The Evan Buckley Thrillers: Books 1 - 4 (Evan Buckley Thrillers Boxsets)

by James, Harper

  With the chair the right way up Seppe stomped his foot through the seat. He pulled his leg back out again, cussing as the cuff of his pants caught on the broken wood and ripped. He went to stamp on the remaining bits of seat around the rim.

  ‘That’s enough.’ D’Amato put a hand on his chest and pushed him away. ‘You’ll be getting the sandpaper out next.’

  The guy holding Gina’s arms pushed her down onto the chair. Seppe taped her wrists together, pulled one leg out of her jeans, forced her legs apart and taped them to the chair legs. When he’d finished he stood back and admired the view, a twisted smile on his lips.

  Gina forced her legs as far apart as the tape would allow. She thrust her pelvis towards him as far as it would go.

  ‘There, is that a better view? I bet you wish it was your momma tied up here, don’t you, Seppe? Get her back for putting a clothespin on your little pee-pee every time you went wee-wee in the corner.’

  The smile evaporated and he took a step forward. D’Amato put a hand on his chest again. Gina looked at him.

  ‘What about you, Fatso? Don’t you want a look too?’

  He chuckled, shook his head in amazement. He put his hot, sticky hand on her shoulder, gave it a friendly squeeze like a Grizzly bear might.

  ‘I got to say, you’ve got more balls than the last guy we had in one of those chairs.’ He shook his head again, but sadly this time. ‘It’s a real shame you’re such a pain in the ass or I’d give you Samantha’s job.’

  They both looked across at Samantha who pretended she hadn’t heard.

  Gina let out a long, slow breath, let her shoulders slump, forced herself to relax. This guy was nuts for sure, but was he a total psychopath too? She didn’t know if this was all just to frighten her because she ignored Samantha’s warning—or if they might actually kill her.

  He sat on the edge of the desk again and swung his leg back and forth. Gina watched it swinging lazily so she didn’t have to look at his face. Behind him, Seppe was moving around. He placed something on the desk behind D’Amato. Gina caught a quick glimpse of it before it was obscured by D’Amato’s bulk, caught more than a glimpse of the look on Seppe’s face. She prayed to God it wasn’t what she thought it was.

  Everybody else seemed to be holding their breath. Gina heard the loud tick of her watch. Outside, a car alarm that she hadn’t been aware of suddenly stopped. One of the goons cleared his throat.

  D’Amato suddenly clapped his meaty hands together. Gina jumped, pleased to see she wasn’t the only one. He shifted his butt on the desk. Gina tried to see past him, see what Seppe had put there, not wanting to know, unable to stop herself. D’Amato was talking but she couldn’t concentrate on his words.

  ‘The way this normally works is you’ve got a guy in the chair and his balls and everything are hanging down’—he paused to make sure he hadn’t lost her—‘then we all take turns whacking the hell out of them with ... well, whatever we’ve got lying around, a baseball bat, something like that. If we really don’t like the guy, we let Samantha take a turn. That’s normally the last turn because there’s not a lot left for anyone else afterwards.’

  He looked at Samantha. She stood with her arms crossed giving him a look that suggested she’d happily put him in the chair if they found one big enough.

  ‘The trouble with you is, you ain’t got no balls to start with.’ He stopped and held up a finger. ‘When I said earlier you got more balls than the last guy I was speaking figuratively—that’s the right word isn’t it? You’re a college girl, aren’t you?’

  She didn’t know whether the maniac was looking for an answer or not. He was leaning towards her, his face massive in front of her, but she still couldn’t see around him.

  ‘Aren’t you? A college girl who’s too clever by half for her own good.’

  He prodded her on the shoulder, then squeezed the flesh along her jaw hard between his thumb and finger. She jerked her head to the side and something snapped inside her, all the fears and worries and tensions of the past weeks finding release, the crazy, unbearable need to know what the hell was behind him, all coming together in two badly chosen words.

  ‘Guinea cocksucker.’

