Shaw
8:12 p.m.
Shaw knew from the shaky tone that Curtis failed to get the cell phone.
He took matters into his own hands, still feeling Curtis’ hands cradling his ass. Reminiscing.
His assistant Janine called back.
“I got access to the security feed,” she said. “Just let me know when you’re in and I’ll block the time and replace it when you leave.”
“Thanks.”
“You need anything else? I can always get somebody else to handle this for you. I know you’re not in it no more.”
“No, I got this. My hands won’t get dirty.”
“They never do.”
It had been a while, but Shaw still had the same pair of black gloves he used back in the day. He still had a black leotard to put under the black polo, a skinny jean with room near the calf, and the same charcoal scarf from back in the day. He had the same fan that his grandmother gave him in high school, which opened into a beautiful image of a geisha in her okiya, but looked like a black shiny baton when closed shut. He even had the brown contact lenses he wore to remind him about how hard people teased him for looking too pretty with his natural hazels.
What he didn’t have was the same narrative motivation. Before the leotard helped him channel all the rage from names he was called when he wore it in junior high.
But he didn’t want to kill people today.
He walked into the ER lobby and spied the girl at the desk.
“May I help you?”
“I’m here to see Rafaelo Torres.”
“Are you a family member?” she said, looking him up and down.
“I am.”
Shaw stood still as a statue and stared at her. His face didn’t change.
“I need you to sign in,” she said. Shaw was clear right away that this was a lie. It should have been the protocol, but since he noticed no sign-in clipboard or pad from the sliding doors when he walked in, she was making it up now. Good riff.
He ignored her and walked toward the locked door.
“Sir, I really need you to sign this.”
“I really need you to open this door.”
The even tone and taut jaw were enough to punk her. She buzzed him in, but Shaw knew that he would have to contend with whatever security guard she alerted after.
After walking around for only a few minutes, Shaw understood that Rafaelo Torres was probably in ICU. On the way up the stairs, he saw the security guard coming his way and realized homegirl at reception worked faster than he thought she would.
“Sir, I need identification.”
Big dude, strong and black.
“I have none on me.”
“Then you can’t be back here, man.”
Shaw was amused at how fast he went from being “sir” to “man.” Respect levels dropped fast in these parts.
“I can. It’s a public space.”
“Did you hear what I said, man?”
Shaw continued up the stairs toward the cop.
“Don’t let me have to ask you again.”
And when Shaw heard the whip-ass in his tone, he knew he would have to help this cop understand. He waited for the cop to check him, assuming correctly that it would be an arm to shoulder.
Shaw thought of Curtis’ lips on his shoulder while he fucked him against the slippery shower glass.
One chop to break the arm.
Palm to T-zone above the nose.
Heel to Achilles to send the man tumbling down the stairs.
Two seconds.
Shaw’s dick thickened a bit.
He made it up the stairs and realized that he needed to check the security room with cameras and live feed just in case. Janine would take care of things for the long run, but the short run could get messy if this errand took too much time, or if ol’ boy in stairwell came to and called friends. Shaw hoped he would be too mad about getting slain by a svelte, pretty dude who was never supposed to win in a fight.
The security guard in the room was even more standard, white and out of shape from sitting too much, Krispy Kremes at that.
“You are not authorized to be in here.”
Curtis’s dick stretched up in him deep enough to pass the second chamber of his insides…glory. He pulled his dick out and Shaw felt it thumping his face, hard with plea.
Closed fan whipped out.
Swat to thorax, broken floating rib.
Spin around swing.
Fan to occiput.
Three seconds.
The man slumped over the desk.
Shaw was irritated about the blood on the back of the head, where the fade would have been if this was a black man who went to black barbers. Shaw liked his work to be free of bodily fluids. He did not like mess. But he was rusty, and forgot to avoid the part of the fan with the clip and it must have scratched the guard.
He would have to do better.
The hospital needed to do better too. Shaw studied the security screens and saw that there were big holes, lot of places where damage could be done in this hospital.
He left the security guard slumped over the desk. Janine would take care of the feed. And he would grab the phone and be out in ten minutes.
Shaw found Rafelo Torres in an ICU room still out. But he needed to be sure that he would stay out – for him to wake up and see him would be disastrous. Shaw looked Torres in the face. You like when I fuck the sweat out of you don’t you Shaw. Without taking his eyes away, he held the fan in his right hand over Torres’ head and used his left to run his hand to Torres’ dick. He fondled the balls between his fingers and palmed the shaft.
Some blood ran there.
Shaw was ready to deliver the correct end of the fan to Torres’ head if consciousness came back. But nothing happened.
Instead unconscious Torres showed off what felt like a beautiful, long, hooded dick. The body around it indicated that at his best, he was probably swimsuit model sexy. And at least eight plump inches.
And this isn’t even the part Curtis was dealing with when he read “brb” as “bareback” instead of “be right back.” Under different circumstances, if Curtis had used a condom like he was supposed to, the man wouldn’t have flipped out and maybe both of them together would have been a nice option…
But if Curtis hadn’t fucked up, Shaw would not be here at the hospital meeting Torres, stroking his dick.
