Jump The Line (Toein' The Line Book 1)
Page 35
It’s a stupid question born of futility. I think of us: Brick’s victims. Angie Miller. She was a young girl from a broken home with no one looking out for her, no family. Me, ditto. And Meera with her tattoo indicating her caste. “It’s a Hindi symbol,”Brick had said. “The tattoo identifies her caste. She’s merchant, not Brahmin. It tells us she’s from India.”
We were lost girls, American society’s throw aways. We were girls no one cared about, perhaps like Brick’s Francine. At least that’s what Brick had thought, and that’s why he picked us. Proving him wrong, I’d searched for Angie. NPD had started searching for her, too, and for Ang and Meera’s killer. I close my eyes.
Is Aidan looking for me? Is anyone looking for me?
“You’re fucked up!”
I glance toward Stoke. “Why don’t you help me, you fuck!”
He shrugs, glances toward Brick. “I’m here to help, to be a good son.”
“You’re . . . his son?” Headsmack. I should’ve guessed. I’ve heard of serial killing pairs, of father and son killers. This is as scary as it gets. “Stoke, c’mon. We’re friends. We played together as kids before you—”
I think of Julianna Short, Stoke’s first victim, and of Meera and Angie and now myself. To think, I’d begged Brick to help me match impressions of Stoke’s teeth to Megalo Don’s.
“Lie down,”Stoke orders, helping Brick drag me to the gurney.
“No. I’m not making this easy for you.”
“You’ve made everything easy for me, Blaze, right down to spending Omar’ Jain’s night deposit.”
“You punkass!” I spit on Stoke. “You at least could’ve been decent about that. It wasn’t your money.”
Brick picks up his favorite tool, the gleaming scalpel. “Do that again, and I’ll fix your smile—without anesthesia. Now move it.”
“Make this easy on yourself, Blaze,”Stoke says, giving me a push with the barrel of a gun. My ankles still bound with duct tape, I fall backward against the gurney.
“I’ve always known there was something weird about you, Stoke,”I hiss, wanting to unload on him, now that I know he’s Brick’s son. “You disgust me. You left that girl’s shoulder in my fridge, didn’t you?”
“Look, Blaze, it’s not personal,”he says, the terrifying scowl I’m getting used darkening his face. “We need your fucking teeth,”he says, edging the gun barrel around my jaw line in the same disgusting way Brick uses his fingers,“but if you don’t cooperate, we’ll use her instead.”
I shoot a frantic gaze at Officer Barbie. She’s still groggy and moaning. Useless. Now the teeth in my mouth—even my life—have become hostage because of her. I want her to get her ass up and do her job. Be a cop.
“I fucked him,”I say, frantic and feeling myself panicking. Trying to stave off the inevitable, images of my prone body on that gurney, two killers molesting my body, cutting teeth from my mouth, I say the one thing I know will upset Stoke. “I fucked Aidan Hawks, and I enjoyed hell out of it. But you wouldn’t understand, would you? You’re an impotent pussy, like your daddy.”
Stoke’s a textbook case of the sadistic sexual killer. I just hate myself for not paying closer attention. I hate myself for being so needy and lacking in self confidence that I’d befriend a pervert like him. Happily, my taunt is pissing him off, but just like Brick he fights for control.
“Maybe,”he says, licking me across the face. “Maybe I’m not a big stud like Detective Hawks, but Alaina, you can be sure of this”—he licks me again—“I might not be as good a fuck as Hawks, but I’ll be your last.”
Vomit rushes from my stomach. I can’t stop it. When I retch, I lunge toward Stoke with the razor. When it connects with his face, a sense of rapture takes over, or maybe I’m just numb. I slice downward, slicing the razor hard across his face. A sudden rush of animal joy suffuses me when I hear his scream: how good it feels to cut. No release like it!
“You bitch! You’re done!”
Inside my head I hear the gun going off, and then the most blissful sound.
“Baby girl!”
I try to listen, but I’m floating away, certain I’ve been shot and I’m on my way to whatever fate awaits me. But in my delirium I hear it again.
Berta Colby is screaming. “Die, you sumbitch!”
