“So now what?”
“Now I’m afraid we part ways.” He sets his glass aside, stands up. “It was a pleasure finally meeting you. You are a very attractive woman and I wish we could have met under different circumstances.”
“Yeah,” I say, standing, “like you would ever have a chance.”
“Perhaps.” Xerxes smiles again. “But what you have to remember about men like me, Holly, is that we always get what we want.”
Three men approach. Two of them take my arms, turn me around. They steer me toward the elevator that’s already standing open. They push me into it. The doors slide shut and we start to descend. I think about options again, about possibilities. The men haven’t let go of my arms. Their grip is tight. They may not know my entire background, everything I can do, but they witnessed me take out one of their own so they know I’m capable.
I think about struggling but know it’s not worth it. It would just waste time, burn energy, and right now I want to save up as much strength as I can.
We pass the first floor, continue down to the basement. The doors open, revealing a parking garage. A car is parked in front of us. Reed and Boylan stand beside it. Reed has a Glock 17 in his hand, Boylan a plastic zip tie.
“Thank you, boys,” Reed says. “We’ll take it from here.”
Forty
They force me to put my hands behind my back. Then they put the plastic zip tie around my wrists. Next thing I know I’m being shoved into the backseat next to a large man with a double chin and a cane who smells like cheap cologne.
He doesn’t look at me.
Reed and Boylan get into the car. Reed slides into the driver’s seat, starts the engine, and then we start driving though the garage.
“Boris?” I ask.
He turns his head slightly, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. He says nothing.
“Where are you and Rocky and Bullwinkle taking me?”
Still no answer.
“You know, you’re a lot fatter than I pictured.”
He’s much faster than he looks. One moment his hand is on the tip of his cane, the next it flies up to backhand me across the face. Then it’s back on the tip of the cane, like it never moved at all.
Boylan shifts in his seat to glance back at me. “Just shut the fuck up, Holly.”
We drive up the ramp to the exit. Reed pauses for the gate to open.
As it does, I play around with the zip tie. When they placed it around my wrists I’d balled my hands into fists and kept them together. Boylan hadn’t seemed too worried about it because otherwise he would have noticed this gives me more room when I move my hands so the wrists are touching. It doesn’t give me a lot of room, but it gives me some, enough to start working the zip tie.
The gate opened completely, we drive out into the rain.
“So where are we going?”
Nobody answers.
“You seriously don’t think Philippe isn’t going to figure this out?”
Still no answer.
I think about it a moment, then say, “Unless Philippe is in this with you guys, too.”
Then I shake my head, say, “No, he wouldn’t be that corrupt.”
I say, “Philippe is a good guy. A true good guy. Not a poser like you fucks.”
Boris does his lightning-quick handwork again. This time I’m ready for it and turn my head away. His backhand hits me in the ear. And because it hits me in the ear, he grunts with frustration and punches me in the ribs.
We turn down one street, turn down another. I have no idea where they’re taking me. All I know is that when we get there they’re going to kill me.
I keep working at the zip tie behind my back.
“At least tell me what the appeal is. From what I could see, Xerxes isn’t all that charming. Why would you guys want to be in his pocket?”
Reed brings the car to a stop at a traffic light. He flicks the turn signal on.
I stare out my window, at the cars parked along the street, at the lights in the stores. “Abraham and Kenneth. Delano never had anything to do with them. At least, he never had men try to come in and kill you all.”
The light changes. Reed presses his foot down on the gas, bringing us into motion again.
“By that point Delano had already gotten to you. He’d made a deal. Probably offered you money.”
The windshield wipers screech back and forth.
“He probably offered you a lot of money. And maybe you didn’t want to split it between five people. Or maybe you knew Abraham and Kenneth would never go for it in the first place.”
Up in the passenger seat, Boylan tilts his head from the left to the right, from the right to the left. In the heavy silence the pops are like gunshots.
“Yeah, you knew they wouldn’t flip, that they would be good until the end. So you had to take them out. You had to kill them. Yourselves. Except … except Boris and Boylan were shot in the process. And so were Delano’s men … or were they even his men?”
Boris shifts beside me in his seat. I pause in trying to free my wrists, ready for another blow. One doesn’t come.
“So you had men standing in as Delano’s men. You killed them, only after you killed Abraham and Kenneth. And then … what—did you guys draw straws or something to figure out who would get shot and who wouldn’t?”
The windshield wipers: back and forth, back and forth.
“You sick fucks. You did draw straws, didn’t you?”
My wrists working the zip tie: back and forth, back and forth.
“And Reed managed to luck out. He was the one who would walk away without a scratch.”
The
