by Sam Sisavath
Savior/Corruptor
Copyright © 2019 by Sam Sisavath
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Road to Babylon Media
www.roadtobabylon.com
Cover by Deranged Doctor Designs
Editing by Jennifer Jensen and Wendy Chan
Contents
About Savior/Corruptor
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
About Savior/Corruptor
SHE NEEDED A VACATION, BUT SHE WON’T GET ONE.
It was supposed to be a much-needed respite for Allie Krycek. She was ready and needed to heal. And that’s exactly what she did in a small nowhere town in the Pacific Northwest.
That is, until certain people decided to drag her into their web of murder and lies.
When an abused housewife leaves a desperate plea for help, Allie doesn’t—she can’t—turn the other cheek. It’s not in her nature to let an innocent get hurt, if she can help it. But not everything is what it seems, and soon Allie finds herself thrust into a complicated conspiracy that just keeps getting more dangerous.
If Allie were any other woman, she would turn and run.
But Allie Krycek isn’t any other woman. She’s going to do the right thing, even if it means taking on one of the most powerful families in the country.
One
MY HUSBAND IS GOING TO KILL ME.
Allie stared. It didn’t matter how many times she read it—five, now, each time slower than the last—the words and the meaning behind them didn’t change.
MY HUSBAND IS GOING TO KILL ME.
This was supposed to be a vacation. She was supposed to get herself back together, physically and mentally. The last few months had been a whirlwind of pain. She could deal with pain. She’d learned how to long ago. That knowledge, combined with five twenty-four hour cycles of ten-hour sleep days, had been just what she needed.
This was day five. She’d told herself she’d only take two more days, at the most, before she returned to civilization.
And then this happened.
The person who had written the letters had left the bar three—or was it four, now?—minutes earlier. Allie hadn’t spotted the note earlier because she hadn’t been paying attention; she’d been too busy ignoring the forty-something barfly in the ketchup-stained flannel work shirt sitting next to her. The man’s speech was slightly slurred, and Allie only got one out of every three or so words, but it was pretty easy to guess what he wanted.
She didn’t see the note until she picked up her glass of beer and spotted it, pinned against the bar counter underneath her coaster. It was written on two flimsy strips of toilet paper in red ink. The letters were all capital letters and not the least bit elegant. That, somehow, only added to their urgency: This was written by someone who hadn’t had a lot of time.
Allie wished she could have ignored it. Flicked it off the counter and watched it flutter to the floor and forgotten about it. That was why she’d come here in the first place.
“You need a vacation,” Lucy had said.
“What kind of vacation?” Allie had asked.
“How about a cruise?”
“A cruise?”
“Yeah. You know. On a boat?”
“I know what a cruise is, Lucy. I don’t know about taking one, though. Locking myself onboard a boat for days doesn’t sound like much of a vacation.”
“I could even come with you!”
“Don’t you have school?”
“What’s your point?”
The conversation had ended there, and for (almost) five days, her much-needed vacation had gone exactly as planned. She’d done very little besides eat and sleep, work out a bit in the woods outside her cabin, then go right back to eating and sleeping. She’d even packed on a few pounds. All the bad fried and greasy food from town was to blame, but she wasn’t too concerned. She could shed the excess blubber when she was ready to go back. She had experience with getting lean in a hurry. All it would have taken was another few days of sweaty work and a decent home-cooked diet.
That was before tonight. Before she stepped into this dingy bar called the Don’t Stop In (Even the name’s a warning. Sheesh.) for a glass of beer. She’d driven past the place a dozen times but had never stopped in until now.
She should have kept right on driving.
Allie stared at the two pieces of toilet paper in her hands. They were the cheap kind, already fraying at the edges. Wet spots had smeared some of the letters by the time Allie noticed them, but that hadn’t done anything to lessen their impact. They still said the same thing after she’d read it for the sixth time.
MY HUSBAND IS GOING TO KILL ME.
The woman who had left the note was a small blonde in her early thirties who wore too much makeup, who had come in after Allie had sat down and was on her second beer. Allie only noticed the blonde’s arrival because someone had slammed the front door, and the loud bang had drawn her attention. She had inadvertently locked eyes with the woman when she glanced over.
How long had their eye contact lasted? Two seconds? Three? A whole minute?
Not a minute. That was impossible, because the woman had come in with a man at her side. She was clutching his left arm as if afraid he might fly away and abandon her. Her husband or boyfriend, Allie had assumed at the time. Maybe even the “husband” who was going to “kill” her.
She peered down at the note again.
MY HUSBAND IS GOING TO KILL ME.
