“You want my help or want me to run?”
“Both.” I kicked a rock, sending it skittering over the pavement.
“Calm down, Ripper.”
“You calm down, Sable,” I said. “I have no idea what he’s doing with her. Maybe she’s already dead.” No. No, he wouldn’t have killed her already. He’d want to drag it out. But that might mean worse things. He might be hurting her, cutting her… I thought of all the things that Ice had told me he wanted to do to women, and I started to shake.
“He said tag, right?” she said. “There’s an abandoned laser tag place out by Route 27. It never caught on. Too far from anywhere touristy, you know? Maybe he’s there.”
“No,” I said. “That’s too obvious.”
“Why leave you a note at all if he didn’t want you to figure it out?”
I stopped walking. “It’s not laser tag.” Tag, tag, tag. Why would he say it? I started walking again. “Okay, see the thing is, tag is a game that children play, and he’d say that, he’d reference that.” Because that was something we had in common.
Ice lost his mother too, see. When he was a kid. He was younger than me, so young. Three and a half. He said it was his first memory, the most clear thing he could remember from his early childhood. Watching his father beat his mother to death.
When he told me that, I remember that he wouldn’t look at me, but he talked about how it made him feel. How helpless he was, stuck there, watching. He said he was crying, and that he even tried to pull his father off, but his father stuck him in his playpen, shut him up there, and that Ice looked through the bars, screaming…
“It’s something about being a kid,” I said. “Are there any rundown playgrounds? Schools?”
“Um, not that I know of off the top of my head,” she said. “Let me get my tablet. I’ll Google it.”
I knew that helpless feeling. It was the way I felt when I watched my mother die. It was deep, stuck inside me, somewhere locked away. Helplessness. Anger. So much anger.
And when Ice looked up at me after explaining it all, we gazed into each other’s eyes, and we knew. We were brothers. We were the same.
And now…
Fuck it.
“There’s a daycare,” said Sable. “It’s been closed down for nearly three years.”
“That’s it,” I said. “Tell me where it is.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Shell
“I cannot pee with you watching,” I said through clenched teeth. I was sweating from the effort of keeping myself in a squatting position. Not only that, it was hot in this fucking room—sweltering. The sweat was dripping down my forehead, getting in my eyes.
Ice put his gun to my head. “Maybe I’ll have to scare it out of you.”
I shut my eyes. I was going to start crying. “It doesn’t matter. I just… it’s not going to work if you’re here.”
“I’m not leaving, bitch,” he said, kneeling down next to me. “So, you’d better figure out a way.”
I kept my eyes shut.
“I will shoot you. Don’t think I won’t.”
“Wouldn’t that rob you of the chance to torture me?” I said, opening my eyes, my voice a snarl. “Isn’t that what you get off on?”
“I wouldn’t speak to me that way if I were you.” He cocked the gun.
Terror flooded me. Holy fuck, he was going to do it. He was going to shoot me.
And suddenly, the fear made my bladder let loose.
“I knew you’d figure it out,” said Ice.
When I was finished, he backed away, allowing me to stand up and pull up my pants. I still felt violated in some horrid way. He didn’t have the right to be here during something so private.
He held out his hand. “Give me the test.”
I glanced down at it. There were no lines yet.
He snatched it from me.
I bit down on my bottom lip. “So, now what?”
“Now, we wait,” he said.
“Why do you care about the test?” I said. My legs felt shaky and sore from having squatted for so long. I shook one of them out.
“Don’t you worry about that,” he said.
I shifted on my feet, watching him.
He was staring down at the test, not looking at me.
I thought again about trying to run. Sure, he was blocking the door, but maybe if I moved fast, I could dart around him and—
He looked up at me, sneering. “The instructions say we have to wait two minutes. So, we’re going to wait, and then we’ll see what this test says.”
I felt anxious. Was I pregnant or wasn’t I? And what did Ice care, one way or the other? Why was he making such a big thing out of this?
It had to be because something with Cade. He didn’t like the idea that Cade would be having a child or something, because Ice had some kind of weird obsession with Cade. But if it came to that, it wasn’t as if Cade wasn’t weird about Ice as well. Cade would kill all kinds of other people without even thinking about it, but he didn’t want to kill Ice.
I didn’t know why that was, but I wished that he had.
When Ice broke into Cade’s house, if Cade had shot him in the head instead of leaving him tied up on the porch, that would have been much better.
I’d be safe now.
I stuck my hands in my pockets. “What’s the test say?”
“Nothing,” said Ice. “It’s barely been thirty seconds.”
“Oh come on,” I said. “Sometimes, you can read it earlier than that.” I’d taken pregnancy tests before. A couple times in college, I’d had some scares. Both times, the test had been negative.
Ice glared at me. “Maybe you should just shut up.”
I decided it was better not to make him angry. So, I looked down at the floor. It had once been a cheery yellow tile, but now it was grimy and dirty. Dead leaves had blown in through the broken window overhead, and they gathered in the corners.
Next to me, there was a painting of a little bear who was standing next to a sink with suds all over his hands. Don’t forget to wash your hands, it read in faded blue writing.
