by Max Henry
“You wanna search those drawers?” I shove a stack of boxes against the wardrobe doors aside with my boot. “I’ll look in here.”
“Sure.”
We work in silence for what has to be close to an hour, turning the house upside down before Tuck’s guys show up. The whole time I catch glimpses of her as she sorts through Cash’s piles of papers and junk, looking for what we need to identify those girls downstairs.
Not many people realize that although I’m one fucked-up son of a bitch at the best of times, I still have some standards. Not fucking with innocent lives is one of those.
Somebody’s daughter. A sister. Maybe even a wife.
God forbid any one of those women down there was some kid’s mother.
They had lives. And my money is on the chance that most, if not all of them, led clean and respectable ones before Cash took them.
For six years, Tuck has worked on this fucking ring of horrors. Two months he’s been knocking on the door of laying this issue to bed once and for all, and five weeks since I said I would help bring an end to the senseless sale, knowing it would give me something to keep my mind occupied, while I bided my time in Cali.
“There’s nothing here,” Abbey exclaims as she slams down a tattered box onto a haphazard pile in the corner. “It’s no use; he didn’t keep anything.”
“We haven’t checked everywhere yet.”
“No?” She turns to face me, frowning as she runs a hand over her hair to smooth it down.
“Didn’t do a thorough search of the downstairs yet.”
Her hand stills on her ponytail before she drops it slowly to her side. “Of course.”
“You wanna wait up here?” The hesitation in her gaze as her eyes dart around the room searching for anything and nothing worries me.
“No.” She squares her shoulders. “I’ll help you look. Although . . . .”
“What?” I stick a hand out, silently asking for hers.
She takes it, giving me a shy smile as we start toward the stairs. Progress. “I’m wondering why he’d keep their things with them, is all.”
“How do you mean?” I lead her down the staircase, the smell not quite so bad now that the doors have been open for a while.
“If you wanted to imprison people, wouldn’t you strip them of all their personal belongings? Remove their sense of identity?”
She has so much yet to learn . . . .
“Not always.” I shunt the leg I used to taunt Cash across the floor with my toe, adding it back in the pile. “Sometimes havin’ those familiar things in reach when a person is trapped against their will is the ultimate mind fuck. How hard do you think it’d be, knowin’ what you had, havin’ a constant reminder of who you were shoved under your nose when you know there ain’t a goddamn thing you can do to get back to that?”
“Never letting them forget it, like?”
“Yeah.” The room is worse than a fucking animal pen. The dirt floor is stained and littered with not only the women’s blood, but their piss and feces as well. “It’s actually a really effective way to break a person.”
“In what way?” Abbey steps over the remains of a torso and slaps a hand to her mouth when she catches sight of the heads stacked against the wall like bowling balls. “It’s so hard to imagine he couldn’t finish this off when he did so much already,” she whispers.
“A person’s conscience can hit at the most inconvenient of times.”
So true . . . .
“But back to the personal belongings and shit. Imagine, for example, you’re out with your friends, dancin’ it up at the local bar. What would you have on?”
“Boots, slim-fit jeans, and a shirt or something.”
Of course—this isn’t your average girly-girl I’m talking with. “I mean, if you were one of these women.” I gesture to the body parts between us.
Abbey shrugs. “I guess if I wanted to be all pretty and that I’d have a dress on. Probably some heels.”
“You’d feel good about yourself, right?” A clean patch of drywall catches my eye.
“I guess so.”
“So imagine how you’d feel then, watchin’ that dress grow filthy with your blood, turn some fuckin’ ugly shade of brown after weeks or months in confinement without a shower.”
“I’d feel dirty, used, and unwanted.”
“Exactly.” On closer inspection, the clean patch is exactly what I’d thought it might be: a hole that’s been fixed recently. “Put a person in a generic sack, and they can disassociate. Put them in their own clothes and remove their control over how they look in them, and they realize pretty fuckin’ fast that they don’t have control over anything anymore.”
