“Then uh, another girl showed up.”
Shawn frowned. “Another one of Madam Nevaeh’s girls showed up?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I think Mr. Lucky and the girl were in some sort of relationship.”
“Aw. Hell. Don’t tell me this man’s wife showed up or something.”
“No! Please. Let me finish. This shit is hard enough.”
“Okay. Okay.” Shawn made a show of zipping his lips.
Abrianna confessed. “I don’t know what happened at the hotel. I woke up this morning with Mr. Lucky missing half of his head. I don’t know if that other bitch—uh, Kitty, I think her name was. I don’t know if she killed him or he killed himself, to be honest. All I know is that ain’t nobody going to believe that my ass didn’t have shit to do with it. So I gotta split until shit dies down.” Abrianna hopped up from the sofa and started pacing.
Shawn stared at her.
After a minute of him staring, she snapped. “Well, say something.”
He opened his mouth—and then closed it. Opened it again—and closed it again.
“Great. You don’t even fucking believe me.” Abrianna threw up her hands. “This shit is sooo fucked up.”
Shawn still struggled to come up with the right words.
“Shawn?”
“Uh . . . all right.” He took a deep breath. “Now I’m going to ask you a question and I don’t want you to get mad, okay?”
Abrianna pulled a deep breath. “Okay. What?”
“Were you high?”
Abrianna’s face reddened—in embarrassment. Not anger.
Shawn rubbed his neck. “You said you woke up this morning. What have you been doing all weekend? Do you even remember?”
Abrianna bit her lower lip and shook her head.
“You blacked out?” he said.
She didn’t answer.
“What did you take?”
She sighed. “What difference does it make?”
“I’d say a lot since you’re telling me you woke up next to a dead body and you have no clue how it happened. I mean, who’s to say that you didn’t kill him?”
“Shawn?”
He tossed up his hands. “Don’t kill the messenger. But I’ve been telling you for a long time that you are a completely different person in the last few years when you get high. If you’re not putting people through walls, you’re contemplating jumping off buildings.”
“Are you serious right now?”
“As a heart attack. Why do you think that I’ve been hounding you to go to rehab? Even right now, I don’t know if this really happened or you were hallucinating. Hell, six months ago you told me that you were talking to your little brother. Your brother who has been dead for seven years.”
“Yeah, but that was different.”
“Really?” he asked, eyebrows raised. “How?”
She couldn’t come up with an answer. And she’d already admitted to herself that she didn’t trust her memory.
“Who’s to say whether there really was another girl in the room?”
Doubt crept around the back of Abrianna’s mind again.
“Half the damn time you’re trying to kill yourself when you’re high. It’s not too big of a leap to go from suicidal to homicidal.”
“What?”
“I’m just . . . Be honest here, Bree. I love you. But I don’t know what to believe.”
Abrianna’s heart sank. Again, she searched every corner of her mind for fragments of memory. “I don’t know what to believe either,” she finally admitted softly. The endless black wall in her head made Abrianna’s heart race.
The teakettle whistled.
“Sit still. I’ll go make the tea.” Shawn stood up.
Abrianna’s gaze fell onto the gun by her clutch bag on the floor. She hadn’t been hallucinating. “Shawn?”
“Yeah?” He stopped and turned to face her.
She started to speak when suddenly the window behind her exploded in a hail of gunfire.
Out of pure instinct, Abrianna dove to the floor. However, Shawn wasn’t so lucky. He fell next to her in a pool of blood.
34
Castillo loitered near the coroner’s van. Sure, she was back on private property, but hotel security and management were too busy dealing with police and the government-looking officials while she waited for confirmation on the identity of the dead body. While she waited, her mind kept wandering back to Abrianna Parker.
The back doors of the Hay-Adams finally burst open. As two coroner techs approached, Castillo flicked away her cigarette and flashed the men her biggest smile.
“Two hundred for a quick look?” she asked, producing two folded bills from her jacket’s breast pocket.
The men glanced at each other, shrugged.
“As long as you make it quick,” one said.
“You got it.”
They opened the back door of the van and, before loading, allowed Castillo to un-zip the body bag.
“Damn,” she muttered. She had her verification. Speaker Kenneth Reynolds was dead. She snapped a quick picture.
“Hey! You didn’t say anything about photos.”
“Really? For two hundred dollars—what did you think?” Castillo rolled her eyes and re-zipped the bag.
One tech with an attitude huffed, “Is that it?”
“Yeah. Thanks.” She handed them the money. “Don’t spend it all in one place,” she advised, winking.
While the techs rolled their eyes, Castillo rushed back to her vehicle. The entire way, her heart pounded. Behind the wheel, she took several deep breaths. She was sitting on quite a bombshell. And yet there was a sliver of guilt about turning over all this information to Tomi. Bree was one of them. A survivor from hell. Who knew what the girl had been living with and through these past six years?
Lord knew that she had been dealing with her own private hell. Couldn’t she have easily gone down a different road? She glanced up at the building and admitted to herself that she still knew only half of the story. She had no idea what had transpired upstairs in that suite.
Maybe Reynolds had attacked Bree?
Maybe he’d had it coming?
