Patrick Quinlan - Smoked

He smiled.

Lola dropped the phone.

Cruz followed Moss up the narrow stairway. Moss’s bulk barely fit between the walls. His head nearly scraped the low ceiling.

Moss burst through the door and Cruz padded in behind him, moving fast, moving quietly. Moss backed the black girl, Lola, into the living room with the gun. The other girl, a slim, bookish white girl, was lying on the floor in a daze. Cruz pulled the door shut and locked it.

The girl on the floor stared up at him. Pretty girl, gone numb.

“If you do anything, I’ll kill you,” he said to her. He held up his gun for her to see it better. “It has big bullets. It’ll put big holes in your body. Understand?”

She nodded. Her eyes were wide and hollow like those of a Japanese cartoon.

“Is anyone else here?”

She gazed at him and didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer.

Cruz did a quick sweep of the apartment. He already had one extra witness. He hoped nobody else was in here. God, the bodies were piling up. He didn’t want to think about it. He went into a room. It was a bedroom with a double bed, the headboard against the wall. There was a poster of a black girl in tennis whites on the wall. Black girls played tennis? So much Cruz didn’t know. He picked in the closet. Nothing here, except some clothes, skirts and such. The room was clean. He went back outside.

He paused in the doorway and glanced over at Moss, who had Lola at gunpoint. She wore a pair of black tights and a belly shirt. Her body seemed to defy gravity. Her hair hung down in wild curls. She was something.

Moss looked at Cruz.

He grinned, and gestured at her with the gun. “Whaddya think?” he said.

Just then, Lola kicked out.

Amazingly, she knocked Moss’s gun right up into the air. Her kick – it finished high, nearly as tall as Moss’s head, and the gun flew back up and over his head, into the room Cruz was standing in. It slid across the floor. Moss watched it go. The girl followed up with a punch at Moss’s throat. Moss stepped back just before getting the brunt of it.

He laughed.

“Girl, I never saw anyone kick that high. Not in real life.”

Then she came for him.

Her movements were a blur. Moss blocked her first two punches. He was still laughing, the embarrassed laughter of a ten-year-old boy being attacked by a little girl in his class. Then Cruz saw her knee go into his groin. Moss grunted. A fist connected with his face. He barely moved. It was almost as if he was watching it happen to him. He couldn’t get his engine going. His eyes said that this sort of thing just didn’t happen. She hooked his leg, whirled and elbow smashed him in the face.

He lost his balance, stepping backwards and sideways. She kept coming.

A punch, a kick and down he went. Moss went down.

MOSS… WENT… DOWN.

It was like watching a building fall. Cruz felt the floor shake.

Incredible.

“Pamela!” Lola shouted. “Pamela, get the gun.”

The girl Pamela looked up from her stupor. Her eyes brightened as she became aware of the situation. She was four feet from the gun. Cruz was half way across the room from her. Ridiculous. Imagine if that little girl actually picked up the gun and began shooting it? She probably wouldn’t hit anything, but then again she might. In any event, a lot of shooting wasn’t the answer in this small apartment building in this residential neighborhood.

She crawled across the floor and reached for Moss’s gun.

Despite everything, Cruz felt calm. Very cool. He had seen worse than this. A lot worse. He had seen worse this very afternoon.

He held up his gun again. “Pamela,” he said.

She looked up at him. He pointed the gun at her and drew a bead down the barrel. He didn’t want to kill her. That was the last thing he wanted. Her face was perfectly centered in his iron sights.

There was no way he could pull this trigger.

“Pamela, if you pick up that gun I’m going to kill you. What I want you to do is crawl right back to where you were.”

Long seconds passed.

She backed away from the gun.

“That’s a good girl.”

As Pamela crawled away, Cruz moved in and picked up the gun. Then he backed into his doorway again, where he could get a better view of the whole apartment. He looked back over at Lola and Moss. Moss was up, circling in. He was still laughing, but he didn’t sound as enthusiastic as before. Lola circled away from him.

“Yessir,” he said, almost to himself. “I never seen anything like it.”

She swung and he blocked it with his thick arm, but an instant later her other hand came around and caught him on the side of the head. Then a foot shot up and kicked him in the balls. She danced away, just out of his reach.

“Lola!” Cruz called.

She cast an eye at him, all the while minding Moss.

“I want you to stop now,” Cruz said. “If you don’t, then I’m going to have to kill Pamela. Do you hear me? We’re here to see you. Pamela is worth nothing to us. If you don’t stop I promise I will kill her. If you do stop, I promise I’ll let her live. How does that sound to you?”

Lola faced Moss again.

“Lola, I’m going to kill her right now. Do you understand?”

Sure, she understood. She must have because she hesitated for moment, then let her arms go slack by her sides. She was winded, and she had a fine sheen of sweat on her face. Cruz pictured her dancing at a nightclub with a similar sheen on her. For an instant, he pictured her moving in bed, her body glistening.

“All right,” she said. “You win.”

Moss walked over to her.

“My friend’s going to give you some handcuffs to put on,” Cruz said.

Instead, Moss smacked her hard across the face, an open hand slap. She fell backwards onto the couch.

“The bitch kicked me in the balls,” Moss said. He wiped his mouth with his hand.

Cruz watched as Moss took out the cuffs and slapped them on.

Cruz looked at Pamela. What to do about her?

Moss came over and stuck out his hand. It seemed a foot wide. He didn’t look Cruz in the eye. He doesn’t like that, Cruz thought. Tangling with a little girl, and being rescued by me. He doesn’t like me. Cruz had known this since yesterday, but it was the first time he actually thought the words. Moss didn’t like him. Moss might look for a reason to kill him.

“Gun, please.”

Cruz handed Moss his gun back.

Moss looked down at Pamela on the floor. He toyed with his gun a moment, as if he were thinking everything over.

“You serious?” he said. “You plan on keeping this one?” He pointed at Pamela with the gun. It would take nothing, a few ounces of pressure, a mistake, and he would shoot her in the face.

“I gave my word, didn’t I?”

Moss shook his head. “Son, this is the most fucked up job ever.”

Hal and Darren sat slumped way down below the dashboard of Hal’s Eldorado. They watched as down the block, the two men came out with Lola and the other girl. The smaller guy seemed to be leading Lola along by her elbow. Oh, they weren’t cops, these two. Something deeper was going on.

Hal felt that old tickle of curiosity. This was even better than what they came for, maybe. “Her hands seem to be cuffed to you?” he said to Darren. “You catch a glint of metal there or anything? Both the girls, they got handcuffs on?”

Darren was watching. “I dunno. Can’t tell. What did you think?”

Hal shrugged. “I think I saw something.”

He kept watching. Now he really saw something. Up ahead, the two men opened the trunk of the Taurus and helped the girls inside. What the fuck? They put the girls in the trunk! And the girls went right on in there!