Chapter Eleven
ELEVEN
The back door was unlocked. Shepherd opened it a crack and held his ear up to the empty space. His palms were sweaty. He readjusted the grip on his bat. No one was screaming, so that was good. But there was no noise at all, which was less good.
With a mumbled curse and a whispered prayer, Shepherd shouldered the door open and stepped inside.
What struck him immediately was the smell.
He had a cat growing up, and as she got older, she had a harder time using the litter box, and sometimes he’d come home from school and that stringent cat-pee odor would hit him straight in the face, making his eyes water.
It was the same smell that greeted him now.
It didn’t take much investigating to find out why.
The back door opened into the kitchen, only it wasn’t really a kitchen, per se.
It was a lab, and it didn’t look like they were doing science experiments.
School experiments, at least, would’ve been done with proper equipment, and not plastic gallon jugs and duct tape.
There were liquids slowly dripping into jugs from wires that were hung up seemingly at random around the kitchen.
Buckets collected who knows what on the floor.
A propane tank and lighter fluid sat in front of the sink.
A half-full blender burbled on the counter.
Perhaps the meth maker was about to make a smoothie when Ginny had barged in.
What was she thinking, sneaking into a place like this?
Shepherd had only seen meth on TV, and even then, it was a bright blue color.
But the crystals in a strainer on the stove top were white.
The windows were closed, trapping in the cat-pee smell, but now that he’d grown accustomed to it, there was a thick stench of cigarettes in the house, too.
That was a shame. You never could get cigarette smoke fully out of the walls or the carpet with just a regular clean.
He gripped his bat tighter, held it up by his ear. Amidst the dripping sound of the various illegal liquids, there was also a quiet hiss. This was not good. This was, in fact, very bad. And Ginny just waltzed into it without a care in the world! At least he had a bat! She went in empty-handed!
But where had she gone? Was she still there, searching from room to room?
Had she snuck out the front door while he’d been breaking and entering through the back door?
A thick, heavy lump settled in the middle of his throat.
Shepherd swallowed. The lump remained. His breathing was shallow and uneven, matching the buzz of his pulse.
There were voices coming from the other side of the house.
Quiet, muffled voices. One male. One female.
The female had the familiar lilt that Ginny had, and his heart ratcheted up to another until-now-impossible speed.
He gulped, and it was audible in the silence of the meth lab.
With careful steps, occasionally looking down for blood trails lest he walk into blood twice in one day, he approached the back rooms. The main area of the house was sparsely furnished: a pull-out couch, with blankets in a bundled heap at the end.
A card table with four chairs, a snuffed-out but still slightly burning cigar in one of the two ash trays filled with cigarette butts.
No artwork on the walls, no carpet on the floor.
He tiptoed down a narrow hallway. Three doors were dark, but the last one on the right had light peeking out of the bottom.
His mouth was dry. His throat was dry. His eyes were dry. It seemed all liquid in his body had moved to his hands, which struggled to keep hold of the bat.
He heard Ginny say, “I’m not the police, OK? I’m looking for my mom, like I already told you.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see if that story holds up once the boss gets here.”
Shepherd was not going to wait to appeal to any boss. Waiting for a boss was a Bad Idea. Unfortunately, so were all his other ideas. Every one he’d ever had. Including this one:
Shepherd threw open the door and ran in swinging.
It took a second to line up the hit, but the man talking to Ginny hadn’t been expecting him.
The man turned towards the intrusion. Not fast enough.
Shepherd swung like he was hitting a home run in the World Series.
He struck the side of the man’s head with a sickening thunk.
Blood spatter covered the wall, his shirt, his right sock.
The man stood there, suspended almost as if by strings, before the invisible lines were cut, and he collapsed.
The metal bat trembled out of Shepherd’s hands, clanging to the tile floor.
Ginny sat on a twin bed, apparently unscathed. She stared up at him with big, blue eyes.
“How bad is it?” he whispered.
She swallowed, the column of her throat constricting, before braving a glance down at his feet. “Um,” she squeaked.