  She surprised herself as much as him, but the words were out. There was a collective gasp from everybody in the room, mouths open in horror or sadistic anticipation, she couldn’t tell which, because everybody except her knew what happened to the last poor schmuck foolish enough to call him Guinea.

  D’Amato’s eyes bulged, his mouth twisted. He spun around, snatched the object off the desk behind him. His body still blocked her view. He grabbed her hair at the nape of the neck with his free hand, wound his fingers into it and pulled her head back sharply. Then, finally, he brought his arm around from behind his back.

  She’d been right.

  She stared in horror at the object in his hand and her mind closed down, refusing to register what he was holding but recognizing one inescapable truth: everything that had come before was like a game compared to what came next.

  Almost lost in his massive hand was a butane blowtorch.

  He pushed the nozzle into her neck and ran it up and over her chin, forced it through her lips and into her mouth. He pushed her tongue until she gagged and then pulled it out again, traced the profile of her nose until it came to rest in the corner of her eye.

  ‘Call me guinea again.’

  She shook her head frantically as much as his grip would allow. He wound his fingers tighter into her hair and pulled her head back harder still, twisted the nozzle.

  ‘Call me a guinea cocksucker again.’

  She kept moving her mouth, but no words would come.

  He retraced the path of the gas nozzle back down her face. ‘Because if you ever do, we’ll play this game again with the gas turned on.’

  Gina’s head swam, the lights too bright, D’Amato’s massive features going in and out of focus, then the merciful darkness swallowed her up as she fainted.

  ***

  SHE CAME AROUND coughing and spluttering, cold water dripping off her face and hair. Her top was drenched and water ran down the insides of her thighs and dripped onto the floor. Seppe stood in front of her with a bucket in his hands and a smug look on his face. He was staring at her wet top as it clung tightly to her breasts. She didn’t have it in her to taunt him this time.

  D’Amato came around and squatted down in front of her, his elbows resting on her knees, his face mere inches from her sex. His bright, mean eyes didn’t seem to have any recollection of her calling him a guinea. It was like dealing with a giant goldfish. One lap around the chair and he’d forgotten.

  ‘We’re going to keep you here for a while. I don’t know what to do with you, but you’ll be staying right here until your friends’ little game is over.’

  She creased her brow and tried to look confused, as if she didn’t know what he was talking about, but she wasn’t very good at it.

  ‘You need to work on your confused face,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘We know all about it. You must think we’re stupid.’

  Gina nodded energetically. ‘Uh huh.’

  D’Amato’s face split in two as he smiled. ‘Game to the last. I like that. We know it’s some kind of sting with Destiny and Evan and Detective Angel. The Three Musketeers.’ He pushed himself up off her knees and sat on the edge of the table again. Gina saw her phone on the table behind him, sitting next to the blowtorch. ‘The only thing we don’t know is when.’

  He raised an eyebrow but Gina wasn’t looking at him any more—she couldn’t take her eyes off Seppe. She watched him approach the desk, pick up the blowtorch, turn on the gas and press the trigger a couple of times. The gas caught and a pointy, ice blue flame spewed into life. He adjusted the gas knob, the flame getting longer and shorter, until he got it just how he wanted it.

  Gina stared in horror, unable to take her eyes off the roaring, blue flame.

>   She didn’t know when.

  She tried to speak but no words would come, as her eyes filled with stinging tears.

  She couldn’t tell them if she wanted to.

  She shook her head violently and tried again to speak. The words came but only as a hoarse whisper.

  ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘What was that?’

  She swallowed. She wasn’t going to cry. ‘I don’t know when—’

  D’Amato put his hand out and touched her face gently. She tensed and the first tear ran down her cheek and came to rest against his thumb. He brushed it away almost tenderly.

  Behind him Seppe fiddled with the gas control again. The roaring intensified as the flame grew longer and subsided to a low hiss as it shrank back again.

  ‘Turn that thing off,’ D’Amato snapped at him, dropping his hand from Gina’s face, ‘before you burn someone.’

  Seppe turned the knob and Gina watched the flame sputter and die. The end of the nozzle glowed faintly orange. His eyes said another day.

