Hell Bent

by Heather Killough-Walden

  But Annabelle could already see what Brandt would find attractive in Ginnie. Meredith was like a ray of sunshine on a rainy day. Like that Indian Summer in a land where winter was a dreaded, white death.

  And she was psychic! That had to be a plus!

  Annabelle smiled to herself at that thought. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in such things, per se, it was just that they’d never played a central role in her own philosophy. Still, if Meredith said she was psychic, than who was Annabelle to tell her she was wrong?

  Now she frowned as she found herself wondering what it might have been that Brandt left behind with the petite blonde. What would a twenty-something year-old med student think was so important, and so dangerous, that he would need to leave it with someone he trusted – to hide?

  And once she asked herself that question, Annabelle realized, with some trepidation, that whatever it was, it was about to become un-hidden and given to her.

  Virginia Meredith turned her key in the gold knob and pushed open the door of her apartment. She crossed the threshold, adjusting her purse on her shoulder, and then paused. She lifted her chin, as if scenting the air for something. And then she frowned, blinked, and came the rest of the way in, closing the door behind her.

  With the practiced aim of one who had done so a thousand times, she threw her purse onto the couch across the room, where it landed, face-up, against the throw pillows. Then she moved into the adjoining kitchen, and, once there, she stopped and looked around her, as if suddenly not understanding where she was.

  Lemon gnocchi with spinach and peas. That’s what she had wanted for lunch today. She’d been craving it from the moment she’d woken up until she’d gotten the phone call from Annabelle Drake. Since that time, however, all she’d been able to think about was Craig. And the thing he’d given to her to hide.

  Six years.

  Six years…

  Virginia turned around and left the kitchen, making her way to the couch as if she were a zombie. She sat down and gazed toward the window, not really looking out through it so much as looking inward. Remembering.

  So much had happened in the six years since Craig’s death. Before he died, they’d actually talked about getting married. Having kids. They both wanted tons of them. Virginia always talked about how she would cook gourmet meals for them to put in their lunches. How they would read to them. She and Craig both loved books. Different kinds, but books, nonetheless.

  Since then, Virginia had dated other men. A few, here and there. One or two of them might have even worked out; they might have given her that family she’d always wanted. But she’d dumped them and moved on, not really knowing why.

  Until now.

  Six years isn’t long enough to kill love. Love, in all of its god-forsaken perfection, is immortal. How horrible is that? How unfair? When people are so fragile, when life is so fleeting. Where does God get off making something so strong that lasts so much longer than we do?

  Virginia found herself sitting back against the couch. Absently, she brushed the back of her hand against her cheek. It came away wet. She looked down at the smeared tears and her brow furrowed. She suddenly felt more lost, in that moment, than she ever had before.

  And, it was at that moment that a sound escaped from the bathroom down the hall.

  Virginia sat up like a bolt. Her mind was at once painfully alert.

  It had sounded like the shower curtain rings sliding over the curtain rod. Her ears strained to hear more. And there it was. A rustle and a footfall.

  Someone was in her apartment.

  Annabelle sat straight suddenly, her hand pausing in its downward swipe through her long hair. She stared out the window, her brow furrowed. Something had pulled her out of her reverie.

  Their surroundings looked familiar. In fact…

  “Weren’t we just here?” she asked. She’d zoned out over the last few minutes, her mind on the matter of Craig Brandt and the somewhat more distracting matter of Jack Thane in bed.

  “Yes. We’ve turned around,” Dylan told her from beside her in the back seat of the cab.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m a bloody fool,” Jack told her from the front seat. He turned to face them both, an agitated expression on his handsome face. His blue eyes were sparking with barely-kept tension. “We never should have left Meredith alone.” He shook his head. “What was I thinking?” He seemed to be talking to himself. Then, to them, he said, “We haven’t managed to go without a tail for more than a few hours thus far. Virginia Meredith is as good as dead.”

