by Chelle Sloan
“Pay you back? For what? I don’t owe you anything. You have to be crazy if you think—”
I feel the needle go into my leg, but it’s not like I could do anything about it. And though I try to fight it, I can’t. And soon, all I see is black.
Garrett
“Where the fuck is she?”
“You need to calm down, Garrett. We are working on it.”
“Well, work fucking harder!”
I know I shouldn’t be yelling at my brother, but I don’t know what else to do. Since Ben realized that Paige was gone, they have dropped everything to try to locate her. They were able to track her for a while; they were guessing she was in a car driving toward the outskirts of town, then the tracker on her phone that Mark installed went dead.
That was yesterday afternoon. She’s now been missing for eighteen hours.
“Do we know this is the mom?” Mark asks, trying to make sense of the little we know. “We can’t make out the person leading Paige out of the school.”
“I don’t know who else it would be,” I say, wracking my brain, trying to remember any detail she told me. I’ve already told them everything I could. “She said her mom was at the physicals a few weeks ago. If she’s made contact with her again, she hasn’t told me.”
“No way a drugged-out mom could kidnap her and keep her hostage this long all by herself,” Ben adds. “Plus, she wouldn’t have had time to tie Paige up or drug her before driving away. It was barely five minutes when I realized she was gone and there was no sight of them. There had to be a partner. I’d bet my life on it.”
“Paige said that her mom always had a new boyfriend, the next one always worse than the last,” I say.
“If she stayed using all these years, it wouldn’t be a far stretch to say it’s her dealer,” Ben adds.
Mark lets out a sigh. “And if it’s her dealer, he’s probably stoned as well, and probably more unhinged. And if pushed, he’ll have no problem leaving Paige for dead.”
I slam my fists against the table at Cole Security Forces, where we’ve been set up since yesterday. Charlie stayed at home with the kids, and Cassie is at Paige’s house in case she comes back.
So far it’s been radio silence.
“We have to find her, Mark. I can’t lose her.”
“You’re not, brother. Not if I can help it.”
We continue to pore over security footage and phone records, anything we can think of to try and figure out where Paige could be. Unfortunately, looking up Naomi Blackstone didn’t lead anywhere. She doesn’t have any credit cards, has barely held down jobs, and has been off the grid for at least a year. The last thing we can find on her was a minor drug conviction when she served six months.
Since then it’s like she’s vanished.
The sound of my cell phone shakes me, and I scramble to hold it when I see Paige’s face on my screen and a request to FaceTime.
“Mark! Ben! It’s Paige!”
I answer before they say anything. “Baby. Angel. Are you OK? Where are you?”
“Aw. That’s sweet. Callin’ me baby. I could do a hell of a lot worse for a son-in-law,” a woman says on the screen.
“Where is Paige?” I’m trying to hold my anger back, but I know it’s not working. “What have you done with her?”
“She’s fine,” she turns the phone to show me Paige, passed out on what looks like a dingy motel floor. Before I can say anything, she turns the phone back around. “I’m going to need something from you now.”
“What’s that?”
She lets out an evil laugh. “Money, of course. And pills. I reckon you have some in that clinic of yours?”
I take a deep breath and try to discreetly look at Mark, who urges me with his eyes to say yes. “I do.”
“Good. Meet me at the clinic in two hours with twenty-five thousand dollars and the keys to where you keep your stash. No cops.”
She disconnects the call. I’m about ready to lose my shit, but when I look at my brother, he’s laughing his ass off.
“Care to tell me what is so fucking funny?”
He takes a seat and picks up his cell phone. “Drugged-out lowlifes are so fucking stupid.”
“Who are you calling? She said no cops. I’m not risking—”
My brother holds up a hand. “She said no cops. She didn’t say anything about a security firm. Or a CIA agent.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Paige
“Wake up!”
I feel a kick to my side and immediately all I feel is pain.
My head. My side. My entire body.
Where am I?
The carpet underneath me is itching my skin, which is exposed because I’m pretty sure my shirt is ripped in the front, but that’s the least of my problems. I can barely lift my head up.
“I think she’s awake,” I hear Mama say, though I can’t open my eyes yet to get a grasp on what’s going on. “We need to get her up. It’s time to go.”
“Don’t you think I fucking know that?” the man’s voice says.
“How much did you give her?”
“She’s apparently a lightweight. Not like her mama. It shouldn’t have knocked her out for this long.”
“Well, we need to get her ass up. We’re going to be late.”
“Hold your damn horses, woman. You’ll get your fix soon enough. As soon as we get the pills and the cash, I’ll give you more of what you want.”
I feel hands underneath me lift me up, and slowly my eyes come open. They are blurry, and I can’t make out much, but from what I can, it looks like a very old, very run-down motel room.
“There’s my girl,” my mom says, stepping into my line of sight. “Ready to go see your doctor man?”
