Don't Let Go (Dark Erotica) Read online

  A windblown Santa Claus sat on a metal chair, his snow-colored beard long and crinkly. That was my first impression, and the orange jumpsuit did little to dispel his genial appearance. It was only when he turned to me that I saw his face, the way the scar tissue furled in on his eyes, threatening to close them. It wouldn’t have made any difference if it had; his eyes were a glassy blue, unseeing.

  Daniel Fuentes was blind.

  One of the only men in custody who’d ever seen Laguardia, and he wouldn’t be able to describe him. A coincidence? I couldn’t believe that. I suspected he was still alive, not because of the twenty guards we’d passed between the entrance and here, but because he couldn’t identify Laguardia.

  Fuck.

  Hennessey didn’t seem fazed by this new development. He’d probably already known about the man’s blindness when he set up the interview.

  “Who’s the bitch?” Fuentes grunted.

  Charming. And creepy, considering he couldn’t see me. Sharpened sense of hearing, I guessed. Hennessy smoothly pulled out a chair and nodded, directing me to sit. I sat.

  “Agent Holmes will be attending this interview. I’m Agent Ian Hennessey.”

  “And I’m Mother Fucking Theresa. What do you want from me?”

  Hennessy didn’t even blink. The other man couldn’t see him, but his expression was smooth as silk, as if he sat in front of a busy courtroom, a poker face. Now I understood why he’d told me not to smile. The urge to laugh bubbled up in me from some previously untapped spring, a combination of nerves and latent appreciation of the absurdity of the situation.

  A blind coke-head Santa Clause in an orange suit sitting across from the crisply-starched renowned Ian Hennessey. My life was surreal, but then what else was new? When I was seven years old, I’d woken up from a bad dream and gone looking for my father. He’d been washing blood off his hands in the sink, and he’d steered me back to bed.

  He’d touched my shoulder with the blood of another child, and I’d fallen into a kind of terrified trance. I’d never woken up, not even when he’d been put in jail, not even when he attacked me there. Everything had always felt wavering and unreal, and the shuddering lights in this room only emphasized it. This is my life. I’ll never wake up.

  Hennessey asked him the standard questions. Where were you on this date or that? Do you have any knowledge of drug activity, of shipments? Bullshit answers. Curse words. Fuentes called Hennessey’s mom a fat slut pig who he fucked in the skull, and Hennessey asked, in a voice so casual and smooth, if he’d ever met a man known as Carlos Laguardia.

  Fuentes stiffened. He tried to hide his reaction, but I saw it.

  Hennessey did too. He leaned forward. “When?”

  Fuentes kicked back suddenly, almost toppling backward, letting loose a stream of rapid-fire Spanish swear words. I jumped at the sudden movement, ruining my statue imitation. Hennessey just looked at him, as if faintly curious, like watching the movements of ants on a park bench.

  The man didn’t look like Santa anymore. His eyes rolled around, landing on nothing. He panted, the wild hair like foam at the mouth. “You can’t make me say nothing. You can’t fucking make me. I’m not going to die.”

  His fear was infectious; it filled the room, an airborne pathogen. I caught it, breathed it in. My pulse raced, my palms sweated. Even the unmovable Hennessey shifted in his seat, as if he felt a fourth presence in the room, a ghost standing beside the table. Carlos Laguardia.

  “You’re safe here,” Hennessey said. “I can protect you.”

  “Fuck you,” Fuentes spat. “You fucking hijo de puta motherfucker with your fucking badge, thinking you own everyone. Thinking you control everyone. Well, you don’t control me, and you can’t make me talk.”

  “I can protect you,” Hennessey repeated. “But only if you help me. Otherwise you’re just another inmate. What can I do about that?” He turned to me, then, as if he expected me to answer. I stared back, wide-eyed. He continued, “I can’t do anything to help a man charged with your crimes, a guilty man. But if you helped me, right now, I would make a call—”

  “No.” Anxiety thickened Fuentes’s voice. “No calls. No calls.”

