“Promise me you’ll protect Beck.”
“It won’t be Beck who needs protecting, but yeah.”
An older black man with prison tats carved into the flesh of his neck and arms opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch as they walked up. He wore a dirty, sleeveless wife-beater and jeans with the waist nearly halfway down to his knees, exposing dingy blue boxers.
Well, at least he won’t try to run far or fast in those.
“Jarome Drexler?” Dewi let go of Nami’s hand after giving it a squeeze, mentally willing her to wait there at the bottom of the front steps and to come no farther.
Dewi started up the stairs.
“Who da fuck are you, bitch? And where’s Da’von?”
Dewi smiled and held out her hand. “Dewi Bleacke. Nice to meet you.”
He stared at her hand. When his right started to slide back around his waistband, Dewi shot out her hand and grabbed his left arm.
His face went blank as she poured the full force of her Prime Alpha into his brain. She rarely had to use this much power on someone, but today, she’d enjoy going heavy-handed.
“You aren’t very polite, are you?” Dewi whispered. “You’re going to hand me that gun, slowly, butt first, without a sound.”
He did.
“Softly, how many of your asshole buddies are inside?”
“Three more.”
With the Prime Alpha connection established and standing this close, she didn’t need to maintain contact with him all the time. She released his arm and checked the gun, an old, beat-up Sig 9mm with chipped grips. One in the chamber, only two in the clip. She added the third round back to the clip, replaced the magazine, and rechambered a round, making sure the safety was off. Then she tucked it into the back of her waistband. It wouldn’t fit in her holster, but would stay secure there for a moment.
Then she grabbed his left arm again and gave him a full-on wolfish grin that widened his eyes. When she smelled ammonia, she looked to see a dark stain spreading across the front of his boxers, above his low-riding jeans.
“Aw, Jarome,” she softly said. “Are you starting the festivities without me? If you’re pissing yourself already, I can only imagine how badly you’ll be shitting yourself in a few minutes. Let’s go in and meet your friends. Introduce me as a friend and call your buddies into the room.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Dewi walked Jarome into the crack shack. One guy, a black gang-banger about Jarome’s age, was sitting on a disgusting and ripped beige couch, his left hand down the front of his pants and a joint the size of a cigar in his right.
“Who da fuck is she, Jay?”
Jarome’s voice hollowly replied, “A friend of mine.”
A younger Hispanic guy with even more tats covering his neck and arms than Jarome walked in from the hallway. In his right hand he held a gun. “Que fucking hell, man? Who she?”
“You heard him, didn’t you?” Dewi brightly asked. “I’m a friend.” She led Jarome farther into the room and over to the guy on the couch. She reached out and clamped a hand onto stoner friend’s left shoulder, pouring Prime Alpha energy into him, too.
He dropped his joint.
“Pick it up and put it in the ashtray before you burn this shithole to the ground,” she said.
He did, sitting up and awaiting her next order.
“So what’s your name, Sparky?” she asked him.
“Hey,” the armed guy said, pointing his gun at her in a ridiculous sideways thug stance straight out of a cheesy rap video. “Yo,
bitch
. I asked who da
fuck
are you?”
Sparky the stoner replied, “I’m Dominic.”
“And who’s your inked up homey over there?”
The homey protested. “Yo, man. Donchoo be sayin’—”
“Emilio.”
“Sit right here a sec,” she told Dominic. She led Jarome over to Emilio, who looked jumpy, nervous, sweating. He smelled like heroin and she realized he was probably overdue for a fix.
She held out a hand, grinning. “Emilio, my man. Que fucking pasa, asshole.”
He frowned, as if trying to process she’d actually spoken to him. “What?”
She grabbed his right wrist, the hand holding his gun, and shoved his hand straight up, twisting his arm hard to the right and hearing a satisfying crunch from his shoulder socket as tendons and ligaments let go. “Didn’t your mother tell you it’s not polite to fucking point guns at friends?
Shut
the fuck
up
and take it like a man. Same way you took all those goddamned ugly-assed tats.”
His howl of pain cut off in mid-screech. She took the gun from him and let go of Jarome, snapping her fingers at him. “Go let my friends in the back door so we can get this party started.”
He went to do it.
Dewi stepped over Emilio, who now silently lay writhing on the floor and clutching his ruined right shoulder.
At the end of the hall, from behind a closed door, she heard a man’s voice yell, “Yo, dawg. What’s goin’ on out there?”
She’d seen in Jarome’s mind that Malyah was duct-taped to a chair in the back bedroom. So far, she hadn’t been molested, although she’d been terrorized.
I’ll have to spend some time with her today so I can make her forget this.
Dewi knocked on the door. “Yo, dawg,” she brightly said. “Avon calling. Want to place an order?”
The door flew open and Dewi sucker-punched the thug, snapping his head back and dropping him where he stood like a sack of three-day-old shit. Sure enough, there sat Malyah, a nasty bandana tied around her mouth as a gag, and duct-taped to an old kitchen chair.
From the back of the house, she heard Beck and Martin enter. “Dewi!” Beck called out.
“I’m fine. I found her. She’s all right. Search those scumbags, and I’ll get this one back here.” She tucked the gun she’d taken off Emilio into the front waistband of her jeans before she worked to rip the tape holding Malyah. The young women flew out of the chair, clinging to Dewi.
“Oh, my god, he was going to let them rape me!”
“Shh, it’s okay. You’re safe now.” Dewi helped the girl step around the fallen man, Beck meeting them halfway down the hall.
