Reunion (7 page)

“Well, then I have the fucking problem that t
he
DEA agent got set loose by the dumbass police chief,” Frenchie grinds out.

My heart sings.

“Excuse me?” The dean’s voice is a metal spike through the eye socket.

“Got a text. Huge MC fight between the Mephists and Loogie’s gang. Rolled into town and the chief needs all his officers. Paulson got set loose but on administrative leave,” Frenchie barks out.
H
e runs a tight hand through his greasy, black hair. “Galt’s on his way.”

Galt? Mark and Chase’s
dad
?

What does all that mean?
I don’t understand a word of it. I just know this has delayed the dean by one minute, and if I can string together enough delays, I can make sure Allie and Amy escape.
 

The dean’s face puckers with rage. “Explain in one sentence.”

Frenchie mutters, “DEA agent loose. Motorcycle gang fight in town. Chief distracted. Galt busy.”

“That was four sentences,” I whisper.

The corner of the dean’s mouth rises a fraction of an inch.

SLAP!
The back of Frenchie’s hand cracks against my cheek before I can even see it coming. I’m used to smelling Amy’s blood.

Now I can taste my own.

“
Shut your piehole, you useless little slit,” Frenchie shouts at me.
 

He’s hit the same cheek that I banged in the parking garage a week ago. It begins to throb. Heat floods the skin around my eye and tears fill my vision. My good eye looks at his hand and sees a big ring on it.

Ah. That’s where the long, hot feeling comes from. I reach up and my fingers slide along blood.

“Learn to keep your mouth shut, Girlie Girl. There’s more where that came from.”

The dean just sighs, as if he doesn’t approve of Frenchie’s actions.

He doesn’t stop him, though.

“There is nothing that imbecile can do,” the dean says with an airy tone. “He was perfect three years ago, though, when we needed him most.”

As I gingerly touch my face and watch Frenchie to make sure he stays away from the hole in the wall, I realize I need to say something.

“Who?” I ask, even though I know the answer.

Frenchie rolls his eyes, reaches over toward my chest, and pinches my nipple. “Your little boyfriend. Bet he loves dipping it in you.”

I go cold.

“Unless you’re still a virgin,” Frenchie adds, the implication clear.

I look at the dean in horror. Allie’s story ripples through what few brain cells I have left. “No. No. I’m not a virgin. I’m sleeping with Mark.” I stumble over my words, my tongue swollen now. I say it again to make sure they understand me. “We’re sleeping together.”

The dean’s mouth stretches in a disapproving line. “So sad. What a waste of pure flesh.”

Frenchie’s nipple twist turns onto a palmful of my breast. Bile rises in my throat. I let him touch me because it buys Amy and Allie time.

It’s a given that I’m going to die. But I won’t die in vain.

“You like that?” Frenchie says in a husky voice, moving closer to me.
T
he fact that I’m not fighting him seems to make him think he has permission. He smells like old spunk, cigarette smoke, and the
sour
nastiness of someone who dr
i
nks themselves into unconsciousness on a regular basis.

I say nothing, but I don’t move.

Frenchie’s phone buzzes again.

“Ah, damn. Work comes first,” Frenchie says, moving his hands off my body. I release my held breath. My neck is tightening, nerve pain filling the bones around the side of my face. A jagged lightning bolt starts around the edge of my eye socket. A migraine. I haven’t had one of those since I was thirteen.

I’m not surprised it’s happening now.

“
Fuck,” Frenchie hisses, looking at the dean in alarm. “We gotta go.”
 

“I’m not going anywhere,’ the dean declares.

“Shipment’s compromised. Fifty-three of them intercepted by a roadblock.”

The dean is examining the saw blade with the emotional interest of a person looking at Egyptian artifacts at a museum. “Roadblock?”

“We were moving them from here to the next target point.”

“Fifty-three? We only had fifty.”

Frenchie snickers. “We picked up a few extra along the way. For good measure.
Plus the new one.
”
Frenchie jerks his thumb at me. “Her friend. The one the butcher took care of.”
 

M
y heart jolts. Wait. The dean
isn’t
the butcher? Then who is?

