Chapter Two: Hannah Silvestri
The sounds and smells of the city filtered through the gauzy curtains over my windows when a whisper of a breeze came through. The night was hot and mostly still, one of those nights in Chicago where everyone and everything seems a hairsbreadth away from melting. The ancient air conditioner jammed into the other window had died two days before, and though I’d asked three or four times, no one had come to fix it yet.
The rhythmic thump of Girls, Girls, Girls filtered through the floor from the club below. Lucky me, I lived above Pussy Whipped, my brother’s strip club. Any money my brother made went back into the club or into his pocket, not in the areas no one saw. It was a shithole apartment and he let me live there free, so in his mind, I had little right to bitch about anything. The paint was peeling on every wall, and the ceiling had a crack that leaked water in a heavy rain. This had caused a huge stain that looked disgusting and was probably festering into deadly mole, but at least it was on the ceiling, so I never looked up and tried not to think about the tiny spores burrowing not my lungs.
A tiny bedroom lay off the living room, and the adjoining bathroom had been remodeled sometime in the eighties. The puke green was a lovely color. All in all, not a decorator’s dream, but I did have a small kitchenette, which served my purposes because all I really needed was a small fridge and a microwave. I got most of my meals from the club’s kitchen, and when I was ready for take-out, almost anyone in the neighborhood would deliver to the club, hoping for a free peepshow.
I was comfortable enough, but the noise level of the music, not to mention the sounds of the catcalls made by its illustrious patrons and the city noise outside, made it hard to concentrate, one of the many prices I paid for being the sister of Richie Silvestri.
I guess I should have been grateful he refused to allow me to dance. Such a good brother to keep his sister from stripping. As it was, I bartended the day shift, mostly because Richie thought the classier men came in during the day. There was nothing classier than a man who spent his hard-earned money going to a strip club during lunch hour and happy hour. And they all leered at me like I was a piece of meat in a butcher’s front window. Not in my most terrible nightmares would I give any of them the time of day, much less allow them into my bed. I wanted a man who wanted me, not some body dancing around a pole.
I’d seen them all lined up at the bar and the tables around the center stage—politicians, guys in suits, office workers, the construction guys, the factory rats. Very few of them tipped the bartender well because they’d earmarked their money on the hot fantasies shaking pussy and tits in their faces. Fantasy was the right word because, underneath the erotic outfits and the cliché names, the daytime ladies would never be indulging the fantasies of these men with no future, no hope, no passion in their lives except the hard-on in their pants. These women were single mothers, women going to night school, trapped girls trying to make enough money to get back home to Boise and Omaha and Bismarck, women who’d once held big dreams for Chicago. I could have told them dreams died in Chicago, but they wouldn’t have listened. You had to live it to believe it.
None of the women gave a damn who passed over the dollar—sometimes a five or ten—as long as it got passed. Yet the men were all looking for that hookup, not knowing that the stripper with the heart of gold, the hot body, and adoring gaze was a fantasy only in their pornographic imaginations. None of the dancers cared who these men were or what they wanted. The women wanted their money, plain and simple, because they had to feed their kids and buy that bus ticket back to failure and lost dreams.
All of us were trapped between fantasy and reality, playing mind games and just trying to make it through our ten-hour shifts. I really hated the daytime.
The nighttime, though, belonged to me. Richie thought I watched Netflix and read romance novels up here in my tiny apartment. If he knew I was working toward a degree, my internet would have been unplugged between one heartbeat and the next. Richie thought women were good for two things—stripping or pushing out kids. I had created a problem for my brother because he didn’t want me doing either.
I finished up my lesson for the night and saved everything on the flash drive. I had just hit Clear Browser History when a fist pounded on my door. My heart skipped a beat.
“Jesus, hang the fuck on,” I yelled.
I shoved the flash drive into the pocket of my shorts.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me, Butch.”
My head dropped before I could hold in the sigh, and though my heart tried to return to a normal rhythm, the sound of Butch Collette’s voice always made my hackles rise. They didn’t come uglier than Butch—or meaner. What the hell was he doing here?
“What do you want, Butch?”
Something knocked against the door, and then I heard the rattle of something metallic.
“Came to fix your window unit.”
Yeah, right. My brother’s right-hand man and enforcer had decided to play service technician? Something wasn’t right here. The man would do anything to be alone with me. I guess I had to give him props for at least finding a valid reason to come to my apartment instead of stalking me on the bar floor like he did every afternoon.
I glanced at the clock on the microwave. It was almost midnight. I went to the door and opened it a crack, making sure to keep the chain in place. Not that a chain—or a door for that matter—would matter to Butch. If he really wanted in, he’d get in.
I peered through the opening, up, up, up into Butch’s face. His bald pate glistened with sweat. The scar on his chin blazed a fiery trail over his skin and cut through his lip. No one talked about that scar, but rumor had it he’d gotten it while protecting Richie from a very dissatisfied customer years ago. Butch had carte blanche around here because of that scar. The prison tats on his hands and arms signaled Butch was a badass motherfucker. I never asked what they meant because I didn’t want to be more scared than I was.
Yes, he scared me, but that didn’t mean I had to let him in my house. Richie thought Butch walked on water, but he would back me on that.
“I’m getting ready for bed, Butch.”
Bed. Wrong thing to say. His piggy eyes lit up as he raked his gaze down the gap, trying to see anything at all, any flash of skin. My skin crawled. I curled behind the door and pressed against it, hoping to become invisible. No such luck because his gaze just came back to mine. I felt the flash drive in my pocket like a dirty secret as I tried not to cower under his stare.
“Anything I can help with?” he asked, giving me a lurid smile.
I almost vomited right there at my front door.
“No…thank you.” I swallowed hard.
“I brought the tools.” He held up a metal toolbox and rattled it for effect. I knew for a fact a hammer and screwdriver weren’t going to cut it on an air conditioning unit. That was the box they used to fix the stripper poles downstairs and occasionally tighten a screw on a barstool.
“Can we do this tomorrow please? Maybe before my shift?”
“Seven thirty?”
“Sure. That sounds great.” I tried to smile, but it felt lost inside. I wasn’t even sure I knew how to smile anymore. I’d heard it often enough at the bar.
“Hey, beautiful, nice ass… give me a smile with those ruby red lips...”
What I wanted to do every time I heard it was smash a beer bottle against the counter and shove it in the guy’s throat just to shut him up.
I really needed out of this town.
“Okay, Hannah,” Butch grunted. “See you in the morning.”
He gave me a gap-toothed smile, turned and lumbered down the staircase, all six-feet-five, two hundred fifty pounds of him, muscles and sinew and bone, so much there to inflict pain. Each step creaked a protest beneath his frame.
I closed the door and locked all three locks, and then for good measure, I shoved a chair under the knob. None of it would have stopped him. He became a charging bull under the right circumstances.
My legs buckled, and I hit the floor hard. The flash drive poked into my hip, reminding me I needed to put it in the tampon box with the others. As far as I knew, Richie never came into my apartment. Why would he? He knew I was a scared little mouse watching the cats prowl around the house with absolute impunity. Every step I took, every move I made, brought the potential for the snap of the traps that seemed to encompass every aspect of my life.
Someday…
I just kept telling myself…
Someday…
Someday I would be free.
But in the meantime, I was stuck here until I could do something better.
Then the flash drive joined the other four, which held the courses I’d already completed, in a tampon box in the top of the bathroom closet, each stuffed into a little cardboard tube which I knew no man would ever want to touch.