  I couldn’t even blame him. Carlos had friends in supposedly safe places. Cops. Security guards. Who’s to say he didn’t have a friend in the Witness Protection Program?

  But his fear proved one thing: he knew something. Something useful, something he wasn’t telling us. Hennessey knew it too. His gray eyes glinted with renewed purpose.

  Hennessey’s voice lowered, soothing and almost seductive. “Fuentes, I want to help you. But I need to know you’re on my side. I have to know that I can trust you.”

  Fuentes moaned, rocking slightly in his chair. Animal sounds filled the room. His chair clattered against the concrete floor. My heart crawled up into my throat. This was real fear, like the shadow of a memory, something I’d been running from for a long time.

  I’d been frozen the first time I’d seen blood on my father’s hands, the first time he’d touched it to my cheek and wished me goodnight. What do you remember? I was broken inside, a psychotic break at age six that I’d been so careful to hide from the world. I never knew emotions the way other people did. I didn’t have morals, and I found his fear so cold, so alluring. I wanted to touch it, to place my palm against the frosted glass and leave a handprint behind.

  I’d only ever wanted to be normal, prayed for it, but it had always been too late for me. While other children had backed away from white vans, I’d looked at them with longing. I wanted to be special enough to be taken. I wanted to matter that much.

  “Just give us something, a show of faith,” Hennessey continued, relentless.

  “Why don’t you ask Carlos’s puta, huh? The bitch lives here, right? Married one of your fucking badges, didn’t she?”

  I remembered reading about the woman Carlos had kept around for obvious reasons. She’d turned on him and managed to escape alive.

  So it was possible.

  Hennessey was inexorable. “I’m asking you. Or I might let it slip that you did tell us something. I bet some people wouldn’t be happy about that.”

  His threat rang in the air, shocking me. Did we do that? Did we threaten to do something that would have an inmate killed? Would he follow through with it?

  Fuentes shook his head, muttering nonsense words, a tie-dye language of English and Spanish and stilted ghetto slang I knew from my childhood.

  It was too late for him. He was blind and broken and locked in one of the tightest security holds that existed. He had a hundred charges against him. If he got out, he would have to face Laguardia. He had no hope, but if there was one thing he could do, if there was one man who had the power to change this man’s fate…

  “Tell him,” I said. My voice came out rusty, as if it had been hours since I’d last spoken instead of minutes. “Please, give him some information. About the shipment, anything. Maybe it won’t even matter. They’ll change it anyway, now that they know you’re caught. It doesn’t have to be useful to get you into the program. It just has to be the truth. Something you heard.”

  Hennessey looked fit to kill. Me, to be exact. His glare accused me. I told you to stay quiet. You said you would. I shrugged slightly, not sorry. Even if it didn’t help, it couldn’t hurt.

  Except Fuentes’s gaze narrowed on me as if he could see my face. In his pale flat eyes I saw a flicker of recognition. A chill went down my spine, and I wondered for a terrifying moment if his blindness was faked. The doctors in prison had ways of checking that, didn’t they? I had no idea, but God, that would be a pretty slick way to get information when people didn’t think you could.

  When I spoke again, it was quieter. “Tell us something you heard. Something you saw.”

  He blinked, a hint of confusion on his face. It was believable, that was for sure. But then, he was a liar and a murderer. I’d learned long ago not to trust men like him.

  I’d learned not to trust an
yone. I still didn’t want him to die.

  “Please,” I murmured.

  He continued to stare at me, but I felt his voice directed at Hennessey. “Fifteen minutes with her. You step outside.”

  The chill in my body turned into a deep freeze. He was asking for fifteen minutes alone…with me. I stared at Fuentes, unable to comprehend what he’d asked. So seriously, too, as if he really thought it might happen. Even though it wouldn’t. I glanced at Hennessey to be sure.

  My new partner met my gaze, and I felt a cold stab of fear. Real fear, the kind I had always been reaching for. His eyes held scales, weighing the information we could get against leaving me with Fuentes for fifteen minutes. Weighing precious information against a rookie agent. The perverted scales of justice, and they tilted against me.

