by Wick,Christa
When Reed left, she was a little more hopeful that she wouldn’t have to stay in the penthouse much longer and that she would never have to see his boss again.
With the phone and a laptop Reed had loaned her, Daniella spent Monday and Tuesday working on putting her life back together. She cried on the phone with her boss at the school district after telling the woman she had to resign. She was hoarse by the time she contacted her insurance agent about the house.
By Tuesday, she was mostly trying to decide where she should raise Christine once she was free to go. She looked at housing, job markets—and crime statistics.
A phone call woke her at seven a.m. on Wednesday, her heart seizing as she read the caller ID.
NC DHHS Children’s Services
“Hello,” she answered cautiously. She had talked to Reed about notifying the agency, which had given her temporary custody of Christine while she worked to officially adopt the baby. He had said the company’s legal department would contact them for her and ensure there were no issues.
“This is Children’s Services calling for Daniella Marquardt,” a woman said.
“This is she,” Daniella answered. “With whom am I speaking?”
“Julie Thrall, I am a colleague of your caseworker.”
More panic crept in and she tightened her sweaty grip on the phone. “Why isn’t Mr. Corbin calling me himself?”
“Because Mr. Corbin is at the burn unit with a brother and sister set on fire by their grandmother,” the woman snapped. “Speaking of fires, we have a report that you are no longer living at the address provided on your temporary custodial agreement.”
“No…” Daniella’s heart began to pound against the back of her sternum, her face flushing hot and beads of perspiration forming along her top lip. “An attorney was supposed to contact the agency—”
“No such contact occurred,” Thrall said, cutting her short. “We need to see the baby immediately and then schedule an appointment to inspect your current lodgings.”
“Of course, I will get her dressed and be at the agency when it—”
An exasperated sigh silenced Daniella.
“A caseworker must see the child,” Thrall chided. “Not a secretary or receptionist. Do you think we’re that dumb, Miss Marquardt?”
“I don’t think you’re dumb at all!”
Good Lord! Daniella thought. She had really lucked out getting Mr. Corbin as Christine’s caseworker. She couldn’t imagine having this sniping, rude woman making decisions about the baby.
“If you can meet me at eight before I make my next health and welfare check on one of my kids,” Thrall powered on, “I won’t have to send the police out to take the baby from you.”
She paused and then her tone turned menacing.
“Is that going to be a problem, Miss Marquardt?”
The question danced around inside Daniella’s head. She didn’t have a car, would have to get a driver and Christine would need changed.
“Is it?” the woman asked again. “Perhaps you should just give me your location now and I’ll dispatch a unit.”
“No, tell me the address,” Daniella blurted. “We will be there.”
A trailer park? Daniella silently questioned as the Tap&Ride driver passed between the two crumbling brick pillars that marked the entrance.
The park was run down, almost stereotypical in appearance as someplace a Child Service’s caseworker would visit on a regular basis. There were no lawns between the mobile homes, just dusty brown spaces with random patches of yellowing grass and vehicles that looked like they should have been hauled off to the salvage yard years ago.
“What number did you say?” the Tap&Ride driver asked, his hand leaving the wheel to stroke at an annoying soul patch as sparse as the clusters of grass.
“Two-twenty,” she answered in a distracted manner as she studied the aluminum-clad structures they passed.
Her stomach, already tied in knots, felt ready to dissolve and her face began to heat. Something was off. The park was a single lane, starting with one-oh-one on the left and two-oh-one on the right. They were halfway down its length. Two-twenty would be on the right at the very end.
None of that was alarming. But there were a lot of motorcycles in the park. They weren’t worn out scooters or cheap rice burners. They were choppers—long imposing bikes with skull caps hanging off handlebars instead of proper helmets.
“Stop!” she said.
The driver responded by taking his foot off the gas.
“Back up—”
“We didn’t pass it,” he interrupted.
“We need to leave now!” In her urgency, she leaned forward and clutched at his shoulder. “Put it in reverse and get us the hell out of here now!”
From behind, she heard the rumble of motorcycles. They hadn’t pulled into the park after her. They were all coming from the trailers she had already passed.
Ahead of the Tap&Ride car, a beat up brown sedan two decades old pulled out of the last drive on the right. A man with shaggy brown hair was behind the wheel, a young blonde next to him in the front passenger seat.
Snatching her phone from her pocket, Daniella opened the note app with the address and the caseworker’s name, typed in HELP!!! then hit FORWARD, tapping Reed’s name. The address field populated and she hit SEND.
“Ram them!” she ordered. “I’ll buy you a new car, just get us the hell out of here!”
The driver snorted as the sedan pulled to an angled stop in front of them. He hit a button, all the car windows going down as his hands went up in surrender.
“Just a fare guys,” he loudly announced over the idling roar of the motorcycles. “Lady’s business aint none of mine.”
“They want the baby,” Daniella yelled as she shoved her phone between the back seat cushions. A prayer banged inside her chest that Reed would receive the message in time.
She had to stall as long as she could while minimizing the risk to Christine.
