MQuinn 03 - Lethal Beauty

by Wiehl, Lis

  Now she pressed the Call button beside the name of the preschool.

  “Rocking Horse. This is Sarah.”

  “Hey, this is Mia Quinn. I was just wondering if you were there earlier when Gabe picked up Brooke?” She would ask about his demeanor. If he had said anything.

  “Actually, he hasn’t yet. He said he was going to be running late today and that he wouldn’t pick her up until close to close.” Sarah added pointedly, “Which is, like, only seventeen minutes from now.”

  Rocking Horse charged a dollar a minute for any parent who was later than six. It didn’t matter if traffic was terrible or the car had broken down. The staff had heard all the excuses before. You could still say them, but sooner or later you would also be opening your wallet.

  Why had Gabe said he would pick Brooke up late? And why hadn’t he? Stomach churning, Mia called his phone again. And left another message. “I guess I’m going to have to pick up your sister. I’ll be home as soon as I can. Please call me back and let me know what’s going on.” She hesitated and then said in a rush, “I’m really worried, Gabe.”

  “Let me go with you,” Charlie said after she pressed the button to disconnect and started to put on her coat. Eli held the back of the collar so she could slip her arms into the sleeves.

  “No, that’s okay, Charlie. This is probably something he wants to stay in the family. He already felt like you were taking on too big of a role on Saturday when you talked to him about the steroids. He kept telling me afterward that you’re not his dad.”

  Charlie shrugged, seeming unruffled. “Gabe’s right about that, of course. But with Scott dead, your son probably needs a bunch of dads, not none. And if something is really wrong, Mia, you’ll want someone else there.”

  She did not want to think about how bad it could be. “How about this?” She looked from Charlie to Eli. “I’ll call one or both of you if I get home and think it’s something I can’t handle. And meanwhile, can you two stay here and let me know what you hear about Jiao?”

  “Deal,” Charlie said, and Eli nodded.

  She got to Rocking Horse a minute before close. Brooke was the last child there. Saying hello and good-bye to Sarah, buttoning Brooke’s coat, and putting her in her car seat kept a tiny bit of Mia’s anxiety at bay.

  But it all came roaring back once she was in the car again, her damp hands sliding on the wheel.

  CHAPTER 49

  After Mia left, Eli looked over at Charlie, trying not to let his distaste show. The guy had never been a parent. He had only been a husband, and he clearly hadn’t been any good even at that, since he had also been divorced three times.

  “So Mia had you talk to Gabe after she found the steroids?” Eli felt a pinch of jealousy. Was she already trying Charlie out for the role of father to her kids?

  Charlie shot him a look, and Eli guessed that the other man knew exactly how he felt. “I happened to be there when she found them. So I asked if I could talk to Gabe, man to man, about how they can affect you. I figured she wouldn’t know those kinds of details, and even if she looked that stuff up on the Internet, it would be pretty awkward talking to her kid about it.” He snorted. “Hey, it was awkward for me.”

  And how exactly did Charlie know these details? Was it from personal experience? Eli only said, “How did he take it?”

  Charlie’s mouth twisted. “Gabe was angry. Really angry. I just hope that underneath he was listening. You know what it’s like at that age. Everything’s a big deal. Everything’s life or death. It’s all the best of times, or the lowest, and there’s nothing in between.”

  That was certainly true for Rachel, and she wasn’t taking steroids. “Steroids mess with your emotions, don’t they?” Eli asked.

  “For sure. Mostly they can make you irrationally angry. They can also make you pretty depressed. Even suicidal.”

  That gave Eli pause. It sounded like Mia was right to be worried. What if Gabe had overreacted to something small that still seemed overwhelming in the moment that it happened? Teens were so impulsive. Would Gabe kill himself rather than face it—or face his mom?

  The shiny silver doors to the surgical area opened automatically, and an African American woman dressed in green scrubs walked between them. She came over to them. “Are you two the cop and the lawyer?” she asked. A surgical mask dangled around her neck.

