Killing Ruby Rose (The Ruby Rose Series)

by Jessie Humphries

  I put the gun and my cell phone down along with my boots and jacket, hooked the rope to a rod at the tip of the stern, and jumped in. The cold Pacific water shocked my system like an abrasive alarm screaming, “This is a mistake!” My clothes suctioned to me, strangling me like a thousand sheets of icy blankets. Each stroke I took felt like a bad dream where my muscles wouldn’t respond to my brain’s commands.

  As soon as I got to him, I hooked the rope onto the chains around his neck (knowing it wouldn’t feel awesome to be strangled as I dragged him) and tried to pull us back in, but his flailing legs made it impossible to even move in the right direction.

  I swam around to face him, hoping that when he got a good look at me—even without his bifocals on—he’d calm down. But instead, his eyes bulged and he started screaming. “No, no! Not you.”

  “Relax, I’m trying…to…save you!” I screamed, choking on seawater. What the hell was he so scared of? A skinny little teenager trying to save his life? Had Silver warned him that I would hurt him? “I’m going to cut you loose…so you can grab the rope.”

  But he couldn’t hear me. He was too busy repeating Hail Marys between gasps for air. I took a huge breath and dipped under the water, away from his splashing blows, to try to get at the knife strapped to my leg. With frozen fingers, suffocating clothes, and collapsing lungs, I almost thought I wasn’t going to be able to do it.

  Just as I thought I was doomed, I let go of the rope, gave my pant leg a tug with both hands, and slipped the blade out of its sheath. Air had never tasted so good.

  Clenching the knife in one hand and taking the plastic tie binding his wrists in the other, I sliced and his hands were free—with or without cutting some of his skin. I neither knew nor cared.

  But as soon as he realized I’d freed him, he didn’t try to swim. He grabbed my head and tried to use my body to stay above water. The moron didn’t understand that he was connected to the boat now, and all he needed to do was grab hold of the new line and pull himself in.

  I gasped for air and tried to tell him, but he was past listening, past feeling, past reason. I tried to fight the sting of the ice water burning my lungs with the adrenaline kicking in to save me. I was drowning, I couldn’t break free of him, and I couldn’t fight—he was too strong, and my reflexes were too weak from the numbing cold. Time and again my head went under the pitch-black water, disorienting me, freezing me, threatening to choke me. I knew I only had one choice left.

  I gripped my knife and gave him a warning stab in his arm—only meaning to hurt him enough to get free of his grasp. Instead of the cut weakening him, it enraged him even more. He was like a shark incensed at the smell of blood—thrashing and clawing at me with more force than I could handle. He grabbed me by the neck and tried to choke the remaining air out of me. My mind went fuzzy.

  I fought back—for precious oxygen, for life—but instead, I inhaled two mouthfuls of foul salt water mixed with blood. I was going to die, right here, at the hands of Father Michael.

  No. I would not be another one of this man’s victims. My dad didn’t train me to survive only to have this pathetic sadist drown me.

  I renewed my grip on the knife and slashed once as hard as I could, until I felt the blade slide through tissue and hit bone. He went limp.

  Oh, crap. Where had I stabbed him that made him give up so fast? I’d only wanted to make him let go of me. But in my choking, frozen, and blinded state, I hadn’t had the senses for precision.

  I released the weapon, too weak to even pull it out, and swam as far away from him as I could. It wasn’t until my fingers felt the slivery wooden ladder that I even turned back. But by then, he was already underwater.

  Chances were he was dead, but I had to at least keep trying to save him. My soul couldn’t take any more deaths.

  I scaled the ladder, shaking in the night wind. I charged to the stern and grabbed the rope, pulling with everything I had left. I heaved until my arms felt like they would come right out of their sockets, with no progress. He was too heavy. Maybe even stuck on something below. If he hadn’t been killed by the knife wound, he had to be dead now after several minutes underwater.

  I let go of the rope, falling to the floor of the boat, and sunk my head between my knees.

