I did not like Scarlett Black.
From the moment I laid eyes on her, she struck a chord in me, a minor chord that sent a shiver of ill ease down my spine. It wasn’t anything anyone else would have noticed. Everyone else would have seen a middle aged woman who was aging well. Chestnut hair flowed about her face in free waves, framing features that were not precisely pretty, but not plain either. Average. Yes. Average. On the looks scale that meant she was about a six or a seven. That’s how the scale works. Average should be five, but it never is.
She was wearing a black leather jacket belted around her waist to emphasize the curve of her bust and hips. It worked. Underneath the jacket, long legs extended clad in equally black jeans. It was a plain outfit, but she looked anything but plain wearing it.
Her eyes had been emphasized with smoky makeup that made them pop in an exotic sort of way. They were brown, the sort of brown that melts you if you look too long. Her nose was slightly crooked, as if it had been broken at some point. After a couple of minutes of knowing her, that didn’t surprise me at all.
She walked into my West Texas office and stood before me, parting ruby red lips stained with lipstick that was too dark for my liking. I don’t like make up. It looks like war paint to me. Women who wear a lot of the stuff always look like they’re gearing up for a battle of some kind. Her smile was wide, charismatic, free. She was not like my usual clients, hunched women who scrimped and saved and worried about the future of their families. She slung herself into the chair in front of my desk and grinned at me. I knew instantly that she was wrong. She didn’t make sense at all. She was out of place, like caviar in your turkey sandwich.
“Hey,” she greeted me amiably enough, offering her hand. I took it out of habit and my general agreement with the social contract of hand shaking. “Scarlett Black,” she introduced herself, squeezing my palm. Warning bells went off in my head, Scarlett Black sounded like a fake name, two colors hastily slammed together for dramatic effect.
“H..hey how help?” I stumbled over my words. Yeah, she had some charisma about her. I corrected my mistake swiftly. “I mean, hello, how can I help you?”
Her smiled broadened a fraction more. “They make you say that, don’t they Ricky?” She read my name tag, using my name in the way elderly people patronizing supermarket checkout girls do.
I stared at her for a moment. “They do,” I admitted. I didn’t like the admission. It made me sound like a puppet, made me seem weak. It was franchise policy to greet customers with a certain modicum of decorum. Drooling over them was frowned on, but Scarlett knew that of course. She was doing this on purpose. I’d known the woman for all of a minute and already she was playing games with me, trying to mess with my head, catch me off guard. There was a scam in the works somewhere, I was sure of it.
“Do you always do as you’re told?”
It was an odd question, delivered in an odd way. She was looking at me like she was sizing me up. Like I was a piece of tender meat. She was a predator. I felt it in my bones. I’d bet money that she’d sucked more than a few men dry in her time, maybe women too. The way she was looking at me was arch, softly suggestive.
“How can I help you?” I repeated my question, ignoring hers as I seated myself behind my desk, glad there was something solid between us.
She broke into another one of those easy smiles that did not reach her eyes. “I’d like a loan.”
“Do you have any security?” I knew I was being curt. I didn’t care. Something about Scarlett made me feel very ill at ease.
In answer to the question, she reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a dazzling diamond necklace. “Will this do?”
“If it’s real and it’s yours it might.”
Anger flashed across her face. She tried to hide it behind a charming facade, but I’d already seen it. I allowed a glimmer of a smirk to appear on my mouth. I liked my clients to know that they weren’t dealing with a fool. People who thought they could put one over on you were less likely to repay their loans.
“You’re a rude little bitch.” There it was. Her temper had risen to the surface, allowing me to see quite clearly who I was dealing with. You could look as classy as you wanted to and you could sling diamonds from here to Timbuktu, but if you couldn’t keep your mouth clean then there wasn’t much point in pretending you were a lady in my book. She looked at me as if she was expecting shock, perhaps an apology. She got neither.
