Kill Whitey

“Not our Georgia,” Jesse said. “Georgia overseas—in Europe. Dumb shit. Whitey’s people bring these girls into the States. Smuggle them through the port down in Baltimore. Feed them into the network from there. Send them off to other cities. They don’t have to worry about immigration papers or any of that. In return, the girls turn tricks in order to pay the Russians back. So they put them to work in strip clubs, massage parlors—places like that. Like the ones Whitey owns. He owns other joints, too. Restaurants. Bars. Whitey’s a big man here in York, but he’s small time in the grand scheme of things. Supposedly, he’s connected to a much larger group out of Brighton Beach up in New York.”

“So he’s not just a pimp,” I said. “Tonya was right. He’s Russian mob.”

Jesse held up his hands. “Yo, I’m just talking. That’s all. I ain’t saying shit. And neither should you guys. Seriously, you don’t want to mess with that. The less you know, the better off you are.”

I wondered if Whitey was actually tied into the mob, or if everything Jesse had said was total bullshit. Jesse had a bad habit of exaggerating the truth. Deep down inside, he’d always had some real self-esteem issues. Usually, his lies and half-truths were designed to make him seem more important. More exciting. Like this time. Wasn’t enough that he took us to a cool strip club. It had to be a strip club owned and operated by the Russian mob, and he had to know all the big secrets that the rest of us weren’t let in on.

But Tonya had hinted that Whitey was in the mob, too. Hooked up. Was she serious, or just feeding into Jesse’s bullshit? Playing along with the customer.

I wondered about the club’s name. The Odessa. That wasn’t Russian. It was German. It stood for Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehorigen, or Organization of Former Members of the SS. I knew this from watching The History Channel. The Odessa was supposed to be a secret society dedicated to rescuing Nazi war criminals. So how did that tie in to the whole Russian mob thing?

On the stereo, Circle of Fear segued into some Deftones. Jesse had closed his eyes again and fallen asleep. Yul was back to biting his fingernails. Darryl lit another cigarette and nodded his head in time with the music.

Could Sondra really be a whore? It didn’t seem possible. Most hookers that I’d seen, usually on old reruns of Cops, looked used. Broken down, chewed up, skinny, scraggly addicts with an aura of stark desperation around them. They had scars, both emotional and physical, and both were visible to the observer. But Sondra didn’t have that air about her. She seemed…fresh.

Maybe I was naive, but I just couldn’t see it. Sondra seemed above all that. Just watching her dance—she’d seemed like an angel, not a devil.

Jesse woke up when we exited the highway and stopped at the red light. He rubbed his face and looked around.

“I need some coffee,” he muttered.

“True that.” Darryl flicked his butt out the window. “I could go for some Dennys. One of those Moons over My Hammy would be the shit right about now.”

I rolled into the GPS parking lot and dropped the guys off at their cars. Yul was in full panic mode now, wondering if Kim would somehow psychically figure out where he’d been. The backseat was covered with glitter. We fucked with him about it some more and then said our goodbyes. Yul went home looking anxious. Darryl and Jesse headed out for some breakfast. I drove home with a raging hard on, thinking about Sondra.

When I walked through my apartment door, my cat, Webster, hissed at me. He was annoyed. His food dish was still half-full, but Webster has never been a half-full type of feline. He always saw the dish as half-empty and got really pissed if I didn’t keep it topped off at all times. This explained why he was so fat.

I’d had him for years. I used to work at the Harley Davidson plant through a temp agency (no option to hire on, which sucked, because I would have loved to get some of those union wages) and I found him there. He was just a kitten at the time. Figured either somebody had dumped him and left him to fend for himself, or a stray had a litter somewhere and he’d wandered away. One of my co-workers found him hiding beneath a stack of skids. Good thing, too. If we hadn’t found him, he’d have been killed soon as a forklift tried to pick the skids up.

His eyes were barely open, he was so small. His skin was paper-thin and his ribs stuck out. I took him home, got some special milk from the pet store, and nursed him with a doll baby bottle until he was old enough to eat real food. I’d had him ever since. Now he was big and fat and grumpy. Coal-black fur and green eyes, a belly that swayed when he walked, fond of sleeping and eating, still had his claws and knew how to use them—especially on the fucking furniture. My sofa and chair were torn to shit.