Seven times now, and not a single one of the letters had altered since the last time she read them. The words were like daggers stabbing at her eyes.
Allie only knew that the note’s owner was the same blonde from earlier because she had spotted the other woman at the bar, standing next to Allie’s temporarily empty stool. By the time Allie saw the dire warning and turned around, the woman was gone. Along with her boyfriend or husband.
Husband. The same husband she thinks is going to murder her.
Allie couldn’t understand why the woman had chosen her, of all the people, in the establishment. Was it because Allie was a fellow female and the blonde expected her to have more sympathy than if she’d chosen a random male? Or was it because they’d locked eyes for that one brief second or two when the couple first entered the Don’t Stop In? Was that it? One or two seconds of contact was all it had taken?
As much as it cut into her female pride, Allie had to admit that a woman under duress would be smarter to reach out for a man’s help, especially if she was afraid of being “killed” by another man. What could a woman do against a potential murderer that a man couldn’t do better to stop it? If a fight broke out—
“…my place?
”
The voice snapped her out of her thoughts.
Slowly, other sounds faded back in: The clap-clap of boot soles on the dance floor, the jukebox playing in the back, and the occasional chatter of the dozen or so other people who had found Don’t Stop In as irresistible as she had this night.
“…know you want to. I can see it in your body language.”
It was the barfly. He was still chatting into her right ear, and for some reason, his words were a lot clearer than before.
Allie turned around. She had almost forgotten he was there, but he hadn’t gone anywhere even as she stared down at the note and didn’t move from the stool for what seemed like an eternity. If he even noticed what was in her hands, it didn’t show up on his flushed face. His cheeks were bloated, as were his forehead and eyes. He was probably still too drunk to know just how close he was from tipping over his stool and falling flat on his face against the floor.
She resisted the urge to give him the nudge he’d need and said instead, “What?”
“My place,” the man said. He flashed a charming smile. Or what he thought was a charming smile, no doubt. It looked like a reptile trying to mimic what it’d seen a human do, and failing miserably. “Let’s go back to my place, doll. Let’s get nasty.”
“Doll?”
No one had called her doll in…well, ever.
“Your breath stinks,” Allie said. She had no interest in being nice, especially to drunks. In her experience, all that did was encourage them.
“My breath?” The barfly cupped one hand in front of his mouth, blew into it, and sniffed the results before giving her a disbelieving look. “Doesn’t stink to me.”
“Trust me, it stinks.”
“Doesn’t stink.” He sniffed his hands again. “Not stink. Why do you keep saying it stinks? It doesn’t stink.”
For a second Allie thought he might be messing with her, but the look on his beet-red face said otherwise.
“You’re drunk,” Allie said.
“Not yet.” He grinned, revealing surprisingly white teeth. “So how about it?”
“How about what?”
“Let’s go back to my place.”
“No.”
Allie glanced back down at the note. Unsurprisingly, it hadn’t changed since the last time she looked. The words stared back at her, as horrific in all its possibility now as it had been the first time she read them.
MY HUSBAND IS GOING TO KILL ME.
“I got more of these,” the barfly was saying. When she looked over, she saw that he was holding up his empty glass of beer. “Tons of more. All for you.”
“That’s generous,” Allie said.
He flashed that winning smile again. “That’s me.”
“But I’ll have to pass.”
“Why?”
Allie didn’t bother answering. She stood up and slipped the note into her jacket pocket. She looked toward the door, the barfly’s hideous breath warm against the nape of her neck.
“…do the nasty,” the man was saying.
Not in this lifetime, Allie thought as she walked away.
“Leave the lady alone, Stan,” she heard a voice say behind her.
“What? What did I do?” the barfly protested.
“You know what you did.”
“I didn’t do nothin’.”
“Let’s keep it that way.”
She looked back and saw the good-looking bartender who had been pouring drinks for her and everyone else all night. He had one hand on the barfly’s arm, pulling him back down onto his seat. She hadn’t seen it, but the drunk had gotten up to pursue her. Or tried to.
Allie exchanged a brief nod with the bartender. She hadn’t caught his name, and he wasn’t wearing any kind of tag on his shirt.
He gave her a pursed Sorry about the drunk smile back.
She turned and hurried across the bar, to the front door. She had to weave her way around a trio of slow-dancing couples on the dance floor, a George Strait oldie-but-goodie about true love blasting in her ears. All but one woman—out of the six—on the dance floor were wearing long-sleeve flannel shirts. Flannel was very popular in this part of the country.
