by Jill Orr
Kevin walked up behind Twain. He looked nervous, agitated. “So what’s the plan?”
Twain shot Kevin a deadly look, then said to me, “You’d be surprised what we can get away with. My boss has a wide circle of influence. And if he wants three people to disappear without a trace?” He snapped his fingers. “They’re gone.”
Kevin, not happy to be ignored, tried again. “Seriously, Gonzalez, what’s the plan?”
Without warning, Twain backhanded Kevin across the face. Kevin staggered back and cried out in pain. “What the hell?” He held his cheek as blood started to drip from the corner of his lip.
“No names,” Gonzalez growled at him.
Kevin looked like a deer who had just heard the clicking release of a gun safety. He was in trouble now, and he knew it. “Listen, I can fix all this,” he spoke quickly, desperately. “All we need to do is threaten the kids. Riley and Ryan aren’t going to say anything to anyone about this. Holman is another matter, but we can figure out—”
“I’ve had enough of your ‘plans,’” Gonzalez barked, punching a number into his own cell phone, mine still in his back pocket. “Hey,” he said into the phone. “Yeah, I’m sending Fitzgerald and Dickens to pick him up. Do you want to talk to him before—”
Bile rose into my throat at the word “before.” Before what?
Riley Ellison, twenty-four, almost-librarian and wannabe reporter, was found dead, bound and gagged. Everyone who knew Ellison was surprised because she seemed like such a quiet girl, not prone to engage in activities that would lead to a gangland-style execution.
“Nah, I just wondered if you wanted to know—” he broke off listening to whatever instructions his boss was giving him on the other end of the phone. “Okay, okay. Yeah, fine. Okay. I’ll call you when it’s done.” He clicked off the phone.
Gonzalez was ruffled; his boss must not be happy. Kevin cowered nearby, glowering at Gonzalez as he dabbed at the cut on his lip with the back of his hand. Since I was pretty sure I’d just overheard someone ordering my death, I figured I had nothing to lose. My only thought was to get Gonzalez talking. Maybe he’d slip up and say more than he intended to? Maybe he’d say something I could use to get us out of here alive? “So what is your plan, Gonzalez?”
His eyes narrowed, glinting with evil self-satisfaction. “Well, we can’t very well pump you full of insulin like we did your little friend.” He checked my face for a reaction. “Or didn’t you figure that out yet?”
I felt the air leave my lungs. Of course, I knew they’d done it, but hearing him confirm it, like it was nothing, shocked me more than I expected.
Gonzalez’s eyes darted to Kevin, whose face had gone white at the mention of Jordan. “She was a lot like you, you know. Feisty to the very end.”
“You killed her.” I directed this to Kevin. “She trusted you and you killed her.” I struggled to keep the tears at bay. What point is there in crying when you have only hours (minutes?) to live? I decided my last few moments on earth would not be spent sad. I would go down swinging.
Kevin’s eyes flicked to mine, then back down to the floor. He looked as if he might throw up. Or run away. But he did neither. He just stood there, impotent, dripping with guilt.
“Coward!” I shouted at him.
“She wasn’t supposed to be involved.…” Kevin said, a small blood blister forming at the corner of his mouth.
“Had to be done,” Gonzalez said with no hint of remorse. “I just wish I knew who tipped her off.”
Kevin closed his eyes. “I never wanted her to get hurt.…”
“Nah, man, you just wanted your take,” Gonzalez said in a venomous tone. “You’ve done pretty good working for the boss man.”
Rage flooded my veins. “You killed Jordan for money?”
“She wasn’t supposed to be involved! I didn’t want her to find out. I was trying to prote—” As if he realized he’d said too much, he shut his mouth. He was hiding something. But before I could figure out what it was, a loud, rumbling sound erupted from the far end of the warehouse, and a black Ford Ranger drove in through the garage door. Holman.
“Your friend is here. Now the real fun can begin,” Gonzalez said before strolling back to meet the truck, with Kevin following. I kicked and struggled against my restraints again, crying out in fear and frustration. The lump lying next to me stirred. “Ryan! Ryan—wake up,” I whispered urgently.
