"You want something to drink?" Logan asked after a few minutes. I thought about a stiff drink, but changed my mind. I would rather keep every wit sharp and focused. Logan was smart, and he was used to playing with well-skilled liars. The tightrope I was walking was roughly the size of dental floss, but I'd been there before and come out ahead.
"Something hot would be wonderful," I replied with an ingratiating smile. He wheeled himself into the kitchen and came back a few minutes later with a couple of cups of coffee. I took a deep breath. That wasn't instant. What kind of man has coffee beans all nice and ground in this society? The perfect kind of course. The perfect sucker that is.
"Didn't know how you liked it," he said apologetically, handing me a cup.
"Dark and strong all the way," I replied smoothly. Take that however you want to. I took a sip. Damn, he had good taste in coffee. Too bad he was lacking in other areas. "Money, class and you make a mean cup of coffee," I teased, "now why has some lucky girl not scooped you right up?"
He looked uncomfortable for a second. Bad move on my part. Widower maybe? Maybe he thought that no woman could want a man in a wheelchair. I could prove him wrong in about five minutes, but that wasn't part of the plan. "Well," he said finally, "you have a genetically engineered killing machine around here enough, it tends to chase most women off permanently."
"Except your aunt Margot," I said quickly, wanting to lighten the mood.
"Except my aunt Margot," he echoed with a little laugh. He mimed wiping sweat off of his forehead. "I can't believe you did that to Uncle Jonas." He seemed genuinely amused. This was a much better track.
I shrugged. "I'm the bad one of the bunch, just ask Zack."
Logan looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. "So how does a girl go from a genetically engineered killing machine to a New Orleans exotic dance club owner?" So politically correct. Not the way I had heard it put before. How does a soldier become a whore? That's what Zack had yelled at me the first time I saw him after I started dancing. I was glad we were alone right then. Anyone seeing the fight that had ensued would have known immediately that I wasn't human.
Still, this was the perfect opportunity to get things started. I could make up lies, but the truth was even better than a lie. "My club," I began, "it's the ultimate in freedom. There are no rules there except for the ones I make. There's no running around hiding, never belonging anywhere. I love what I do, and really, it's the ultimate fulfillment of the X-5 wish: to never have to be a soldier, doing what you are commanded to, even if it's supposed to be all for the good of the country, instead doing what you want to do." He didn't change expression, but somehow I knew I had struck a nerve with him. There was just the slightest change. Max knew he was Eye's Only. I was willing to bet he had her running around for him. This was going to be just too easy.
"I left my oh-so-beloved foster home when I was eleven or so," I said. From my tone and the way I rolled my eyes, Logan could tell I was being sarcastic. He smirked.
"You and Max do have a lot in common," he commented. I raised my eyebrows in question and he explained, "She didn't exactly go to the greatest family either."
"For her sake, I hope it wasn't as bad as what I got sent to," I replied. Oddly enough, I really hoped she didn't. "Anyways, I took off and spent a couple of years on the streets, doing whatever to survive. It actually wasn't that bad really. Better than Manticore at any rate." I was glossing over quite a bit. There were parts that were worse than Manticore. The never-ending loneliness for one. It was a long time before that went away. It hadn't been so bad at first when I was on the road with Tex and Rose and the rest. They had taken several weeks to get to Louisiana, and when I was with them, it wasn't lonely as much. After I got to the foster home, the pain of Zack not being there to protect me was too much to bear, and I locked it all away. Once I was on the streets, I really was alone, and it tore at me for the longest time.
"When I was thirteen I met Frankie Devenchenzi, this Italian guy that liked his girls young," I continued quickly, not wanting to think about what had happened, just rattle off the facts. It wasn't as easy as I wanted, but maybe that was an advantage. Play the sympathy card. "He made me an offer that he would take me off of the streets. I was quite a bit more developed than most girls my age, and he liked what he saw. I'd be his mistress and he'd set me up in this little apartment. The only deal was that I would have to work in his club because he didn't want his wife to know he was keeping a mistress. Her daddy was some big-time mafia crime boss up in New York, and Frankie had been warned by daddy that if princess came to him crying, she was going to be wearing his balls as earrings, and that would be the only parts of him that anyone would ever be able to find." Frankie never told me that, but I had found it out later. He had just told me he didn't want his wife to know.
