Fixed in Blood by T. E. Woods Read Free Book Online

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    “Option two. You could borrow the money from one of your friends or family members. You got anybody like that?”
    She thought of her mother, sitting alone in her trailer, wearing the same seersucker housecoat she’d worn every day for the past twelve years, watching her soaps and shooing her cat away from her bowl of Doritos. Francie shook her head again.
    “That leaves us with option number three.” He sounded tired. “You gotta give me something that’s worth forty-three hundred dollars. You do that and we’ll call it even.”
    She looked at him through tear-swollen eyes. “I don’t have anything like that. I got my clothes, but they’re pretty much trashed. My car’s a junker. I don’t think I’d get five hundred dollars for it. My futon was secondhand when I got it.” She shook her head slowly. “I think if you added up everything I own, it wouldn’t come to a thousand dollars.”
    He was quiet for a long time. Francie kept her head down and prayed he’d let her sign one of those blue sheets again.
Just let me get out of here. I want to go home. I’ll agree to more fees. Just let me go home.
    “Well, you’re in a real pickle, then, aren’t you?” He paused for a moment. “Maybe there’s something I can do.”
    She lifted her head in time to see him shrug his shoulders and sigh.
    “You’re what, almost twenty years old?” he asked.
    “Come August I’ll be. August twelfth to be exact.” If he needed her to be twenty to find a way out of this, she wanted him to know it wasn’t that far away.
    He looked her up and down. “You’re pretty enough, I guess. Maybe could lose ten pounds or so, but you might clean up nice.”
    Francie’s breath stopped in her chest. He was an old man. Probably close to forty, she bet.
If he’s wanting me to be his girlfriend, I’d rather go jump off some bridge. How’s he going to get his money if I do that?
    “What exactly are you talking about here?” she asked.
    He chuckled. “Relax, Francie. I want you to start thinking about what you have that could be worth some real money.” He leaned forward across his desk. “And I want you to start calling me Boss Man.”
    —
    Two hours later Boss Man pulled a cellphone from his safe. A bunch of cloak-and-dagger spy shit if you asked him. Use this phone to contact her. Never use this phone for anything else. This woman had more rules than a PGA manual. Add that to doing business with some voice over a speaker phone hanging from some giant caveman’s neck and it was enough to make him long for the good old days. When running whores was a simple case of keeping ’em hooked and afraid and paying the cops to look the other way. Now it was all high tech. Now it was all treat-the-women-with-respect.
    That’s what happens when you let a snatch think she’s in charge.
    But he still hurt from that beating Staz gave him last time. He punched the one number on the spy phone’s contact list. She answered on the third ring. It was always the third ring.
    “What is it?” She was pure business. No “How ya doin’?” Never a “What’s new?”
    “I’ve expanded the staff.” That’s the way she liked to hear it. He’d be happy to play her game until it was time not to.
    “Just a moment.” He heard the sound of clicking computer keys. “I’ll need her name, age, and what she plans for her life.”
    This was the part that drove him nuts. What the hell did she think the kid wanted? Stop making payments, that’s what she wanted. But again, the game wasn’t tilting his way at the present.
    “Her name’s Francie Michael. Nineteen years old.” He tried to sound enthusiastic, like he’d just hired the head of the class from Dumbfuck U. “She hopes to be a nurse someday.” He rolled his eyes as he made up a scenario about her debt keeping her from following her dream. He even threw in a puppy named Chocolate. Shit if he knew about Francie’s dreams. She was a piece of trash who owed him big. That was the