I’d seen movies and even read a few books with scenes of heroines being tortured until they eventually gave up the desired information to their captor, but nothing could have prepared me for the real thing. Held captive in a small concrete room with my arms and legs secured to a steel chair with duct tape, the only resistance I could muster was mental or verbal.

As far as I was concerned, the weirdo pacing the floor was going to have to kill me. My fear was that he had reached a point that he was prepared to do just that. Nevertheless, I had no intention of providing him one word of useful information.

I’d promised Vince he could trust me. Making good on my promise to him was more important than anything.

I turned my head toward the sound of his footsteps and opened my tired eyes. Dressed in a dingy wife beater, cut-off sweat shorts, and lace-up boots, he resembled a boxer in training – but I knew better. He was one of the upper echelon of the city’s underbelly, and he was currently $2,000,000 poorer than he wanted to be.

He loomed over me with a blood-stained piece of leather dangling from his clenched fist. Over the last fifteen minutes or so, the three of us had become quite intimate. “I need that fucking money,” he seethed. “All of it. I don’t give a fuck that you’re a girl. I’m going to keep beating the shit out of you with this until you answer me or you’re dead.”

Therein lied my answer.

If he was going to slap me to death with his little piece of leather, it was going to be an extremely long night. I closed my eyes and said a quick prayer that Vince would find me before the sour-smelling prick beat the life out of me.

I inhaled a slow breath and prepared for the inevitable.

“Where is he?” he demanded.

I pressed my tongue against the roof of my mouth and attempted to generate enough saliva to respond. It wasn’t as easy as one might think. Reluctantly, I made eye contact. “I told you. Over and over. I have no idea what you’re…”

In a blur, his hand came down hard against my cheek. A bright flash of light was followed by a burning sensation on the side of my face. I dragged the tip of my tongue between my teeth and my swollen cheek.

The coppery taste of blood caused my stomach to convulse.

He raised the strap and studied it. The skin on each side of the bridge of his nose was translucent and darkened, making his eye sockets appear to be sunken deep into his skull. Combined with the foul smell of his clothing, the greasy strands of shoulder-length graying hair, and his unshaven face, my guess was that he hadn’t slept in a week or more.

“You know why it feels like you’re getting hit with a piece of steel?” he asked.

It felt like he was hitting me with a ten-pound rock, but I didn’t bother responding.

He traced his index finger along the outer edge of the kidney-shaped strap. “Because it’s filled with lead. Two pieces of leather with a piece of lead sandwiched between them. It’s made for knocking the shit out of people, and nothing else. Sooner or later, you’ll talk.”

You don’t know me very well.

Although my current situation was far from pleasant, I reserved hope it would end and end soon. If Vince was as good as I believed him to be, he’d manage to find me. I just hoped he did so before it was too late.

Stinky man wiped blood from the surface of the leather with the tip of his thumb. “Where is he?”

“If you’d tell me who he is, maybe I can help you,” I lied.

A grumbling sound escaped his lungs. It resembled the growl of an animal. A predator. I clenched my jaw in anticipation of what was sure to come.

With the strap clenched tight in his fist, he pressed the heels of his palms against his temples and murmured something. There were two modes of speaking for him – mumbling and screaming. Oddly, I preferred the latter. When he muttered I had no idea what he was thinking. When he shouted, at least his thoughts were made clear.

He turned to face me.

His eyes narrowed to slits. “The fucking ghost,” he said through his teeth. “El Fantasma. The man with my god damned money.”

My eyes fell to the floor.

That’s what they were calling him.

El Fantasma.

In and out without a trace. Some claimed he wasn’t human. Others believed what had been happening to the city’s drug dealers and thieves was simply karma.

I knew better.

El Fantasma was real, he was walking sex, and he was the man I had fallen in love with. On the day we met I sold him a car. While we were on our test drive, he kidnapped a man, and then paid me nineteen thousand dollars to keep my mouth shut.

Since that day, the truth was getting harder to believe and increasingly impossible to divulge. Lies, on the other hand, were commonplace and rolled from the tip of my tongue with ease.

I wouldn’t change things if I could. The lies allowed us to continue living a life that was fast-paced, always entertaining, and rewarding in many ways. What he was doing may have been immoral in the eyes of many, but the few who clearly understood his means and methods would understand it as nothing but a necessity. In short, he did what he did for the betterment of mankind, and to cleanse the community of shit-hats like the one standing before me.

Fully prepared to tell yet another lie, I glanced up and met the hardened gaze of the man who was determined to beat me into speaking. As I did, I noticed a green eye staring back at me from between the door and the doorframe that was positioned immediately behind him.

My mouth twisted into a shitty little smirk. I liked it when Vince’s eyes looked green.

A confused look washed over my captor. Maybe he thought I was having a moment of clarity, or that the truth was going to spill from my lips.

“Oh, the Ghost?” I asked. “El Fantasma?”

The door behind my abductor opened a few more inches.

With his back to the door and unaware of who was behind him, stinky man grinned enough to expose his yellow teeth. “Yeah.” He slapped the leather strap against his open palm. “Where is he?”

I tossed my head toward the only door in the room. “He’s right behind you.”

It was the first time I’d told the truth all night.