Chapter 11 #2
Somebody screamed through an open window. Tires shrieked against pavement, and the smell of burning rubber pushed through my vents. Still, I kept going.
The Challenger jerked onto an exit ramp too fast, and I saw the mistake before he did. The back tires lost traction, and the entire car fishtailed violently. It slid sideways across the pavement before the driver overcorrected.
The car clipped the guardrail, and the entire passenger side burst apart in a spray of sparks and shattered glass.
“Oh shit!” I yelled, watching it flip.
Once.
Twice.
Glass exploded everywhere.
The car landed upside down with a sound so violent it shook through my chest.
Smoke curled into the air.
I slammed on my brakes so hard the seatbelt cut into my shoulder. My car skidded sideways before coming to a stop near the wreckage. For a second, everything was quiet except for the ticking of my engine and the faint crackle coming from the flipped car.
I stared at it.
My breathing turned shallow.
Then Booda opened his door and stepped out. I followed right behind him.
The Challenger looked crushed from top to bottom. One wheel still spun slowly in the air while smoke seeped from beneath the hood. The windshield had shattered completely.
The woman inside was dead. I knew it before I even reached her. Her body hung halfway twisted in the passenger seat, upside down from the seatbelt, with her head bent at an angle no living person could survive. Blood poured from her nose and disappeared into her hairline. Her eyes were still open.
I froze for half a second. Not because she was dead, but because she looked young.
“Don’t worry about her,” Booda said, moving around to the other side of the car.
The driver groaned, and that pulled my attention back fast. He was still alive, barely. Blood covered the side of his face, and one of his arms looked broken in several places.
His eyes cracked open when he saw Booda and me standing there. Fear hit his face instantly. He recognized us.
“Don’t look so shocked,” Booda and I said simultaneously.
The man tried to move, but pain folded him immediately. A scream tore out of him so raw it echoed across the empty highway. I crouched beside the broken window and stared at him.
“You should’ve pretended you didn’t see me. Could’ve ambushed me when you got where you were going. You're not too bright, are you?” I asked with a giggle.
“Help me…” he rasped, his voice was wet with blood.
I looked over at the dead girl again. Her hair swayed slightly in the breeze coming through the busted windshield.
“She didn’t deserve this,” I muttered.
“Nah,” Booda replied. “But she got in the car with him.”
A strange calm settled over me after that. I wasn’t angry anymore, and I wasn’t panicking either. I just looked at the girl hanging dead in that car, then back at him, and accepted what the night had turned into.
Booda reached in first and grabbed the man beneath his good arm. I grabbed the other side, and together we dragged him from the wreckage while he screamed and clawed weakly against us. Blood smeared across my hands and sleeves.
By the time we got him to my backseat, he was crying. Actual tears. Begging. Promising money. Offering information.
That triggered something. I’d been in a situation similar to this before.
And one thing I’d learned then was that people always pleaded when they knew death was inevitable.
Funny how morality suddenly kicked in when your bones were outside your body, and death was standing close enough to breathe on you.
He was heavy as fuck, and I could barely hold him up. Thank goodness Booda bore most of his weight, or I would’ve been out of there.
The man cried the entire time we dragged him toward my car. His feet scraped against the pavement while blood poured down the side of his face and soaked into his shirt. One of his arms hung wrong, limp and twisted near the shoulder.
“Please,” he choked out again. “Please don’t kill me.”
I ignored him and yanked the back door open.
Booda shoved him inside first. The man screamed the moment his broken arm hit the seat, and the sound bounced around the empty highway.
“Shut the fuck up,” I snapped.
He tried. I’d give him that much. His cries dropped into ragged whimpers while he curled awkwardly across my backseat, shaking so hard the entire car moved with him.
I slammed the door and looked back toward the wreck. The woman was still hanging upside down inside the Challenger.
Her hair brushed the crushed roof while smoke drifted into the night around her. One heel had come off during the crash and lay several feet away near shattered glass glittering across the freeway.
For a second, I couldn’t stop staring at her. She probably thought she was going out for a regular night. Now she was dead on the side of the freeway while he begged for his life in the back of my car.
“Let’s go. It’s nothing we can do to help her,” Booda said from beside me.
I looked away from the wreck and climbed back into the driver's seat. Cops and paramedics would be here soon.
The engine turned over, and I pulled away from the scene without looking back again.
The farther we got from the freeway, the quieter the city became. Buildings spread apart, traffic disappeared, and streetlights grew farther from each other until darkness started swallowing whole sections of the road.
The man groaned behind me every few seconds, and his blood kept dripping onto my seat.
“You know where you going?” Booda asked.
I swallowed and tightened my hands around the wheel. “I think so. Something about coming this way feels right.”
I wasn’t guessing. My body knew the route before my mind caught up to it. I made turns without thinking. Left at the light. Right near the railroad tracks. Straight through a row of dead warehouses with busted windows and rusted gates.
Then I saw it.
My stomach tightened instantly. The warehouse I was unconsciously looking for sat behind a chain-link fence wrapped in weeds and old graffiti. The loading dock was bare, and half the windows were painted black.
