by Amy Faye
Not hurting feels strange. I feel it more where they haven't hit me. In my calves and thighs. The feeling is a strange one.
Finally they let me down. My head's still swimming, but I'm not in danger of passing out. Unlike the first crew, these guys seem to know what they're doing. They don't want me to pass out, so I won't.
Maybe they screw it up, sometimes. You never know, with some guys. They go down fast and easy. I've never had a glass jaw, but then again I've never taken a beating so bad before, either.
They pour my body into a chair. I feel as if my arms are going to melt right off, but they don't. Something in my body is still ready to fight to hold together in a human shape.
"Why are you so insistent on seeing the boss?"
I can't move enough to shrug. "I'm not."
He doesn't like it when I lie, so I make sure to do it as often as possible. I don't brace for the hit because I can't. His hand doesn't move to strike me, which is good.
"Beauchamp, you're a fucking idiot, you know that?"
I can just about still move my face to smile up at the guy who's been working on me for what feels like weeks. It might have been three hours.
"You're not going to meet McCallister."
"I'll be alright," I assure him. "I mean, I got to meet you, which is just as good."
The guy smiles. He's got a good sense of humor, this guy. I might be able to get along with him, in different circumstances. My body hurts too much not to get along with someone right now, though. "That's sweet. You know, you make it out of here, I'll have to put you on the Christmas card list."
"That sounds lovely," I manage.
He turns around and walks out of the room. I get a minute to breathe. Every time I take in a good breath, my ribs stab into my lung, so I take shallow breaths and try not to hurt myself. It doesn't work.
I try to force myself to sit upright, but my body won't move right. I try to push myself upright with my legs. They're mostly unhurt, after all. My boots scrabble off the concrete floor, legs unable to handle even the slightest bit of weight.
This time, my friend comes back in with a friend. A woman friend.
"You're lucky, Beauchamp. Someone on high must like you."
I smile at her. "Are you an angel?"
She's got a sweet voice when she answers. "Is this a pickup line?"
My head lolls to the side, in spite of my best efforts to keep myself looking like I can control my body in the least bit. "It doesn't have to be."
Her big, round lips split into a smile. She's got a soft body with curves in all the right places, and none where you don't want any. Attractive doesn't begin to describe it. She looks like a Barbie doll came to life.
"You think you're very clever, don't you?"
My face hurts when I smile, but I do it. It hurts when I don't smile, anyways. "Ain't you heard? Cops tell it from one side of the country to the other. Criminals are stupid. All of 'em, dumb as rocks. I'm a crook—must be dumb as a rock."
Her fingers burn where they touch my skin. It hurts just to be in the same room as her. Hurts to be in the same room as anything. I'm just not sure whether or not it would hurt to float in a sensory deprivation tank. Maybe not, after a while.
"You're not going to meet McCallister," she says. Everyone has been telling me that since I got here. I'd think that eventually they would figure I heard the message, but they don't seem to get tired of hearing it.
"I was just telling my friend here—I'm just here to make friends. He's my friend, aren't you, old buddy?"
The big guy behind the woman makes a tight-lipped smile in response to her questioning look. "He's very friendly, Krissi."
"I can see that," she says. She turns back to me and smiles. "You can be a real pain in the ass, you know that, Beauchamp?"
"It's not my fault," I protest weakly. "I was just born with these natural good looks and charm."
She pinches my cheek. It hurts like a son of a bitch and it's insulting to boot. I try not to let either show on my face, but my ability to hide the pain went out the door a long time ago. I decide to take a little risk.
"Are you going to kill me, or no?"
The woman looks over her shoulder. I can't tell who's in charge between them. Each seems to be answering to the other, in their minds. The guy shrugs, and the woman turns back to me.
"No, you poor boy. We're not going to kill you. We need you."
That's the best news I've heard all day. My body hurts too much for any sort of tough-guy act, but I manage to keep myself from having much of a reaction at all. At least long enough to hear what they had to say.
"Why's that?"
"You let us deal with that. You want to meet with McCallister, is that right?"
"Not any more," I tell her. "I just want to have a beer with my two new best friends."
"That's good," she says. The smile's disingenuous, but so is everything else about her.
"Besides, everyone tells me I'm not going to. I figure, eventually I had better not get my hopes up."
"See, Sasha? The boy can learn." Krissi looks back at me, stepping back. My hands aren't tied. If I wanted to, I could reach right out and grab her.
I'd have to want it real bad, though, because my muscles wouldn't want to do it, and neither would the rest of me for that matter.
"He can learn, sure. But why him?" He doesn't take his eyes off me for a minute.
I was wrong, I realized, when I thought that I could have grabbed her easy. The big guy—Sasha, she says—wouldn't let me move more than six inches before he had me caught up again. I wouldn't like what came after that. It's a good thing for me, then, that I'm not too worried about moving.
"You know why, Sasha. We can't afford to wait for another chance to come along, can we?"
The big guy lets out a long breath and shifts his weight from one foot to the other, not taking his eyes off me. "We can always afford to wait."
"You're right. Afford, that's not the right word. But why waste a golden opportunity?"
