84
ANSON
The Kid had zeroed in on the laptop. I found him hovering over the keyboard, his face pasty and shimmering with sweat. He seemed oblivious to the dead man at his feet. When I saw what was on the laptop screen, I understood why.
Twill was in some sort of a cage, her back against the bars.
Unconscious. The image was hazy, tinged with bright green.
Some kind of night vision. It looked like there was someone in the cage with her, lying against the opposite wall, also unconscious.
That wasn’t the worst part, though. It was the small button in the corner of the screen that grabbed me. It read, “Bid Now.”
“Is this live?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. Not at first. He was busy clicking through windows and studying text that looked like complete gibberish to me.
When he did speak, his voice was trancelike.
I only got half his attention. “I don’t think so.
It’s hard to tell. It’s not a video file stored locally on this machine; it’s being broadcast on a private VPN network.
There’s no way to differentiate between a live feed or a recording, but the ‘bid’ button doesn’t work. That makes me think . . .”
“It’s too late to bid because it’s already happened.”
“Yeah.”
“Can you tell where she is?”
He shook his head. “The VPN keeps rolling. Every five seconds, the IP address changes. It’s rerouting all over the world.
” He tapped a dirty fingernail against the corner of the screen near the clock.
“That little lock icon is for a program that keeps it all in sync, like a key. Garage door openers work the same way. It makes them hard to clone. You need both halves to complete the link, but even if you have them, the rolling IP prevents tracing. She could be in the next room, or she could be halfway around the world.”
On the screen, Twill stirred. Her head rolled loosely on her neck as she slowly came to.
“Oh, fuck! Is that Twill?”
Ruddy.
I ignored him. “Is there anything on that thing that might help us find the girls?”
The Kid minimized the video window and went back to the gibberish text. “Maybe. I need to spend some time on it—check all the directories, software, stored data . . .”
From the middle of the room, Vincent called out to me. He had the woman on her feet. “You coming or staying here?”
I told the Kid, “You can’t stay here. It’s too open. Why don’t you take the laptop to one of those storage rooms we saw on the way in and see what else you can find? Wait for us there?”
The Kid looked relieved. The truth was, without elevators, we’d be climbing stairs, and he was in no condition for that.
I think part of me knew there was a good chance we wouldn’t be leaving this building, particularly if we went upstairs, and I wanted the Kid to live.
I wanted to see him escape all this. I turned to Ruddy. “Stay with him? Keep him safe?”
Ruddy tightened his grip on his rifle and nodded. “Yeah, alright.”
I went back to the others. When I told Paul and Vincent what was on the laptop, Paul whistled.
“Twill in a cage match? Fuck that.” He glanced over at Vincent.
“Remember what she did to that Mathew kid back at Finicky’s?
Tore him apart, literally.” His eyes grew wide, and he turned back to me.
“She sliced him up into pieces and put him in these small white boxes. Ears, eyes, nose, lips, even his—”
“Enough,” Vincent told him.
Paul wasn’t done, though. “She left the boxes all over the farmhouse. Tied them up with a string like some kind of present. Scared the piss out of Finicky every time she found one. Even Welderman and Stocks were rattled. I’d never seen them scared before.
That girl has no trouble going batshit. You don’t want to be on the receiving end of her crazy. ”
Vincent was eyeing me, but he kept his mouth shut.
He’d told me Twill led Mathew out to the cornfields and killed him, but he said they never found the body. Apparently, that was only half the story. The grim look on his face told me Paul was telling the truth.
I thought about what she did to the medical examiner back at Roper the day I’d first met her. The three guys in that cottage out at Charleston Harbor.
I told you from the start that girl was off, Champ. Didn’t I tell you? Maybe it’s best if she dies in that cage. A wild animal is one thing. A caged wild animal is another. A caged wild animal who escapes is another beast entirely. Not something you want to encounter.
The woman at the end of Vincent’s rifle had remained quiet through all this, as if waiting patiently for whatever came next, a bored look on her face. Like our sole purpose was to break up the monotony of her day.
Vincent shook off Paul’s story and turned back to all the other kids still milling around the lobby.
“I thought I told them to spread out.” He opened his mouth to address them, and the woman managed to quiet him with a simple look.
“If they leave this lobby and venture further into the hotel, they will all die.”
He stared her down. “We’re armed and we have numbers.”
“You’re children marching into the fire. Do you want their deaths on your hands?”
Vincent didn’t reply to that.
“Tell them to remain here,” she said. “Or go back outside. I don’t want to see them die any more than you do.”
“Because you’re some kind of saint and you want to help us?” Paul said sarcastically.
Although she didn’t reply, I understood. “Because we’re only worth something to her if we’re alive.”
A flash of ice passed behind her eyes. “Further bloodshed is unnecessary. I’ll take you to your friends, then you will leave us to conduct our business.”
Paul coughed into his hand and muttered, “Bullshit.”
“I can’t risk further injury to my clientele. It’s bad for business. There will always be more girls to fill the coffers.” She smiled coldly at me. “Boys, too. But proper clientele can be far more difficult to cultivate.”
She said this without emotion, as if stating facts, and the knife Lisco had given me grew heavy in my hand.
It wanted to come out of the sheath. It wanted a taste of this woman’s neck.
Vincent’s finger eased closer to the trigger of his gun, too.
I think we all wanted her dead, but now wasn’t the time.
Vincent leaned toward Lisco and Pudge, who had come up beside him. “Wait here with everyone. If we don’t come back in fifteen minutes, I want you to clear this place floor by floor. Kill every last one of these people.”
Pudge let out a soft grunt and flexed his bloody hands.