  Annabelle’s eyes widened. “I’ll call her.” She held her hand out for Jack’s phone, but he shook his head, his eyes boring into hers. “It’s no use, Bella. I already tried to contact her. No answer.”

  He had? When had he done that? While she was staring blankly out the window day-dreaming about his sexual prowess, most likely. She blanched.

  “No answer?”

  Again, he shook his head. Once. “None whatsoever. It went to voicemail.”

  Virginia’s scream died in her throat when she hit the back of the couch and it dug itself into her diaphragm, choking the breath from her lungs. She dropped to the floor and then scrambled, still breathless, across the hardwood floor.

  Her attacker followed her easily, stalking her around the living room. So far, he hadn’t spoken a word to her. He had merely appeared in her hallway in time to stop her from making it fully to the door and out into the apartment’s main corridor.

  Then he had slapped her, not hard enough to knock her out, but hard enough to send her stumbling backward into the coffee table in the living room. She’d gone for her purse next, attempting to make it to her cell phone. But, again, he stopped her, making it to the purse first and dumping the contents of the entire bag out onto the faux fur rug. They watched her phone bounce once and land near the leg of the coffee table.

  Before she could contemplate making another dive for the cell, he was crushing it beneath his boot. It wasn’t hard. The man must have weighed in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds. Not much of it was fat, either.

  When this had happened, Virginia’s dread kicked up a notch. She tried to consider her options. There wouldn’t be any running out the door, because he stood in-between the exit and herself. She had no landline into the apartment. Her cell was her only means of communication with the outside world. She had a computer and did possess cable internet service, but she highly doubted that her attacker would sit back and wait patiently while she typed out an email SOS.

  That left the fire escape. There was nothing in between it and herself except the dining room table and a sliding glass door.

  She had stood still, breathing heavily out of terror, and trying, with every fiber of her being, not to give herself away by stealing a furtive glance toward the glass doors. She’d slowly inched her way around the coffee table, her back to the fire escape exit.

  And then she had heard that same glass door open slide open behind her.

  “Took you long enough,” the man in front of her had said, speaking to someone over her shoulder. Virginia had been nearly overwhelmed, then, with terror-induced nausea. Her heart was in her stomach as she slowly turned around.

  Another man was standing there, this one just as tall, but skinny as a rail. The expression on his ugly face was nothing if not mean. “Hello, sweet heart.” He’d grinned at her, exposing crooked, tobacco-stained teeth.

  So, Virginia chose to exercise the only option that had been left to her at that point. She opened her mouth and screamed.

  Which was when the big guy had spun her around and slammed her against the couch. It had been deftly done, as if he’d know just how to get her in the solar plexus and knock the wind from her body.

  Now, she crawled across the living room floor, attempting in vain to gain back a little air. Her head pounded and her vision was blurring. Having a bit of a medical education, she knew enough to recognize that the swimming dots and tunneling vision in
front of her were due just as much to fear as they were to a lack of oxygen in her system.

  She was having a panic attack. A part of her wanted to give in to the attack and let it take her under, where the men couldn’t hurt her any longer or do anything worse to her. But another part of her fought the impending darkness and yanked her out of unconsciousness with a ferocity that can only come from the human old-brain’s intense aversion to death.

  Her lungs expanded and she swallowed in gulps of air.

  Someone grabbed her by her hair and began to pull her into a standing position. She cried out, coughing with the effort, and grabbed the man’s hand, instinctively pulling on it to relieve the pressure in her scalp.

  “We’re gonna ask you some questions, pretty, and if you answer nicely, we’ll forego the worst of the torture. How’s that sound?” It was the skinny one. His breath smelled like onions and digesting sausage.

  She gagged and tried to turn away from him, but his hand in her hair prevented any real movement.

  Her mind was spinning. Think, Virginia, think! “Just let me go and we’ll talk,” she croaked out.

  Jack threw open the door to the taxi and began running down the block before the driver even came to a full stop.