I don't like the way they're talking about me. I don't like that they're doing it right in front of me, but I especially don't like the way that I seem to be someone's golden goose.
I've had plenty of dupes. Known plenty of dupes. And I don't want to find myself in that position again.
Chapter Twenty-Five
MAGUIRE
The text is short and simple, and I might have ignored it if it didn't come from work, and I didn't have a bad feeling. From Danny Ball, 11:52 P.M. Only 8 minutes before midnight.
"Come quick."
My car is still sitting, turned off and dark inside, outside the warehouse where they took Ryan. He still hasn't come out. Nobody's left, and nobody's entered. Not for… I try to do the math, but my head's already fuzzy. Maybe 9 hours, maybe more.
Come quick.
That's not the sort of thing Danny would usually say. If he wanted me in the office, he'd just tell me so. Usually he'd be kissing ass while he did it, because he knows I can be testy. No ass-kissing. No asking, no telling.
'Quick.'
I turn the car on, frustrated that the lights immediately kick on automatically. As if I'm lighting a beacon that says 'I'm leaving now.'
There's nothing else to be done, though.
I push down the accelerator and start moving fast. 'Quick.' I already had a bad feeling. 9 hours is a long time. It's a very long time, indeed. Ryan can't be doing well, not after 9 hours. Something's going on inside that building, and I want to know what.
But I can't ignore the text. Just two words, and they keep ringing in my head, over and over. Come quick. I don't like it. Something's gone wrong, and it's something that's worse than just a gangster getting beat to death in an industrial warehouse.
It takes me twenty minutes to get back to the office, and by the time I'm there, my mind's turned back the other way.
I shouldn't have left Ryan. He could be hurt. He could be hurt bad. Someone needs to be there to ensure he gets out alrig
ht, and if he doesn't get out alright—if they drag him out, throw him into a car trunk in two separate garbage bags, and drive out into the desert to dump him somewhere that nobody will ever see—well, someone needs to be there for that too.
It's too late, now. I'll never be sure that the lost time didn't end up making all the difference in the world. Nobody will ever be completely sure.
I swallow hard and put the car in park out front. It's not hard to figure out why I had to come. At least, I know where I'm going to find out. A small crowd has gathered right outside the door. Maybe a dozen people, most of them civilians, by the look of it.
They're standing at a distance, like high school kids ringing around a fight, but they all look on with interest. Another dozen or so are standing further back, interested enough to watch, but not wanting anyone else to know about it.
A heavy-set Latino man resumes walking his dog when my eyes pass over him as I get out of the car.
I muscle through the crowd, heading for the door rather than the center of the interest, but it's impossible not to look over my shoulder into the ring as I pass.
I force myself to keep moving toward the door as if I hadn't seen anything. Hawkins's body can wait. I have to talk to someone, and I have to talk to them now. About what the hell happened, about how the body was found, about why it's still sitting there on the side of the road.
Danny stands up as I walk in. He's sitting in the chair right by the door, waiting for me.
"Boss, I know you're gonna have a lot of questions—"
"You're God damned right I am," I growl. "Give me the details."
"We found him about thirty seconds before I texted you. We heard a firearm discharged right outside, an engine speed off."
"Did we get a shot of the guy who did it?"
"We did," Danny confirms. He guides her over to a computer.
"And why is Hawkins still outside?"
"We can't move him, officially. Waiting on the lead Agent to make the decision, but officially this isn't a Bureau matter. We have to wait on the Sheriff's Office to come and get him. We've already put out calls through official channels."
So it's either she breaks protocol, or they sit there with their thumbs up their asses and wait for the Sheriff to show up. I take a deep breath.
"Show me the security footage."
He nods and clicks a button. The image on screen cuts to life. The time stamp reads 11:51 P.M. and 36 seconds.
At 41 seconds past the minute, a large motorcycle rides into frame. It appears to be two men on the motorcycle. The one in back appears to be driving.
He pulls the bike to a stop, puts down the kick-stand, takes the weight of the guy in front. I'm not having trouble figuring out that the guy in front is dead, and he's our inside man.
The place where the body gets dumped is just out of frame. As the guy leans down to place the body, he slips out of the shot, and then stands back up. You can see him just at the edge of the screen.
He goes back down to do something else out of frame. He slides back onto the back of the motorcycle and fires his gun into the air, then speeds off.
"Take it back," I growl. Danny is already on it.
"You want a look at the bike, right?"
"There's a smart boy, Danny. There was a good shot of it, near the end."
I don't want to be right. That's why I'm having him bring it back. Because there was a very good shot at the end, there. Because I know exactly what the bike looks like.
I know what it looks like because I've seen it before, and I'm going to have a hell of a time explaining how I know that Ryan Beauchamp, the only guy driving a 1946 Indian Chief in this state, definitely wasn't the one who made the drop.
Explaining it will mean explaining where I've been the past two days. Which, by itself, means explaining how I managed to get Beauchamp to go along with the plan. It means explaining that I've been insubordinate and gone over Donaldsen's head. It will be career suicide by itself.
But what worries me that much more is knowing that somewhere along the chain, it'll get back to McCallister and the Crazy Horses.
