“What about our loose end? Is he dead yet? We can’t have guys betraying us.”
“He’s a hero right now. We don’t want more media attention. We wait, and then we kill him.”
“Get rid of him before he starts more trouble.”
I slide around the side of the stairs, the dusty air messing with my breathing. I coil in preparation for when this guy gets close, but my train of thought stops when I hear the distinct crack of gunfire.
Miles.
Castor snaps his attention to the door. “I’ll call you back,” he says. “I think we’ve been compromised.”
He hangs up his phone, and I have to remind myself that I’m here for a purpose. Castor heads for the door, and I lunge at him. My shoulder connects with his back, and we both hit the ground, winded. I grab my gun and press it to his head, but he rolls to the side—faster and stronger than I anticipated—sending me to the floor.
Castor jumps to his feet. I fire, missing him, but his panicked dive for cover gives me long enough to stand. I rush after him and tackle the guy before he can get his own handgun up and ready. We struggle for a moment, and I wrench his weapon from his hand. Castor pulls back with a fist and cracks me hard across the face.
The next moment I’m on my back, my head pounding.
I get up, and that lunatic kicks me in the sternum like he’s a goddamn soccer player. I stumble back and hit the stairs, unable to take in breath.
Castor runs for his handgun and I fire again, causing him to go for cover. With my strength returning in small amounts, I kick his handgun away and chase after him. Castor exits the building into the midafternoon light. He’s running at full tilt—no way I’ll catch him—and instead I fire at his legs, clipping his ankle and sending him to the dirt.
Before he can recover, I throw myself on top of the man and torque his arms around to his back. He thrashes about, the blood from his ankle splattering across the ground in light amounts. I use the zip-tie to keep his arms in place, but the man is thin like a boney coatrack. I fear he might be able to slip from the device.
The sound of a car peeling out across loose gravel draws my attention. A van—some dirty ice-cream truck thing—rolls through the construction site at a speed well beyond the posted limit. It heads straight for me, not but a hundred feet away, and my whole body tenses.
“Pierce!”
I jump up and shove Castor away from me, getting some extra momentum as I push him to safety. The tires of the van graze the tip of my shoes as I stumble back across the dirt, my heart pounding.
Gunfire rattles from the vehicle as a pair of lowlifes fire at me with fully automatic weapons. I scoot backward behind a stack of pipes and listen to the ricochet of bullets on metal.
Castor, handcuffed, snakes his way away. “Hey!” he barks. “Hey!” But his voice is drowned out by the roar of a car engine, the blasts of Uzis, and the general pandemonium of echoes across the construction yard.
As the van speeds off and begins to turn, I run over to Castor. Sure enough, the man is nimble and flexible. He jump ropes backward through his arms and gets his hands in front of him, though he can’t seem to slip the handcuffs. I land a solid punch across his face, but he kicks me in the side with some roundhouse bullshit like he’s a trained fucking fighter.
I’m ready to brawl, but he grabs my jacket and yanks me close. I struggle to get out of it, if only to shed the clothing he’s holding, but Castor pushes me back just as I get my arms out, sending me to the ground as the van tears toward us.
Castor throws my jacket over me, temporarily blocking my sight, but panic fuels my flight as I leap up and away from the van’s swerving. Bullets cut through the jacket at multiple points, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I got hit, but my mind can’t process pain at the moment. I rip the jacket off and chase after Castor as he limps away.
For the fourth time, I collide with him and we hit the ground, dirt filling my mouth. I spit, get up, and punch him in the side, my knuckles cracking down on ribs. Castor groans and goes still.
Sirens cut through the cacophony. I hold Castor down as I watch the van peel out of the construction site. Who called the cops? I shake my head. After all that gunfire, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole city called the cops.
Castor gets one good look at my arm—and my tattoo—and then stares up at me. I feel ice run through my veins when he gives me a look of recognition.
