by JD Nixon
“So what? I would never let Heller beat me up. Or tie me up. You’re making excuses for Kirnin.”
“He’s my husband.”
“Big fucking deal. He’s not treating you like a normal man treats his wife.”
She hung her head, not able to meet my eyes. “You know how these types of men are. They do what they want with their women.”
“No, they don’t. Heller doesn’t beat me up and I’d never let him.” I went over to sit next to her, grasping her hands. “Rose, what he’s done to you and Marcus is assault. It’s a criminal offence against you both. He’s disrespected you like no husband and father should ever do. You need justice. My brother’s a detective and maybe he can tell us the best way to proceed.”
She leapt to her feet in agitation. “No police! Are you crazy?”
“Are you?”
“Let me put it plainly. If I go to the police, he’ll kill me and maybe Marcus too.”
“That’s why you need to go to the police! He’s a clear danger to both of you. If you can’t think of your own happiness, please think about Marcus. He’s just an innocent boy caught up in this abuse.”
Her face crumpled with tears. “It’s all Heller’s fault. He ruined everything.”
“How can you blame Heller?” I asked in disbelief.
“He’s stolen all of Chris’ important clients.”
“He didn’t steal them. He offered them competitive prices for the same services. Your husband’s been ripping his clients off for years.”
She sank back to the lounge, cradling her face in her palms. “This is like a nightmare. I just don’t know what to do.”
I sat next to her and wrapped my arms around her. “The best thing to do is to think of Marcus’ welfare. He’s a child trapped in the middle of all this ugliness. You have choices, but he’s at the mercy of the adults in his life.”
She heaved huge sobs of despair. “I don’t know what to do.”
“We’re all overwrought. How about we sleep on it? You and Marcus can share my bed and I’ll sleep on the lounge.”
“I couldn’t possibly –”
“I insist. You can’t go back home tonight.”
She grabbed my hands and squeezed tightly. “Thank you so much, Tilly. I’ve always thought that anyone from Heller’s was an enemy of ours, but you’ve been so kind.”
I contemplated her sadly. “We’re not an enemy. You do know what your husband did to me, right?”
“No.” Her puzzlement seemed genuine, but her face suddenly hardened. “Have you slept with him?”
“No! Are you kidding?” I dropped her hands, drawing back in disgust.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that there have been a few in the past and you’re young and pretty.”
“Not me. Never. He almost killed me and my little friend.”
Neither of us got a chance to say any more because Marcus came out of the bedroom. “Have you finished? I’m bored.”
“How about we watch a movie or some TV and then go to bed,” I yawned. “We can think about what to do next tomorrow morning.”
I fortified Rose with a big glass of shiraz and some painkillers and made Marcus and me a toasted sandwich and a hot chocolate each. We settled to watch some movie I couldn’t even remember afterwards. And at a ridiculously early hour we settled down to sleep – Marcus and Rose in my bedroom, me on the lounge.
I had a horrible night’s sleep, but didn’t hear a stir from my bedroom. My mobile rang quite early, waking me from the fitful doze into which I’d drifted. I checked my clock – 5:15 AM.
“Hello?” I asked eagerly, expecting it to be Heller.
“I want my family back, bitch,” someone slurred into my phone.
Chris Kirnin. I’d know that ugly growl anywhere. Obviously he’d recognised me from his security camera footage smuggling his family out of his house.
“Screw you,” I said and hung up, snuggling back under my blankets. I slept deeply for a nice hour. My phone rang again.
“You’re going to regret this. You think you’re clever, but you’re nothing but Heller’s whore.”
“You should know how that feels. You’re Heller’s biggest whore.”
“Fuck you, you barren bitch. You’ll never know what it’s like to have a family. You’re worthless as a woman, nothing but an average screw hardly worth the effort of a second fuck.”
That jibe burned inside me like a hot poker, as it was meant to. I hung up again, but unsurprisingly further sleep eluded me – just one more reason to hate Chris Kirnin.