The man and woman got out of the sedan, the woman scratching incessantly at her forearms with long, black lacquered nails. She walked ahead of the man, stringy yellow hair sticking to the sides of her face and down her shoulders. A broomstick skirt as black as her nails swirled with her long steps as an oversized denim purse bounced against one hip.
Popping her head through the window, she grinned when she saw Christine and started banging on the roof.
“Jackpot!” She pulled away as the baby began to cry from the noise. Turning to the man, she pointed at him. “Pay up, motherfucker. I delivered exactly what you wanted!”
The tone was different, the diction messy, but Daniella recognized the voice as belonging to Julie Thrall, the supposed Children’s Service employee.
Christ! How had they known her caseworker’s name?
You told them, idiot.
Oh, God, she had, hadn’t she? But they had her phone number.
You didn’t change it after Lynn died.
“Hey, my man,” the driver said, trying to sound cool and chummy as Julie’s companion approached. “Maybe we can work together. I get a lot of drunk fares—drunk bitches, hot as fuck.”
“Pay up, Donnie!” Julie demanded, reaching for the pockets on the man’s black leather riding vest.
He grabbed her by the wrist and gave a vicious twist, bringing her to her knees. “I need you sober until we get back to the stash house.”
Dipping his free hand into his pocket, he fished out a single pill. “You’ll get your junk then. For now, be a good little slag and swallow this.”
She stuck her tongue out, unfurling the long, slender tip to accept the pill. When she swallowed it down, a serene expression spread rapidly along her face and Donnie released her from the twisting grip.
“I get to see into a lot of homes,” the driver went on, his voice turning to a desperate whine. “Getting bags and shit. Premium stereo systems, big screen TVs.”
“Get out,” Donnie ordered without looking at him. “Leave t
he key.”
“Sure, sure man.” The driver scrambled out, sprawling onto the gravel road in his haste. “You can trust me, whatever you need.”
He clutched at the bottom edge of Donnie’s riding vest. “Deliveries…I can do that.”
Donnie stared silently at where the driver clutched the leather. Slowly, the man drew his hands away, palms and fingers bouncing with terror. With a jerk of his head, Donnie summoned one of the bikers behind the Tap&Ride car to come forward.
“Toss this piece of shit in a cage,” he growled. “He can be the warm up act before Friday’s first fight.”
A dizzying wave of nausea crashing over her, Daniella watched as the man was dragged away screaming for help. The bikers did nothing to silence him. They weren’t afraid of anyone coming to the driver’s rescue or even calling the cops.
This was their territory and she had stumbled blind and reckless into it.
Donnie jerked her door open then dragged Julie, still on her knees, over. With his hands in her stringy, greasy hair, he gave Julie’s head a hard shake as he glared with contempt at Daniella.
“Thrall means slave. Bet you feel like a dumb bitch.”
Daniella didn’t respond, just blinked rapidly, the blinks stopping when he slapped Julie across the face.
“Get to work,” he ordered. “Search her, find her phone and give it to me.”
The woman started pawing at Daniella, going through her pockets, shoving her hands down her blouse and groping at her thighs, making her lift her ass then dumping her purse and the diaper bag on the backseat floor in search of the phone.
“I was in such a rush I forgot.” Daniella swallowed as a panicky fear tried to force the truth up. She just prayed Reed had the message and didn’t try to call her, exposing the lie in the process.
Beyond the car, Donnie unzipped his pants and pissed a long, disinterested stream as another man got behind the wheel. Finished, Donnie jerked Julie onto her feet and shoved her toward the car’s rear bumper.
“Sit on the other side of the kid.”
“I did good, Donnie,” she said, opening the back passenger door and crawling in. “I got her out here just like you asked.”
Leaning over Christine, the woman tilted her head, her face twisting into a snobby, upperclass expression.
“Cary Academy Theater Club, 2014,” she wolf smiled then twirled a lock of stringy hair. “Homecoming queen, too.”
With that, she settled against the seat cushion and stared up at the car’s roof, her face going slack as Donnie pulled a cheap, nondescript phone out of his back pocket and thumbed in a number. He cocked his head, listening for something. After a few seconds, Daniella realized he must be calling her phone—but it wasn’t ringing, not in the car at least.
Did that mean her phone wasn’t working out here and the message to Reed never made it?
“Guess you were telling the truth,” he said, tossing his phone into the front passenger seat. His fingers pushed into the same pocket from which he had pulled the pill Julie took. He fished another capsule out, bigger and different in color. He wrapped an iron hand around Daniella’s jaw. She struggled, head twisting, lips clamping shut as she tried to grab his wrists.
Donnie just grinned, confident in his strength.
The last two things she remembered were dirty fingers in her mouth as he shoved the pill deep down her throat and then his hollow laugh.
“Hope you don’t mind dry swallowing, bitch.”
Chapter Eleven
Daniella woke with a scrambling need to vomit. She lurched forward, arms outstretched and vision blurry. Her palms hit a grimy shag carpeting a second before her stomach exploded.
“I’m not cleaning that up,” Julie growled from nearby.
“Stoker, man—should I give her another pill?” Donnie asked.
No, no, no! She screamed inside her head while a dry heave twisted through her body, her head jerking around in search of Christine. Eyes refusing to focus, she located the baby still in her car seat, seeing only a little flesh colored blob with a tuft of baby hair strapped into a cage of purple plastic.
