38. Ivy
THIRTY-EIGHT
IVY
As soon as Coyote was out of sight, I snuck further down the hallway, heading straight for St. Clair’s office. I knew she kept the hard copies of records there, and with Coyote and the others hopefully waiting for me at the staircase, I had ample time to get in, get what I needed, and get the fuck back out before someone caught me.
All I had to do was get there.
I was so close. If I could find out why they wanted my father dead, maybe I could figure out the who of it. Which one of his so-called friends wanted to end his life so they could take what didn’t belong to them?
I refused to believe there was any valid reason outside of that. Why would anyone want him dead? He’d done nothing wrong.
With St. Clair occupied with her ex and the party she was hosting, I breathed a sigh of relief when I found her door unlocked.
How stupid of her. Leaving her room open to access from anyone who wanted in. I didn’t even need my lockpicking skills.
Disappointing.
I was in the room in seconds, the door closing silently behind me. Time was short, so I used what I’d learned from my previous visits here to navigate the darkness, hesitant to turn on a light that might give me away.
My fingers followed the wall until I reached the place she’d designated as her “office,” finding that this door, at least, was locked. I should have known a woman like Lilly St. Clair would lock away her most important secrets. She assumed no one would dare to venture into her lair uninvited. And should they be so bold, they wouldn’t reach what they were after without some solid effort.
But I’d anticipated the troubles. I was expecting resistance.
She wouldn’t keep me out. Not that easily.
I slipped the lock pick from my sleeve and got to work, crouched in front of her office door like a true burglar, only what I was after wasn’t valuable to anyone but myself. What I wanted, what I sought, was only going to hurt three very specific people—and they waited unknowingly for me at the stairs.
As the lock clicked into place, my mind wandered. Would they come looking for me if I didn’t turn up soon? Would they suspect something was up? Would they even care?
Why did I care if they noticed my absence?
I shouldn’t.
I really, really shouldn’t.
But a part of me did. She defied all logic, all common sense, all manner of sense I should possess, and cared what the men who ruined her life thought about her little, insecure self.
Once again, I had let something dangerous into my life, and here it was, hurting me from the inside. Would I even be able to kill them when the time came? The fact that I felt things for them, well, that didn’t change their deservingness of pain and retribution.
I sifted quickly through the stacks of boxes labeled with each crew’s name and the year of the files, biting my tongue so hard it bled when the urge to whoop in celebration rose inside me. I found the year and their name on a box shoved in the back, tugged it free, and finally clicked on the desk lamp to flip through the folders.
I found it buried beneath the others, like someone had intentionally tried to hide it.
Ashamed of their own work, apparently.
But when I tugged it free, the joy and satisfaction I should have felt was short-lived.
I opened the folder and set it on the desk, my fingers trembling as I flipped the front cover back and spotted the picture in the corner of my father, just as he looked when he died, his charming smile looking eerily menacing in the lighting of the room.
Surely that was just a trick of the light .
My father never looked like that.
I read through their detailed bio on him: address, age, height, weight, license number, family–both live and dead, and his businesses. All these facts of his life were reduced to single lines of ‘data’ that gave these killers a profile to work with, a way to identify their target.
Bile rose in my throat. I was looking at the same file they used to determine he was an evil man in need of culling.
I turned the page, finding images that shook me to my core.
Girls, all of them too young to even drive, in a cramped shipping container with the business name M-bargo painted on the side in his company logo. Not a one of them wearing clothes, their nakedness blacked out to spare the viewer from the travesty.
A dingy house with condemned signs on the doors, boarded-up windows, and overflowing dumpsters in the alley beside it. In the doorway, a man stood in handcuffs, one I recognized from his frequent trips to the house—our house. To my knowledge, he was a lower-level assistant in the company ranks. Sometimes, Father had him run errands. But in this image?—
He was covered head to toe in cuts and scrapes, bruises, both fresh and old, and his wrists were cuffed in front of him. The cops didn’t even bother to hide them with his jacket.
And to the left of the front door, there were more girls and some boys, all a little older than the ones from the previous photo, all with the same haggard look of someone who’d spent years strung out on IV drugs. Years.
Another image showed more of the same, girls and boys alike, all in beds they were chained to, buckets in the corners, the familiar sight of rat droppings in the corners.
I wanted to vomit.
How could anyone in their right mind think my father was involved in this? There was no way he?—
The last picture on the page was of two shadowy figures, their faces partially obscured by the shadows of the night. They shook hands, a young girl standing just off to their right, a chain around her neck. The other end of which was in the man on the left’s hands, no less. He held on to her like one would a dog.
