Neon

by Elise Noble

  The powerful engine roared as Emmy kept her foot to the floor through country lanes. Thankfully traffic was light, but they left a few startled deer in their wake as the vehicle flew along, as well as the smell of burning rubber.

  “One mile,” Mack announced, and Emmy slowed the car to keep it as quiet as possible.

  With half a mile to go, she found an overgrown track by the side of the wooded road and nosed the SUV down it. They'd go the rest of the way on foot, silent wraiths on a moonlit night.

  As they assembled outside, Mack closed her laptop lid and switched to a tracking app on her phone, the screen darkened so it only showed the bare essentials—an indicator of the terrain and Bradley's green dot.

  “Good to go,” she whispered.

  Emmy took point as they glided through the forest, with Mack second, Dan next, and Carmen bringing up the rear. The low hoot of an owl and the odd rustle of rabbits and deer in the bushes gave no indication of the nightmare moving through the trees, about to unleash hell on whatever lay ahead.

  Sure beat an evening playing Monopoly, anyway.

  According to the tracker, they'd closed the distance to fifty yards when the first voices drifted through the night, a rough West Virginia accent followed by Bradley's higher pitched tones.

  “Pick up the fuckin' shovel and dig.”

  “No, I will not. My boots'll get dirty.”

  “They're going to get dirtier when we bury you.”

  “Well, I'm not helping. These here are made from calf skin, and they'll get scuffed over my dead body.”

  “That can be arranged.”

  “You're an asshole, you know that? You already made a hole in my jeans, and they're Versace, and my sweater's got a loose thread.”

  Emmy glanced behind and stifled a smirk as she saw Carmen roll her eyes in the moonlight. Bloody Bradley. Trust him to be more concerned with fashion than dying. Another thirty seconds, and Mack slipped her phone into her pocket. They didn't need it any longer.

  In a small clearing up ahead, lit by a lantern sitting on a nearby log, one man tried to pass Bradley a shovel while another held a gun to his head. Rather than do as instructed, Bradley had folded his arms, and Emmy knew from the set of his mouth that gun or no gun, the dude might as well give up and dig the damn hole himself.

  “It's just a fuckin' sweater,” the man holding the pistol growled.

  “And you're just a fuckin' pig,” Bradley shot back.

  “Can't we just shoot him now?”

  The man with the shovel shrugged. “Might as well if he won't dig the hole. Bernie just said to get rid of him.”

  The cock of the revolver's hammer cut through the night, but that was eclipsed first by the report from Carmen's Korth, then by the gunman's howl of agony as the gun left his hand along with several of his fingers.

  Bradley dropped into a crouch, and Emmy was pleased to see that at least some of the training she'd given him over the years in case a situation like this arose had paid off. A hostage should never lay out flat—it made escape far too difficult.

  “Dead or alive?” Carmen asked.

  Emmy took a second to consider the question. Instinct told her these men were unimportant, not to mention unprofessional—their argument with Bradley proved that. And thanks to shovel-guy, they already knew Sheldon Bernadino was behind the abduction. No, they didn't need these two.

  Emmy brought her own Walther P88 up. “Take out the trash.”

  One bang, two bullets, two bodies.

  And one hysterical personal assistant.

  “Emmy!” Bradley shrieked. “I knew you'd come.”

  She only just had time to holster her gun before he threw himself into her arms and hugged her tight. The smell of his Ralph Lauren perfume tickled her nose as he buried his face in her shoulder.

  “They tried to make me dig my own grave,” he sobbed.

  “I heard.”

  “And they wanted to bury me in torn pants.”

  “Stop thinking about it.”

  “I c-c-can't.”

  “Try. Look, let’s redecorate the lounge at Little Riverley. Why don't you sit and think up a new colour scheme while we bury these bodies?”

  “But you said you liked it as it was.”

  “A girl can change her mind, can't she?”

  “Really?”

  “Here, take my jacket and sit over by the lantern. We'll be done in no time.”

  Bradley looked down at himself. “At least I didn't get any blood on me.”

