Jace

 

“Please, please, please,” I babbled, “you gotta grab Benji, too.”

 

“Ain't grabbing your fucking dog,” the Boss said as he dragged me by the arm to the stairwell. Guests were spilling out of their rooms, the looks on their faces more concerned and confused than anything else.

 

“She's not my dog,” I protested as he threw open the door for the stairs and pulled me along behind him. “She's one of the other girls. When the cops find Sven, they're going to connect him back to her through the hotel. Then, they'll connect her to me and you! We gotta get her out of here!”

 

I wanted out of this hotel, badly. If I didn't get out of here, and I went up for killing Sven, I'd never get a chance to take my shot at the man holding my arm in a vice grip. It didn't matter if he was even sexier in person than he had been on Sven's phone, The Boss was my real owner, the one ultimately responsible for Tommy's death. Sven had just been a hired lackey.

 

But, if the cops got hold of Benji, she'd fold like a house of cards. There wasn't any sense in betting on her doing anything else.

 

Besides that, Benji was my friend. My only friend really. She and I were roommates, co-workers, confidantes. But she could be real soft, real sensitive. Like a flower that had to ask permission to bloom.

 

“Look,” I said as the Boss started to drag me down the stairs behind him, “I saw the way she handled Orleans Parish Jail. She ain't gonna last if the cops start asking her questions.”

 

The Boss and his friend stopped in the middle of the stairs, their breath heavy and their eyes searching around desperately for a clue as to their next step. They exchanged glances, and the Boss nodded to his buddy. He looked back to me. “What room?”

 

I gave them Benji's regular room number, the one Sven normally got her up on the eleventh floor, two above us.

 

“Meet you at the car, man,” the Boss said.

 

Boss's buddy took off, up the stairs, but stopped a few steps up. “Hey, you,” he called to us. “What's your name, girl?”

 

“Huh?” I asked, eloquently.

 

“So Benji knows I'm on the up-and-up.”

 

“Jace,” I said. “Tell her Belle says to get the fuck moving.”

 

The Boss gave me a weird look, and I just shrugged back at him. “Inside joke,” I muttered as the other guy went sprinting up the stairs to retrieve Benji.

 

We, though, scrambled down the opposite way as fast as my heels would carry me without snapping in two. And, the whole way, I repeated my silent little mantra: Act normal, Jace. Act normal, Jace.

 

# # #

Koen

 

I wasn't sure what to think about the whore beside me in the front seat, or the shit that was babbling out of her mouth. And she wouldn't stop fucking calling me “Boss.”

 

We sat there for a few minutes in the nondescript sedan we'd brought for the meeting, my hands wrapped in a death grip around the steering wheel as my eyes searched back and forth for signs of Fed and this new girl, Benji.

 

“Where we going after this?” she asked as she touched up her garish red lipstick in the mirror. I noticed her hand shaking, just the tiniest amount. She must have caught it, too, because she immediately snapped her lipstick back together and put it away in her purse.

 

“Where are we going?” I repeated back. “Bus station, maybe? You got somewhere you can hide out, get clear of town?”

 

She shook her head, pressed her lips together. “Nope, no place.”

 

There was something about the way she did it, too, that gave me a faint stirring in the front of my jeans. Sure, she was a sex worker, but I didn't really care about that. Long as she was clean, right? But, there was just a small part of her that I just couldn’t quite place my finger on. Something just purely sexual about her, like she had no concept of what it would be like to be uncomfortable with her sexuality, with her body.

 

She turned to me, smiled just the smallest amount. “You really gonna send your little investments away that fast, anyways?”

 

I blinked, shook my head as I laughed a little. “My . . . investments? What in the hell's that supposed to mean?”

 

“Means, you got your property back in one piece, Boss.”

 

My mouth dropped open in surprise, but I remained silent. This sweet little thing had just legitimately stunned me into silence, mainly because the words coming out of her mouth were so damned crazy. F&B may have done a lot of unsavory shit in our times but, unless I was missing something pretty big here, we'd never run girls before. That was a little outside our wheelhouse.

 

Before I could respond, though, I heard Fed herding along the other girl through the garage, towards us. “Come on,” Fed said, his voice exasperated. “Car's up here.”

 

Jace's friend was a real looker, too. She looked like she was a couple years older, maybe, but with all the makeup on both of them it was kind of hard to tell exact ages for sure. She moved with less sureness in each stride of her high-heeled leg, though, like she was less certain about what life was going to throw at her, and more wary of the various ways it could downright screw with us all.

 

“Swear to God, if Jace ain't here with y'all,” said the girl in a higher-pitched voice, “I don't know what I'll do.”

 

I laughed a little, despite the situation, at how ridiculous that statement had been. I mean, we were all in that “I don't know what I'll do” boat. At least she honest about it, right?

