With effort, Will managed to zip up his pants. He shouldered Angie out of the way as he walked across the room.
She asked, “Is it your time of the month again?”
“Did you know about the baby?”
She cocked her hand on her hip. “What baby?”
“I don’t care what the answer is, but I want the truth. I need to know the truth.”
“You gonna beat me if I don’t tell you?”
“I’m gonna hate you,” he answered, and they both knew what he was saying was true. “That baby could’ve been you or me. Hell, that baby was me.”
Her tone was sharp, defensive. “Mommy leave him in the trash-can?”
“It was that or whore him out for speed.”
She pressed her lips together, but would not look away. “Touché,” she finally said, because Diedre Polaski had done just that very thing to her baby girl.
Will repeated his question, the only question that mattered anymore. “Did you know that there was a baby in that penthouse?”
“Lola was taking care of it.”
“What?”
“She’s not bad. She was making sure it was okay. If she hadn’t got popped—”
“Wait a minute.” He put out his hands to stop her. “You think that whore was taking care of that baby?”
“He’s fine, right? I made some calls to Grady. Mother and son are united again.”
“You made some calls?” He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Jesus Christ, Angie. He’s a tiny baby. He would’ve been dead if we’d waited any longer.”
“But you didn’t and he’s not.”
“Angie—”
“People always take care of babies, Will. Who looks out for people like Lola?”
“You’re worried about some crack whore when there’s a baby in a trash heap starving to death?” He didn’t let her answer. “That’s it. That’s it for me.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means I’m finished. It means the string on our yo-yo has broken.”
“Fuck you.”
“No more back and forth. No more screwing around on me, running out on me in the middle of the night, then running back in a month or a year later pretending like you can lick my wounds all better.”
“You make it sound so romantic.”
He opened the front door. “I want you out of my house and out of my life.” She didn’t move, so he walked over to her, started pushing her toward the door.
“What are you doing?” She pushed back, and when he wouldn’t budge, she slapped him. “Get the fuck away from me.”
He lifted her from behind, and she used her foot to kick the door closed.
“Get out,” he said, trying to reach the doorknob even as he held on to her.
Angie had been a beat cop before she’d been a detective, and she knew how to take him down. Her foot kicked out, popping him in the back of the knee, dropping him to the floor. Will held on, pulling her down with him so they were struggling on the floor like a couple of angry dogs.
“Stop it,” she screamed, kicking him, punching him, using every part of her body to cause pain.
Will rolled her onto her stomach, pushing her flat against the wood floor. He grabbed both her hands in one of his, squeezing them together so she couldn’t fight him. Without even thinking, he reached down and ripped away her underwear. Her nails dug into the back of his hand as he slid his fingers inside her.
“Asshole,” she hissed, but she was so wet Will could barely feel his fingers moving in and out. He found the right spot, and she cursed again, pressing her face into the floor. She never came with him. It was part of her power play. She always squeezed every last bit of soul out of Will, but she would never let him do the same to her.
“Stop it,” she demanded, but she was moving against his hand, tensing with each stroke. He unzipped his pants and pushed himself inside her. She tried to tighten against him, but he pushed harder, forcing her to open up. She groaned and there was a sweet release as she took him in deeper, then even more. He pulled her up to her knees, fucking her as fast as he could while his fingers worked to bring her to the edge. She started to moan, a deep, guttural sound he had never heard before. Will rammed himself into her, not caring if he left marks up and down her body, not caring if he broke her. When she finally came, she gripped him so hard that it almost hurt to be inside of her. His own release was so savage that he ended up collapsed on top of her, panting, every part of him sore.
Will rolled onto his back. Angie’s hair was tangled around her face. Her makeup was smeared. She was breathing as hard as he was.
“Jesus Christ,” she mumbled. “Jesus Christ.” She tried to reach out and touch his face, but he slapped her hand away.
They lay there like that, both panting on the floor, for what seemed like hours. Will tried to feel remorse, or anger, but all he felt was exhaustion. He was so sick of this, so sick of the way Angie drove him to extremes. He thought again about what Sara had said: Learn from your mistakes.
Angie Polaski was looking like the biggest mistake Will had ever made in his miserable life.
“Christ.” She was still breathing hard. She rolled over on her side, slid her hand up under his shirt. Her hands were hot, sweaty against his skin. Angie said, “Whoever she is, tell her I said thanks.”
He stared up at the ceiling, not trusting himself to look at her.
“I’ve been screwing you for twenty-three years, baby, and you’ve never fucked me like that before.” Her fingers found the ridge at the bottom of his rib, the place where the skin puckered from a cigarette burn. “What’s her name?”
Will still didn’t answer.
Angie whispered, “Tell me her name.”
Will’s throat hurt when he tried to swallow. “Nobody.”
She gave a deep, knowing laugh. “Is she a nurse or a cop?” She laughed again. “Hooker?”
Will didn’t say anything. He tried to block Sara out of his mind, didn’t want her in his thoughts right now because he knew what was coming. Will had scored one point, so Angie had to score ten.
He flinched as Angie found a sensitive nerve on his damaged skin.
