Chapter Eleven
Rebecca
The giant in leathers was mad as hell; that was plain to see.
But now Andrew, the professor, that’s what Finn had called him, was also furious.
Chelsea’s pretty face twisted in confusion.
“Why are you here?” She tried to shake off her brother’s hold to no avail.
“To get you. We need to talk.”
“No we don’t.”
“Get your hands off her,” Andrew said. “Now.”
Finn and Cillian stood. Phil stopped eating and put his plate to one side. Jamie, cute as a button and could have been an A list model, sat back, clearly waiting to be entertained.
The atmosphere in the garden had gone from sunny to stormy in a heartbeat.
“Vince!” Chelsea shoved him. “Get off me.”
This time he did let go.
“What’s your problem?” Finn said, clicking his neck left to right and then rolling his shoulders.
“My problem is that my sister is supposed to be studying. Not hanging out in a fucking brothel.”
“I’m allowed an afternoon off.” Chelsea folded her arms. “And it’s a safe house, not a brothel. You want me to be safe, I presume.”
“Safe house, is that what this old dude tells you.”
“I’m warning you, Vince.” A tendon flexed in Andrew’s jawline, and his nostrils flared.
“Do I look like I care?” Vince huffed and set his attention on Chelsea. “We need to talk.”
“What about?”
“Our mother.”
A fizz went through the air, the atmosphere changing again, a sharp pressure forcing down.
“What about her?” Chelsea paled, and she swallowed noisily. “What do you have to say?”
“Not here.” Vince scowled.
Chelsea tipped her chin. “These are my friends.” She paused. “Just say it.”
“Okay.” Vince folded his arm, his knuckles pressing his big biceps outward and his black t-shirt straining. “You really want to know the truth about her?”
“Of course.”
“She wasn’t supplying Ranson with Eastern European women to use as whores. She wasn’t doing any of the stuff he said she was.” Vince pointed at Andrew. “And I have proof. Lots of proof.”
What the hell was going on? I was struggling to keep up.
“But all of the evidence,” Chelsea said. “Her number in his book, and she was racing off in her car, going somewhere and…”
“That number was not proof that she was a goddamn human trafficker, Chelsea.” Vince’s scowl deepened. “And you were so quick to accuse her, to believe she was. That’s hateful, unforgiveable, you know that, right?”
Andrew slipped his arm around Chelsea. “You okay?”
“Okay?” She stared at him, and the color returned to her cheeks. She stiffened and then pushed at him. “How the fuck could I possibly be okay?”
“Oh shit,” Jamie muttered and crossed his arms.
“Chelsea?” Andrew held out his hands. “What have I done? Why are you mad at me?”
Finn and Cillian sat down again, giving the impression they no longer wanted to get involved.
Vince also stepped back; he’d set off a bomb and was happy to watch the explosion. A faint smile tugged his lips.
“What have you done?” Chelsea shouted at Andrew. “You had her on your kill list, and if what my brother has just said is true, my mother was innocent. You would have killed an innocent. My mother. You told me you would have. I heard you say that with my own ears.” She tapped the sides of her head.
I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Kill list? What the fuck was that?
“Not just innocent,” Vince said, his voice loud. “She was also a fucking cop.”
Chelsea stared at her brother with her mouth hanging open. “What?”
“She was undercover,” Vince went on, “had been on this case for nearly a year, waiting for Ranson and his sick contemporaries to put in an order for Albanian women after the real Candy Floss had died suddenly. She’d made up a story about having a new number but was good for the women and was communicating with the gangs.
She was getting close, they would have been able to shut the entire organized crime group down within a month if she’d lived. ”
“Our mother wasn’t a cop!” Chelsea put her hand over her mouth as though the conversation was making her nauseated. “Was she?”
“Officially she was in technology and information, covert detail, though this case was too important for her not to step out of her box and try and get the convictions. Plus, apparently she sounded just like this Candy Floss woman on the phone.”
“And Dad? He knew all of this?”
“Yes, that’s why he’d begged her not to go out that night.
He knew she was meeting Ranson with no armed backup.
When her car…” Vince paused, squeezed the bridge of his nose with his fingers, then went on, “When her car crashed into the ditch, killing her outright, he got her laptop and phone to protect us, to protect the mission.”
