Chapter Fifty-Three
Fifty-three
The first thing I was aware of was the stiffness in my leg. The next was Teddy Piro’s voice, muffled and insistent. “…sick of being the only one getting my hands dirty,” he was saying. “It’s your turn, asshole.”
Scepter’s voice countered: “I didn’t ask for what you did.”
“Oh, fuck you, buddy. I helped you. Now it’s your…”
My eyelids fluttered open. I was on a metal folding chair in a bright room with no windows, my hands zip-tied behind my back.
I was still wearing my bloody skirt, but the blood had dried—a huge, rust-colored stain.
I looked closer at my leg. The tightness around my thigh.
My wound had been bandaged. I was alone, Scepter and Piro arguing just outside the door.
What did they want from me? Why hadn’t they killed me? What was going on?
“I am so unbelievably sick of you,” Scepter was saying. “Twenty-five years. We’re like your dad in the other room. We just keep going, Teddy. It’s time to pull the plug.”
“I’m sick of you, too,” said Piro.
“Then why do you keep calling me?”
“Why do you keep coming?”
“You’re ruining everything. Do you not fucking get it? Are you stupider than you look? Is that even possible? People are going to come looking for her.”
There were metal shelves in this room. Blinking lights. My eyes adjusted. The blinking was coming from computers. Laptops. Dozens of them lined the shelves, their screens alive with activity.
“That’s why you’ve got to do it,” Piro said.
“Jesus Christ, Teddy.”
The computers were all active, text scrolling on their screens.
At the top of each screen was an embossed label.
From where I was sitting, I couldn’t read the text, but I could read the labels.
They were all different names. Roberta Adams, one said.
Graham Wilson, said another. One of the others read Leila Donnelly.
I scooched my chair closer. I still couldn’t make out Leila Donnelly’s text. Graham Wilson’s was legible, though. It looked like an action scene, being written in hyperdrive.
…knew I’d never come back to Logan County unarmed…the screen read. Two seconds and probably fifty paragraphs later, I saw the words THE END.
What was this room? What was going on?
Scepter and Piro were still arguing, but they’d moved. I could hear them clearly now. They were just outside the door.
“I took the fall for the burglary. My dad never forgave me for that. You robbed from your mom and I took the fall.”
“Dude, let it go. We split the fuckin’ money. And we were seventeen!”
“Okay, well, what about Lee, then? I didn’t want to kill her.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“She was going to tell. She was going to the press. Your whole life. Everything you’ve worked for. Your dream would have been destroyed—”
“You honestly think I wanted you to do that, Teddy?”
“Of course you did, choad. You told the press you’ve got three more of her books.
But the truth is, AI could write a hundred of them, and the bots could go nuts for them all.
You could say you discovered a secret cache of Leila Donnelly content and you wouldn’t have to worry about the real Lee getting all squeamish about it. ”
“Teddy,” Scepter said. “She was the mother of my child!”
I actually gasped.
“Go fuck yourself,” Teddy Piro said.
“She was.”
“No more talking, Greg. Do it, and we’ll be even. Clean slate. I’ll help you with the body.”
The door opened. Greg Scepter stumbled into the room, and then the door slammed shut behind him.
He was wearing a white linen suit with a white T-shirt underneath, blood spatter across the front.
He had on the same chunky necklace he’d worn for the press conference.
It was even cheesier in person. And he was carrying my gun.
“I’m sorry about this, but Teddy’s such a dickhead,” Scepter said.
“He won’t let me out of here until I kill you. ”