by Mark Stone
“Snakes can’t hear noises,” Anchor said, giving us what had to be his tenth or eleventh random snake fact of the journey. “So, if you do see one, be sure to say it out loud. Don’t worry about it hearing the sounds. So long as you keep your body as still as possible and don’t freak out, it very likely won’t attack.”
“The only reason I can see my hand in front of me right now is because Cross’s shirt is white,” I answered. “I’m certainly not going to see some snake hiding in dark brush.”
“Pessimistic stuff like that is the reason people think you’re no fun,” Anchor told me, still walking.
“How do you shut him off?” I asked, lowering my voice so Cross realized I was talking to her.
“I wish I knew,” she answered. “He’s a handful but, more often than not, he’s there for people when they need him.”
“Does that count for you too?” I asked.
“No,” she answered swiftly. “I said for other people, he’s there more often than not. For me, it’s every single time.” She stopped for a beat. “He’s a pain in the ass. I can’t deny that, but he’s maybe the best partner I’ve ever had, and that’s saying something.”
“You are too sweet,” Anchor said, and I could practically hear the smile in his voice. He had obviously heard us and was getting a kick out of what Cross had said about him. “I knew you were sweeter than you let on, but I didn’t know you were the sweetest woman in the world.”
“Shut up, Anchor,” Cross said, shaking her head.
We reached the other side of the gap and walked into the parking lot of the abandoned building without incident. Letting go of each other, we all took a look at our surroundings.
I couldn’t see the front side of the building anymore, but I had to imagine the Scorpions had found their way inside. That would have meant that Tyler already called for backup.
“Is that a broken window?” Anchor asked, pointing to an area of shattered glass beside the back door.
“Yeah, but we don’t need to use it,” I answered. “We can wait right out here,” I said, looking at the others. “Cross and Anchor, you can head to the front door, maybe even disable the Scorpions’s bikes if they’re already inside. I’ll stay here at the back and stand guard. There are only two points of entry here. That means two exits. Backup is undoubtedly on the way. All we have to do is make sure no one inside there gets out.”
“You’re forgetting that we still don’t know if Tanya is in there,” Cross said. “Or what she might be going through. They could kill her in the time it would take for backup to arrive.”
“If they wanted to kill her then, as sad as it is to say, both of us know they already have,” I answered matter of factly. “I’d bet money that she’s not being held captive at all though. I’d bet she has an active role in what’s going on here. Of course, if we go running in without proper backup, it’ll only escalate. If we want to get her out alive, then our safest course of action is to stand guard out here unless we see or hear something that makes us act otherwise.”
As though fate just wanted to slap me across the face, a woman’s scream sounded from inside the building. It was just like the scream I’d heard that day back on the Good Storm, the scream that started all of this. Something horrible was going down right now. I might have had a good plan, but I wasn’t going to have the luxury of implementing it.
“Goddammit,” I muttered. “There goes that idea.”
“The broken window then?” Anchor asked, looking at Cross and me.
I grimaced as I answered him, knowing we didn’t have a choice.
“Yeah, dude,” I said. “The broken window.”
Chapter 25
“Let’s move as quickly as we can, but try and be silent,” Cross said. “If at all possible, we need to keep our presence a secret.”
I didn’t need to be told that, of course. I knew that, even if things were going down right this minute, the element of surprise would still be the only thing that might keep us alive. I didn’t say anything though. I had to imagine that this kind of exposition was purely for Anchor’s sake. He wasn’t an officer and, from what I could tell, he hadn’t been at this for anywhere near as long as Cross and I. If he needed the extra direction, there was no harm in it.
He nodded at his partner and, alongside us, rushed toward the broken window beside the back door.
I pulled at the knob. No surprise, it was latched tight.
“Let me get in there,” I said, moving toward the broken window.
“Stay here,” Cross said. “I’m smaller. Anchor can hoist me up. I’ll crawl in and, if the coast in clear, I’ll open the door for you guys.”
“And if it’s not clear?” I asked, my eyes narrowing.
“If it’s not clear for me, then it wouldn’t be clear for you either,” she answered. Looking to Anchor, she added, “We all know the risks here. I’m no less willing to take them than anyone else. That opening is small. I have the best shot at getting through it without the shards slicing into something vital.”
From inside, another guttural scream echoed. It caused me to shudder.
“Fine,” I said, swallowing hard. “Just be careful, and do it quickly.”
“Thanks for the pep talk, Storm,” Cross said, turning back to Anchor and motioning for him to lift her. The man did as he was commanded in one swift motion, though I couldn’t help but notice the look on his face as he watched the woman slide through the broken window’s opening. It was a look of worry, but not the same worry that tinted my own features right now. These two had a connection, a deep one. That much was obvious by the way they interacted with each other, by what they said. Perhaps there was something deeper going on between them that neither of them was prepared to admit. That much was equally as clear by what they did not say.
The woman disappeared through the opening and Anchor’s eyes fell on me. I didn’t need him to speak to know what he was thinking. Like myself, he was praying he wouldn’t hear ruckus indicating Kate had been seen entering the building. Worse than that, he hoped he didn’t hear gunfire that would indicate her end.
