Nikki was a block away from her apartment, at an all-night diner on the corner.  The night air had calmed her down enough that she wasn’t shaking anymore, and she didn’t look too desperate among the desperate people who spent their time in all-night diners.  But even though she didn’t look the part, she was the part.  She was as desperate as she had ever been in her entire life.

So desperate that she actually called her father.

She knew it would have been easier to call Donald Trump and ask for a favor.  That was the kind of relationship they had.

And then, over her phone, she heard his voice.

“What?”

No hello daughter.  No how are you daughter.  Nikki knew it was going to be hard.  But damn.  But she knew her father.  She cut to the chase.  “I need your help.”

“I needed yours, but you still snitched on me.”

Nikki leaned her head back. Talk about a soul who’d been misunderstood!  No, she thought.  Not misunderstood. Lied on!  Falsely accused!  Judged to have done something that she would have never, not if her life depended on it, do!  “I didn’t snitch on you.”

“If you wanted to divorce Damon, all you had to do was divorce him.  But oh no!  Not Miss Self-Righteous!  You had to take him down first.  You had to tell the Feds everything he was up to.  And that got them snooping.”

“I didn’t snitch on you.  I didn’t snitch on Damon.  I didn’t snitch on anybody.  It wasn’t me.”

But her father was unforgiving.  “You know what, bitch: tell it to the Feds.  You talked your ass off then.  Talk to them now!  I spent five years in prison because of you!”

“Because of me?”  Nikki remembered how even as a little girl that man used to hide in big freezers the money he got from pimping out hookers who lived on their block.  How she used to have to lie for him.  How she became a badass big mouth by covering up all of his crimes.  And he was blaming her?  “You spent five years in prison because of what your ass did,” she shot back.

But, as she knew would be the case, he ignored her truth.  That little fact was too inconvenient for him to admit.  “Five long years,” he declared.  “One thousand-eight-hundred-and-twenty-five days.  This time of morning, and I still remember that number!  My wife died while I was in that prison.  I lost everything!  And you need my help?  You’re calling for my help?  Fuck you, bitch!  Fuck you!”

And he ended the conversation.

Nikki closed her eyes.  Why oh-why did she call that fool?

But that was what desperation did to you.  She thought about that prison she could spend the rest of her life wasting away in.  Pride was no longer an emotion she could afford to have.

That was why she called another fool: Damon Tarver.

Damon was her ex-husband.  He’d been her father’s righthand man for years, and the guy who would transport hoes across state lines for him.  But by crossing state lines, their little local prostitution ring became a federal offense.  The kind of offense that got the Feds’ attention.  Her father had been paying off the local cops to keep quiet.  He couldn’t pay off the Feds.

But Damon, like her father, insisted it wasn’t their actions, but Nikki’s big mouth, that got the Feds interested.  It was her need to punish him for fucking other girls that caused her to snitch on him and take him down, and her own father down, too, while she was at it.   She was steeling herself for another bad conversation.

But it never happened.  Damon, unlike her father, had the good sense to block her number.  Damon had the good sense to not even try to bother with her ever again.  She sat her cell phone down and closed her eyes. She was running out of options.

She had to consider her situation.  She had the body of a white man, a man the cops would declare was a good, respectable gentleman, inside her apartment.  A body that might, or might not, be dead.  Daybreak would emerge soon enough, and Louie might be missed right away.  The cops might be called.  They might search each and every apartment.  Some insomniac might have heard her and Louie arguing over rent when she first came home earlier, or the racket they made in her apartment, and he might tell the cops.  Her apartment could be the first one checked!

She called the one man she had wanted to call after she first fired that shot.  But it would be like calling a movie star and asking for a favor just because you liked his movies.  It was a fool’s errand, in other words.

But she knew a gangster when she saw one.  Her father peddled sex, but he had to have gangster tendencies to peddle it.  Her ex was a sex trafficker, too, with similar gangster ways.  Teddy Sinatra was just gangster.  And at a time like this?  Full-blown gangster was what she needed.

She picked back up her cell phone and decided to torture herself one more time.