“I’ve heard that before, and worse,” I said, reaching for the necklace. She dropped it into my hand. “You have papers for this?” I looked at her over the sparkle of the diamond.
Wordlessly, she went fishing in her jacket and yanked out a folded square of paper. She tossed it at me with a petulant motion that only served to amuse me all the more. I took my time unfolding the paper and smoothing it out. It was an insurance receipt that claimed the necklace I was holding in my hot little hand was worth twenty thousand dollars. Quite the princely sum.
“How much are you looking for, Ms Black?”
“Ten thousand.”
“Do you have any ID?”
She gave me a driver’s license. It looked real enough, but I ‘d seen some pretty good fakes in my time, enough to know that looking real isn’t always enough. Fake driver’s license, fake necklace, fake name. The fake was beginning to add up and I had a tingling sense that something nasty was about to happen. I should have concluded our business then and there but I continued the interview on the off chance I was being too suspicious. I tried for a little more information, some things were harder to fake than others. “Do you have a Social Security number?”
She reached into her purse. One moment everything was fine. The next moment there was a gun. Time doesn’t exactly stop when someone pulls a gun on you, but it gets slow, real slow. Every second was like an hour as I stared at the snub nose of the pistol, knowing all too well what that little thing could do to me. It could put holes in me, tear me apart. It could destroy me. Maim me. Kill me. Such a little thing to be able to do that much damage.
I looked from the gun to the woman holding it. She’d dropped the charming act. Her eyes were cold. This wasn’t her first rodeo. She’d done this before for sure. I could tell by the way the gun stayed steady in her hand, by the way her eyes held their steady focus. A first timer would be nervous. She wasn’t.
“Let’s go to the safe,” she said in the same sort of tone a friend might suggest going to the park.
I glanced over at the location of the hidden safe, where much of the money was. Not the money, my money. Tens of thousands of dollars in hard cash. I looked back down at the gun. Was it worth getting myself killed over? No. Definitely not.
“Hurry up, Orphan Annie, we don’t have all day.” Orphan Annie, because I have red curly hair. Cute. Real cute. It’s not even naturally red. It’s naturally a dirty blonde. I had dyed it red a couple of months earlier because I was bored and thought it might perk me up. “Nobody needs to get hurt,” she said, waggling the barrel. “Give me the money and I’ll leave you alone.”
It was a nice reassurance, but as it was coming from an armed criminal, I didn’t put too much stock in it. “The safe is behind you,” I told her.
“Don’t fuck with me,” she warned as I slowly began to stand up.
“I have no interesting in fucking with you,” I assured her. “May I show you?”
She nodded and I went forward and moved the painting on the wall behind her to reveal the safe. The ol’ safe behind the painting was a cliché, but it worked well enough. The place had been burgled once or twice and people had ripped up the carpets before thinking to move the cheap copy of Van Gough’s Sunflowers.
“Kitschy,” she noted. “Open it.”
I entered the combination. It was okay, I told myself, insurance would cover it. That’s why I had the stuff. She came up close behind me as I pressed the digits into the keypad, so close I could feel her breath on my cheek. It was with pleasure that I took a solid step back into her as I swung the safe door open. A hundred thousand dollars in cash bundles sat there innocently watching as I trod on her toe heavily.
“Sorry!” I gasped. I wasn’t sorry. Not at all. She growled and glared at me, holding out her oversized handbag.
“Put the money in here.”
Insult to injury, making me give her the money myself. I complied though, because that’s what they tell you to do. In the event of a robbery, do as the robber wants. I placed the bundled notes inside her bag, piling them up until it bulged at the seams. It was only just big enough and the final bundle went into her jacket pocket
When she had all my money she smiled, put her hand up to caress my cheek and leaned in as if she were about to kiss me. That was the final straw. I could handle being robbed, I could handle being insulted, but I would not put up with unauthorized lip to lip contact. I turned my head and sank my teeth into her hand hard, real hard. Hard enough that I felt the bones grind beneath my teeth. She howled with pain, something heavy crashed against my skull, and I fell into dizzying blackness.