"Our affair lasted a little under two years," I said. "After a while, it wasn't him that I liked so much as it was the club. It drove him nuts that I never fell in love with him. He got off on having these young girls fall desperately in love with him, and then dumping them. One of them committed suicide, and that just pleased the bastard to no end. Our affair lasted much longer than his usual six-month limit just because he wanted me to declare I was in love with him, and when he said it to me to try and get me to say it, I laughed in his face. I told him that love was for romance novels and liars."
"He said he loved his wife, and I reminded him that he had just spent half the night fucking a fifteen-year-old kid, and swearing that he was in love with her. He said he couldn't love a slut like me. I reminded him that he just proved my point. That's when he slapped me. If I had returned the favor, I would have killed him, and that would not have been a good thing considering that he was a big guy and people would have wondered how a little thing like me could take him out. I decided I was just going to have to kill him in another way."
"Anyways, right after that Frankie dumped me for a thirteen-year-old runaway. He was waiting for me to break down and sob, but all I did was ask him if I could keep dancing at the club. I was such an attraction by then, he didn't want to lose me. I was bringing in a shit load of cash to the club, and we both knew it. He said it was fine for me to stay dancing, but I was going to have to go into the private rooms like the rest of the girls since I was no longer his personal whore." Logan flinched at my wordage. I had a feeling he didn't like my language, but fuck him, I didn't talk for approval, I did it for effect.
"You…you were forced to be a prostitute?" he asked uncertainly, the pity in his eyes almost painful in it's honesty. He must have known from Max what we suffered at Manticore. To hear that my poor body had been ravaged again must have been heartbreaking to him.
"I was trained to adapt to any situation and do whatever was required to survive and complete the mission," I replied. It hadn't been easy. Frankie hadn't been my first lover, but I had never sold myself before. A lot of street girls that I knew would take money because that would make them a whore, but would fuck men they didn't like for a free meal or night's lodging. I never had slept with a man I didn't like. I really did like Frankie at first. "I did what I had to do to live, Logan. There wasn't much of a choice for me that I could see then. I couldn't go back to foster care, and stealing was a great way of getting my barcode photographed in a mug shot."
The outrage in his face was immediate. "Men like that are the worst kind of cancer in this society," he snapped, not at me really, more at society in general. "Preying upon children, it is the worst thing that any human being could do to one of their own kind." I was impressed by his strong words. I hadn't really wanted to do it, but I was willing. I did make the choice to be a whore so I could keep dancing rather than hit the streets again. On the streets I probably would have had to turn tricks anyways. This kept me where I wanted to be at least.
"Nobody told me it was wrong," I said a little lamely. "I was on my own, and even with my training, I was a kid. Kids tend to make wrong decisions especially when learning a moral code started with Manticore."
"When did Zack find you?" he asked. Zack, protector of all that is X-5. Logan really believed that. Perfect.
"Actually it was around that time that he let himself be known," I answered. The son-of-a-bitch had known for a while where I was, and when I was on the streets, it would have helped to know that he was there. "Maybe five months or so before Frankie broke up with me. I had noticed this guy at the club. He'd been there the last few nights in a row, and I had seen him there a couple of times in the last year or so. I had just finished a night at the club, and was walking home when he grabbed me and pulled me into an alley, and demanded to know what the hell I thought I was doing."
"I thought at first he was just some drunk wanting to fuck me since I had danced for him, and went to go kick his ass, but I was the one that ended up flat on my butt. He dodged and blocked my blows, and I had been wearing some live ivy for a routine I had done. It was still wrapped around me, and I ended up tripping over it, and looking up, wondering how the hell he was as fast as me, and then it hit me who he was. Zack."
"He hauled me up and yelled at me wanting to know what the fuck I was thinking being a stripper. I told him to mind his own fucking business since he hadn't cared enough to show up early enough to stop me. From the way he froze, I don't think any of the others that he'd contacted had yelled at him like that. He also wasn't expecting to hear one of his soldiers yelling with a New Orleans accent. He doesn't really like what I do, but he doesn't tell me what to do, and he knows that he doesn't scare or intimidate me. He did what he could to get me to stop, and in the end he helped me get out of the worst of it."