I can’t answer before the man drags me out and throws me in the car. This time he takes the wheel and Mama sits in the back with me. She has a gun at my side, and I can’t believe this is real life. Naomi was never a candidate for mother of the year, but this is extreme, even for her. She hit me a few times, only when she was drunk or stoned, and even those instances were so random I barely remembered them. Was I neglected? Sure. I was the adult of the household for as long as I could remember. But this? Kidnapping your daughter and holding her at gunpoint? If I wasn’t living it, I wouldn’t believe it.
“Why, Mom?” My words come out in a barely there whisper. I’m so thirsty. “Why are you doing this?”
She lets out a sigh, like she’s explaining something to be me for the hundredth time. “Because you, my girl, owe me. Do you know what you left behind? You left me alone, without you or Ralph. I had no money, no man, no nothin’. And it’s all your fault. We had a good thing going, and you went and ruined it. So the way I see it, this has been a long time coming.”
“Naomi!” the man up front screams. “What did I fucking tell you about bringing him up!”
His tone makes my mother go stiff. “I’m so sorry, Paul,” my mom says, and it truly sounds like she is. “You know I don’t mean to.”
“You better fucking watch it. You know I don’t like it when you talk about him. At least this time she isn’t wearing her wire. She didn’t get me before, and she’s not getting me this time.”
What does this guy mean? I try to remember back to that time. It’s been so long since I thought about those years…
The two of them shooting up in our kitchen.
Arguing over everything.
Ralph giving me pills to sell.
Ralph telling me once that he didn’t have his stash yet, that he had to wait for it to be delivered.
His brother coming over to get high.
Then, it hits me.
Paul.
Ralph’s brother.
And not just his brother. Apparently, he was the supplier all along.
Paul didn’t come around much. The few times he did, I remember that he gave me the creeps. I never directly saw who gave Ralph the drugs he had me sell. But if my cloudy mind is correct, he must have gotten
them from Paul.
We pull into the empty parking lot of the clinic. When the car stops, Paul yanks open the door, pulls me out of the car, and immediately wraps one arm around my neck and puts the other hand, the one holding a second gun, to my temple. My mom follows, lazily waving the gun she had held to my side. We start walking toward the clinic entrance as headlights blind us as a car pulls into the parking lot.
Garrett.
God, I hate that he’s in this situation. I hate that my mother and her habit could hurt someone I love. If something happens to Garrett, I honestly don’t know how I’ll survive.
I can only hope that he’s not trying to be Superman right now and that Mark is here… somewhere.
“Drop the bag and put your hands up!” Paul yells as Garrett gets out of his car, a duffel bag in his hand.
Garrett does as he’s asked, holding his hands above his head.
“You didn’t call the cops, did ya?” Paul asks.
“No. You told me no cops. It’s just me.”
My mom walks over to where Garrett stands and picks up the duffel bag, looking in it before she walks back to us.
“It’s all there,” she says, holding up a few stacks of money. “If I would have known you could get this much so quick I would have asked for more.”
She then grabs Garrett’s shirt and yanks him down, planting her lips on his. What the actual hell is she doing? I see him cringe at her touch. I want to vomit.
“Just wanted to see what my daughter was getting. She never brought any boyfriends for me to share.” She waves her gun in front of Garrett, signaling him toward the door. “Now open this up. Disable the alarm. And take us straight back to the pills. No lights.”
Garrett listens, and when he walks past me, the look on his face nearly kills me. I can tell he’s trying to be strong, to not show weakness right now. But I can tell he’s scared.
I’m scared too.
He does as he’s told and we all enter the clinic. My mom flips on what I’m guessing is a cell phone light as we make our way back to the safe that holds all of the narcotics.
“Open it,” she says, pointing the gun in his direction.
Garrett looks at Paul, his eyes pleading. “Please, let her go. We’re here now. I’ll give you what you want. Just let her go.”
“I thought doctors were smart?” Paul says, his grip getting tighter on me. “Quit fucking talking and let her in. Naomi, get the damn pills.”
Garrett swipes his card for the safe before entering a code. I hear the beep as the door unlatches.
“Sweet Jesus, we’ve hit the jackpot,” I hear my mother coo as she opens it.
“Quit talking, Naomi, and get the shit.”
I have no idea what Garrett’s plan is or why it has gone this far. There is no way Mark isn’t in on this, or isn’t coming in to save the day.
I just wish I knew when.
As if someone could read my mind, all of a sudden Paul’s grip goes loose on me and I hear a grunt. Before I know it, I’m being grabbed by a hand and pulled into an exam room.
“Stay here and don’t move,” Mark says as he slams the door shut.
I do as I’m told. I try to listen through the door, but it’s muffled. I hear something hit the ground, my mother yelling, and then—a gunshot fired.
I know what Mark told me to do, but I have to know what’s going on. I throw the door to the exam room open and look at the carnage in front of me.
Paul is on the ground and unconscious, lying in a heap in the middle of the hallway as Charlie ties him up. I take a step forward toward the safe and see Ben holding my mom around the waist as she desperately tries to break from his hold.
And then on the floor, bleeding, is Garrett.
“No!” I scream as I sprint to his side, Mark already next to him applying pressure to his shoulder.
“Don’t worry, Angel,” he says, though his words come right before a hiss of pain. And there’s blood. So much blood. “It’s just a flesh wound. I’ll be fine.”