  This was the surgeon, Eli realized as Charlie nodded, not the scrub nurse. How often did he only see what he expected to see?

  “How’s Jiao doing?” he asked.

  “We had to give her five pints of blood, but she’ll make it.” The doctor touched her own throat. “She’s going to have some pretty significant scarring on her neck. And the pen nicked her vocal cords, so her voice will probably be affected, but hopefully not too much. She might end up sounding a little husky. We’re just lucky that she’s so young and that her underlying level of health is pretty good.”

  “When will we be able to talk to her?” Charlie asked.

  The surgeon pursed her lips. “Not for a while. We want her not only medically stable but psychologically stable. Which means it definitely won’t be tonight. She’s still sedated and won’t be waking up from the anesthesia for several hours. We’ll need to get an interpreter in tomorrow and assess her medical state.”

  “Do me a favor,” Charlie said, “and make sure you don’t use the one we did. Her name was Kwong something. She freaked out when this happened. She was pretty useless. And I don’t want her around Jiao, reminding her that she almost died.”

  “I can imagine it was pretty intense,” the surgeon said. “A girl shoving a pen in her own neck—hopefully that’s something you never see in your life, or you only see once and never again. But I’ll make a note of it. No interpreter or visitor named Kwong.”

  Even before she disappeared back behind the doors, Eli was pulling his keys from his pocket and getting to his feet. He knew Charlie wasn’t going to like what he was about to do, but Eli didn’t care what he thought.

  “Where are you going now?” Charlie asked.

  “The same place you are. I’m going to see if everything’s okay with Mia. And if it’s not, I’m going to help in any way I can.”

  CHAPTER 50

  Ever since the man had left him lying on the floor of the garage, handcuffed, trussed, and gagged with duct tape, Gabe had been working on freeing his hands. He had been trying so long that now his hands were wet with either sweat or blood. Because they were behind his back, he didn’t know which and he didn’t much care. All he knew was that whatever it was, it was a lubricant. It might be just what he needed to slide one hand out of a cuff. Just one. And then he would be free.

  Only neither hand would go. The metal rings refused to slide down any farther than the meaty part of his thumbs, despite how much he pulled and pushed. Finally he admitted defeat. He was going to have to find another way. If he could just get his cuffs in front, he could at least use his hands to get off the duct tape that bound his legs and sealed his mouth. He could at least open doors. He could walk out of here. Maybe even handle a weapon, like the rake that stood in one corner.

  Moving like an inchworm, Gabe rolled and dragged and creeped until he reached the built-in cabinets at the back of the garage. He pressed his back against one and managed to scoot himself up until he could grab a cupboard door handle. He used that to lever himself to his feet. But the duct tape around his calves compromised his balance. For a long, terrifying moment he felt himself beginning to fall right onto his face. He staggered frantically forward in tiny steps until he managed to catch himself. Then he crouched, sliding his hands down behind him until they cleared his butt and were behind his thighs. His shoulders were already screaming before he half sat, half fell onto his back. Then it felt like they were being pulled from their sockets. A shriek was forced out of his lungs. He hoped the duct tape across his mouth had stifled it.

  He had imagined that he could roll back and then kick his legs over his cuffs, but it turned
out that wasn’t possible. Maybe he could do it if he could step over the cuffs one leg at a time, but his legs were still bound together. He grabbed the back of his pants at the thighs and yanked and pulled, snorting with exertion, his desperation giving him strength. Finally the button at his waist popped off and the pants began to slide down his butt. Inch by inch, Gabe wrangled his pants down, tugging with first one hand and then the other, until he finally managed to get them down his legs and over his stocking feet.

  Now he just had to get his feet back over the cuffs one at the time. Gabe rolled himself up as tight as he could. He strained and stretched, trying not to grunt even as his shoulders felt like they were being twisted off as if he were one of Brooke’s Barbies.

  If that man came back in the door and saw what Gabe was doing, he would surely shoot him. The one positive thing—if you could even look at it that way—was that Gabe had to be giving himself wounds that could not be explained away as injuries consistent with suicide.

