Touch Me

4. Karl

Karl

I wasn't sure what to think about the w***e beside me in the front seat, or the s**t that was babbling out of her mouth. And she wouldn't stop f*****g 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 s*x 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 s****l 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 s**t 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.”

Jassy'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 Jassy 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 Jassy. “Alright,” I said. “Talk. What the f**k 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 Jassy 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 s**t 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 Karl, Fed's my buddy. Now, Benji, where can we take you?”

Before Benji could open her mouth, though, Jassy 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!” Jassy 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, Jassy,” Benji started to say, her voice worried, “I don't-”

“We can't go back to the apartment, Benji,” Jassy 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,” Jassy 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.”

“Karl,” 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 f**k 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. “Karl,” 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 Jassy's tight little body, still wrapped tightly with Benji's in a sisterly embrace.

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

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

I didn't have a f*****g clue.