Authors: Clever Black
“You can’t answer with that shit around your lips,”
Carmella said. “How rude of me. I will answer for you then! I
want to play a game of cards with you guys, okay? Okay!” she
snapped as she pranced over to the bar and grabbed a set of cards.
Carmella skipped back over to her guests and slid a small table
before the three individuals. She then grabbed a chair and sat before
the trio. “When I was a little girl, my Ma-Ma knew this lady
who was a gypsy. She could tell people’s future by looking at
these cards. Cards like these,” Carmella said as she held a
deck of tarot cards up for display.
Percy, Francesca and Ponita only stared in silence; neither had a
clue what was going on inside of this woman’s head nor that of
the horror to come. They watched as the woman went through the deck
of cards, selected the three specific cards she wanted, and placed
one face down before each of them and stood up. It was obvious to
everybody, including Carmella’s hostages, that their fates had
been sealed long before the card game had ever begun.
Carmella was enjoying being master of ceremony over this maniacal
macabre meeting of opponents, even if she and her bunch were the only
ones who understood the reasoning behind the action. As far as Percy,
Francesca and Ponita knew, they could’ve merely been picked at
random to be robbed and just happen to encounter some sick
individuals. But no matter which way the chips fell, and who thought
what, the fact was that Carmella had three of her opponents dead
right and it wasn’t a damn thing they could do to stop what was
about to happen. Anything her heart desired was possible on this
night. She went back over to her table and lit up a blunt and poured
herself another drink while the rest of her crew lingered around
conversing as they smoked and drank, occasionally tuning in to watch
Carmella do her thing.
“Now guys,” Carmella said upon her return to her
makeshift fortune teller’s table, “I will flip one card
at a time and then tell you what your future has in store. Is that
okay? Okay!” she snapped happily, as if her captives were
really going to answer as enthusiastically as she was making this
twisted game of torture out to be while being happy participants.
Carmella reached out and flipped over Ponita’s card which
showed a skeleton dressed in a black knight’s suit sitting atop
a white horse. “This is the death card,” Carmella
remarked in mocked somber, her head shaking from side to side in a
slow fashion. “You will die a slow death tonight and will never
be seen again,” she told Ponita, who seemed to gag as tears
began streaming down her face. “Don’t cry ma-mi! It is
what the cards say must happen to you.” Carmella said as she
leaned forward and gently stroked Ponita’s face.
Ponita jerked her head away and Carmella stood up and smiled down on
her. “Where are you going? Huh? No-fuckin’-where! You’re
going to sit your ass right there in that seat and take what’s
coming to you! Okay? Okay!” she ended happily as she sat back
down in her seat.
Carmella then turned to Percy, and after taking another toke of her
blunt, and a slow sip of her tequila, she flipped over the card and
showed him the image, which was a crucified man hanging upside down
on a cross. “This is the hanged man card, amigo,”
Carmella said. She then pointed to Ponita and said, “You will
watch her die a slow death, and then I will make you tell me what I
want to know. How quickly you give me what I want to know will
determine how quickly you die, because the card says you shall remain
in suspended animation for a short time and then you must die. Okay?
Okay!”
The look on Percy’s face, which was sheer terror, was priceless
to Carmella. The fear she was instilling in her captives was a high
she couldn’t get enough of; it was nearly orgasmic. Leaving her
second captive to marinate and reflect upon on his own impending
martyrdom, Carmella slid her chair a few paces to the left, sat
before Francesca, placed her hands on the table in a prim and proper
manner and merely smiled in silence for a couple of minutes.
“What a beautiful specimen of woman you are,” Carmella
finally complimented. “If you were any other woman? I would
take you and make you mines for the night. I would have so much fun
with you, brown sugar,” she said as she picked up the card and
showed it to Francesca, who only tilted her head up slightly to see
the image of the planet Earth encased in a wreath. “This here
is the world card,” Carmella said. “You will have the
weight of the world on your shoulders shortly and you will be the
last to die. But lucky for you your death will come quickly. I will
have no use for you other than for you to die. I hate to do it to you
because I really would rather fuck your brains out, but this is for
business not for pleasure. Okay? Okay!”
