I eyed his battle-scarred features fondly, but I couldn’t argue with the truth. “Sure, let’s go.”
As we got out of the SUV, the cab pulled away, its rooftop sign illuminated once again.
“She must be waitin’ on the other side of the dumpster.” Hellhound called softly, “Hey, Miz Smith, it’s Arnie Helmand. I got my friend Aydan with me, an’ we’re comin’ around to ya now. Don’t be scared.”
He received no reply, and we exchanged a look. When we turned the corner a second later, Hellhound jolted to a stop. His arm flew out to push me behind him. “Back to the truck. Lock the doors.”
I stared at the man in front of us. His face was deeply lined, but his bulky build still looked powerful despite his age. I was pretty sure I’d never met him, but he looked oddly familiar…
“Fuck, Aydan, go!” Hellhound’s shout made me jerk with shock. “Get in the fuckin’ truck!”
The old man smiled, revealing several missing teeth. “Damn bitches. Ya just gotta show ‘em who’s boss. But you’re so fuckin’ pussy-whipped, ya can’t even make the bitches listen.” His abrasive voice was a horrible caricature of Hellhound’s sexy rasp. “Hi, son. Did ya miss me?”
“Skip the bullshit, ol’ man. Where’s Miz Smith?”
His father’s harsh laugh made a chill crawl down my spine. “Knew you’d come runnin’ for some cryin’ bitch. Miz Smith. Ha.” He snapped his fingers. “Two-bit hooker.”
“What’d ya do to her?” Hellhound’s voice was level.
“Who gives a shit? Dumb bitches’re a dime a dozen.”
Hellhound’s fists clenched, and his father grated out another laugh. “What, ya actually gonna fight me this time? Don’t tell me ya grew a dick since I saw ya last.”
Strain bulged in Hellhound’s shoulders. “I ain’t gonna fight ya. I ain’t you, an’ I never will be. Go ahead an’ take your shot so I can call the cops again an’ send ya back to the fuckin’ slammer.”
The old man spat and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Ya always were a fuckin’ disappointment. At least your brothers had balls. Ya were always a fuckin’ little pansy-ass mama’s boy.”
“It ain’t gonna work, ol’ man. Take your shot.”
“Arnie.” I laid a hand on his arm, feeling his tension like an electrical current. “Let’s go. Just walk away.”
“Can’t, darlin’.” His hard stare never left his father. “We gotta do this every time the ol’ fuck gets outta jail. Sooner we do it, sooner he goes back, an’ maybe this time somebody’ll do the world a favour an’ shank the fucker ‘fore he gets out again. Fuckin’ waste of skin.”
Fury flared in his father’s eyes, and I felt Arnie’s almost-imperceptible tremor.
“Gonna teach ya a lesson this time, boy.” His father’s voice was thick with rage. “This time ya gotta fight or die. Time to grow some balls.” He stepped forward, his big hands clenching into murderous fists.
“Aydan,” Hellhound said very softly. “Please go to the truck now.”
I hesitated.
Obey him and call the police? Or just pull my gun and end this?
His father spoke again. “If ya won’t fight for yourself, maybe you’ll fight for her.”
The old man swung so fast I barely had time to recognize the threat. I dodged, but pain exploded in my face and my head rang with hollow metallic thunder. My muscles turned to water and I dropped, pavement slapping the breath out of me.
Pull your gun. Shoot.
My body refused to move.
“NO!” Hellhound’s bellow reverberated in my skull. I dazedly registered a flurry of motion, my vision blurred by involuntary tears.
A sickening muffled pop.
Hellhound flung the slack body aside like a discarded rag.
“NO!” He fell to his knees beside me. “No, no, no…” Arms wrapped over his head, he rocked violently while the terrible cries wrenched out of him. “No, no, no, no…”
Comprehension arrived along with my ability to move again.
Flashback. The worst day of his life.
I dragged myself onto hands and knees. Blood dripped onto the pavement from my throbbing nose and my body tingled with pins and needles.
“Arnie.”
“No, no, no…” Five-year-old Arnie sobbed out his agony and terror.
