He cocked a brow. “Am I your guy, Quinn?”
“I guess you are. Wow, maybe I should pass you a note in chemistry class. Look, I came out here to apologize. I’ve been acting like an ass all day. It’s just…I guess knowing you knew, I thought maybe you wouldn’t want to, you know, be with me. I thought you’d somehow think you were better than me or you’d judge me or—something.”
The self-assured Quinn Tyler suddenly insecure, took some getting used to. He didn’t like it. He wanted the smartass back. “Let me write this day down on my…”
“Oh, shut up. What more do you want me to say?”
“I want you to stop all this insecurity that’s surfaced the last twenty-four. Self-doubt and Quinn Tyler don’t exactly go together. I want the smug Quinn back.”
She put a fist under her chin, leaned in on the arm of the chair. “Smug? I’m as down-to-earth as you could get.”
He bounced the baby on his knee, shifted in his seat to meet her halfway. “Not snobby, smug as in major smartass.”
She let out a sigh. “Oh. Well. Hmm, I guess I am a smartass. But in a good way.”
Sitting there holding the baby Reese thought this might be the perfect time to mention the reason he was so edgy. “When you’re working on a patient in the ER, you don’t always have time to stop and ask that patient what treatment he or she wants, what’s best for them? Correct? You do whatever it takes in the heat of the moment to make a gut decision to save his life no matter what, right?
“Sure, what’s your point?”
“Over the course of working on someone you choose what’s best for them in the long run, even if it might upset the patient later, right?”
She eyed him suspiciously. Believing he was making his case for therapy again she said, “Absolutely. But therapy isn’t the answer for everyone, Reese. Where are you going with this?”
“Sometimes the only way to deal with an issue is meet it head-to-head. Before you can move on with your future you have to resolve the issues rooted in your past.”
“Stop using that bullshit psycho analogy on me, will you? You don’t know a thing about it. I’m not going back into therapy and talking about this with another living soul. That’s the end of it.”
“You don’t even plan to tell Kit and Baylee, do you?”
“No. Don’t you understand how mortifying it is? I feel like I let them down.”
He gaped at her. “That’s ridiculous. You’ve shared so much with them already. You know they won’t judge you.”
“I won’t do it. You know, and that’s enough. I don’t want to hear any more about therapy or talking about it or baring my soul to Baylee and Kit either. I would never have told you…except…”
“And here I thought it was because you trusted me enough. I guess not.”
She sighed. “Reese…it isn’t that.” She squeezed his hand.
When Sarah started to fuss like she was sleepy, Quinn reached over and snatched the baby out of his lap.
He ran his hands through his hair and watched her walk back into the house, knowing he’d have to meet her wrath straight-on when the time came.
Because in less than twenty-four hours she’d have to deal with yet another traumatic event—and come face to face—with the father she hated.
CHAPTER 18
In Agoura Hills, fifty-year old Gloria Gandis pulled her car into the garage, her mind anticipating the arrival of her son, Ben, a son she had yet to lay eyes on.
Two days. In two short days she’d get to look into his eyes, gaze upon his face for the very first time in her life.
She was so nervous about meeting him she’d gone shopping for a new outfit. She’d already gotten her hair styled in a new ’do, a sassy cut that spiked just below her chin. The hairdresser had told her it made her look ten years younger. Even though she doubted that, she did feel energized. She’d had her nails done in a French manicure that made her feel better about herself, better than she had in years.
She might not be the twenty-five-year old that had given birth to him, but she could damn well put forth the effort to look her best the very first time she saw him.
Her tall, statuesque frame had dropped six anxious pounds waiting for him to finally get to L.A., a fact she would admit to no one, even though it had precipitated the shopping spree.
She unsnapped her seat belt and crawled out of the car wearing a pair of brand-new, low-riding Capri jeans and a snazzy purple button-down shirt.
Once out of the garage, she set Morty down to wander off and hopefully take a pee on the grass while she headed to the mailbox at the curb to get her mail.
