Page 43 of Nasty
There was every chance this wasn’t going to work out. I’d met Sera under extremely fucked up circumstances, and we were both more than a little broken, that much was obvious. If we’d met at a coffee shop and we’d started flirting, maybe asked one another out on a date, we’d still have been facing a monumentally steep uphill climb toward the realms of a normal relationship. Her past with her father hung over her like a thunderhead, black and angry, ready to break into a fully-fledged hurricane at any moment. I could see that a mile off, even though she tried to keep it from me. And my own demons were constantly on the prowl, demanding attention, determined to shred apart whatever ounce of happiness we might be able to forge. We were dancing with disaster, and if I couldn’t find this Carver guy before his new assassin found us, then god only knew what would become of us.
It fucking killed me to climb out of bed and leave Sera behind. I had work to do, though. I had somewhere I needed to be, and it was somewhere I couldn’t take her.
The Barrows wasn’t safe. Wasn’t safe for me, let alone a woman. Sera could throw a mean right hook but otherwise she was defenseless. Maybe in time she could be trained, honed into a lethal weapon capable of facing down the dark tide that promised to wash over us, but until that day…
I gathered up the items I needed—gun, an extra clip, throwing knife, duct tape—and I packed them all into a backpack. Outside, the night air was muggy and oppressively humid, causing a layer of sweat to break out across my back as I hurried to the truck, got in and started the engine. As I drove across the Manhattan Bridge, I prepared myself for what was to come.
The Barrows was dangerous any night of the week, but tonight was First Night, the first Friday of the month. If a fighter wanted to be able to compete for the rest of the month, he at least had to show up tonight and lose a match in order to return. If he missed fighting First Night, then that fighter would have to wait until the first Friday of the following month to try his luck again.
New York City’s most deadly and deranged would be out on the prowl, ready to claim as many victories and as much money and weapons as possible. The arrogant, the hard up, the ambitious, and the raving mad would be braving the fifteen-story building on the outskirts of the Bronx tonight, each of them hoping to reach the rooftop—to as much tequila as they could drink, and as much pussy as they could fuck. And overseeing the whole clusterfuck, the man in charge, the most soulless, morally corrupt, evil piece of shit crime boss there ever was: Oscar Finch.
I detested the man more than any other living soul, but I was going to have to learn how to maintain a civil tongue in my head if I wanted to get Rabbit’s fucking thumb drive back. It had been a long time since I’d felt nervous about anything, but I was nervous right now.
The city whipped by in a blur. I had to calm my shit before I reached my destination, otherwise all would be lost. The men I was about to face were like blood hounds; if they scented fear on you, even the faintest whiff of it, they’d rally together like pack animals and tear you apart until there was nothing left behind but a handful of teeth floating in a pool of blood and viscera.
I’d broken out in a cold sweat by the time I reached The Barrows. The building was a monstrosity, the exterior once grand and impressive, but now the heavy stonework was cracked, the mortar crumbling, the windows caked with dirt and tagged with spray paint.
No one in their right minds came within a hundred feet of this building. Twenty years ago, the area had once been busy, used primarily by cloth merchants, who sold their bolts of fabric out of small store fronts and occasionally from stalls set up on the street corners. When the gangs had moved in—Armenian and Russian families that battled over turf, women, and the right to breathe the air in general—things had become unsettled and the clothiers had moved on to other parts of Brooklyn and Hell’s Kitchen. Soon, the buildings were abandoned, losing their value, and Oscar Finch swept in and snapped up The Barrows, or the Barrowman Hotel, as it had once been called. He brought henchmen toting semi-automatic weapons along with him, who terrorized the gangs that remained behind, and soon they were all either dead or had moved on, too.
The four-block radius surrounding The Barrows was a ghost town, the streets deserted and cluttered with garbage. Plenty of parking, though. I pulled up beside the curb on the opposite side of the street from the old hotel, noting a gleaming black muscle car parked fifty feet away, but aside from that, there were no other vehicles in sight. Oscar discouraged people from bringing their cars on nights like tonight. He liked to keep things as quiet as possible and having a fleet of sports cars and souped-up SUVs pulling up out front only served as a pulsing beacon for the cops, who sometimes dared to patrol the area when they were feeling brave.
Tonight, I was breaking Oscar’s rules—more than one of them—but I didn’t give a fuck. I needed the truck nearby in case I had to make a swift exit. Without it, I’d be vulnerable, and the very last thing I felt like doing this evening was running for my life through the streets. Oscar’s sentries were everywhere. Mostly ex-military, they were brutal, and didn’t think twice about shooting an unarmed man in the back if they thought he might be running from Oscar.