He put it down and searched the room for the phone. It was nowhere to be found.
He went through Torres’ pants. They had a wallet and keys, but no phone.
It meant that they were on to Torres. The FBI had made it here already. They would use the phone to build a case to put him jail for his little side operation.
Or just deport him.
On the move out of the hospital, Shaw made a mental note to follow up on this just to make sure that the Feds had no reason to comb through Torres’ Jack’d conquests. If they had enough with just phone records, things would be fine.
Shaw texted Janine that he was on his way out the back door. Before he hit SEND, he saw the first security guard, the brother, angry outside, swollen in the face.
“No friends?” Shaw said.
“Naw, I wanted to teach you this lesson all by myself, you fucking punk.”
Shaw smiled a bit, careful not to get upset; the man would not survive it.
“Mind your business. No worries. Nobody’s trying to be your punk.”
The dude swung.
He licked the sweat off Shaw’s neck and fed it to him with his tongue.
Shaw dodged under.
Fan to skull.
The cop was back, hands checking Shaw’s shoulders.
Say you like it. I’m gonna keep fucking you this hard until you say you like it.
Heel to shin. Compound fracture.
Fan to right hand. Three carpals broken.
The cop could not make a fist but tried. He grabbed Shaw’s head with both hands.
Say you like it.
Shaw saw the head butt coming.
Jump. Knee to the chest.
Heel of hand to cheekbone.
You’re gonna make me cum in this ass boy. Damn tell me you want this cum.
Shaw didn’t have time. And he did not want to sweat. He unleashed five or six perfectly executed strikes on the diesel security officer and took him down.
Three minutes.
Shaw returned the fan to his coat, leaned over the cop and said:
“If you ever meet a guy named Curtis, you should thank him. He and his dick are the reason you’re alive right now.”
He pulled out his phone, walked away and pressed SEND. Without stopping, he said, “Be kinder to the gays, or the people you think are gay. Or weak.”
Martina
7:46 p.m.
“Has anybody seen my husband?”
At this point I was worried sick.
“Is he your husband, I mean I don’t remember a wedding.”
“Don’t start Davia, I’m worried and I’m on the rag.”
“Thank God.”
“I heard that,” I yelled from the other room. “You think you’re mumbling but you’re not. Girl, I hear you. And I am lethal right now so lay low. Do you know where he is?”
“No, I don’t know where he is. And Negro Newsflash, you ain’t the only one with real deep ish going on today.”
Davia driving Uber after quitting a really good job as a production coordinator, which was after quitting an even better job as a stage manager, she couldn’t even get close to deep troubles. She knows all the reasons, which is why her smart mouth makes me want to punch her in her ear. The only reason we are all crammed into this three-bedroom house is that the city pushed our mother out of the old one to build the damn Expo Line and didn’t give her enough money to get something better. My little brother is sleeping in the fucking living room and we are all struggling to make it with this one and a half bathroom situation.
Meanwhile my husband is missing, and Marc and Davia still got their arms folded. Resentful motherfuckers.
It’s partly my fault.
I met my husband a few years ago at a gay bar in New York called The Monster. I was there with my girlfriends celebrating my 24th birthday, mainly because one of them knew that the best place to see hot dudes naked on a Thursday night was at the gay bar. It was lit. There were so many of them that they were competing for our attention. More of them working than there were patrons in that basement. And whatever you liked, they had it – short and musclebound, tall and strapping, big dicks, medium dicks, dicks curved to the right, dicks hard all night with rings to keep them that way. And the trip was, most of them were Dominican.
Made sense. If you didn’t have papers and you lived in New York, could certainly make cash at The Monster. One stripper in particular was sexy as hell, rippling as fuck and had a beautiful smile. He pretended not to speak good English, which I also thought was hot, and he kept trying to get me to hire him for a lap dance. It was textbook: I resisted, my friends insisted, I fought them more, they fed me more liquor and then they threw him a few twenties.
“Wait,” I said when we got back to the private room. “Are you straight?”
He slid off his thong, as if this was some kind of hint.
“Whatever dude, this is a gay club.”
“Mira,” he said. Then he slung his dick from side to side.
“Prove it.”
“You really want me to prove?”
Now mind you, I was two sheets to the wind and this club might as well have been a tornado. None of this was smart.
Then he put his tongue in my mouth. When he got in a handstand, he put his dick in my mouth. I was so impressed that, well, the alcohol recommended that I couldn’t not sit on his penis for a while.
By a while, I mean three songs.
The $40 only covered two, and we were on number five or six by now.
One of my friends came back there and he felt bad that he kept me from them. So he gave them the money back and told them to have a lap dance of two while he took me to get some water.
He promised to meet us for breakfast and nobody believed him. When he showed up, we were floored. I had to sober up very fast.