Chapter 52
The officers Captain Meyers sent over as backup arrive at Stoke Farrel’s apartment building. I run over to them. “Where’s Wes Gillam? You seen him?”
They look at each other. “No, sir, Detective Hawks. We’ve been waiting on you.”
“How about Detective Laws? You seen her—?”
“No, sir.”
“—or any Feebs? SAC Smith?”
“No, sir, one of the boots, Officer Bailey says. “Captain sent us to serve your warrants. He said we’re to wait on SWAT before going in.”
“Right,”I say. Taking the front steps two at a time, I bust inside the dump that slime ball Stoke Farrel calls home. Flying down the steps to the basement, I slow at the bottom, where officers Bailey and Scofield catch up. “Take positions,”I order.
With them on either side of the door, I kick it open and nearly fly into the empty apartment. It’s not locked. “Jesus!”I whisper, gagging when the stench hits me.
A blur flies from the apartment and then hits me square in the chest. I grab and hold it. “Shhh!”I say, praying I’ve not alerted whoever’s inside.
“It’s about time you got here,”Berta Colby hisses, yanking free. “What did you do, Detective Hawks? Take a vacation in the Bahamas on your way?”
What do you do with a woman like this? I’ve no time to argue or upbraid her for leaving Goshen without me. “Get your ass upstairs,”I say. “You’re obstructing a murder investigation.”
If we weren’t both intent on finding her daughter, I’m sure she’d toss her head back and laugh, but in that familiar hands-on-hips defiant gesture I’m learning is a Colby trademark, she rasps,“It wouldn’t be the first time.”
Brown eyes snapping, she adds,“Hear me out, Detective Hawks. You’re going to put up with me. It’s my daughter we’re talking about. I’m not going upstairs or any place without my baby girl.” She smiles, but on her it looks more like a grimace. “Now what do you plan on doing about that in there?”
“You’ve been waiting inside that apartment?”
She lets out a short impatient snort. “Only for a few damn hours while you traipse around Mount Repose with Billy Lee.”
I swing my gaze toward the open door. “What’s in there?”
“You’ve got an officer down,”she says. “I think that sumbitch we’re looking for is around here somewhere, but I can’t smoke his ass out for the life of me.”
“I think I can,”I say, stepping inside the apartment.
“There,”Berta says, pushing up behind me.
“Oh, God.”
It’s Wes. He’s lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
“Fuck.”
Silently signaling for one of the boots to call an ambulance, I carefully scan the apartment, but when I start to turn I hear gunshots.
At first I think they’re in the room with us: they’re that loud. “They’re close,”I say, listening,“but they sound muted.”
“It’s coming from behind the wall,”one of the boots yells from across the room. “Here!”
Officers Bailey and Schofield and I, and Berta Colby, rush toward the wall. Turning ourselves into a human battering ram, we’re fighting to breach it when SWAT arrives.
Inside the room, I find carnage. And Alaina lying on the floor covered in blood.
Chapter 53
I hear Robin puttering around in his bedroom, listening to his Guns‘n Roses. “Listen to your music online,”I’ve always begged him, but he won’t. He has to touch his DVDs, rearrange them. “It helps me focus,”he’s always saying, defending his OCD behavior. Today, after all he’s been through, I don’t say a word. Instead I enjoy the fact he’s home. He’s safe.
I touch my jaw, running my tongue gratefully along my teeth. I’d fought, but Stoke and Brick had shoved me up onto that gurney and tied me down. They’d started extracting two of my teeth when Aidan caught them. Almost becoming Megalo Don’s last victim has given me a new appreciation for my pearlies, all thirty-two of them.
Robin walks barefoot from his bedroom and shoots me a smile that melts my heart.
“Hey,”I say, giving him an impulsive hug.
“What’s that for?”
“Thanks for my surprise birthday present,”I say. “It’s the best ever.”
After he and his NPD team busted in on Stoke’s and Brick’s basement party, and shot Stoke and arrested Brick, Aidan urged me to go the hospital. “You’re going,”he said, when I kept insisting I was okay. “Then when you’re home we’ll talk. Okay?”