His large, dark frame stirred. Eventually, he opened one eye and looked toward the sound of my voice. “Riles?”
“Ryan, wake up—we have to get out of here!”
He spun himself slowly, not able to get himself to sitting but able to face me. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Listen to me: They’re going to kill us. We’ve got to figure out a way to get out of here.” My voice was just above a whisper now; even though Gonzalez and Kevin were at the other end of the warehouse, I didn’t want to risk them seeing that Ryan was awake. I was afraid of what they’d do to him.
Ryan’s eyelids fluttered, struggling to stay open. I looked at his face properly. It was a mess. He had a swollen black eye that couldn’t open all the way, a bloody lip, and a broken front tooth. The sight of him so badly beaten made my stomach lurch in fear. “I’m so sorry. I never meant to get you mixed up in all this.…”
“Hey, hey,” he said, “this isn’t your fault, honey. You didn’t know they’d come after me.”
“And your mom? Is she—” I couldn’t even finish the sentence. The thought of any harm coming to Mrs. Sanford was unbearable.
“She’s fine. I told her I was going to see you. She probably thinks I’m still at your place. These assholes grabbed me before I got to my truck.”
I gasped in relief and tried to control my breathing. I needed a clear head if we were going to have a prayer of making it out alive. I took a deep breath, held it at the top like Holman taught me, and reminded myself that anger was a more useful emotion than sadness in life-or-death situations.
“It was Mr. Monroe,” I said after I’d regrouped. “He’s somehow working for Juan Pablo Romero—they’re dealing meth, and Jordan found out. They killed her.”
Ryan closed his eyes and nodded. “I overheard them talking. This is some serious shit here, Riley.”
We heard a clatter and a chorus of yelling ring out from the far end of the warehouse. “Riley?”
Holman’s frantic cries touched my heart. “I’m here!”
His escorts, two large men and Gonzalez, kicked and prodded him over to where Ryan and I were being held. He too had been beaten, and I could see the yellowing of a fresh bruise developing under his right eye. His glasses had a crack in the right lens. I gasped when they shoved him down, and he tumbled to the floor.
“Are you okay? Did they hurt you?” He searched my face for signs of injury.
“I’m fine. You?”
He looked at me with tears in his perfectly round eyes. “I’m so sorry.…”
“Yeah, yeah, everyone’s sorry,” Gonzalez snapped. “You have something that belongs to us.”
Holman nodded toward the large man standing to his right. “Charles Dickens has it. He wouldn’t let me hold it on the way over.”
“Wait!” I said, without really knowing what I was going to say next.
Holman turned to me. “It’s okay, Riley.” Something about the way he said this quieted me. I wondered if that magnificent bastard had a plan after all.
CHAPTER 38
Dickens went back to the truck and retrieved the large olive-green Rubbermaid container that contained his boss’s meth. I could smell the patchouli oil waft into the air. Holman was looking at the container like it was his last lifeline, which in a sense, it was. Gonzalez undid the latches on either side and lifted the lid.
“What the hell is this?” he roared as he looked inside.
Holman cleared his throat before speaking. He was obviously terrified but resolved to fight through his fear. “That,” he leveled his gaze on Gonza
lez, “is a live video feed of your methamphetamine strapped to an explosive device with an active timer. Sitting on top of several bags of white rocks meant to approximate the size and weight of the real thing, of course.”
I saw Gonzalez’s jaw clench and the muscles in his neck flare. “You idiots didn’t check the product?”
Dickens and the man I assumed was Fitzgerald looked at each other, then at Gonzalez. “Um, it smelled like the stuff…we just figured.…”
“You don’t get paid to figure,” Gonzalez shouted. “I should just—”
Holman interrupted Gonzalez’s fit. “I’m attempting to bribe you.”
At this, Gonzalez actually laughed. “Oh, you are, are you?”
“Yes. You see, I need you to let Riley and Ryan go free, and the drugs are the only leverage I have to ensure their safety. It was really my only play. You’ll note there is a timer on the bomb. It will detonate in about an hour if I don’t call in the code to disarm it.”