Francesca was still struggling to free herself. She knew not what
state of mind Percy and Ponita were in, but if she could find a way
to break free, she was going to cause mayhem and force the people
around her to kill her quickly. Sitting by idly while awaiting death
was a fate she cared not to endure. The plastic ties were doing their
job, though, and escape seemed nearly impossible for all three
captives. Francesca mumbled something inaudible to Carmella, who
merely laughed as she stood up and said, “Don’t worry,
Foxy Brown. Soon, you’ll be yelling nonstop.”
*******
Asa Spade, Xiang and Dougie had just returned to their condo and
where expecting to see Percy, Francesca and Ponita lounging around.
Instead, they were met with dead silence. Everything seemed in order
inside the pristine pad, but something wasn’t sitting right
with the three. No words were spoken as texts and calls began going
out to the three missing members. Asa and company tried for nearly an
hour to get in touch with their cohorts, but the numerous texts and
calls had gone unanswered.
“One of the boys down at the trap said Percy ‘nem left
like two hours ago with the re-up,” Dougie said in a worried
tone. Dougie and Percy had done their own fair share of dirt from
kidnapping to murder and he knew foul play when he saw it. Something
was wrong with this night most certain, only neither he, nor Asa
Spade and Xiang knew what was going down exactly.
“Let’s back track,” Asa Spade said before grabbing
the keys and heading for the door with Xiang and Dougie following his
lead.
Asa and his crew rode over to
The Royal Flush
and saw an empty
parking lot. They then headed back over to the trap in Shorter Arms
and woke three soldiers who were laid up in the house. The men had no
clue as to the whereabouts of Percy, Francesca and Ponita. Two hours
later, Asa Spade was cruising through the parking lot of the condo
when he stumbled upon Percy’s 2002 Navigator that was properly
parked in one of the slots. A quick search around the surrounding
area uncovered Ponita’s cell phone on the ground with the
missed calls and texts that Francesca had made and sent earlier.
“That woman at the club,” Xiang remarked, “she may
have something to do with this.”
“It’s a good chance,” Asa said. “She used a
credit card to pay the bill. Let’s go back to the club and go
through the receipts and get her name and see if we can track her
down.”
*******
The sharks inside the tank inside of
Glitz
were in a frenzied
state as flesh splashed down into the water. If ever there were a
real life horror flick, then the events inside this club would
definitely qualify. True to her word, Carmella had delivered a slow
death to Ponita Felton. Francesca and Percy were forced to sit and
watch as their friend was crucified to a plywood board with small
steel spikes and her body dismembered while she was still alive.
Ponita’s arms were cut off with a chainsaw. The sounds she
made, coupled with the blade slicing through her bones were nothing
short of heartbreaking. She’d begged to be killed, but had
remained alive for nearly a half hour until her legs were severed and
she bled out completely. Her murderers were now throwing pieces of
her flesh into the tank and the two bull sharks were swallowing the
body parts whole and circling for more.
While her comrades entertained themselves by feeding human flesh to
the aquatic carnivores, Carmella picked up a machete and she and
Desiree approached Percy. Blood splatter was on Carmella’s
chin, but she refused to wipe it off, merely letting it trickle down
her neck as she, too, was in frenzy—a murderous frenzy fueled
by a sincere determination to eradicate those who unknowingly stood
in her way.
Desiree removed the small table before Francesca and Percy and
Percy’s chair, with him in sitting it, was picked up by two of
Q-man’s henchmen and placed atop the plywood that still had
remnants of Ponita’s blood and flesh splattered about. Carmella
stepped forward and stood before Percy soon after.
“You,” Carmella hissed as she pointed her machete at
Percy, “when I remove the tape from your lips I want you to
tell me the name of your boss and where he lives. And then I kill you
quickly to put you out of your misery.”
Percy said nothing as he sat bound and naked. Slowly, Carmella pulled
the tape away. “You might as well kill me now bitch because I
ain’t tellin’ you shit!” Percy yelled.
“Did you hear that bitch gurgling and begging to die when that
chainsaw cut into her ass?” Carmella asked through laughter.
