She Sold a Future Cop

Exam results came out. I finished first in the state. The admissions director of the country's top law-enforcement academy drove out himself to hand me my acceptance letter. Then my girlfriend messaged me. She wanted me to fly down to Cancun and keep her company. I emptied my savings account and went, planning to share the best news of my life with her. When I got there, she informed me I would be covering everything. For her, and for the guy she grew up with. It sat badly with me, but there was nothing I could do about it. I told myself I would just end the trip early. Then I opened my eyes the next morning inside a scam compound. I fought until I got loose, went out a window ten feet off the ground, and limped through the front gate on a broken leg. A taxi pulled up outside. My girlfriend stepped out of it. For one bright second I thought I was saved. She waved her arm and shouted. "Over here! This one's running! "Somebody take him back inside!" Chapter 1 The whole time the compound's men were dragging me back toward that room, I could not put words to what I felt. Claire had not come to save me. She was in a little white dress, arm hooked through Derek Vaughn's like the two of them were out on a date. Derek. The guy she grew up with. She'd talked about him constantly. His family had no money, she always said. He dropped out before he finished eighth grade and went to work. "You made it all the way inside the compound and you're still not behaving. "Guess you have to take a beating first." Derek stood over me, looking down, his voice half mockery and half amusement. I stared back at him with something bitter turning over in my chest, and all I could manage was a crooked smile. Claire looked at me and adopted a reasonable tone. "Ryan, you're a smart guy. Smart people read the room. "I know you've got a lot of rich friends. Just settle in, stay put, help us get their money. "Then we let you walk out." I didn't buy a word of it. I'd read enough news. Of the people who get sold into these places, how many go home in one piece? And anyway, who told her I had rich friends? "I don't know any rich people. "Claire, I'm a broke student." She didn't believe me. She held out her hand and showed me the ring on her finger. "Don't lie to me. "The stone on this is not cheap. You're a student. If your family didn't have money, how would you afford it?" I asked her the only question that mattered. "So you were with me because you thought I was rich?" "What else?" Not a flicker of guilt. Like playing with what I felt for her had only ever been a game. I thought about the night I met her. My classmates and I were out together and there she was on a street corner, selling cocktails out of a cart. Sweat on the collar of her white shirt. Under the moon she looked like something behind a veil. One look and I went straight down into it. To be with her I kept up my classes and hauled brick on a construction site and tutored middle schoolers on the side. Filthy work, exhausting work, I did all of it, because I wanted money to buy her things. What she never knew was that I'm an orphan. The place I live is a school dormitory. Rich, me? Every cent of that money was money I broke my back for and then handed to her. "Quit wasting breath on him," Derek said. "He's just stubborn. He doesn't want to cooperate. "One beating and he'll behave. "I've handled plenty of rich boys. All bone and attitude right up until the baton touches them, then they wet themselves. "Baby, you might want to cover your eyes in a minute. Don't let it scare you." He stroked Claire's shoulder while he said it, gentle about it. She made a contemptuous noise. "Scare me? I've seen him uglier than this. "Any time he didn't come in first, he'd sit in front of me and sob himself hoarse. "Snot and tears everywhere. It was genuinely something to look at." Hearing that did something to me I can't describe. Night after night I had peeled myself open and let her see the softest part of me. And she had filed every bit of it away as a weapon. Just then one of the men walked in carrying a stun baton. Chapter 2 "All right, baby, I'm starting. You're not going to feel sorry for him, are you?" "Not a chance. Hurry up and make him behave so he'll start pulling in money." The baton came down across my head and split my forehead open in an instant. My skull rang. My scalp went numb all over. Something warm ran down the bridge of my nose, and with it a thick smell of iron. Blood. Drops of it the size of beans hit the floor one after another. Derek kicked me over. My hands and feet were tied. My right leg had snapped in the fall out the window, and the pain of it went straight through the middle of me. "Run. You like running. You going to run now?" His face was ugly with it. The tendons stood out along the arm holding the baton. He grabbed a fistful of my hair and hauled my head up off the ground to ask me again. When I didn't answer, he hit me again. Every time the baton landed I could feel the current crawling through my nerves. I clenched my jaw until my mouth was slick with blood. At the edge of my vision, Claire was scrolling her phone like none of it was happening. Then, bored, she opened the camera and pointed it at my face. "This is great. "Ryan, why aren't you screaming? Doesn't it hurt?" I cursed her inside my head. Cold-blooded. Did she need me howling and begging before she'd be satisfied? Derek was breathing hard, soaked through. "Yeah, why isn't he screaming? Must not be enough voltage." He turned it up a notch and drove it into my arm. Everything inside me felt scorched at once. Every nerve in my body shook. I don't have the vocabulary for that kind of pain. I never will. "Aagh!" That was when I couldn't hold it anymore. Facedown on the floor I was a stray dog. Helpless, pitiful, small. If somebody had cut my hands and feet loose I would have put both of them on the ground and beaten them into it. But I couldn't. Then I felt the heat spreading through my shorts. And when I looked down at myself, the shame of it finished off whatever I had left. A yellow pool spreading out under me across the floor. "He pissed himself! "He got shocked so hard he pissed himself!" Claire pointed at my lap and doubled over laughing. Derek made a face and fanned the air in front of his nose. In that moment I wanted to die on the spot. Then I thought about the academy. About the letter. About the life that was sitting there waiting for me. Twelve years of work. If I threw my life away here, I'd be spitting on every one of them. I thought about something a man used to say on a fraud-awareness program I never missed. "Be ready, every day of your life, to stand against the dark. "Even at the very last minute, you don't quit." The coincidence was that the man who said it was Director Daniel Foster, the admissions director of that academy. Weeks earlier he had driven out and put my acceptance letter in my hand himself. Claire knew nothing about any of it. I had been saving it as a surprise for her. Instead it had become the one weapon nobody knew I was holding. A plan assembled itself in my head. "Ryan, now that you know what pain is, behave. You come here and don't cooperate, there's only one way that ends." He slapped my cheek, hard, eyes flat. "Say something, you little piece of garbage. You gone mute? "Want me to hit you again?" He crouched and brought the baton back toward my arm. "No. No more running." I let the fear show. "I'll cooperate. "I'll cooperate with you. Please stop. Don't hit me again." Wait for it, both of you. You really think I'm that easy to squeeze? As long as I was alive, there was a chance.