  How much more of this could I take? I tried to breathe, but my lungs were burning and I could only gasp in agony. My hands shook with the bitter cold.

  What was I supposed to do now? Call the cops and tell them I’d killed yet another man? Watch them pull the priest’s body up with my knife sticking out of his chest? My stomach clenched in disgust.

  Try to explain (again) that it really wasn’t my fault? How would I even justify my presence here—or his?

  The whole truth would need to come out, only to be twisted and used against me. Used to destroy me, my mother, my dad’s good name. My heart stung with rage.

  I let out a wild cry, banging my fists on the boat’s wet floor and letting the tears fall.

  I hated myself, I hated Silver, and I hated what he’d made me.

  He was Dr. Frankenstein, and I was his monster—forever tainted by the shedding of so much blood.

  My tears mixed with the salt water still dripping from my sodden hair. I shook with anger—in near hypothermia, and in horror. Alana was right. I was always the one looking for the fight. I’d chosen to follow these men that I’d killed. I’d chosen to put myself in a place I shouldn’t be, carrying weapons I shouldn’t have.

  Yes, part of me had wanted the priest dead, but not at my own hands. Yes, he had deserved to die by injection or old age in his lonely prison cell, but not by stabbing. Yes, he would never hurt another soul again, but what about me? I still had a soul. Perhaps a dark one—but it was a soul nonetheless.

  I had to pull myself together and report this one. The four bodies at the warehouse were different. I had no idea where the damn warehouse even was. I would have looked like a lunatic.

  But this body was right in front of me, dangling at the end of a hook like chum in the water. Silver may have made me into an executioner, but I wouldn’t let him take away my integrity. I wouldn’t leave Father Michael’s body here for a poor old fisherman to find.

  Plus, I still believed in the justice system, and believed that I would receive a fair trial. Despite the mess of everything, I could rely on a jury of my peers. Well, maybe. As long as my mom employed a high-powered defense team (using up all my dad’s life insurance money meant for my college education); as long as I portrayed myself as sympathetic (which I had no idea how to do); as long as no juror had a secret hatred for any member of my family (not likely, since the polls showed that at least 25 percent of Orange County strongly disapproved of my mother’s tenure as D. A.); and as long as the press stopped calling me a Teen Vigilante (they’d probably come up with something worse).

  OK, so maybe I didn’t believe the justice system always worked. But I still needed to call 911. I forced my boots back on and pulled my jacket over me for warmth.

  As I stood, a new light caught my eye—there was a car up on the street. No, a van.

  A black van—pulling into a parking spot. It stopped in mid-turn as the beams of light landed on me like I was the star performer in his sick show. I couldn’t see him, but he could most certainly see me.

  I grabbed my gun and phone and sprinted up the rickety dock to the street. When the van’s tires squealed and it roared away, I changed course to get back to Big Black.

  My nerves and icy fingers had me shaking so badly that I could barely get Big Black’s door open. Silver was getting away. Finally, I was in and I screeched out onto the street. I knew the general direction he was going: south. If I could get close enough, I could shoot out his tires and stop him.

  I pushed the engine down the empty street until it opened up into a busier area. I barely blinked, waiting and watching for something to show me where the van had gone. Suddenly, about two stoplights away, I saw a black vehicle turn left and disappear behind a b
uilding. I blew through two yellow lights and turned in after it down a narrow street, which became a claustrophobically thin alley with nowhere to hide. It seemed like I was on the butt-end of a strip mall, where workers came to throw out the trash and sit on milk crates to smoke. Except no one was around—and probably hadn’t been for a while.

  Big Black’s headlights finally lit up the gate at the end of the alley. The sign on it said: “Dead End.”

  He must have somehow gotten through this gate and relocked it. I flashed Big Black’s brights on the sliding gate. Either I was delirious or that heavyweight padlock was still swinging.

  I thought about doubling back and finding out where the end of the alleyway led, but that was ridiculous. Silver was long gone. A thousand steps ahead of me—a million miles away. He’d outsmarted me again and lured me away from the crime scene. I could just see myself on the witness stand trying to convince everyone that I wasn’t the stupidest girl in the world. Not that my defense team would ever let me testify.