“It’s alright,” I found myself saying. “She’s good at what she does. She’s not going to—”
The door opened slowly and the knot which had tied itself in my stomach when she climbed through the window started to fall away. It was a memory by the time Cross stuck her head out. She was moving more freely than I anticipated and, when she spoke, I understood why.
“This door leads into a separate room,” she said, motioning for us to enter. “I could have climbed in here with the damned Harlem Globetrotters and not been seen.”
“Thank Heaven for small favors,” I said, echoing something my mother used to say when I was a kid. “It’s about time we got a break.”
“I don’t know about a break,” Cross said as I walked past her and into the separate room. “Tell me if I’m wrong, but that thing looks like a big ass padlock to me.”
I followed her finger, my eyes scanning a dusty, darkened room with an empty desk, a broken chair, and a trashcan filled with that looked like ash.
The door at the far end was shut tightly and, like she’d said, a padlock sat over the knob, shiny and new where the rest of the door was older. That wasn’t the only strange thing about it though. We were inside of the room, and the padlock was turned toward us. The door locked from the other side, separating this small room from the rest of the building.
“That’s backwards, isn’t it?” Anchor asked, settling beside me. “Why the hell is that backwards?”
“I think I know,” I said, my stomach dropping into my heels as I took a closer look at the room. There was a sleeping bag and a few empty bags of chips. My mind instantly went back to the hideaway where Victoria Sands had been kept all that time. And, just like when I saw that place, a shiver of horror and disgust ran up my spine.
“My God,” Cross muttered. “She was being kept here, wasn’t she?” Cross’s hands tightened into fists at her s
ide. “She was so close. She was five goddamned miles away the entire time.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I answered, my head spinning. “She was standing freely. Daniel saw her standing there on that pier. It doesn’t jive with what I’m looking at right now.”
“Maybe, like I told you, Daniel was wrong!” Cross yelled in hushed fury. “This, Storm, this is real! My friend was in this hell, and we didn’t do anything to save her!” She shook her head. “Not until now.”
Cross marched toward the door.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Another scream, shrill and terrified, filled the air. We were closer now and, because of that, we could hear more details in the tone of the horrible noise.
“I’m stopping that from ever happening again!” Cross said, her face tight with rage. “You hear that scream? I recognize it now. It belongs to Tanya. It belongs to my friend.” She pulled out her gun. “And I’ll rip through every bastard in this place if it means she never has to make a sound like that again.”
“You go out the door like that, and you’ll get yourself killed,” I answered, looking to Anchor for help. The man looked as confused as I had ever seen him. I sighed and turned back to Cross. “Even more, you’ll get the rest of us killed, and probably Tanya along with us.”
“Please!” Tanya’s voice shouted. “You don’t have to do this!”
“Don’t care,” Cross said flatly. “At least the last thing she’ll see is a friend doing everything possible to try and save her. She deserves that. She deserves to know she’s not alone when she dies. She deserves to know that someone tried.”
“Cross!” I exclaimed. “Don’t do this!”
She reached the door, her hand twisting against the handle. “It’s already done.”
I braced myself, readying my body for the onslaught of gunfire that would undoubtedly come when that door opened and Cross revealed us to the parties inside. Luckily for my very bullet averse being, the padlock had been turned. She couldn’t get out.
“Thank God,” I muttered.
“Stand back,” she said, pointing her gun to the padlock.
“Are you crazy, Cross?” Anchor asked, rushing toward the woman. “The second you fire that thing, they’ll know someone is in here. If they don’t snap her neck right then, we’ll be lucky.”
Cross glared at the man. “I’m not just standing here and letting her go through that.”
“Did you forget about Tyler?” I asked, throwing my hands out for emphasis. “He’s listening to all of this. Help is on the way.”
“Not quickly enough,” Cross answered.
“Then let me do it,” Anchor said, getting on his knees, pulling a safety pin out of his pocket and twisting it into a weird shape. “It’ll take two minutes.”
“You pick locks too?” I asked.
“I’m very well rounded in all the wrong ways,” he answered.
“Fair enough,” I said, looking over at Cross as another scream, this one featuring Tanya begging for the people on the other side of the door to “Stop!” ripped into my eardrums.
“Two minutes,” I said, nodding at her.
“No more,” she promised me. The look on her face left no room for questions.
“In the meantime, throw that walkie talkie of yours up to that vent and let’s get these bastards on record.
I motioned over to the air vent near the top of the wall. Walking over with Cross, I pressed my ear near the part of the wall where the vent was, the part of the wall where the talkie connecting us to a silent Tyler now sat.
“Shut up, bitch!” a male voice screamed, silencing Tanya. I couldn’t see through the wall, of course, but I imagined the man was the one in the bandana, the one who wanted to rip my head off my neck back in the Thirsty Seagull.
“You don’t get to talk to her like that,” a voice I instantly knew to be Natasha Rayne said. “Not until I get my money.”
“Money?” I muttered.
“I’m waiting on the all clear from my boss, Ms. Rayne. You know that,” the man said.
