8. Only The Facts Please
Chapter 8
Only The Facts Please
HUNTER
T he weight of my Glock feels heavier in my hand than it usually does as I hold it close to Parker’s temple. Obviously, I know why. Parker is a friend.
Correction– was a friend.
“So this is what goes on down here?” Parker scoffs, his eye already swollen and purple from the interrogation I’ve started in the basement of The Blue Whiskey.
“You don’t want to do this,” he pleads.
Lars stares at him, arms crossed in front of him, with the quiet judgment of a disappointed big brother. From the other side of the room, I can feel Vaughn watching me, worry oozing from his pores. I haven’t been myself. I’m running on vodka and rage, and I’m not in the right mind to make a smart decision.
But I don’t give a shit.
Not when it comes to Megan.
“You’re right, Parker. I don’t want to do this but yet here we are.” I lower my gun but keep it at my side as I pace in front of him. “Now, let’s go over it again.”
“I’ve told you a hundred times.”
I lift my gun again, pointing it straight at his balls.
“Are you being a smart ass?”
“Tell the story until it makes sense,” Lars says, speaking for the first time since we’ve been down here. “You’re leaving something out.”
Parker’s head drops.
We’ve been beating his ass for thirty minutes, but it turns out that all we actually needed was a bit of condemnation from a very disillusioned Lars.
“I dropped you off. I stayed in the car like you asked me to do. I was playing on my phone, texting a woman I met a few weeks ago.”
“Too much backstory,” I say, sick of his bullshitting.
“Okay,” he huffs. “That’s when I spotted the car. Fabre’s car. He was having some sort of argument with Naomi outside of the car, and then she finally got in. He didn’t make her, and neither did the goon with him. She got in on her own. I know she’s Megan’s girl, but I didn’t think anything of it. ”
He takes a painful breath, probably because I kicked him in the ribs for ten minutes.
“Continue,” I say, not giving a shit about the pain he’s in.
“It might have been five minutes later when I noticed Megan. She came out of the apartment and didn’t have a handbag like she usually does. I figured she was going for a walk or something.”
“And you didn’t keep eyes on her?” I ask in an accusatory fashion.
“Whatever she was doing was none of my business. The apartment is her home and she had a sad expression on her face. I guessed that you two had some sort of an argument, and she needed a beat.”
“Is that right? You know my fiancee that well that you can sense when she needs a beat?”
Parker looks up at me with a fiery determination in his expression. “You had me follow her for months so yeah I think I know her.”
I smack him against the side of his head with the butt of my gun, and he howls in pain.
“I can finish this,” Vaughn interjects, knowing that he’s only interfering because he thinks I’m about to kill Parker.
I’m not.
I don’t take life and death lightly.
And whatever role Parker’s played in all of this, I know that the real person I have beef with is Naomi’s father.
I raise two fingers, signaling that I want Vaughn to back off. I’ve got this.
“What happened next?” I ask him. “And stick to only the facts.”
“It’s hard to get all of the facts straight when there’s blood dripping down my neck.”
Before I can respond, Lars places a hand on the arm that’s holding the gun and steps forward. Parker’s hands are zip-tied behind his back so Lars takes a small handkerchief out of his back pocket and dabs the side of Parker’s face.
“Thank you, Lars.”
“Parker, this is not a joke.” Suddenly the Eastern European accent that Lars always works so hard to mask peeks through. “You’ve worked here long enough to know how badly this can end for you.”
“I’m trying.”
“No, you are not. Something is holding you back. What is it? Tell us everything, no matter what it is, and I am sure that Boss will be lenient.”
I clear my throat, letting Lars know that he’s making promises that he can’t keep, but Vaughn taps the back of my heel with his foot, wanting me to allow Lars to continue working his magic on the kid.
“Something happened before Megan ever came outside."
"Go ahead."
"After Naomi got into the car, Fabre’s man spotted me.” Parker sighs heavily with reluctance, clearly not wanting to tell this part of the story. “They must have asked Naomi who I was, or maybe they just knew by the look of the car, and Fabre approached me.”
“This was your first time talking to Fabre?” Lars asks.
“Yes.”
