Her body goes limp, but for good measure he keeps the chain tight for another minute before he lets go. Strangling someone is not a pretty matter. It’s much messier and brutal than shooting someone in the back of the head, and it brings Troy no satisfaction in knowing that she’s dead. It won’t bring him any satisfaction in knowing that Bobby and Nate will soon be dead, but as the old saying goes, an eye for an eye.
The death of Veronica Blanc was for his sister. The death of Nate will be for his niece. And the death of Bobby will be for Robert Grant. One down, two more to go.
Troy pulls up the chain and flicks the light off. He waits a few seconds, and then he uses a torn off sleeve of Veronica’s shirt to unscrew the bulb. Then he waits by the door patiently for it to open. It takes an hour and a half for someone to open up that door finally, and the first one to walk in gets a light bulb smashed in his eyes. Judging by the roar, it’s Nate.
Bobby tries to turn around in an attempt to flee, but Troy’s hand snakes out and pulls him back by the shirt color. Nate is attempting to get the glass from his bleeding right eye, but it’s no use. The door slams shut, and they’re left in darkness with Troy on the prowl. The sound of a chain trailing around the room sends chills up his prey’s spines, but neither one of them move. That’s what he wants, and they know it.
“You were never a stone killer, Robert!” Bobby says into the darkness. It’s obvious by his tone that’s frightened.
“I never had to be, Bobby, but I’ve had a lot of time to think. I think it’s time for a career change. I rather like the thought of ripping off your fingernails one by one instead of taking the traditional bullet to the head hit man route. I think you need some time to think about what you’ve done. You need to feel what I felt!” The chain comes out of nowhere and hits Bobby in the face, effectively breaking his jaw. It’s amazing how just one hit can bring a man to his knees, sniveling as he tries to keep in his cries of pain.
“I was willing to forget that this all happened. I was enjoying myself and the start of a new life! Then you had to come along and pull it out from under me. Why, Bobby? Because you were jealous? Too pissed off because I fucked your wife? Or was it the fact that I actually had a chance at being something other than a monkey with a gun for hire?” Nate has gotten the bleeding from his eye under control, and he inches for the door. He hisses when his boot scrapes on the floor, and before he knows it, the chain is whipping out to hit him in the chest. But Nate is not as slow as Bobby, and he manages to grab a hold of the metal before it’s gone.
He yanks, and something solid on the other end stumbles. Troy braces for the hit to the face from Nate, and takes it with grace as he bounces back. He wraps his solid fingers around the man’s neck and squeezes, but Nate is almost as large as Troy. This man has a better shot at beating Troy rather than Bobby.
In the darkness of the room, they both grip each other’s throats and squeeze as hard as they can. Bobby is still sniveling on the ground about his broken jaw, and curls up against the wall as he tries to hold it in place. Soon he’s going to pass out from the pain, and Troy wouldn’t feel right killing a man while he’s down. But Nate isn’t down, not yet.
So he wraps some of the chain around his fist and slugs the man between the eyes. Nate stumbles once, and then his knees buckle. The clatter of a gun falling to the ground alerts Troy’s ears, and he kneels down with his attacker to find it. To his left, close to Nate’s foot, is the Glock that Troy purchased with the silencer. He doesn’t have time to wet it with water to make it even more silent, but he had greased it. So he flicks off the safety in one move and points directly in front of him. The gun goes off in the room and leaves an echo that sounds like a firecracker.
Nate’s roar alerts Troy to the fact that the man is still alive, and he fires again. This time there isn’t a noise to go with the sound of a bullet cutting through flesh. Bobby’s still whimpering in the corner, and Troy is pointing in his direction. He feels something in his chest that he refuses to acknowledge and pulls the trigger. When he’s sure that each person in the room, other than him, is dead, Troy flicks on the safety for the gun and opens up the door.
He was wrong. He’s not inside of a storage room. Troy stares at the interior of a parking garage that has been abandoned for years. He was being held within a rather large storage room off the underground garage. The sun peaks down through a hole in the ceiling where rebar is bent as if it melted in a fire long ago.