With her hands full, she walked up to her front door. Doing her best to balance her purse along with the mail without dropping anything, she took out the key and stuck it into the lock.
She had just taken a step inside when Morty set up a din of barking in warning. A noise behind the door had her turning around.
Envelopes fluttered to the floor.
She backed up, made a dig for her cell phone lodged somewhere in the bottom of her purse. But she never got the chance to make a call. She was still digging when a man hit her on the head with the butt of his gun, knocking her to the floor.
Her head came back hard on the sandstone tile. For a minute she saw nothing but stars.
Brandishing a handgun, Cade Boyd went to her, pulled her upright by her hair. “Come here, you old bat. You’re going to do what we say, you got that?”
Through the pain, Gloria recognized the voice before she saw that Collin too held a gun in a nervous fist. She watched as Cade went over to the phone in the living room, jerked the cord out of the wall. He stripped the cable and used it to bind her hands, tight.
Meanwhile Morty kept up a steady yip-yip-yip.
“Collin, shut that fucking dog up. He’s getting on my nerves.”
“Nooooo! Don’t hurt my Morty!”
Collin picked up the little Chihuahua and started to hurl it against the wall, but Morty bit down, clamped his teeth into the man’s hand, and held on for dear life, taking out a chunk of skin in the process.
Collin dropped the dog to the floor. “That little bastard bit me.”
“Shake it off, will you? It’ll be okay. We’ll put something on it later. Take care of that mangy mutt. Do it now! This’ll be home base for the next couple of hours until we figure out what to do from here. They’ve cut off our fucking money and this old bat is going to be our key to getting it back.”
Cade turned to Gloria. “You do what we tell you, when we tell you, and we might let you live. You understand?”
When she said nothing, Cade approached her, delivered an open hand slap across her face. “Nod your head if you understand me.” When she still said nothing and made no move to respond, this time he backhanded her. “Look, I can kill you right now, it doesn’t matter to me. But you’re going to answer me, show me some respect.”
He held his hand around her throat.
Still hurting from the dog bite, Collin grabbed a hunk of Gloria’s hair and made a production of nodding her head up and down. “See, she does understand. This was fucking genius, Cade. No one is going to be looking for us here. We hide out here until we get ready to make the call. And we can use Gloria to get Kit to come to us. All we have to do is sit back and wait.”
Cade bumped Collin on the back of the head. “How many times do I have to tell you to keep that mouth of yours shut about the plan? This is about taking them all down by surprise and getting them to give us the money back. Get that through your thick skull now. Gloria’s gonna help us, though, no question about that. Aren’t you, old woman?”
Eyeing the sandwich makings the two of them had already set out on the kitchen counter before Gloria got there, Collin announced, “Hey, she can cook us up a real meal. No need to eat this crap when she’s a terrific cook. Aren’t you, old woman? You need to get your ass over here and fix us a decent meal. From now on when I say move, you move.”
Trevor Dan
e did a double-take when he zoomed in on the address that had already changed twice since he’d plotted their course. He punched in the location again on his phone just to make sure. It couldn’t be. Could it? The only person he knew connected to this mess who lived in Agoura Hills was Gloria Gandis, Kit Griffin’s biological mother.
Why would Cade and Collin be at Gloria’s house? Unless…
He threw the Chevy into gear, made a U-turn in the middle of the Coast Highway and headed southeast to where he knew Gloria lived.
Thirty minutes later, he parked his car several streets over. He grabbed his weapon and crawled out of the vehicle, quickly making his way through the back alleys, approaching Gloria’s house from the rear.
Knowing she had a yappy little dog, he had to be careful not to set him off. He snuck around through shadowy patches of shrubs and bushes, felt spider webs cling to his face and even had to vault over a fence until he got to the backyard.
Carefully, Trevor crept along the house peering in window after window looking for any sign of Gloria. Knowing these two men as he did, he feared the woman might already be dead.