“Arnie.” I rubbed slow, gentle circles on his back. What endearment might his mother have used? “Arnie, it’s over, sweetie. It’s all over now. He won’t hurt anybody, ever again.”
The gut-wrenching sobs didn’t cease, and tears welled up in my eyes. “Oh, Arnie.” I wrapped my arms around him and rocked with him, my heart breaking. “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay. It’s over. I promise it’s over now.”
Long moments passed while I rocked him and murmured comfort time and again, and gradually his sobs eased. His body vibrated with long tremors, his bulky muscles hard as iron in my arms. The frigid pavement numbed my knees and my own trembling threatened to shake me apart.
“It’s over. It’s okay. It’s over,” I soothed. “You’re okay, Arnie, it’s okay.”
He drew a deep, shuddering breath.
“…Aydan?” His voice was a broken remnant.
“I’m here, Arnie. It’s okay. It’s over.”
His arms locked around me, almost crushing my ribs. “Aydan… darlin’…” He pressed his face into my hair. “Aydan…”
“I’m here.” I held him tightly, wishing my embrace could heal the terrible wounds in his heart. “I’m here. It’s all over. It’s okay.”
At last he released me and drew away. His ravaged features twisted at the sight of my face. “Aw, darlin’.” He raised a trembling hand to touch my cheek, his fingertips barely brushing my skin. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.” Forgetting my bleeding nose, I took his icy hand in both of mine and pressed it to my lips. He stiffened at sight of the crimson smears on his skin, old horrors resurfacing in his eyes.
I hugged his hand to me, wiping the stains away. “It’s not your fault,” I repeated forcefully. “None of it. Not then, and not now.”
He sagged back to sit on the frozen pavement, his stare passing through his father’s crumpled body to some invisible hell beyond.
“Yeah, it is my fault. Call the cops.” His hollow monotone bespoke utter defeat. “The fuckin’ bastard won after all.”
I stared at him, unwilling to comprehend.
“Call the cops,” he repeated. His barren eyes met mine. “I gotta pay for what I did.”
Fury seized me. Violent rage at the monster who had done so much harm in life and even more in death.
“No.” I lunged to my feet. My voice vibrated on the edge of explosion. “No. You’ve been paying all your life. No more. No fucking more.”
I yanked open my waist pouch and punched the button on the secured phone. When Stemp’s flat ‘yes’ crackled over the line, I held the phone away from my sluggishly dripping nose and snapped, “I have a body. I need a cleanup.”
Arnie’s eyes widened and he half-raised a hand, but I shot him a look and he subsided.
“Shots fired?”
“No.”
“Wet cleanup?”
“No. Broken neck.”
“Tidy.” Stemp sounded pleased. “Where?”
I did a rapid mental calculation. “I can meet them anywhere on the east side of town in an hour. You tell me where.”
“Stand by.”
The heat of anger ebbed while I waited. I shot an anxious glance around the parking lot, shivers racking my body. Arnie slumped in silence, staring blindly into the past.
Pacing on stiff legs, I peeked in the dumpster, evaluating my resources before forcing my skittering mind to concentrate on details and logistics.
Stemp’s flat voice came back on the line. “Zero one-thirty, under the bridge at Heritage and Glenmore. Look for a dark blue panel van. Do we need a coverup?”
“No.” I shot a hard glance at the bod
y, hatred still boiling in my veins. “Nobody will ever miss him.”
A moment of silence greeted that announcement. Then, “I’ll expect a full report tomorrow.”
I sighed. “Yeah. Oh, and I got the money and Hibbert should be happy.”
“Good.”
He hung up without ceremony, and I tossed the phone into the dumpster before climbing in after it. Thank God the contents seemed to be mostly discarded packing material. At least it smelled better than the women’s washroom at the Hogback.
Ignoring the eye-watering throbbing in my face, I bent to tear open some plastic garbage bags and dump them, thankful for the clotting blood that mostly obstructed my sense of smell.
Bags in hand, I clambered out again and headed for the body. A pool of urine glistened around it, and I caught a whiff of fresh shit. Even though I knew death had given the old man no choice, I muttered, “Yeah, you fucker, you just have to do everything you can to be a prick, don’t you?”
