I’m attached to a twitching Frenchie, though, whose wild eyes meet mine as he gurgles and gags, hands flailing, reaching for the gun he dropped.
And then Galt takes one step forward and puts a bullet in Frenchie’s head.
Chapter Seventy-One
The storage room door opens and a man wearing a flak jacket and carrying what looks like machine guns runs in, barrel pointed at us all. Mark, Galt and Loogie all put their hands up in the air.
Allie points the gun at the guy and screams, “You can’t ignore me!” Her hair looks like Medusa snakes and she’s caked with filth.
They all ignore her, though.
“Drew,” Mark says with a sigh. “About time.”
“Hey, man,” Drew snaps. He looks like the epitome of a soldier from the movies, all short hair, heavy brow, and complete concentration. “We did our job.”
“That you did,” Mark snaps back as he looks at me. He drops his hands and crouches down to me.
I can’t stop staring at the lightbulb. The long, fluorescent lightbulb. It’s soothing, even as my body throbs and pulses. Pain isn’t pain any longer. It’s just existence. It’s who I am.
Mark’s filthy, anxious face hovers over me. His hands touch me gingerly.
“Medic!” he screams, like he’s in a war zone.
I guess we are.
“Right here, sir,” Drew barks as a groups of uniformed paramedics fill the storage room carrying what looks like a surfboard with straps.
“Jesus, that was close,” Galt says, clapping Mark on the back. No one is smiling. He turns and gives Loogie a resigned look. His eyes skitter over to Frenchie, whose head is sunken in, like a rotten pumpkin.
“We’re gonna have to file a metric fuckton of paperwork on that one,” Loogie mutters to Galt, motioning toward Frenchie’s dead body.
“WHAT IS GOING ON?” Allie shrieks. Her gun floats between Drew, Galt and Loogie. Suddenly, they aren’t ignoring her. Drew’s hand goes to the trigger of his gun, but he doesn’t point it at her.
I’m watching all of this with eyes that are looking anywhere but at Mark.
“Put the gun down, honey,” Chase says from the top steps of the storage door. “Please. Allie, it’s over. It’s over.” His voice is steady, like he’s gentling a crazy horse.
“But what’s Galt doing here?” she asks in a trembling voice. “He’s trying to kill you! He wants you dead! And why did he kill Frenchie? And—” Her eyes roll in the back of her head. Loogie grabs her before she falls.
Her fainting unravels Chase, who rushes to her side. He slips on a small patch of congealed blood.
“What the fucking fuck?” he screams. He cradles her head in his lap as he looks around the room with frantic eyes. Then our eyes meet.
“Carrie. Carrie, what did he do to you in here?” Chase’s horror looks misplaced on his tough-guy face. “Your face. Your shoulder. The scratches, the…” He moves his hands in a shaky way over Allie’s sleeping body, then looks at El Brujo’s dead body. “What happened in here?”
Between his reaction and Mark’s warm hands on me, I realize it’s okay.
I can let go.
And so I do.
The world fades out.
I am done.
Chapter Seventy-Two
When I come to, I’m in a hospital bed. Mark’s worried face fills my sight the second I open one eye.
One eye is all I can open.
“Carrie?” His voice is so rich with relief I want to cry. But if I cry, I won’t be able to see.
I open my mouth to say something, but my lips stick together.
“Water?” he asks.
I try to nod and pain shoots through my neck. I just grunt.
He doesn’t make a joke, or comment at all. A straw appears at my lips. He cups the back of my head gingerly and helps me sip.
The water is so welcome I want to cheer.
“Hospital?” I whisper.
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“About a day.”
My shoulder blade screams. I try to move it and it’s like moving a boulder. I look down. A weird contraption holds my upper body immobile.
“What happened?” I ask.
He strokes my hand. His eyes are sad and searching. “You tell me. We only know what Allie could tell us, once she woke up. Amy isn’t really in any condition to talk yet. The only person who really knows what happened in that storage space is you, sweetie.”