“I’m not cleaning that up,” Julie repeated, her tone strident.
A hand roughly shoved at Daniella. Her back hit against the bottom cushion of a couch that was as stained and grimy as the carpet. With her vision remaining blurred, she saw the same blotchy shape of the man who had shoved her grab Julie by the hair, haul her over to the spot and push her down until her face was about an inch from the former contents of Daniella’s stomach.
“You giving the orders around here, slag?”
“No, Stoker,” Julie whimpered. “I—”
He whipped Julie’s head upward, hyperextending her neck as his voice dropped to a menacing whisper that sent hard chills stabbing down Daniella’s back.
“You don’t get to use ‘I,’ you got that? You aint human. You’re meat. Meat for me to fuck, meat for me to sell.” He pushed her head down again, the tip of her nose brushing the vomit. “Now what is your meat ass going to do?”
“Clean this,” Julie answered through lips tucked tight against her teeth.
Releasing the woman with another sharp jerk that sent her landing on her side, the man they called Stoker walked over to a battered leather chair alongside the couch. He plopped down, knees spread wide, the heels on his heavy boots pointed inward and almost touching. With her vision finally clearing, Daniella pieced enough of his features together to recognize him as the man in the first picture Mr. Cobb had sent her.
She swallowed, her throat raw and her spit tasting of bile.
He lifted a bushy eyebrow that was an aging mix of dark brown and gray. “You know me?”
Daniella rolled her lips before shaking her head at the question. This “Stoker” wasn’t any of the men who had appeared on Mr. Cobb’s camera, either the fire or the visit to her house on the Thursday before the fire. He could be any one of more than two dozen names Reed had on a list, but she hadn’t looked through the photos or the men’s summaries. She just knew they were all horrible people.
That was all she had wanted to know—until now.
“You are…an associate…of Merl’s…” Daniella trailed off. Whatever drug Donnie had shoved down her throat was making her thoughts punchy.
She thanked God that Stoker, presumably the boss of those present, hadn’t answered Donnie’s question about giving her a second pill.
“Associate?” Stoker rolled the word around his mouth then off his tongue. “I own that two-bit pimp.”
She nodded her understanding.
“Which means, what’s his is mine.”
Her cheeks heated. She knew angering him was absolutely the wrong choice, but she couldn’t stop the words from rushing out of her mouth. “There’s no proof Christine is his!”
Julie, returning to the room with a roll of paper towels and a squirt bottle, froze. Daniella froze with her. “Meat,” she was certain, didn’t yell at the boss and she needed to stay alive long enough to get Christine to safety.
Stoker leaned forward, his elbows planted against his knees and his fingers dangling between his legs like spiders encrusted in dirt and oil. “He owned your slag of a little sister—her ass, her mouth, her pussy…and anything that came out of it.”
Daniella dropped her head, her stomach threatening another full revolt. Her gaze landed on a bag next to her. She recognized it as Julie’s denim purse. It was filled with crap—a brush the girl didn’t look like she had ever used, a smoke stained glass tube, a long red strip of rubber that reminded Daniella of when she donated blood, a zip case, two phones…
Her gaze darted away. Covering her face, she faked another dry heave.
One of the phones looked exactly like hers, right down to a scratch on the edge from where she had once dropped it on the asphalt parking lot at the district office where she worked.
The tip of a pointy shoe hit her ribs as Julie warned, “You better not throw up again!”
Donnie, q
uietly observing, repeated the question Daniella had been dreading.
“You want me to dope her up again? She came off that awful fast—Mexicans must be cheating us.”
“Not yet,” Stoker answered, leaning back in his chair. “She can clean up her own puke first.”
Julie dropped the paper towels and squirt bottle then slithered over to Stoker’s side, her body squirming, her hands running over her hips and breasts. “Mmm…daddy, Donnie said all I had to do was get her out there and I was good for the day.”
Slowly cleaning up the mess she had made, Daniella kept her head down. But her gaze cut a wide arc as she scanned the room. Hearing Julie’s sick attempt at a seductive whine, she felt like someone had jabbed an ice pick into her heart. The bitch had sold out an innocent baby for her daily fix of drugs!
“Paulie!” Stoker bellowed as he pushed Julie away from his chair.
Metal clanked out of sight. Daniella turned her head in the direction of the sound to see an open doorway and the edge of a refrigerator.
A man ran through it, a bandana tied around his throat.
Please, Lord, please, don’t let them cook anything around the baby!
Tears filled her eyes at the thought that this was the kind of squalor and violence Lynn had left her home, two months pregnant, to come back to. Why? Had Daniella not been welcoming enough? The coroner said Lynn had stayed clean during the pregnancy, so it wasn’t for the drugs. And she couldn’t believe her sister could love Merl like that—that any woman could love any man like that.
“Yeah, boss?”
“Bring me a beer and whatever you got for this slag.”
He pointed at Julie. The woman let out a happy squeal and skipped over to her purse. Sitting on the couch, she pulled the purse into her lap. Daniella looked up just in time to see the cautious glance Julie threw in her direction.