Dewi handed her off to Beck, then cupped the girl’s face in her hands. “Malyah,” she whispered, “you’re safe. Events are going to get really cloudy in your mind now, really fast. Jarome called you, but nothing happened after you told him to fuck off. You weren’t hurt, but now you hate the son of a bitch. You told him if you ever saw him again, you’d call the cops on him and tell them he threatened you.”
The girl’s sobs immediately quieted as she nodded, Dewi’s Prime Alpha energy soothing her.
“If anyone asks you what happened,” Dewi said, “tell them you’re having trouble remembering. When I get back, you and I will talk first, then we’ll talk to everyone else. For now, go with Nami. You’re going to my house. We’re going to have a nice family dinner and a cookout tonight and enjoy each other’s company.”
Dewi looked at Beck. “Change of plans. Tell Ken to stop at Nami’s, let her go in and get clothes and overnight stuff for her and Malyah and Da’von. Including swimsuits. Tell Nami not to say anything to Malyah about any of
this
until I can talk to her about it.” She stroked Malyah’s right cheek, where a bruise was already forming. “Nami and Malyah are definitely spending the night at my house, with us. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Malyah nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
Dewi hugged her. “You don’t have to call me ma’am, sweetie. Beck’s going to take you out to your sister, and Ken will drive you. You listen to Ken and do what he says until you get to my house. Go on.”
Beck cast Dewi a grateful look before ushering Malyah down the hallway.
Dewi returned to the fallen man, who was now groaning in pain as he started coming to. She searched him, found a gun tucked in his pants, and then grabbed him by the back of the shirt and dragged him down the hallway to the living room.
Jarome and Dominic were sitting on the couch. Emilio still silently writhed on the floor in the middle of the living room where Martin had dragged him.
Dewi dropped the moaning fourth man onto the floor next to Emilio. “Sparky, introduce me to this fuckless wonder.”
“Monty.”
“Monty, huh?” She kicked him in the side. “Yo yo yo, dawg. Monty, wake the fuck up. We need to have us a real heart-to-heart confab.”
Beck returned. “They’re on their way.”
Any hint of a smile on Dewi’s face departed. “Good,” she growled, letting her canines slide into place to ease the ache in her jaws from the struggle of holding them back. “Close and lock the doors.”
They got all four of the guys into the kitchen, sitting around the wobbly card table there. In the middle of the table they piled the men’s cell phones, as well as all the drugs in the place, courtesy of Sparky’s help. Dewi pulled a pair of vinyl gloves out of her back pocket and put them on, grabbed a paper towel from the counter, and started wiping down the confiscated guns, including the magazine and rounds from the one she’d taken from Jarome.
“I want to introduce you boys to a game I call ‘Dewi Says,’” she said, walking around the table. “You fuckers sit there in your chairs, no moving allowed, with your hands flat on the table. Oh, well, Emilio, heh. Sorry there, buddy. You can keep the injured one in your lap. Just don’t play with yourself.”
Silent tears of pain coursed down the stricken man’s face as he eased his left hand onto the table while the other three men complied.
Dewi nodded to Martin and Beck, who drew their own sidearms and covered the men as she laid each confiscated gun on the table in front of the man it’d been taken from. Then she placed their hands on each gun, getting their fingerprints all over them, before putting their hands back on the table.
“Okay, assholes,” she brightly said, grinning and making sure they saw her canines. “Here’s the rules to Dewi Says. It’s easy enough even dumbasses like you can play. I ask you a question, you answer me truthfully. No lying allowed. I don’t like how you answer, you’ll earn a point.” She snorted with laughter, slapping her thigh. “And by point, I mean entry wound.”
She laughed again. “Now, I will admit, I probably won’t like
any
of y’all’s answers, at all, but that’s okay. You boys are fucked twelve ways to Sunday regardless. This is just for funsies, now.”
She bared her teeth at them and smelled fresh ammonia as at least one more of them wet himself. “See, y’all made the mistake of fucking with my family. Nobody fucks with
my
family. Ever.”
Rounding the table, she stopped behind Jerome and put her hands on his shoulders, squeezing hard enough to make him whimper in pain. “So, what were you going to do with Da’von, huh? Dewi Says tell us the truth.”
“Little bastard didn’t want to help me out. Wouldn’t get me any money. I was going to make him work with us. He’s smart. He doesn’t have a record. He could have helped us.”
“Helped you do what?”
“Got a friend doing card skimming. He could have helped us set some up, gotten a job at a gas station and used his key to get us into the pumps. Emilio’s cousin was going to get him a job.”
“Ah, I see. How are you fucks even smart enough to work a skimmer?”
“Not us. A gang out of South Tampa. They give us a cut if we got them in.”
“So you were
really
going to let these three assholes fuck your daughter, you low-down piece of shit?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm.” She turned to Beck. “Beck, my buddy, how do we usually handle fuckers like that?”
“We castrate them,” he growled.
“That’s right,” Dewi said. “We castrate them.” She grabbed Jarome’s hand, put the gun in it, and shoved it down the front of his pants.
“Pull the trigger,” she said. “And don’t make a fucking sound when you do. Other than the gunshot, of course.”
He did. The other three men flinched at the report. Jarome’s face contorted into a silent, agonized scream.
She patted him on the shoulder. “It’s okay, buddy. The sting will wear off in a few days. If you live that long. If anyone asks, and I’m sure the deputies will, you accidentally shot your own goddamned junk off. Now, how unlucky is
that
?”
She straightened and pointed across the table at Sparky. “Dewi Says no lying to me. Were you going to fuck her?”
He nodded.
“So you were going to rape her?”
He nodded.
“You ever rape anyone before?”
He nodded again.
“
Tsk tsk tsk
.” She walked around the table and stood next to him. “How many?”
“I don’t remember.”