“Sweetie,” I murmur.
He kisses my forehead. His lips are so gentle. Mark sits back down. “My sweet warrior princess. Jesus, Carrie, what it took for you to survive that….” Tears fill his eyes. I see him fight them, his jaw muscles rolling. He blinks over and over.
I’ve never seen Mark cry.
I take a good look at him. He’s clean. His hair is wet, like he just got out of the shower. No uniform, just a polo shirt and jeans. He’s also wearing a look of utter interest in hearing what happened.
I’ll get there. Eventually.
Right now I’m just marveling that I’m alive.
How did that happen?
“Allie killed El Brujo,” I mutter. “You know that, right? Shot him.”
“Yes.”
“And your dad killed Frenchie.”
He shifts, suddenly uncomfortable. Maybe this isn’t the time for this conversation after all.
“Technically,” he corrects me, “I killed Frenchie. No one can survive that kind of kidney wound.” A long sigh comes out of him. “I should know. I train people to use that technique.”
My stomach flip-flops. There’s so much about him I don’t know. “But your dad finished him off.”
“Yes. Galt did.” I notice he’s not calling him Dad. I understand that.
“And why did Chase tell us not to shoot Galt? I thought Galt was out for Chase? He wants him dead, right?” My thumb strokes the back of Mark’s hand. A tickle in the back of my throat threatens to make me cough. If I cough, I’ll hurt. I tighten my chest to stop the spasm.
And then all my pain comes roaring through my body at once. I seize, my muscles turning to stone.
I begin to pant, short bursts of breath that fight the wall of torture.
“Carrie?”
“Pain.” It’s the only word I can think to say. It’s the only word I know right now.
“Here.” He pushes a button on a remote control thing attached to a wire.
A nurse rushes in. She doesn’t even introduce herself, focusing first on the IV.
Second later, sweet heat flows through me.
“There you go, Carrie. I’m Lucy.” She looks just enough like Amy to make me blink a few times and focus better. I wonder if she lived in constant fear of being kidnapped.
I squeeze Mark’s hand. He reaches up and brushes my cheek.
“The kidnappings? The women?”
He shakes his head, topaz eyes warm and yet troubled. “No new ones, but it’s only been a day. We’ve recovered most of the recent ones, though.”
“Recovered?” My voice lifts up with a hopeful tone.
“Dead and alive. Mostly alive,” he grudgingly says. “Look, Carrie, I don’t think this is the time to talk. You need to heal. Your job is to rest and get better so I can take you home.”
Home.
Tears ruin my ability to see. I start to shake, even though the painkillers Lucy gave me are kicking in. I’m so swollen and hot. My skin will burst.
“Carrie, Carrie, don’t cry,” he soothes, wiping away the tears with his thumb. He’s caressing my hair.
Wait.
I reach up with my good hand and move without upsetting the IV lines.
I have no hair.
All I touch is gauze.
“What happened to my hair?” I whisper.
His eyebrows wrinkle with compassion. “Um, it was mostly gone when we found you. Allie said there was a candle accident.”
Candle accident.
My memory is so faulty. Candle accident? When wer
e there candles?
Then I remember. Yes. When Allie appeared in the pipe.
“Is it gone? All of it?” Fat teardrops drip drip drip down the side of my face, stinging the long scrape from Frenchie’s ring.
“Not all of it. Er, it wasn’t. It is now, though.”
“Huh?” I’m feeling fuzzy all over. His hand is so warm. So nice.
So good.
“They had to shave your head, honey. The flame burned your hair and fused it into a big mess, and when we med-flighted you here, they weren’t sure how bad your head injuries were. So we told them to just shave it.”
“We?”
“Me and Allie. You had no next of kin, so…”
No next of kin.
A huge sob builds in me.
No one. I have no one.
“Mikey,” I hiss. “Mikey and Elaine and Brian. Were they in on it?” The thought of Elaine betraying me makes every part of me want to throw up.