Troy stands in the sunshine for over fifteen minutes as he tries to wipe what he just did from his mind. The gun hits the concrete, and he knows that the police will find it. They’ll also find his prints, well, Robert Trenton’s prints. Their database won’t hold his new names, either one of them. The FBI will know who murdered these three, but they’ll also know that Troy Red did this in self-defense. How else was he supposed to get out of that room alive?
Without looking down at himself, he stumbles up the concrete steps to the ground level and looks out at the abandoned block of Los Angeles that was almost his grave. There will be others hunting for Robert Trenton because that’s the way life goes for him, but none of them will find him. If they do, no one will find their deep graves.
A woman puts her hands to her mouth as she comes around the corner with a grocery bag in her hands. The eggs crack and spill from the paper bag when it slips from her fingertips, and her eyes bulge when she sees the deep gashes across Troy’s chest. His eyes are glittering with something feral and dangerous, but she slowly withdraws a small cellphone from her purse.
“I’m calling the police.” She says in a strong voice. Her dark skin reminds Troy of chocolate chips, and her kind, brown eyes remind him of his niece’s undying love for a man who killed others to survive. As the weight of the matter starts to crush down on him, Troy falls to his knees on the concrete and looks down at his traitorous hands covered in blood.
“Does it ever end?” He whispers as he hears the sirens in the distance. All he can think about as they load him onto a stretcher is how the woman who had dropped her paper bag had put her hands to her swollen stomach. Is that what Cassidy was going to tell him? That she is pregnant?
* * *
Rolling over in the hospital bed, Cassidy pinches the bridge of her nose as she tries to make her headache dissipate enough for her to concentrate. The sound of a monitoring machine beeping loudly makes her want to vomit, but it’s not the same feeling she had before outside of the dude ranch barn. As the memory of vomiting all over Victor’s shoes flashes back, she feels a flush coming onto her cheeks.
When her eyes open, the room is blurry for a moment as her vision focuses, and then she wishes she were still passed out. Victor is sitting with his hat pulled down over his face, and his legs spread out in a plastic chair. He looks rather uncomfortable, but he’s snoring nonetheless. Rolling over onto her back, she lets out a long sigh as she tries to remember what happened after she passed out in the bathroom.
Out of her peripheral vision she sees someone with blonde hair sitting in another chair with a baseball cap pulled down over his head. It’s around eight in the morning, and she supposes that both men didn’t get much sleep last night. Her hand automatically flutters to her abdomen as she thinks, and then she pulls it away quickly. There’s nothing there. She took a test, so why does she keep thinking that something might be there?
A few more minutes pass before a nurse coming shuffling in quietly with a cart. She makes a shushing motion with her finger to her lips and her eyes sparkle as she grabs a pudding cup off the cart and plops it onto a plastic tray with eggs, bacon, and a piece of toast. While it all might sound appetizing, it looks as if someone mutilated the toast, the eggs look as though they must be just the whites, and the bacon was microwaved. It looks rubbery.
“So which one is the daddy?” The woman with brown, frizzy hair asks as she moves an attached platform over Cassidy’s bed and puts the tray down. Her eyebrows furrow as the woman looks at her expectantly, and then her heart st
arts to race in her chest. The monitor shows how much the question has actually upset her, and it prompts a nurse to come in with a worried expression.
“What’s going on?” She asks loud enough to wake both men. Victor’s legs jerk as he sits up and repositions his hat. As soon as he sees that Cassidy is awake, he gives her a broad smile and crosses his arms over his large chest.
“How’re you feeling?” He asks at the same time the nurse asks the other woman what happened. Cassidy looks from one face to the next and tries to gauge from everyone’s emotions just how serious this situation is. Her bottom lip trembles as she starts to feel overwhelmed, and she wishes she could throw herself out the window.
“Would you all just be quiet?” She yells, startling everyone into silence. Her loud breathing is the only noise in the room as she methodically rubs the bridge of her nose with two fingers. Her head is going to fall off soon! “Will someone please explain to me what is going on?” The nurse who brought breakfast pats her on the leg gently and retreats with her food cart to do the rest of her rounds.