A strange pressure built behind my eyes the moment I pulled in, and images flashed through my head too fast to fully grab. Men laughed. Music echoed through the building. Stacks of cash were spread across a table. Booda stood near a scale with a gun tucked into his waistband.
Even worse, I knew the gate code before I even looked at the keypad, and I knew where the side entrance was. I knew this place in and out.
I hit the brakes hard enough to jolt the man awake in the backseat.
Booda looked over at me calmly. “You remember this place.”
“No,” I lied.
If I admitted I remembered this place, then I also had to admit that whatever version of me existed before the hospital wasn’t as innocent or morally decent as I’d like to believe.
And that terrified me.
Not because I remembered the warehouse, but because the memories didn’t feel foreign. Nothing about the place felt unfamiliar to my body. I’d been here before—with people who’d pissed me off in some form or fashion.
Many times.
The man whimpered in my backseat as I climbed out of the car. Blood soaked through the seat beneath him, and the smell of it mixed with oil, rust, and old rainwater that lingered in the air around the building.
Booda walked toward the side entrance, and I followed him.
The keypad was hidden behind a loose metal panel near the door. My fingers froze over it for half a second. Then a set of numbers entered my head. I typed them in, and the lock buzzed.
“You remember more than you think,” Booda said behind me.
I ignored him and shoved the door open. The warehouse was dark except for a few dim overhead lights near the center of the room. Dust floated through the air. Metal shelves lined the walls, and old plastic wrap covered stacks of abandoned boxes near the loading dock.
But underneath the dust, the place still felt lived in. A folding table was near the back wall beside two metal chairs. A mini fridge rested in one corner. A security monitor flickered near another table covered in old tools.
“You good?” Booda asked.
“No,” I answered honestly as I turned around to head back out.
As soon as I made it outdoors, the man groaned again from the car, and reality rushed back in. He screamed when we pulled him out, and even louder when his broken arm bounced off the concrete floor. We paid him no mind as we dragged him inside together.
“Please,” he cried. “Listen! I got money. I can pay.”
“Fuck your money,” Booda spat.
I shut the warehouse door behind us while the man shook on the ground.
Blood spread slowly beneath him, and he looked worse under the lights. One side of his face was badly swollen, and glass glittered on his shirt and hairline.
“You know who I am?” I asked.
His eyes found mine, and fear swallowed the little toughness he had left.
“Yes.”
“Then you know why you here.”
“I ain’t touch your money,” he rushed out. “I swear to God.”
My expression didn’t change.
“You got thirty seconds before I stop caring about your injuries.”
He started talking before I even finished the sentence.
Names. Addresses. Phone numbers.
Everything poured out of him so fast it almost sounded rehearsed.
Funny how loyalty disappeared once people tasted their own blood.
Booda crouched near him while I searched the man’s pockets. I found two phones, a wallet, and a thick stack of cash held together with a rubber band.
The second phone unlocked with Face ID the moment I held it toward him.
“Open the banking app,” I said.
His lips trembled. “Please—”
I stepped on his broken arm, and his scream tore through the warehouse so violently that it echoed off the walls.
“Open it.”
He fumbled through the app with shaking fingers while tears streamed down his face. Several accounts popped up. Business accounts. Personal accounts. Thousands sat in all of them.
Booda looked over at me. “Transfer it.”
I nodded. The scary part was that I already knew how. Not just how to move the money. How to clean it. How to bury it. How to make it disappear before sunrise.
That knowledge slid into place too naturally, and something about that made my stomach turn worse than the blood on the floor. Because memory wasn’t just bringing back faces anymore.
It was bringing me back. All of me.
The man kept crying on the floor while blood spread beneath him.
“I gave you everything,” he choked out. “Please…”
I stared at him while my thoughts turned strangely calm.
Not empty.
Focused.
My eyes drifted toward the red toolbox sitting against the wall. The second I started walking toward it, the man’s entire demeanor changed. Real panic hit him then.
Recognition.
“Nah,” he whispered immediately. “No. Not that. Just kill me.”
I stopped.
A strange feeling crept into my chest. “Not what?”
His breathing turned ragged. “Please don’t do that shit to me.”
“What shit?”
He shook his head violently, tears mixing with the blood on his face. “I heard about you.”
The warehouse suddenly felt colder.
Booda stayed quiet behind me.
“I don’t know what you talking about.”
“Yes, you do,” he cried. “Those niggas in Dallas… what y’all did to them…”
My nerves lit up instantly.
A quick image flashed through my head. Somebody screaming. Music playing loudly over it. Plastic stained red.
Then it disappeared.
The man saw my expression and started sobbing harder. “Please,” he whispered. “They said you peeled one of them niggas skin back layer by layer.”
My eyes drifted toward the toolbox again.
Toward the fillet knife resting beside a pair of pliers.
The man noticed immediately.
“No,” he whispered, panic flooding his voice. “Please…”
Silence swallowed the warehouse after that.
Because the terrifying part wasn’t the accusation.
It was the fact that somewhere deep down, it didn’t sound impossible to me.
I looked toward the toolbox again.
Then back at him.
And for the first time all night, I smiled as I grabbed the knife.
The scream that left his mouth after that barely sounded human.