  I had to go back to the marina and use the Security Guard of the Year’s phone to call it all in.

  “S-s-say what?” the guard stammered as he slammed down his remote control. What was he so irritated about? His stupid, inconsequential, non-life-threatening football game was over.

  “I said, can I please use your phone? There’s been a terrible accident.” I looked a mess—soaked and matted hair, smudged eye makeup I couldn’t wipe off, still-sopping clothes, and my poor, innocent, formerly light-brown Diesel ankle boots crusted with salt water and debris.

  “What kind of accident?” he asked, grabbing his walkie-talkie.

  “A man drowned out there,” I said, trying to sound calm. “I tried to save him, but he was tied up. I need to call the police right away. Please, where’s your phone?”

  “Hold on there a minute,” he said with his hand up, suddenly alarmed. “What man? Where?”

  “We don’t have time for this.” I didn’t want to explain anything to this guy. He was drunk, and my words could be twisted. “Can we just call the police?”

  “Look here, young lady,” he said. “There ain’t no phone around here. This here radio’s all I got. Budget cuts. So you’d better tell me the location so I can report it.”

  “Fine,” I said. “B-16.”

  He started jabbering into his walkie-talkie, waving me to follow him to the dock and describing me to whoever was on the other end as a juvenile delinquent and possible meth head. Through the static noise and unintelligible war codes they were using, I presumed the police had been notified. The guard was surprisingly sprightly and nimble through the darkness, and we were back to the Ruby Belle in no time. Maybe he would have been able to help me save Father Michael after all.

  “Where?” he demanded.

  “Right there,” I said, pointing to the rope leading over the stern of the boat.

  He climbed aboard, and I followed him up to the edge of no return. We stood there looking down into the dark water. In just a few moments, he would pull on the rope and make the most ghastly discovery of his life. Inch by inch, he pulled at the dead weight. The rope made a sickening grinding noise against the metal of the boat. Either this guy was shockingly strong or Father Michael had already lost most of his blood and limbs to the bottom feeders.

  Finally, the end of the rope came into sight. My knees buckled, and my lungs locked up.

  Where was the body?

  CHAPTER 18

  I stared at the rope, incapable of forming a logical thought. All that was left of Father Michael was his shirt.

  “Better call off the fuzz, Jimmy. We got a false alarm here,” the crotchety old guard complained into the radio, staring at me with what looked like a mixture of sympathy and disgust. “Just a dumb Halloween prank.”

  A prank? That’s what he thought this was?

  “Somebody put an old shirt in the water.” He held the shirt in the air to demonstrate what a stupid blonde I was. “Girlie, you need some new friends.”

  My legs felt like overcooked spaghetti noodles. My brain was telling me to sprint out of this haunted harbor, but I couldn’t make my feet move. I felt trapped, watched, manipulated. So much for standardized testing and its assessment of my “elite” intelligence—I was an elite idiot to have come here without Liam. His presence might have prevented this. Or at a minimum, he’d be here holding me now.

  “Are you OK?” the guard asked.

  “Of course,” I lied.

  “You’re trembling. Are you cold or somethin’?”

  “Yeah, cold,” I said.

  “Well, c’mon back to the hut with me and I’ll fetch you a blanket.”

  “No, I’m fine,” I said, because I still couldn’t move. But I suddenly noticed the stink of bleach.

  Somehow, Silver had managed to come back and destroy all the evidence that Father Michael had ever been here. But that was impossible. How would Silver have had enough time?

  “What did you say you were doing out here?” the guard asked, staring at me.

  “I didn’t say,” I responded flatly. And I walked away.

  As I drove, I kept shoving all the harbor images out of my mind. I tried to think about Liam instead.

  The closer I got to home, the heavier my guilt became. I should’ve called 911 and reported what I’d done. Yet, how could I do that with no body? Not even a shred of evidence that anything at all had occurred? Only a discarded wet shirt. Just like with the warehouse killings, I had nothing to back up my story.

