“It would help me a lot if you could clue me in on your long game, here,” Clay said as they went back to the front room.
“The plan hasn’t changed. We’re going to find out how Thane does what he does.”
“But what does that have to do with this guy?”
“We have both seen Thane move enormous rocks. I don’t know how he does it, but I do know it has to do with leverage. I’m employing some leverage of my own.”
“Listen,” Clay said, pausing to search for words. “If this doesn’t end well, or exactly like you’re planning, can we just let Thane be?”
“You think I would hurt him?”
Clay shrugged. “Not at the moment, but that’s what worries me. I never know what makes your reasons materialize and Thane didn’t sign up for any of this.”
“Did you see how I’m treating the man who abused him?”
Clay nodded.
“My treatment of Thane is the inverse. Dealing with Waylon isn’t about money. It’s a gift for Thane. Yes, I want Thane’s secret, but you know justice is most important to me, particularly for people like Thane who aren’t treated fairly in life. You might not understand what I do, but my scruples are predictable. Thane is safe.”
Morana and Clay spent the next hours reviewing Morana’s idea on how to integrate Waylon into their plan to acquire Thane’s secret. They brainstormed all the possible risks introduced by each step. After working until the early morning hours to devise their scheme, they fell asleep in the living room.
†
Just after 7:00 AM, Clay lay slumped in an easy chair, his legs draped over the arm. The beeping of a truck backing up outside jolted him awake. He rubbed his eyes and checked his watch, cursing the time.
Morana stirred on the sofa.
“I have to get to the office,” Clay said, stumbling toward the bathroom.
Morana sat up and then went back into Clay’s bedroom to check on their guest. When she opened the closet door, Waylon grunted through the gag and tried to roll to his other side. “One night of discomfort. Done. Only a few thousand more to match what you’ve done to Thane.” She watched him for a few moments before slamming the door closed. She went to the kitchen for some breakfast.
Clay emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a bath towel. “I wish I could skip the office today, but the boss man knows I’m back and will expect me to come in. I’ll see about getting off early.”
“We’ll be waiting,” she replied.
Clay finished dressing and left for work.
Morana finished eating and as she was putting a bowl in the sink, heard a commotion from Clay’s bedroom. She grabbed her pistol from her bag and approached the bedroom door. She pushed the bedroom door open with her foot and raised the gun. The closet door was still closed. She crept across the bedroom and pulled it open.
Waylon, laying on his side, looked up at her and tried to say something.
She turned on the closet light.
He squinted in the bright light and repeated something unintelligible.
Morana stepped back and placed her gun on the bed, then squatted beside him. “We have some work to do,” she said. She squeezed his collar with both hands and pulled him up to a sitting position.
Something on the floor where Waylon had been laying caught her eye. A fine dusting of eggshell-colored plastic shavings was below the edge of the wire shoe rack beside his waist where his wrists had been zip tied.
Before she could react, Waylon swung, landing a solid blow to her jaw with his fist.
Morana fell back onto the floor.
Waylon launched himself, landing on top of her outside the closet. He grabbed her arms.
When she thrust her hips upward to dislodge him, he used his full weight to press her wrists to the floor.
She saw that his ankles were still bound, so she bucked and twisted, causing him to fall beside her.
He tried to wrap his leg around her, she managed to land a solid blow to his groin with her knee. He screamed through the gag, fighting through the pain to get his hands around her neck as he struggled to remount her.
She tried to head-butt him, but he held her at arm’s length, so she bucked him with her hips, again. They rolled over one another several times before colliding into the wall.
Waylon managed to get her pinned again. He let go of her neck long enough to swing his fist, landing another solid blow to her face. Her body went limp.
Chapter 22
WHEN MORANA REGAINED consciousness, only one eye opened wide enough to see, as the other was nearly swollen shut. Her head throbbed, and she clenched her teeth. Clay’s bathroom ceiling slowly came into focus. She was on her back on the floor, her head near the tub and her feet toward the door. She didn’t know how long she had blacked out, but it had been long enough for Waylon to drag her there and bind her hands behind her back. She shifted her legs and felt a burning pain in her ankles.
Waylon came into view, towering over her, his wingtip loafers pressed against either side of her waist. He leered down at her. “Good afternoon, Morana Mahker. That’s been some hell of a game of hide & seek you’ve been playing. It’s over.”
Morana turned her head and squeezed her eyes shut.
“You know, I was tempted to leave,” Waylon said. He drew Morana’s pistol from his back pocket and placed it on the sink. “I could have been long gone by now. But the only thing sweeter than escaping from you will be the satisfaction of claiming the fortune I’ll make from your reward. And since I heard your geek friend say he wouldn’t be back until this afternoon, I figured we have some time to get to know each other a little better.” He leaned down and brushed his finger across her chin.
She pulled away, her temples flared as she gritted her teeth.
“Easy!” Waylon said. “If you don’t like my touch, it’s gonna be a long morning for you.”
Morana lifted her head and looked at her feet. The hacked ends of a cut lamp cord protruded from her ankles like antennae.
“What are you looking at? Ankles too tight?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Good,” he said, grinning at her.