“It’s so complicated—”
“That’s a yes.”
“No, it’s not,” he insists. “Here—drink more water. You need to hydrate. Between the burn on your neck, the dislocated shoulder, the broken arm, and the infected rat bite, you need to go slow. Start with water.”
“Infected rat bite?” I ask, then take a big sip of water.
The nurse comes back in then. “Did I hear you talking about the rat bite?” she asks, her voice soft but businesslike. “May I ask a question, Carrie?”
“Yes.” I sigh, the sound long and pressured.
“Was the rat in the mousetrap the same one that bit you?”
“Yes. That’s a weird question,” I mutter.
“If it is, then we don’t need to worry about giving you a series of rabies shots.”
“Shots?” I am terrified of shots. Adrenaline pours into me like it’s been injected into my IV.
IV.
Needles.
I look at my arm.
And pass out.
Chapter Seventy-Three
“We just have a few questions to ask,” someone shouts outside my hospital room, followed by a bunch of shouts of my name and so many flashes it’s like Fourth of July fireworks in the hallway.
Ah, twenty-four hour cable news. They have to cover something. And El Brujo’s death and my role in it makes me a minor celebrity.
For now.
It’s day three, and Mark had to go to D.C. for a briefing. He had no choice. I vaguely remember him whispering in my ear and telling me how much he loves me. He left the staff with strict instructions not to let anyone in here. Flashed them his DEA badge.
And a look that makes them all comply.
That must have been this morning. It’s night time now. I can tell because it’s dark outside.
The flashes in the hallways make the darkness even starker.
A man in a suit squeezes through, flanked by two guys who also wear suits, though a different color. Both have guns. They look like bodyguards.
“Carrie,” says the first man. He’s familiar. Young, like me. Somewhere between me and Mark in age. Short hair. Direct speaking style. He talks like he expects to be respected.
The clipped tones of a man in charge.
He walks to the side of the bed and sits in Mark’s usual seat. “I’m Drew Foster. We met two days ago under very unfortunate circumstances.”
“I’d call them fortunate,” I say. I lost my voice, maybe from screaming in the storage room. I sound like an eighty-year-old chain smoker. “I’m here now, aren’t I?”
He gives me a half-grin. “Fair enough. I’m here because Mark sent my firm.”
“He sent mercenaries to my hospital room to protect me? What are you going to do? Defend me against bad hospital food?”
I swear one of the guys’ mouths twitches.
“They’re here to guard you,” Drew explains.
“Guard me? Guard me from who? El Brujo is dead.”
He thumbs toward the door. “The media.”
I laugh. It hurts. I stop laughing. “The media? I don’t care about the media.”
“They care about you, though.” He won’t stop staring at me. His eyes bore into me. The other two men stand at attention, eyes roving over the room.
“So what? They suck. Nothing I say will get quoted properly. I know the drill from when my dad was imprisoned. No comment and all that.”
“You weren’t healing from being physically and psychologically tortured by El Brujo and his men back then, Carrie.” He isn’t compassionate. Drew is all no-nonsense. This is business for him.
“No. But I was tormented by their lies and destruction of my entire life back then. And I thought the man I loved had betrayed me.” I look down at my bandaged body. “This? This is nothing in comparison to thinking that the only person I’d ever given my heart to had double-crossed me and left me to hang out to dry.”
Drew flinches. It’s like watching a wall wince.
I’ve hit a nerve of some kind.
He stands. Walks over to the two men and whispers something to them. They nod in unison.
Drew walks to the door, puts his hand on the doorknob, and turns around.
“It’s day two of the investigation. We don’t know who might still be out to get you in El Brujo’s organization, Carrie. We’re mostly certain you made a lot of people very, very happy by killing him—”
“I didn’t kill him! Allie did. She should get the credit.”
“—by facilitating his death.” He narrows his eyes. If I weren’t broken and bandaged in bed with a raging case of narcotics hangover, I’d think he was hot as heck.