“I never thought of it that way, but I guess you’d be right.”
“Got a bit of experience in it,” I say, prodding at the clean plaster.
Do you ever . . . .
“What are you looking at?” Abbey steps over to where I have my head against the wall while I tap along the expanse in even steps.
“This.” Taking a step back, I ball my fist and then drive it straight through the patch. Plaster dust rains down onto the floor, and I shake the particles from my hand before ripping into the edges to make the hole bigger.
Abbey stands off to the side, arms folded, and her eyebrow cocked. “Clever.”
“More than him.” I smirk. A smart man would have smeared dirt on the new plaster to make it the same dull cream color as the rest, rather than white.
Or at least hung a picture . . . a little art could really give this place some culture . . . .
Yeah, or that.
The space between the drywall and the dirt behind is narrow. My meaty arms are too damn bulky to reach between the beams and the earth supporting the rest of the house.
“Somethin’ has to be behind here, otherwise why would he bother?” I rip another section of wall off, tossing it on the growing pile.
Abbey lifts a hand and ushers me away with the backs of her fingers. Any given day, a person who dismissed me with that kind of attitude would be missing a couple of smartass fingers. But Abbey?
I step back and gesture with both hands at the wall. “All yours, m’lady.”
She pulls my phone out of her pocket—forgot she still had that—and swipes up to turn on the torch feature. I stand back and watch as she pushes up on tiptoes to see into the hole, torch pointed down in the gap.
“Definitely something down here. Can you hold the light?”
I take it from her, and then watch as she jams a slim arm down in the space, head in the wall also.
“Here.” She reemerges with a handful of plastic cards held together with a rubber band, passing them over before going back in for more.
Out comes a sequined purse, two billfolds, a set of keys, four phones, and a couple of GPS units. Odd. She saves the best for last, wrestling a trash bag out of the gap and onto the floor at our feet.
It contains the girls’ clothes.
“Nice work, babe.”
I flick through the cards while Abbey checks out the clothing. To look at the photos on the licenses, you wouldn’t have a damn clue that these are the same women spread over the dirt floor. Gorgeous, painted faces stare up at me, a snapshot of life as it was. These women are twelve out of tens, real catches. No wonder Cash took interest. How he lured women like these home with him, though, I wouldn’t know.
Couple of roofies go a long way, you know . . . .
True.
“Real shame,” I say, pocketing the licenses and tossing the credit cards and whatever else onto the pile of limbs beside me. “You ready to go now?”
Abbey sits cross-legged amongst the clothing, a black stretchy dress in her hands. “What happens to the bodies?”
“Tuck’s men will move them somewhere else, someplace that they won’t be connected to.”
“And then?” Her sad eyes look up to me, filled with so much misplaced hope.
“And then I’ll tip the cops off to where th
ey are.” I reach down, running my fingers under her jaw. “Don’t worry, Abbey-girl; they’ll get a proper funeral.”
She nods, looking around at the gore that surrounds us. The horrors contained in this room puts Hollywood movies to shame. This kind of shit is one thing to see on the big screen, but in life there’s a kind of realness about it that seeps into who you are. It’s inescapable, and undeniable that to reach this point some pretty sick fucking shit went down first.
You would know . . . .
Yeah, I would. But after doing it as long as I have, I’m kind of conditioned to it. Abbey though? I don’t know.
“Ready to go?” I hold out my hand.
She sighs, setting the dress down in the pile before accepting. “It’s so sad.”
“Not much we can do about it now, though.”
“No,” she replies, a vacancy slipping into her gaze as she comes in for a hug. Her arms slip around my waist and she rests her perfect head against my chest. It feels like we’ve been doing this for years—I wish we had. “It’s far too late to change things now.”
THIRTY-ONE
Abbey
Sawyer’s fingers run through my hair in a slow, methodical rhythm as we stand amidst the horror. Seeing their clothes, their bank cards, and their phones laid out before me hit home how much these mangled piles of flesh really were somebody once.