At the hospital, he gave me a hug, several hugs, and lingering kisses that gave Berta a coughing fit. “A LEO,”she’d joked. “Baby girl, I told you—”
No LEOs. “I know, Mom, but I’m not six any more,”I’d reminded her. “I’m going to be twenty-two—”
I’d watched her and Aidan swap secretive gazes at the hospital when I’d mentioned my upcoming birthday. They amazed me, laughing at each other’s jokes, my mom’s as crude as Aidan’s. It also made me happy. For the first time ever, we all felt like a family. Berta was sober. Robin wasn’t stoned. The tension from our past, the arguing, had evaporated—temporarily. It helps that I finally had my little chat with Berta and confronted her about my dad’s death.
“Did you murder him, Mom?”
She never lies, and she didn’t this time.
“He had the gun, baby girl, and was going to shoot me. We wrestled and it went off, then he dropped it. I was so scared. I got to the gun first, but he shoved me back down on the floor and was coming after me again. I fired. He fell.”
Her eyes had teared over, and for once I saw my mom as the vulnerable human being I’m getting to know.
“It was self defence, Laney, and that’s exactly how the prosecutor saw it.”
I’d hugged Berta and rocked her when she’d cried.
All that matters is that she and I—mom and daughter—are talking.
I know the Colbys too well to think there’ll be no arguing. But for my birthday I got the best present you can imagine. Berta told me where Robin had been, when I was worrying he was Megalo Don and was out murdering girls, including my friend, Angie Miller.
“He wanted to surprise you for your birthday. He self admitted at STARZ, one of the best rehab joints in the country.”
While I was running around frantically searching for Robin, worrying he might again be using drugs and going to end up back in prison, he’d admitted himself into a detox facility for his meth addiction. He’d been under lockdown, a perfect alibi, which meant he couldn’t have murdered Ang, or anyone, and that he couldn’t be Megalo Don. Aidan also told me at the hospital that Robin’s friend, Squeal, who they’d finally tracked down and interviewed, confirmed his story that Robin was checked in at STARZ. Squeal had felt bad about snitching Robin out earlier by telling NPD he’d seen my brother in the alley the night Angie’s body was dumped behind Omar’s.
Being in rehab at STARZ also meant Robin couldn’t have visitors, so he’d sworn our mom to secrecy because he wanted to surprise me for my birthday.
I release him from a hugeass hug. “Just because,”I say, aching when I think what he’s done for us. “I like to hug you just because.”
He drops his head, smiles some more, a little embarrassed. I don’t bother wiping the tears from my eyes. There’s hope for my little Goshen Colby family and former crime gang. For my brother. For my mom.
For me.
“Thanks for not thinking I was Megalo Don,”he says, socking me on the shoulder.
“I trust you. Always have,”I say, wondering what would’ve happened if Meera’s family had trusted her. They’d chosen a husband, a much older man, for her to marry in India, and she’d ran away to escape the arranged marriage. For a brief time, before her dad had tracked her to Cincinnati, she’d worked in a tattoo parlor off campus, which is where I recall seeing a photo of her ankle tattoo. The initials, G.M., hadn’t meant anything to me, so I’d forgotten them until the moment Brick and I had been gazing at photos of her ankle. Yet I couldn’t place them, and they remained as they’d always been: low-level noise floating around in my brain. Until Aidan told me they’d stood for Gayatri Mantradi, her name.
Poor girl. Like I said, if only someone had trusted her, as I trusted Robin not to be Megalo Don. I gaze at my handsome brother and smile.
“I kicked around the idea you were Megalo Don, Rob, but then I dumped it. “But,”I add, wishing trust ran both ways,“You and Mom lied to me. She let me think . . .”
Mom’s not telling me where Robin was has been bothering me, so I feel like I’ve got to clear the air.
“I told her not to tell you I was at STARZ,”he says, defending her, making me feel like we’re back to being our usual quarreling selves. “Besides, I didn’t tell you, either.”
“I know,”I say. I want to trust her, as I do Robin. I want this all to work. I know it’s going to take time. That’s okay, too, I guess.
“Hurry,”I tell him. “We’re going to be late.”
“Wouldn’t want that,”he says, grinning.
