You Can't Hide: A pulse-pounding serial killer thriller (7th Street Crew Book 3)

by Willow Rose

  I grumble behind the tape and finally she understands. She leans over, grabs the tape, and pulls it off. It hurts worse than getting a Brazilian wax. I only tried that once and I’m never doing it again.

  I fight my urge to scream, but instead I take in a few deep breaths. “Thanks,” I whisper. “Could you?” I show her my hands and she unties the cord around them. I can tell she is in pain. Her neck looks terrible. She touches it.

  “He tried to strangle me with a cord,” she whispers, when she sees I am looking at it.

  The cord left a visible mark. I don’t say anything. I just nod.

  “Where is he now?” she whispers.

  I nod in direction of the door, then put my pointer finger to my lips to signal that she needs to be very quiet. Meanwhile, I untie my legs. I get up and help Paige get up as well. I can tell she is shaken. The man behind the door terrifies her. We have to move fast now before he finds out we’re up and running.

  I look around at this strange room we’ve been placed in, trying to find some sort of a weapon. They took my gun when they knocked me out, and my phone. There has to be something else we can use.

  I scan the entire room and finally my eyes land on two machetes hanging on the wall. In the middle hangs an old gold necklace.

  Bingo.

  I grab a chair and climb up to grab the machetes. I give one to Paige, and keep one for myself.

  “We better hurry up,” I whisper. “You ready?”

  She draws in a deep breath and looks down at the big machete between her hands. “You can do it,” I whisper. “If any of them come at you, you swing that beast.”

  “Them? There is more than one?”

  “Yes,” I say. “You see a man, you swing it at him. You kill him if you have to. Survival of the fittest, all right?” I say, and lift my clenched fist in the air.

  We bump fists before I lift the machete up in front of me and walk towards the door. Carefully, I open it and peek out. I can’t see anything, but I can hear a voice. It sounds like Dr. Seuss. He is talking to someone. I signal Paige to follow me and we walk out of the room towards where I hear the voice. I wonder if we can make it through the front door without him noticing it, but realize we can’t get through the gate if we do. Plus, I need to find Tara and Chloe.

  Seconds later, I find them. As we walk closer, I spot Chloe sitting in the middle of the living room, tied to a chair, Dr. Seuss is in front of her, talking to her.

  What’s that in his hand? What the heck is he doing to my friend?

  The realization hits me like a train wreck. Dr. Seuss is holding a massive syringe in his hand, and as I stand there and watch, he places it on Chloe’s skin and presses it down.

  Chapter One Hundred Four

  April 2016

  “TOWANDA!!!!”

  I don’t know why I am yelling exactly that, but the quote from Fried Green Tomatoes is all I can come up with as I storm through the house towards Dr. Seuss, the machete held high in the air.

  I want to startle him; I want him to stop what he is doing right away. And I succeed. My yelling makes him turn and look, but the syringe stays in Chloe’s skin. I swing the machete and hit him right in the face. Dr. Seuss is knocked down, but to my surprise, the knife doesn’t cut anything.

  Dr. Seuss falls to the ground with a bruise on his head, but is quickly back on his feet.

  “What?” I ask.

  Dr. Seuss laughs. “Do you have any idea how old these machetes are? Forty years old. They have never been sharpened. They’re dull and couldn’t cut a banana.”

  He walks towards me, reaching out to grab the knife, but I pull it back. Dr. Seuss sighs. He pulls out his gun and places it on Tara’s head. Chloe is struggling behind the tape. I look at the syringe and wonder how much of that stuff he managed to put in her before I disturbed him. It is only half full now.

  “I’m getting tired of you people,” Dr. Seuss says, scratching his head with the one hand that isn’t holding the gun. I watch his finger on the trigger to see if it moves. My heart stops completely, thinking about Danny and how badly he wants to be in Tara’s life.

  If she’ll live. If any of us will survive this maniac.

  “Let her go,” I say.

  “Or what?” Dr. Seuss says. He scratches his head again, and that’s when I see it. I take a step closer.

  “You have lice,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “What?”

  “Lice. Right there. All over your hair. They’ve even infested your eyebrows.” I reach out and snap a louse from his eyebrow and show it to him. “See?”