Somebody possibly like me.
Possibly not.
Do they have families who miss them? Or were they lost in life, looking for love in all the wrong places?
Worse still, though, are the repressed feelings these women dredge up. The first seven years of my life weren’t spent living. I don’t know what you could call that time. I guess I was growing, but I sure as hell wasn’t experiencing anything you could call a childhood.
I might have been young, I may have been naïve, but I sure as fuck wasn’t stupid. Mom went to work, Evan had “friends” over . . . but sometimes they never left. Even a four-year-old knows there’s something intrinsically wrong with that.
I don’t protest when Sawyer pushes his arm beneath mine, wraps it around my back, and hoists me into his hold. He carries me out of the basement, through the house of horrors, and into the crisp dawn air without saying a single word. I clench his cut in my balled fist, burying my face into the crook of his neck and clinging to him like he’s Flopsy and I’m four years old all over again.
Only this time I would have had a demon of my own to keep me safe.
Where were the big bad men with good hearts, like Sawyer, when I was young? Where were the knights disguised in leather when the coward I was forced to call Daddy ruled my life with terror and pain?
I guess late is better than never, huh?
I jostle in Sawyer’s hold as he seats himself on the front steps of the house. The gray pickup looms in front of us as I stay huddled in Sawyer’s lap. I reach out before us and point to it.
“We should get her out.”
“Rooster will take care of it.”
I blink, my mind lost somewhere in the fog between the past and now. “Who’s Rooster?”
Sawyer coaxes me to sit up so that my head rests back on his shoulder, and points past the pickup, down the driveway. In the distance three lonely figures walk toward us, kitted out all in black, the color that’s become such a part of my life.
“Promise me something, Abbey-girl.” The words whispered in my ear send shivers racing over my flesh. I’d give this man my soul if he asked that sweetly.
“What?”
“You’ll tell me all your darkest secrets when we get back to Lincoln. I’ll let you get where you feel safer first, and you let me share your pain.”
I turn in his hold; the men are close enough now that I can hear their boots crunch the dry dirt. “Why burden you with more of what you already have enough of?”
His hand rises and rests gently against the side of my face. The honesty in his clear blue eyes has me in a trance, entirely under his spell. “Because my shoulders are strong enough to carry it for you.”
“We interrupting?” a rough smoker’s voice calls out from behind me.
Sawyer sweeps his thumb across my lips, leaving a trail of fireworks in its wake. I climb off his lap to sit out of the way, and push my hands between my knees as he stands to greet our visitors.
“Rooster. Good to see you, brother.”
The enormous redheaded man grins, pulling Sawyer in for a clinch. “What are they feeding you, boy? You almost look normal.” He laughs, stepping back to let the other two men shake Sawyer’s hand also.
A young, skinny guy steps forward almost nervously and gives Sawyer’s outstretched hand a quick pump. He backs up, hands in his pockets, and watches from under a curtain of dark hair as the third guy regards Sawyer with much less camaraderie. Critical brown eyes bore into my pretty boy as the stocky guy steps up and gives a formal handshake. There’s no mistaking it’s out of etiquette rather than actual friendly greeting.
“You got everythin’ you need?” Sawyer asks, addressing Rooster.
“Pretty sure we do.” The big guy gives me a nod. “Ma’am.”
“If it’s all good with you then,” Sawyer interjects, eyeballing Rooster, “we’ll head off.”
“No problem.” Rooster raises two fingers and flicks them toward the house. “Set to work, boys.”
The dark-haired kid and the hostile head indoors with what look like, and smell like, canisters of gasoline in their hands.
“Message me the coordinates when you’ve got the bodies sorted.”
“You have names?” Rooster asks, frowning.
“Yeah.” Sawyer reaches out for me, and I rise off the step. He tugs me into his side. “We found their ID downstairs.”
