Everyone Pays by Seth Harwood

Whatever she saw in my face, she didn’t like. “Okay then.”
    “Get up,” I said, then to him, “Let her go. She should leave. The two of us have to talk.”
    “Oh, do we?” His face turned sour, ashen, and his hand went to his belt. I saw the gun, its handle.
    She asked, “What you say to me?”
    I told her, “You’re free. Go. Leave and find salvation in God. He loves you. I give you love.”
    The pimp stepped to me, hand at his belt. “What you—”
    “No,” I said, “no.” Before he could do anything, I took him by the throat with one hand, held his wrist with the other to keep the gun in his pants. I pushed him back against the wall hard enough to knock down a framed picture of a girl.
    He called me a name through gritted teeth, a racial epithet I’d never been called before.
    I hit him in the gut with a left, then she was coming at me, arms windmilling, punching, her robe wide open. I covered my face, let her hit my arm, leaning into the pimp so he couldn’t lift his gun. I brought my knee up hard into his stomach and then again to his groin. He doubled. I grabbed the back of his head, his Medusa’s mane of dreads, and thrust his face against my knee. He crumpled, down, out, and I turned my attention to her.
    I caught her wrists and held them. “Be still. I am here to save you.”
    “I don’t want saving, you perverted—”
    “I give you love, child. Take it.”
    She spit in my face.
    Like the man on the street, she chose her own way. We are nothing if not our habits. She writhed in my hands, tried to kick. I turned away, wanting to ask how much he meant to her, why she would protect him. She tried to bite my neck, berserking, gnashing teeth.
    I shoved her back onto the couch, harder than I meant to, and she went limp.
    “Are you all right?”
    This was for Emily—Emily and what he did to her—and it had little to do with this girl. She had chosen her own path away from God. And this was what it wrought, this result in a place she shouldn’t be.
    I stood over them, watching them breathe. Under her head, I saw a metal box, realized this was what she’d hit her head on. I pried it out from under her and opened the lid. It was filled, of course, with drugs and money. The money wasn’t a lot: twenties and crumpled, dirty tens, even change. Bags of white powder, rolled into tubes pushed against a bag of weed, cubes of hash, clear plastic boxes of pills. I closed the box, put it aside.
    Something moved inside me at the sight of her bare thighs, something I didn’t like. I reached down to wrap her robe back around her, but it was caught underneath. I had to crouch down, so close, to lift her and pull both sides closed. I smelled her scent: unavoidable, earthy like sweat, sweet like cheap candy. For a moment I wanted to touch her.
    “No.” I shoved the word out. Her teeth, dark, stained, unkempt, pushed me away. I could barely see her gums. I tied the robe tight with its sash and pulled her up off the couch by the arms, got her on her feet and then over my shoulder. I carried her back through the apartment to a bedroom, flopped her down on the bed. It sloshed and moved under her.
    A water bed. Funny. I almost laughed as she swished around on its waves, thinking how good it was for Emily and so many others that soon he would be gone.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
    In the pimp’s living room, I slipped my knife out of my pocket, opened it with care, and slid it up the back of my hand, watching as it trimmed black hairs from my skin. It was ready, and so was he.
    I took a pillow off the couch and wiped blood from his mouth. He still didn’t respond. Not until I pulled him up by his hair, held him in front of me, slapped him. Then, when he started blinking, I lifted him higher and smashed him facedown into and through his glass-top coffee table, making one big mess on the floor.
    He scrambled onto his hands and knees, the fight rising in him, and I let him stand, seeing I’d made an even worse mess of his