Chapter 2
He had stuck the girl in a tiny cage with rusty metal bars, in the middle of a smoke-filled room. Her cat was curled up beside her. She was starting to stir.
“Why’d ya take the fuckin’ cat?” Jakelord asked. His every nerve was on edge. This whole thing had been a big mistake. He didn’t really see any way out alive. He silently damned the day that he had decided that money was his god. “I said... Why’d ya take the fuckin’ cat?”
The man he was talking to shrugged and Jakelord smacked him. Why the hell had he done this? He hadn’t wanted to do it. He didn’t want to tangle with Tarent Powers. He was a little bitty bad man and he didn’t really play the big leagues. But sometimes you had to make a stand. Tarent had gone after Mishy, and if he succeeded at getting rid of Mishy, little Jakelord couldn’t be far behind.
Besides, Mishy had paid Jakelord a butt load of money, and there was that worshipping money as a god thing that he had to deal with.
Just a few more minutes and he could relax. He didn’t have to kill the girl. Waiting for weeks for her to poke her head out of the building had been the hard part. They had gotten away undetected with the help of some of Mishy’s high-tech guys and his own skill as a computer jumper. All Jakelord had supplied was the code busting and some muscle. The girl had come out on her own. All he had to do now was wait for Mishy to come and get the girl, but the longer he sat here with the girl waiting for Mishy, the more likely it was that Tarent’s boys would find him first, and no amount of money was worth dying for.
He didn’t think.
The girl was wide-awake now, and she trembled with fear as one man licked the bars of her cage. “Can we fuck her?” he asked Jakelord.
She cringed.
“No, you can’t fuck her.” Jakelord ran over and kicked the man. “Just leave her the fuck alone till Mishy gets here. Whatever’s going to happen to her, Mishy’s going to do it. Not me.”
“She’s beautiful, man,” another man said looking with lust at the half-dressed woman in the cage.
“Yeah, and she’s going to stay that way at least until Mishy gets here,” Jakelord said. He took a deep breath and let it out. “Where the fuck is he anyway?”
Elantra pulled her shirt tighter around her. It had torn at some point. The place stank and it was dark. There were only two small windows at the very top of the wall and Elantra could see that it was dark outside, too. There was one small bulb burning in the middle of the dank room, and a rickety wooden staircase with no rail led down to the floor from a door twelve feet above them. There were about a dozen rough-looking men and women in the large room sitting on what might have once been nice furniture but was now filthy and disgusting. Several of them were wearing weapons in plain sight, dressed in clothing in not much better repair than the furniture they sat on.
Elantra swallowed hard. These didn’t look like the people her father did business with. These looked like... well, they looked like... not very nice people.
“My father is going to be very angry,” she said. She got shakily to her feet and picked up the cat.
“No shit!” Jakelord said, and all his men laughed hysterically.
“I say we fuck her, and then we kill her,” one of them said.
“Dead people don’t talk,” another one agreed.
“And if we’re going to kill her anyway we might as well fuck her.”
“Why don’t we kill her, and then we can fuck her,” yet another said.
“Shut the fuck up!” Jakelord yelled. “We ain’t gonna fuck her, and we ain’t gonna kill her. Not in any order. We’re going to sit here and pray that Mishy gets here and takes her off our hands before the cops or Tarent’s hired goons come and blow our fucking asses away.”
Elantra held her cat in front of her like a shield. “My father doesn’t have any goons. I’m sure that if you gave me back now, my father would be willing to make sure that the police give you a fair break.”
They all laughed. “Little girl, what do you think your daddy does?”
Elantra never had been really sure. “I think... I know he’s in imports and exports...”
They rolled with laughter.
“Yeah, he imports drugs and programs and exports hookers and programs,” Jakelord laughed.
“What do you mean?” Elantra asked, confused.
Jakelord walked up to the cage. “You really don’t know? Honey, your daddy is the biggest gangster in Freight City. Hell, if he has his way, eventually he’ll own the whole damn place.”
“My father is a legitimate business man.” She pulled her blouse even more tightly around her.
They all laughed. “And I’m the fuckin’ president,” Jakelord said.
There was a knock on the door at the top of the stairs, and suddenly the room got very quiet except for the sound of people jumping to their feet and the cocking of guns. Elantra, feeling that it might be helpful, started screaming. Jakelord cocked a rifle and stuck it through the bars into in her face. “Shut the hell up!” he hissed. “Or I’ll blow your pretty head off.” She was quiet.
A voice hollered through the door, “Jakelord!”
Jakelord looked relieved and lowered the rifle. “It’s Alex. Let him in,” he ordered.
One of the thugs started to open the door. Someone on the other side kicked the door open, and the man opening it was slung off the stairs. He fell screaming to the ground and landed with a thud. He yelled out in pain as his leg broke in two places. A man, apparently Alex, bloody and badly beaten was held like a shield in front of the person who walked in behind him. Then Alex was tossed down the stairs to land at Jakelord’s feet. The injured Alex looked up at Jakelord with a mixture of fear and apology.
A woman stood alone at the top of the stairs. Elantra stared at her in disbelief. She was like a character the computer might generate; tall, thin, well muscled, and not quite real. Her long, straight hair was jet black. Her skin was well tanned, and her one eye was the brightest blue Elantra had ever seen. There was a patch over the other eye. She was wearing a simple tank top and what was left of a pair of pants. She held a weapon that looked like it was capable of eliminating everyone in the room with a simple sweep of her arms. There were primitive tools hanging from a belt she wore around her waist. She looked at Elantra, and Elantra felt like she could no longer breathe.