God, why were we here? This place was creepy as hell, even creepier than the abandoned mental hospital. Why did Ice always have to hang out in places that were decrepit and falling apart like this?
I supposed I could ask him, but he wasn’t likely to answer me. He’d probably just be annoyed.
But he did seem to be waiting on the results to the test for some reason. Maybe he wouldn’t hurt me if he didn’t know the result yet.
Hmm.
What if I could work it so he didn’t know the result at all? Maybe I could grab the test and run? Maybe he wouldn’t hurt me, even if he caught me?
But that wouldn’t work, because he’d just make me take it again, and…
Still, if I ran very, very fast, maybe I could get away.
I eyed him. He had the test in one hand, and he had his gun in the other. He wasn’t currently looking at the test. He was looking out at the window.
I was going to do it. I was going to jump at him and snatch the test out of his hand and—
He looked down at the test again. “Damn it,” he said.
Why was he saying that? Was there a result? If there was a result, then my plan wouldn’t work, because he would know if he was going to hurt me or not.
“Damn it all to hell.” He turned and aimed a kick at the wall. He looked absurd, like a toddler who was throwing a tantrum. He turned back to me, angry, and he shoved the test in his pocket.
If he wasn’t looking at it anymore, that did mean there was a result. Was I pregnant? “What?” I said. “What does it say?”
He leveled the gun at me. “Face the wall. Don’t struggle, or it will be worse for you.”
* * *
Cade
I threw open the door to the daycare center, and went in gun first, like I was on one of those cop TV shows. “Ice?” I called. “Frazier?”
There was no answer. In
side, the place was empty, full of shadows. I could see the paint job on the wall—peeling lions and tigers.
“Ice!” I called again.
He melted out of the shadows, a devious sort of smile on his face, something almost cartoonish, which only made me feel more worried. He saw the world the way a child did sometimes. He didn’t seem to quite fathom the fact that other people were more real than a game or a story. He saw this all as a nasty little game we were playing. He didn’t understand, and I wanted to strangle him.
But there was more to it than that, because I felt a kinship for him. He was like the brother I’d never had—albeit a bratty little brother who was always getting into trouble.
And, of course, neither of us had a mother that we could tattle to on the other, which meant that in a situation like this, we had to sort out the problem on our own.
“Where is she?” I said in a hoarse voice.
He just smiled.
“Did you kill her?” and my voice broke. “So help me, Frazier, if you killed her, I will end you.”
He cocked his head to one side. “You wouldn’t. We’re the same, Cade. We both know it. If you kill me, you’ll be all alone. You wouldn’t do that, and I would never really hurt you either.”
“But you are, though, Ice,” I said. “You’re hurting Shell, and that hurts me.”
He scuffed his toe against the floor. “You like her more than you like me, don’t you?” He was whining a little.
“God damn it, Ice, where is she?”
He laughed. “She ruined everything.”
“No, you ruined it. Because we aren’t the fucking same, Ice. I’m not nearly as twisted as you are.”
“You’re weak,” he said in a low voice. “Infected with caring, like the rest of them. I care about you, Cade, but you’re worthy of me. That girl, she’s not. She’s just like all the others.”
After Ice’s father killed his mother, his father went to jail. And Ice was shuffled around from relative to relative like me. No one could handle him, though. And then his grandmother had a stroke, and she was the only one who would still allow him in her house. So little Frazier went to foster care. He was six years old. He had it worse than me, and I always felt bad for him. Like maybe now I could make it better. I could take care of him, and I could fix him.
But he wasn’t fixable. It went too deep.
“She ruined us,” Ice said again.
“Ice, I’d already kicked you out before she showed up. This has nothing to do with her, so just tell me where she is.” And don’t let her be dead. Or too badly messed up.
He lifted his chin. “She’s dead. I already killed her.”
I wasn’t prepared for the rush of despair that filled me at his words. It was crippling, and I actually stumbled, hardly able to keep my balance.
“I did it fast. That should please you,” he said in a quiet voice, almost a purr. “Just a bullet to the back of the skull execution-style. She’s gone now, and there’s no reason why we can’t be—”
I dove onto him, not even mindful of the fact that I was holding a loaded gun and that I could have blown him away. This was too personal, and I needed my hands on him. I needed to feel it when I squeezed out his life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Cade
Ice struggled, knocking the gun out of my hand.
I didn’t care. I wanted my hands around his neck.
But he blocked me. He fell onto his back, but he brought his knee into my stomach.
It caught me hard, knocking the wind out of me, and I grunted, floundering.
He grabbed me by the neck, then, and he slammed me into the ground
Now I was beneath him, and he was over me, hands around my neck, his demented freckled face looming over mine. “I had to see if you’d do it. I had to know,” he was saying.
I wasn’t listening to him. He was making it hard for me to breathe, but that wasn’t going to stop me. I put my hands over his hands, and I started to pry him away from my neck, finger by finger. I bent back his fingers, bent them back as far as I could.
He shrieked in pain. “I didn’t kill her, Cade. I didn’t kill her. I couldn’t.”