  “Wait here!” Annabelle told the man, and then followed after Jack. Dylan was hot on her heels. At full speed, Annabelle had a very hard time keeping up with Jack, who she knew was not running nearly as fast as he could. He didn’t exactly want to leave the two of them behind and vulnerable, even if he did want to make it to Meredith’s apartment as soon as possible.

  So, Annabelle forced any discomfort she felt in her body, especially her damned hips, to a backburner in her consciousness and tried, very hard, to ignore it. She pushed herself as hard as she could, focusing on the sweet blonde woman who owned The Lavender Garden, and her impending doom should they not make it to her rescue on time.

  And several yards ahead, sprinting at a racer’s pace, Jack continued to silently beat himself up. He’d been so preoccupied with Annabelle, in so many damned different ways, he’d self-fulfilled his own bloody prophecy about his inability to concentrate eventually getting someone killed.

  He no longer bothered to ask himself how he could have been so blind, because the answer was plainly clear to him. And it didn’t exactly matter, anyway. In the end, what was done was done. What mattered now was amending the mistake and getting to Virginia Meredith before the Colonel’s men or Godrick Osborne tortured the truth out of her or killed her out-right.

  The latter was sure to come after the former, in the end, anyhow. So Jack hoped that, at the very least, it took a little while for the young woman to break.

  The skinny man let go of Virginia’s blonde hair and gestured toward the couch. He was still grinning lecherously. She put her hand over her mouth, willing the bile to stay in her stomach.

  Just get them out of here…

  She slowly made her way to the couch and sat down. She was shaking badly. She wondered if she was going to die, and what she could possibly do to prevent it.

  She swallowed, but almost choked on it because her mouth was so dry. She knew why they were there, in her apartment. She knew it was no coincidence that they’d shown up just hours after her phone call from and meeting with Annabelle Drake. They were there because of Craig and the thing he’d given her to hide. The secret he’d left in her care.

  “Now then,” the skinny man began, “let’s talk about your old boyfriend and what it is he left for you, why don’t we?”

  “What do you want to know?” she stalled. Her jaw began to ache with the effort she put forth to keep her teeth from chattering together.

  The skinny man’s grin faltered. His eyes narrowed. “If you wanna play games with me, sweetie-pie, I can think of some better ones.”

  She held up her hand, which was shaking so much that it looked as if she had Parkinson’s disease. “No – what I mean is, do you want to know what it was,” she asked, blinking as she again tried to swallow a dry lump of fear down into her gullet, “or where it was?”

  The skinny man blinked. Then he glanced at the big man, who still stood across the room. The expressions they exchanged were nervous.

  “What do you mean ‘was’?” The skinny man asked.

  Virginia steeled her nerves. Keep it together, she told herself. You can do this. She took a shaky breath. “I already gave it away,” she said, managing to inject some resolve into her tone. “You aren’t the first people to ask me for it today.” This, she knew, they would already be aware of. So, it only reinforced her own act.

  It was several long seconds before either of the men spoke. They looked at one another and then back at her. The skinny man narrowed his gaze at her and she surprised herself by meeting it head-on. And then he pulled a cell phone out of his front pocket and pushed a button on its pad.

  Jack stepped back from the locked door of the apartment complex and scanned his surroundings. There was a keypad on the main entrance door. Through the tiny chicken-wire-reinforced window in the thick metal-lined door, Jack could see a small lobby with mail boxes along one wall. A stairwell and elevator occupied most of the wall on the other side.

  Annabelle and Dylan came around the corner at the end of the block. He spared a glance in their direction and then turned his attention back to the door. He thought about it for a few seconds. And then he stepped back into the shadow of the awning.

  When Annabelle reached Jack, it was to find him pulling out his gun and screwing a silencer onto the end of its barrel. Her eyes widened. She looked around nervously, but no one was watching. Instinctively, she crowded close to him, wanting to shield his actions from the view of passers-by.