“Who’s happy? Aside from the DEA,” I ask, genuinely intrigued.
“Dealers oppressed by El Brujo. People under his control.”
I frown. It hurts. “What about Claudia?” I sit up with a jolt of memory. “And Eric? Eric Horner?”
Drew frowns. “Mark hasn’t told you?”
“Mark’s in D.C. getting yelled at by his f-bomb screaming boss.”
Now all three men stifle smiles.
“I assure you she’s not yelling at him,” Drew finally says. “In fact, Mark’s probably getting a promotion right now.”
“A promotion? No! He wants out.”
Three sets of eyes all catch each other in an unspoken exchange of thoughts.
Drew opens the door an inch, then turns to me.
“You’re being guarded. It’s for your own good. And don’t judge Mark too harshly. There’s always more to any story that doesn’t make sense on the surface.”
And with that, he leaves. A woman squeezes past him, her body small and soft. He moves aside just enough to let her in. A nurse?
No. A familiar face. A familiar scratched-up slightly red, ragged face with big, brown, worried eyes.
“Allie,” I rasp. “Oh, Allie.”
The tears come again as she sits carefully on the edge of my bed and gives me a tender, light hug.
“Hey, you,” she murmurs in my ear, against the giant bandage that is my head.
“Hey, you, hero,” I whisper back.
We just hold each other.
It’s all we can do.
There really aren’t enough words for what we’ve been through.
A hug has to be enough.
She holds me while I weep. It feels like hours go by.
“You did it,” I say through sniffles and waterworks, finally breaking the calm truth of just being held and understood.
“We did it.”
“How’s Amy?”
Allie pulls back. Her big, brown eyes are framed by black hair. She must have dyed it back to her normal color. She’s strikingly beautiful, scratches, scars and all.
“She’s recovering. Her mom’s with her. She’s in a different hospital. They got antibiotics in her right away, but her kidneys aren’t doing so good. It’s touch and go but she wouldn’t even have a fighting chance if it weren’t for you, Carrie.”
“And you.”
We
squeeze hands. Well, my good one, anyhow.
“How are you. Really?” she asks, eyes darting around the room. “I know that it took a long, long time for me to recover from what happened to me.”
I don’t have to lie to her. I don’t have to shine her on. Even with Mark, I pretend. I did earlier today, when he told me he had to leave.
I lied.
I told him it was okay.
It wasn’t.
“I’m a mess. Look at me. Whatever I look like on the outside isn’t as bad as how I feel on the inside. And I’m different from you. Mark’s here. Mark didn’t do to me what Chase did to you. I never had a moment where I thought Mark double-crossed me and left me to the mercy of El Brujo like you did.”
She nods. “It’ll be easier for you. But never easy.” Stroking the scarred skin on her forearm, her eyes glaze over. “It never really goes away.”
“It’s only been a year for you, Allie. Two days for me. I’m mostly drugged up, anyhow,” I say with a giggle.
“Right. But he’s gone, Carrie. Dead. I shot him. I killed him. I killed a man,” she says, her voice going lower and lower into a whisper of utter horror.
“You didn’t kill a man.”
“What? You saw it happen.”
“You killed a monster. You killed evil in human form.”
She sighs. “That’s what Chase says.”
“Then listen to Chase.”
“You sound like Mark.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
We hug again.
And then, in the stillness of my sterile hospital room, we weep like children until we’re boneless.
Chapter Seventy-Four
Two days pass. Two days without Mark. Drew’s firm sends new men in eight-hour shifts. I become super bored by day three and make them play card games with me. We play three-handed Euchre.
It’s not the same as playing with Elaine, Mikey and Brian.
No one will give me all the details.
“C’mon,” I ask Silas, one of the guards, as he shuffles. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“Mark’s the one who will debrief you.”
“I’m not talking about taking off my panties for Mark.”
He reddens. Aha.
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