  ‘I bet that nozzle’s hot. Here, give it to me.’

  Seppe passed him the blowtorch and he held his palm an inch above the glowing tip, sucked in his breath.

  ‘Told you. How about we give you a little something to remind you what happened here today? A nice little red circle, maybe?’

  He took hold of her hair and held the nozzle an inch above her cheek, just below her eye. It twitched and watered as the heat stung it, merging with her tears.

  ‘I’d stop shaking if I was you, or you’ll make me slip. It’s awfully close to your eye.’

  She closed her eyes, the tears leaking out from under her eyelids, her voice small and pathetic. ‘I don’t know when ...’

  He dropped the blowtorch on the floor and released his grip on her hair. ‘I know you don’t know,’ he said and cocked his head. ‘But we don’t need to know’—his face filled with obvious delight at the simplicity of it—‘because as soon as Destiny says she’s found a good prospect we’ll know it’s Showtime.’ He threw his arms up in the air. She thought he might do a little dance he was so pleased with himself.

  ‘And something tells me it’ll be your friend Evan who’s the lucky guy,’ Seppe added.

  D’Amato wagged a finger at her. ‘And if he thinks he’s going to pretend to be drugged and get a free blowjob on the house he’ll be very disappointed.’

  ‘Very disappointed indeed,’ Seppe echoed.

  Gina wondered what they did for an encore.

  D’Amato walked behind her and rested his hands on her shoulders, his sweaty gut pushing against her hands behind her back. An involuntary shiver ran through her. ‘Ugh. You’re all wet and shivering. Do you want one of the boys to dry you off before we go?’

  Three sets of eager eyes looked at her. She couldn’t think of anything smart or clever to say so she didn’t bother saying anything at all.

  ‘Only joking. We’ve got to go now. One of the guys will come by now and again to check up on you. Make sure you’ve got everything you need.’

  He walked back in front of her and looked down at her. She forced herself to meet his gaze but then her eyes dropped to her phone. She couldn’t help herself. There it was, sitting right in the middle of the table for everyone to see. Almost shouting to them Here I am. Don’t forget me. She looked back up at him immediately but it was too late. He’d caught her looking. He raised an eyebrow and turned to see what had caught her attention.

  The big grin that she already hated more than anything split his face. ‘Silly me.’ He picked up the phone and put it in his pocket. ‘For all I know, this thing might be voice activated. We don’t want you calling your friends and spoiling the surprise.’

  Chapter 47

  EVAN WAS SITTING ON the bed in his hotel room, wondering whether to take the bull by the horns and call Mitch, try to calm him down, when there was a knock on his door. He got up and opened it without thinking, before he suddenly realized that they might be coming for him too. It was only Angel. He stepped aside and let him in. He’d cooled down since their last conversation on the phone although anyone would have felt the energy between the two of them.

  ‘I’m bringing it forward. We do this tonight,’ Angel said.

  ‘Tonight? You said tomorrow night.’

  ‘Things have changed since our last meeting.’ There was an edge to his voice, maybe he hadn’t cooled down so much after all. ‘Or hadn’t you noticed?’

  Evan’s jaw tightened, his breath exiting through his nostrils. He wanted to punch him. There was no way it would have made any difference if he’d said anything earlier. He didn’t know whether to ignore the comment or tell Angel to shove his attitude up his ass. They stood staring at each other for what felt like forever, the tension between them as real as a third person in the room. Then, before Evan said anything he’d regret later, Angel’s shoulders relaxed and he held up his hands.

  ‘Sorry. It’s not your fault,’ he said, sucking air up from the floor.

  Evan would have liked to leave it there and move on. If he didn’t say anything about the note, nobody would ever know apart from the sick bastards who wrote it. But it wasn’t in his DNA.

  ‘I think it might be.’

  Angel gave him a look and Evan dug the note out of his pocket. The Zippo lighter got caught and came out with it, fell on the floor between them. Angel picked it up, turned it over in his hands.

  ‘Nice lighter. My old man’s got one just like it. Same sort of fatalistic verse. He was 101st Airborne Division.’