I take a deep breath.
"What's he doing with the body?"
Danny seems to deflate just a little. "Come on. I'll show you."
We step outside a few seconds before the Sheriff's Office pulls up, but they don't hassle us as we flash our badges when they walk up.
Right there on the chest, someone has written with permanent marker.
2 down.
3 left.
I swallow hard. Some part of me had hoped that this wasn't what I thought it was. That Beauchamp had figured out that we were pulling the wool over his eyes, and 'Spider' was a plant.
This confirms that there's nothing like that going on. This is payback, coming straight from McCallister. He's going to work his way through the guys who did it, and the list isn't a long one.
It's not going to take long for me to get to the coveted next spot on the list. When that happens, there's going to be a lot bigger problems facing me than just career suicide.
Chapter Twenty-Six
RYAN
It takes a long time before they finally let me out. Long enough that my body's started to realize that it's not supposed to hurt all the time, and it's decided to lodge a formal protest.
I force myself to move again. The blood moving back into my limbs hurts, like a fire burning at my fingers and toes. I try to rub the pain out of them as best I can, but I have to be honest with myself and admit that it's not going to stop hurting any time soon.
They've got my number. They told me so, more than once. I slip my phone out of my pocket. I know I wasn't wearing these pants when they'd hung me up for the beatings that I took, so I don't need to wonder whether or not they've gone through the phone.
I can safely assume that they have. I run through to see if there's anything obvious. There isn't. They turned the phone off, and as it boots back up I slip it back into my pocket. No clues here.
I slip my leg over the bike's seat and kick it to life. It doesn't complain. She never complains, not any more. I like to think that the old girl knows how much work I put into her, and doesn't want to come off as pushy after all these years.
She hums happily beneath me as I ride back out of the industrial park, and get on the road back to my apartment. It's not a long drive, but my entire body hurts, and I can barely see straight.
The drive takes twice as long as it needs to because I'm too afraid to fall off the son of a bitch, or let some crazy fuck hit me, so I go slower than I should.
I pull up in front of the house and try to get myself off the back of the bike. My foot doesn't raise high enough, and my toe catches, sending me falling hard to the concrete.
I push myself up. Nothing worse than I dealt with the rest of the day. It's almost over. I take a deep breath. Almost over. Then I'll be able to start trying to recover. I can only hope that it helps, because the way the day's been going so far, I need something to be going for me.
The door comes unlocked nice and smooth. It had better do, the lock is new. Had to replace it only a week ago, for the tenth time this year already. Some part of me considers moving in near Logan. He's always talked about how much nicer his neighborhood is.
Another part of me doesn't want to. More than that, with the question of leaks. I don't want to be close enough to be able to confirm my suspicions.
I slump down into the sofa. It's a good sofa, I think. Good for naps. Just long enough to lay out flat, with my head on the armrest. Just the right height for it. I close my eyes and try to relax.
Sleeping on a bed, I figure, would just hurt more at this point, as my body tries to find the most comfortable position, and in-so-doing, finds and catalogs every hurt bone in the whole thing.
A voice in the back of my head tells me I should go to a hospital. That's not going to happen, though. Hospitals ask a lot of questions, and whether they get their answers or not, whether I give them their answe
rs or not, they're not shy about sharing their thoughts with the cops.
No, I need to be able to stay as free and clear as possible, and if things are going the way that Maguire says they're going, then I can be sure that if things go bad, I can always get the cops to take me on Monday.
They'll have to, won't they?
I quiet the thoughts in my head. Eyes closed. The room is dark all around me. No light to set me off. My head's comfortable. The sofa's got soft arms. Not as soft as a pillow, but good enough to lay my head down.
My body feels like it's floating. Every inch of it is covered in pins and needles, and I can't stop hurting, but I can let myself slip easily, comfortably into sleep.
I can almost feel myself drifting off. My mind starts to wander. To happier places, to happier memories. To this morning. I can feel myself growing hard at the thought of how I spent last night.
Even still, my mind wanders, further and further afield, until—a noise wakes me up. I don't know if I've been asleep long, but it's still dark outside. The digital clock on the wall is hard to read in the darkness, but I can almost make out where it reads '4:15'.
I lay my head back down. Houses make noise, I remind myself. Nothing to get worried or upset over. It's nothing.
The noise comes again. Someone's outside, I realize. I suck in a deep breath and push myself up. I have to stifle a pained groan as I turn over.
There's a pistol in a drawer over by the wall. I get it out, nice and easy. Someone's outside, and they're fiddling with locks. I can hear it, clear as day.
The light outside never turns off, so I'll have a better angle on whoever is out there, than they have on me. I sidle up to the back window and look out. Nobody there. Whoever is coming in, they're only at the front.
That doesn't sound like cops. I move up to the front windows and check the street anyways. A car. One I recognize.
I don't let Maguire in. If she wanted in, then she'd knock, or she'd call. Whoever is out there, they're driving Maguire's car. She might even be with them. But she's not in control of the situation.
I work the slide on the pistol and flip off the safety. Then I get myself in a good, protected position, and I wait. I don't have to wait long.