The woman scanned the room until she saw Jakelord. Then she smiled a smile that made Elantra’s flesh crawl. Before she could speak, Jakelord muttered in a voice filled with respect and fear, “Shit! It’s the Hammer.”
The woman fixed Elantra with a stare then, and Elantra looked away.
The Hammer turned her attention back to Jakelord. “I have no beef with you, Jakelord. We have been friends a long time, family. I came for the girl, and if you give her to me we’re okay.”
“Hammer... It’s not that easy, man. Mishy’s gonna have me killed if I lose the girl.”
Hammer smiled. “I’m takin’ the girl, Jakelord. Don’t get in my way.”
A man in the corner moved to fire his weapon. With a flick of her wrist and without turning to look, Conner aimed and fired. A sixteen-penny nail smashed into the man’s forehead, blowing up most of the man’s skull in the process. He gasped once and fell to the floor, his body erupting in a fit of spasms.
Elantra couldn’t control the scream that was ripped from her lungs.
Jakelord shuddered. “Let the girl go! Let her go!” he ordered. One of his boys started unlocking the door. “Hammer... What do I tell Mishy?”
Hammer started down the stairs, talking as she went. “Tell Mishy I came and I took the girl. Tell him I said I’d make it right. Tell him I said if he did anything to you, I’d kill him.” She reached in, grabbed the girl by the arm, and dragged Elantra out of the cage. She looked at the cat Elantra held and made a face. “Come on.” She dragged her up the stairs and out of the basement, and Elantra knew in that instant that nothing was ever going to be the same again.
Jakelord watched them go.
“What we gonna do, Jakelord?” one of the boys asked.
“Hope that Mishy’s as afraid of Hammer as I am,” Jakelord answered.
“What did she mean… tell him she’d make things right?”
Jakelord smiled broadly. “I think it means Tarent isn’t going to get his little darlin’ back till The Hammer gets what she wants.”
Mishy and two of his thugs walked into Jakelord’s den. Mishy looked around, surveying the destruction left in Hammer’s wake.
Jakelord was nervous; it was hard to tell how a man like Mishy might react. “The Hammer showed up...” Jakelord started to explain.
“No fuckin’ kiddin’.” Mishy bent down and pulled the nail out of a pool of gray matter by the dead man’s head. “What did she say?” he asked, throwing the nail onto the stiff’s chest and wiping his hand on one of his goon’s jackets.
Jakelord repeated Hammer’s message in its entirety.
Mishy looked at Jakelord and smiled. “It must be nice to have friends in the police business... Ya done good, kid. You’ll get full payment.” He rubbed Jakelord’s head then looked at his hand in disgust and rubbed it on the goon’s jacket again. “I’ll be in touch.” He laughed all the way out of the basement.
Jakelord sighed with relief. “Okay, you dickheads get rid of Ryan’s body and let’s go celebrate. The girl’s gone, we’re not dead, and at least for a couple of weeks we’re filthy rich.”
Tarent waited impatiently at his terminal. Needless to say the transmission he received was not the one he wanted. “Mishy,” he hissed. “What the hell have you done with Elantra?”
“I thought I’d have to wait longer than this to taste revenge.” Mishy laughed. “The best part is I don’t even have the little bitch. I really never did.”
“I’ll kill you, Mishy, if you so much as touch a hair on her head...”
“Touching her hair was never on the agenda.” Mishy leaned closer and continued. “Thanks to you, Tarent, I welcome death, I long to embrace it. I live for one purpose and one purpose only, and that’s to see you go down in flames. If I go down, I will take you all the way down before I go.”
“I didn’t kill your family...” Tarent said, his voice sounding as desperate as he felt.
“Then why did you take credit for it? You did it, and now you’re going to pay. And the rich thing is that I don’t have to do another damn thing.”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“Five years ago it was my little sister Peggy you killed to make a point. No one could prove that, either. You didn’t really know Peggy; she was a bit of a flake. A Constructionist of all things. You know, those whacked-out people that believe computers and technology are basically evil. So you see her personal life doesn’t really show up on the web. It’s a shame, really, because if it had maybe you would have learned that Peggy had a lover, in fact a legal partner. A big ole dyke cop with enough implants in her to build a small car. But then you didn’t really care about Peggy or her personal life, did you? No, all she was to you was a way to get at me. A way to scare me so that I would back off and let you have what I busted my ass to get. It didn’t work, just pissed me off. So then I killed some of your people, and you killed some of my people, and I killed some more of your people. In the end Peggy was dead, I still had my shit, and you still had your shit, but my sister was still dead. Now you’ve killed my son, and I asked myself, if I had backed off—let you win after you killed Peggy—would my boy still be alive? And the answer is that it doesn’t matter now because I didn’t and now he’s just as dead as Peggy. The business doesn’t matter to me anymore, and I’ve got nothing else worth living for, so the only thing that matters to me now is seeing you burn... And now as my sister the Constructionist used to say, ‘All the chickens are coming home to roost’.’”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“You pride yourself in being a smart man, Tarent. You hired a police agency to find your daughter. Peggy’s partner was a cop. A cop named Conner McVee. Why don’t you call your police agency and see who they sent out to save your daughter?” Mishy laughed as the transmission closed.
Tarent stared at the computer screen for a minute. “Computer, call James Rank.” In a second James Rank was on his screen.
“Not yet, Tarent. I’ll contact you as soon as we have the girl,” Rank said plainly
“Who did you assign to retrieve my daughter from Mishy?” Tarent demanded.
“The computer spit out only one name, and I sent that agent. I assure you that if anyone can return your daughter in one piece, it’s her.”
“Who the fuck did you send!” Tarent demanded.
“Conner McVee.”