By the time I got the bags laid out beside the puddle, the itchy stickiness on my face overrode my reluctance to touch my painful nose. I did a cautious mop-up with the only clean spot I could find on my jacket sleeve before turning to Arnie. “Can you help me move him?”
He stared up at me, shivering.
I wiped my hands on my jeans and knelt to stroke his face. “I’m sorry, Arnie, I know you’re in shock right now and I promise this will all go away, but I just need you to help me for a minute and then we need to get out of here.”
He shook his head as if to dislodge the memories, his blank expression firming into the Arnie I knew. “Aydan, ya can’t do this,” he said. “It ain’t right.”
I held his face in my palms. “It’s too late to argue. I’ve already done it. You’re free, Arnie. It’s over.”
His eyes squeezed shut and he pressed his forehead against mine for a long moment. Then he pulled away and rose shakily, his hand heavy on my shoulder. He straightened to his full height, squaring his shoulders, and gave me a twisted smile.
“Awright darlin’, let’s take out the trash.”
Chapter 17
I leaned back in the passenger seat of Hellhound’s SUV, my face pulsing with slow, deep pain.
“Ya sure ya don’t wanna go to the hospital?” He frowned concern as he pulled in behind my truck.
“No. I’ll see Dr. Roth tomorrow.”
“Aydan, ya were knocked out. Ya should get checked tonight.”
“I wasn’t really knocked out. I just whacked my head on the dumpster when I fell, and it hurt too much to move for a few seconds.”
He sighed but offered no further argument as I craned my neck, checking the small parking lot.
Hibbert’s car was gone, and I eased out a sigh of relief. With any luck, he wouldn’t have noticed my old truck still parked among the rest of the dilapidated vehicles. As far as I knew, he had never seen me drive anything but my new Legacy.
I turned to Hellhound. “Do you remember the access code for Weasel’s autobody bay?” I stopped myself from slapping my aching forehead. “Of course you do. Photographic memory, duh. I’ll follow you there and we can make the transfer…” I jerked a thumb toward the rear of the SUV, “…where nobody will see us.”
He frowned. “I don’t wanna take a chance on Weasel bein’ there, an’ I still don’t think ya should be doin’ this.”
“Weasel won’t be there. He was piss-drunk. The only place he’ll go is home for a little quality time with Rosy Palm and her five daughters.” I got out and headed for the truck before he could protest again.
When the big overhead door rolled up on Weasel’s shop, I drew a breath of relief at the sight of cavernous darkness. Despite my confident words, I had been afraid Weasel would be hard at work on another stolen car.
Safely enclosed in the windowless space, leaden fatigue coursed over my body and I slumped briefly in the driver’s seat before forcing myself to get out of the truck.
Hellhound met me at the tailgate, his features haggard in the harsh overhead lighting. My heart contracted with sympathy and I stroked his cheek, wishing I could banish the dark ghosts that haunted his eyes.
“Almost done, Arnie. It’s almost over.” I lowered the tailgate and climbed in to spread out the polyethylene tarp I always kept in the back.
When I climbed out again, Hellhound laid a hand on my arm. “Aydan, I can’t let ya do this. I killed him, I gotta take the consequences. Ya gotta tell Stemp the truth an’ call the cops. I ain’t gonna let ya take a murder rap for me.”
“There isn’t going to be a murder charge. Pretty soon there isn’t even going to be a body. This never happened.” I popped open the rear door of his SUV. “And it’s too late to change my story with Stemp. I won’t get in trouble for killing somebody, but I’ll sure as hell get in trouble if Stemp finds out I lied.”
“But Aydan, the ol’ man’s… he was a big guy. Stemp’ll never believe ya took him out on your own.”
I sighed. “Trust me, he’ll believe it.” I eyed the plastic-wrapped body gloomily. “In fact, I probably couldn’t convince him otherwise.”
“Aydan…”
“Just help me move him. On three. One, two, three…”
The slippery plastic bags shifted when the body thumped onto the tailgate and I shuddered at a glimpse of the face, frozen in a rictus of rage. I hurriedly flipped a fold of the tarp over it and tucked the ends in. “Help me roll him.”