 

Soon enough, though, Fed had her stuffed in the backseat. “Got her,” he said, almost conversationally, as they both settled into the backseat.

 

I started the car up and pulled us out of the parking spot. The girls immediately began talking, but I just tuned them out as I ran through the drastic change of plans that had just been forced onto me and Fed.

 

Not only were we not able to find a better connection, now we had two real Pros dropped in our lap. And, maybe, just maybe, a murder the cops could involve us in. Great.

 

But, still, I knew we could overcome our problems. Sure, it was a setback, but just a minor one. After all, we had our regular leads in Volkov. So what if we had two girls on our hands? They were only wrinkles in the big scheme of things. Besides, the one who was riding shotgun with me had legs for days.

 

As we pulled out into the noise and traffic of a New Orleans night, with all its lights and humid heat, I turned slightly to Jace. “Alright,” I said. “Talk. What the fuck happened back there?”

 

“Yeah,” Benji asked from the back seat, her voice almost quavering, “what the hell happened back there? This guy pulled me away from a client.”

 

I watched as Jace tentatively licked her freshly-painted lips, as her eyes searched carefully around the car. “Okay,” she said after a moment, before getting up and half-turning in the seat so she can address all three of us. “I was in the room with a John, right? Then, Sven bursts in on us and starts trying to shake the guy down, okay? Sven's getting real mean with the guy, talking all sorts of crazy Russian shit to him, then my John pulls out a gun. Then, next thing you know, my John and Sven, they've shot each other, and I'm just standing there.” She turned to me as she finished, her eyes boring into the side of my head, like she was checking for my reaction to her story.

 

I'd been glancing her way while she spoke, trying to get a bead on her. Something about this whole thing didn't add up. I'd only heard one shot, but we'd just arrived on the scene. Clearly, we hadn't heard the whole thing, because we hadn't been there long enough. So, there was that.

 

I chewed on the inside of my mouth. All we had to go on was the word of his hooker we'd just met fifteen minutes before. But, despite my misgivings, there was something about her. Something about those cupid's bow lips, about those big brown eyes of hers, and the swell of her hips beneath that too- tight skirt.

 

It occurred to me then, as I followed the line of one long leg up to the hem of her skirt in the peripheral of my vision, that I didn't know anything about them. I shook my head, wiped a hand down my face.

 

“Alright,” I said, “first thing's first. I'm Koen, Fed's my buddy. Now, Benji, where can we take you?”

 

Before Benji could open her mouth, though, Jace was already interjecting. “We ain't got nowhere, like I told you,” she said. “We're yours now, Boss.”

 

I shook my head and Fed just guffawed. “Ours? Y'all girls ain't ours!”

 

“Well, Sven made it seem like you were!” Jace said. “He said you were the Boss, and that we were supposed to listen to you. That you were our new owners. So, now we're your problem. You want the police to get hold of us?”

 

“Hey, Jace,” Benji started to say, her voice worried, “I don't-”

 

“We can't go back to the apartment, Benji,” Jace said, cutting her friend off. “You wanna go back to Parish Jail again?”

 

Benji exhaled a frustrated breath through her nose. “No,” she said, quietly. “Guess not.”

 

“Exactly,” Jace said, her voice sounding oddly satisfied. She slid a hand down onto my lap before I realized what she was doing, and warmly patted my thigh. “So, the Boss is going to help us out.” She squeezed me through my jeans.

 

Her tiny hand with its long, painted nails on my thigh suddenly reminded me that it had been a while, at least a couple weeks, since I'd been with a woman. And, something about the way this little thing handled herself told me she'd be quite the ride once I got her motor going. “Alright,” I said before I'd had a chance to think about the words, “you can hole up at Hellfire for a while.”

 

“Koen,” Fed said, his voice wary, warning.

 

I glanced up and caught his eyes in the rearview mirror. “Just for the night, Fed,” I said. “Till we can figure out what the fuck to do with 'em.”

 

Conversation died down after that, but we were soon pulling up near the club anyways.

 

We piled out of the car after I turned the car off, with Fed coming around to join me as the two girls embraced tightly in the yellow pool of light under the nearby streetlight. “Koen,” Fed said, his voice quiet and reserved, “we got a major problem here, buddy.”

 

“Yeah?” I asked, even though I knew we did. But, I didn't want to admit it to him or myself as my eyes traveling up and down Jace's tight little body, still wrapped tightly with Benji's in a sisterly embrace.

 

“Dude, Koen, man, we don't own these girls, not now or ever. What the fuck we gonna do with 'em?”

 

Do with them? I could think of lots of things to with Jace, at least in the short term. But, in the long term?

 

I didn't have a fucking clue.