***
I woke up with a hell of a headache, the taste of blood strong and tangy in my mouth. There was blood on my hands too, and blood on my shirt. I was a mess, dumped on a concrete floor like refuse. I groaned as I returned to unpleasant consciousness in the small room. It was tiny actually, a few feet wide by just a few feet more long. More like a cell than a room. I was not alone, though it took me a minute or two to see Scarlett leaning up against the far wall, watching me like a vulture watches its prey.
“You’re awake.” She seemed pleased by the fact. A smirk established itself on her attractive features. “You have a thick skull.”
“Yeah.” I sat up and dragged the back of my hand across my mouth. A thin smear of red came away on it. She must’ve hit me pretty hard. Hard enough to knock me out. She obviously didn’t mess around, though I couldn’t help but notice that I wasn’t dead. If she’d wanted to seriously hurt me, she could have just shot me. That meant she wasn’t done with me yet.
She stared at me and I stared back at her, wondering if this had always been a part of the plan. Had she always intended on kidnapping me? I didn’t ask. I wasn’t feeling chatty. I was feeling nauseous and cold.
Unaffected by my discomfort and bloody appearance, Scarlett stood up properly and stretched. She was tall for a woman, when she stretched her hands almost reached the ceiling. “Want some water?” she asked the question casually, as if we were two friends hanging out, not a kidnapper and her captive.
“That’d be nice,” I kept my tone casual too. No point getting hysterical. No point demanding to be told where I was. She threw me a bottle that had been sitting beside her on the floor. I caught it and twisted the top off then drank deeply. I was thirsty. Real thirsty. I drank until there was nothing left, then sat back, resting my sore head against the wall. This was supposed to be the part where I asked what she wanted, what she was going to do with me, but I found that I didn’t really care all that much. It wasn’t that I wanted to die, rather that this was the most interesting thing that had happened to me in a long while. If it was about to go really bad, I didn’t want to know about it.
The loan business is boring and depressing. You see too many people fucking up, making bad decision after bad decision. Drunks coming in for a few bucks to drown their sorrows, gamblers coming in to put the house down on a loan so they could keep gambling, single mothers who already couldn’t make rent and had another baby on the way. I saw them all and I gave them all loans. They paid me many times over for the money I lent them and if they didn’t, well, they lost what little they had left. I saw people at their most desperate all the time. Compared to what some of them went through, what was happening to me was nothing at all.
“You’re mighty calm.” There was a Southern twang in her voice that hadn’t been there before.
“I guess.” I held the bottle in both hands, twisting it around for something to do.
She walked over, her long legs looking longer from my vantage point near the floor. They folded as she knelt in front of me and looked at me with a puzzled intensity. “Don’t you want to know if I’m going to kill you?”
I shrugged. It hurt. Every movement made my head hurt. “Not really.”
Her mouth quirked. Maybe she was disappointed that I wasn’t blubbering and pleading with her to let me go. “Why not?”
“That’s the sort of thing I don’t need to see coming.”
She laughed then. “You’re a funny girl.”
I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t a funny girl. I’d never been funny. Never been charming. Never been anything but smart enough to know that a penny saved is a pound earned if you played your cards right.
“Well I’m not going to kill you,” she patted my shoulder gently.
“Good to know.”
She smiled and it seemed genuine. The crow’s feet around her eyes wrinkled with the motion. “You really don’t care, do you?”
“It’s not up to me, so no.”
“You mean it’s not in your control.”
“Not whilst you have the gun and I don’t.”
Her smile faded slowly. “Don’t get any ideas about trying anything silly. I’d hate to have to hurt you.”
I didn’t believe that at all. She was way too comfortable with a gun, way too comfortable with my bloodied state to be someone who hated hurting people. “Would you really?”