  Finally he got his right leg over. Now he was straddling the cuffs. But when he tried to do the same with his left leg, it did not seem able to bend as much. No, no, no. Any second the man was going to walk in and find him, awkward as a pill bug, squirming, the handcuffs still stuck behind his left knee. With a final burst of energy, Gabe pressed his right foot on the cabinet and rolled so far back his weight rested on the bones in the nape of his neck. He managed to get his left leg up and over, painfully scraping the back of his bare calf on the metal chain linking the cuffs.

  Gabe was still lying on the floor, breathing hard through his nose and trying not to make any noise doing it, when he heard his mom’s car pull up in the driveway. No, he thought. No, please, God, no, I’m not hearing this. He heard the sound of his mom’s footsteps climbing the stairs to the porch. Fear pierced his chest like a needle.

  And then, to his horror, he heard the high, piping sound of Brooke’s voice on the front porch.

  “Where’s Gabe, Mommy?”

  And Gabe’s heart broke.

  CHAPTER 51

  When Mia turned onto their block, the house was completely dark. Not even the porch light on. Her heart contracted. She turned off the car and pinched the house key between her fingers before she unbuckled Brooke from her booster seat. Should she have raced out of the hospital, let the charges pile up at Rocking Horse, and hurried home? What if her son was lying dead somewhere inside the house and these last few minutes could have made all the difference?

  Brooke must have picked up on her anxiety. “Where’s Gabe, Mommy?” she asked as Mia carried her up the front porch.

  “I’m not quite sure,” she said, hoping the answer wasn’t going to prove to be too awful to bear.

  Unlocking the door, she went inside. “Gabe?” she called out, then held her breath. Did she hear a faint thumping noise? Or was it just the beating of her own heart? Before she turned on the light, she bent over to set Brooke down. Just as a shot split the darkness and sang just overhead.

  Charlie followed Eli out. There was no point in trying to argue him out of going. The man was stubborn. Stubborn as a mule.

  He had to admit that maybe they had that in common. That and their affection for Mia. Once in the hospital’s parking structure, he lost sight of Eli when the other man kept climbing the stairs to a different level. Charlie hurried to his car, dialing Mia’s cell phone as he went. No answer.

  It was against department policy, but that didn’t stop him from putting on lights and sirens as soon as he pulled out of the lot. Charlie flew down the highway, past all the other cars, which were forced to pull over to the shoulder. But then he picked up another vehicle, drafting in his wake.

  He squinted at his rearview mirror. Eli Hall. Doing what he wasn’t supposed to be doing either.

  Maybe they had more in common than Charlie thought.

  Once he hit Mia’s neighborhood, he cut the sirens. Sometimes if a person was on the verge, the sound of sirens could make a bad situation infinitely worse.

  Mia’s house was dark, without even the porch light on. But the front door gaped open, as wrong as a missing tooth in a mouth.

  Charlie got out of his car and hurried to Eli’s. “I need you to stay back,” he whispered. His hand was on the butt of his gun. “You can’t just go running in there. You don’t know what you’ll find. And you’re not armed.”

  From the house came the sound of a gunshot.

  And then they both went running.

  Moving faster than thought, Mia put her mouth close to her daughter’s tiny ear. “Stay right here, baby. Don’t move. And don’t make a sound.” Then she half opened the hall closet door and shoved Brooke inside.

  Her ears still roaring from the sound of the gun, Mia was reacting on pure instinct. On hands and knees, she scuttled toward the kitchen. She needed a weapon. Something to fight back with. She mentally rehearsed how she would lunge for the knife block while praying that the knives were actually in the block and not, say, scattered all over the counter.

  She had just put one knee on the tiled floor when Eli, shouting her name, ran in the still-open front door. Mia turned to call out a warning.