Allie pushed through the front door and stepped outside into the chilly night. George Strait’s soothing voice faded into the background along with the closing door, and Allie was left to stand underneath the dark light of the moon by herself.
She zipped up her jacket halfway while she scanned the parking lot, even as she told herself she didn’t know what she was looking for. She’d only seen the couple enter the bar but hadn’t caught how they’d gotten here. They could have been sitting in that beat-up van across the lot (though that was unlikely, given how the two were dressed) or necking in the back seat of the equally beat-up Chevy sedan three car lengths down from where she stood.
Dammit. She’d let too many minutes slip by while she tried to digest the note. Add to that the minutes she’d lost before she’d noticed the warning in the first place, and it all came down to the same thing: She had wasted too much time.
It occurred to Allie suddenly that she hadn’t really gotten a very good look at the husband. She’d been so focused on the woman—on all that makeup on her face, way too much makeup, as if she were trying to hide something—that she’d only gotten a cursory glimpse of the man she was with. The couple hadn’t stayed very long, either. In and out, as if this were some kind of pit stop. It made some sense; they were dressed way too well to be frequenting a dump like the Don’t Stop In. Besides, neither one of them were wearing flannel.
Allie took out the two pieces of tissue paper from her jacket pocket and read it again.
MY HUSBAND IS GOING TO KILL ME.
There it was, in bright red ink, written on two very thin pieces of toilet paper that looked as if they might disintegrate in her hands if she held them for too much longer. The “paper” of choice meant the woman was inside the bathroom when she wrote the note. It would also be the only time the blonde could get away from her husband—
A scream cut through the cold night air, coming from behind her.
Allie spun around.
It was a woman’s voice, and it had come from the side of the building.
Maybe she wasn’t too late after all!
Two
Except it wasn’t the blonde and her husband. It was a brunette—a young woman in her early twenties, wearing a white T-shirt that was a size too small with a pair of shorts that were a size too short, especially in this weather—being pinned to the ground by a man twice her size. The man on top of the girl had his back to Allie, giving her a good look at his leather jacket and the eagle at the center, with the words Devil’s Crew MC stenciled in bold white letters that were gripped in the bird’s talons.
There was a second man, just as big as the first, wearing equally dirty jeans and an identical jacket. She could see specks of mud and dirt on them even with just a single fading squiggly yellow light back here, far from any witnesses.
The second man stood to the side, too busy pushing a bandana against his face to get involved with the action on the ground. He either heard or sensed Allie’s arrival and turned around. Blood dripped from the bandana to the gravel floor, an extension of the parking lot behind her. The biker was breathing hard, on the verge of wheezing.
“Mitch,” the one with the bandana said.
Mitch, the biker pinning the girl to the ground, refused to look up. “What?” he said. Or grunted out. He wouldn’t take his focus off the girl, who struggled underneath him, but she was a small thing, and from the looks of it, already tiring.
“We got company,” Mitch’s buddy said.
That got Mitch’s attention, and the man looked up and over his shoulder. He saw Allie, and a flash of annoyance raced across his pockmarked face. “Get lost, bitch. Invitation only.”
“Maybe we should invite her,” Mitch’s buddy said.
“Do what you gotta do.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Th
e man lowered the bandana, revealing a busted nose, and shoved the cloth into his back pocket. He walked toward Allie. “Hey, little lady, you like what you see?” He looked her up and down. “You’re a little older than I like ’em, but tonight, you’ll do, missy. Oh yeah, I think you’ll do, all right.”
Allie stared at him, trying to decide how much of this she wanted to be a part of. But another look at the girl, still struggling against the brutish Mitch, and the decision was made for her. There wasn’t much of a choice at all.
Mitch got up, dragging the girl up with him, and shoved her against the Don’t Stop In’s filthy wooden siding. She let out a pained grunt as her chest and cheek struck the building. That also turned her head around so that she locked eyes with Allie.
The kid didn’t have to say a word; Allie could see the terror in her eyes.
“Don’t mind her,” Mitch’s buddy was saying. Then, when Allie looked over at him, “She came here willingly. This was her idea. Daddy’s little girl got the urge to take a walk on the wild side.” He snorted. “Not our problem she changed her mind at the last minute.”
“I didn’t change—” the girl shouted.
Or started to, before Mitch punched her in the back where her kidney would be. The girl screamed and might have fallen down if Mitch didn’t grab her by the back of the neck, one beefy hand covering her entire nape, and kept her propped up.
“You good?” Mitch’s buddy said.
“Yeah, I’m cherry.” Mitch glanced over at Allie again. “Be careful. I don’t like the looks of this one.”