That’s when he told us the situation. That he’d only been in the States for a year, and that he was making money to send home to his parents and siblings. Couldn’t get a green card. I felt for him and figured the least I could do was allow him to make me cum on my birthday. This was a design-on-a-dime (or a nickel) birthday so the ladies did Groupon on top of miles on top of credit card points. We were sharing a suite. I wasn’t sharing this dick any more than I was going to the Bronx by myself with some strapping stranger I didn’t know.
I mean, I had never been to Central Park. This way I could kill two birds with one fat orgasm. He sat on a tree stump and I rode his dick in public with a view of the sky and buildings. And I came for as long as it takes to walk across that park.
I went back home with no Empire State Building romantic bullshit ideas in my head. My college days brought about thongs or wrong, but I was always level headed about the shit.
That said, I kept in touch with him over the next three months and we got to be tight. We were friends and none of my girlfriends believed I was okay. They thought the dickmitization demon had snuck on the plane in my carry-on.
They didn’t believe that I actually loved this guy, but it’s my fault. I downplayed it. They thought he was using me when he moved to LA, meanwhile it was my idea. The thing is, he was hard and sexy in a way I had never done hard and sexy. He was sort of dark under that beautiful smile. He liked to grunt when he was fucking me. He liked to grab my hair and pull it back when he had me on my stomach. He liked it rough. He choked me a little when I came the first time with him behind closed doors.
You know sisters, we sisters don’t like this kind of shit.
Physical pain with our pleasure.
Choking.
Getting fucked in the ass.
I would rather let these hookers believe that I was a silly ass chickenhead. People are fine when you on some old Waiting to Exhale, Being Mary Jane bullshit. But the 50 Shades of Deadpool is not for cocoa butter users. I liked his darkness. And the only person who would get that is my brother.
And true fucking twin that he is, Marc got it. He didn’t like it, but he got it.
Marc and Davia were pissed.
Davia is still pissed, apparently.
After the wedding—we got married very fast one day downtown—things were better for everybody, until he couldn’t get an apartment and moved in with us. My mother loves him because he damn near moved us out of the old house by himself when we lost it.
Now, I’m not a fool. I know he’s busy fucking every bitch who looks twice at him. But I’m fine with it as long as he keeps our hustles tight. Save some dick for me and keep the hustle right so that we can get out of this slump quickly and I could retire from the plantation sooner, and I would be alright. This was something that I had known through the grapevine, that the average Dominican man has a wife, a mistress and a girlfriend, the last two being totally different things. So I knew this negro had bitches back home too.
I just didn’t know that the brothers and sister in the story were in truth his three kids. Details he said I got confused because I was drunk. The baby’s mama, which in this equation is the girlfriend, brought her trifling ass to LA with the three kids thinking it would be easier for him to take care of them here than in the DR. Trifling ass ho.
They end up at my house every now and then and I remind his ass that she can’t come into my Mama’s house. This baby mama and any of the other bitches he messed with had to stay away from where I sleep.
But Davia was mad that she was sure he was out fucking.
Marc wasn’t mad about it, but it’s because he was too busy out there trying to do his own fucking.
Really he was out working out this hustle. And the fact that he wasn’t back yet scared me.
“When is the last time you saw him Davia?”
“You mean vertical?”
“You know what, I’m going to find him. I haven’t heard from him since yesterday.”
“He didn’t come home last night? Can’t believe it.”
I ignored my sister because I love her, but I can’t win with her.
And I needed to figure out what was going on.
Like all others, his phone is trackable with GPS. And since he’s not as phone savvy as he thinks, he doesn’t know that when I was using Maps one day, I was able to invite myself to his Location Sharing feature.
Without bothering to say anything else to Davia, I headed north following the tracker. It seemed I was on my way to he hospital and that’s when I started to think the worst.
I started blaming myself for going along with this hustle.
I knew in my gut it was dangerous.
I wondered if it was worth the effort to get a house, because that’s what this was all about anyway. All my mother’s kids were trying to figure out how to make enough money to pay her medical bills from the Lupus treatments and get her in a better living situation.
I worried that now my husband was in the hospital behind this damn hustle.
But the tracker had me passing Presbyterian.
Now I had different concerns.
Heading up toward Silverlake in that quiet area made me nervous. The tracker took me to a very residential, sort of eerie community with dark houses. I didn’t see a lot of lights. At the end of the block, I parked underneath a light within 20 feet of where the GPS showed my husband’s phone to be.
Good judgment, I know, I know, good judgment says to keep ass in the car and wait until something happens. Case the joint for a while to see what pops off. But this lasted for about 10 minutes before the quiet and eeriness got the best of me. Besides, I was here already. Couldn’t go to the police. And what if my husband was in one of these houses bound and gagged, bleeding out? I couldn’t save him myself, but I could at least find out exactly where he is and get friends on Crenshaw to take care of it for me.
Fuck it, I thought, and got out of the car. I took out my phone, as if it was gonna Moneypenny me into defensive gadget wear. Somehow, I felt safe walking a few steps in every direction until the GPS showed me I was getting closer.
Ten feet.
This was the right direction.
The thud on the top of my head, that was the last thing I remembered.