I checked my wallet, making sure I had the correct amount of cash on hand to buy my way inside the building. A cool grand, all in twenties. The money wasn’t just to gain access to The Barrows; it was also my contribution towards tonight’s prize money. Everyone who entered was permitted, and expected, to fight. Newbies started in the basement. Crowds gathered there, fight club style, to beat the shit out of each other, until someone either submitted or fell down fucking dead. If a fighter survived the basement, they were admitted to the elevator, where they would be granted access to the next floor up, and the circus would begin all over again. And so on, and so forth, until the sun came up and everybody limped or crawled home. There were fifteen floors. No one ever made it to the rooftop, where Oscar awaited, on their first night. If a fighter found himself on the eighth floor by the time the klaxon sounded at dawn, then the next time he came back, if he chose to come back at all, he would start at the fifth floor.The three-floor rule, they called it. The Oscar Finch Fuck You. No matter who you were or how hard you fought, it didn’t matter. You never re-entered The Barrows on the same floor you walked out on. That’s just the way it was. The moment a fighter did make it to the fifteenth floor, that was it. They could ride the elevator straight up to the rooftop every weekend without ever having to fight again. But if theydidfight, they had a chance at winning some seriously big money. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Guys came to fight at The Barrows to claim status and bragging rights. They came to prove their worth and test their mettle. A tenth-floor graduate was always going to get served before a basement chump at any bar in Hell’s Kitchen. But that huge pot of money Oscar presided over was the main reason people came here. They wanted out of their shitty situations. They wanted to clear their debts and start afresh. Sometimes they just wanted to buy their body weight in cocaine and snort themselves to death on the winnings. But it was the money that made people so hungry, and they were merciless in their pursuit of it.
I bared my teeth at the doormen guarding the entrance to the building. These guys were nothing like Rabbit’s bouncers. These men were a different species entirely. Their necks had vanished, their traps were so big. Their eyes were blank, lacking any arrogance and bravado. They didn’t need such devices. They were fifteenth-floor veterans many times over, and since Oscar had hired them to man his doors, they had proved themselves to be lethal many more times than that. They were brothers. Clinically insane. Probably. When they’d first started coming here, years ago, they’d show up over and over again, battling their way from the twelfth floor to the fifteenth, thanks to the three-floor rule, for what appeared to be the sheer joy of letting blood. And once they had destroyed everyone and everything in sight each time, they had left, never once stepping foot onto the rooftop to celebrate their victories or try their hand at winning the pot.
From what I’d heard, Oscar paid them an average salary, and the boys were happy to stand guard each night, just waiting for the opportunity to beat someone to death with their own dismembered leg.
“Foster. Falco.” I greeted one and then the other.
“Marcosa,” Foster growled in response. He nodded as if to himself, his mouth turned down at the corners. “We figured you were dead.”
“Probably should be by now.” I kept my back straight, staring both of them down. They shared the same cold, dead eyes—the eyes of a shark, or some other primitive, small-brained predator.
Falco jerked his head back, gesturing to the heavy reinforced steel door behind him. “You want in?”
“Yeah. I need to speak to him.” I hadn’t thought about how I was going to get the thumb drive, but I did know where it would be. If it was important—and it sounded like it was—it would be on Oscar’s person. He was just as insane as Rabbit, and twice as paranoid. He had an office here somewhere, but he never used it. Even the prize money was kept in a steel lock box on the roof, where Oscar could maintain a visual on it at all times.
“Still gonna cost you,” Foster said.
I already had the money in my hand. I thrust it out toward him, slapping the wad of twenty-dollar bills against his chest. “It’s all there.”
Foster didn’t make a show of pretending to check it. He probably couldn’t count that high. “All right, then. You gonna take him, brother, or should I?” he asked. He didn’t look at Falco. He stared at me some more, like he was casually wondering how much force it would take to rip my head clean off my shoulders.
“You take him, brother,” Falco replied. “I’ll stay here, just in case.”
Foster smiled, and it was hideous. “After you, Father.”
I narrowed my eyes, every part of me going cold. “Just Fix. Marcosa, if you have to. But call me Father again, and I’ll rip your ball sack off and use it as a motherfucking coin purse.” Violence begat violence, it was true. But sometimes it was necessary. It was all these two fucktards understood, and politely presenting them with a request wasn’t going to get me anywhere with them. I had to be dominant and forceful. They had to believe I would do something as rash as attacking one of them, and they had to believe, from the stone-cold steel in my eyes, that there was a possibility that I would fucking win. Foster drew himself up to his full height, at least four inches taller than me, and he leered into my face.
“You still got a tongue on you,” he snapped. “MaybeIshould ripthatout.”
“Go ahead and try. But when people start asking you why you’re speaking in falsetto, don’t be surprised.Bitch.”
God. Bitch? That was pushing it. I set my jaw, piercing him through with my gaze, tamping down the nerves that were once again rattling through me.
Foster flared his nostrils. It looked like he was scenting me, like he could actually detect the pheromones and testosterone in the air. For one long second, I thought he was going to pile drive his fist through my face. And then his head rocked back and laughter boomed from his chest, ringing down the deserted street. Falco joined in two seconds later.