The dean nods once. “
She was promising. Looked so much like my beautiful Nora.” He makes a
tsk tsk
sound. “
And they’re all gone?”

“Fuck,” is all Frenchie says.

The two mutter to each other, their conversation hard for me to hear over the ringing in my ears. If Frenchie hits me again like that, I’ll pass out. And I can only imagine what he’d do to my body if I weren’t sentient.

I shudder. I try to breathe through my nose and can’t. It’s clogged, swollen from the blow.

But I’m also relieved. They think Amy was part of the shipment of women who’ve been intercepted. They have no idea I got her out of here. No idea she’s alive and with Allie, Chase and Drew.

I know where everyone is, now.

Except Mark.

I may not know where he is, but I do know one thing.

He’s coming for me.

And he won’t stop until he succeeds, or—

He dies.

“
Carrie,” the dean says, reaching out to touch my upper arm. I flinch. He ignores it. “We regretfully must pause our little interaction.”
 

Sick. He’s
a
sick
bastard
.

I turn my head away.
H
e grabs my chin and yanks so hard I feel something pop in my neck. I open my mouth to cry out and he jams my jaw up, my teeth slamming into each other so hard I feel something break.

“You were the final piece in this, Carrie.
T
he piece that got away. Joe figured it all out in prison and sent you a letter before we could kill him. You were so easy to lure. Just a job with benefits. That’s all it took,” he says with a sad, low rumble in his chest. His eyes blaze with calculated madness. “So simple.”

I want to look anywhere but at those eyes.

“You know nothing, though. Not one thing. Remarkable, how Joe protected you. Foolish of him. Telling you the truth would have given you a tool. A weapon. Instead, he left you defenseless. You came back to seek the truth. How cute,” he adds.

When he says the last part, I see Claudia in his features.

“
We need to go,” Frenchie says, his voice terse. A strange sound fills the air behind him, up top where the storage room door is open. It’s a low rumble, like thunder in the distance. It grows, like a Doppler effect, but it doesn’t peak.
 

It just keeps getting louder.

The dean freezes, looking at Frenchie with a speculative air. He is in no rush.

Bosses never are.

Frenchie’s nostrils expand, his knee jiggling, his body nothing but supersonic speed trapped inside bones and skin.
He storms across the room, grabs the giant bag of coffee beans, swings it around his hip and shoulder like it’s a demented sack of Santa’s toys, and stomps up the stairs.
 

O
ne drop of what I now know is blood splats on the concrete, leaving a stain in the shape of a bullet hole.

T
he dean drops the saw to the ground with a clanging echo,
then
click-clacks
up the stairs.
T
he hatch shuts over my head, leaving me in the blinking light of too many fluorescent bulbs.

But with the light of a thousand suns as hope burns so bright.

Galt. Mark. The dean. Frenchie. The interception of fifty plus women. Mikey. My mind races to process it all.

Mark is out. He’s free and he will find me. By now, Chase has explained where I am and what’s happening—

Bzzzzz.

Allie’s phone. I reach back into my pocket and grab it. My hands are slick with my own blood and the phone rises up in the air, arcing high across the room, crashing down near the hole in the wall and the sound of glass breaking feels like my heart shattering into dust.

No.

NO.

I open my mouth and realize there’s something in it. As my jaw pops from being opened, I reach between my lips and worry out the irritation.

It’s a piece of my own tooth. Frenchie really did a number on me.

My tongue finds the jagged molar where the tooth broke. It’s sensitive, but just the white tooth. The root isn’t exposed. The inside of my mouth has the texture of raw hamburger. I wonder what I look like. The gunk from hiding in the tube is drying on me. I haven’t showered in two days. Heck, I haven’t cleaned up from having sex by the beach. I am, in every possible way, a complete mess.

And if Mark or Allie don’t get here soon, I’ll be a dead mess.

I shuffle over to the phone and look down, wincing. My eyes are open just
millimeters
, the one Frenchie hit swelling closed anyhow.

I can’t look. If I broke the phone, my one lifeline, then—

I make myself look.

It’s broken.