“No, I wouldn’t,”I agree, finger combing my hair.
I’ve purposefully worn no makeup, except a dab of blue mascara and my Black Pomegranate nail polish. It matches the little black dress Aidan sent me for my birthday, along with a dozen pink roses. I haven’t called him since he visited me at the hospital. After what almost happened to me, I’ve needed time to myself. It’s time I should’ve taken when I first met Aidan.
Do I regret jumping into bed with him without knowing who he was?
Not at all. I’m slowly discovering that while Robin is OCD, I’m impulsive. I also realize that love-at-first-sight is a strong possibility with Aidan, and that’s great, but it’s an impulsive feeling that prompted me to fall blindly into bed with a man I’d yet to know. I’ve no serious regrets, other than just wanting my space—freedom from the complication of a hookup—to sort myself out.
I look at myself in the mirror on the hall door. “I look like Mom,”I tell Robin,“and I likeme today.”
“What’s wrong with looking like Mom?”he says.
Robin told me she’s been conspiring with Aidan. They’ve planned a birthday“luncheon,”as Berta says—snickering—Aidan’s mom calls it.
The Hawks. I shiver. Nervous, I guess. For one, I’m going to meet them. For two, I have to apologize to Aidan. I accused him of using me, trying to trick me into rolling over on Robin. I was wrong.
I twirl and touch the dress. Expensive. Am I worth it?
“You look pretty,”Robin says.
“Thanks.”
It clings to my body, so I know Aidan picked it out to please him, not me. But it’s also demur, long sleeved, and sophisticated. His mom will like it—I hope. For several seconds, I gaze at my reflection. I feel almost like the Hyde Park whiney heads, like I really am worth it.
I do another twirl then stop, my breath catching. Why do I question my self worth?
It’s his wealth. Aidan’s family is“loaded to their gills,”my mom says. While she finds it amusing I’ve fallen for a LEO with money, I’m scared. Meeting his mother terrifies me, but Aidan swears she’ll love me.
I get the urge to rip off the dress. Does Aidan think he can buy me?
“He’s here,”Robin says.
Chapter 54
When I answer the door, I’m ins
tantly breathless.
“Close your eyes, Alaina. Don’t open them until I say.”
I smell his skin, after the brief kiss he lands behind my ear, setting me on fire, and go with the intensity of my reaction. It’s been a while, but he still has the same effect. The little fire he lights screams across my brain, awakening the need in my body that I swore I wouldn’t allow. I close my eyes and laugh when he lifts me into his arms.
“What are you doing?”I squeal.
“Keep your eyes closed.”
I giggle, feeling light as a feather, but I know it’s gotta be a challenge, even for someone as strong as Aidan, to lift me off my feet and carry me out the door and up my basements steps.
“Okay,”he says, putting me down. “Open your eyes.”
“Is it for—me?”
There’s a red Ferrari parked at the curb. The skinheads who stripped the Coke truck Stoke and I stole would kill for even the hood ornament.
“Is this a joke? I mean, Aidan, I don’t mind accepting dresses for a gift, and roses, but this is too—”
“Vulgar?”he says. “It’s not for you. I’d just like to take you for a birthday ride.”
Headsmack. How could I have imagined he’d bought me that car as a present? Men don’t give Ferrari’s to girls they barely know. Do they?
Aidan opens the door for me, and I slide into the posh leather seats.
“This is for you,”he says, handing me a tiny gold ballet slipper the second he closes his door, and right after leaning over and kissing me.
I resist the Berta Colby urge to crunch the charm between my teeth. It’s obviously gold and very expensive.
“Thank you,”I say, pleased, still smarting from embarrassment at my faux pas over the Ferrari being a birthday present. When will I learn how not to act like Goshen, Ohio trash?
“I forgot this. What good’s a charm without a bracelet?”Aidan says, leaning across lthe console, his gaze sweeping my bare thighs.
I hook the charm to the bracelet. Feeling not the least bit awkward, I forget my promise to resist my crazy urge to devour him. I’m sitting in a Ferrari with a hottie who’s just given me a gold bracelet with a ballet slipper charm. Why deny this moment?