“This is so…” Chelsea swayed. “Oh…”
“Chelsea. I’ve got you.” Andrew quickly put his hands on her waist. “I know this is hard to get your head around and—”
“No, I’ll tell you what’s hard to get my head around.” She shoved violently at him. “You.”
He staggered back a pace, shock washing over his features.
Chelsea went on in a loud, sharp voice, “And that you think you can still touch me, talk to me, and—”
“I’m sorry, it’s a misunderstanding, that’s all, can’t we—?”
“No.” She retreated from him. “We can’t…”
“Don’t do this, Chelsea.” Andrew’s frown deepened, his eyes becoming thin slits. “Don’t walk away from me. I’m warning you. You stay here…with me.”
“I’ll do whatever I want, and you can’t stop me.
Warning or no fucking warning.” She gripped her brother’s upper arm and puffed up her chest. “Because I’ve seen the real you now.
I’ve seen how dangerous this game is you play.
You think it’s commendable. You think it’s justice.
Well, I’m telling you, if you hurt one innocent person, kill one innocent person, then it’s all a pile of shit.
And you guys are no better than the assholes on your kill wall, the people you believe you’re so superior to. ”
Again the atmosphere changed. I could almost sense the hackles rising on the men around me. Her words had cut deep.
But why? What did Chelsea know that I didn’t? And what was a kill wall?
She marched off with Vince, her long, shapely legs keeping up with his ground-eating paces.
“Fuck!” Andrew snapped and raked his hand through his hair. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
“Cillian?” I turned to him and then Finn who was scowling deeply. “You’d better explain what that was all about? Kill wall?”
The men, sitting around me, all looked my way.
“This is bad,” Phil muttered, then took a slug of beer.
“Definitely not the best thing to have happened,” Jamie agreed.
“What’s going on?” a deep voice I recognized bellowed down the garden.
Mitch, the cop who’d come to my rescue had arrived.
Mitch jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Was that Chelsea’s biker brother?”
“Yeah,” Andrew said.
“Why is he here?” Mitch grabbed a burger. His jeans were low-slung and his t-shirt red. A Manchester United cap sat on his head.
“He’s saying their mother was a cop, undercover,” Finn said. “You know anything about that?”
“What? No.” Mitch paused, burger mid-way to his mouth. “How could she be…? Her number was in Ranson’s book.”
“Undercover, tech and information or something like that.” Jamie shrugged. “Not your department then?”
“No way.” He tutted. “That shit comes from London. Fuck. This is bad.”
Everyone was quiet, their dark expressions pressing their lips down and eyebrows together.
“Is Ranson who I think he is?” I stood and paced behind my chair to grip the back of it. I was trying to remember where I’d heard about his death. It was a few weeks ago, and it was a shooting. Shot in the head.
“Who do you think Ranson is?” Cillian asked me. A tendon flexed in his cheek.
“He’s the guy who was killed when Finn got arrested for being at the warehouse.”
“Yep.” Finn nodded. “That’s him.”
“And,” I went on, “he is, or rather was, an asshole who was slippery, got off twice, if I recall, with serious charges that should have sent him away for a good ten years or so.”
“You’d be right there.” Cillian shrugged.
“I wasn’t his lawyer, it was a guy called Joseph Gooding; he’s good, too good in this case.”
“Yeah, and he got a guilty guy off the hook.” Andrew stared in the direction Chelsea had gone.
I clasped the back of the chair until my knuckles ached. “And now he’s dead. Murdered.”
“Killed,” Finn said quickly. “Not murdered. Killed.”
“Good riddance,” Phil muttered.
I studied the faces around me. They all wore the same certain conviction that Ranson was better off dead, or rather the world was better off that he was dead.
“So…” I paused and cleared my throat. “Was Ranson on your kill wall along with Chelsea’s mother?”
“Sit down, doll,” Finn said with a frown.
“No, I won’t.” A steely determination gripped me. The way it did in court when I wasn’t going to let anything stop me getting information from a witness.
“Sit,” Cillian ordered.
Being told what to do had always irked me. “No, I won’t, and don’t think I can’t handle knowing this stuff. You know what I have to deal with at work.” I pointed at Mitch. “Same assholes he has to.”
Mitch raised his right hand. “She does. That’s true.”
“So, where is this kill wall and what’s it all about?”
Everyone was quiet.
“I’ll find it,” I said, “I’m like a terrier after a rat when it comes to finding things out. You should trust me on that.”