She asked, “Is she normal?”
Normal. They had used that word in the children’s home to describe people not like them—people with families, people with lives, people whose parents didn’t beat them or pimp them out or treat them like trash.
Angie kept tracing the tip of her finger around the burn. “She know about your problem?”
Will tried to swallow again. His throat scratched. He felt sick.
“She know you’re stupid?”
He felt trapped under her finger, the way it was pressing into the round scar where the burning cigarette had melted his flesh. Just when he thought he couldn’t take it anymore, she stopped, putting her mouth close to his ear, sliding her fingers up the sleeve of his shirt. She found the long scar running up his arm where the razor had opened his flesh.
“I remember the blood,” she said. “The way your hand shook, the way the razor blade opened up your skin. Do you remember that?”
He closed his eyes, tears leaking out. Of course he remembered. If he thought about it hard enough, he could still feel the tip of the sharp metal scraping across his bone because he had known that he should send the razor deep—deep enough to open the vein, deep enough to make sure it was done right.
“Remember how I held you?” she asked, and he could feel her arms around him even though she wasn’t holding him now. The way she had wrapped her whole body around him like a blanket. “There was so much blood.”
It had dripped down her own arms, onto her legs, her feet.
She had held on to him so tight that he couldn’t breathe, and he had loved her so much, because he knew she understood why he was doing it, why he had to stop the madness that was going on around him. Every scar on his body, every burn, every break—Angie knew about it the same way she knew everything about h
erself. Every secret Will had, Angie held somewhere deep inside her. She held on to it with her life.
She was his life.
He gulped, his mouth still spitless. “How long?”
She rested her hand on his stomach. She knew she had him back, knew it was just a matter of snapping her fingers. “How long what, baby?”
“How long do you want me to love you?”
She didn’t answer him immediately, and he was about to ask the question again when she said, “Isn’t that a country music song?”
He turned to look at her, searching her eyes for some sign of kindness that he had never seen before. “Just tell me how long so I can count the days, so I know when this is finally going to be over.”
Angie traced her hand down the side of his face.
“Five years? Ten years?” His throat was closing, like someone had fed him glass. “Just tell me, Angie. How long until I can stop loving you?”
She leaned in, put her mouth to his ear again. “Never.”
She pushed herself up from the floor, smoothing down her skirt, finding her shoes and underwear. Will lay there as she opened the door, then left without bothering to look back. He didn’t blame her. Angie never looked back. She knew what was behind her, just like she always knew what was ahead.
Will didn’t get up when he heard her shoes on the porch stairs or her car starting up in the driveway. He didn’t get up when he heard Betty scratching at the dog door, which he’d forgotten to open for her. Will did not move for anything. He lay on the floor all night, until the sun coming in through the windows told him it was time to go back to work.
CHAPTER TWENTY
—
Pauline was hungry, but she could handle that. She understood the pains in her stomach and lower intestines, the way the spasms reverberated through her gut as they grasped for any type of nourishment. She knew it well, and she could handle it. The thirst was different, though. There was no way around the thirst. She had never gone without water for this long before. She was desperate, willing to do anything. She’d even peed on the floor and tried to drink it, but it just made her thirst even wilder so that she’d ended up sitting on her knees, baying like a wolf.
No more. She couldn’t be in that dark place for long. She couldn’t let it get to her again, envelop her so that all she wanted to do was curl into a ball and pine for Felix.
Felix. He was the only reason to get out of here, to fight, to stop the fuckers from taking Pauline away from her baby boy.
She lay on her side, arms pinned to her waist, feet sticking straight out, and lifted her upper body, straining her neck so that she could line herself up right. She held herself like that, muscles tight, sweating, the blindfold rubbing her skin, as she took aim. The chains around her wrists rattled from exertion, and before she could stop herself, she reared back her head and pounded it into the wall.
Pain streaked through her neck. She saw stars—literal stars—swimming through her vision. She fell onto her back, panting, trying not to hyperventilate, willing herself not to pass out.
“What are you doing?” the other woman asked.
The bitch had been lying on her back like a corpse for the last twelve hours, unresponsive, uncaring, and now she was asking questions?
“Shut up,” Pauline snarled. She didn’t have time for this shit. She rolled over onto her side again, lining up her body with the wall, moving down a few more inches. She held her breath, squeezed her eyes shut and pounded her head into the wall again.
“Fuck!” she screamed, her head exploding with pain. She fell onto her back again. There was blood on her forehead, sliding underneath the blindfold, getting into her eyes. She couldn’t blink it away, couldn’t wipe it. She felt like a spider was crawling across her eyelids, seeping into her eyeballs.
“No,” Pauline said, and she found herself wrapped in a full-on hallucination, spiders crawling across her face, digging into her skin, laying eggs in her eyes. “No!”
She jerked up to sitting, head spinning from the sudden motion. She was panting again, and she bent her head to her knees, touched her chest to her thighs. She had to get hold of herself. She couldn’t give in to the thirst. She couldn’t let the dementia settle into her brain again so that she lost where she was.
