Chapter 3
Chapter Three
H angman…
She worked herself up into a tizzy, shrieked and screamed, kicked, and even fucking bit me – but it was all for nothing. I wasn’t letting go and she wasn’t going anywhere. Not until we figured some shit out.
We couldn’t move her in broad daylight, and this time of year, the sun wasn’t setting until almost nine o’clock. It was just our fucking luck she’d come to in the afternoon. It wasn’t great, but it was better than keeping her held up all day.
Grim said to hold her and that he was calling Syn, which pretty much told me everything I needed to know. Lorelai, no last name given, no real clue if it was even her name to begin with, had done something or crossed someone in Savannah’s underworld or elite to wind up here.
Body disposal wasn’t something the club typically offered when it wasn’t a body that we’d personally dropped for monetary exchange, so there had to be some kind of trail to track backward where she was concerned. It was just about getting the ball rolling on that and deciding if she was more valuable to us dead or alive. Never knew, her being here might provide us leverage in something. We weren’t above blackmail if it was lucrative enough.
I felt a little bad for her, but not much. I figured a few hours to a day or two and we’d know what was up and would make a decision as to what should be done with her.
She begged, she cried, she hyperventilated, but all of it was for naught.
I stayed down here with her and hoped like hell she didn’t try me again, because damn it, muscle fatigue was a real thing. I couldn’t keep this shit up forever and I really didn’t want to shoot her.
The high oblong windows started to dim with the setting of the sun and just before full dark, the president himself came through the double doors. He came down the steps and pulled a rolling stool over and dropped onto it, bracing his forearms onto his knees, and leaning in. He fixed Lorelai with an unreadable gaze from behind a pair of dark aviators.
“You’re a problem,” he said to her, point blank.
“I promise, I’m not—” I tightened my hold on her and she fell silent.
Synister smirked and nodded slowly. “No, you are,” he said. “Right now, you’re one great big pain in my ass that I don’t know what to fucking do with.”
“Just let me go,” she pleaded desperately.
“Can’t do that,” he said, shaking his head. “Not yet.”
“What’s the scoop?” I asked.
“In about an hour, shit should be dark enough. We’ll get some of the guys down here to help you get her into the crypt until we can figure out who she is, where she came from, and why the fuck she wound up here.”
With that alone, Syn told me everything that I needed to know.
He didn’t know, which meant that this was one big clusterfuck. There was no telling if she was important or not and we weren’t in the business of just arbitrarily killing a woman who was supposed to already be dead. Never could tell. She could be valuable to us. Still, it was dicey what he was suggesting. Keeping her, and in the crypt? Shit, she’d been through a lot and she was pretty, soft against me. With Reaper being a fucking pervert – I couldn’t believe I was going to say this – but I felt bad for what was about to happen.
“You got two options right now,” I growled in her ear when Syn was pulled away by Grim. “Option one, keep being a pain in the ass and I fucking bury you in a moldy-ass crypt where no one can hear you scream, and you cook in the tepid heat all day, in the pitch black, with only a bucket to piss in if you even have enough hydration in you to piss.”
“Option two…” she said. “Option two has to be better.”
“Option two is me going out on a big fucking limb for you, but I promise you, it’s loads better than that.”
“Option two is what?” she asked.
“Option two is you fucking cooperate with me, and as long as you cooperate with me and stay inside the lines that I lay out for you – you get treated like a human being. Clean rooms, indoor plumbing, clothes, two to three meals a day, books to read, TV to watch, and an air-conditioned place to stay in with windows to look out of.”
“Please don’t kill me,” she whispered.
“I can’t promise that,” I told her. “All I can promise is that it’s up to you on how well you’re treated while we figure this shit out. If it comes down to it, I’ll make it so quick you won’t even know it happened.”
She started to cry.
“I don’t know anything. I don’t want to die. Please…”
“Listen,” I told her. “I don’t think you’re gonna die, but you need to know, the rest of these guys don’t play. I’m willing to work with you. Will you work with me?”
She nodded, her head bobbing so quickly I thought it might come off.
Synister came back down in our direction and said to me, “Should be good to move her.”
“Grim,” I called. “Need you to take over for a minute while I have a chat with Syn.”
“I got you,” Grim said.
“Cooperate,” I whispered in her ear and she nodded dumbly. I passed her off to Grim and said, “She won’t make a move, but stay on her a minute for me.”
Grim grasped her wrist lightly and stood in front of her while she clasped my flannel to cover herself.
I walked to the double doors where Syn waited and stepped out into the hallway with him.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“I think I’ve got her under control,” I said.