“You fucking bitch!” my mom yells as Ben carries her out of the clinic, literally kicking and screaming. “I wish you were never born!”
And those were the last words I hear out of my mother’s mouth as she’s dragged away. Hopefully, for good.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Garrett
Despite my protests, I had to stay the night in the hospital. That’s what happens when you are shot by your girlfriend’s mother and are on blood thinners.
I knew I needed treatment, but I didn’t want to leave Paige behind, and the only reason I did was because Mark and Charlie were there. As soon as she was done giving her statement, and Paul and Naomi were taken to the police station, she was at the hospital with me. And because my girl knows everyone at the hospital from her years of volunteering, it didn’t take much for her to convince the nurses to find her a cot so she could stay with me overnight.
I wanted to go straight back to her place once I was given the green light to leave the hospital. I wanted to climb into bed, bring her in my arms, well, my good one, and never let her go. I wanted to kiss her and make sure that after everything that happened, that she was OK.
But we had to make one stop first.
“You look like hell,” Mark says as he holds the door open for me and Paige. “I mean, I’ve always been the more attractive brother. But today I’m really running up the scoreboard.”
“Nice to see you too, asshole.” And it was. I know scenarios like last night are something he and Charlie are used to, and I’ll never admit this out loud, but I was terrified at every step. So much could have gone wrong. And because of my brother, his wife, and his team, everyone I love is now safe.
And that is all that matters.
As we sit down around his dining room table, which is overflowing with food, we are caught up on what happened at Innovative after I was taken to the hospital. At first, neither Paul nor Naomi were talking much, except for blaming each other and Paige. And, from what Paige says, that went as far as “my bitch of a daughter” before the police eventually took them away.
Luckily for us, drugged-out people are not hard to get an advantage on. Since Naomi only said, “no police,” we figured they didn’t know what Mark did for a living. And once they told me to meet them at the clinic, Mark called in Charlie, knowing we’d need an extra set of hands and a woman who could move like a ninja. Both of them were planted inside with Ben stationed on the outside. Hell, I knew they were there and they still took me by surprise once everything went into motion.
“I still want to know who has twenty-five thousand dollars just laying around for a rainy day?” I ask Mark, who spent most of the night at the police station listening in on the interrogation.
“You never know when you need to pay off terrorists, or idiot drug dealers,” he says with a grin. “Pass the ketchup.”
“Did they say anything?” Paige asks. “I still don’t understand why after all this time she came looking for me. Or how she even found me.”
“Oh, they said things. It was quite interesting hearing both of them try to pin it on the other to get a deal.”
“So what did they say?” I ask, growing frustrated with my brother’s lack of urgency.
Mark takes a big bite of his burger before beginning. Asshole.
“Naomi talked the most. From what I pieced together, after she got out of jail the last time, she didn’t have anywhere to go. Her landlord rented out the house. Now, this part was fuzzy, because she started rambling. Sometime after that she called Paul, for drugs or sex or a place to stay, maybe all three, and that’s how they got together.”
From what Paige has told me, all of that makes complete sense.
“They had to leave town. Paul pissed the wrong people off. And when you’re a lowlife drug dealer, it’s not like you can just pop up in a new town and start selling. They were running low on cash when Paul mentioned you. Your mom said you were in Virginia but that was all she knew. Apparently, he
might be a piece of shit, but he knows how to use the Internet. He Googled you, saw an article on you in the paper after you won county teacher of the year, and figured out what part of Virginia you were in. When they got here is when they learned about Garrett. It was their cherry on top. And the rest… well, you know.”
“I can’t believe she told the cops all of that,” Paige says, an almost relieved tone in her voice. “That doesn’t seem like her. She usually stands by her man in these situations.”
Mark chuckles. “Apparently, when she’s the one being interrogated, she sings like a bird. And tries really inappropriately to use her sexual ways. I think they made a deal with her just so she would quit trying to take her shirt off.”
“I’m so sorry,” Paige says, looking at everyone at the table and then to me. “I put you all in so much danger. I would have never forgiven myself if something would have happened to you.”
“We’re fine,” I say, using my good arm to bring her into my side. “We’re fine. You’re fine. Your mom and Paul are in jail. No one is hurt.”
“And I finally got to use my new stun gun!” Charlie says excitedly as she begins to clean up the containers. “I love getting to use new equipment to knock a grown man on his ass in two seconds.”
“Glad we could help,” I say sarcastically, noticing Paige lets out a deep yawn. “I think it’s time for all of us to get some sleep.”
Mark rolls his eyes. “We get the hint, brother. You want to examine Paige thoroughly to triple-check for any injuries. I get it.”
Charlie swats his arm. “I like their idea. If they leave, we’ll still have an hour before the kids are home from Ben and Gretchen’s.”
That’s all my brother needs to hear as he all but kicks us out of their house.
The drive back to Paige’s house is silent, which I understand. Hearing everything that Mark said, and just the events of the last forty-eight hours in general, is a lot to handle. She was kidnapped. I was shot. That’s a lot to process.