“And you’ll remain polite until you get it,” she answered. “Rest easy though, Scorpions. As soon as you hand that money over to me, you can treat her anyway you’d like, assuming your boss is okay with that.” She stopped for a beat before continuing. “Because, at that point, you’ll have bought yourself a real live girl, boys.”
“Lord in Heaven,” I heard Cross gasp beside me. “It’s human trafficking, Storm. That horror show of an ex girlfriend of yours was behind this the entire time. She’s going to sell her. She’s going to sell Tanya.”
Chapter 26
My heart was in my throat, beating faster than I could count. My head was spinning and my lunch threatened to come shooting out of my mouth. Natasha Rayne; a woman I had claimed to love, a woman I was minutes away from pledging the rest of my life to, was actually going to sell an innocent woman. She was going to unload her so much like cattle, to treat her like she didn’t matter, like she was garbage on the side of the road.
There was something about all of this that still didn’t make any sense. The pieces didn’t exactly fit, and it was because I was missing something, something that was very likely right under my nose.
I couldn’t think about all of that right now though. Whatever it was, whatever truth I had missed in all of this would have to wait. There was a biker gang on the other side of this wall and, when their leader received a call from some unknown boss, Tanya Harris would be shipped off to God knows where to do God knows what. The ideas boggled the mind. I thought about what Daniel said on the pier, about girls going missing in larger numbers than normal. He’d implied that these vanishings hadn’t gotten much coverage (or, in some cases, even been reported) because the women in question were either homeless or otherwise the sort that slipped through the cracks. I wondered how true that was now. I wondered how many of these girls and women had been taken by the Scorpions, sold to the highest bidder, and condemned to a life of slavery, to a fate worse than death.
“Anchor,” Cross whispered, the shock of what she’d just heard laid bare on her voice. “How much longer?”
“A few seconds,” he answered. “I’m working as fast as I can.”
“I get that,” she answered, looking back to me. “But, if this goes down before you work that lock, I’m blowing my way out of here, and no amount of calm words and valid reasoning are going to stop me.”
I stared at her, not speaking. There was nothing I could say, no way I could tell her to stand back and let her friend of many years be carted off. All I could hope was that Anchor could get through this door quietly enough to allow us to sneak up on this group and, perhaps even more importantly, that the backup would come in time to give us a much needed helping hand.
“Are you sure you want to go through with things this way, Ms. Rayne?” the man on the other side of the door asked. “Just because my boss is willing to meet your demands doesn't mean he’s happy about the crap you pulled.”
“The crap I pulled wouldn’t have been possible if you idiots would have done your job correctly, and that boss of yours knows that,” Natasha answered, her tone level and unmoving. This wasn’t bothering her at all. It was like she was returning a lunch order because her steak was undercooked. “So, my guess is that, however angry he is at me for snatching Tanya Harris up off the street after she escaped your clutches, he’s twice as mad at you for losing her in the first place.”
The breath caught in my throat as I processed this new information. Tanya had run. She had gotten away. Perhaps that’s what Daniel saw that night. Perhaps he had watched her being captured all over again by Natasha and he didn’t even realize what was going on.
How could that be though? Tanya would have been frantic if she’d have been kidnapped again. She’d have screamed and thrashed. Daniel certainly would have noticed that. He’d have certainly said as much when he spoke to us. What was more, what would she be doing on the pier in the first place? Sh
e could have gone to the police station. She could have gone to her father’s house. Hell, she could have gone to any hotel, store, or restaurant in town. As Daniel made clear, her face had been all over the news. Anyone would have recognized her.
The idea that maybe she’d seen Natasha and asked for help crossed my mind, but that didn’t make any sense either. Even late at night, people were out on the pier. Natasha had to be a stranger to her and, in a place like Vero Beach, the daughter of the police chief wouldn’t have to look far to find a friendly face. Why would she run to a stranger?
“Now,” Natasha said sternly. “This can go simply. Your boss can call and give you the go ahead. You can hand me that pretty briefcase full of money, and I can give you the woman who represents the biggest mistake you’ve ever made. Or this can go the other way. I can pull this trigger; a bullet will rip through Tanya’s pretty little skull.”
“And, if you do that, we’ll kill you,” the man answered. “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re pretty outnumbered here.”
“Numbers are misleading, Mr. Coin,” she said. “For instance, I’m sure that, in your liquor-addled, pea-sized brain, you probably thought the bigger the gang you had, the safer you’d be. Safety in numbers and all of that. What you didn’t count on is the fact that more men means more mouths, and more mouths means more of a chance for someone to spill your secrets.”
“No one would ever talk!” the man, Coin, said loudly. “We all know what happens to snitches.”
“You won’t have to talk. I have an automated email set up to go out in one hour if I don’t stop it. It has enough information to lead the police to the little side business you and the Scorpions have going on here. And, once it does, my guess is one of those many mouths will open and lead the way to your boss; snitches or not.”
“You bitch!” Coin shouted.
“Not that it matters in your case. The same thing that happens to people who hold up their end of the bargain, when it comes to you,” Natasha said. “If you don’t believe me, all you have to do is go look at the freshly laid and seldom visited grave of that MMA fighter. What was his name? Mikey?”