I blinked at her. “What? Nothing’s wrong. Tell me about your day.”
“Oh, fuck my day,” she said, setting the drink aside and wiping her lips on a napkin, staining it blood red. She reached across the table to put her hands on my arm. “Okay, cut the shit, home girl. This is me. I can read you like a book. What’s wrong?”
I glanced toward the bar. My father wasn’t looking our way. He was lining up shots and pouring drafts for the regulars at the bar. His expression was blank, emotionless. Like me, he was just going through the motions. I saw him glance toward the door several times. I wondered if the people he owed the money to would actually come into the bar to collect. They might come in to intimidate him, but I doubted they’d do anything to him in front of a roomful of people. Rats and cockroaches avoided the light. When they came to collect, it would be in a back alley where there were no witnesses.
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 whi
spered. “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?”
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.”