  “Five,” Hennessey said.

  My heart turned into a thunderstorm, heavy and untamed. Oh God. This couldn’t be happening. It was a dream, the horrible trance. Wake up, wake up.

  Fuentes snorted. “What could I do in five minutes? Barely stand up. Nothing. Nada.”

  Feeling off balance, I stood up. My chair scraped against the floor, filling the room with an awful screech, like the scream I was incapable of making.

  “Ten minutes,” Fuentes countered.

  Hennessey stood up too, and I walked backward until the cold wall stopped me, imprinting its cracks on my body. How far would he go to get the information he needed? How far would he go to bring down a criminal? Was this how he’d managed to catch so many of them? But Hennessey wasn’t walking toward me. He circled the table, going for Fuentes.

  Fuentes backed up too, knocking over his chair. We shared a kinship in that moment, both of us terrified of Hennessey but tied to him. Like planets orbiting the sun, we needed him for survival, but we would keep our distance as long as we could. Fuentes huddled against the wall, looking pathetic even though he was larger, slightly taller and definitely wider, than Hennessey. Still, Hennessey managed to put his palms on either side of the other man’s head. He leaned over him, threatening him without a single touch.

  “I’ll leave you alone with her, but it will take less than five minutes. You’re old and handcuffed, and I’m not talking about a quick fuck anyway. I’m talking about how long it’ll take for her to kill you once I give her a knife and tell her what you did to those three little girls in Tijuana. Or was it four? You’d know better than me.”

  Fuentes was shaking. I was shaking. The world felt unsteady, an earthquake in our heads. Three little girls in Tijuana.

  What do you remember?

  I remembered rage. The impotent rage of a child. Fuentes disgusted me, but the worst part of all was that I connected with him. He looked past Hennessey’s shoulder and stared into my eyes because he felt it too. I believed he was blind in that moment, because this wasn’t a man who would want to be weaker than he already was. He heard my breathing, he felt my pain, and he homed in on it. I wanted that knife. I wanted to use it. Did Hennessey know that about me? Could he tell?

  Five minutes. Ten. What could happen in fifteen minutes?

  “Two weeks from now,” Fuentes said, wheezing. “In two weeks. There’s a building shaped like an M. An old warehouse nobody uses owned by Laguardia under a shell corporation. That’s where the drugs are going. A lot of them.” Fuentes slumped against the wall, defeated. “That’s all I can tell you.”

  Hennessey stepped back and straightened his suit. “Thank you.”

  Fuentes slid down to the floor, the orange fabric stretching grotesquely across his legs and belly. “The call?” he asked, sounding like a lost child. “You’ll make the call.”

  Hennessey nodded shortly. “I will.”

  Fuentes nodded, looking miserable. Guilt over ratting out Laguardia? Or fear for himself?

  When my legs would support me again, I pushed off the wall and followed Hennessey out of the room. We walked in silence, with only the accompaniment of metal bars clanging to mark the steps. Even when the sunlight blinded my eyes and the exhaust of the city burned my lungs, I stayed silent. Mute. Like he’d told me to be inside. Why hadn’t I listened?

  This will be our little secret, okay?

  That was what my father had told me, but I hadn’t listened to him either. I just couldn’t keep quiet, even when it was important. I was constantly searching, always reaching out, desperate for a connection that I had yet to find.

  My poise lasted until we reached his car in the parking garage. He went to the driver’s side door, but instead of getting inside, I went to stand by the wall, resting my forehead against the cool cement. Like the walls of the interview room and yet so different. Here we were free, with the sunlight streaming in through open-air spaces on the sides. Here we were safe. Tears streamed down my cheeks, as unstoppable as rain.

  I felt Hennessey behind me, and then he was turning me, pulling me close. I breathed in his scent and sank into the hardness of his embrace. I climbed inside him, standing still, while he held me, murmuring words I couldn’t understand. The cloth of his dress shirt became wet beneath my cheek, damp with tears, the transference of fear from me to him, because he was strong enough to carry the burden for both of us. Are you afraid? No. Not with him.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. Sorry for crying on you. Sorry I spoke in the room when I wasn’t supposed to. Sorry I’m a weak, inexperienced rookie you’re stuck with.

