Don't Look Away (Veronica Sloan) (34 page)

Leslie A. Kelly is a best-selling author who has written more than fifty novels under various pseudonyms. She lives in Maryland with her husband and their daughters.

DON’T LOOK AWAY is the first book in the Veronica Sloan Series. To learn more about The Veronica Sloan Series visit Leslie online at
http://www.lesliekelly.com
.

Continue on to read an excerpt from DON’T EVER STOP, the exciting second book in the Ve
ronica Sloan Series by Leslie Kelly. Available September 2013!

PROLOGUE

November 29, 2022

Long Beach, CA

Angelo Ortiz had always figured he’d die fast, die hard, and die bloody.

If the cops didn’t kill him, one of his competitors would. It was a part of the job. He’d accepted that from the time he was ten and had gone to work for the neighborhood dealer, passing crack to kids in the public housing complex where he’d grown up. Since then, every day he’d woken up wondering if some un-bribeable LAPD officer (there were a few) would put a bullet in his head. Or if he’d get it from somebody sitting at the other end of the powdery pipeline that snaked up from South America to South L.A. Hell, it could even be one of his own lieutenants, paid off by the competition, wanting to crawl up the drug-encrusted ladder. So, yeah, he’d always known he wouldn’t grow old and die in bed, that it would be fast, hard and bloody. 

Unfortunately, he’d only been right about two of the three.

It was slow. Agonizingly slow.

“You’re a dead man, you know that, right?” he managed to whisper.

“You first,” his captor replied, the voice as slick as a snake.

Throughout the torture session, the psychotic bastard hadn’t even sounded like he’d breathed hard. He was calm and cool, deliberate. There hadn’t been so much as a quiver in his hand when he’d taken the garden shears and cut off Angelo’s trigger finger.

Pain. Oh, Madre de dios, the pain.

“So do it, you pussy,” he whispered, knowing his words were inspired as much by hope that this would end as by any of his infamous bravado.

A rough laugh. “You’d like that. Like for it to be over.”

Angelo—dubbed the Angel of the South side because he always had goodies that made you feel
real
good—would never have admitted it to his posse or his women. But yeah. Oh, yeah, part of him just wanted it over. Death had to be better than this.

He’d never known it was possible to experience so much agony, lose so much blood, and remain conscious. There was no escape, not even through unconsciousness. Whenever he was on the verge of passing out, he was jerked awake by some vile-smelling cloth dropped on his face.

He’d taken beatings before. Been stabbed. Run over. Shot once. But this sadistic prick was like some kind of demon straight from hell. A reincarnated Marquis-de-whatthefuck.

Angelo had never even considered that somebody would grab him off his own toilet, in his own house. Much less that they’d torture him in the soundproof room he, himself had used to mete out punishment to those who’d deserved it. Of course, he’d never done more than rough up a couple’a guys. Maybe shot one in the head. But that was humane. Nothing like this. Nothing this twisted. It was sick. Like something out of a horror movie.

The intruder was a ghost. He’d gotten past the two guards outside—Angelo’s cousins, who he’d personally trained. Danny and Ricky were probably dead. Even if they couldn’t hear what was going on, no way would they have let this much time go by without checking on him. He’d gone up to his room to do a little blow at around eleven-thirty. They usually buzzed him around one a.m. to report in. If he didn’t answer, or call them back, they would have come up.

That had been hours ago and they hadn’t come to check in. There hadn’t been a sound in his enormous house. It had seemed like forever since he’d heard anything but his torturer’s taunts, and his own screams.

“How’d you do it?” he whispered, somehow needing to know. “How’d you get in?”

The dude, so unthreatening Angelo might have passed him on the street and never even noticed him, grinned. “Been watching you and your homies. Everybody’s got bad habits…theirs was shooting up every night in your back yard.”

No way. They’d been strung-out on duty?

“Don’t be too hard on them. They sure aren’t going to do it anymore. Or anything else.”