“You are hard, okay? You’re hard. But don’t make
this more difficult than what it has to be.”
“Fuck you!” Percy yelled.
“Fuck you!” Carmella yelled as she knelt down and hacked
off half of Percy’s left foot. “Now he wants to cry,”
she said over Percy’s immediate screams of agony as she stood
up once more and spread her arms. Carmella showed no mercy when she
raised her arm and slammed the machete into Percy’s clavicle,
slicing through it completely and leaving his left arm dangling.
“You’re now half the man you once were, mutherfucka!”
she yelled. “Your boss! Who’s your boss? Who do work
for?”
Percy began coughing uncontrollably and vomiting onto himself, still
he wouldn’t give up names. Carmella raised the machete again
and slammed down into Percy’s knee, slicing off a portion of
his knee cap. His cries brought tears to Francesca’s eyes. She
wished he would just say the name and end it all for everybody, but
she had to admire his resilience. It was a resilience that was
forcing her to fight for her own life. She sat wrestling with her
plastic ties, determined to break free as she watched her friend’s
eyes roll to the back of his head.
“Hey,” Carmella yelled as she slapped Percy’s face
with the bloody machete. “Amigo, you woke?” she asked.
“I think he died,” Desiree said while checking for a
pulse.
“The tourniquets,” Q-man said.
“Say again?” Carmella asked, nearly out of breath, as she
looked back at Q-man.
“You wanted to kill that man so bad your ass forgot the
tourniquets.”
“Shit. You’re right.” Carmella laughed as she took
her machete and sliced Percy’s throat, making sure he was dead.
She then turned to Francesca and said, “That leaves you, bitch.
I want the name of your boss and where he lives!”
“As much as we would like to stick around for the show, we need
to get back to our room so we can get ready to leave out later on,”
Q-man said as he stood up and stretched.
“You’re not going to watch me murder this bitch?”
Carmella asked.
“If you’ve seen one murder you’ve seen them all,”
Q-man remarked as he and his boys headed for the stairs with the
money stolen from their enemies.
“Okay then. Call me when you get back to the Ap,”
Carmella said as she and Desiree followed Q-man and his crew
downstairs, unintentionally leaving Francesca alone as all were high
out of their minds and had become lackadaisical with the securing of
their last surviving captor.
When the group disappeared from sight, Francesca saw her opportunity.
She’d broken free shortly before Carmella had sliced Percy’s
neck and was only awaiting the right time to make her move. She eased
up from her chair and crept over to Percy and saw that he was dead.
The gate being raised on the first floor let her know her captors
were all the way to the front of the club. The only way out was
through the small office behind the plywood and plastic laying on the
floor so she tiptoed over to the door and eased it open.
Once inside, Francesca saw a single door that led to a fire escape.
It was the same door she and her friends had been ushered through
shortly after their capture. She ran over to the door only to
discover that was padlocked from the inside. The cage being lowered
alerted Francesca to the fact that Carmella and her crew were
returning to finish her off. She grew frantic as she paced the
office, opening drawers and flipping over sofa cushions in hopes of
finding a gun, but she came up empty-handed. The voices from her
captors were growing closer and Francesca knew she had to act fast.
Out of desperation, she grabbed a chair and threw it towards the
small window beside the office door and it shattered, giving her a
way out onto the fire escape.
Carmella and Desiree heard the noise and they rushed up the stairs to
find an empty chair, Percy’s dead body and an open office door
with a shattered window. “Fuck!” Carmella yelled as she
ran into the office where she saw Francesca climbing out of the
window.
Carmella made a mad dash for Francesca, but she’d fallen out
the window and dropped about four feet onto the metal walkway of the
fire escape. Francesca wasted no time in getting up and running down
the stairs butt-naked as gunshots from Carmella’s .45 automatic
rang out into the night.
Bullets ricocheted off of metal and concrete as Francesca reached the
bottom of the stairs, dipped behind several dumpsters and disappeared
into the night, forcing Carmella and Desiree back inside to clean up
their crime scene as both were certain that their escapee would
notify authorities.