Page 53 of Heartless Heathens

I pulled out fast and kept the car in reverse, doing one of the things I enjoyed most. I sped through the parking lot, dodging and swerving around any obstacles or cars that appeared in my way before shifting the gears and driving out onto the main road. Reesa screeched out like a banshee the entire time but when I looked over, Romina’s face had a smile carved widely over her cheeks. Her hands clutched her seat tightly, but her enjoyment was too evident to be denied.

I pulled the e-brake, letting the car spin twice before righting it to the direction we needed to go.

“Where to, then?” I asked, turning back to look at Reesa, sprawled over the backseat, dread and panic written all over her features.

“T-the Court of Miracles, asshole,” she yelled out, kicking the back of my seat.

“What the fuck do you know about the Court of Miracles?” I asked, looking at her through my rearview mirror.

“It’s a shopping mall.” She crossed her arms and frowned at me.

“Good,” I told her, speeding through the streets.

The first store that Reesa took us to had mostly mustard yellow clothes floating around the mannequins.

“No,” I told her before she tried to force us to walk in, placing my hand over Romina’s chest to keep her from entering.

“What do you mean?” Reesa asked.

“She’s not wearing that shit.” It looked like the kind of clothes you’d see on a sad PTA mom who got railed twice a year by a husband that could barely get semi-hard.

“Oh, because you have better fashion sense?” she asked as if she wasn’t wearing black and yellow checkerboard pants that clashed terribly with her green t-shirt.

This girl was a fucking wreck.

I sucked something imaginary from my teeth as I thought about my options here. I didn’t actually give a shit what the girl wore, but if I let this buffoon dress her, then there was a good chance I was gonna have to suffer Sonny’s wrathandbe forced into a do-over.

Whatever that fucking saying was about getting a job done well the first time, we could apply it here.

“Do you want to see therealCourt of Miracles?”I asked Reesa and her eyes went wide with her nod.

“I fuckingkneeewit,” she exclaimed happily like all her possible conspiracy theories were about to be revealed in front of her very eyes.

“It goes without saying, that if you repeat anything you’re about to see, that I’ll fucking rip your eyeballs out myself before I stuff them down your throat, yeah?” I asked her, nostrils flaring as I proposed her options to her.

“I guess it's a good thing you said it then.” She laughed nervously and hooked Romina’s arm into hers.

I grabbed Romina’s hand and pulled both of them across the street, through the small shopping square they called The Court of Miracles. It was just a distraction, a way to hide what was really there, if you knew where to look.

The black door in the narrow gray building was smashed in between a bookstore and a bakery. It was hardly noticeable, so much that it was the bookstore she took note of instead. I didn’t miss the way Romina looked inside the glass window to stare at the books longingly.

I opened the door knowing any passerby would think it was an entrance to an upstairs apartment for the retailers who had businesses on the ground level. There were maybe six or seven of them in total. They paid heavy taxes to the Church to be able to run their businesses without the meddling of the Nile. It was mostly Mom and Pop shops with workers who still held a dream of owning something real for themselves.

Poor suckers didn’t know that just a few feet below them was an entire ecosystem of people calling the shots themselves. People who didn’t abide by Frollo’s laws and refused to put their heads down and let a conglomerate and a made-up God decide their fate.

It was the illegal market to end markets.

Reesa tried to walk ahead but I stuck my arm in front of her in warning.

“You don’t come back here without me. Not unless you have a death wish. You understand?”

She nodded fearfully.

We walked through the narrow hallway until it got so dark that you couldn’t see in front of your hands. It came to a dead end, and I heard Romina squeal when her chest hit my back from behind. Soon followed the ‘Oof’ of Reesa doing the same.

The walls narrowed too tightly at the end of the corridor, I reached into my pocket to grab my phone for a light, always forgetting that crucial stepbeforegoing deep into the hallway. It didn’t help much, but I could at least find the painting hanging on the wall without having to feel around for it. I pushed it to the side, feeling the cool breeze seeping in from the hole hidden in the wall.

“In you go,” I whispered to Romina, guiding her by the elbow into the tunnel carved inside the wall.