“What are you doing?” the stranger whispered, terrified.
“Leave me alone.”
“He’ll hear you. He’ll come down.”
“He’s not coming down,” Pauline snapped. Then, to prove it, she screamed, “Come down here, you motherfucker!” Her throat was so raw that she started coughing from the exertion, but she still screamed, “I’m trying to escape! Come stop me, you limp-dicked motherfucker!”
They waited and waited. Pauline ticked off the seconds. There were no footsteps on the stairs. No lights turned on. No doors opened.
“How do you know?” the stranger said. “How do you know what he’s doing?”
“He’s waiting for one of us to break,” Pauline told her. “And it’s not going to be me.”
The woman asked another question, but Pauline ignored her, lining herself up with the wall again. She braced herself to pound her head into the wall again, but she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t hurt herself again. Not right now. Later. She would rest a few minutes and then do it later.
She rolled onto her back, tears streaming down her face. She didn’t open her mouth, because she didn’t want the woman to know she was crying. The stranger had heard the sobbing, heard Pauline sliding around in her own piss. That show was over. No more tickets would be sold.
“What’s your name?” the stranger asked.
“None of your goddamn business!” Pauline barked. She didn’t want to make friends. She wanted to get out of here any way she could, and if that meant walking over the stranger’s dead body to freedom, Pauline would do it. “Just shut up.”
“Tell me what you’re doing and maybe I can help you.”
“You can’t help me. You got that?” Pauline twisted to face the stranger, even though they were in total darkness. “Listen up, bitch. Only one person is going to make it out of here alive and it’s not going to be you. You understand me? Shit rolls downhill, and I’m not going to be the one smelling like a sewer when this is over with. All right?”
The stranger was silent. Pauline fell onto her back, looking up at darkness, trying to brace herself for the wall again.
The woman’s voice was barely a whisper. “You’re Atlanta Thin, aren’t you?”
Pauline’s throat tightened like a noose had been put around it. “What?”
“ ‘Shit rolls downhill, and I’m not going to be the one smelling like a sewer,’ ” she repeated. “You say that a lot.”
Pauline chewed her lip.
“I’m Mia-Three.”
Mia—slang for “bulimia.” Pauline recognized the screen name, but still insisted, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Mia asked, “Did you show them that email at work?”
Pauline opened her mouth, just tried to breathe a while. She tried to think of the other things she had told the Pro-Anna Internet group, the desperate thoughts that raced through her mind and somehow ended up being typed onto the keyboard. It was almost like purging, but instead of emptying your stomach, you were emptying your brain. Telling somebody those awful thoughts you had, knowing they had them, too, somehow made it easier to get up every morning.
And now the stranger wasn’t a stranger anymore.
Mia repeated, “Did you show them the email?”
Pauline swallowed, even though there was only dust in her throat. She couldn’t believe she was tied up like a fucking hog and this woman wanted to talk about work. Work didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered anymore. The email was from another life, a life where Pauline had a job she wanted to keep, a mortgage, a car payment. They were waiting down here to be raped, tortured, murdered, and this woman was worried about a fucking email?
Mia said, “I didn’t get to ca
ll Michael, my brother. Maybe he’s looking for me.”
“He won’t find you,” Pauline told her. “Not out here.”
“Where are we?”
“I don’t know,” she answered—the truth. “I woke up in the trunk of a car. I was chained. I’m not sure how long I was in there. The trunk opened. I started to scream, then he Tased me again.” She closed her eyes. “Then I woke up here.”
“I was in my backyard,” Mia told her. “I heard something. I thought maybe a cat …” She let her words trail off. “I was in a trunk when I came to. I’m not sure how long he kept me in there. It felt like days. I tried to count away the hours, but …” She went into a long silence that Pauline didn’t know how to interpret. Finally she said, “Do you think that’s how he found us—on the chat board?”
“Probably,” she lied. Pauline knew how he had found them, and it wasn’t that damn chat room. It was Pauline who had led them here—Pauline’s big mouth that had gotten them into trouble. She wasn’t going to tell Mia what she knew. There would be more questions, and with the questions would come accusations that Pauline knew she wouldn’t be able to handle.
Not now. Not when her brain felt like it was stuffed with cotton and the blood dripping down her eyes felt like the tiny, hairy legs of a million spiders.
Pauline gasped for breath, trying to keep herself from freaking out again. She thought about Felix and the way he smelled when she bathed him with the new soap she picked up at Colony Square during her lunch break.
Mia asked, “It’s still in the safe, right? They’ll find the email in the safe and they’ll know you told the upholsterer to measure the elevator.”
“Bitch, what does it matter? Do you not understand where we are, what’s going to happen to us? So what if they find the email? Some fucking consolation. ‘She’s dead, but she was right all along.’ ”
“More than you got in life.”
They shared a moment of commiseration. Pauline tried to remember what little she knew about Mia. The woman didn’t post much on the board, but when she did, she was pretty on point. Like Pauline and a few other posters, Mia didn’t like whiners and she didn’t take much bullshit.
The Will Trent Series 5-Book Bundle Page 116