I froze, gazing at him. What kind of trick was this? Was he saying this to spare his own life?
“She’s pregnant,” said Ice.
And I let go of him.
He rocked back on his knees, massaging his hurt fingers. “I couldn’t kill a mother. You know that. You know me.”
“Where is she?” I said, getting to my feet.
He pointed. “She’s in the bathroom.”
I staggered across the room and threw open the door he was pointing at. There she was, huddled under the sink, tied there, a gag in her mouth.
“Shell?” I whispered.
“I’ll leave her alone now, I promise,” said Ice from behind me. “I didn’t know about the baby. If I had known, I wouldn’t have taken her. But this is going to change everything between us, Cade, and I don’t—”
“Shut up.” I didn’t look at him, I just gestured behind me. My voice wasn’t steady. I dropped to my knees in front of Shell, and I yanked the gag out of her mouth. “Did he hurt you? Did he touch you?”
“Did he say the test was positive?” she said. “He wouldn’t let me see it, and I didn’t know, and he tied me up here. Did he say I was pregnant?”
“Are you okay?” I said. Geez, we could worry about that in a second.
She nodded.
I finished untying her. I helped her stand up. I put my hands on her face, and they were shaking as I brushed her sweaty hair away from her features. Fuck. I pulled her close.
She clung to me.
Together, we made our halting way out of the bathroom.
Ice was looking at his shoes, the expression on his face like a scolded toddler. “You’re angry, Ripper, and I know I shouldn’t have—”
“You leave us alone.” I put my finger in his face. “You never come near me or her ever again.”
“Never come near you?” He looked so hurt.
Damn it. I shut my eyes for a second. Then I opened them, taking a deep breath. I gave Shell a gentle shove toward the door. “Wait for me outside.”
She gave me a funny look.
I crossed the room and scooped my gun up off the floor. “Outside, Shell,” I said.
“Cade—”
I turned to her sharply, and she stopped speaking. She nodded and headed for the door.
“Listen, don’t be angry, Ripper,” said Ice. “I know I crossed the line, but you liked her so much, and she was so yummy looking. I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would be like to hear her scream.”
I nodded. “I know, Frazier. I know.” I crossed to him, and I opened my arms to him. “Come here. Come here, little brother.”
His face twisted, like he might cry.
I was starting to feel a little choked up too.
He walked into my arms, and we embraced.
I stroked his hair, just like he was a little boy. “You can’t help it,” I whispered. “It got in you too young. Or maybe there’s just too much of your father in you. I don’t know. But you can’t help it. And you won’t stop.”
He hugged me tight. “It’s in you, too.”
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think it is.”
And then I brought the gun up between us, settling it under his chin.
His eyes widened, alarmed.
“I’m sorry, Frazier,” I choked. “Just… just go to sleep, okay?”
And I pulled the trigger.
* * *
Shell
Cade told me to leave, but I watched it from the doorway. I watched him shoot him. I watched him slide to the ground with the body. I watched him cradle it and cry.
When he came out, he was covered in blood, but I didn’t care. I threw my arms around him.
He held onto me like I was his life jacket and he was adrift on a choppy sea.
“He was your friend,” I whispered
.
He buried his face against my shoulder. “He was my enemy.”
“But you were close to him. Closer than you are to anyone else.”
He raised his face to look at me. “No. I’m closer to you.” He touched my face.
And he kissed me.
We held onto each other, outside that broken-down building, half of the windows busted out, the Florida sun beating down on our bodies, the air full of the smells of sweat and blood and guns discharging. But in each other’s arms, we found a sweet oasis of calm, of goodness.
He pulled back slowly. “I’m a mess. I’m getting you all messy too.”
“I don’t care.” I clutched him fiercely.
He rested his forehead against mine. “I’m sorry about all this.”
“It’s not your fault.”
He kissed me again.
I was lost to the sensation of it.
He kissed my chin. He kissed my forehead. “I’m just glad you’re okay. I thought you were dead, and it nearly destroyed me.”
I looked into his eyes. “I shouldn’t have run off like that. Sable told me it was a bad idea, but I was too upset.”
“Whatever she told you about how I feel about you, you have to know that it isn’t true. I care about you. I love you.”
I felt weak. I was glad I was holding onto him, because I didn’t know if I could have held myself up. “I love you too,” I murmured, and I knew it was true, as crazy as it seemed.
“I want… I want us. I want this. I don’t know how it works, but I want it.”
I smiled. “Yes.”
“And the baby. I want…” He bit his lip. “But if you don’t want it, I understand.”
“No, I want it,” I said. “I thought that even if I didn’t have you, if I could have your baby… I mean, that sounds pathetic, and I’m not pathetic—”
“It doesn’t sound pathetic.” He kissed me again. “It sounds amazing. It sounds really good.” He grinned. “We’ll make it work, somehow, then.”
“Yes,” I said again, grinning too.
And then we were kissing again.
He pulled away, running a hand through his hair. “God damn it, this scene is messy as fuck. I’m going to have to clean it up. My DNA is everywhere. Your DNA is everywhere. I’m going to have to douse this place with bleach.”
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