“You’re with the Vice family?” he hisses. “You fucking traitor. You’ve made a huge goddamn mistake.”
CHAPTER TEN
I ROLL down my long sleeves and search for my gun. It’s in the dirt, still loaded with a few bullets, and I scoop it up, ready to solve my latest problem. Miles jogs up to me from the other side of the construction site, a bruise over his right eye but otherwise unharmed. The sirens continue to shriek in the distance, closing in faster and faster.
“What’s going on?” Miles asks.
I level the gun at Castor’s head. “Nothing. I’m just correcting a mistake.”
Miles grabs my arm and pushes it away, a look of incredulous disbelief written across his face. “You can’t shoot him! This isn’t street justice—we have to hand him over to the police!”
I pull Miles close. “He knows who I am,” I growl. “He has to die.”
“How? You two know each other from before?”
“My tattoo.”
Castor, under my knee and thrashing about, spits at me, missing. “You’re living on borrowed time, asshole! I don’t know what you thought you would accomplish here, but going against us was the stupidest mistake you’ve—”
“Shut up,” I state, cutting him off. I get it. They’ll come after me. That’s not news.
Sirens. They make my skin crawl. A shiver goes down my spine when I think about what Castor could say to them.
“We can’t give him to the cops,” I say. “Then they’ll figure me out.”
“We can’t kill him,” Miles replies. “We can’t. Not when we have him subdued. It’s straight-up murder at this point.”
“If we let him go, he’ll go straight to the Vice family with what he’s seen.”
We’re running out of time. Every second adds a whole new layer of stress. What have I gotten us into? Fuck me. This is all my fault, and I need to pull it together. I pick up my ruined jacket and grit my teeth. Anything is better than inaction.
“Help me grab him,” I command. “We’ll decide this later.”
“What do you mean, later?”
“When we aren’t swarmed by the cops!”
Miles nods.
Castor, on the other hand, flails about. I take my gun and smash it across his face, and then repeat the action, blood and saliva splattering onto my knuckles. Miles grabs my arm, a look of panic and concern etched into his face. I stop. Castor isn’t unconscious, but he’s dazed to the point of stunned compliance. I grab him by his armpits and Miles takes his ankles.
Kidnapping a kidnapper. How ironic.
We get to the fence, and I know we’ll never be able to carry a grown-ass man over the chain-link barrier. Miles knows it too, and drops Castor’s feet in order to fling himself to the other side of the fence and jog to the car. Within seconds he’s turned our vehicle around and speeds toward me. I drag Castor out of the way, just in time to see Miles smash a portion of the fence open enough for me to get through.
I open the trunk and unceremoniously heft Castor up into the thing. The smell of oil stings my nose, but I push it from my mind as I slam the hatch shut. After I get into the passenger seat, Miles peels away from the construction site, his eyes glued to the road. I grab another cigarette and light it up. Anything to relax.
“I can’t believe what we’ve done,” Miles mutters.
He speeds out of the area but forces himself to slow once he pulls out onto a busy road. The oppressive nature of Noimore is comforting—almost like the city is lulling us back into a world of crime—and I know that no one is going to bother us as long as we k
eep our heads down. Police vehicles speed by in the opposite direction, their sirens disrupting the peace.
“What happened?” I ask Miles, my mind going over our plan a hundred times in order to see what went wrong.
“I found my guy,” he replies. “But when I jumped him, there were these other guys I hadn’t even seen. I got away from them, well, after one guy tried to punch me and another tried to shoot me, but then they jumped in a van. When I got outside, you were already there and in a fight.”
“So there were others?”
“Yeah. Two others.”
“And your guy got away?”
“All three of them did! You saw the van.”
Which means the cops will walk away empty-handed. I exhale a line of smoke and rub a hand down my face. “Listen, I’ll take our guy to a spot I know, beat some information out of him, and then dump his corpse in the Noimore landfill.” It’s a pretty nice place to dump bodies. Sure, they find them occasionally, but never with any expediency.
