2
ANSON
“What the hell are you doing, Bishop? You’d better not be writing all this down.”
I looked up to find Vincent Weidner glaring at me in the rearview mirror of our stolen Chevy, specks of dried blood dotting his face, lit only by the dashboard lights in the moonless night.
Paul Upchurch was in the passenger seat, his face resting against the glass, snoring loudly.
How he could sleep, I had no idea. My heart had been racing for the better part of the night with no intention of slowing down.
The fact that I had a nasty graze on my leg from a stray bullet didn’t help; neither did my throbbing right arm.
I broke it for the first time after an unfortunate run-in with a pedophile a few weeks ago, and I was fairly certain I’d broken it again a few hours earlier after fleeing an isolated farmhouse.
We were maybe two hours outside Simpsonville, South Carolina, on our way back to that same farmhouse just outside Charleston.
“We’re in enough shit as is,” Vincent muttered. “The last thing we need is you documenting everything like some play-by-play for the cops.”
I looked down at the black and white composition book in my lap, the pen in my good hand. “I wouldn’t do that.”
We’d stolen the car from a dirty police detective shortly after we killed him, and I’d found a package of empty composition books in the pocket behind the driver’s seat.
I imagined he used them to document his less dirty activity.
His name had been Detective Stocks. We killed his partner, too, an equally dirty cop named Welderman.
We’d killed them both at the farmhouse we were now returning to.
The insanity of that screamed at me. “We shouldn’t go back there. That’s what they’d want us to do.”
Vincent grunted. “How the hell do you know what they want? You’re just a damn kid. You don’t know shit.”
I was fifteen, and tonight wasn’t the first time I’d killed someone. It wasn’t even the first time I had to kill a dirty cop. I knew plenty. “The bodies in that car, they were cheese.”
“Huh?”
“Bait.”
His head shook. “They weren’t bait—they were a message.”
“Bait.”
“You’re an idiot.”
We’d stolen the detective’s car. The girls and the Kid were supposed to be right behind us in Finicky’s car.
They were supposed to head straight for the meet.
That was the plan. We were supposed to be right behind them, after we picked up Weasel.
None of that happened. The cops killed Weasel before we could get to him.
The girls didn’t show. Instead, we found Finicky’s car at the meeting spot with the detectives’ bodies laid out inside and a note warning us off. No sign of the girls or the Kid.
“Someone went through the trouble to load Welderman and Stokes into Finicky’s car and drove them three hours to a place only Libby and I knew about. They did that to tell us two things: one, they have the girls, and two, if we want them back, we need to come and get them.”
Vincent rolled his eyes. “The note said, ‘You’ve got an hour to take out the trash before I call the locals. Forget the girls. Don’t follow,’ signed by some jack-off named Sam Porter. That’s a message telling us to go anywhere but Charleston and disappear, or they’ll finger us for the murders.”
“You called me a kid.”
“So what? Now your feelings are hurt? You are a fucking kid.”
“That’s how they see us, too. As kids,” I explained. “When you tell a kid to do something, what do they do?”
He was about to argue, then it clicked. “The opposite.”
I nodded. “They told us to stay away because they knew our reaction would be to do the opposite and come back.”
He shook his head again. “Why go through all that trouble? If they wanted us back, they could have grabbed us at the meeting spot.”
The meeting spot.
My old house in Simpsonville.
I’d given the address to Libby. Only Libby.
She wouldn’t give it up willingly.
What did they do to get it out of her?
I didn’t want to think about that.
Couldn’t.
I’d found Libby’s locket in the dirt right after we found that note. It was in my pocket, the warmth of it throbbing.
From the passenger seat, Paul snorted in his sleep, shifted position, and drifted off again, his breath leaving a foggy stain on the glass.
Vincent lowered his voice. “Listen, you saw all the pictures in the farmhouse, all the kids they ran before us. They’ve been trafficking people through that place for years.
This isn’t some little one-off operation; it’s a machine.
You, me, Paul, we’re damaged goods. I’m almost eighteen, too old for what they want.
Your arm’s busted. They probably know you took a bullet; they don’t know how bad.
And Paul, let’s be honest, he’s not much to look at.
Not exactly going to fetch top dollar. They don’t give a shit about the three of us; they want us gone.
They want the girls. Scratch that, they’ve got the girls.
The Kid, too. They’re cutting their losses.
They sent a message to scare the three of us off.
A loud and clear message. We killed those cops. We surface and they’ll pin that on us.”
“Dirty cops.”
“Cops are cops. Nobody will care if they’re dirty. We can’t prove it anyway.” He let out a low sigh. “We should have burned the car.”
“That would have brought the fire department.”
I knew that because they came when my house burned. Not fast enough to save the house, but they came.
Vincent shrugged. “At least there’d be no evidence. Nothing useful, anyway. That’s probably why they didn’t just kill us at the meet. Killing us creates more questions. More problems. Force us to run, and they can throw all the blame our way. That’s the only reason we’re still breathing.”
Vincent had killed Welderman with a wrench, a nasty blow to the head.
I’d stabbed Stocks in the neck. Nothing clean about either kill.
Who knows what kind of trace we left behind?
Looking down at my hand, I realized Stocks’s blood was still on me.
On my hand, on my shirt. It dotted the cast on my right arm.
If we got pulled over, there’d be no hiding what we’d done. Somebody else might get hurt.
“Maybe we should stop somewhere and get cleaned up,” I told him. “Change clothes.”
“I could eat,” Paul said in a voice halfway between awake and asleep.
“We’re not stopping.” In a softer voice, Vincent added, “I’m not giving up on Kristina. Every second counts.”
He was right, of course. There was no time. Stupid of me to suggest it.
We needed a plan. A new plan. Stopping meant procrastination. Procrastination was hiding from the inevitable.
I think a part of me was worried about what we would find when we got back to that farmhouse. Maybe I already knew what we’d find. I knew and wanted to put it off as long as possible.
While Vincent’s thoughts were of Kristina, I couldn’t lose Libby, and the idea of that was eating at me.
Without her, nothing else mattered. I’d told her I loved her, and I did.
A few months ago, I had no idea what that meant, but she brought it out of me.
Knowing she was in danger, knowing what they planned to do to her .
. . it hurt. It physically hurt. More than my broken arm or the bullet wound in my leg.
It hurt deep in a way no painkiller could reach.
Libby.
Kristina.
Tegan.
Vincent.
Paul.
The Kid.
Me.
We were all in this together. Weasel died for us.
There was no running; there was only seeing it through. We’d get them all back. Then we’d end it. We’d end the people responsible. Oh, and if they hurt Libby . . .
That sounds dangerously like an emotional reaction, Champ, Father’s voice chimed in from somewhere in the back of my mind. Emotions are for the weaker lot. Not for you. Not for my boy.
“You loved Mother,” I silently mouthed.
That I did. Look where it got me.
“Anson’s right,” Paul mumbled, sitting up and wiping his eyes. “They’re not there. They’ve ghosted that place, never to return.”
Vincent frowned at him. “How much of all that did you hear? I thought you were asleep.”
“Enough to know you think you’re prettier than me, you self-centered prick.”
“We go to the farmhouse,” Vincent said flatly. “We’ll be careful about it. If they’re not there, maybe we can figure out where they took them.”
“And if we can’t?”
Vincent looked first at Paul, then back at me in the rearview mirror. “Then we figure out who the fuck Sam Porter is and beat it out of him.”