“I’ll get the doctor.” The other woman explains quickly as she retreats from the room, as well. Feeling guilty that she’s almost cleared the entire room, Cassidy lies back on the fluffy pillows behind her and closes her eyes.
“Do you want me to draw the curtains?” Victor asks with a gentle tone. With one nod of her head, the curtains are being drawn so that the room is a little darker. She can actually hear her heart rate slowing as she counts backwards from one hundred. It’s something that her father taught her when she was young.
“Ms. Fern?” The doctor asks, and she recognizes her cover name. Cassidy opens her eyes and sits up a little straighter when the female doctor comes in. She’s not much older than Cassidy with a bright, wide smile and pretty, brown eyes. Cassidy notices that both men in the room seem to sit up a little straighter, too.
“Yes, Cassie Fern, that’s me!” She says nervously with a little chuckle. The doctor gives her a funny look, but her smile never falters. Moonlight rolls his eyes behind the woman’s back and repositions his baseball cap so that it’s backwards. The man might have a chance if he could wipe the desperate look off his face.
“I’m Doctor Gray, Cassie, and you’re in the Saint Ethel Hospital. Do you remember what happened?” She shakes her head, and the female doctor looks pointedly at both men. “Patient confidentiality, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you two to leave since neither one of you are the father.” Her throat starts to clog up, and she almost wants to ask both men to stay in the room. Then she won’t have to hear what she knows is coming. Doctor Gray sits down on a plastic chair near Cassidy’s bed, and her smile begins to turn down.
“Cassie, did you know you were pregnant?”
Wow, that one hell of a way to have it broken to you. Cassidy thinks as she shakes her head.
“Well, let me get you up to speed on this. You’re around two months along. Don’t worry, they’re very healthy!” Cassidy knows that she’s growing paler by the second, and her forehead feels clammy. She might vomit again. “While morning sickness is quite common, seizures are not. Now, we did some blood work, and I took the liberty of doing some testing on the fetuses for you, as well.” Cassidy starts to grip the white sheets over her as she tries to draw in deep breaths. Can’t Doctor Gray see that she’s going to pass out?
“How many?” She chokes out faintly. The woman finally looks up from her clipboard to see the distress on Cassidy’s face.
“Oh, oh I’m sorry! Three. You’re having triplets.” She thought she was bad off before when she thought it was one! The room begins to spin violently as her world crumbles away and she feels a sob building up as she tries to comprehend what this woman is saying. Her fingers loosen on the sheet as she falls backwards and loses herself into darkness.
She’s not sure how long she’s been unconscious, but the doctor is now standing over her with a stethoscope to her chest and then the woman moves it down to her abdomen. Cassidy tries not to think about what the woman is listening for down there, and stares at the popcorn ceiling above her. She wonders how they clean those things.
“Could you just tell me why I had a seizure? Is there something wrong with me?” Cassidy tries to clear her throat as she’s speaking, but it’s not working. She has a groggy voice from passing out, and it’s not going to go away for the rest of the hour, most likely.
“No, of course not! You just had extremely low blood sugar. Do you have diabetes?” Cassidy shakes her head.
“No, I’ve never had low blood sugar in my life.” She puts a hand to her forehead and glances at the door. Moonlight and Victor have their faces almost pressed to the glass as they stare in with worry.
“Have you been experiencing nausea?” Cassidy chuckles dully, and the doctor smiles knowingly.
“I’ve been throwing up every morning, afternoon, and evening for the past few weeks.” At least the heart monitor is not going haywire now.
“Well, dehydration and lack of proper nutrition would explain all of your symptoms. We found nothing wrong with your blood work otherwise. So we’ll just need to keep you here for another couple of hours to monitor your condition, and then we’ll set you free with strict orders to keep hydrated and keep eating. Triplets will suck the life out of you!” Cassidy feels a tightening in her chest as the heart monitor starts to jump again, but Doctor Gray puts a comforting hand on her knee.