He smirked.
“The sound of the crypt put the fear of God into her?”
“And then some,” I agreed.
“I meant it,” he said.
“It’s a good deterrent from her getting out of line, I think,” I said. “For now, I think she’ll do okay at my place.”
Syn nodded. “Hadn’t thought of that, to be honest,” he said.
“I’m up for it,” I told him, glancing back through the windows in the doors to see Grim standing fast, talking to her. He’d relinquished his hold on her wrist and she was slipping into my shirt more fully.
“What the fuck is going on with this one?” I asked Syn and he sighed.
“Legit not a hundred percent sure,” he said. “Nobody ran disposing of this little girl by me but somebody knew the procedure.”
“Shit,” I muttered.
“Ain’t no freebies,” Syn said, staring past me. Lorelai had turned her back and was fumbling with the shirt’s buttons, her head bowed, her long, long hair mussed and a bit of a tangled rat’s nest.
“She give you anything more?” he asked.
“Says she doesn’t remember. I believe her. What do you think that is?”
“Not sure, but I’ve got the doc on speed dial to run some tests. There’s some kind of buzz in the streets about some new designer drug. Lowers inhibitions in micro doses, easy to overdo it, though. Lot of questions coming up in a lot of hospitals. It might be something. They call it corpse weed. In a regular full dose, it takes the mind for a ride but paralyzes the body. There’s a real potential for abuse. Could be the newest thing to roofie some chicks into submission. We haven’t heard of it in Savannah yet, but that doesn’t mean it’s not here. Fucks with the memory which is why it has my attention here. It’s a whole lot of bad for business. Not sure I like the sound of it.”
“That’s nuts,” I said with a note of disbelief.
“Whole thing is. Get her to your place, keep her under wraps. I got Requiem and Specter doing the digging. I’ll have the doc come by and draw some blood and run it. Sounds like this shit likes to linger in the system. Sometimes days, sometimes up to a few weeks or more. Not sure who came up with it but it sounds like it’s a strong case for ‘just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.’”
“H.U.A,” I said, which sounded like hoo-ah, but stood for Heard, Understood, and Acknowledged.
“You got some kind of rapport going with her. Try to keep that shit up for right now and hopefully we can get somewhere and get there quick on this.”
“I’m pissed too,” I said, looking at her.
“Fucking Reaper,” Synister muttered with a sigh. “I’m hoping someday that shit will be funny, but right now it just complicates things.”
I grunted in acknowledgment on that one and sighed, too. We’d do what it took to protect Reap and the club’s reputation. Scary, yes, that’s the rep we wanted. This perverted corpse fucking shit? That we absolutely did not want getting out. We had a reputation for a lot of things, were in a lot of ways the boogeyman of the city – but some things we weren’t. Perverts? Sure, within reason. Rapists? No. Fuck no. That we absolutely were not. Nor did we allow certain kinds of drugs to sweep our streets. Like Synister had said, it was bad for business.
Our business was in underground card games and running guns, sometimes making this problem or that problem disappear. We even ran an underground fight or two – again, to bring the big money out to play.
We were a playground for the rich and the elite. A tourist town from bottom to top. The city had a reputation as much as we did and we relied on that reputation to keep visitors coming and going – but not in a pine fucking box or out by way of ambulance.
I looked at Syn and said, “It’s not the Manse, or the Ritz, but it’s better than the fucking crypt.” He nodded.
“Anything is better than the crypt. Be grateful my Madi’s softened me up some to even consider it.”
“It backfires, I’ll take the fall,” I said, looking back to Lorelai.
“Fuckin’ right you will,” he shot back. “You think that’s her name?” he asked and I nodded.
“It was an automatic response. She only got tripped up when I asked for her last name – which I get. I’ve seen dudes out in the field with head injuries forget their own name before. Brain stuff is weird. I would definitely have the doc meet us ASAP and make sure it’s drug and not some kind of injury.”
Syn grunted an affirmative sound and gave me a shove in the direction of the strange young woman who was dead until she wasn’t.
I couldn’t wait to find out who was responsible for making her our problem, or how this was going to shake out.
It was a pickle, for sure.
Wasn’t her fault she was here, but her being here complicated a lot of things for us.
Here was hoping we could unravel the mystery fast and come to some sort of solution that didn’t involve finishing what was started when she first arrived.
I mean… fuck. She seemed nice, was definitely pretty, and I hated to see a flower as pretty as that clipped and die too soon.
I’d seen enough of that shit.