not really, but it was strong, and she recognized it.
“Blood. I’m covered in blood.” Her skin slipped into a thick wave of gooseflesh.
She was pretty sure it wasn’t hers, but that didn’t do too much to make her feel better. It wasn’t a little blood, not like from a busted nose-Mommy hits when she’s in a mood-or even from a big scrape like she got along her leg once when she was a kid and a car hit her.
No, this was a lot of blood, like enough to fill a person.
Tina’s skin crawled again at the thought. She bit her lip to stop herself from panicking. Panic too much and people think you’re easy prey. People think that way about you in Camden, and you don’t live long. That was a lesson she learned a long time ago and one she never intended to forget. You couldn’t be a coward if you wanted to survive in her hometown.
So, she was covered in blood. But at least it wasn’t hers. That was a bonus.
On the other hand, she could be in serious trouble if she didn’t figure out who the blood belonged to, and the last thing she could remember was partying with Tony Parmiatto after he offered to give her a lift.
Tony was the real deal, one of the guys who actually made money in Camden, dealing the sort of stuff no one ever wants to think about and smart enough not to get hooked on it. He was handsome, rich and fun to be around. He had a great smile, and his jokes always made her laugh, and okay, so he was a few years older than she was, but that wasn’t so bad.
He was also her ticket out of Camden. Maybe she could never be a Mafioso, not in the truest sense because, hello, female, but if she got in good with Tony, she could be connected to the Family in the right way. She could learn from her mom’s mistakes and do things differently. She could get work, could make enough scratch to get the hell out of Camden and never once look back.
That was the plan, right up until he tried to slip his hand up her shirt.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like him, because she did. It was that she wanted him to like her, and not in the way that meant he called her when he was horny. She wanted him to like her enough to introduce her to his friends, to his bosses. He’d have to work for it before he got anywhere beyond a little snuggling.
Tina shivered again. They’d been arguing about something, she remembered that much. She closed her eyes to try to focus on the last discussion they had and she could remember Tony laughing, a nasty, mean sound, and smiling, but it wasn’t a nasty smile, it was just, it was just Tony being Tony. She was angry about something, but she couldn’t make her mind get past the noise that came out of nowhere deep inside her head, a sound loud enough to make her want to scream WAKE UP!
– like an explosion going off, and that was all she could remember. After that there was waking up a few minutes ago.
“What if I did something to Tony?” She spoke the words softly, afraid that saying them out loud would make them a reality.
She had to bite her lip again to stop the panic. Tony was made. He was connected. Throw a hundred other Mafia cliches out there and he was those too. He was second or third in line for the local mob guys and that meant if she’d done something to Tony, his friends would be after her to do something back.
Now and then a body showed up in the Delaware River. At least twice she watched them get fished out by the cops.
She stood up from her makeshift seat and looked around. There was a big space of parking lot in front of her, but the entire shopping center she was in looked like it hadn’t seen a person in months. A weathered sign faced the highway a few yards off. It read PENNSAUKEN MART and over that, someone had placed several yellow signs that stated it was marked for demolition.
Pennsauken? That was miles from Camden! How had she gotten here?
She shook her head and dug into the duffel bag, hoping for shoes a second time. It was going to be very, very hard to walk back home without a good pair of shoes.
There was a pair of sandals that looked almost new. They were three sizes too big, but she didn’t much care. Tina fished them out of the bag and dropped them on the ground ready to slide her feet into them. Then she froze and stared back into the bag.
She stared hard, barely even breathing, and then hastily closed the zipper. Then she opened it again. Closed it, looked around and finally inspected the contents a little better.
Money. A lot of money. Most of the bundles of bills she could see looked like hundreds and twenties. Her ears were ringing and her heart felt like it was about to break a few ribs.
She sat down hard on the warm concrete walkway to the interior of the abandoned shopping center.
“Oh, damn. What did I do?”
It was hard to swallow.
“What the hell did I do?”
No one answered her. No one. She was all alone.
Chapter Nine
Hunter Harrison
Hunter Harrison looked at the address on the folded envelope he’d pulled from his jeans pocket. It matched the one on his learner’s permit. He stared at the road where 138 Willoughby Way should have been. No houses, just a lot of torn-up buildings and construction vehicles. Oh, and the sign that said there were new houses going up in the Silver Hills Community!
His stomach did a nervous drop and he shook his head. It hadn’t been much of a chance anyway, had it?
There weren’t a lot of chances for things to go right around him. Nothing had been going his way in the last five months and before that, well, he couldn’t remember much of anything anyway.
Five months. That had been when he woke up in Baltimore, Maryland, in a sleazy hotel room with two suitcases full of clothes and very little else. He hadn’t expected to wake up there. He’d expected to wake up in his bedroom at 138 Willoughby Way, which should have been in front of him.
Five months to learn that nothing was what he’d expected it to be. Five months to try to understand why the face in his hotel mirror looked much older than the face he thought he remembered or even like the crappy photo on his learner’s permit.
Time had gone wacky around him, maybe, or he’d been out of his mind for more than five months because he didn’t for a second think he could have changed as much as he had in less than a couple of years, at least if the picture on the ID was right.
If he thought about his past a lot-and he did-he could get glimpses, flashes of memories, but none of them made much sense. There was a man he thought might be his father and a woman whose face made him feel happy. He was almost certain she had to be his mother, but he couldn’t come up with a name to go with her face to save his life. There was another boy, smaller, younger, with a bright smile. He thought his name was “Gabby.” He wanted to know all about them, all of them. He wanted to know about the others he saw now and then, kids in uniforms, sometimes just eating lunch together and other times studying. He knew he’d gone to school with them, but that was all. There were no names, not even the name of the academy they’d attended.
They might as well have all been images from a stranger’s scrapbook.
Even after he woke in the hotel in Baltimore, things hadn’t gotten any better. He’d spent most of the last five months as a slave to some punk whose name he didn’t even know.
Five months! The thought sent his blood pressure soaring.
He’d been trying to get back to Boston for a long time but never managed it until now. Sometimes he’d get close, like all the way into Rhode Island, but as soon as he closed his eyes, he found himself somewhere else. That unknown, unnamed bastard that gave him orders kept him enslaved so well that sometimes he almost gave up on trying to get away.
Blackouts. Or maybe the kid was drugging him. He couldn’t say for sure. All he knew was that the faceless voice from the recorded messages could steal his life away at a whim.
Worst of all, whenever it happened, days or weeks had gone by. The first few times it was days. This last