Bleary-eyed, I made myself a cup of coffee and sat like a zombie on my lounge sipping it, worrying what on earth I was going to do with Rose and Marcus. I couldn’t go to Clive or Sid for help, because they’d condemn me for bringing enemies into the Warehouse. And also, they’d let Heller know what I’d done. I sure didn’t want to face that reprimand.
Why couldn’t life be less complicated?
I spent the day skulking about, stealing some of Daniel’s clothes so that Marcus could have a shower, lending Rose some of mine. I made them breakfast, I made them lunch. After fending off thirteen offensive phone calls from Kirnin, I turned their phones off – what they couldn’t hear couldn’t hurt them. I kept mine on though, in case Heller rang me.
Miss Petunia phoned me to enquire, in a decidedly snippy tone, if I would be honouring the store with my presence anytime today. Seeing another job opportunity slipping away between my fingers, I had to resign. I had no idea when I’d be able to go back there, or indeed, if I even wanted to. I still wasn’t sure if I’d ever been properly employed there in the first place.
“What are we going to do now?” asked Rose expectantly, looking up at me with huge hurting eyes, her bruising stark against her pale skin in the glaring midday sunlight streaming through my window.
I wanted to say, “I don’t know”, but I didn’t think that would cheer up anyone. Instead I distracted them with more food and DVDs. They sat close together on my lounge, holding hands.
A knock on my door caused us all to freeze. I shooed the two of them into my bedroom with a hand gesture and opened the door a crack.
“What’s up, Danny?”
“Is Niq with you? I haven’t seen him for hours and I can’t find him anywhere. He hasn’t been in the office.”
“No. He’s not with me. I haven’t seen him all day. I’ve been tied up with something.”
“He’s not answering his phone either.”
Worry lurched in my stomach. “Are you sure you’ve checked everywhere?”
“Yes! There aren’t that many places here to check. Why would he be hiding?”
“Let’s look at the security footage. Maybe he went out there.” I gestured with my hand to the window to connote the outer world.
“Good idea. I’ll ask Sid to retrieve the footage.”
“Hang on, I’ll come with you.” Leaving him at the door, I ducked back into my bedroom to tell Rose and Marcus I was disappearing for a while and for them to stay put.
If Daniel was suspicious of my strange behaviour, he didn’t show it, all of his mind on Niq. Though I’d been forbidden from entering the surveillance section, when he heard why we were there, Sid reluctantly let me in. He pulled up security footage from seven this morning, the last time Daniel had seen Niq at breakfast.
He fast-forwarded through the footage, until we all saw Niq’s unmistakable small frame, dressed in jeans, runners and a hoodie, dart out of the Warehouse through the front door.
“There!” Sid said triumphantly, pointing at the screen.
“Where’s he going?” asked Daniel.
“Why didn’t he tell anyone he was going out? And why does he look so furtive?” I asked as the tiny televised Niq looked around in apparent wariness, before briskly walking away, his hands shoved in his pockets.
Daniel, Sid and I all exchanged puzzled glances.
“He didn’t want anyone to know he was going out, so does that mean he’s gone someplace he
knows we wouldn’t allow him to go?”
“Shopping?”
“Nah,” I rejected. “He’d ask me if he wanted to go shopping.”
“Where else would he want to go without telling one of us?”
“Maybe he’s gone to meet someone?”
“Who? It’s not like he’s ever met many people.”
“He has online.”
The penny dropped at the same time for all of us. “That girl in that game he likes playing,” Sid said grimly.
“Heller told him not to have any contact with her until he checked her out.”
“I know he was growing frustrated with how long Heller was taking to do it,” I told them.
Sid thumped the desk. “How could he be so stupid? Heller will be furious.”
“Heller’s not here, so how he reacts is irrelevant at the moment,” I said flatly. “We need to deal with this. Ring Niq again and see if he answers this time.”
Daniel rang and we all waited, watching his face as he listened to it ring out. “Why isn’t he answering?” he snapped, hanging up, rare anger showing in his voice.