  “Can’t get in any other way?”

  “We don’t have time.”

  Dylan joined them then and she shot him a meaningful glance. He looked down at Jack’s gun and then back up at her and Annabelle knew that his expression mirrored her own.

  A motorcycle passed by on the street and Jack pulled his trigger. The strange sound it made was masked by the bike’s engine. The keypad smoked and lay lopsided against the door. Jack wasted no time ripping the door handle off with his gloved hands and swinging the broken door outward.

  The skinny man watched Virginia closely as someone on the other end of the connection spoke into his ear. Then he closed the phone and re-pocketed it. The lecherous sneer on his face was gone now. It was replaced with a more serious expression. One almost regretful.

  He pulled a gun out of a holster beneath his jacket and pointed it at her. “Last chance, pretty. You sure you gave it away? You sure you don’t want to make it magically appear out of thin air?”

  Her next breath hitched, refusing to enter her already sore lungs. Her eyes were the size of saucers. Dread encased her in a cloak so dark and cold that her vision once more began tunneling inward.

  She couldn’t make what Craig gave to her appear out of thin air. And even if she did – even if she told them where it was – they were going to kill her. Either way. No matter what. She knew it with every fiber of her being. The skinny man’s gun was going to go off.

  I never called to thank dad for the check, she thought to herself. It was a fleeting regret, floating before a mind that was quickly spinning into oblivion.

  The skinny man shrugged. His form was outlined by the sun shining through the still-opened sliding glass doors that led to the fire escape. It made him look like a demented angel. “Sorry, sweetie-pie. You’re a cute little morsel, but we gotta go now.”

  Virginia opened her mouth to scream, somehow subconsciously deciding that if she was going to go, it would be while making some noise. But the big man standing behind her slipped a giant callused hand over her mouth, silencing her final outcry.

  And then there was a blur behind the skinny man. It was red and blue and brown and was carrying something long and thin. That long, thin thing swung through the air like the blade of a helicopter, blurring just like the rest of the
figure.

  There was a strange thunking-popping sound, and the skinny man went down, dropping like a meager sack of potatoes. The bullet he fired burned a hole in the couch beside Virginia and slipped out the back to embed itself in the big man’s upper thigh.

  The big guy released Virginia’s mouth and doubled over in pain. As he did so, there was further fast movement beside Virginia and the long hard instrument, a Louisville Slugger, slammed into the side of the big man’s head as well, taking him down along with his under-fed compatriot.

  The room was suddenly, shockingly, still. Still, but for the sound of two sets of lungs breathing heavily – one out of fear, one out of exertion. Virginia looked from the fallen figures on the floor to the man who stood beside the couch, a baseball bat in one hand, green-gray eyes gazing intently down at her.

  She stared for a long, long time.

  And then, with a trembling voice nearly too quiet to hear, Virginia whispered, “Craig?”

  Jack closed his phone, taking the stairs two at a time. The man on the other end had just told him which apartment number was Virginia Meredith’s. Annabelle and Dylan raced up the stairs behind him. A part of him wanted to tell them to stay behind and keep out of the way, but he knew they wouldn’t listen, even if he did.

  At least, Annabelle wouldn’t.

  And if Annabelle wouldn’t, Dylan wouldn’t either.

  So, Jack just moved fast and kept his requests to himself. He made it to the third floor and ran down the hallway to the fourth door on the right and didn’t hesitate before turning the knob and bursting inside, his gun drawn and held at the ready.

  Annabelle rushed in behind Jack, her eyes scanning the setting and its inhabitants with somewhat surprising speed. Instinctively, she’d drawn her own gun, and now gripped it tightly with both hands. But, instead of a scene of torture and terror, what she found herself studying was Virginia Meredith sitting on the couch, a man seated beside her, and two men, dressed in sports coats and jeans, unconscious on the hard wood floor. Small, dark pools of blood were spreading beneath their heads.