The only light source inside flickered from the living room as though someone might be watching TV there. As quietly as he could, he headed that way. Watching through a set of half-closed blinds, he spotted the Boyd brothers lounging on the sofa, staring at the telly, deep in conversation.
While they were occupied in that part of the house, he moved to his right and to another window. He saw Gloria sitting in a kitchen chair, her wrists bound, her blonde hair matted. Blood trickled down the side of her head. She had a gash to her skull.
She was either asleep or unconscious.
“They’ll pay for this, I promise you that,” he murmured to himself as he pulled his Beretta Cheetah from his waist and screwed on the silencer. Retracing his steps, he made his way back around to the front of the house.
Trevor had already decided to kick in the door when he noticed the brothers were no longer sitting on the couch. The TV screen black, the room now dark, Trevor realized they were in another part of the house, hopefully going to bed.
Okay, he decided, he could do more damage if they were asleep. But just when that idea started to have merit, he heard voices coming from the garage.
He ducked behind a row of hedges just in time to see the garage door rumble its way up.
Trevor watched as a blue Chevy Tahoe with Cade and Collin inside sped out of the garage and down the driveway.
Fearing the worst, Trevor raced to the front door and kicked it in, sprinted inside the house. On his way to the kitchen, his shoes skidded on the floor in a sizeable pool of blood.
“Fuck no, not again!”
Expecting to see Gloria dead, his eyes focused on her little dog. Someone had cut the animal’s throat. A bloody kitchen knife lay on the floor.
He made a quick search of the rest of the house but found no one there.
They’d obviously taken Gloria with them. That had to mean they’d kept her alive.
Trevor rushed out the back door, heading to his car on a dead run.
Tossing his gun on the front seat, he put the car in gear and roared off. Remembering to turn on the tracking App on his phone, he raced down the street after the Tahoe.
Minutes later he caught sight of the SUV and fell back as far as he could without losing them. He went over all the ways he intended to make the assholes pay if they put any more bruises on the woman. He hadn’t picked up a few tricks from his journeys for nothing. He could make their deaths slow and very painful. He would make them pay for this, and pay dearly.
Inside the Tahoe, Cade looked at Collin and smiled. “I gave your suggestion some thought. It just so happens I have a key to Grant’s cabin in the canyons. It isn’t big, but it’s out of the way. And it’ll be vacant this time of year.”
Collin grinned. “Told you it would be a great place to lay low until we can trade this crazy bitch in for our money.”
“Who says we’re going to trade her in?”
Cade took the Las Virgenes Road south until it dumped into County Road N1 weaving farther back into a stretch of winding canyons off the main road.
They were so busy patting themselves on the back at a job well done they never noticed the car that had been following them for the last thirty miles.
When they got to an unmarked turnoff, Cade took a right onto a gravel road.
Several hundred yards behind them, Trevor cut his lights. He slowed his vehicle to let them continue on before waiting a few minutes, then shooting a U on the narrow road. Circling back, he moved at a snail’s pace along the unlit roadway until he spotted the Tahoe parked in front of a small A-frame.
Leaving his car a good hundred yards down the road off the shoulder, he got out and made his way up to the house. In the shadows, one of the brothers, it looked like Collin, struggled to get Gloria out of the backseat and up onto his shoulders.
“Come on, dumb ass! Get the fucking door open, this bitch is heavy.”
Cade jiggled the key in the lock and Trevor watched as both brothers stepped inside a dark cabin.
Once they got into the small interior, Collin dumped Gloria onto the nearest piece of furniture, which happened to be a futon without much padding. Like a sack of potatoes, she landed hard, her head hitting the wooden arm with a crack.
“How long do you think she’ll be out?” Cade asked.
“Another hour or so. Why?”
“’Cause it’s time to call Reese Brennan and demand our money back. We go out, make the phone call from a public phone booth, that way they won’t be able to trace the call.”