Shepherd’s indigestion came back with nauseating force. He covered his mouth and looked down. A bald white man, wearing jeans, a white shirt, and a leather vest, lay spread-eagled on the tile.
His head was no longer as round as it should be.
Something sour hit the back of his tongue, and Shepherd gulped it down. “He’s OK, though—right?”
“Yeah,” Ginny said. “Yeah. We should, um”—she stood up, smoothing out imaginary wrinkles in her dress as she did—“we should go, though. Like, right now.”
She hopped over the meth maker and grabbed Shepherd by the shoulder. “Take the bat.”
“Shouldn’t we call the police?” Shepherd hissed.
“And what?” Ginny was walking with both of her hands over her heart. “Confess to murdering a random dude for no good reason?”
“No good reason?” Shepherd grabbed her elbow and forced her to spin around, worried she was holding herself oddly due to injury. But there was nothing noticeably wrong with her. “Ginny, he held you captive!”
She waved a hand. “I’m not saying he was a good random dude. But he was unarmed, and you had a bat, and we would’ve outnumbered him, and so, yes, I would tell the police that I was in fear for my life even if I wasn’t. You understand?”
Sometimes talking to Ginny felt like trying to solve a word problem in fifth-grade math class. “What?”
“Just don’t touch anything,” she ordered. “And follow me. We have to get out of here before his boss arrives.”
“Cardello?”
She shook her head, scurrying down the hall. “Definitely not Cardello. Charlie is a more modern organized-crime guy—the kind women write romance novels about. He wouldn’t mix with a white supremacist, meth-making, biker gang.”
“Oh, well. Good for him! How great for the mob boss, leaning more modern, changing with the times!”
Ginny spun around at the kitchen threshold. Her fists landed on her hips. “Why are you snapping at me?”
“Are you joking?” He laughed. It felt like his head was on loose, as though his neck bolts had been undone.
Like he was multiple people all mashed together and all trying to flee in opposite directions at once.
“Are you joking, Ginny? Look where we are!” Shepherd used the bat to point at the meth lab behind her.
She cleared her throat and did not look where they were. “It’s not like I’m the one making meth.”
“You brought me here!” He laughed again.
Was he floating? It felt like his feet were no longer on the ground.
“This was supposed to be brunch!” Shepherd smacked himself in the face.
His nose stung. “I was supposed to be eating overpriced brunch on the beach with my landlord and a scary lady who hurt my feelings! But no, I just bashed a man in the head with my bat. He could wake up at any minute and kill us!”
“Oh, Shepherd.” She smoothed two fingers over his sore nose. Her perfume filled his nostrils, a soft vanilla scent that mixed with the coconut of her shampoo, and the pads of her fingers were soft and warm. It was almost enough to forget the horrors he’d suffered already today.
Almost.
“He’s not gonna wake up, honey.”
Shepherd glared, yanked away from her touch. “He might!”
Lots of people survived head injuries. In fact, on every TV show he’d ever watched, someone would bash somebody else in the back of the head as a convenient scene change. He stomped past, the intermittent dripping and the constant hiss making the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
“I am stopping for Alka-Seltzer before we go to your dad’s house, and you are paying for it!”
“Fine,” Ginny snapped, “you big baby.”
“Excuse me?” He spun around, bat loose in his hands.
He had more to say. Lots more. A big baby?
He’d gone into the room she was being held hostage in and saved her freaking life like a man.
And she had the nerve to insult him? He was going to say all that, sprinkle it with some expletives, but his palms were damp, and the bat was wet with some stuff he’d rather not think about.
The bat, quite of its own volition, simply flew out of Shepherd’s hands.
The plastic jugs gurgled and spat as they fell over.
The quiet, constant hiss was no longer quiet.
Shepherd acted without thinking—something he wished he could do more often, his damn brain never shutting off its narration except for sleep and sex—and ran towards Ginny at full speed.
He shoved her out the back door, practically carrying her under his arm as he high-tailed it out of the building.
He was vaguely aware that she was screaming curse words in his ear, but she was quickly drowned out by the explosion.