Chapter 51 #2
Timms chortles and relaxes at hearing his own language tossed at him by a nonthreatening white man in jeans and a half-zip pullover.
“Shit. Why me?” the disingenuous fuck asks.
“Who knows?” Dr. Mohr would hold his gaze. Joe’s eyes drop. “A low-value female like that hates being reminded about the natural order of things. They want to see great men like you brought down.”
His fingers tighten on the gun. “Fucking whores.”
It’s definitely time for my gambit to keep her from being shot the instant she crosses the threshold.
Please let this work.
“What I want to know,” I say, “is how she got the jump on Whitfield. Navarro, I get. He didn’t treat his body as a temple, you know?
Bitch probably found him drunk and nagged him to death.
” Joe is pleased when Timms laughs at his little joke.
“But Whitfield, that man was a tank. How’d she do it? Where’s his body?”
“Shit. Yeah.” His jaw clenches, then he adds with a forced laugh, “If it’s even true.”
“Right,” I say. “If it’s even true.”
We both fall silent, and Felicity whispers, “Warning’s delivered. You’re up, Emerald.”
Rue’s code name for tonight. Felicity just gave her the green light. Anxiety twists my stomach. If she gets hurt, if she gets ki—
Timms snaps his head up when a creak comes from the kitchen. “What was that?”
That’s my girl. Be careful, baby. I love you.
“Stay here.” Timms points at me as he stalks out of the room, gun first. My entire being strains to follow him. Instead, I plant my feet in the center of the floor and strain to hear what’s happening in the next room.
At first, there’s silence. Then we hear everything. Timms’s furious shout. A body being slammed against the wall. Rue’s small cry of pain.
I’m moving before I can think better of it.
“Everything okay, brother?” I call, but I don’t make it out of the room before he returns, holding Rue by the back of the neck, his gun at her side.
We should’ve just killed him. I can’t bear this.
“Look what I found.” He’s beaming, the air of defeat from earlier gone as he peacocks in front of a captive woman.
He shakes her roughly, showing her off like she’s a prize he’s captured.
She’s dressed in her usual black gloves, running shoes, and mask.
But unlike the high-necked shirt and hoodie I’m used to, she’s wearing what she laughingly referred to earlier as her slutty assassin gear: low-rise leggings and a tight, plunging V-neck shirt that show off her breasts and the curve of her waist. She said it’d be another weapon in her arsenal.
“Caught this one trying to come in through the back door.” Timms lets his flabby innuendo hang in the air as his gaze devours my girlfriend.
“Guess my gun guy was right,” I say hoarsely.
He thrusts her at me. “Hold her. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
I grab the woman I love and spin her to face the other man.
When Timms struts forward and yanks the mask off her head, his mouth flops open in shock. “Shut the fuck up. Rue fucking Bellamy?”
She tosses her head, sending her braid flying over her shoulder. “Surprise, asshole.”
“Uh, do you two know each other?” I ask.
Timms’s face flips through confusion, rage, and fear before settling on amused arrogance. “My friend says you’re here to kill me.”
She glances over her shoulder, hitting me with a poisonous glare I know is part of the con. It tears into me anyway.
“No.” She turns back to Timms and says coolly, “I’m here to tell you that I’m going to destroy you. Then I’m going to kill you.”
He laughs, cocky as ever. “The fuck does that even mean?”
She lunges for him, and I tighten my fingers, keeping her in place. I gripped her shoulders just like this as I slid my cock into her in the shower this morning.
I can’t bear this.
“Guess I’d better check you for weapons, huh, girlie?”
Timms tucks his gun in the elastic waistband of his shorts and runs his hands over my girlfriend’s body.
It’s not a search. It’s an assault, and he takes his time squeezing her breasts, trailing his fingers up her inner thighs, reaching behind her to grope her ass.
Rue is rigid under my touch the entire time, breathing fast and shallow, and I squeeze her upper arms.
We’re going to make him pay, baby.
“Interesting technique,” I say tightly as she quivers in my arms. I hope it’s rage and not fear. My brave fucking girl.
He laughs and holds up the knife from the pocket of her leggings. “It works, though.”
“That’s mine,” she spits out, and I know how much she hates seeing her weapon in his tattooed hands.
“It’s mine now.”
He goes to shove it into his pocket, then realizes the extra weight will be too much for his elastic waistband, which is already drooping where he stuck the gun.
“Hold this.” He hands me her knife, and I let Rue go long enough to pocket it. Apparently I’ve passed all the tests necessary for him to arm me, which is rich since I’m handing it back to her the instant I can do it safely.