Maybe, just maybe.
35
Abrianna screamed and covered her head as glass rained around her on her living room’s carpeted floor. But she couldn’t take her eyes off Shawn, lying so still across from her. Just as she felt herself slipping into shock, a voice thundered through her inner madness: Get the hell out of here!
But she was torn. She couldn’t leave her friend. “Shawn,” she called, crawling toward him even as the gunfire continued. Before long, she heard the sound of rushing feet. The gunmen were racing to the apartment.
“Shawn, can you hear me?”
At long last, he blinked. But he must have also heard the men because he said, “Get . . . get out of here.”
“No. I can’t leave you like this.”
“Bree, please. Just . . . go. Go!”
The men drew closer.
Shawn closed his eyes and she panicked. “Shawn! Please, Shawn. Wake up!” She shook his shoulder, but his eyes remained closed.
The men were almost at her door. Abrianna looked around, spotted the gun.
A second later, the door burst open just as she reached for the weapon. The next few seconds passed in a blur. She remembered wanting the gun and the next second the gun zipping across the floor and into her hand. Her thumb swept the safety off and she fired. Four bullets flew from the barrel. Three found targets and sent the men reeling back and collapsing outside of her door.
Stunned, Abrianna scrambled in a spider-like scurry toward the kitchen back door. Once she reached it, she lifted her arm up to unlock and open it. In the apartment building’s hallway, she glanced left and then right before making the decision to race toward the back of the building.
On her feet, she took off, both elbows and knees up as high as she could get them. Before long, she was flying. A few of her
neighbors cracked open their doors just as she zipped past. One or two even called out her name—but she didn’t dare stop before she rounded the corner.
In her mind, she kept seeing Shawn falling. She wanted to stop—go back. But in the next second, bullets zinged past her head. “Shit!” Abrianna rounded another corner, exiting her apartment complex.
Seconds later, the shooting continued. What the fuck?
Jagging to the right, Abrianna ducked behind another apartment building and then another. She had no idea where in the hell she was going, but eventually, all the zigzagging led her to a crowded street, where she spotted a man climbing out of an SUV with an Uber sticker on the windshield. She sped forward while the man stuffed a money clip back into his pocket. Without a second thought, Abrianna dove into the backseat before the door slammed behind her.
The driver swiveled around in his seat. “What the hell?!”
“Drive!” she ordered.
He pointed. “Hey, Autumn—”
“Drive!”
Suddenly, the back window of the SUV exploded in another wave of bullets.
“Fuck!” Kadir twisted back around in his seat, shifted into drive, and slammed on the accelerator.
They took off like a rocket.
Abrianna sprang from the backseat and into the front passenger seat and then squeezed down into the floorboards just as another window exploded.
“The fuck?” Kadir shouted, ducking and weaving between cars. Horns blared from every direction.
“Whatever you do, don’t stop,” she warned him.
“Who in the fuck are these people?”
“I have no idea,” she panted, still trying to think.
Far too many times, he came dangerously close to clipping one car after another. After running through several red lights, he checked his rearview mirror again. “Okay. I think we lost them,” Kadir said. When the woman didn’t respond, he glanced down at the floor. “You can climb out now.”
She nodded, but didn’t make a move. An odd combination of bravery and fear was splayed across her face.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
She shook her head, but then added, “I don’t think so.”
Now that the danger seemed to have passed, he eased his foot off the accelerator while looking for a place to pull over. An awkward tension thickened the air. “Look . . . I’m sorry about this, but . . . I don’t know what’s going on and I don’t want to know. I can’t get involved.”
She didn’t respond.
“Hey!”
Her gaze snapped up at him. It was clear that she hadn’t heard a word he’d said.
“Are you sure that you’re all right?” he checked. “I could take you to the hospital.”
“No,” she barked. “No doctors. No hospitals.”
Kadir’s gaze swung between the road and the woman huddled down on the floorboard. “Oookay.” Returning to the rules of the road, he hit his turn signal.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Pulling over.”
“Why?”
“Why? I just told you. I don’t want to get involved in whatever it is you’re in, lady. Those goons just shot up my car.”
At the sudden sound of squealing tires, Kadir’s gaze returned to the rearview mirror. A black SUV zigzagged through traffic as it barreled toward them. “Oh, shit!”
“What?” Abrianna crept up from the floorboard to look through the missing back window and spotted the trouble. “Go, go, go!”
“I’m going,” Kadir shouted, jamming his foot down on the accelerator.
But the SUV gained ground.
“They’re catching up to us,” she shouted, panicked.
One of the SUV’s tinted windows slid down, and an incredibly large gun appeared.
Abrianna ducked just as the weapon spat out a booming fire that took off the passenger’s headrest before shattering the front window.
“Fuck!” A stunned Kadir swerved out of his lane but sped up.
The SUV stayed on his tail while still unloading.
“Shoot them,” Kadir barked.
“What?”
“Shoot them!”
Abrianna had totally forgotten about the gun in her hand. She climbed up from the floor, took aim, and fired.
But nothing happened.
“Shit,” she swore. “I’m out of bullets!”