“No,” Miles says. “We can’t kill him.”
“Why not? He’s a piece of shit. He shot Davis—he would have shot me—and he’ll definitely go back to his scumbag ways if we let him go.”
“We’re on the side of the law now,” Miles says with a tone of sardonic anger. “That’s not what cops and private detectives do.”
“Yeah, but this way I can work him over for information. That’s what we want, right? Stopping these kidnappers will go ten times faster with some straight answers.”
Miles grips the steering wheel like he’s choking the damn thing. “We can’t do that either.”
“Why?”
“Illegally obtained information can’t be used against someone,” Miles states. “If we beat information out of this guy, we won’t be able to use any of it to prove the guilt of the people we’re trying to finger.”
“Says who?”
“The federal government. Shelby didn’t explain to you the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine? It’s a cornerstone of legal investigation.”
Jesus Christ. Does he know everything about the law now? I take a long drag on my cigarette and exhale. “Fine. We can’t kill him. We can’t work him over for information. What do you want to do?”
“We should take him to the police station,” Miles says. “We’ll tell them that we arrested him and brought him straight there.”
“I told you—we can’t do that. If he tells the cops about me, we’ll have other problems to deal with.”
Miles gets quiet.
What other option is there? The only other thing is to let the guy go, and we can’t do that either. He’ll go straight to the Vice family, which might be worse than him going to the cops. Jeremy is unstable and off in the head. He’ll do something—send enforcers to kill me, have someone bring me back, something—and I don’t think I can deal with that.
So what choice do we have? Keep Castor in our trunk forever? That’s tantamount to torture, and we won’t even get any information out of it.
Miles comes to a four-way stop and stares at the street signs. One street leads deeper into the city, toward the central police station, and the opposite leads toward the freeways out of town. There’s a honk from behind us, causing me to tense, and Miles turns the car toward Joliet. I exhale another line of smoke.
We still don’t know what we’re doing with this guy. We’re just eating time.
“What if we drop him off anonymously?” Miles asks.
“I dunno. You tell me. Will the police take a person randomly gagged and bound on their front doorstep?”
“No,” Miles murmurs.
“There you go.”
I sigh. There isn’t anyone in the police department I trust enough to leave this guy with. I know some officers who were on the Vice family payroll—and I would recognize them on sight—but they don’t owe me any favors. If I went to them, they would go to Jeremy. Same problem, different chain of events.
We get onto the freeway and exit Noimore. No trouble. No hassle. I figured we’d be fine, but fate has a way of fucking with me. Still… the problem only gets worse the longer we go.
“I need to pick up Jayden and Lacy,” Miles says.
“We should handle this first.”
“I can’t be late.”
“Why? What does it matter? A few minutes won’t kill them.”
“I told them I’d be there,” Miles states. “Okay? I know you don’t care about them, but they mean a lot to me.”
Yeah, I know. He went out of his way to save Jayden on more than one occasion. His siblings mean the world to him.
“Fine,” I say. “Let’s get them, drop them off at the house, ask our old neighbor lady to watch them, and then deal with this guy. One way or another.”
Miles nods. “All right.”
“—AND THEN we learned the basics of the quadratic formula,” Lacy says, her voice blending together in my ears like one long uninterrupted sentence. Parts of my body feel like they’re on fire, and listening to this isn’t helping.
I forgot how fucking boring school was. Although if I had to do everything all over again, I might try to stick it out. But Lacy makes it seem like the secret circle of hell.
“You’re learning about the quadratic formula in seventh grade?” Miles asks. “I’m surprised. I didn’t learn about that until high school.”
“It’s a fancy prep school,” Jayden interjects with a dismissive wave of his hand. “They keep telling us it’s for college. Hell, some of the classes offer college credits. Lacy might have a degree by the time she graduates.”
Lacy grabs the back of Miles’s seat and sits forward. “Can Shannon come over today? I got a perfect score on my history exam.”
