joneses?”
“Just making sure you’re not gonna light someone’s house on fire so you can ‘hear the music’ again,” I say with air quotes, and take the package from the seat between us. I pull the cap lower on my head and angle my face towards the ground, so any outdoor security cameras won’t make a positive ID as I walk to the front door, press the bell and wait.
The maid had answered the door, ready and waiting to take my package. She was a sweet young thing, had that Catholic virgin quality about her, and she’d blushed to the roots of her hair when I’d told her I had a big one for her. She’d still been biting her lip when I’d reached in my back pocket, pulled out the foul-smelling rag and covered her face with it. She’d gone out like a light, and I’d gently eased her down on the marble floor. I’d searched the house and found only an ancient-looking woman sipping tea in the yard by the pool. She’d been just as easy to take care of.
Chlorophyll. The friendly sedative aiding killers and psychopaths since 1814.
But you never know how long someone will be out on that shit, so I’d worked quickly setting up three tiny cameras under the eaves of the upstairs bedrooms, all of them overlooking Ryzhanov’s property.
When I reach the front door, the maid is still laid out on the marble where I left her. I carefully step over her sleeping form and jump into the van, only Crazy’s not here.
“Jesus fuck!” I’m going to strangle that little cocksucker the second I find him. I open my door when a movement in the rear-view mirror catches my attention. I glance up and freeze as something sharp and cold jabs me in the neck. I swing my elbow back, attempting to hit the fucker in the face, but the interior of the van swims and my eyelids grow heavy as I fight the drug coursing through my veins.
“I don’t like it when people touch my things,” a man says from the back of the van. The voice is unfamiliar, and yet there’s something in it, a cadence I know well. And the green eyes that accuse me in the rear-view? I know those too. They belong to Ivy, only it’s not her small hand resting on my neck and easing the needle from my flesh, it’s her father’s.
The man I’ve been dreamin’ about eviscerating for years now. And here he is, right behind me. I hadn’t had to look very far at all. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? I hadn’t been lookin’. I’d been knee-deep in Prez’s dirty work. I hadn’t been payin’ attention, and now I’ll pay for it with my life.