  “I wanted to spare you that,” Hennessey said gruffly. Meaning a direct confrontation with the man. I’d brought it on myself, he meant.

  “It’s okay. I knew you wouldn’t really do it, what he asked for.”

  The statement hung in the air like a question. I wanted reassurance, after that one breathless moment when I’d thought he was seriously negotiating my rape.

  Hennessey didn’t have any reassurance for me. “Fuentes gave us what we needed.”

  “And you’re going to…to make the call, right? For witness protection?” I didn’t know why I cared about a criminal. He’d probably done lots of horrible things, and I had no desire to learn the details of the girls in Tijuana. Yet it felt important that we follow through on the promise we’d made. Because for a moment, it had seemed as though the threat Hennessey had made to Fuentes was real too, spreading the word that he had talked and thus ensuring his death. Hennessey had sounded so horribly sincere, and I wanted to believe it was the mark of a great interrogator.

  Hennessey stepped back, his hands lingering on my arms a second too long. He spoke softly, with something like regret in his eyes. “You have to understand. He’s already dead. From the moment we stepped into the room. Laguardia won’t care if he talked or not. He’s a liability. From the moment he did business with a man like that, this is how it had to be.”

  It was my first glimpse of how this game really worked, outside of the weird bubble my father had created, outside of the carefully manicured lectures in the academy. In the real crime world, everyone was a target. We were all going to die here; it was just a question of when and how gruesome it would be.

  Only as we pulled away did I realize what was strange about that room. I pictured it again in my mind. Drab walls butted up against each other, with a flat ceiling stacked on top. There was no camera in that room. No mirrored window with an observation room on the other side. No evidence that Hennessey had ever threatened Fuentes, except for my word. And if Hennessey had left me in that room for five, ten, fifteen minutes, if he’d gotten the guard outside to agree, there would’ve been no evidence of that either.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The next morning, I woke up before my alarm went off. The sky outside was stained pink, like someone had washed something red with the pale sheet of sky.

  I wore my silk blouse with the pale yellow chevron patterns that I’d found at a vintage shop on a rare trip to Austin. Over that I wore a black jacket far too rigid to really be comfortable. I didn’t like it, but it was basically a requirement to be taken seriously. I was already a rookie, and my short height and chi
na doll features didn’t do me any favors.

  So I put on the sleek Italian wool, but underneath it all, I wore satin and lace and remembered the feel of a warm, solid chest beneath my cheek. I wished I could take back that moment, so he would see me as an equal instead of a scared little girl.

  No, scratch that. I wanted him to remember that moment like I would, one second of the connection I’d always been searching for. I hoped my tears had stained his shirt, turning it a grim impossible pink so he would remember I was a woman too. I’d always been ancient, really—even when I was a kid.

  I drove to work wondering how just one day could make things seem a little sharper, a little weightier. Was it Hennessey who made it different? Or was it the act of facing evil for the first time in over a decade?

  Both, maybe.

  Life or death situations could bind you to a stranger, the way I mourned every day for the children my father killed. For the children I’d let him kill before I turned him in. We were in the same position, those kids and me. At the mercy of a psychopath. But they had died, and I had lived.

  Survivor’s guilt, the textbook would say. It wasn’t me who had caused that pain; it was misfortune, coincidence, the melody of a madman. I was a victim too, they said. I was the one who had suffered, not the one who caused suffering. Except I hadn’t ever suffered, not really. No one had ever hit me or continued to touch me when I said no.

  Creepy men in white vans took one look at the jaded knowledge in my eyes and kept on driving. They knew there was no innocence left to corrupt—just a hollowed out space where my soul should have been.

  I didn’t want those men to hurt me because I liked pain. I wanted them to hurt me because I knew I deserved it all along. I’d escaped it through a twist of fate. I’d let the hurt fall to other more hopeful children. And for that, I would always deserve to be punished.