Chapter 11
eleven
This sucks.
Really. Really. Sucks.
“Can we do something now?” The petulant sound of my voice makes me cringe. Not that I care. The car is small and cramped, and the muscles in my legs are screaming in protest from not having moved in over an hour.
“You asked that twenty minutes ago,” my father scolds. Huffing, I blow a strand of hair out of my face.
“Get used to it.” Vas smirks. “The word patient isn’t in her vocabulary.” The men in the car snicker.
“No, but the word beheaded is.” I stick my tongue out at him. It is official. I am a child. “As well as castrate.” Vas widens his eyes in mock horror.
“Settle down, children,” Sully scolds playfully. “We need to wait until he arrives here; otherwise, he’ll see us coming.”
“You sent him a note that told him, ‘We know your secret. Do you really think those files are safe? Give them up or your family dies,’” I remind him, with air quotes and everything. “He probably already knows we’re here waiting for him.”
“He’ll think we are at the meeting point I designated,” Sully explains. “Dr. Martin believes he’ll have the drop on us, but in reality, we hold all the cards.”
I shrug. “If you say so.”
“He’ll never give us those files,” my father points out.
“Speak of the devil,” Vas murmurs.
Dr. Abram Martin is a tall, gangly motherfucker with round wire glasses, wearing a tailored Armani suit and driving a Benz.
Two things a medical examiner shouldn’t be able to afford with his salary.
A dive into his financial records indicates he received a two-point-five-million-dollar payout three days after my mother’s death and smaller subsequent payouts throughout the years that we tracked back to the suspicious deaths of local trucking company owners and even a few cops.
The man looks over his shoulder nervously, causing him to take several extra moments to properly unlock the doors with his shaking hands.
“That’s a go.” Sully nods the moment the good doctor steps inside the office. He doesn’t lock the doors behind him.
“Bet you the first things he goes for are the false files.”
Vas scoffs at Sully. “I’m not taking that bet. Do I look stupid to you?”
Sully’s mouth turns down as he thinks about that. “Eh.” He makes a so-so motion with his hand. “A little, yeah.”
“Fucker,” Vas growls and grabs his gun from the trunk before handing me mine.
“Come on.” I nudge his shoulder with mine. “You can hit him for that later.”
Vas grins. “Promise?”
Laughing, I nod and assure him, “Yep. All yours, big guy.”
“Dreams really do come true.”
“I heard that,” Sully mutters as he walks past.
“Good.” Vas winks. “I wouldn’t want to have to say it louder for your old-ass ears.”
Giggling, I shake my head in amusement and stride up to the office door.
“You know the drill,” Vas reminds me. “Stay in the center of us and—”
“Don’t take any unnecessary risk or try to be a hero,” I drawl.
“Exactly.”
“Fun ruiner,” I mutter behind his back as the men surround me. Jesus, it’s like being the president of the United States, but worse. I can defend myself. Not many presidents can say that. The current one would probably have a heart attack if he had to.
Quietly, on soft footsteps, we make our way through the darkened building toward the good doctor’s office. Papers shuffle around, the sound echoing into the hallway. He curses, a hard heavy object falling to the floor with a distinct thud.
“Where is it?” the man mutters to himself in a panic.
“Looking for something, Doctor?” The two men in front of me part to let me through. I stride into the man’s rather posh office, head tilted up as I study the man who falsified my mother’s death report and who knows how many others.
“You…” he trails off, the blood draining from his face as he stares at me, eyes wide.
The corner of my mouth tilts dangerously. “Cat got your tongue?” I sneer. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“How can…your…”
“Dead?” I raise an eyebrow, eyes flashing darkly at the word. He thinks I am my mother. The ghost of his past coming back to haunt him. That is something I can work with. “Funny thing about death. Never really sticks when you want it to. Does it?”
“What do you want?”
I let out a harsh puff of air tinged with a dark chuckle. “I want my life back, Doctor,” I tell him. “The one you stole from me. Tell me, how much was your soul worth? A couple of million?”
“I—it wasn’t—”
“Personal?” I sneer. “Sure as hell felt like it. But don’t worry.” I bite my bottom lip, eyeing him like a lion does his prey. “When I kill you, it’ll be very personal to me.”
“You don’t have to kill me,” he pleads, dropping the file in his hand onto the desk. “I’ll give you whatever you want. I promise. Name it.”
“Who gave you the hush money?”
The man visibly swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing dramatically as fear swells in his eyes. His chest heaves. Once. Twice. I can see the war going on in his mind through the minute facial tics he can’t hide.
“I can’t—”
“Wrong answer.” The doctor screams, his left leg collapsing beneath him as my bullet tears through his patella. The silencer keeps the gases that propel the bullet through the chamber quiet, muffling the sound of the bang making it sound more like broomstick snapping than a gunshot.
Vas grimaces. “What is it with you and kneecaps?” I shrug. It’s just an easy target to hit that I know won’t cause him to bleed out or pass out.