“You never met him before? Talked to him before?”
“No.”
“And what did he want?”
“He identified who he was. He told me he was Naomi’s father and that he was here visiting. He asked me if Boss was home so he could thank him for looking out for her.”
“And?”
“I knew immediately when he said that something was off about the guy. I knew a thank you wasn’t exactly what he wanted to give. I told him that Boss wasn’t home.”
“Wait–” Vaughn interrupts. “Why would he think that you knew who Naomi or Hunter were at all? How could he know that if you’ve never met?”
“Exactly,” I mutter, taking a seat across the room and letting my guys pick Parker’s lies apart, statement by statement.
“I might have forgotten to mention that he knew who I was. When he came over, he called me by name. He called me Parker. I thought that maybe Naomi told him who I was but that wasn’t the case because it didn’t take him long to bring up my mother.”
“Your mother?” Lars questions.
I didn’t even know Parker had a mother. Well, I mean, I guess we all have one, but he’s never mentioned her. What the hell does she have to do with any of this?
“She’s sick. Really sick.”
I stand up. “I’ve never even heard about this mother of yours, and you’re trying to tell me that Fabre knows who she is?” I say.
“Yes, I don’t know how. I guess the dude does his homework. It isn’t hard to find if you care to look. We have the same last name, live in the same city, and her address is one of the old places I’ve lived that you can pull up on any credit report.”
I turn to look at Vaughn, and he gives a slight shrug of his shoulders. It’s his job to vet all my employees, but it’s not his job to remember every single detail about their lives. If he ran across the address or the name of Parker’s mother in his search, it’s probably sitting in a file somewhere on his computer. And even if he did, the fact that someone has a mother is not cause for a red flag.
“Okay, so she’s sick,” Lars says. “And Fabre knew this?”
“Yes, he knew she was sick, and she knew she was broke. She doesn't have enough money to even continue care in the same hospital she worked for her whole life. So he offered me a king’s ransom to leave the area for an hour.”
I am fucking livid.
“Do I not pay you enough for your loyalty?” I roar, charging forward and bitch slapping him like the traitor he is.
“It’s for my mother!” He cries.
“Did it even dawn on you to tell us the truth about your situation and ask for help?” Lars asks.
“No, it didn’t. The boss is not warm and fuzzy. Do you think he would give a shit about my sick mother? All he cares about is her . Look around, Lars. He doesn’t care about us. We’re just a means to an end. It’ll be a miracle if I make it out of here alive and you know it. I’m only here because Megan begged me not to take her back to Fabre because she believed that Boss could be reasoned with.”
I’m so incensed by his admission that I can’t see straight.
“So you found her and were going to take her back to Fabre?”
Megan didn’t tell me any of this. To be fair, I didn’t want to push her to explain anything after all that she’s been through, but this…is untenable.
Why is she protecting this piece of filth?
Can I trust anyone around me?
“I didn’t know he was going to take her. He gave no indication that he was going to hurt Megan. How was I even supposed to know that she’d come downstairs alone? That’s not her usual MO.”
“If you were supposed to disappear for an hour, then how did you know she was taken? How did you end up in Arizona following them?” Vaughn asks with the calm demeanor of a police detective.
“A part of me knew that whatever he had planned wasn’t going to involve just talking, although I wanted to believe the best, so I stuck around. I parked around the corner and walked back on foot, staying out of sight.”
“Your story doesn’t make any sense,” I say, shaking my head in disbelief. “None of it.”
Lars’s body language mirrors my own. Neither of us believes this story. Parker’s not stupid, and there are holes in it. He's probably been working with Fabre for a long time, just biding his time.
“If y’all are not ready to shoot this liar yet, then I’ve had enough for today. I have a club to run.”
“Hunter–” Vaughn tries calming me down.
“Maybe Parker needs a moment in silence and several moments away from his dying mother to consider what’s truth and what’s fiction,” I continue.
Everyone knows what this means.
We’ll leave Parker tied up down here in total darkness, with no food, no nothing until he decides to tell us what we need to know...the complete truth.
And I don't care how long it takes and who may disagree with my methods.
Even Megan.