  Dr. Seuss stares at the louse between my nails, then reach up to touch his hair, a look of utter terror on his face. While he’s touching his hair with both of his hands, the gun finally pointing away from Paige, I spot my moment. I lift the machete and swing it down once again, this time harder, and to my luck it cuts through his skin and leaves an open wound in his chest.

  He gasps, drops the gun, and puts both of his hands to the gushing wound. I take a step backwards while blood fills his mouth and starts spurting out. He tries to speak, but no words come out, only thick red blood.

  Epilogue

  April 2016

  “You’ll never believe this.”

  Chris Fisher is at my door. I smile when I see him and let him in.

  “After what I’ve been through, try me,” I say. I walk to the kitchen and pour us some coffee. Three days have passed since the insanity at the mansion. I am still exhausted and haven’t slept much. Salter is still gone and I have no idea where to look for him. It makes me sick to my stomach. I am hoping that Fisher is bringing me good news, but I have learned to not get my hopes up these days.

  I serve him coffee and sip my own. We sit at the kitchen table. Fisher is in Salter’s spot.

  “So, what is it you don’t think I’ll believe?” I ask.

  “Well…considering with your son and all, I know you’re waiting for good news about him, but this is about something else,” Fisher says. “I just thought you should know this.”

  “Maybe it can take my mind off Salter for a few seconds. What is it?”

  “We found the cause of the massive fish-kill in the river.”

  I look at him, surprised. “That’s awesome. What caused it?”

  “Well, actually, we owe it all to you. That we found it, I mean.”

  I shake my head in confusion. I am very tired and not sure I am hearing things right anymore. “Me? What do you mean?”

  “It was formaldehyde,” he says.

  “Formaldehyde?”

  He nods eagerly. “There was a spill. From the tank at Theodor G’s mansion. Salt had eaten away at it and it was rusting badly. It was leaking and had been for quite a while. Right into our river. Killed thousands of fish.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” I ask.

  “Nope. We solved it. Now we can clean it up and get back to normal again. A team of specialists is out there right now; they’ll flush it out, they say. I don’t know how these things work, but hey, they’re the experts, right?”

  “That is great news. So no spill from a power plant or any other polluting chemical factory, huh? I guess my story is down the drain as well.”

  “Well, you’re the first person I’m telling this to, so maybe if you write it now, you can get some attention on that account.”

  I shrug. “I’ll try, even though I’m not in the mood for writing much these days.”

  “How are you holding up?”

  I shake my head with a deep sigh. “I’m still here, aren’t I?”

  “Sure. How’s Chloe?”

  I sigh thinking about her. I can’t believe she was hurt like that. Why does everyone around me keep getting hurt?

  “They don’t know yet. She did get a lot of the formaldehyde into her bloodstream, but they still don’t know how much it has destroyed. She’s gotten a blood transfusion and they hope that’ll save her.”

  Fisher puts his hand on top of mine and squeeze
s it. He can tell I get emotional when talking about it. I have been living at the hospital these past days, waiting for news about Chloe and taking Paige to visit her mother.

  “How’s Paige doing?” he asks.

  Paige has been living with me and my dad to make sure she’s not alone while her mother is getting better. Nicky should be discharged in a few days, they have told me.

  “Getting better,” I say. “The psychologists say she is doing really good actually. I have taken her to the hospital every day to be with her mom. And I think we finally got rid of those little critters of hers, using teat tree oil, so she won’t spread them to anyone else. I noticed them in her hair back when we found that lock in the Boxer’s house. Filled with nits. I’d recognize those critters anywhere, since we went through it with Salter last year. Such a nightmare. But I think we’ve got it under control now.”

  “Good. That’s really good,” he says. I can tell he is eager to move on. “Well, I’d better…it’s been a busy few weeks, I’ll tell you that.”

  “I know. Have they found any of the other missing women or children?” I ask.

  Fisher gets up and puts on his cap. He shakes his head. “Nope. All we found so far was the body of the Boxer and the embalmed bodies of Maria Verlinden and Theodor G’s own brother. But they were all at the house. We’ll keep looking in the river, but with all the animals out there, chances are there isn’t much left of them if he dropped them in there like he did with Kim and Casey Taylor. But we’ll keep looking, searching all areas of the river.”

  I try to smile, but it doesn’t come out right. Fisher sees it.