Next, he checks the pockets at her hips, reaching the fingers tattooed with STAY into the left one and the fingers tattooed with HARD into the right. What he finds is a tube of lipstick and—
“The fuck is this?”
Love and fear collide in my chest when he holds up the small, thin package, and it bursts out of me as a strangled laugh.
“Did you bring a heart Band-Aid to a murder, little girl?” I ask gruffly. I can’t bring myself to call her anything more demeaning.
She looks over her shoulder at me again. “You never know when someone might need patching up.” Her eyes don’t linger on me, but I feel them long after she’s turned back around, and I’m going to spend the rest of my life at her back, by her side, in her arms. Wherever she wants me, I’ll be there.
Timms, though, sneers as he tosses her love note to me on the ground so he can examine the lipstick.
“Who the fuck brings makeup to a murder?” His laughing sneer is directed at Joe, his audience of one. “What’s wrong with these vain cunts?”
Rue waits a beat, then says, “Did you want an answer, or was that rhetorical?” She makes a sympathetic little noise. “Sorry, do you know what rhetorical means?”
His face goes red, and he ratchets back his arm, the lipstick clutched in his fist. Rue and I both brace, her to take the hit and me to kill him for it. But that’s not how to keep the night on track, so I let her go and step between them.
“Aristotle, man,” I say evenly. “Proportionate anger toward the appropriate target.”
Joe doesn’t understand Greek philosophy very well.
Lester Timms understands it even less.
“You’re right. She doesn’t deserve my strength.” He unclenches his fist and thrusts the lipstick at her. “Here. Make yourself pretty before you try to kill me.”
She takes it gingerly. This asshole’s just taken the dial-a-dose and clenched it, jostled it. The opposite of delicate. And now he’s pointing a gun at her, ordering her to paint her mouth with it.
“Quit stalling,” Timms snaps.
Rue’s hands shake as she uncaps the tube and touches the creamy red bullet to her lower lip, applying the first stroke of color.
Timms watches raptly, his arms over his chest and his eyes fixed on her mouth.
I watch in horror, prepared to snap Timms’s neck and sprint for help with her in my arms at the first sign of hemlock paralysis.
When she finishes stroking the color over her top lip, she caps the only weapon she has left and slides it back in her pocket.
“How’s that?” she simpers, blowing him a kiss.
He swaggers forward and grabs her by the chin, roughly tilting her head up and running his thumb along the edge of her mouth to even out the lower line.
“You’re awfully pretty for an alleged murderer,” he says in a low voice while I struggle to remember that I promised Rue I’d keep my cool.
“Well, you look terrible, Les. I turned you down for drinks when you still had a little muscle mass, but now?” She eyes his arms, his gut, his skinny legs. “Yeah, it’s an even easier ‘no.’”
His hand whips out to grab her cheeks, squeezing until her ruby-red lips jut into a painful-looking pout.
Then he shoves her to her knees. She gives a small cry that I feel down to my atoms when she lands hard, catching herself on her hands.
She’s mostly recovered from her jump out of Overton’s window, but she doesn’t need any more strain on her joints.
“For the record, there’s no ‘alleged,’” she says, looking up at him calmly. “I’m a murderer. I killed your friend Marcus.”
Timms crouches to wipe the lipstick on his thumb down the front of her shirt, going nose to nose with her in the process. “That was an accident.” His tone is dismissive, but when he stands, his eyes cut to me.
That’s right, asshole. Joe did mention the conspiracy theories running around your precious forum.
She sits back on her heels and folds her gloved fingers in her lap. “Not at the end when I stabbed him in the dick with a six-inch shard of glass.”
Timms and I recoil. Even Pell gives a low whistle over our comms. This fact is news to all three of us.
“Oh, and you were right,” she continues. “I also killed my ex.”
Timms scoffs. “Sure you did.”
“I killed my ex—a goddamn Cook County assistant state’s attorney—and made his body disappear without a trace.” She continues to gaze steadily up at him. “So you have to ask yourself, how good a killer am I to have pulled that off?”
“You… you…” he sputters. “How?”
“Maybe I used my feminine wiles, Les.” Every time she calls him that, he flinches. “It’s like you said the other week. I’m the woman who used to keep Greg’s dick wet.”
He fucking… he said what? Joe’s starting to think his hero isn’t such a great guy after all.
“Okay, fine,” Rue says with a sigh. “I actually tranqued him, moved him into my kill chamber by wheelchair, and cut off little pieces of him until he died screaming.” She smiles. “Or maybe he’s on a beach in Belize drinking Bellinis. Who can say, really? Either way, I’m here to kill you now.”
After a pause, Timms doubles over with a wheezy laugh, looking up at me as he wipes tears from his eyes.