The smile returned as a smirk. “You’re a perceptive little thing, aren’t you? I’ll rephrase. I’d hate to have to harm you.” She stood up and moved away from me, leaving me to my wounded devices.
It was uncomfortable down there on the floor. I put my hand to my head tentatively. It stung to touch and my fingers came away with fresh blood on them. I could feel dried blood congealing in my hair. Head cuts bleed more than almost any other cut. Scarlett saw what I was doing and grunted at me. “Leave it alone. The nurse will look at it soon.”
“You have a nurse?”
“The Syndicate will send a nurse.”
“What’s the Syndicate?”
That question went unanswered. I got the feeling that the Syndicate would be the ones who got my many thousands of dollars. Maybe Scarlett was nothing more than a hired gun, just another woman doing her job no matter what the cost to others. The irony of being the victim in such a situation was not lost on me.
She resumed her leaning position against the far wall, her eyes on me steadily. She watched me like it would kill her to take her eyes off me, like I was the most dangerous thing in the world. I moved into a more comfortable position, my knees bent in front of me, my arms crossed on top of them. I was beginning to shake from cold and shock. Maybe I wasn’t as calm and collected as I pretended to be. Scarlett made a grunting noise, got up and walked out, slamming the door shut. She came back a minute later with a blanket over her arm. She tossed it at me as she walked in. “Put that around you.”
It wasn’t exactly a hug and a lollipop, but I appreciated the small kindness. I pulled the blanket around me, grateful that it seemed clean. It was definitely warm. Even that little bit of comfort made me feel better. With the warmth of the blanket I slowly stopped shaking. We didn’t talk much after that. What was there to say? Most social situations are covered by a script. You see a distant friend, you say hello, you ask how they’re doing, they say they’re fine. You buy something at a shop, the checkout clerk tells you to have a nice day, you return the sentiment. There’s no small talk script for a kidnap situation.
The nurse turned out to be a guy in his mid thirties with a tired, weary expression. He didn’t want to be there. His hurried movements and haunted look told me that. He didn’t meet Scarlett’s eyes, not even when she opened the door for him, instead he’d glance at her out of the corner of his eye when he spoke to her, keeping his head bowed as if he was afraid she might hurt him.
Me he was not so cautious of. He crouched town and poked around my head a bit before breaking out some antiseptic and making the pain much, much worse. “She’s fine. Bit banged up” he declared eventually. He offered me painkillers, two white tablets. I reached for them, hesitated, then refused them. I didn’t want to be out of my skull on meds when whatever happened next happened. I wanted my wits about me.
“Thanks, you can get out of here,” Scarlett dismissed him.
“Thank you Ma’am.” He was gone fast. No desire to hang around the crime scene I guessed. Or maybe Scarlett just scared him that much. Maybe he knew something about her I didn’t.
“Can you stand?” Scarlett asked me.
“I think so.”
“Good. Get up.”
I got up. I was a bit wobbly on my feet at first and my head throbbed aggressively, but I made it to the door and followed Scarlett out into bright sunlight. My feet crunched on gravel and the reason for the cell like quality of the room became apparent when I turned around to see what I’d been cooped up in. It was squat and rusted red, held together with rivets. We’d been inside shipping container the entire time, on the side of some railway tracks in the middle of fuck knows where. Probably the outskirts of town. I thought I could see the silhouetted forms of the city’s skyscrapers out in the distance.
There was a card parked a few yards away from the container, a solid white sedan. It looked dependable, the sort of sensible vehicle an environmentally aware mom would drive. Scarlett opened the back door and made an inviting motion with her arm. “Get in.”
I hesitated. A fact came floating to mind, something I’d seen on a documentary some time. If you were kidnapped, it was getting in the car that got you killed. Once you were taken to another location, you’d had it. If you were kidnapped you were never supposed to get into a car. Of course I’d already been bundled into a car once and I was still alive, so I was beating the odds.“Where are we going?”