  “At least Danny gets to be with his daughter,” he says. I can tell he is trying to make me feel better. “And he is now officially acquitted of everything. Even the trouble he got himself into in Orlando. They decided to drop all charges. It’s not all bad, you know. And you saved those two girls. Just sayin’.”

  I do feel happy for Danny. I can still see that look on his face when he got to meet Tara for the first time. I took him to see her at the hospital, where she was being kept for observation. Danny tried hard, but couldn’t hold back his tears as soon as he saw her. Luckily, Tara took it really well. It’s not easy to lose your mother and gain a father in the same week. But she was very moved to finally meet him. She threw herself in his arms and they spoke for hours afterwards. I hope he’ll be able to get custody of her and that they’ll all be a family with Junior too. I am beyond thrilled that everything went so well for Danny. Especially that they never found out he killed that woman. I just hope he’ll leave the police work to those who are paid for it from now on.

  Well…who am I to talk?

  “I know. It’s just so hard to…you know be happy when…when your son…” I am tearing up as I speak, thinking about my son, and I am forced to stop. I close my eyes quickly, then look at him.

  “See you around, Detective. Let me know if you have any news, alright?”

  He nods and walks to the door. He stops just as he is supposed to open it, his hand resting on the handle. He hesitates, then looks back at me, biting his lip, like he wants to say something, but then changes his mind.

  “Have a nice day, ma’am,” he says, lifts his cap, and walks out the door.

  Back in the kitchen, I am left to my own emotional roller coaster. I try hard to not cry, but it still overwhelms me. It shouldn’t. I mean, we got the bad guys. They’re both dead. No more disappearing single mothers and children.

  But we never found my own son. Why is it I can save everyone else, but never myself? I can fix everyone else’s life, but never my own?

  I decide I want to write the article. Maybe it’ll take my mind of things for a little while. I open the lid of my laptop and find my blog, just as an email pops up on my screen.

  I open the email with a small gasp when I realize it contains a picture of Salter, sitting on the back of a motorcycle, blindfolded. In front of him, in the driver’s seat, taking the selfie, is my brother, Blake Mills.

  The picture comes with a message:

  Careful little eyes, what you see.

  THE END

  Afterword

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you for purchasing You Can’t Hide (7th Street Crew #3). I hope you enjoyed it. I got the idea for this story from a long post I read on Facebook. A woman described how she was in Target one day and this guy followed her and her daughter and approached her afterwards in the parking lot. She got away, but called the police who told her there is a sex trafficking ring that target moms and their daughters. She wrote the post on Facebook to warn other moms.

  The story turned out to be a hoax, but it had me thinking. I was terrified when reading it and so I believed it could make a book. The part about slave-auctions in the airports is true, though. Ugly as it might be. You can read about it here:

  http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/jun/05/ukcrime.travelnews

  Furthermore, I am terrified of what my kids do on the Internet every day, who they meet, what they tell them, and how they could be tricked by some old guy lying to them. It simply terrifies me that I can’t control them all the time, which I can’t. So I wanted to write about that too.

  Then there is the story about Danh. It’s based on a lot of true stories I have read. With all that is happening in the world today, especially in Europe, we have to remember that many before them have been refugees, and that they go through terrible trials to get to their destinations, and often they lose their family members on the way. Some might not even find each other again until years later. People flee because they can’t stay, and it is horrible what they go through. I wanted to describe that using Danh’s story, and a lot of what I wrote is taken from real stories about people fleeing Vietnam in 1975. I made up all the terrible stuff, but what I have read is also horrifying, and many people died trying to flee the communist regime.

  Here’s an example of one of these remarkable stories:

  http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-443335

  About the fish-kill. Well, it is actually going on right now in Cocoa Beach. Thousands of fish have turned up in people’s canals and no one knows why. They believe it’s from a type of algae, but why it is so bad right now, they still don’t know. I came up with the idea of spilling the formaldehyde because it has actually happened once. And it killed a lot of fish somewhere in California. You can read about it here:

  https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=336&dat=19820326&id=Gv0yAAAAIBAJ&sjid=WoMDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5537,7427887&hl=en

  So now you know a little more about how this book came to be. I hope you’ll check out all my other books as well, if you haven’t already read them, and don’t forget to leave a review of this book, if you have the time for it.

  Take care,

  Willow

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