Into the Shadows

by Carolyn Crane

  “A little,” Miguel said.

  “How are they dressed?”

  “I didn’t see. They came out of the garage already in the Ranger. Hold on, they’re turning off. Let’s see where they go.”

  “I’ll wait,” Jerrod said.

  Andrea was still staring at him. Jerrod muted the phone and stood. “You have a problem with me having business dealings? You rather me not have business dealings?”

  “Yeah, I’d like us to watch a movie without your business dealings,” she said.

  “You don’t like my business dealings.”

  She stayed curled up on the couch. “No.” She was young, and she had a bit of an act going—the classy, overprivileged girl. A little too pouty.

  He wasn’t feeling it. He pulled out his Sig Sauer.

  Her eyes grew wide.

  “Stand up,” he said.

  Her voice was just a whisper. “Jerrod.” A lot of people had heard of his Russian roulette thing, including her, it seemed. There always came a point where reputation was more powerful than action.

  “Stand.”

  She straightened where she sat, fear dancing in her eyes, but didn’t quite make it to standing. She thought he was going to play roulette with her. Some people had an inflated sense of self-importance.

  “Did I give you a choice?” He jerked the gun. It wasn’t even his roulette gun. If she wasn’t so wrapped up in herself, she’d know that.

  She stood.

  “Hold on.” Miguel was back on the line. “They’re at a hotel. Motel.” Jerrod held up a finger for Andrea to wait as Miguel rattled off the name and location.

  Jerrod squinted. The Party Princess and Richard going for hotel-motel action? It’s the only thing that would make sense. And what about Thorne? Maybe he could use this to unsettle Thorne. Miguel could maybe even do some filming. Miguel would do anything he asked.

  “Wait, they’re not going in. They’re picking somebody up—I think,” Miguel said. “Don’t seem to be checking in.”

  “Stay on it.” He muted the phone. Andrea was shaking. Every woman thought she was special. That she’d be the one to impact him.

  “Did my business dealings buy you those diamond earrings?” Jerrod asked her.

  She nodded, tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “Take them off,” he said.

  She removed them and set them on the coffee table, hands shaking.

  “Did my business dealings buy you those five-hundred dollar shoes?”

  “Yes,” she squeaked.

  He made her take them off. He made her take everything off until she was standing there naked in front of him. He’d even bought her the underwear, as it turned out, which was a definite stroke of luck, because she could just as easily have been wearing underwear she’d bought herself. Jerrod was born under a lucky star that way.

  “Turn around,” he said.

  She turned around, trembling. He hoped she wouldn’t pee. He hated when they peed. He stood and pressed the gun to the back of her head. “March.” He marched her to the front door. Casually he opened it. “Get out.”

  “What?”

  “Out.”

  He saw her relief when she realized he wasn’t going to shoot. People didn’t get what a pain in the ass a dead body was.

  “Go. Unless you want this to go a different way.”

  He saw the moment when she thought to ask for her purse. The moment she decided against it. She turned and walked, naked, out into the night. Fifty degrees and raining. She wouldn’t die from it.

  He slammed the door and sat back down. A few minutes later, Miguel was back. “Some guy just came out. Just one. Too dark to see who. Big guy. Duffel bag.”

  “Really.”

  Miguel stayed on the line. The three of them got back on the highway and continued northeast instead of returning to the house.

  “Stay on them, but don’t let them see you.” Jerrod said. “You got masks?”

  “Yup,” Miguel said.

  “Running around in the middle of the night with a duffel bag,” Jerrod said. “Always suspicious.”

  “Always,” Miguel said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Richard switched lanes. Blue grumbled about the rain from the backseat. Nadia sat there, turning her mother’s name over and over in her mouth and in her mind.

  Yana. The crappy wipers swung back and forth, leaving an unwiped streak right in front of her face; the taillights of the cars up ahead blurred in the pounding rain.

  Yana. Maybe tonight.

  She checked the safety on Lizzie. On. She returned it to her shoulder holster.