Morana thrust her hips, slamming them into his leg. She twisted to her side and thrashed a few times until Waylon dropped to his knees and rolled her to her back. He mounted her legs to keep her from twisting again.
He grinned at her. “I kinda like seeing your face turn rosy when you strain. I’ll enjoy seeing it a few times for a few different reasons this morning.”
Morana’s writhing had shifted her to a position that relieved the weight of her torso on her wrists. She felt slack under the knot and rubbed the cord between the floor and her back trying to bring the loose tails closer to her fingers.
“Each time you fight me like that, you’ll lose, and you give me a fun little victory to go with the big one that’s coming!”
She tried to head-butt him again, but he dodged it. “Ohhhh, sneaky!” he said. “Maybe I’ve been too gentle with you.” Waylon raised up slightly on his knees to reach for the gun.
The moment his weight lifted, Morana bent her knees, pressed her feet to the floor and bucked him harder, this time raising him off the floor.
“Whoa—easy, easy, easy,” he said, waving an arm over his head like he was riding a bronco. He giggled when she stopped, he pushed her shoulders to the floor. When she refused to look at his eyes, he moved his face close to hers, grabbed her chin, and forced her to look at him.
She closed her eyes.
He said, “I know this is all such a surprise, but if you relax, maybe you can find a way to enjoy it. In fact,” he swiped hair from her face, “I wish you’d make more sound while you fight me. I think that would be hot.”
Morana’s nostrils flared with each breath. Although she had failed to dislodge Waylon, she felt the tail of the cord knot coming loose at her fingertips. She couldn’t quite pinch it and continued rubbing it against the floor.
>
“We better get started,” Waylon said. He scooted lower on her legs, keeping them pressed between his knees. “I’m going to untie your ankles. We’ll need them as far apart as possible for about seven, maybe eight minutes.” He laughed and reached back and pulled her ankle cord loose. “I’m going to stand up. If you fight me, I’ll punch you in that pretty little face again,” he said. “All they’ll need to recognize is your fingerprint for me to get my money.”
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Morana said, softly, her eyes still closed.
“Ohhh, she speaks! And I do like your change of tone since our last conversation. Let’s see… do I want to do this?” He tapped his chin a few times. “There are three things I like more than anything else.” He leaned back and pushed the door closed. “Power, sex, and money. And who’s the lucky girl that gets to help me experience all three in one day? This girl!” He squeezed her breast.
Morana winced.
“Of course, there is one way you can skip all the fun I have planned for us this morning.”
“I’m listening,” she whispered.
“You’re going to tell me exactly how Sykes moved that garage foundation like it was weightless.”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit,” Waylon yelled. “You know goddamn well how he does it! You helped him.”
“I had nothing to do with the moving floor while you were trapped. I don’t know how he does it.”
Waylon wagged his finger at her. “You have to know!”
“If I knew how he does it, why would I have asked you how he did it when you were trapped?”
“Because you were testing me. You and Sykes were trying to determine if I had figured it out.”
“You’re wrong. But if you untie my hands, maybe we can come to a deal. You’ll never get what you want from him without me.”
“You can forget about getting untied.”
“Then we both lose.”
He grabbed her by the neck and yelled, “I know that you know. Tell me!” His red face contorted an inch from her face.
“I can’t tell you what I don’t know.” Morana wheezed.
Waylon’s jaw tightened, and he let go. He sat back and unbuckled his belt. “Maybe you need some probing to get you to talk.” He took the gun from the sink and pointed it at her face. “Now wouldn’t be a good time to get squirmy again.” He slowly stood up, holding the gun steady. He stepped between her legs. He tugged at his zipper, trying to lower it with one hand.
Morana considered a groin kick as Waylon’s stance and her position were perfect for it, but his finger was on the trigger, and she knew her pistol was loaded.
Waylon managed to get his zipper down, and his pants dropped to his knees. He shook his legs to make them drop to his ankles. “There we go.”
“Wouldn’t it be better in the bedroom?” Morana said.
Waylon laughed. “Nice try. I heard you and your geek friend discussing all his cameras. I’m not supplying him with any revenge porn—even though I’m sure ours will be hot enough to sell. No, we’re gonna play right here.”
Morana raised her head.
Waylon pressed the gun between her breasts as he knelt between her legs. “Get ‘em open wider,” he barked.
Morana raised her head. For the first time, she made eye contact with him and said, “This won’t end well for you.”
“Since you won’t give up the magic you and that little nigger have going on, this is proper compensation for my trouble—I can’t think of a better ending.”
Morana’s eyes bored into him with reptilian iciness before her expression abruptly softened. Her shoulders relaxed, and she let her legs fall apart. With a hint of a smile, she said, “Come and get it.”
Chapter 23
CLAY SAT AT his desk in his office, unable to concentrate on any work knowing that Morana was alone with Waylon at his apartment. Three texts and one voicemail message to her burner phone this morning had gone unanswered. When his boss leaned in to announce that he was headed out for lunch and wouldn’t be back for the rest of the day, Clay waited a few minutes, then took the opportunity to leave early, too.