  A thousand things happened at once. The lights flared on overhead. Charlie was standing in the doorway in a half crouch, his gun drawn and held out before him in both hands. Kenny Zhong had one hand fisted in Eli’s dress shirt, yanking the taller man down to his level. And he was holding a gun to Eli’s head, pressing hard enough that Eli’s forehead had turned white where the barrel pressed against his skin.

  Eli himself was standing very, very still.

  Into the sudden silence, Brooke’s small voice came from the closet. “Can I come out now, Mama?”

  And at that moment Gabe, pantless and silent in his stocking feet, slipped up behind Kenny Zhong, looped his handcuffed arms around the man’s neck, and jerked backward.

  CHAPTER 52

  TWO WEEKS LATER

  Mia lit the cinnamon-scented candle in the holly centerpiece on the dining room’s sideboard. Shaking out the match, she stepped back, feeling satisfied. Everything looked perfect.

  Well, maybe not perfect in the traditional sense of the word. There was a stain on the carpet in front of the TV where Brooke had once tipped over a glass of milk, and the furniture showed signs of being well used. She had gathered up all the unopened mail and shoved it into the junk drawer. But the house was still hers, and it was going to be filled with her friends and family, and that was all that mattered.

  The Saturday before Christmas she always had an open house. But this was her first one without Scott.

  So many things had changed in the past year. She had lost her husband. Gone back to work. Learned truths she would have said would be too hard to bear, would bring her to her knees and then smear her face in the dirt. But here she was, still standing.

  Arranged on the sideboard, the kitchen counters, and the living room coffee table were trays of crackers and cheese, just as she always had. But this year there were also trays of cut vegetables. And some of the crackers were made of nutty whole grain. Some. But not all. Mia had realized it was impossible to eat perfectly, or for that matter to do anything perfectly. But it was possible to do better.

  Better didn’t mean that Mia wouldn’t sample Kali’s contribution to the party: traditional Samoan panipopo—sweet coconut buns. The doctor had said Kali’s tumor was shrinking dramatically. Soon she would be done with chemo and have her mastectomy behind her. She would be able to start working again. Once Kali had more money, maybe she would want to move out. But for now she and Eldon were here, and part of Mia’s improvised family.

  A hand reached past Mia and snatched a piece of Swiss cheese before she could swat it away. “Gabe!”

  “It’s only one piece, Mom.” He stuffed it into his mouth. “And Coach says I need to eat a lot of protein.”

  After stopping steroids, Gabe had gone to his old football coach and asked him for help designing a strength regimen. Coach Harper’s plan inclu
ded a diet of real foods only, no supplements, no weight-gainer shakes. Gabe hadn’t told the coach what had happened, but Mia was sure he must have guessed. After all, how many kids would get smaller even as they lifted weights every day?

  Smaller, but somehow happier. And Gabe had managed to hold on to some of his muscles. Yesterday he had told her, “Now if I get results, I’ll know it’s natural, that I did it myself. I don’t have to be one of those guys who need drugs to get big. Now it will really be me.”

  Kenny Zhong’s empire—the smuggled steroids and Viagra, the restaurants and massage parlors staffed by illegal immigrants who were really slaves—had started to crumble the night he tried to kill everyone Mia loved and had been foiled by a fifteen-year-old boy. Now Kenny was facing dozens of felony charges, including the murder of his former hired gun, the man who had shot Abigail Endicott.

  On the day Kenny was arraigned, a dozen television cameras had been waiting for him outside the courthouse. As soon as he spotted them, he lifted his head and straightened his shoulders. Even so, he barely reached the chins of the federal agents escorting him. His expression was proud and unapologetic, despite the fact that his hands were cuffed behind his back, despite the two agents who had their hands hooked in his elbows and were dragging him forward. In fact, if it were possible for a man to strut in such circumstances, Kenny had strutted.

  Kenny was also facing charges for the assault and torture of Chun, the waitress who had talked to Charlie and Mia. Cops had discovered her, handcuffed to a pipe, in the basement of the house the workers from the Jade Kitchen shared. Beaten badly, but alive. Just.