  In Nadia’s fantasies, Yana was happy to see her. Not just happy, but reuniting with her long-lost daughter and grandchild and getting a safe, comfortable place to live helped to undo the damage. In Nadia’s fantasies, the damage was reversible, and her mother still had the capacity to feel happy.

  But always before a raid, she worried that it was too late.

  She pulled Arty out and checked the safety, just to focus on something else.

  Richard gave her a dark look.

  She put it back.

  Blue was going on about the antics of his ferret.

  She wondered if Thorne was still in the kitchen alcove chair.

  When Richard came down and made hot chocolate right in plain view, she suspected that he’d pre-drugged the cups. But then, he’d let her drink from the one he’d given to Thorne, and she’d decided it was innocent.

  But no, it was the marshmallows that he’d drugged. She hated marshmallows. Richard didn’t use them. Thorne had loaded them on.

  Her jaw had dropped open when Thorne drifted off. She’d glared at Richard, who kept going on about the soccer game. He shook his head at her as he spoke, warning her not to try to shake him awake. Because then he’d know.

  Kill you, she mouthed, slipping the cup from Thorne’s fingers, feeing so shitty. At least she could keep him from spilling all over his shirt. She put the cup on the coffee table and sat on the arm of his chair, stroking his hair as Richard droned on. She thought about what he’d said about always being scared. Making friends with his fear. Probably there had been times in his life that fear was his only friend.

  Father of her boy.

  She stroked his hair again, arranging his cowlick so that both sides puffed up to the same height, as she did sometimes with Benny.

  He was so beautiful, telling her true things with those keen, wintery-blue eyes. And the way he’d come to her. If you’re scared, he’d whispered, if you need something—anything—you ask me.

  He’d seemed to really mean it, and for a brief moment, she had the sensation that if she told him about her mother, that he’d share her outrage and he’d want to help her. But then she reminded herself that he was the enemy. Part of Hangman. User of the warehouse co-ops.

  User of hotel soap.

  She’d forced herself to stop stroking his hair and instead thought back on the night she’d finally tracked him down at the billiards bar where the Hangman guys went to drink. He’d been distant at her father’s funeral the week before, and she’d been out of her mind with grief and pregnancy hormones.

  Kara had cautioned her not to tell him, but Nadia wanted to give him the chance to make a life change, so she’d burst into the bar. She spotted him across smoky space, leaning in a corner with a pool cue. His face changed when he saw her; in one smooth movement, he put aside the cue and surged up from where he was, moving around the pool table, past the jukebox and the row of bar stools and right to the door where she stood. She remembered how her heart sung to see him coming to her once again. Then he’d turned her by her shoulders and pushed her out of the cool bar into the hot, muggy night, out past the groups outside and all the way to the edge of the parking lot. Like he was embarrassed even to be seen with her. “What are you doing?” he’d asked.

  “Looking for you!” She’d begun immediately to cry, of course. The pregnancy hormones had made her mind a raging sea of
emotion, and she missed her father. That was before she knew what he’d done, of course, back when his death was still a tragedy. She’d blurted out something garbled, how Thorne couldn’t leave her. “You can’t leave me. You can’t, you just can’t!”

  It was then that the coldness had come over him. “I’m already gone,” he’d growled.

  She’d told him he couldn’t be gone, and she was just leading into her news when he’d grabbed onto her shoulders and looked right into her eyes, interrupting her. “When you leave a hotel, do you take the soap?”

  “What?”

  “Do you take the soap that you used?” he asked. “It’s a simple question.”

  She remembered trembling. She knew where he was going with it, but like an idiot, she answered, because she kind of couldn’t believe it. “N-no.”

  “Then why do you imagine I would take you with me?”

  Shock settled over her like a haze. Her grief had been warm, but her shock was cold. Angry.

  “Why would I ever do that?” he’d asked.

  She’d pushed him away. “Go to hell, then,” she’d hissed. “You go to hell.”

  “Will do,” he’d said. Like it was all just some joke.

