Page 27 of Bourbon & Blood

“You stabbed our boy, what? Three times?” I asked.

He shouted from behind his gag.

I rammed my blade home, into his right kidney, and I went on and on, counting each one out.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty!

I’m pretty sure I rendered his kidney and maybe a couple more of his major fuckin’ organs into hamburger. By the time I was done; he’d stopped screaming from behind his gag. Instead, his head hung back, some of his blood vivid against the silver tape over his mouth as his eyes leaked tears down his temples and he swallowed hard. His gaze was fixed and unfocused as he slid into shock, I think. I didn’t particularly care.

“Ain’t so tough now, are yah?” I demanded. I wiped my blade off on the top of the thigh of his dirty jeans.

He whimpered some, and I looked to Cy.

“Let’s load him on the boat and feed him to the gators.”

Cy looked back at me with no emotion and gave a nod before letting his arms fall to his sides and taking a step forward.

“I got this,” he said. “Why don’t you head on over to the pump house and get yourself cleaned up.

I looked down, my arms flecked with blood, my right hand slicked with it almost to the elbow, and nodded.

“Yeah,” I said after I heaved a few breaths.

I wondered briefly what my little Alina was doing.

CHAPTERTHIRTEEN

Alina…

I’d gone to the police station to try and get them to listen, or to at least take a report, but no dice. With nothing else to do, I had gone to work. Dorian looked up from behind the bar, lifting his chin in that way that was asking, without blurting out our business across the whole-ass bar.

I sighed, and knew I looked both tired and crestfallen as I shook my head.

His face dropped along with his shoulders and he looked just as frustrated as I felt. Days and days had passed, and I just couldn’t seem to get anyone to fuckinglisten to me.

The night was a busy one, which was something, considering how hot and humid it was out there.

The extreme heat of the day had carried over into the night and that was never a good thing on Bourbon. It was like the gods had seen fit to anoint the street with crazy when it was like this. The lights of the bars could sometimes wind up muted by the strobing lights of emergency vehicles. The music drowned out by sirens. If we were lucky? It’d be medical emergencies rather than violent felonies.

I didn’t know what the rest of the city looked like on a night like this, but I had to imagine it wasn’t nearly as awful as Bourbon could get. Mostly because it felt like the whole city washere, leaving no people to commit crime, or have a seizure, or to pass out from dehydration or with a case of alcohol poisoning.

We had a patron go down by mid-shift, but Clyde, our manager, took it, leaving me and Dor to mind the bar.

I was grateful for it. I still had a massive headache and both Dorian and I were running off fumes from lack of good sleep, worrying about Maya who was missing over a week by this point.

By the time the night was over, we were both dog tired.

“How were tips?” I asked and Dorian made a face, curling his lip in disgust.

“Looks like one-eighty a piece.”

“Not so bad,” I said.

“Not so good if you pulled in over two-fifty last night,” he said. I nodded.

“Feels like we were twice as fuckin’ busy,” I muttered.

“When? Last night or tonight?” he asked.

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