Power and Empire

The screwdriver was still in his left hand, a nine-inch leather sap in the other. Palmetto had just hit the girl hard in the back of the head. She pitched face-first into the unmade bed, perfectly framed in front of two tripod-mounted cameras. Palmetto’s head snapped up at the noise behind him. Clark’s sap took him across the temple, the ten ounces of lead shot impacting bone and rattling teeth with a satisfying thud. He dropped like a sack of wet sand.

Clark registered a flash of movement to his left. He turned in time to see a very large black man with long dreadlocks barreling at him from the open bathroom door fifteen feet away. Focused as he was on Palmetto, the attack caught Clark flatfooted, driving him against a wall and knocking the wind from his lungs. Clark attempted to bring the sap into play, but the man was too close, robbing the swing of any power.

The man was at least forty years younger — though with Clark’s balaclava, he hadn’t figured that out. What he did know was that he was a half a head taller than Clark.

Clark exhaled quickly, relaxing his paralyzed diaphragm. He couldn’t do anything about the searing pain in his ribs.

“You messed up!” the man growled, stepping back to have a good look at the little man he was about to crush. “Parrot is about to put a chop on you that you never gonna forget!”

Clark stopped listening when he heard this guy was Parrot. The name had come up too many times — always in association with a bruised or broken girl. He’d read Blanca Limón’s statement, heard the stories about the brutal “choppings” this monster used to discipline his girls and keep them in line.

With his back to the girl on the bed, Clark feinted with his right hand, drawing the much larger man’s attention to the leather sap.

“Punk ass,” Parrot said, and chuckled. “I’m gonna take your little bat an—”

Clark wasted no time on words. Bounding forward, he drove the screwdriver straight up through the bottom of the big man’s jaw, shoving upward, aiming for the ceiling. The steel shaft of the screwdriver pierced Parrot’s tongue and impaled the soft palate at the back of his mouth. His teeth slammed together. His eyes flew open in shock. He made a vain attempt to grab at the screwdriver, but Clark batted his hand away with the sap. Clark pressed the attack, slamming the lead-filled sap into the man’s elbow as he fell.

Clark shot a quick glance toward a sound to his right and saw a black girl in her early teens peeking around the bathroom door. The fog of battle made it difficult to tell for sure, but Clark thought she had a bloody nose.

Parrot gurgled, trying to draw a breath around the screwdriver through his sinuses. Clark turned in time to see the man claw for a pistol in his waistband.

Enraged at the sight of a bleeding child, Clark bounded forward, kicking the handle of the screwdriver, driving the remainder of the shaft into the man’s brain with a sickening pop. Like his life, Parrot’s death was brutal, ugly, and loud, and it was over.

Clark spun, dropping the sap to the floor in favor of his .45. He needed to be sure Dorian Palmetto was still out of play. Palmetto wasn’t dead — but not for lack of effort on Clark’s part. He’d learned long before that knocking someone silly wasn’t all that difficult so long as the possibility of killing them in the process wasn’t taken off the table. Palmetto’s eyes were closed and a thin trickle of blood seeped from his ear, but unlike Parrot, he was still breathing. The girl on the bed was either out cold or pretending to be.

Clark secured Palmetto’s Glock in his waistband, and then, his own .45 held at low ready, inched sideways to bring the bathroom into view. Cutting the pie.

He found the black girl huddled alone on the floor beside the tub. Blood soaked through a bath towel she’d wrapped around her naked shoulders. Clark holstered the pistol and held up both hands.

“I’m a friend,” he said.

The girl hugged her knees to her chest, rocking back and forth, eyes clenched shut.

Clark shot a peek around the corner to make sure Palmetto and the girl were still out. They were, so he squatted down to be more or less on the same level as the cowering girl.

“What’s your name?”

She said nothing.

“Look.” Clark took a deep breath. He was hell at being mean. Tenderness was a little more difficult, so he decided he’d just be honest, and as kind as he knew how to be. “These men aren’t going to hurt you anymore. Let’s get you some clothes.”

Clark backed out of the bathroom, not wanting to pressure someone who was already shattered. A few moments later, he had both Palmetto’s and the purple-haired girl’s hands zip-tied behind their backs. He suspected this one was still pretending to be unconscious, but she was an unknown entity, so he decided to leave her restrained until she came to.