A few moments later, the lumpy tarp-wrapped bundle lay inside my truck box, and I clanged the tailgate shut and closed the door of the box topper. Turning back to Hellhound’s SUV, I extracted my reading glasses from my waist pouch to peer closely at the back cargo area. I removed a few shreds of packing material, but there didn’t seem to be any incriminating hairs or body fluids.
When I turned, Hellhound was still staring into the back of my truck. As I watched, his hands clenched into slow fists.
“Arnie.” I spoke softly so as not to startle him.
When he turned, his expression was unreadable, his eyes bottomless wells of darkness.
Worry gnawed at my gut. “Are you…” I stopped myself from finishing the question with ‘okay’. Of course he wasn’t okay. “Are you still with me?”
“Yeah.” His hard rasp made me shiver.
“All right.” I took his icy hands, clasping them between my own and willing warmth into him. “I need you to go home and wait for me. Just go straight home and get warmed up. Don’t call anybody. I’ll come as soon as I can. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I slid my arms around his rigid body and kissed his cold lips. “Go now. I’ll close up here.”
“Okay.”
He plodded to his SUV like a robot. When I pressed the button to roll up the overhead door, he drove into the night without looking back.
I hauled myself into my truck and leaned my forehead against the steering wheel for a few long breaths. Twenty minutes to make it to the drop point.
No problem.
Much to my surprise, it wasn’t a problem. The panel van was already there when I arrived a few minutes early, and two silent men swung the tarp-wrapped bundle into it without ado.
I hesitated for a moment before dipping into my jacket to remove the envelope of cash. Stripping off the filthy blood-smeared garment, I tossed it on top of the body. “Could you get rid of that, too, please?”
They nodded wordlessly and departed. The whole transaction had taken about a minute.
Shivering in the frigid air, I climbed into the truck box to retrieve my sleeping bag from the emergency pack I always carried for winter driving. When I wrapped it around me, its accumulated cold penetrated to my bones.
Huddled in the driver’s seat with the heater blasting, I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered until the thick padding warmed. When my fingers skimmed over the old bullet hole, my thoughts drifted back nine months to my first encounter with Kane. At the time, I had been so horrified by a bullet hole in my sleeping bag.
Now it seemed foolishly insignificant.
Reaction set in while I drove through the dark streets toward Hellhound’s condo. My nose throbbed with slow bloated pain while my hands trembled on the steering wheel. I gulped, my breath hitching into shaky gasps that wanted to become sobs. The streetlights blurred and I scrubbed a fist across my brimming eyes.
Goddammit, get it together. Yoga breaths. In. Out. Slow like ocean waves.
At last, I parked in one of the visitor’s stalls and tottered to the front door, hoping no late-roaming resident would sound the alarm over a dishevelled, blood-smeared woman clad in a bullet-punctured sleeping bag.
I peered carefully through my headache before pressing the call button for Hellhound’s apartment. Wouldn’t want to wake some poor resident at two in the morning.
Long moments crawled by.
No answer.
Shit, had I hit the wrong button after all? I rechecked the list before pressing the button again.
Still no answer.
Burning worry flooded my stomach. Had he left? Or never returned?
Or…
His haunted eyes stared from my memory.
Had he harmed himself? My heart kicked painfully against my ribs.
I leaned on the button one more time. If he didn’t answer in ten seconds, I’d summon his neighbour, Miss Lacey. As much as I hated to wake a ninety-year-old woman in the dead of night, I knew she’d forgive me when I explained why I needed her key to Arnie’s apartment. She loved him like a son…
Oh, God, I had to be wrong. He had to be okay.
I was reaching for Miss Lacey’s call button when the speaker crackled to life.
“Yeah.” Hellhound’s rasp made my knees go weak with relief.
“It’s Aydan.”
The door lock released and I hurried inside, trembling.
Inside his apartment at last, I hugged him fiercely, taking comfort from his reassuring bulk. “I was afraid you weren’t going to answer. I was just about to ring Miss Lacey.” His arms didn’t close around me in return and I drew back to study him worriedly. “Arnie?”
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