“Good.” Rooster gives us each a tight nod in turn. “Leave the rest to us. Y’all enjoy the rest of your day.”
He heads indoors, taking the entrance steps in one great stride. I snap my attention back to Sawyer when he gives the arm looped around my shoulders a squeeze. “How about breakfast, huh?”
“Perfect.” I smile, thankful that as dysfunctional and horrific as the night’s been, I can always find comfort in the least expected of places.
Sawyer slips his arm off my shoulders and takes my hand in his, leading us down the driveway. I glance back over my shoulder at the house, so unassuming from the outside.
“What have they got the gasoline for? Will they burn it down?”
Sawyer shrugs. “I wouldn’t have—draws too much attention when you start doin’ shit like that—but who knows for sure. Tuck might have other plans for the property.”
“How long have you known?”
He glances down at me, holding my gaze as he frowns. “About the girls?”
I nod.
“Long time, Abbey-girl. Trafficking ain’t anything new.”
“I know, but have the Devil’s Breed been doing it for long? I never knew. I mean . . . King wouldn’t have anything to do with Tuck if he knew, right?”
“Tuck doesn’t sell them.” He gives my hand a little squeeze, his lips turned up in a small smile. “He sets them free.”
“He buys them back?”
Sawyer nods. “Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Long story, girl, and one that’s his to tell, not mine.”
“But he was affected personally by it, right?”
“Yeah, he was.”
I walk with him in silence, thinking things over. Surely Cash wasn’t the only guy Tuck had involvement with? Maybe this could be the breakthrough I need.
“How many contacts does Tuck have?”
“Why you ask?” His irises glow bright in the sunshine as he looks my face over.
“I wonder if he can search for someone, for me.” I look away, unable to hold his gaze anymore. I’ve never divulged my full story to a single soul: not Fingers, not Hooch, and not even Apex or King. The men have had tidbits fed to them on a need-to-know basis, but there isn’t a single soul at t
he Fallen Aces, or anywhere for that matter, who knows the truth.
Only my mother.
If she’s still alive.
A quiet, barely discernible rumble sounds from beside me. “I can take care of it,” he snaps.
“What’s the matter?” I steal a glance at Sawyer as we near the end of the driveway.
“That heartbroken fuckin’ look on your face,” he says. “I’m warning you now, Abbey-girl, if I ever find who did this to you, who made you so sad, this guy”—he taps his head—“gets free rein.”
“Better let him rest up then,” I say dryly. “Because hopefully he’ll get a workout.”
A small smile spreads over Sawyer’s lips as he looks down at me. “You have no idea how happy that just made him.”
“You’re fucked-up. You know that, right?” I say with a laugh.
He nods, his smirk growing to a smile.
My own fades as I drop my gaze to the road beneath our feet. His bike is a few yards up. “When did you know you were different?”
“I don’t think there was a moment when it occurred to me that there was somethin’ wrong with me,” he says. “I just knew from the start.”
“Nobody’s born like you, though. I mean, it has to be conditioning from the environment you grew up in, doesn’t it?”
He frowns down at me, thumb rubbing over the back of my hand. “What you getting at, girl?”
How do I explain it to him? He embraces who he is so wholeheartedly, and here I am trying to deny that this is who I’ll be for the rest of my life. I wasn’t born afraid. I wasn’t born untrusting. And I sure as hell wasn’t born with the ability to watch a man be butchered—alive, and dead—and to not even bat an eye. Once upon a time I was a happy little girl, I’m sure of it, back before my life was sent off course by a selfish pig of a man who stole my mother’s heart.
“I guess,” I say, “I’m just hoping that I’m yet to find out who I really am.”
“Is this not you?” he asks, stopping us and turning me to face him. “This girl here”—he prods my breastbone—“is she not Abbey?”
“Not the Abbey I wish she was.”
“Why? What’s wrong with her?”
“Everything,” I murmur.