Daniel’s phone rang, startling us. “Hello,” he answered. “Yes, I’ll accept a reverse charge call. Niq! Where the hell are you? We’ve been worried sick about you . . . Whoa! Slow down. Not so fast, I can’t understand you . . . What are you doing there? . . . Can you catch a bus home? . . . What? All your money and your phone too? . . . Are you all right? . . . Please don’t cry . . .”
“Tell him I’m coming right now to pick him up,” I said determinedly. “Where is he?”
Daniel relayed some rather garbled directions that I thought I finally understood. Forgetting about anything else, I raced downstairs, wondering how on earth Niq had managed to find himself on that side of the city.
I sped out of the garage and off down the road. Adjusting my rear view mirror, I noticed a black vehicle pulling out of a parking spot on the side of the road. Having any kind of black vehicle following behind mine was never a comfortable experience for me, and this time was no different. I marginally sped up to put some more distance between us, forced to slam on the brakes when a car came flying out from a side street. It parked askew across the road, blocking my way.
Panicked, I threw the gear into reverse, but the car behind parked askew as well, blocking my retreat. I locked my doors and reached for my phone with shaking hands. My window burst into a hundred pieces over me and a hand reached in, unlocking the door. I fumbled with my phone, pressing the wrong access code several times, my fingers trembling uncontrollably.
My door was yanked open, rough male hands pulling me out of the car. My hand clasped over the capsicum spray in my handbag. I managed to squirt one in the face, before battling intensely with another three men. One of them threw a black hood over my head and another forced my arms behind my back, propelling me forwards. A door opened and I was shoved inside of a car, onto the back seat. Face down on the seat, my wrists were tightly bound behind my back.
The car door slammed, as did the driver’s door.
“Go!” yelled a man and the car screamed away with me inside.
Chapter 33
I kicked out in every direction, blindly wild. My feet connected with someone a couple of times. Fed-up with that happening, he slapped my legs and tied my ankles together.
“Geez, hellcat, would you just calm down? Pull over when you can, Joe. This chick is kicking the crap out of me. I don’t want to sit in the back with her a second longer than I have to.”
Joe duly pulled over after a couple more minutes of driving and me squirming on the seat and trying to engage them in dialogue. The person with me got into the front seat.
“Where are you taking me? Who are you people?” I asked for the fifth time, my voice muffled through the hood.
“Will you shut up in the back? We can’t understand you and frankly, we don’t give a shit enough to even try.”
“You need to let me go. I was on my way to pick up a kid. Please? He has no way of getting home.”
“Look, just knock off the constant whining, would you? You’re doing my head in. Maybe we should have gone for the kid instead of her? He probably wouldn’t have whinged so much.”
“Nah, I knew we’d do better than the kid if we were patient. This tasty piece of arse here is Heller’s whore. Much better to deprive him of his number one cocksucker than some dumb kid. I always say, hit a man where it really hurts.”
“Bah, you’re biased. You’ve never liked kids.”
“Snotty little terrorists, most of them. Tell me I’m wrong about that.”
“Please let me go.”
“Shut up! All I can say is that she’d have to be a world-class cocksucker to make up for being such a whiny bitch.”
“Chicks can’t whine when their mouths are stuffed with meat.” They both laughed.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, lying still for a while, frustrated and spent from all of my fruitless struggling. “I’m sure there’s been some kind of mistake. I don’t even know you people.”
One of the men laughed again nastily. “Don’t worry about that, sweetheart. You’ll be getting to know us very well soon enough. We’ll make sure of that.”
I kept quiet for a while, trying to listen for anything that might give me a clue as to the identity of my charming escorts. I was fairly confident it was not a staggering coincidence that the two men had sat in their car outside the Warehouse waiting for an opportunity to snatch one of us, at the very same time Chris Kirnin’s wife and child were holed up inside. It was clearly an act of revengeful retaliation. I doubted there was anything I could say that would deter them from this course of action, so my best bet was to make sure I came through the ordeal as unscathed as possible.