Gonzalez ran a hand through his thick, black hair. “You think you can threaten me with this amateur shit?” He stared at Holman with such venom that I feared he might shoot him right then and there.
To his credit, Holman maintained his icy gaze, though his trembling voice gave him away. “We make a simple trade,” Holman said. “You let Riley and Ryan go, and you can have your drugs back.”
I stared, open mouthed, at Holman. What was he doing?
“Or how about I blow your head off right here, right now?” He leveled his gun at Holman.
“I’ve got half a million in meth that says you don’t.”
If Holman had put on a dress and started singing “Let It Go” from the Frozen soundtrack, I could not have been more surprised. Will Holman was playing hardball with gangsters. And judging by the look on Gonzalez’s face, he was winning.
“All you have to do is let them go,” Holman continued, his voice gaining strength from Gonzalez’s obvious shock. “And then I disarm the bomb and take you to the drugs. At that point, you can do whatever you like with me.”
“No!” I cried.
He looked at me briefly, then back to Gonzalez. “The way I see it, your boss wants two things: his product back, and me out of the way. Killing two innocent people is only going to complicate your situation.”
The warehouse was dead quiet as we watched the standoff between these two unlikely competitors. The seconds stretched on.
Ryan finally broke the silence with. “Riley and I won’t say a word about any of this—”
“Ryan!” I shouted, horrified. “Holman, you can’t do this! There has to be some other way.”
Gonzalez lowered his gun and yelled a string of curses in Spanish so loud it reverberated against the metal walls of the warehouse. “How do I know that these two are gonna keep their mouths shut?”
Holman said calmly and quietly, “Because Ryan is about to become a father.” As his words sank in, all eyes turned to me. The implication, that Holman obviously intended, was that I was carrying Ryan’s baby.
“You’re pregnant?” Kevin’s voice was somewhere between confused and panicked.
I looked at him but said nothing. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Holman gave Ryan an almost imperceptible nod. Go ahead, the nod said, save her. Maybe Holman really did have a hero complex?
“We will forget this ever happened,” Ryan said. “We won’t say a word. Ever. Just let us go. Please.”
Gonzalez looked from Ryan to me to Holman, slowly focusing on each of us as if his eyes were a polygraph trying to determine the truth. Between the bombshell Holman just dropped and the literal ticking time bomb, the air crackled with tension.
“All you have to do is let them go.” Holman kept his voice even. “Just let them go, and I give you the code and the drugs, and everyone can move on.”
“Except you, Sherlock,” Gonzalez said in a low growl.
Holman nodded. “Except me.”
Gonzalez walked away to call the boss and get approval for this unexpected change in plans, and Fitzgerald and Dickens stood in front of us, guns in hands. Once Gonzalez was out of earshot, I whispered to Holman. “You can’t do this, Will! They’ll kill you for sure.”
“It’ll be okay.” He kept his eyes straight ahead, not daring to look at me.
“Listen,” Ryan said to me. “Once you and I are safe, we can call the police. We can make sure they come back for Holman before anything bad happens.…”
“How can you be so selfish?” I snapped at Ryan.
“I’m not being selfish, Riles. I’m thinking of you—and the baby.” His expression was deadly serious, and despite my wanting to be angry at him for choosing us over Holman, the look of papa-bear protectiveness in his eyes softened my resolve. He wasn’t being selfish—or at least not entirely. He was behaving like a father who wanted to be there to see his child grow up. “Once we’re free, we’ll send someone back for him.”
I looked from Ryan to Holman, and my eyes instantly filled with tears. “No,” I said. “There has to be another way.”
Holman turned to me. He smiled, but then Gonzalez walked back over. He pointed his gun directly between Holman’s eyes.
“The lady is right,” he said. “There is another way. My way.”
CHAPTER 39
Here’s what’s going to happen,” Gonzalez said once Fitzgerald and Dickens had loaded Kevin, Ryan, Holman, and me into the back of one of the Tacos Los Locos trucks. Gonzalez sat in the passenger seat, Fitzgerald to his left in the driver’s seat, and Dickens stood sentinel just behind them with a gun pointed our direction. “You’re going to disarm the half-ass kitchen bomb you made, pendejo, and take me to my product.”
