Rob Cornell - Ridley Brone 02 - The Hustle (32 page)

“Did you know that nearly every member of the Arndt side was killed by unnatural means?”

His eyebrows went up and his eyes went wide. “Wow. I didn’t.”

I wondered how much of that surprise came from his realizing where I was headed with this. I pulled my left arm close to my body so I could feel the bulge of my gun under my coat. I unzipped the coat, but made sure to keep my weapon covered. “Nice and warm in here.”

“I hate the cold. Winter time comes, I crank the heat. Drives my wife nuts. Swear she’s got an internal heat source. She wears shorts outside in December. You believe that?”

“Must be nice.” I shifted on the couch so I could reach under my coat if I needed to. Small talk aside, we were only a few words from the crux of this conversation. “Anyway, yeah. Almost all of Eddie’s immediate relatives killed by some freak accident or tragedy, like the murder-suicide.”

“Eddie used to say he thought he was cursed. Now I wonder if he wasn’t right.”

“He wasn’t.” I watched his face, looking for a tell. Nothing yet. “There’s no such thing as curses. But Eddie did have a whole lot of heartbreak in his life. A whole lot of torture. Everyone he loved taken from him, sometimes brutally.”

“I know, right?” He wrinkled his brow. “Unluckiest bastard I ever met.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Huh?”

“Luck had nothing to do with it,” I said. I lifted my eyebrows. “Isn’t that right?”

Now his gaze hardened. The hinges of his jaw bulged under his skin as he clenched his teeth. “If I didn’t know any better—”

“You do. You know damn well.”

A vague accusation like that was just the thing to shove him into a staggered confession. But he didn’t trip. “Are you accusing me of something?”

“Like what?”

“You tell me.”

“Let’s try this,” I said. “Do you see what pattern I’m talking about?”

“All the bad deaths in Eddie’s life.”

“All of them Arndts.”

“You saying those deaths, they weren’t accidents?”

“No accidents, and no murder-suicide. Just plain murder across the board.”

The color rose in his face. “And you think I have something to do with it?”

“Don’t you?”

He shot up from his chair. “That’s crazy. Eddie was like a brother to me. Why the fuck would I do that?”

“To punish him for what he did to your actual brother. To Hunter.”

His nostrils flared. He slowly turned his head from side to side as if trying to screw it tight so it wouldn’t blow off. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course not. It’s crazy, right? An older cousin spending the better part of his life torturing the younger, getting revenge. Now you see why I had so much trouble wrapping my head around the idea.”

“You need to get the fuck out.”

“Is that a confession, Shawn?”

“I’m not confessing shit. What you’re saying is ridiculous.”

I eased back on the couch, playing it chill even as acid boiled in my gut. “You want to explain why you didn’t tell me you saw Eddie right around the time he was killed?”

“Whatever whacked out theories you have don’t matter. The cops said it was an accident. I’ll take their word for it over some hustling private detective.”

“All this time you were pretending to be his friend as a way to stay close and find other ways to tickle your vengeance. But I bet it grew beyond that. I bet after killing Eddie’s parents and little brother, you decided you liked killing.”

He charged at me.

Remembering his championship fighting plaque, I wasted no time standing. Before he reached me, I had my gun out.

He stopped short, glaring at the gun as if I held out a pile of dog shit instead. Only about a foot stood between us.

“Back up,” I said. “We’re not done talking.”

He didn’t back off, though. He puffed up his chest as if he thought he were bulletproof. “You going to force some confession out of me by holding a gun on me? That ain’t gonna work. Even if it did, you think the cops would take it seriously?”

“That’s what’s funny. I’m not worried about what the cops think. I’m worried about Eddie. He hired me to look into his family’s murder. I made some bad choices, and now he’s dead. I owe him the truth.”

“The only truth is that Eddie and his family are a bunch of assholes who thought they were better than us. Even my aunt turned her back on us. Snobs, all of them.”

Maybe there was more to this than just getting back at Eddie. “That’s quite a bit of animosity toward one whole side of your family.”

“Not my family. I’m a Wagner, not an Arndt.”

“Well, a genealogist would disagree with your interpretation, but I’m not interested in your family tree other than the branches you cut off.”

“Last chance,” he said, looking at me over the gun. “Get out before I get you out.”

I waggled my piece. “Gun here, remember?”

His gaze snapped to the gun. He smirked.

I made the mistake of blinking. Next thing I knew my hand was numb and the gun was gone. I had enough time to glance over to where the gun had landed on the living room carpet.

Then Shawn’s fist nearly knocked my head off my shoulders.

Chapter 32

I tipped away from the strike, feet slipping out from under me, and the floor raced up to say hello. Lucky for me, he had knocked me down within reach of my gun.

Unlucky for me, he grabbed me by the ankle and yanked me out of reach. Then he twisted my leg in an unnatural way, the tendons in my knee crying uncle as he bent and bent. Some kind of submission hold.

I tapped the floor until my palm stung, but he didn’t let go. Guess tapping out wasn’t an option in this fight. I stretched out my hand toward the gun, but unless I turned into Mr. Elastic, no way I could reach.

Shawn, on the other hand, must have thought I
was
Mr. Elastic with the way he kept bending my leg. “A little more and it’ll snap at the knee,” he said.