  He waited for Evan to respond with a similar legitimate claim to owning the lighter, reassure him that he wasn’t just a collector of memorabilia from somebody else’s war.

  ‘You don’t look old enough to have been over there,’ he said to ease the tension when Evan didn’t respond. ‘Was it your old man’s?’

  ‘No. I think it belonged to ...’

  Angel waved that off, handed the lighter back.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s no skin off my nose if you bought it on eBay. But you don’t smoke, do you?’

  Evan shook his head, read the verse. He still couldn’t be sure about the words.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Evan. What’s got into you? I know I gave you a hard time over Gina, but—’

  ‘I never told you about my wife, did I?’

  ‘Wife? I never knew you were married.’

  Evan flopped onto the bed, waved his arm at the easy chair. ‘Have a seat.’ Then he told him about Sarah’s disappearance, the years of frustration, took him through the Clayton case five years later, and ended up with the desperate fight with Carl Hendricks in his basement. He lobbed the lighter back to Angel.

  ‘Which is where I found this.’

  Angel caught the lighter and read the verse again.

  ‘You know, I think these might be the exact same words as—’

  ‘The thing is,’ Evan said over the top of him, ‘my old man didn’t go to Vietnam. He was one of the lucky ones. But Sarah’s did. He had a Zippo just like the one you’re holding. And he gave it to Sarah. Told her if she ever needed to get a grip on her life, all she needed to do was read that. Then she’d realize that maybe her problems weren’t so bad after all.’

  Angel nodded, cleared his throat. ‘Pretty damn good advice. My old man thinks the same way. It’s just I got to wait until he dies before I get the lighter.’

  ‘It worked for her, too. And what I need to know is, was she kept in that filthy, stinking basement, reading those words every single day’—he jabbed an angry finger at the lighter—‘whilst God knows what was being done to her, wondering when it was going to work its mojo and make her very real problems go away. Because that would be a first step in finding out what the fuck happened to her.’

  ‘But you don’t know if it’s the same lighter.’

  Evan closed his eyes, took a deep breath, let it out slow.

  ‘Exactly. You do a search on the internet, there are a ton of differ
ent inscriptions, all the same anger and resentment and black humor, slightly different words. And I never really paid much attention to her old man’s lighter, even after he gave it to her, so I can’t remember the exact words on it.’

  ‘That’s the way to drive yourself insane, for sure. You can’t call him up, see if he remembers?’

  ‘Not unless you’ve got a direct line to the big man upstairs. Maybe you have with your name?’

  Angel smiled like wouldn’t that be nice.

  ‘It would be a hell of a coincidence.’

  ‘I know. The rational part of me tells me I’m clutching at straws. Hendricks and his sick buddy were in the military after all. I’m sure they all have stuff like this, all part of the ethos.’

  ‘But rational doesn’t enter into the equation at four in the morning, eh?’

  ‘I see you’ve been spending time inside my head.’

  Angel pushed himself out of the chair and slapped Evan on the shoulder. ‘Everybody’s got their demons, my friend. And before you ask, no, we’re not about to turn this into a mutual self-help session, or hug any trees. What was that you were saying about all this being your fault after all?’

  Evan had almost forgotten about the note he’d found on Gina’s kitchen table. He handed it to Angel, watched his face darken as he read it, his lips a tight line.

  ‘What the hell’s that about?’

  Angel didn’t say a word as Evan ran through the whole thing. ‘You should see what she’s like over this cat. She’s crazy about it. If she’d come downstairs and seen that note, the pot sitting on the stove all ready and waiting for Fluffy to be dropped in, Christ knows what it would’ve done to her.’

  ‘Fluffy?’

  ‘I can’t remember what it’s called.’

  Angel stared at the note. ‘I’d have done the same. You weren’t to know. Hindsight likes to give you a hard time, eh?’

  ‘Tell me about it. I just hope I get the chance to make things right.’

  Angel read the note again. ‘They’re a bunch of real sick bastards, aren’t they? We have to assume Gina will tell them what we’re planning.’