Blood Abandon (Donald Holley Book 1) (7 page)

The address led to an apartment building on Hollywood Boulevard. It was a
rectangular, three story pinkish stucco structure that was open in the center with a courtyard and pool. The building itself essentially served as a border for the interior which was populated by tan men and women sunbathing under the occasional palm tree outcropping. The name of the complex was the StarWalk Oasis, a nod to the Hollywood stars memorialized in the sidewalk pavement outside on the street. I pulled into a parking space that looked into the center courtyard entrance. The apartment Gerald was in was on the third floor, apartment 315. I pulled out the binoculars and scanned the third floor walkway; I could see the door to his apartment, but the blinds were closed. I sat and watched for about forty-five minutes, with no activity to report.

I left and went to get something to eat at an Italian restaurant called Vinnie’s down the street. After dinner, I went back to my hotel room and went over things in my mind. I had a simple plan, but there was no way to develop it more in depth due to the quick nature of this job. Some of it would develop on the fly, which I was okay with, all things considered. I was skilled at improvisation as I had been in situations where it had been necessary in the past.

Of course, those were contracts, not my brother.

I reminded myself that he was brother in flesh only. That was a hard thing to accept, but every time I flashed back to him standing over me and firing a bullet into my chest at near point-blank range made it somewhat easier to rationalize. I’ve never been an emotional person; this is part of what has made me a successful killer. I once took a razor blade and cut a man over one-
thousand times. Eventually he bled to death, but before that happened, his screams were endless, pitiful, agonizing, and yet, if you had taken my blood pressure you would not have registered a spike.

I don’t feel much, which is probably part of why I’m still alone at this point in my life.

But my brother...

I felt something: anger, and to a lesser degree, sadness. I felt anger about his daughter; I felt anger about his willingness to kill me without a second thought when I was totally blind to what was happening. I felt sadness about the shared history of suffering we had shared, how we had been
each other’s spines for so long, all the love that had been there that was now completely gone. We had started as two small boys in North Carolina, and here we were two and a half decades later in California, in what would certainly be a final act for one of us.

Chapter Twelve

I went over my weapons to make sure they were properly loaded and in working order. After feeling satisfied, I put them into a black handbag, along with the knife, and the money. I got dressed, went to my car and drove to a nearby hardware store. I bought a red plastic gas container, a roll of three-quarter inch nylon twine, a roll of duct tape, a box of latex gloves and a packet of lighters. I next went to a gas station where I filled up the gas container. I paid for everything in cash and then drove back to the
StarWalk Oasis apartments.

***

I pulled into the parking lot and backed into a space near the exit. I put on a sport coat over the polo shirt I wore, and tucked the SIG Sauer with the silencer into one side of my waistband, and put the .20 caliber gun in the other, along with the knife. I put the remaining cash into my pants pocket, and put two pairs of gloves into my sport coat pocket. I exited the car and walked into the courtyard.

I took the stairs nearest the side of his apartment. It was shortly after nine p.m., and there were a number of people still hanging out around the pool, drinking beer and swimming. They paid me no mind as I moved past them; they were lost in their own activities, oblivious to the danger. It was dark on the third floor balcony and I slipped on a pair of latex gloves as I approached the door of Gerald’s apartment. The blinds were still closed, but there was light illuminating them and the television was on. I could hear muffled voices blending in with the TV; I leaned in close to the door and knocked with my right hand. The voices stopped; someone turned the television down. I pulled close to the door, just below the peephole. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone go to the window, peek through the blinds for a few seconds, then move away from them. I heard a male voice starting talking that I was sure wasn’t my brother, then a female, and finally Gerald’s voice. I knocked again and stood up straight, withdrawing the SIG Sauer. I heard footsteps come to the door, the handle turn, the lock engage and someone start to open the door-

I shoved it open, knocking a man backward onto the carpet. I quickly closed it behind me.

“No one move, no one make a fucking sound,” I hissed. “Not a sound.”

I quickly assessed the room; it was a living room, very dirty, with beer cans, pizza and take-out boxes strewn about. The couch was pulled out into a bed, and a young looking, small white girl sat on it, naked except for panties. She looked strung out on something, and had bruises and a black eye. She looked at me in a daze, but also scared. The guy on the floor was a black guy, short, covered in tattoos, and hatred burned in his eyes. He glanced over at my brother, then back at me, trying to put it all together. Finally, my brother sat in a chair against the wall, looking at me like he was seeing a ghost. In front of him was a coffee table with a gun on it, as well as a large glass bong and a
crack pipe. A rolled up dollar bill and the remnants of several cocaine lines also sporadically powdered the glass table. My brother looked at the gun on the table, then at the one in my hand, clearly considering his options.

“Don’t even think about it,” I said. “You’ll be dead before you can get your hand to it.” I looked over at the girl; tears were welling up in the corners of her eyes. I figured she couldn’t be older than eighteen or nineteen. I looked at my brother.

“Who’s the girl?” I asked him.

“Just a whore,” he said.

“You do that to her?” I motioned toward her face, at the black eye and bruises.

He
put on a wicked grin. “Nothing she isn’t used to.”

I looked at her again. “What’s your name?”

“Danielle,” she said, weakly.

“Danielle, in my pocket I have some money. Five hundred dollars of it is yours if you will
go in the bathroom, lock the door, and don’t make any noise no matter what you hear. I’ll get you when you can come out. Is that a deal?”

She nodded, stood up, stumbled, and fumbled past my brother and the guy on the floor to the bathroom. She was mostly out of it; I hoped she would stay quiet.

