Free Shetani's Sister by Iceberg Slim Page B

plate numbers for her and the others. She or her pimp could drop a coin on him to Internal Affairs that would kick off an investigation that would destroy him.
    He surveyed Petra’s curves. He decided that, as lush and gratifying as she was sexually, his personal risk and the pressure of their deal with no money payoff would have to be terminated. He could squeeze a payoff out of her pimp, but that would only be insurance against the dropping of a dime to Internal Affairs. It was the return of his mentor, Rucker, with his sixth sense that concerned Crane most. He’d played himself into a trap. He decided reluctantly that he would have to kill her to escape.
    She stared into his grim face as he again placed the gun’s muzzle against her temple. “You don’t have to kill me. Let me go back to New York,” she pleaded with desperate eyes.
    His finger pulled lightly against the trigger as he stared into her enormous eyes, fiery with fear. His trigger finger pulled harder. The cylinder started to roll. He felt drenched in sweat. He jerked the gun from her temple and rammed it into its holster. She collapsed forward. She cried, with her face against her knees. He slit-eyed her.
    “Does anybody besides you and your boss know about how you got tipped to the plate numbers?”
    She shook her head.
    “How old is your boss?”
    She blubbered, “Around forty. I don’t really know.”
    He grabbed a fistful of her hair. “Sit up and look at me,” he commanded as he yanked her erect on the seat.
    She took tissues from her purse to blot her eyes before she faced him.
    “I want eleven hundred bucks a week for the plate numbers. You’ve got until the day after tomorrow to lay it on me. That’s when new cars and plates hit the track. Understand?”
    She nodded. He shouted, “Goddamn you! Say it.”
    She said softly, “I’ll bring the bread when I come to work tomorrow.”
    He turned on the engine and lights. He backed out of the estate and headed down the hill for Sunset Boulevard. She lit a stick of grass to relieve the mad uproar of her nerve ends. She held the burning match and stared hypnotically at her reflection in the windshield. Aging angles of shadow and light in the flare of the match made her the mirror image of the one person on earth she truly hated. Helga Lindstrom, her mother.
    The flame of the match scorched her fingertips. She flung it into the dash ashtray. She thought of Carl, her sweet father. She remembered mean-spirited Helga, the neurotic social climber. She was responsible for Carl’s suicide in prison when Petra was turning sixteen. He had been the treasurer of a New York firm owned by a group of his close friends. He embezzled sums of money over a period of years to satisfy Helga’s ferocious drive to outdo the extravagant Joneses of Long Island, New York.
    Petra’s fingernails stabbed into her palms as she remembered Kristina, her younger sister, and the other reason she hated Helga with soul-deep venom. Kristina, the angelic, the adorably good apple of Helga’s heart, could make no mistakes and do no wrong whatsoever. If she did, that was always bad Petra’s fault for not preventing it.
    Petra remembered the countless times that she had heard Helga praise Kristina for being wonderful and good. She shuddered now at a vision of herself, recoiling from Helga’s index finger, slashing at her like a stiletto as she condemned Petra as the baddest girl there ever was.
    Petra shaped a bitter smile as she thought about the midnight when she fled the family mansion. She was only seventeen, but she was determined to show Helga what bad really was. She’d go to the capital of bad, the Big Apple, and become a gun moll or even a whore. That would give self-righteous Helga a kick in the gut, all right.
    Now the station wagon lurched Petra from her painful reverie, when Crane jerked the steering wheel to avoid a gaping pothole on Vine Street.
    “Say, man, you owe me for the coke,” Petra said as Crane pulled