  Emmy wrapped her coat around his shoulders and led him to the log. “See, there’s thinking positive. We'll get you some new pants as soon as we get back to the hotel.”

  With Bradley sitting quietly for once, it was on to the least enjoyable task of the night. Digging. And it seemed everyone shared that view.

  “I hate burial as a disposal method,” Carmen grumbled, picking up one of the two shovels the men had brought. “It's too labour intensive.”

  Emmy hefted the other. “The secret is to use a pre-prepared hole.”

  “Yeah, like when you were building your house,” Dan said.

  “You buried someone under Little Riverley?” Mack asked.

  “I thought you knew about that? Yeah, there's a paedophile under the downstairs toilet. Means I can shit on him every morning.”

  Mack giggled. “I won't be able to flush without thinking of that now.”

  “Brings a smile to my face every time. Do me a favour, would you, and go through their pockets while me and Carmen start on this bloody grave?”

  The girls took it in turns to dig a hole deep enough that passing animals wouldn't be tempted to investigate, then unceremoniously dumped the bodies into it. Filling in was easier than taking out, and half an hour later they'd finished.

  “It's a bit lumpy,” Bradley said.

  Emmy shrugged. “Yeah, the dirt never quite fits back in. Don't worry, we'll drag a few branches over the top and we're golden. You feeling okay?”

  “I'm thinking cream for the lounge with a navy-blue feature wall. Maybe a few silver accents?”

  “Sounds great. New furniture too?”

  A smile flickered across Bradley's lips. “I could take a look at sofas?”

  Emmy offered him her arm, and he looped his elbow through it. “Perfect.”

  CHAPTER 9

  AFTER THEY'D MOVED the kidnappers' van a few miles down the road, Emmy flicked her lighter and set fire to it before climbing back behind the wheel of the Porsche.

  “Shame we didn't bring marshmallows—we could have made s'mores.”

  Carmen glanced at her watch. “It's almost two o'clock. Reckon we can find some food? All that digging gave me an appetite.”

  “On it,” Mack said from the backseat, tapping away at her keyboard. “Okay, there's a twenty-four-hour diner six miles away. Who's up for burgers?”

  “I'm so hungry I’m about to chew my own fingers off,” Dan said.

  Bradley shuddered, squashed into the middle between her and Mack. “Please, could we stop with the finger jokes?”

  Emmy drove more sedately on the way back, well, marginally, and it wasn't long before they pulled into the parking lot outside an old railway carriage, now converted into “Benny's.” Inside, a chain-smoking waitress eyed up Bradley's silver cowboy boots and raised an eyebrow. At Emmy's glare, she quickly looked away and took out her order pad.

  “Five cheeseburgers with everything, extra fries, and keep the coffee coming,” Emmy said.

  “You won't sleep tonight,” Bradley warned as they slid into a booth.

  “Can't. We've got work to do once we get back to Cedar Ridge. We need to deal with Bernie.”

  “Oh yeah, him. The two assholes kept mentioning his name, but I had no idea what they were talking about.”

  “I wouldn't expect you to. They were supposed to kidnap the life coach from Cedar Ridge, not you.”

  “Nigel?”

  “Yes, Nigel.”

  “What did Nigel do? I li
ked him. We had a wonderful chat about soft furnishings this morning.”

  “He didn't do anything. He saw Bernie kill his wife, and somehow Bernie found out about it.”

  “So what was he doing at Cedar Ridge? Hiding out?”

  “We don't have the full story yet—we left him with Tia and Lara while we came to get you.”

  “In that case, we'd better eat quickly and get three bags of food to go.”

  By the time they pulled back into the parking lot next to Carmen's G-Wagon, the Porsche smelled like a fast-food restaurant and nobody could eat another thing. That didn't stop Emmy from retrieving the bag of snacks and her coffee sachets from the Mercedes before they headed back to the main building, though.

  “It's for breakfast,” she explained. “That avocado mush I ate yesterday morning tasted disgusting.”

  “Good plan,” Dan said.

  Tia's eyes lit up when they all trooped into Bradley's room and she smelled the food. “Fries? You brought fries?”

