She picked up the phone and saw someone had sent a text:
There’s an address already plugged into this phone's GPS. The keys to the car are in the glovebox. If you want to see your sister alive again you will go there. You will come alone or she will die. Text back to let us know that you have received this message. It is a nineteen-minute drive according to the GPS. We’ll give you twenty. If you’re late I cut something off of her that she’ll miss.
Instead of texting, Margot selected the text and hit the button to reply with a phone call. While the phone rang, she retrieved the keys and slid over to the driver's seat.
On the fourth ring, someone answered.
“I told you to text.”
“I find these kinds of conversations are better if you can hear my voice.”
“We’re not having a conversation, not right now anyway. We’ll talk when you get here. The clock is ticking by the way.”
“I’m going to need to talk to my sister.”
A minute later she heard Melanie say, “Margot—” before being cut off.
“Like I said, clock’s ticking,” the man told her.
Margot was already driving when she asked, “Who are you?”
“I think your friend Mal referred to me as ‘The Cowboy.’”
“I killed the cowboy.”
“No, you killed a cowboy. I’m ‘The Cowboy.’ There’s a difference. Clock’s ticking.”
The Cowboy ended the call. Margot brought up the GPS and started following the directions. She didn’t know when exactly The Cowboy had started the clock, so she ran the stop sign at the first intersection and put the pedal to the floor. They’d said to come alone, but she still called Radcliff and told him the address and what was going on there. She didn’t figure he or anyone else would get there in time to do anything but clean up the bodies.
Margot ran another stop sign before she pulled up to an old house in an older neighborhood. It had a for sale sign in the front yard that looked almost as old as the house. The phone buzzed and Margot looked at the screen. The text read:
I’m in the house across the street. Leave your car where it is. I’m watching you.
Margot saw that her slim chance of the cavalry arriving to save her had just got a lot slimmer.
Chapter 10
Margot knocked on the door and a voice matching the one from the phone said, “It’s open.”
Margot went inside.
“Come on back, we’re in the bedroom.”
Margot walked back. She expected to see the man she’d seen a while back at Shaw’s office, the one wearing a hat and boots and driving an old Cadillac convertible, but this wasn’t him. He was younger and taller. He wasn’t built like a tank like Brantley, but he still looked strong. Like the other two men she’d thought might be ‘The Cowboy,’ he looked very sure of himself. He had a Glock with an extended magazine in his right hand hanging casualty at his side. The gun had a long suppressor that hung down past the man’s knees. He could probably fire the weapon in the back bedroom without anyone really hearing it, even if they were right across the street. He flipped a large combat knife around like it was a baton with his left hand.
Suddenly, he stopped playing with the knife, tipped his hat to Margot, and motioned towards the bed with the blade. Melanie was bound with duct tape on her wrists ankles and over her mouth.
“I don’t know if you noticed, but this is not the kind of neighborhood where people come running when someone screams for help.”
“What makes you think I’m going to scream for help?”
The Cowboy smiled, “Tough chick, huh?”
Margot didn’t bother to answer.
“As you can see, she is alive and well as promised,” he continued. “You must have a lead foot, Margot, because you did that nineteen-minute drive in just under seventeen minutes and that was with a slow start.”
“Let her go. You’ve got me and she has nothing to do with this.”
“I don’t know about that Margot. She’s your sister. Do you know how many otherwise innocent people I’ve killed to send their brother or even their cousin a message?”
“No, I don’t really want to know either. Just let her go. You wanted me, and I’m here.”
“Do you think that’s my end goal out of this? Just to get you here?”
“I have no idea what your goals are. The fact is, this was over a while ago. Did someone forget to tell you?”
“Who said it was over? Not the man paying me. I’m an independent contractor, Margot.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“It has everything to do with it. The people that hired me to not just kill Dean Stone, Mal, and yourself, but to make all you miserable while I did it, don’t get to cancel the contract just because they lost their status in the cartel. If you hire me to do a job, I’m going to do the job.”
“How are they going to pay you in federal lock up?”
“That is their problem, Margot. Trust me, they’ll find a way. I can be very persuasive. Now, enough about me, let’s talk about you.”
“What’s there to talk about? You were hired to kill me.”
“Yeah, but I was hired to make you suffer too. In fact, whether I need to kill you all or just kill most of you was unclear. My interpretation of the contract was I had some discretion on who suffered and who got killed, as long as all three of you got a good taste of at least one of those two options.”
“Is that why you made a deal with Mal? He was just