My eyes traveled over the details in the image—not that there were many—until I spotted a car off to the side of the frame that sent chills down my spine.
I knew that car. I’d ridden in that car so many times it wasn’t even funny. It was my daily ride to and from primary school until he traded it off for a newer model. His ended up being t-boned in an accident one night while his assistant was driving it to?—
I flipped the page, and my heart stopped.
Time stopped.
I slammed the folder shut with a gag.
There was no fucking way. No.
No.
No.
The single photo on the second page of images showed my father with his pants around his thighs, his body hunched over one of the girls from the pictures inside the drug house, her legs spread around his waist. She wore a chain around her neck, and though her eyes were open, it wasn’t hard to see from the lack of light in them, the dull dinginess of her hair, and the odd positioning of her body, that she was no longer alive in that picture.
She hadn’t been alive, then, in the image where she was chained to the bed. Or if she had, she didn’t stay free for long.
My father was a good man.
This had to be some sort of Photoshop. Some sick, twisted play at revenge for someone else who was jealous of what my father had.
But the mole on his ass was undeniably his. I’d seen it once, in passing, as he showed it to my mother and explained to her it was benign. There was no way someone knew about it if they didn’t see him naked .
“Doctor thought it was cancer, but he biopsied it. Nothing. So it’s just a regular mole. Might have it removed next year, I dunno. Not like anyone but you will see it.”
“No,” I whispered to the empty room, my chest tight, eyes watering at the corners like I was watching him die all over again.
I opened the folder back up and turned the page.
This time, there was a noted absence of photos. Just notes someone had made in the margins around what looked like a ripped-out page of?—
The black notebook from his desk. The one I took that made no sense when I’d tried to read it.
I read through the lines, still seeing nothing but gibberish, but this time, with the aid of the handwritten notes, I was able to piece together some things.
Some very damning things.
Zinnia. 120904. D. H. House 3. $200/hr, high yield. needs replaced.
In the margins, I read the notes and shivered.
Name. DOB. Status. Drug of Choice. Price. Value. Personal notes.
I wanted to scream. Surely this wasn’t right. My father was talking about flowers in these notes. Peony. Rose. Zinnia. All flower names. I wasn’t sure how they’d deciphered the rest of the notes so wrong, but I knew my father. He was building a botanical garden across town. Maybe the numbers were just him trying to figure out how much those particular exhibits would bring in per hour.
I was so deep in denial even the truth right in front of me couldn’t sway me.
I shoved that thought aside and flipped to another page. The last one was manufactured. Forged. I wouldn’t believe it was his handwriting, his notebook, until I went back to my hiding spot and checked the notebook for myself.
The last page of the file was filled with notes about his daily habits. Now this I knew couldn’t be right. I knew his schedule in and out. I skimmed the dates, times, and notes for each event on his calendar.
Monday, meeting with B.
That was his weekly board meeting. They discussed the company and its ventures at the beginning of each work week. Even Momma knew this. She’d bitched about it enough while I was growing up.
Wednesday, visit to houses 2 and 4. Disposal call made to remove bodies.
No. Wednesdays, he played golf with his partner, Bill. They teed off at 8am sharp, and he was always home for lunch by noon. Then, when my mother left to get her hair done, he went back to the office and clocked in to review finances. The company records showed him there every Wednesday. I’d even visited him once or twice when I wasn’t in school, hanging in his office while he flitted around the floor, making phone calls to business associates?—
Friday, visit to wharf. Shipment checked, approved or denied. Payment exchanges hands the following day under the Dread River Bridge, in unmarked plateless black sedan.
That wasn’t right. Fridays he traveled to Nocturna Beach for work, checking his various ventures there and meeting with their board. And Saturdays, he spent at home, all day, from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed.
They had it all wrong. They were so, so wrong. The images were forged. This was all an intricate lie built to tear down a man who had something someone else wanted.
It had to be.
And then, I flipped the last page over and spotted a hastily scrawled note on the back of a menu from his favorite restaurant downtown.
Benni—
Leave no witnesses. Clean house. #5 not safe. Exterminate and dispose, report back to me.
—Cullough
I couldn’t deny that was my father’s handwriting. I’d seen it scrawled on several of his ledgers, in his notebooks, even on his contracts. Benni was the assistant in the picture of the drug house from the second page of the file. I flipped back to scan the image again, and there in the margin, in small print:
House 5. Caught mid-extermination. Benni Trello, interrogation 1.