“Not until Riley and Ryan are safe.” His words remained on message, but the confidence in Holman’s voice had faded.
“Nah,” Gonzalez sneered. “See, I came up with a new plan. We’re going to head over to a place of great importance to your girlfriend—” He reached under the seat and brandished a bottle filled with an amber-colored liquid and a dirty rag sticking out of the top.
Holman interrupted him. “Remember, we are not romantically involved. Despite Riley’s symmetry, our relationship is not—”
“Shut up!” Gonzalez roared. “The only relationship you need to worry about right now is the one between you and the old people at the Tuttle Corner Library reading their newspapers and shit.”
Gonzalez smiled, hyena-like, as he watched our reactions. “You think you can call the shots with me? That you can threaten me?” His voice rose as he watched our horrified faces absorb this reversal of fortune. “Nah, the way I figure it, if you’re willing to die to save two innocent people, you ought to be willing to give back what is rightfully mine in order to save a bunch more. And even if you don’t, I need to send a message over there anyway. Two birds, one bomb, you know what I’m saying?”
Shock rippled through the food truck. Gonzalez was going to throw that Molotov cocktail into the library if Holman didn’t cooperate.
The truck pulled out of the warehouse and into the bright sunlight. I didn’t know exactly what time it was but figured it was close to two o’clock. The library would be filled with patrons. Images of Dr. H and Tabitha swam before my eyes.
Holman’s face drained of color. He had not expected this. “But if you kill us all, then you’ll never get your methamphetamine back.”
“See, I don’t think it’ll come to that. I think you’ll swoop in and save the day. Why save two lives when you can save so many more?”
“Don’t do this,” Kevin interjected. “We can still get the product. Just let me talk to Holman—I’ll get him to give up the code. I personally guarantee it.”
“Your personal guarantee doesn’t count for shit. And by the way, there is no more ‘we,’ Monroe.”
Kevin froze. He’d been cut off, just like that. In the space of one second he went from one side to the other. A prince to a pauper, a general to the enemy. Now he was in exactly the same situation as Holma
n, Ryan, and me.
Gonzalez enjoyed seeing the realization settle over Kevin. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I think you’re the reason we’re in this situation to begin with.”
“What? No—”
“Yeah, I think you sent that tip in yourself.”
“I didn’t—I swear!” Kevin was as bad a liar as I was.
Gonzalez ignored him. “I didn’t put it together until earlier when you were talking in there—but I think you were getting scared. You’d already gotten a ton of cash for fixing charges, but you couldn’t handle it anymore. Didn’t have the stomach for it. Or maybe your girl was getting too close, and you didn’t want her to find out you were involved. So you sent in the tip yourself so we’d all get busted, and no one would ever know about what you were doing.” Gonzalez may have been a madman, but he was smart.
Kevin looked terrified as Gonzalez explained what had undoubtedly happened. “Fausto—I swear!”
“Stop,” Gonzalez roared, and Dickens stepped toward Kevin, the barrel of his gun pointed directly at his chest. “Sit.”
“How do you think you’re going to get away with bombing a library?” I asked, voicing the obvious, practical question. “The police will figure out who did that. There will be some shred of evidence that will lead back to you and your ‘boss.’ Even Romero can’t kill dozens of people and get away with it.”
Kevin said quietly, “Romero isn’t the boss.” His voice was flat, resigned, like he had nothing left to lose.
“Watch it,” Twain warned.
But Kevin wasn’t listening. His face was chalk-white, beads of sweat appeared around his hairline, and his eyes were unfocused as he stared at the floor in the truck. “He doesn’t even know about the drugs.”
“Monroe,” Gonzalez snarled again in warning.
“It’s all coming from Romero’s uncle up in Jersey. Well, he and—”
“Shut up!” Gonzalez nodded to Dickens, who punched Kevin in the ribs. Hard. I screamed as Kevin doubled over, moaning in pain.