Kadir reached underneath the seat, but got only the tips of his fingers on the weapon before he had to swerve to miss a Lexus. “There is a gun underneath my seat. Can’t you reach it?”
Ignoring her fear, Bree crawled over the divide to reach in between Kadir’s legs. At first, the paper bag confused her, but she quickly felt the outline of the gun.
“You’ll have to load it.”
“What?”
“Please tell me you know how to load a gun. There’s a box of bullets in the bag.”
More bullets hit the body of Kadir’s vehicle, and he shouted, “Hurry before they turn us into Swiss cheese!”
“I’m going as fast as I can,” Abrianna snapped, dropping a few bullets on the floorboard. Her concentration was shot.
“Oh God,” Kadir moaned.
Abrianna kept loading. Finally, she snapped the clip back into the gun, chambered the top of the weapon, and came up looking for her target. It was perfect timing, too. The SUV was coming up on the wrong side of the road to the driver’s left. She wasted no time aiming and firing.
Clearly she’d caught the shooter off guard as his weapon fired wildly up in the air before falling out of his hand and onto the street. “Got him,” she announced.
But one gun was quickly replaced by another—the driver’s.
One bullet grazed Kadir.
“Fuck this shit.” Kadir gripped the steering wheel with both hands and deliberately swerved into the SUV, crashing into their side door. An oncoming commercial truck blared its horn at the two vehicles playing a dangerous game of bumper cars as they barreled toward a potential head-on collision.
Kadir jerked back into the right lane while the SUV slammed on its brakes.
The truck also slammed on its brakes, but despite it kicking up a shitload of smoke, it slammed into the SUV, turning the front half into an accordion within a blink of an eye.
“Fuuuck,” Kadir said after catching the collision in his rearview and finally easing off the accelerator again.
Bree caught her breath against the searing pain in her right shoulder and, abandoning the gun on the floorboard, worked herself back into the passenger seat to see the wreckage they were jetting away from.
At long last, police sirens wailed.
Kadir groaned and slumped in his seat.
When Bree realized that the vehicle was slowing down, her panic returned. “You can’t stop!”
“Why? Are the cops looking for you too?”
She didn’t answer.
Kadir shook his head. “Lady, I’m not going back to jail over whatever gangster bullshit you’re involved in. I’m on probation.”
“Gangster shit?”
“What? You’re going to deny it? Those guys were trying to blast your head off just for the hell of it, I suppose?”
“I don’t know who those guys were or what the hell they wanted!”
“Yeah. Yeah. Right.” He pulled the car over. He didn’t care how disturbingly beautiful she was or how great she danced. He couldn’t get involved. He stopped.
“No, please.”
“Sorry, lady. This is where we part ways.”
The sirens grew louder.
Abrianna cocked her head. “You said that you were on probation?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So I’m guessing that you’re not supposed to have a firearm wrapped in a paper bag under your seat. Am I right? And we just discharged that firearm in the middle of a high-speed chase.”
He stared at her.
“Hate to break it to you, but your waiting here for the police to file a report will just end with you
being placed in the backseat.”
The sirens grew even louder while Kadir and Abrianna engaged in a staring contest.
“Ticktock,” she warned and sweat broke out across her forehead.
Kadir groaned and shifted the car into drive.
Abrianna smiled. “Thank you so much.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Whatever.” He pulled away from the curb. “I can’t believe this!”
She squeezed her eyes shut as if he were working her nerves. “I’ll pay for the damage. I just need a second to think.”
Kadir shook his head. “Lady, I don’t want your money. I just want you gone.” He checked his mirrors and started to work his way over.
When Abrianna climbed up from the floorboard, Kadir finally noticed the blood blooming on her right shoulder.
“Holy shit! You’ve been hit,” he said, alarmed. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“You were shouting at me,” she reminded him, but sounded weak. She leaned her head against the door. “I just need to rest for a few seconds. I-I’ll be fine.” She closed her eyes.
“Shit.” Kadir’s panic returned. “Hey, lady. Are you okay? Wake up.”
She nodded once and went still.
My God, she’s going to die on me. “Goddamn it!” He needed to get her to the hospital. Hospitals call the police for gunshot victims.
This was the last thing he needed in his life right now, but what else could he do? “Hey. Stay with me now. I think I know somebody who can help. Just . . . stay with me.” He reached a hand over to shake her.
No response.
“Oh shit. Don’t die on me.”
36
As Tomi rushed through her shower, her mind drifted back to the picture Castillo had sent her by text. It had been six years since she’d seen Abrianna. Suddenly all the horrors that had happened down in Craig Avery’s basement replayed in Tomi’s mind. All of those sick experiments and that evil, maniacal laughter that rang incessantly in her head. With little effort, Tomi remembered the dank, stale air. The constant screams—especially of the girls who had never walked out of that dungeon alive.
When Bree had disappeared from that hospital, a part of Tomi had envied the teenager. She hadn’t had to suffer through the media circus that followed. Everyone wanted to know what it was like being under the control of such a mad man. More than a few had profited off of their misery. Books by pseudo-psychiatrists and crime aficionados had come out of the woodwork, and before a solid year had passed, a made-for-TV movie had been produced.
Conspiracy Page 18