When I closed the file and moved to put it back, a sound in the outer room made me freeze in my tracks.
Someone was in here with me.
I hastily shoved the file between two boxes when a thin, black flash drive fell from the damn thing. I picked it up, shoved it between my tits, and raced for the window as the sounds of humans in the front room grew closer. There was more than one distinct voice in there, and as the words became clear, my blood ran cold.
“The alarm was triggered, Keehn. I’m not imagining things. Someone was in here, and they might still be.”
A heavy sigh. “Listen, Lilly, if someone broke into your rooms, then you need to let me clear them first ? —”
“I’m not some delicate flower in need of protecting, Keehn. I’m a vicious bitch who’s killed more people than you’ve put away. So put your gun back in the holster and stop playing the strong protector. I didn’t like it when we were married, and I haven’t changed.”
If I lingered here much longer, I’d be discovered, and I couldn’t afford that. I was in the inner circle. If I were caught in her office, it wouldn’t be the Neon Dogs getting their just desserts. It’d be me getting the axe.
Lilly St. Clair wasn’t afraid to kill. And if she knew she’d been betrayed, she’d kill me in a heartbeat.
I spotted an air vent in the far corner, behind an empty chair being used to hold more boxes, and took the chance. Luckily, it was a snap-in kind and not a screw-in kind because if I’d had to find a tool to make my escape, I’d have been doomed. As it was, I was cutting it super close.
I squeezed myself into the small crevice and snapped the cover back into place just as the doorknob turned and Lilly and her cop ex entered the room. As much as I wanted to stick around and find out what she had to say, I didn’t have the time. I needed to get out of here and find an exit. Reorient myself, and meet up with the guys. They would be an invaluable alibi, should I need one.
I didn’t have claustrophobia, but this fucking place gave me the chills as I inched along, hoping I’d find an exit soon. Hell, even falling through the floor at this point would be preferable to staying in the HVAC system much longer. Last thing I wanted was to end up in the main line and run into the heater itself.
Just as panic started to set in, I spotted another vent cover, breathing a sigh of relief as the room it led to came into view.
It was the commons in the back of the house. At this time of day, it’d be abandoned, so I didn’t have to worry about being spotted. I kicked it free and fell head-first into the room, only barely avoiding cracking my skull off the concrete floor when two firm hands caught me midair?—
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the little bandit from the other night.”
A familiar voice echoed from behind a mask, and I frowned as that familiar Oni mask came into view as I stood and straightened my skirt. “Oh, it’s you,” I said simply, trying for disinterest again. I wouldn’t let another man intimidate me for crawling around in a vent. Hell, these things led all over the place. He couldn’t possibly know where I’d been.
“Running away from your partners? They’ve been looking for you for a while now.” His gaze shot to the door, and I shivered as I spotted his carefully concealed gun in the waistband of his pants, hidden by the flap of his jacket. “Maybe we should go find them.”
“I’m perfectly capable of finding them on my own,” I muttered hastily, the haughtiness from days long gone coming out in a surprising burst of rage. “You keep your hands off me and stay far, far away from me and my business, you hear?”
The asshole’s eyes twinkled dangerously at me. “No can do, princess. You see, everything that goes on in this place concerns me. So I can’t just let you do what you want and try and dismantle the system from inside.” His grip released me, though, as he watched me like a hawk contemplating releasing the mouse or eating it whole. “Don’t go far, girlie. I’ll be watching you.” He tapped his temple. “It’s what I do best.”
I couldn’t help the shiver that went down my spine as he slipped out of sight into the darkness beyond, leaving me alone and chilled from the encounter. I didn’t want to run into him on a good day, let alone when I was three seconds away from being caught doing something very much not approved.
I stood there in the dark like a statue until I could no longer hear the blood pounding through my veins. And then I stepped in the direction of the rear staircase, intending to go up it to the floor we lived on, so I could descend it and act like Coyote hadn’t understood my instructions when they inevitably found me where I had told them to find me.
But when I hit the first step, something in me broke. I couldn’t go back to them now. Not when there was so much unknown in me, so many doubts and confusion racing through my mind. I wasn’t ready to face them, not until I’d confirmed what I already knew to be true.
Their whole contract had been built on lies.
But I couldn’t just bail without the key to the safe deposit box where I kept his journal and a few other things I couldn’t afford to lose. And it was safely tucked away upstairs in Jackal’s bathroom, buried under some fluffy towels and a box of tampons.
Fuck.