Next, I addressed the guy on the floor. “Who are you?”

“None of your business, you cracker-ass motherfucker,” he said.

I turned to my brother. “Who is he?”

“His name is James. I buy stuff from him.”

I motioned at the coffee table. “This type of shit?”

“Yeah, among other shit,” he said.

“These are harder drugs than you’ve been into before, Bit.”

He said nothing.

“The girl?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“Yeah, he provides them also.
Whatever type I want.”

The man named James spoke. “What the fuck, G?
Why you tellin’ him all my shit?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I interjected. I walked over to the television and turned the volume up louder.

“What are you doing?” James asked.

“This.” I pulled out the .20 caliber handgun, leaned in and shot him through the forehead. The sound was not very loud with the
TV turned up. The bullet didn’t exit his head, bouncing around his brain instead. It was the perfect close range assassin tool, and I had used it before. I put the smaller weapon back in my waistband.

“Damn, Donnie,” Gerald said, pushing back in his chair, looking down at the dead man on his floor. A single stream of blood ran down James’s face, tracing down the bridge of his nose through the corner of his right eye, pooling out and running down his cheek, soaking into the carpet around his head.

I turned the television back down to a lower volume. I listened for the girl; she wasn’t making any sound.

I turned to my brother. “You got lucky in that I already had the money in a safe.”

Gerald chuckled. “I would have gotten it anyway. Oscar had a very brutal way of getting what he needed. You would have given up the bank information, eventually,” he said.

Yet again I realized how much I had underestimated him.

“What’s out here that you wanted my money for?”

“Palm trees, bitches and drugs,” he replied sarcastically. “That’s what everyone wants, right?” He looked at the guy on the
floor. “Man, I can’t believe you killed that dude.”

“I’m not interested in your bullshit, Gerald. What’s out here?”

He ran his hands through his hair. “Nothing, really. It was just a fresh start, and a fast-paced life.” He flashed his devilish grin again. “All jokes aside, with money, you can get whatever you want out here.” He grew quiet for a second. “I’ve got a question for you: how the fuck are you still alive?”

“I’m alive because of surgeons who are very good at their job, and because you weren’t very good at yours,” I said.

Gerald bristled. “You’re lucky, that’s all that is. Pure luck.”

“Even if that’s true,” I said, “that doesn’t help you now.”

He looked at the gun on the coffee table again, then me. “You going to kill me, then?”

I ignored his question. “Is there a back way out of these apartments?”

“Yeah. The stairs on the other side.”

“You have a vehicle down there?”

“Yeah, your Tahoe.” He shrugged. “I stole a different set of tags off another vehicle in Tennessee, slapped it on there.”

“That sounds more like your usual abilities as a criminal,” I replied.

“Fuck you,” he snapped.

I ignored him, instead walking over to a dresser. I opened the drawers, flipping through them, until I found a tee shirt and a set of athletic shorts. I pulled them out,
then fished out a set of socks. Gerald sat watching me.

“Don’t move,” I said, “or I will shoot you.” I put the clothes under my arm and walked slowly toward the bathroom, keeping my eyes on Gerald. I knocked on the bathroom door.

The girl named Danielle cracked the door open, eyeing me cautiously. “Here, put these on.” She took the clothes from my hand and closed the door. “Come out when you are dressed,” I said.

I walked back to the living room and trained the SIG Sauer on Gerald. “When you were doing things to that girl, did you not see your daughter in ten years?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “Of course not, Donnie. Don’t play mind games.”

“And you never thought about your daughter, either.”

“Is that a question?” he asked.

“No.” I could feel pressure in my temples. “You took all this
money and left town without giving Kate or Marie any of it. Why would you steal a million dollars and not share it with your daughter? She wouldn’t have needed to know where it came from.”

“They’d have known it wasn’t legit,” he said, shrugging. The attitude of defiance was cracking.

“So? You could have given them some of it, and told them you won it gambling, and they would never have been the wiser,” I said. “But that’s not what the reason is, really. You just didn’t want to share it with them.”

He looked up at me, his face a mask.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“Everything happened to me. I got tired of being everyone’s bitch.”

I thought about the guys from his crew that he and Oscar had killed, so brutally. “How could you murder your whole crew so horrifically?” I asked. “And what about the club manager? Why kill him if there was no cash?” I tried to picture it. “Was it you, or Oscar?”

“You
gotta do what you gotta do,” he said. “Oscar did the cutting, I did the planning. Club manager was necessary to sell the story.”

I shook my head. “You are a real piece of shit,” I said.

Right then, Gerald lunged for the gun on the table. I fired a silenced bullet from the SIG Sauer into his hand quickly, destroying his thumb. He screamed loudly and fell back into the chair gripping his hand, his eyes wild.

“Shut the fuck up,” I said. “You keep screaming
, the next one goes in your brain.” I walked over, picked up the gun and sat in on the dresser behind me.

“Where’s the money?” I asked.

“I-in the closet, in the b-bag.” He nodded. “Take it, and j-just go,” he stammered.

“I will, eventually.” Danielle stepped out of the bathroom, and looked around, her eyes growing large. Seeing the scene before her was dampening the effect of the drugs she was on.

“Don’t scream,” I said.

“I won’t.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve seen things like this before.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I pulled out five hundred dollars from my pocket, and gave them to her. She looked at the money as if it weren’t real. “That’s for doing as I asked.” She didn’t say anything.

“How much do you get to do this?” I asked her.