I don’t even react. I am dead inside. El Brujo and Frenchie might as well finish the job and make it official. Make my exterior match my interior. What possible brutality inflicted on my bo
dy
could be worse than what they’ve done to my mind?

I begin to pace. The storage room looks so weird with full light. Blood streaks the floor where Amy was. My own blood mottles my hands, my clothes, the backs of my hands. The stain from whoever was in the coffee bean bag makes a strange sort of smear on the unpainted concrete floor.

Boxes are on their sides, upended from my time shoving everything off the shelves to get to the hole in the wall. Papers scatter on the shelving, the floor, and litter the space.

It looks like someone’s ransacked the place. Normally, criminals do that. Not truth seekers.

Chase must be texting me. He has no idea why I’m not replying. Is Mark with him now? I close my eyes.
I
t’s not hard with one of them so swollen. I imagine Mark. I conjure his face. I remember those muscled arms, dusted with light brown hair. How his eyes warmed when I talked to him about dogs at the shelter. The way he was so quick to comfort me.

How he waited three years for me.

“Carrie!” Allie’s voice is so faint I wonder if I’m dreaming it.

I pause. I hold my breath.

I wait.

“Carrie!” Her voice is more urgent. Slushy noises, like suction in a cup of pudding, come from the hole in the wall. “
It’s raining outside and I need you to get here, now!”
 

I scurry over to the wall and look in. A thin line of water is
drip drip dripping
into the room, running down the cinderblock wall, making a dark, nasty stain.

Nothing as bad as the blood by the stairs, though.

Her face appears at the opening, shoulders tight in there. I slide my hands under her armpits. She looks up, her nose almost bumping mine.

“What happened to you
r
face?” she gasps in horror.

I yank her. She spills out, slithering like a snake through mollasses. Allie falls clumsily to the concrete floor.

She looks around and blinks, over and over.

“You found the light switch.”

“Not exactly,” I say, my words a little slurred. I can’t quite focus on her any more. My eyes aren’t able to work together.

She stands. A rope is around her waist. She looks at me, the whites of her eyes sticking out in a filthy face. “What happened?”

“Frenchie.”

All I have to say is his name. She grabs my shoulders and peers into my
e
yes. Well—
my one
eye
that’s functional
.

“Did he hurt you? I mean, other than your face?”

I know what she’s really asking.

“He didn’t rape me.” Mentioning the nipple grab and the groping won’t help right now. I can tell her later.

“Thank God.” She looks around, her eyes pausing on the broken phone. “He broke it?”

“No.” I hold up my bloody hands. “I fat fingered it.”

She frowns. “Okay. We need to go.”

“El Brujo was with him.”

As I say the words, the live rat that bit me earlier in the pipe, when I hid in there, begins to lick the blood stain where the coffee bean bag was.

Allie looks down and lets out a shriek.

I scream.

We both stand there, screaming as if we were being electrocuted.

A phone rings.
I
t breaks through our freakout. Allie digs into her mud-covered ass and pulls out a phone I’ve never seen before.

“Yeah,” she says breathlessly. “In here. She’s fine. We’re—what?
What?
Oh, fuck.”

I’ve never heard Allie curse, so....

She looks at me with alarm. “Frenchie and Galt are here. Just pulled into the driveway on their bikes. They’re waiting in the parking lot. Drew’s watching. He was about to come in and get us, but he can’t now
without creating a bloodbath, and we could get hit in the crossfire
. Chase doesn’t know where Mark is.”

“Shit!”

“I know,” she snaps. She listens urgently to Chase, then adds, “We need to get out of here.”

“We can’t,” I point out. “If Frenchie comes back and sees only me, then it’s safer than if he finds us both.”

She shudders. “He’d love to get his hands on me.”

“He’d love to get his hands on anything with a vagina, Allie.”

We both grimace.

“Look. You hide in the pipe. I’ll put a box over you.
Wait until they leave.”
 

“You don’t know what Galt and Frenchie are like, Carrie,” she says in a cold voice. “Galt wants Chase dead. He’d rather see his own son dead than have left the motorcycle club. If he gets his hands on me, Chase will come find me, and then...”
H
er voice trails off.