I clenched my teeth, but it did nothing to hold back my moaning. Tears swelled in my eyes. The pain in my leg nauseated me, as if it had crawled up into my belly and taken a dump. Somehow, I hung onto the glib. “It’s okay. I have another one.”

“Fine,” he said.

The next thing I heard was the cartilage in my knee popping like the sound of a toy cap gun firing a few shots. The pain blinded me. I only saw swirls of red and purple. Some terrible noise roared in the room. I didn’t realize right away that it was me screaming. When my vision cleared, I lay still and limp, face smashed into the carpet knap. Pain pulsed up my leg with each beat of my heart. My cheeks were streaked with tears.

What did he do to my leg? Oh, God, what has he done?

He dragged me across the carpet, well out of reach of my gun. When he dropped my leg, my knee knocked against his barbell. Stars sparkled and popped across my vision.

A sneakered pair of feet stepped into my line of sight. “I don’t need a gun.” Shawn’s words trailed down to my ringing ears. “I can kill you without anything more than my own body.”

I worked for each breath. “This is just as good as a confession.”

He barked a short but hearty laugh. “You don’t quit, do you?”

“It’s my fatal flaw.”

“Fatal’s about the right word.”

I’m no Ultimate Fighting Champion, but I’ve held my own in a number of scraps. And when your life is on the line, it’s okay to fight dirty. I wrapped my arm around his ankles and yanked toward me.

He’d let his confidence breach his guard. He lost his balance and tipped backward like a chopped tree.

I didn’t wait until he hit the floor. After tripping him, I jackknifed my body and grabbed the barbell.

He pounded to the floor on his back. I heard the
whuff
as the wind hopped out of his lungs.

Once you start fighting dirty, you can’t stop. I swung the barbell with as much force as I could muster and connected with the side of his knee.

He cried out and tried to roll away. I swung again, downward, and struck the same knee. The crack I heard sent a victorious thrill through me. A knee for a knee, motherfucker.

Shawn was tough. I had a few seconds at best. I dragged myself across the floor to within reach of my gun. I stretched out my arm and my fingers brushed the grip.

A hand wrapped around the calf of my bad leg.

Oh, shit.

Shawn tugged.

White flashes sparked across my vision. All I had left was the animal instinct for survival. The pain had otherwise wiped my mind clean. I pulled forward even as he pulled back, a tug-of-war with a broken leg. My knee felt as if it were filled with crushed glass. But still, I stretched. I reached.

Shawn stopped tugging. I felt an instant of exquisite relief, then he dropped onto my back and straddled me like a wild horse. His hands snaked over my shoulders and hooked to meet under my chin. His fingers locked and he yanked back on my head.

The muscles alongside my neck screamed along with my bent spine. A person simply was not meant to bend that way. Seemed Shawn was an expert in body bending. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t fight his grip. Which all left me with little hope even as my hand took hold of the grip to my gun.

If Shawn noticed I’d reached my weapon, he didn’t seem to care. He kept his fingers laced under my chin and continued to turn my neck and shoulders into a U.

I had no chance of shooting him in this position. But I had a gun, damnit. That had to count for something. I cocked my arm at the elbow and tried to aim over my shoulder.

Shawn must have seen the gun then. He let go.

My head and shoulders snapped forward like a bent branch suddenly released. I fired a shot off on the way down.

Shawn shouted and rolled off of me.

I didn’t think I’d hit him, but a gunshot up close was loud and startling. Especially when the barrel of said gun is pointed in your general direction. Once I had him off my back, I rolled onto my side, facing the way Shawn had dove, bringing my gun around with me.

He sat on the floor, legs straight out in front of him, his back against the wall. An easy target. And a big honking part of me wanted to pull the trigger for what he’d done to my leg. Later, I would realize the similarity to Eddie’s own trials—broken limbs and the thirst for revenge.

“Don’t you fucking move,” I said.

The way he sat, he had no chance of moving off his ass fast enough to knock the gun away this time. He held up his hands, his face red, eyes simmering.

The horrific pain shooting up and down my leg, along with the burn in my throat from having my neck bent backward, made me shaky. I had to make my next move before I dropped the gun or passed out. Holding the weapon in one hand, I dug out my phone with the other. I had Palmer on speed dial—something he would resent if he knew—and I called him up.

“My leg’s broken and I have a killer at gun point,” I said. “Think I could get an assist?”

“Brone?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s Ridley. Forgot about that.”

“Did I hear you right?”

“If you heard about a broken leg and a killer at gun point, you heard just fine.”

“Jesus Christ. Where are you?”

I gave him Shawn’s address. “I don’t want to rush you, but—”

He had already hung up.

I expected Palmer. I got Detective Shanks. She came through the front door shouting . “Hawthorne PD. Hawthorne PD.”

My head was a little spinny, but I could still appreciate the sexy authority in her voice. When she and a pair of uniforms barreled into the living room, guns drawn, I let my gun tumble out of my hand and flopped onto my back. The edges of my vision closed up. I heard a ruckus, some more shouting, but all at the periphery. Then a face came into what remained of my vision. Detective Shanks.

“Brone. What the hell happened here? Ridley?”

You’re so pretty
, I thought.

She made a face.

Wait? Had I said that out loud?

“Do you need medical attention?” she asked.

“Hell yeah I do.” Then I drifted off.

The following morning, an otherwise kind-looking nurse served me a mysterious plate of something she claimed was food. I thanked her, then pushed the tray away on my little hospital table and settled back against my pillows.