  “Yup.” Emmy held out a bag to her. “And we got Bradley back.”

  She glanced up again. “Oh yeah, that's good too.”

  Emmy jerked a thumb at Nigel, still sitting in the same chair they'd left him in. “He been okay?”

  “He hasn't moved.”

  Nigel's head took in the newcomers, and a little of the tension seeped out of his body when he spotted Bradley at the back. Emmy saw it in the slight drop of his shoulders, and a relaxing of the lines that criss-crossed his forehead.

  “I didn't think you'd manage to get him back. Bernie's men can be brutal.”

  “Turned out to be quite easy. They left Bradley tied up in this little shack in the woods, so all we had to do was cut him loose.”

  “How did you even find him?”

  Bradley looked up from the Snickers bar he'd just bitten into. “Yeah, how did you find me?”

  Emmy tapped the side of her nose. “Trade secret.” Those earrings stayed. She'd weld them onto his ears if necessary. “Now, Nigel, you need to start your story from the beginning. Here, have a cheeseburger.”

  Nigel shook his head and pushed the food away. “I can't eat, not until this is over. I feel sick.”

  “Fine. Just speak.” Emmy dragged the chair from the desk over, arranging it so she sat opposite Nigel. Putting herself on the same level as an interviewee always built rapport.

  He took a deep breath. “It started almost a year ago when Mrs. Bernadino called me for a consultation. She'd been really stressed, and she figured maybe I could help her figure out how to relax. Only when we talked things through and discussed what she wanted out of life, it turned out her only wish was to leave her husband.”

  “I take it he wasn't too happy about that?”

  Nigel's hair flopped over one eye as he violently shook his head. “She always said he'd kill her if he found out. He was a controlling monster, and he kept her locked in the house most of the time. Oh, he'd pay for anything she wanted—clothes, shoes, jewellery, weekly visits from a stylist, a personal masseuse, art lessons, but that was no substitute for love. All she wanted was her freedom.”

  “Why'd she marry him in the first place?”

  “The whole cliché—forty-year-old charmer snares a girl half his age from a terrible part of town with promises of everything she could dream of. She saw his true colours when he...when he raped her on their wedding night.” Nigel began sniffing, and Bradley passed over a handful of tissues.

  “Since when is that a discussion a person has with a life coach?”

  “We became friends, okay? Neither of us had many.”

  “You liked her, didn't you? As more than just a client?”

  His tears fell harder. “Yeah, I did like Laurel, but nothing happened, I swear. Neither of us would have dared with Mr. Bernardino around.”

  “But she asked you to help her escape?”

  “Not asked. I offered. If you saw the way she was living, the bruises all over her, you couldn't have left her there either.”

  “So what went wrong?”

  “He held a weekly poker game, him and a few buddies. They'd sit in his den and get drunk for hours, and I’d sneak in and talk to Laurel. Until that night he'd never come upstairs before two in the morning, but…but…”

  Nigel gulped for air, and Lara settled an arm around his shoulders. “It's okay. I know it's difficult.”

  “Did he finish the game early?” Emmy asked.

  “No, the sick bastard bet her as part of a losing hand.”

  “He what?”

  Nigel's voice dropped to a whisper. “He ran out of chips, so he bet a night with his wife instead.”

  “Fuck me.”

  “We heard them coming, and I hid in the wardrobe. She fought back. She fought back, and Mr. Bernadino held her down while his friend raped her, and when he'd finished she wasn't breathing any more.”

  “And you got all this on camera?”

  He nodded, clinging on to Lara's hand for support. “I should have tried to stop them, but I was scared, and...and...”

  “And you'd have been dead too. How does the police chief fit in with this?”

  “He was playing poker with Mr. Bernadino. All of them helped to bury the body afterwards.”

  What happened to upholding the damn law? “Do you know where?”

  “Not exactly, but it was somewhere out the back of the house. They were all too drunk to drive anywhere. That's the only reason I got away. One of them spotted me running down the road to my car, but when they chased after me in Mr. Bernadino's BMW, they crashed into a tree.”