He checked his phone. Still, nothing from Morana. He dialed again, pressed his phone to his ear and flung his coat over his shoulder as he walked out. In the lobby, the receptionist cleared her throat at him.
Clay looked at her, pointing to his phone.
She mouthed, “Are you coming back?”
He shook his head and pointed toward the parking lot. By the time he arrived at his car, Morana’s burner phone had rung for the tenth time. The generic, computerized voicemail greeting answered—again.
“Mo, where are you and what’s going on? Pick up or answer my texts or something. Call me back, it’s important.”
He ended the call and re-checked the text messages he sent earlier, to verify that they had gone through.
8:14 AM: Everything okay?
9:50 AM: Didn’t hear back… Reply to confirm all good.
11:22 AM: Are you there?
A check-mark beside each message confirmed successful delivery. While driving back to his apartment, all the potential reasons for her failure to answer festered in his mind. Maybe she’d simply lost her phone. Or maybe she carelessly left Waylon alone at the apartment all day to go spend more time with Thane. What if law enforcement had caught up to her? Or maybe Waylon had managed to get the upper hand with her. Every scenario made Clay’s fingers sweatier as he wrung the steering wheel. Now he regretted turning off all the cameras. If Mo hadn’t insisted, he would already know what was happening in his apartment. Why couldn’t she just take two seconds to confirm that things were okay?
The light midday traffic helped him reach his neighborhood quicker than usual. Instead of parking in his usual place on the street, he drove down into the garage. As he climbed up the steps to ground level, he saw the gardener and his neighbor, Carol, talking in the apartment courtyard at the base of the steps to his second-floor walkway. As he closed in on them, he overheard Carol say, “… It’s far too much for a nosebleed.”
“What’s going on?” Clay asked.
“Someone must have been injured,” Carol said. “We can’t figure out where it’s from.” She pointed to a line of blood splatter that was on bottom four steps, ending with a small pool the size of a tennis ball at the bottom.
A shiver shot up Clay’s back.
“It looks minor to me,” the gardener said. “We thought it might be you,” he said, pointing to Clay. “If you weren’t bleeding this morning, it’d have to be from unit 206 or unit 204 since you’re the only units that use the stairs on this side of the building.”
Clay felt his heart pounding harder. “No, it wasn’t me.”
“I haven’t seen Emily in unit 204 for days,” Carol said. “Shall we call the police?”
“No!” Clay snapped, startling Carol and the gardener. “I, uh, agree that it looks minor. A bad nosebleed, a kitchen knife accident, something like that. If this was a more serious injury, you’d have heard it, or they would’ve knocked on a neighbor’s door.”
“I suppose,” Carol said.
“Could you get these stairs washed down for us right away?” Clay asked the gardener.
“I’ll get the hose,” the gardener said, leaving.
Carol walked away from the men muttering, “Apparently mysterious blood is nothing to worry about anymore. I hope you two are right.”
Clay climbed the stairs and saw something that Carol and the gardener had missed. His apartment door wasn’t fully latched. It looked closed from a distance, but it was ajar the width of a finger. Clay looked down over the railing to the courtyard. Carol had gone into her apartment, and he heard the gardener rustling in the equipment closet below. He took a step back from the door and pulled a small pistol from a concealed holster under his belt. He set his briefcase down on the walkway and then pushed the door open with his foot, sweeping t
he gun to clear the room.
“Dear God,” he said.
The apartment was ransacked. The sofa had been shifted out of place, its pillows were strewn all over the floor, one of them in the kitchen. The coffee table was cracked across the middle with one of its legs broken completely off.
“Hello,” he yelled.
No answer.
“Mo?”
Again, no answer. Clay kept his pistol ready as he sidestepped toward the bedroom where he saw that its door had been knocked from its hinges and laid diagonally across the hallway. Under it, a smear of blood on the wall from shoulder height ran down to the floor. He looked in the bathroom and found blood smear and spatter on the sink and on the floor beside the bathtub. A bloodied handprint on the wall beside the hand towels. “My God,” Clay said, taking a deep breath to control the surge of adrenaline.
He ducked under the fallen bedroom door. The bedroom was in worse shape than the rest of the apartment. The bed linen was twisted, some of it spilling onto the floor. His mattress was shifted from the box spring. His closet door was cracked. When he pulled it open, a hinge came loose and fell to the floor. The closet was empty.
His bedside table was knocked over, and the landline phone lay on the floor beeping off the hook.
Clay holstered his gun and texted Morana again.
Where the hell are you?
Someone knocked at his door. He pulled his gun and hurried to the front room. He looked through the peephole and saw Carol. He opened the door a crack.
“What’s going on with you?” Carol asked.
“Listen, Carol, it’s not a good time,” Clay replied.
“What I mean is I’ve never seen you forget things.” She pulled his briefcase out from behind her and held it up, grinning.
“Those blood droplets that you said are not a big deal, must have shaken you up to forget your briefcase right here on the walkway!”
“Oh, thanks.” Clay opened the door enough to take the briefcase from her.
“You’re welcome.” Carol craned her neck, going for a glimpse into the apartment, but Clay closed the door. He went to the kitchen, the only place in his apartment that was relatively untouched. His phone chimed with a text from Morana.
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