  And then he’d simply walked off, leaving here standing there, crying and pregnant.

  Of course, it had been blessing in disguise. Because what had she been thinking? Telling Thorne? Benny had dodged a bullet, maybe many bullets, the night Thorne compared her to hotel soap.

  Ten minutes into the ride, Blue spoke up. “Is it possible that we have a tail?”

  “Which one?” Richard asked.

  Blue eyed Nadia with a warning. “Don’t look around.”

  “Yeah, I think I graduated out of what-to-do-when-you-think-you-have-a-tail 101 about nine years ago,” she said.

  “The silver Honda,” Blue said. “It was there at the beginning, and it dropped away, but I’m seeing it again.”

  “Same one?” Richard asked.

  “I got the license.”

  “A lot of folks drive this stretch,” Nadia said.

  “It feels like a tail. We need a detour,” Blue said, pulling out his iPad. He found a different route. It would add twenty minutes to the trip, but they all agreed it would be worth it. They needed to know. They didn’t have the manpower to handle a surprise.

  The Reedsville co-op was actually the nearest to where they lived. They’d saved it for last for a number of reasons: one, it was usually light in terms of money and hardware, and they understood it was a smaller sweatshop. Also, it kept suspicion off of them to avoid the nearest co-op.

  According to their surveillance, and they’d done a lot of it on this particular one, three low-level guys guarded it on a typical night. Three attackers could easily take three guards if they had surprise on their side.

  Richard had once told her that even one guy could take three guards if he had surprise on his side. It had seemed funny to her. Not four? She’d asked. Specifically not four, but three? Richard had confirmed that yes, three. Like gangster calculus that they all somehow knew.

  “Does anybody want Twizzlers?” she asked, pulling out the bag.

  “Fuck that,” Blue said. “I’m not going in there on a blood sugar valley.”

  “I’ll have a blood sugar valley,” Richard said, grabbing one.

  The tail didn’t seem to be there after the detour, or at least Blue insisted it wasn’t. Richard thought it was, but the rainy darkness really confused things. After a few circuits around the industrial park, no tail was evident.

  At around two thirty, Richard pulled into the plastics extrusion plant parking lot across from the Reedsville co-op warehouse and killed the engine and the lights.

  Still no tail.

  The rain had stopped. Everything was wet and smelled fresh.

  You could see in the window of the co-op warehouse across the way. A small lamp sat on a desk situated just inside the door, and a faint blue glow from a computer console reflected off of a nearby wall.

  Nadia resisted the urge to check Lizzie’s safety once again, or to reposition Arty in her holster, trying not to worry about the danger, trying not to question why she was there or whether she could hold up her end of the raid.

  Richard rested his hand lightly on her knee. “This is what we trained for,” he said.

  She nodded. She hadn’t slept for a long time, either, and more than that, she felt a little lost when she was apart from Benny for so long. Kara was amazing with him—she’d be making the hotel into a huge adventure. Hell, Benny might not even miss her; but God, Nadia missed him. She missed his smile and his sweet nature. She missed the smell of his hair and his fun little faces. She needed a Benny recharge.

  Thorne got his power from letting death be a possibility, to accept it, but no way could she do that. She’d fight it every step of the way. She was there to pull her family together, not break it even more.

  And they’d agreed that this mission was safety first—not to find her mother at all costs. Blue was animated, hoping to get lucky and find lots to pillage.

  Twenty minutes later, the guards set off on their half-hourly tour of the perimeter, and the three of them slipped out.

  She and Richard and Blue ran in an arc, crossing the grassy ditch and the street and the co-op parking lot. Nadia crouched behind the lone car at the entrance and Blue and Richard positioned themselves behind the bushes flanking the door. When they’d first started watching the place, they’d laughed about the bushes—ambushes, Richard had called them, because they were the perfect size and position from which to attack.

  It wasn’t so funny now.

  Nadia counted to twenty as Richard had instructed, then snuck off toward the back, where she was to wait.