“I’m kidding! Well, kind of. You’ll be perfectly fine as long as you see your local gynecologist for regular check-ups. This will be considered a high risk pregnancy, so you’ll need to go in often. They’ll explain the risks for triplets when you go in next.” Cassidy’s head starts to spin, and the doctor recognizes the look of nausea on her patient’s face and grabs a basin. There isn’t much to come up, but it’s still gut wrenching.
Cassidy leans back onto the pillows and stares at the ceiling as she tries to comprehend what she’s supposed to do with triplets. Her hand rests on her abdomen as the doctor gets her some water to rinse her mouth out with, and then Moonlight steps into the room. He looks nervous as he settles into one of the plastic chairs.
“Get Troy.” He opens his mouth to argue, and she turns a steely gaze on him. “You will contact him and let him know that he’s a father. It’s his choice whether or not he wants to live up to that responsibility. But I won’t have him walking around not knowing.” With that said, she closes her eyes as she leans back and struggles to keep the tears in. She sincerely hopes she won’t have to go at this alone.
Chapter Twelve
Snippets of the doctor’s conversations over his limp body come back to him as he starts to surface from unconsciousness.
Lost a lot of blood…
Can’t seem to find identification…
Going to need stitches on this one…
What the hell happened back there?
He surfaces with a loud gasp and immediately tries to sit up. His jerky motion pulls the IV right out of his hand, but he doesn’t notice the tiny prick of pain. A nurse tries to get him to lie back down, but he’s in survival mode, and her hands all over him just makes him struggle harder. He’s weak from blood loss and his body aches all over, but he’s still a formidable opponent for five nurses, including one male.
“Lie down, you idiot! You’re going to rip out the stitches and end up spending much longer in here than necessary!” He recognizes that voice and tries to slow his breathing to a normal rate.
“Marty.” Troy whispers with a gritty voice. He tries to clear his throat, but ends up making the situation worse. “What the hell are you doing here?” He finally gets his eyesight aimed at Marty Summers and tries for a smile. The man is wearing a Hawaiian shirt with a pair of khakis, and he looks absolutely ridiculous. His silver hair is sticking up at all different odd angles, and his brown eyes are narrowed with his dispassionate gaze.
“I was on vacation, dick. They called me back from the Jamaican Islands to come get your ass.
You know, I was really enjoying myself there.” He throws up his hands in a placating gesture as Troy crosses his arms over his chest. He’s disbelieving of the man in front of him, and he doesn’t want the IV shoved back into his hand.
“Right.” He responds with a quipped tone.
“Okay, okay. I wasn’t in Jamaica, but I was on vacation.” Troy just eyeballs the aging man in front of him and he finally sighs. “Right, fine, I wasn’t on vacation. Let’s just get you out of here and take you home. It’s Jack now, right?” The female nurse quirks an eyebrow and Marty shrugs a shoulder. “He changes names often, sometimes it’s Jack, Jackie, or Jackie Boy. You know, one of those guys.” She still doesn’t look convinced, but Marty stares her down until the young woman retreats.
“I’m not going back to Colorado.” He pulls the sheet off himself and starts to swing his legs over the side of the bed.
“So you’re officially declining the witness protection program help?” Marty looks a little taken aback for once, but he regains his composure almost as quickly as he lost it.
“No, I’m not. But you’re going to take me to Cassidy Grant, or whatever her name is now.” Both men’s gazes meet, and Marty recognizes what’s in the young man’s eyes. Well, he’s a young man compared to Marty Summers. He used to see it in his own eyes when he was younger, the love and compassion for another. Boy does he miss those days.
“You’re in luck, son. She insists that she speaks with you in person as soon as you’re able to leave the hospital.” Troy stands up on his own two feet, and Marty turns around as soon as the man pulls off the hospital gown. “Jesus, kid! Your clothes are in the closet.” Marty points at the tiny closet near the bathroom door and Troy pulls the door open to grab his clothes.
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