“Thank God! She’s finally learned to keep her mouth shut. Silence from her is especially golden.”
I knew one of the men’s names was Joe and it wasn’t long before I discovered the other’s was Noel. That was good – anything I learned about them could be useful. Though a bit panicked, I tried to think strategically. I didn’t know what had happened to my handbag, but it was probably back in my car – most likely stolen by now. I had no phone and no money, not an enviable situation to find myself in, but something I currently had in common with Niq. My thoughts of him, stranded and waiting for me to pick him up, growing more anxious with every passing minute, weren’t happy. Frustrated at my inability to let him, or anybody, know that I wasn’t on my way, I struggled anew at my bindings, achieving nothing but cutting into my wrists and ankles.
The car slowed down and turned, coming to a halt a minute later. The driver turned off the engine and I heard a garage door closing.
“Out you get,” said Noel in an uninterested voice, as if he abducted women all day long – and maybe he did? It could have been his hobby for all I knew.
I groped around cautiously, fingers outstretched to feel for the edge of the seat. I didn’t want to fall out of the car. Tsking with impatience at my sluggish rate of movement, he slipped his arms under my armpits and dragged me from the back seat.
“Shit, she’s heavy.”
“I am not! I’m just tall, that’s all!”
He shut the door and propped me against the car for stability, while he bent down to untie my ankles. As soon as they were freed, I kicked upwards, cracking into his chin with my shoe. I shambled off in the direction where I thought the garage door was located, with all the grace of Frankenstein’s monster. It was an ambitious move, doomed to failure. Still blinded by the hood and with my hands behind my back, I’d barely taken six steps when I ran into Joe.
“Thanks for the laugh,” he chuckled. “Most idiotic thing I’ve seen all year.”
“It’s all right for you to laugh,” moaned Noel. “You didn’t get a mouthful of her shoe.”
They took an arm each and frogmarched me through a doorway.
“We’ve got her!” Joe yelled out.
“Good. Take her to the gue
st room.”
I was led somewhere, then through another doorway. Hands pushed me until I fell down on to a timber chair. The men bound my ankles to its legs and briefly freed my arms before retying them to the chair behind me. The hood was whisked off, leaving me blinking madly in the light.
Kirnin sat on the bed in front of me, grinning. He stank of alcohol, and his eyes were red-rimmed with excess or tiredness. He was even more brutish and unattractive than I remembered.
“I don’t know what you think you’re going to achieve by kidnapping me,” I derided, determined to show a bit of false bravado.
“This is what you call a hostage exchange, stupid. I’ll get my family back and I’ll get Heller’s attention. This time it can be him who concedes to me.” He nodded his head, a snarling smile stretching across his fleshy lips. “Yeah, I’d like that.”
“Heller would never concede anything to a loser like you. You’re dreaming if you think he will.”
Kirnin’s smile turned nasty. “Oh, I’m sure he’ll come to see things my way, especially if it involves the safety of his little girlfriend.”
I didn’t know whether or not to tell him that Heller wasn’t even around at the moment. I didn’t want to jeopardise Kirnin’s consideration of me as a useful bargaining tool, but neither did I want to anger him when Heller proved unresponsive, as he surely would. So I stalled.
“You’re pathetic.”
He backhanded me, a ring on his finger gashing my cheek. Blood instantly trickled into my mouth. Kirnin stood and looked down at me with satisfaction. “Good. Gag the bitch. It’s time to take some photos. And rough her up a bit more, but not too much.”
“Heller’s going to kill you,” I said defiantly, even though my heart hammered at an unhealthy rate.
His ugly visage twisting with anger, he struck out with his fist into my eye, the force so strong, I toppled backwards in the seat even as I cried out, hitting my head on the ground. Dazed, I lay on the carpet, my eyes fluttering up at the ceiling.
“You keep your mouth shut from now on. Pick her up and gag her.”