Accidental Acquisition (Kindred)

“I’m talking about how I’m gonna cut off one of your pretty little fingers every time you lie to me from now on,” Moreno snarled.

“Oh my God!” Instinctively, Jillian curled her fingers into a fist. But Jimmy only shook his head.

“Oh, so you’d rather I cut off your whole hand, honeybee? I can do that, too—I sharpen my blade for an hour before every job.”

“What? No!” Jillian protested. “Please…please don’t do this! I told you, I had nothing to do with any missing money! Brad is lying! He—”

Her words ended in a shriek of pain and horrified surprise as the silver blade moved with wicked precision, slicing through her pinky and ring fingers at the top knuckle joint, where they joined onto her hand.

Or they had joined to her hand, Jillian thought sickly. Now they were hanging by two flaps of skin, dangling beneath her still-closed fist from a few shreds of bloody flesh. Blood spouted from the stumps of her mutilated fingers, splattering onto the dirty concrete floor. Pain lanced through her, sharp and immediate.

“Oh my God,” she gasped, staring in disbelief at her maimed left hand. “Oh my God—oh my God!”

“Now, you got only yourself to blame for that, honeybee,” Jimmy Moreno remarked conversationally. “I told you not to lie to me—I just hate it when a pretty lady doesn’t tell the truth.”

“I…I wasn’t…I didn’t…” Jillian couldn’t get the words out. The pain in her hand was awful but even worse was the knowledge that he might not be done yet.

“Now, you can still hold a knife to chop or a spoon to stir—you still got two fingers and your thumb,” Jimmy went on in that same, conversational tone—the same tone he might use if they were discussing the weather. “But the way you answer my next question determines whether you get to keep those fingers and thumb or not. Now I’ll ask you again…where’s my fucking money you little bitch?”

Jillian’s mind felt distant and far away—as though her head was a balloon, floating ten feet above her body. Shock—I’m in shock, she thought numbly. She tried to think what she could say to keep Moreno from cutting her again, but her brain felt like someone had wrapped it in thick cotton and no coherent answers were coming to her.

“Money? I don’t—” she began and then the knife flew again in a silver-crimson blur and her middle finger was lying on the floor at her feet.

This time, Jillian didn’t scream. She just stared in numb disbelief at what had happened to her.

If watching her get maimed bothered Brad at all, her ex certainly didn’t show it.

“Jilly-baby, just tell him where it is!” he shouted, still apparently trying to pin the blame on her. “Tell him about the safety deposit box—just tell him!”

“Safety deposit box, huh?” Moreno grunted in her ear. “Whatcha got in there, huh, honeybee? Could that be where you put my fifty thou or the coke you bought with it?”

“The only thing in there is my mother’s diary and my grandmother’s ring.” The words came out automatically, sliding through numb lips. A part of her brain was screaming at her, Lie! Lie! Tell him you have the money somewhere else—anything to make him stop cutting you! But somehow only the truth came out when she opened her mouth—a fact that was likely to get her killed.

“Fuck this with the fingers,” she heard Moreno snarl. The knife blade was suddenly whisked out of sight and he stepped behind her. “Maybe this will make you tell me the truth, honeybee,” he said.

And then something skewered Jillian, slicing directly through the right side of her body with a stabbing pain so bright and sharp she actually saw stars in front of her eyes as her vision wavered in and out of focus.

Looking down, she saw the bloody tip of the carbonized steel blade protruding from the right side of her abdomen. The bastard had stabbed right through her!

She shrieked then, as the numbing shock broke and everything went from cloudy and hazy to ultra-bright and sharp.

“The money, bitch!” Moreno snarled in her ear. He yanked out the knife in a move that hurt almost as much as when he had stabbed it in and a gush of blood began pouring down Jillian’s front, staining her chef’s whites, which she hadn’t bothered to change out of before coming down to Earth.

“Please!” she gasped, trying to staunch the flow with her right hand, since her left was wounded and useless. “Please, don’t! Don’t hurt me again!”

“Then tell me,” Moreno insisted. “WHERE’S MY FUCKING MON—”

But strangely, he didn’t finish the question. It ended, instead, with a loud cracking sound and then he let go of Jillian abruptly.

“Oh Gods, sweetheart—you’re hurt!” a deep familiar voice said. “Hurt really bad, I’m afraid!”

48

“K-kalis?” Jillian turned dizzily, so unsteady on her feet that she nearly tripped over the slumped body of Moreno, which was sprawled on the floor at her feet. The mobster’s thick neck was bent at a funny angle and though he was lying face down with the bloody knife still clutched in his hand, his head was turned all the way around so that his face was looking up at her.