Call me selfish, but I couldn’t help but wonder if that would be the end of it. Once he was dead, would they expect me to cover his debt? People like that don’t just write off seventy-five-grand like a business loss. They would get their money one way or another. And I was a twenty-one-year-old girl. Maybe I’d seen too many Liam Neeson movies, but I knew that I had assets that were worth money to people like that. The thought made me shiver.
“Kat, what the fuck is wrong?” she asked, shaking my arm, pulling my eyes back to hers. “You look like you’ve seen a fucking ghost, babe. What’s going on?”
“They’re gonna kill him, Bethany,” I said quietly as my eyes drifted back to my father, who was staring back at me even though I knew he couldn’t hear me speaking.
Bethany squeezed my arm. “Who is gonna kill who? Katrina, who is gonna kill who? What the fuck are you talking about?”
“They’re gonna kill my father,” I whispered. “And there’s not a damn thing I can do to stop them.”
* * *
Bethany clutched my hand as she followed me through the kitchen and up the stairs to the apartment. We sat at the kitchen table where my world had collapsed just hours before and I told her the whole story. She held my hand and listened quietly.
“Jesus, Kat, he blew your college money?” Bethany held up her hands with her fingers crooked as if she was choking my father. “That old fuck! That old piece of fucking shit. What the fuck are you going to do?”
“I don’t know what to do,” I said as I wiped the tears from my eyes with my knuckles. “I’m not concerned about the money right now, I mean, I’m pissed, but what if they make good on their threats? What if they kill my father?”
Bethany huffed at me. “You’re worried about that prick? He got himself into this mess, Kat. It’s not your responsibility to get him out. You just need to get the fuck out of here and let him deal with his shit. Pack a bag, you can come stay with me.”
“He’s still my father,” I said pensively, as if I was coming to the realization at that moment that no matter what he’d done over the course of my life, he was still my father and I still loved him in my own warped way.
Bethany sat back with her arms folded over her chest. “Okay, fine, whatever. Do you know who he owes the money to?”
I shook my head. “No, he wouldn’t say. He said it didn’t matter.”
“And how much does he owe again?”
“Seventy-five thousand dollars,” I said. “It might as well be a million dollars because we don’t have it and there is no way to get it. This place is mortgaged to the hilt. He’s blown through my savings. We don’t have anything to sell or anyone we can borrow it from. We’re screwed, Bethany. I don’t know how to get us out of this.”
“There might be a way,” Bethany said quietly. I glanced up at her. She had a cautious look on her face, as if she knew the path to take, but also knew it would be fraught with danger.
“How?” I asked.
She leaned her elbows on the table and held out her hands. I set my hands in hers and her fingers closed around them. “I’m going to ask you a question that you might think is totally irrelevant, but when you hear why I’m asking it, you’ll understand.”
I blinked at her. “Okay…”
She looked at me and arched her eyebrows. “Katrina, are you still a virgin?”
CHAPTER FOUR: Nicky
“Dude? Hey, Nick. What the fuck’s wrong with you, man?”
I glanced over at Tony and was immediately sorry that I did. He was leaning back with his arms splayed over the back of the booth with a goofy smile on his face. I looked down. The dancer with the gap between her front teeth was under the table sucking his cock. Christ, it looked like she was sucking on a thick Italian sausage. Jimmy Fist was sitting sideways in the booth, his broad form shielding from view what looked like a pretty decent blowjob from the rest of the club.
“Jesus, man, do you have to do that here?” I asked, wincing and turning away. “Take that shit into a back room. What if your dad walked in?”
He just grinned at me. “He would give me two thumbs up and find some bitch to suck his cock,” he said. He punched me in the arm. “I’ve been talking to you for ten minutes and you haven’t heard a word I said. What’s on your mind.”
I gestured at the girl’s head bobbing up and down on his cock. “Seriously, we’re gonna have a conversation while you’re getting your cock sucked.”
“Fuck, man, hold on…” He put his hands on the top of the girl’s head and pushed her mouth down onto his cock until she gagged. “Okay… that’s it… right there… yes… yes… fuck…”
I looked away as he moaned and shot his load into her mouth. I could hear him groaning and her smacking her lips. I heard her ask if I wanted one. I held up my hand without looking at them and Tony told her to get lost.
“You should have had one, bro,” he said with a satisfied smile. “Bitch ain’t much to look at, but damned if she can’t suck a cock like nobody’s business. I give her five for looks, and ten for performance.”
He picked up his drink and sighed into it. He had changed over to whiskey sours a couple of hours ago. I had lost count of how much he’d had to drink, but he still seemed pretty much in control. I looked at my watch. It was just after seven. I knew he’d be hitting Jimmy’s cocaine cross soon. That’s when I’d be checking out. Tony could be a real cunt once he started doing blow. Besides, tomorrow was Monday and I had to be at the office by nine. Tony would stay up partying all night because there was no place that he had to be at any particular time. He’d say that he was Tony D’Angelo for fuck’s sake. He wore a twenty-thousand-dollar Rolex just to show it off, not to tell him the motherfucking time.