Hell Bent

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