Her face got hard. She’d put the gun away, holstered it somewhere I couldn’t see, but it was still on her, I was sure of that. Scarlett struck me as being one of those people who was always weaponized one way or another. Even stark naked she would have retained her native threat, I was sure of it. “Get in.” She ground the words out, ignoring my question.
I backed away a step, then another. It was just me and her. Some survival instinct told me that if I got away now, I’d avoid whatever she had in store for me and I’d be glad of that fact.
“Don’t fucking do it, Ricky.” She was swearing, but she didn’t seem angry. She just seemed determined and impatient.
I took another step back. Every step took me closer to freedom. Her brow quirked as I took another step. She seemed surprised at my defiance, as if she had expected obedience. Still she didn’t move to come after me. She just watched me. It was almost like she wanted to stop me by sheer will alone. It wasn’t going to work on me though, not now. I’d had enough. I wanted to go home. I wanted to see a real doctor. I wanted to press some charges and see this bitch’s ass hauled into court.
“I’m going home.” I turned around and started walking. It wasn’t the best part of town to wander around in wounded, but who knew where I’d end up if I didn’t get away now.
Click. I heard the sound of the gun being cocked behind me. I froze. Dammit. I hadn’t wanted to freeze. I’d wanted to be courageous and brave and just walk out of there and let her shoot me in the back if she wanted to, but the pain in my head was bad enough, I didn’t want to imagine what a bullet in the back felt like.
“Come back here, sweetheart.” The endearment was out of place and yet there was a note of sincerity in her voice.
I turned around slowly, not wanting to make any sudden movements. She hadn’t said anything about not making sudden movements, but I was running on the snippets of information gleaned from years of television. When someone had a gun, you definitely weren’t supposed to make any sudden movements. You were supposed to put your hands up. I raised my hands to my shoulder, palms facing her.
“Put them down,” she hissed. “You look like you have a gun pulled on you.”
I did have a gun pulled on me. That was the thing. That was the thing in it’s entirety in fact. I put my hands down pretty smartly and stood there gormlessly, waiting for her next instruction. My own attempts at working out what I was supposed to be doing had not gone down well at all.
She motioned to the interior of the car with the business end of the pistol. I got the general idea. Shuffling forward, I resigned myself to my fate. She had the gun, she made the rules. I’d bide my time and hope that it didn’t run out before I managed to find some way to escape.
Before I reached the door she grabbed me and pressed me, face first, up against the driver’s side of the car none too gently. A bolt of panic shot through my body, but it was entirely useless. There was no option for flight and fighting her was out of the question. I heard her holster the gun, then her gun hand came down firmly against my ass with a loud smack that echoed around the train yard. The polyester business pants I wore might have been ironing free, but they did precisely nothing to protect me from her palm. She smacked me harder and I cried out involuntarily. I felt her body pressed along mine again, her lips close to my ear. She was taller than me and when she loomed over me, I felt incredibly small and weak. Precisely what she wanted me to feel.
“Do as you’re told and you won’t get hurt,” she purred. “Be a bad girl and you’ll be punished, understand?”
“I understand.” I understood that my head was killing me and now my ass was stinging. Her hand was still there, cupping my cheek and she gave my bottom a squeeze before she let go.
“Good girl.”
Forget everything you know, forget every lesson you were ever taught. All the rules have been broken, all bets have been called off. The world as you know it is about to disappear.
I thought I knew how the game worked. I thought I had it all figured out, slinging high interest loans to people too stupid to know better or too far gone to have any other option. I had a nice car, a house in the suburbs. I had cable television, twenty four hour make up and shoes that matched my handbag. I was an apex predator at the top of my game. I thought I was untouchable. I was wrong.
I’d forgotten one thing, one very important thing. It doesn’t matter how big you are – there’s always a bigger shark out there. In my case, that shark was a revolutionary named Scarlett Black. She didn’t just want my money, she wanted me. All of me. She claimed my body, opened my mind and demanded nothing less than total obedience. She didn’t get it.
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