“Let’s try that again, Abram.” I crouch down in front of him, gun dangling loosely between my legs. “Who gave you the hush money?”
“They’ll kill me,” he sobs. “Please.”
“You’re going to die either way,” I tell him. “How painful your death will be is up to you.”
“Please…” His cries and pleas for mercy fall on deaf ears.
Just like my mother’s.
“How about this.” I lift the barrel of my gun, pointing it at his stomach.
“I can shoot you in just the right spot—you know, the sweet spot. The one that’ll have you laying here on the floor for hours in agony before your body finally shuts down.
You’ll be begging me to kill you, but I won’t.
I’ll sit here and listen to your pitiful cries, and then I’ll go find that sweet little family of yours and do the exact same thing. ”
I won’t go after them, but he doesn’t need to know that.
“No!”
“Or—” I tilt my head, eyes wild. “You can tell me what I want to know, and I’ll leave your family alone and give you a nice, quick death. You decide.”
“I can’t…” He shakes his head mournfully. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
“I’ll give you to the count of five.”
“Listen—”
“Five.”
“Their organization runs deeper than you can imagine.”
“Four.”
“If I give them away, they’ll come after my family. Even if I’m dead.”
“Three.”
“You don’t know what they do to women and children.”
I give a throaty, venomous laugh. “You don’t know what I do to women and children.” My finger slips over the trigger. “Two.”
“Mercy. You have to have mercy.”
“One.” My finger begins to pull on the trigger.
“Magnus Cartwright!”
Abram sighs in relief when I lower the gun.
“Who is Magnus Cartwright?”
“The new chief of police,” Sully answers for him. “Fucking bastard of a man if you ask me. Dirty as they come.”
Abram nods.
“Why would he want to cover up my mother’s death?”
“Because whoever wanted it to look like a robbery set him up for life,” Abram rasps. “I can see it now.” He smiles sadly. “You look so much like her it’s uncanny.”
“The only time you saw her was dead on your table,” I snarl. The doctor nods solemnly and huffs a sad breath.
“Whoever killed your mother,” he tells me, “It wasn’t a robber.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because the wounds were too personal,” he hiccups. “Someone without attachments to her would have stabbed her or shot her and gotten it over with. Whoever killed your mother went into a fit of rage doing it.”
You had everything I wanted. Everything. Why couldn’t you just lose for once in your fucking life?
Another memory. Another mirage of the past. A woman’s voice cutting through the haze of memories I locked away.
“What else did you lie about on the report?” my father grits, hand clenched tightly around the gun. His knuckles are white, the tendons in his neck taut as he holds himself back.
“Cartwright wanted the report to reflect that it was a man who killed her,” the doctor divulges. “But it couldn’t have been. The blows were too weak to be a full-grown man.”
“What about an older gentleman who walks with a limp and a cane?”
Abram shakes his head.
“Another set of evidence that was suppressed was a pair of bloody shoe prints on the stairs,” he continues. “Pointed toes with no heel.”
“Stilettos,” I breathe. It is starting to come together. The puzzle pieces fit snugger and snugger as more of the picture reveals itself. There is only one woman I can think of with the means and motive to kill my mother.
Marianne.
My mother confided in her once, and then suddenly Elias found her again. I know the note my father says she left is utter bullshit. Even without seeing it, there is no way my mother would have left him. She loved him.
Looking back now, at all the times she discussed the love of her life, I know it is him. It was always him. But why did she run to Portland instead of back to him?
What made her flee? Or more precisely—who?
Marianne could easily drive the two hours to Portland to kill my mother, and no one would be the wiser. She has the motive, too. Years of living in my mother’s shadow. The mafia princess with her fairy-tale life and prince charming.
I glance at my father out of the corner of my eye.
Nope. He wouldn’t take that well. I need concrete proof before I drop that bombshell on him. He didn’t take it well the last time I brought my Marianne theory to him. Better to wait.
“What about the other cases you fudged?”
Abram sobs, still clutching his bleeding knee. “They’re on the table. Every case I’ve ever manipulated. I kept proof in case they went back on their word.”
“Did you meet with anyone other than Cartwright?” Sully questions.
“Jameson O’Neill,” he admits with disgust. “Owns Platinum Security.”
“Anyone else?”
Abram shakes his head. “No one I’d know by name. There was an older gentleman with a cane I ran into a few times meeting O’Neill or Cartwright, but he never introduced himself.”
Flipping through my phone, I find what I’m looking for. “Does he look like this?” I show him the screen.
Abram nods.
“That’s him.”
“Good.” I tuck the phone away. “Thank you for the information.” I aim my gun at him.
“Wait,” he pleads. “My family.”
My eyes soften. “I was never going to hurt them.”
“They will, though.”
“Then know I will protect them,” I promise. “But no one can protect you.”
The trigger gives way under my finger.
Abram is dead, and I am one step closer to avenging not only Matthias—but my mother as well.