  She walked softly, expertly avoiding the tiniest crunch of stones, just as she and Richard had practiced, staying in the shadows near the building. She slowed at the corner and peeked around. Nobody at the back entrance. No bushes, either, or cars. She waited there, as planned. It was a bit far from the back door, but she was a very good shot if it came to that. The back of the building was bare parking lot and some scrubby grass that disappeared into a scrubby tangle of bushes and trees, like cleared-off land going back to nature.

  She took a deep breath. Two guards out and one guard in. The two outside guards would be nearing the front now, coming up on Richard and Blue any second.

  No sounds.

  That was good.

  She took a deep breath. You know how to use a gun. You know how to be a badass.

  Richard said the tricky part would be getting the inside guy, because they could have lost the element of surprise by then. And there could be extra guys on the inside now.

  She held Lizzie in two hands, pointed down at the ground, shaking her shoulders to get them nice and loose. Calm, she thought. Gonna kick some ass, she whispered. Kick some motherfucking ass. Because, fuck it! she added.

  Nevertheless, her heart nearly leapt out her throat when the door cracked. A hand came out and slapped the wall. A-okay.

  She raced over and slipped in. Richard pulled the door closed. “Vid central is this way.” That was their plan: lock the place down and secure the surveillance before the women.

  “Is there any cash for Blue?”

  “No, but there’s a crapload of horse he can sell.”

  She had to think for a moment to get that that’s what Blue called heroin. These guys loved their nicknames. “Great,” she said sarcastically. “Important that horse doesn’t stay locked up. Blue needs to get that horse out into the world.”

  “You want him paid?” Richard said. “It’s out there either way.”

  Great.

  She eyed a slumped figure some ways up the hall as Richard forced open the door to the mechanical room. A blast of heat hit her in the face as they went in. The place was as large as four garages stuck together, dark, and packed with pipes and wires and tanks. Richard moved to a dark corner and ran his fingers over the wires, follow
ing them into another smaller room, like a closet. Cool inside. A temperature-controlled server nook. He punched a few keys. “Not transmitting, not online that I can see. In-house.”

  She stood back. She knew what was coming.

  Richard pulled the bolt cutters from his pack and started smashing the machine, breaking its housing and crunching the motherboard, brown hair flying. Nadia pulverized a few pieces with a hammer and scattered them into the dark corners.

  They met Blue out in the hall, duffel bag stuffed. “You good?”

  “It’ll do,” he said.

  “Keep a lookout,” Richard said.

  You could always tell the door to the actual sweatshop area because it was typically bolted from the outside, and sometimes padlocked, too, but this one was bolted only. She looked at Richard, heart fluttering. Yana might be in there.

  And she might not.

  Richard slid aside the bolt and opened the door. Six women stood together at the far wall.

  She could see right away that her mother was not one of them.

  Straighten up, she told herself. She ran through the Russian phrases. We’re friends. Here to get you out. They were cabled to the wall. Would alarms go off this time?

  She cast a worried glance at Richard.

  Richard pointed his gun up at the wall above, at a junction box. “Shooting on three.”

  Nadia put her hands over her ears. “Like this. Pazhjalsta,” she said.

  The women followed suit. This was a small group, a strong group, all up and on their feet and alert. Two leaders.

  Richard shot the alarm, disabling it. Nadia clipped them loose, rattling off more of her speech: What they were up to, where they were going. Soon they were moving through the hall. Nadia hopped over the slumped guard’s legs. The women went right along, stepping over, hopping over. They were ready to get the hell out.

  “Where’s Blue?” she asked Richard once they were at the front door. Blue was supposed to have been there.

  “I’ll find him. Get them packed in and start up.”

  She and the six women hurried across the parking lot, across the dark road, and over the ditch. You could tell, just by the wary, hunched way these women moved, that they weren’t used to open skies above them. Once she’d gotten her mother and the rest of them safety and didn’t have to worry about them being killed as part of a coverup, she was going to make the Slaters pay. She didn’t know how she’d do it, but she’d find a way.