My answer seemed to be oddly satisfactory to Logan. Zack might have not always been there, but he had been there when it counted. Not really, but that was good enough. "Anyways, Frankie brought this little girl into the club, and she thought since she was fucking the owner, she ruled the place. The other dancers thought she was a bitch, and she always loved making digs around me about how wonderful Frankie was treating her. It was driving her insane that I could care less. Then she started trying to sabotage all of the other dancers, and I almost ended up with a broken ankle. Anyone else would have gotten hurt, but I'm a lot more agile." Logan smirked. He knew what we could do. "That was it for me. A few of us went to Frankie and told him to fire her or else. He said she gave the best head he'd ever gotten, and fired us instead."
Logan perked up a little. "Not the wisest move on his part. Angering a person trained in strategy and tactics."
"And who had been taught combat ethics by Don Lydecker," I added. Logan laughed at that. Combat ethics was a short class. Winner takes all. Class dismissed. "I got together with Victor, the bouncer at the club, and planted a camera in his office. I got footage of him fucking his girlfriend, and a few of the other dancers at the club. Then I went to Frankie, showed him the tape, and then asked him what would he prefer, turning the club over to me, or I turn the tapes over to his wife."
"He went to beat the shit out of me and take the tapes. At least that's what I thought he was saying he was going to do from all the screaming and cursing. He took a swing at me, and I caught his arm and pulled his gut into my knee. I think I might have cracked a few ribs, but I shoved him back and told him that he better decide right then and there if he wanted to live or die. He told me to fuck off that his wife was a fucking moron that would believe him when he told her the tapes were fakes."
"Did you send them to her?" Logan asked, a little wide-eyed.
I smirked. "My only wish is that I could have been there when the little woman called Daddy," I said. Logan had this pleased smirk of one who had just heard about a truly evil man getting what he deserved. "I don't know what happened really, but I do know that Frankie turned up at my apartment the day after she got them, all torn up and scratched, and brusied all to hell and back. He was begging me to tell his wife that the tapes were faked. He promised to turn over control of the club to me. Daddy had a couple of men on their way to New Orleans, and Frankie was a dead man."
"Frankie signed the papers, and I went to his wife and told her how the rival family here in New Orleans forced me to make those tapes. There was a man who looked like Frankie, and I helped him and a few girls break into Frankie's office and make the tapes. I was sobbing, begging her to forgive me, but I had two small children that would have been put in danger if I didn't do it. But Frankie was a good man, and helped me get my kids to California, and I was going there too, and I wanted to make sure she knew that he was a upstanding husband."
"She believed it?" Logan asked a little incredulously.
"I am an actress beyond compare," I replied, wondering if he would get how double-sided that remark was. He didn't. Figures.
"And that was it?" Logan asked me. "He never came after you or tried to get revenge?"
I shrugged. "His wife was still a little suspicious that maybe there was truth behind the fiction. She demanded they move back to New York, and he was smart enough to go." Logan looked satisfied with that answer. It was a blatant lie, but how was he to know that?
I had told the wife that a rival family had set Frankie up. I had done my homework well. Wifey's family was just itching for a war with the one in New Orleans. Two top button men had been sent to New Orleans to take out Frankie. This maid that had been fucking the pool boy out in the maintenance shed saw someone jumping off of their balcony of their hotel room late one night, and that morning it was discovered that both of them men had had their throats slit in the night. The maid was discounted since she had been drinking and they were on the fifth floor, but it didn't matter. The war was on. Frankie was smart, smart enough to be scared at any rate. The last thing he wanted was to be part of a mob war. He went to New York with his wife, and neither side of combatants ever noticed my little club that was now doing boom business after a little reorganization. Some said that I had to have the luck of the devil for everything to come together for me so perfectly. I accepted the sentiment, but I knew the truth. Luck is merely a well-organized plan carried out with absolute precision. I could plan, and I had long been very precise in what I did.