“Yeah, I think I do.” Cillian said. He looked at Andrew.
“We’ll walk and talk.” Andrew tossed his beer bottle into a bin. It landed with a clatter. “Come on.”
“You ain’t going after your woman?” Phil directed at Andrew.
“No, she’s boiling with anger, I’ll let her simmer down.”
“What if she doesn’t?” I asked.
He scowled at me. “Then she’ll get thrown over my lap and spanked until her ass is red raw and she’s begging me to stop.”
The curl of his lip and the flash in his eyes let me know he wasn’t joking. That’s exactly what Chelsea was in for if she didn’t have a rational conversation with her boyfriend—much older boyfriend.
Finn and Cillian stood. They didn’t seem happy.
“What’s up?” I asked, folding my arms.
“We’d rather you didn’t get involved in this, you’ve got your own shit going on. We need to find out who’s been tailing you.”
“Don’t baby me, I’m a grown woman.”
“We know that.” Finn touched my cheek with the back of his thumb. “But forgive us for being protective.”
“Yeah, we wanna kill him just for frightening you,” Cillian said.
I was about to state that I didn’t need protecting and I didn’t want anyone killed and then I remembered the fright of getting home and finding that rose and note on my bed. Yeah, maybe he did deserve to die.
“The kill wall, it’s stuff you don’t need to worry about,” Cillian added. “It’s our…”
I raised my eyebrows. “Your what?”
“Our way of making the world a better place.”
“Well now, I’m really intrigued.” I looked at Andrew and as I did so my phone tinged. So did Mitch’s.
I pulled it from my pocket. It was a local news alert on the screen.
Notorious Local Criminal Archie McDougal Found Murdered in His Bed
“What the fuck.” A strange hollow feeling grew in my chest. I read the line again. It was fresh news. This had not long since happened, and the police had just released the information to the press.
“What is it?” Finn asked.
“Archie McDougal, the guy I was telling you about only a few nights ago…he’s dead. Murdered.”
“He was an asshole,” Andrew said. “People had died because of him. More would have.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Because I make it my business to know what goes on in Oxford.” His dark eyes were narrowed and his body tense.
The guys were all studying me. Waiting for me to connect the dots.
I did.
“You…you killed him,” I directed at Andrew.
He glanced at Finn and Cillian. Classic shared knowledge communication.
“ You killed him,” I said to the twins. “After I told you about him. About him robbing that old couple and them both dying and him getting off on the charges.”
“He was a murderer,” Finn said.
“He was an evil man, that’s true.” I suppressed a shudder. The menacing glint in Archie McDougal’s eyes had been disconcerting. He hadn’t cared about anyone or anything other than himself.
“The justice system had had its chance to balance the scales,” Cillian said, his head tipped as he studied me.
“It failed,” Finn added. “On more than one occasion.”
I had no argument for that. “So you took the law into your own hands.”
Finn kind of shrugged, not apologetically, in a so-what kind of a way.
Cillian shoved his hands into his jeans pockets and held my eye contact.
They had killed him. And fast, too. They must have raced around there, guns at the ready, and taken him out.
I turned to Mitch. “And you’re okay with this? You’re a cop?”
“Maybe more than anyone else. I see the misery and devastation assholes who have no respect for life leave behind.”
I looked at Jamie, handsome and smart. Phil, built like a brick shithouse and sullen to boot. They were all in on it. This brothel…safe house, was just part of whatever they were up to. Whatever game they were playing, as Chelsea had put it.
“I want to see this kill wall…now.”
Andrew glowered, said nothing, then turned and walked toward the side of the house.
“You sure?” Finn asked, slipping his arm around my waist.
“Yes. I need to, now that I know about it.” I followed Andrew.
Cillian was on my left, Finn on my right.
“What are you going to do with the information?” Finn asked as we stepped onto the street and into the shade of the sycamore trees that lined the avenue.
“I don’t know yet. I haven’t got the information.”
“You know what we are now,” Cillian said.
I stopped and turned to him. “I know you’re fighters, that you believe in justice, and now I know that you are prepared to murder for your beliefs.”
“Kill,” he said. “Murder is different. These guys were sent here from the Devil, we just send them back to Hell. Where they belong.”
We started walking again. My mind was spinning. What on earth had I got involved in? Who had I got involved with?