“Of course,” Miles replies.
A thump echoes throughout the cab of the car, and I know immediately that it’s Castor in the trunk. Miles flips on the radio, no doubt understanding the situation as well, but it screeches with white noise like the piece of crap it is. He turns the radio off and pulls out his phone. He sets it to rock music—something with a buzz of bass—and then leaves it.
“Are you okay?” Jayden asks.
“Yes,” Miles says, curt.
“Are you two fighting? You both have, like, bruises and stuff.”
“We’re fine.”
Jayden leans in between the front two seats. He glances back and forth before smirking. “So, when you guys get a divorce, does that mean we won’t be seeing Pierce any longer?”
“We aren’t married,” Miles states.
“So we definitely won’t see Pierce any longer?”
“Jayden.”
Miles’s threatening tone gets his brother quiet. Jayden slinks back into his seat.
“Hey,” Lacy says. “It’s that police officer again. Who is he?”
I stare out the front windshield and grit my teeth. I knew fate wanted to fuck with me. Lieutenant Rhett Walker waits in front of our house like he’s guarding the place, milling around the sidewalk next to his cruiser. The empty streets and sidewalks should have been a dead giveaway. Nobody wants to be out when there’s a cop nearby.
Miles turns to me with a look of panic. I want to tell him Hit Rhett with our car, but I know that’s not a real option. Well, not an option Miles would take.
“Park a few blocks away,” I tell him as I remove my bullet-hole-ridden jacket and shoulder holster.
Miles nods.
I throw my equipment onto the floor of the car and make sure my sleeves are down to my wrists. I don’t need any unnecessary questions.
We have a driveway, but Miles drives past and turns a corner, much to the confusion of his two siblings. Lacy stays quiet, but I don’t think Jayden has it in him to keep his mouth shut.
“What’re you doing?” Jayden asks. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I tell him. “Get out of the car.”
Everyone files out, and I walk around to the driver’s side. I go for the keys, but Miles stops me. “We shou
ld all go up together,” he says. “Rhett knows we’re here now. Let’s talk to him first.”
I don’t like this plan, but I’ll go with it. I guess it’s better than getting Rhett more suspicious than he already is by disappearing whenever he turns up.
We walk together around the corner and up the street. The uneven pavement threatens to trip me a few times, but I avoid stumbling thanks to the light of the descending sun. Lacy jumps over the cracks with grace but stops once we near Rhett. She gets odd and tense, like she doesn’t trust him, and for a brief moment I like her a little more than before.
Rhett straightens himself when we get close, his dark hair windswept yet still styled—does he groom himself for the criminals, or was it prep for visiting us? I’d ask, but I don’t think I could keep my condescension out of it.
“You parked pretty far away,” Rhett comments. “Why?”
“So this fatass can burn some calories,” I say as I motion to Jayden.
Jayden glares, his face a shade of red. “I’m not even that fat,” he chokes out under his breath. “Why do you keep saying that?”
“Because you react.”
“Jayden, Lacy,” Miles says. “Go into the house, please.”
His siblings walk away—Lacy more eager than Jayden—and I wait a few feet behind Miles, hoping this encounter will be over with quick. I doubt Rhett is here to arrest me, considering he hasn’t done anything yet, but he may be here to question us. Why today, of all days?
Once the front door closes, Rhett crosses his arms over his chest and sighs. “I got a call today in conjunction with the group of human traffickers.”
Miles and I remain silent.
Rhett continues, “Apparently there was a gunfight at a construction site in Noimore not but an hour ago. From all the reports we gathered, it looks like prep work was done on the place for our suspects to do their shipping, but everything was interrupted. An elderly gentleman in charge of the security says he saw two people in a jalopy of a car snooping around the area.”
Silence settles between us. Everyone knows what Rhett’s implied, but what does he think we’ll say? It’s not like we would out and out admit anything. Well, I wouldn’t. A small piece of me thinks Miles might.
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