“Good, because I could use some food. What about that convenience store we passed near the State Park?”
“That’ll work. You stay here.”
“No way, you’ll pick out all the junk food. I want to get my own stuff. I’m sick of the crap you choose.”
“Bitch, bitch, bitch. Fine, ditch her in the closet in the bedroom and lock the door.”
Collin picked up Gloria and headed to the only bedroom the cabin had.
Outside, Trevor studied the house for the best way in. Suddenly, the front door flew open. He leaned back into the shadows sticking to the side of the house until he watched Cade and Collin climb back into the Tahoe without the woman.
At Crandall House, Reese and Quinn were snuggled in bed.
Still doing his best to find a way to work tomorrow’s meeting with Nick Tyler into the conversation, Reese toyed with a couple of strands of her hair. “You feel better about things now, right? We’re okay?”
“We’re better than okay.”
His stomach flip-flopped with nerves. “I have to go into the office tomorrow for a meeting.”
“That thing you were setting up this morning? Okay.”
He swallowed hard. The deceit wanted to lodge in his throat. “I want you to come with me.”
Her brow furrowed, she narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
“Because Kit goes into the Book & Bean around six-thirty and Jake goes with her. Dylan’s taking Baylee to the hospital to visit her father. Afterward, they plan to make a stop at the house on Bel Green Drive, see if they can come up with Sarah’s diary. That leaves you here alone unless, of course, you want to go with Baylee, put in an unofficial appearance at the hospital, and get a good look at your co-workers hard at work while you’re still on suspension.”
No one could accuse him of not knowing the right buttons to push.
She wrinkled her nose. “That isn’t an option. I want to go back and see Mendenhall on his knees begging for my return, telling me how he made the worst mistake of his career by letting me go and how he’s removing the entire incident from my personnel file like it never even happened.” She grinned. “I know. I know. But it’s my fantasy and I’m sticking to it.”
“Nothing wrong with a good fantasy as long as Mendenhall suffers, right?”
“Absolutely.”
Plugged into its charger on
the nightstand, his cell phone rang.
“That can’t be good news at this hour,” Quinn moaned.
He picked it up. “Brennan.”
“Now you listen to me, asshole, I’ve got Gloria and I want our fucking money back in our accounts by tomorrow morning. You don’t make it happen, Gloria’s dead. You got that?”
“Calm down. I want to talk to Gloria. How do I know you haven’t already done something to her?”
“I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it. I want to talk to Quinn.”
“I’m afraid that isn’t possible.”
“You put Quinn on now or so help me God I’ll put a bullet in Gloria’s head right now.”
Reese decided to play hardball. “Call back in an hour and she should be back home by then.”
“You better not be lying to me. You assholes give us our goddamned money back.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’m sure we can work something out, okay? There’s no reason to hurt Gloria.”
“You just have our money back by tomorrow morning or she’s a dead woman. And I’m calling back in another hour. Have Quinn waiting by the phone.”
Cade disconnected the call.
Reese crawled out of bed and started pulling on his jeans.
“Ohmygod, that was Cade,” Quinn breathed. “They have Gloria.”
Reese nodded. “We need to let Kit know.”
As soon as Trevor was certain they were gone, he went around to the back of the house and to the door leading into what looked like a tiny kitchen. The cabin was rather small, a simple A-frame design with only two ways inside. But it did have a back door with panes of glass running down to the halfway mark.
In the dark, he took out his penlight, ran his hands around the rim of the doorframe to check for contact strips indicating an alarm system.
Confident there wasn’t one; he punched in one of the square panes of glass on the door with his elbow.
Reaching past the knob, he turned the deadbolt lock. Stepping into the kitchen, not knowing if there was anyone else in the house, he drew his Beretta. His eyes scanned the room, quickly deciding Gloria wasn’t in this one.
Ending Evil (The Evil Secrets Trilogy Book 3) Page 20