  I had to get home, to get warm. Maybe then my brain would start working. My ice block of a foot lay heavy on the gas.

  I peeled onto my street, anxious to escape the darkness of the worst Halloween night of my life. Luckily, my neighborhood was too snooty to participate in trick-or-treating, so I didn’t have to worry about running over any little witches or wizards. But Big Black—and my heart—skidded to a halt when I neared my house and a dark shadow materialized next to a parked vehicle outside the gate, exactly where the paparazzi usually lined up. Except, the car wasn’t Sammy’s old Pinto.

  No, it was Liam Slater’s red canvas-topped Jeep.

  I jumped out of Big Black without even bothering to shut the door behind me. Running to Liam, I buried my face in his chest and let his arms encase me. I breathed him in and instantly felt safer.

  After a second, he pulled away from me—probably because he’d realized my hair and clothes were wet, not to mention I smelled like blood and fish guts. With his hands on my arms, he scanned my disheveled state with eyes as dark as the night.

  “Oh, Ruby,” he said. “What did you do?”

  I told Liam the whole sordid story, and he just sat there in my bucket seat, staring down the radio dials like they’d done something horrible to him. Or maybe it was the heater vents. Oops, he was probably sweating in the hot car. I was still cold from being in the dirtiest part of the Pacific Ocean. I turned down the heater, and my seat warmer up. Damn, I wanted out of this car and into a hot shower, but Liam deserved to know what had happened.

  I wondered when Liam was going to yell at me. Ask questions. Storm off to the police station. Or any other rational response.

  “Liam, I’m really sorry I didn’t wait for you. I was impatient and cocky, and maybe in the back of my mind I felt like you didn’t deserve to be dragged any further into this mess.” I slammed my head back onto the headrest. “I win the contest for Most Screwed-Up Girl and Idiot of the Year.”

  I flinched as his fist connected with the dash. Out of all the reactions I could’ve foreseen, that wasn’t one of them.

  I gripped my armrest, unsure of what he might do next. I’d never seen this side of him. He was furious.

  “Yeah, Ruby, maybe I’m a little pissed that you went to see Sammy without me. And maybe I think you’re absolutely crazy for hunting down this guy alone. But what I’m the most upset about is the danger this dick, Silver, is putting you in. You could have died!” he raised his voice like I wouldn’t get the m
essage at a normal volume.

  “Relax, Liam.” I slid my hand halfway over the console between us. “I didn’t die. I’m right here.”

  He saw my gesture (which was no little thing for me) and was quiet for a few moments. Taking a deep breath, he grabbed my hand and squeezed it in both of his. “Ruby, this guy is smart and patient. He knew you would go to the boat dock. He had it all planned out. He made it so that either you had to watch the priest die or risk yourself to save him. He obviously told the priest that you were dangerous to ensure the priest would fight back and you’d have to kill him in self-defense. Then he lured you away so he—or his accomplice—could go back and take the body and leave the priest’s shirt, knowing you’d call the cops. He’s not trying to get you caught. It’s almost like he’s trying to protect you.” As he said it, some of the puzzle pieces started shuffling around in my mind, but they weren’t fitting neatly into place.

  I pulled my hands away and slumped back in my seat, massaging my sore head. “If that’s true, then he has split personalities or something. First, he puts me in these dangerous situations, forcing me to kill, and then he defends me and cleans up to make sure I could never be prosecuted. The dude gave me back my dad’s engraved handgun! Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know, but no matter what, it’s like he’s ten steps ahead of us.” Liam paused and pursed his lips. “I know you don’t like it, but I think it’s time to go to the police, Ruby. Maybe Sammy was right and Detective Martinez would back us up if he knew what was going on with your dad.”

  “No.” I stared at him. “No, no, and no.”

  “Things are getting out of control—”

  “Things have long been out of control, Liam. I have killed, or been responsible for…” I stopped to count with my fingers. “Seven deaths now. Seven!”