31. Chapter 31
Chapter thirty-one
Dax
The deli. My father’s deli. Wrangler was torturing women in the place where I’d spent my entire childhood.
Where my mom sang to the radio, and my father worked until he decided to join her in the afterlife.
I thought I was gonna be sick, though that could have been the stench from Mateo’s soiled pants.
I heard the tapping of Emile’s computer in the background, and my eyes trailed to Mateo, who was still tied to the chair a few feet away from me. And then, as if a light bulb clicked on in his head, he started screaming again.
“Hey! Whoever’s on the phone! This crazy bastard has me locked up in a fucking warehouse! I need help—”
Mateo was barely able to get that last word out of his mouth before I pulled my Glock from underneath my jacket and clocked him upside his head with the barrel. He wasn’t dead, but he passed out cold immediately.
“That sounded annoying,” Emile muttered on the other line. Annoying didn’t begin to describe the frustration fueling my temper. “Okay, I’ve got it. Sold a little over three years ago to an anonymous buyer, then again a couple months later to…Oh shit.”
“Oh shit?” I asked, my patience crumbling. “Oh shit, what, Emile?”
His pause was a little too long before he spoke. “It was last sold to Deana Laskin.”
The name rang an immediate bell in my head. That was the shrew I called whose plates were allegedly stolen from her Tesla and found on the SUV used to abduct Tara. I felt like such a fucking fool. I’d known there was something there, felt it deep in my gut.
“Where did you say she lives?” I asked, running a hand across the back of my head through my hair.
Fuck. What time was it? I needed to get back to Lucy soon.
“Her residential address attached to the license plate was in Mill Valley. She works at a building development and architecture firm in the city—fuck, what was it called?” I heard him typing for a few more seconds. “Some place called Echelon Developments.”
If I’d thought my heart was going to jump from my chest when I saw the photo he just sent me, it couldn’t compare to the way it raged against my ribs now.
I wanted to puke. I wanted to roar. I needed to get to Lucy.
I left Mateo in the chair at the warehouse where a couple of Clay’s guys would have to keep watch over him. He was the last thing on my mind at this point, though I wanted to kill him for what he did. I’d have to decide later what to do with him.
The minivan wasn’t gonna get me there fast enough. My Pagani peeled down the street as I raced toward Echelon Developments.
I fucking left her there. Walked her right up to the lion’s den and fed her to the pride.
I didn’t stop at any lights. I didn’t wait for pedestrians to cross the street or traffic to slow. I drove up onto the sidewalks when I needed to. I swerved around people riding their bikes and I pummeled through the streets of San Francisco with ultraprecision.
All the while I prayed I wasn’t too late.
The car slid to a screeching halt in front of the office building. The doorman was no longer there, and I didn’t even try to hide the gun in my hand, another one strapped beneath my jacket. I ran up the steps and busted through the door.
The opulent lobby of Echelon Developments was empty except for a female receptionist and the doorman, who stood over the front desk next to her. Her eyes shot to me, and her lips twisted into a provocative smile as I got closer. That was before she saw the gun.
The doorman, on the other hand, saw it right away. He tried to dive under the desk, but I aimed my Glock and shot it at a large, decorative vase perched on its edge. It shattered and rained glass on top of his body. The girl screamed.
“Where is she?” My growl echoed across the lobby as I approached them, aiming my gun at the doorman’s stomach.
“I don’t know who—”
“I’m not here to play any games, motherfucker. Where’s the girl I dropped off here earlier? Tell me now or a bullet’s gonna tear through your flesh.”
The receptionist screamed again, but the doorman only smirked, then flipped me off. That was all it took. After years of trying to contain it, the monster inside me possessed my body, my brain. Like a familiar coat, it wrapped its claws around my shoulders, and I felt the darkness consume me.
I pulled the trigger.
“Oh my god! You shot him!” the receptionist shrieked from behind the desk, and I swiveled the barrel of the gun toward her. She stopped screaming, the noise hanging in the air around us. The doorman’s body slumped to the floor, a gurgling noise bubbling in his throat.
“Where is she?” I asked, my jaw hard.
“I imagine she’s already on a plane by now,” a cool, sardonic voice came from behind me. I spun around to find a red-haired man who looked like a grown-up frat boy a few feet away. He had a gun pointed right at my face.
This was him. The one from the footage, whose name wasn’t Gabe, but Bryce. He flashed a sinister, crooked smile. “Gotcha.” He let out a manic laugh.
By comparison to me, the piece of shit was scrawny. It didn’t matter though because guns made even a weak man powerful. Good thing mine was aimed right back at him.
“You know, when Deana told me that somehow Chase and I’d pissed off a chef, I laughed in her face,” Bryce said in his smarmy tone. “You’re much scarier than I’d pictured in my head.”
“You’ll lose that head if you don’t tell me where the fuck she is,” I rumbled, the beast tearing from my throat.
He laughed again, the sound like nails sliding down a chalkboard. “If you haven’t noticed, big boy, I have a gun too.” He wiggled the pistol in his hand and winked. Rage pounded in my head, along with a healthy dose of dread. I couldn’t die here. Wherever she was, Lucy needed me to get to her.
“If you shoot me, I’ll still have time to pull the trigger. Then we’ll both be dead,” I said flatly.
Something seemed to click inside of Bryce’s head, which he tilted to the side as he studied me. “Hmm, I suppose you might be right. So, what do you propose we do? Put the guns down and have a chat like civilized people?”
I gave him a little shrug, tilting my head back at him like a mirror of circumstance. “I suppose so,” I said.
“Fine. On the count of three, we put them on the floor,” he challenged.
“Fine.”
We both moved slowly, eyes trained on the barrels of our pistols as we crouched toward the floor. “One…” Bryce drawled.
“Two…” I continued, not wanting him to think he had the upper hand.
“Three.” Metal met the glossy tile floor as we simultaneously set the guns down. Then I lifted my eyes back to Bryce’s face for the briefest second.
I realized my mistake too late. His viscous grin shot back across his face as he snatched his gun back off the floor and flipped it up toward me.
A shot rang loud and clear.
My heart stilled in my chest, the sound deafening. Somehow, I was still breathing. My fingers twitched back and grabbed my own gun off the floor, just in time for Bryce’s body to slump forward and smack down right in front of me.
Clay stood only a couple of feet away from where Bryce was seconds ago. I wished I could say this was the first time he’d appeared as my guardian angel, but we’d seen far too many close calls for that to be true.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see you,” I said.
“You have,” he told me, stepping around Bryce’s body and holding out his hand. I took it and he pulled me up straight. “You’ve just chosen to forget about those times.”
“I assure you, brother, I haven’t forgotten.” Even though I tried my damned hardest to.
I turned around to the reception desk, but the girl was gone. She must have escaped while Bryce and I were standing off. A buzz went off in my pocket, but when I pulled out my phone, I realized it wasn’t coming from that.
No, it came from the other phone I’d had tucked away in my pocket of my leather jacket. It was the burner I took from Marty’s office the day I went to The Wire. I flipped it open.