  “And how did you end up here?” Because surely nobody would choose to come to Cedar Ridge voluntarily?

  “Just kept driving until I ran out of gas. I only had fifty bucks in my wallet, but when I stopped to buy food and gas, I saw an advert for a job here in the local paper. It seemed perfect. No phones, no email, no cameras. I didn't think they'd find me.”

  “You can find anyone if you look hard enough.” Something everyone in the room knew all too well. Sometimes it took time, often it took money, but perseverance always paid off.

  “I know that now. But I didn't have anywhere else to go, so I slept in my car until I'd earned enough to rent a room in town. Now I'll have to leave again, won't I?”

  “Yeah, you will, at least until we can get Bernie arrested and the Fairoaks police department cleaned out.”

  Nigel looked up at Emmy, wiping his cheeks. “What do you mean? You're going to help me?”

  “No man can kill an innocent woman then kidnap my assistant and expect to get away with it. Of course we're going to help you. Now, eat the damn cheeseburger because fainting from hunger isn't going to improve matters.”

  CHAPTER 10

  EMMY LEANED BACK in the chair and sighed. Yes, it promised to be a long night. “Tia, Lara, you need to go to bed. And you, Bradley.”

  “I'm not tired,” Tia said.

  “I don't care, and it's not optional.”

  “But—”

  “No buts.”

  The next part of the impromptu job would be the most unpleasant, but watching Nigel's video was unfortunately necessary, if only to check his side of the story. Lara slipped out of the door without a murmur, but Tia still managed a dirty look as she stomped back to her room. She hated being left out of anything, even though she had to know Emmy only did it to protect her.

  Bradley paused to give Emmy a hug before he left. “Thanks, boss,” he whispered.

  “Any time, rock star.”

  Once he and his sparkly boots had left too, Mack put her laptop down on the desk. “Where's this video? Tell me you didn't leave it on your phone?”

  “No, I was scared they could make it disappear forever, so I uploaded a copy to a storage website.”

  She spun the keyboard towards him. “Here, log in.”

  A minute later, a surprisingly clear picture sat frozen on the screen, showing a pretty girl lying back on a bed in a cream silk robe. The edge of th
e wardrobe door Nigel had been hiding behind formed a black line on one side of the frame.

  “Mack, you go. Take Nigel into the bathroom. Neither of you needs to see this.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I'll call if we need you.” Mack's stomach had always proven a little delicate in these types of situation, and the last thing Emmy wanted to do tonight was clean vomit off the carpet. Killing a man, burying two bodies, and watching a girl get murdered would be quite enough, thanks very much.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  Carmen and Dan both nodded, and the three gripped each other's hands as Emmy hit play.

  It was every bit as bad as she'd feared. Really, there isn't an easy way to watch a girl get raped, especially when you've experienced the horror for yourself as Emmy had. As Laurel Bernadino struggled in vain against two men much bigger than her, Emmy's resolve hardened while her ice-cold heart melted a little, and she vowed that the two monsters carrying out the despicable act on the screen in front of her wouldn't see out the month. Some men didn't deserve to walk this earth.

  Carmen clearly felt the same way. “Which one do you want?”

  “You can have Bernadino. I want to cut the other one's dick off and put it in a blender.”

  “Might be hard to make that look like an accident.”

  Emmy scrunched her lips to one side. “I know. I'll have to give it some thought.”

  “What about the police chief?” Dan asked.

  “The FBI can deal with him. I've got contacts in the Public Corruption program, and I'd say this falls under their remit. We can hand over the file in a few weeks. Could you see what else you can dig up in the meantime? Nine times out of ten dirty cops aren't just grubby, they're up to their neck in sewage.”

  “With pleasure.”

  Usually the girls sealed deals like this with their drink of choice—Bombay Sapphire for Emmy, Patron for Carmen, and Jack Daniels for Dan, but in the absence of a minibar they settled for a group hug instead. Once a team, always a team.

  “Mack, it's safe,” Emmy called.

  She led Nigel back in, and the two perched on the end of the bed. “Have you got a plan?” she asked.