So they
were
dead. This guy had killed his two best men, and probably his dogs, disabled the alarm, and slithered into the bathroom, putting a gun to his head mid-shit. Somehow knowing about the quiet room, he’d forced Angelo downstairs and into it, naked and enraged. The maniac had brought his own cuffs—hand and ankle—and fastened him to a sturdy chair in the center of the room. A dirty rag had been shoved into Angelo’s mouth to cut off his furious yells. Later, when the fight had been hammered and sliced out of him, the rag had been yanked out so the stranger could get to work on his face. He’d used a long, thick piece of pipe at first. Then he’d gone on to Angelo’s own brass knuckles, which had been hanging on a hook by the door.

All of his strength was gone. Threats too. He could only see out of one eye—the other was swollen shut. The air sifted audibly through his shattered nose as he tried to breathe, and warm blood dripped freely down his face and neck, landing in thick, sticky drops on his bare chest. There was a huge puddle of it on the floor.

No strength. Barely any brain cells. Now there was just a hint of the bravado that had carried him through his entire life, plus shock that this was really happening, that he was facing death courtesy of a smiling
gringo
who looked like he could be a banker.

“Ready for the next part?”

“Fuck you,” he said on a guttural groan.

“I guess that means yes. Open wide.”

Seeing the shears and the pliers, he knew his tongue or some teeth would be next. He couldn’t even try to resist the strong hand that grabbed his chin and pushed it down.

Tears formed in his good eye and, almost against his own will, he whispered a word that had seldom crossed his lips during his entire life. “Please.”

The man hesitated, then bent down until they were almost nose to nose. His brown eyes shone with intensity.
Insanity
. He appeared to be studying Angelo’s face as if noting every scar, every scratch, and committing it to memory.

“Are you asking for mercy?” His breath smelled like mint. “Is that what you want?”

Angelo managed a tiny nod.

A pause. Another long stare. As though he were actually weighing his options and the decision hadn’t been made and committed to long before he’d broken into Angelo’s house.

But Angelo knew it had.

“Your kind doesn’t understand mercy.” The killer straightened. “So you’ll get none.”

The pliers entered his mouth, the metallic scrape across his tongue making him jerk. Angelo twisted his head, trying to evade the probe. The man clutched a fistful of his hair to hold him still, grabbing the tip of his tongue with the tool and pulling so hard his head jerked forward.

He tried to scream. The shears came up. He twisted, struggled, bracing himself against the agony.

It came quickly.

Snip
.

Fire ruptured within his head. Blood gushed into his mouth, hot and salty, and it flew out in specks as he howled his anguish. He felt himself drifting out of consciousness.

The cloth. That smell. He groaned, shocked awake to experience the pain all over again.

“I imagine you’re wondering why this is happening to you.”

No. He wasn’t. Right now Angelo was only picturing this guy being ripped apart by wild animals, imagining the pleasure of skinning him with his largest knife, fantasizing about digging into his guts, pulling out his intestines and feeding them to his dogs while the man cried out for the mercy he didn’t believe in.

The crazy gringo explained anyway. “It’s because of 10/20.”

Angelo tried to respond, but couldn’t do more than make a guttural groaning sound that sent spit and more blood flying past his lips.

“You don’t understand. That’s all right. You don’t have to. Let us just say that if it weren’t for what happened on 10/20, you’d still be sitting on your shit-smeared throne, deciding which woman your gang would rape next or which kid you wanted to turn into a junkie.”

Nothing made sense. But he didn’t think it would have even if he hadn’t been in so much pain, bloody, broken and wondering how much more he could take. He’d had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks of 10/20/17. Hell, five years ago, he’d just moved up to importing his own product. He’d barely murdered anybody—nobody who mattered anyway—much less been part of the bombing that had destroyed much of Washington D.C. and killed the president.

“I suppose I could explain it to you, after all, nobody’s going to
hear
what we’re saying.” He laughed softly. “Well, they won’t hear what
I’m
saying. I don’t imagine
you’ll
ever talk again in what’s left of your pathetic, useless life.”

The man walked over to a utility sink that stood in the corner and began to rinse off the pliers and the shears, whistling softly as he scrubbed. He even looked up and smiled at himself in the mirror attached to the wall above it—useful for keeping an eye on what was going on in the room at all times. Especially on the room’s owner bleeding to death in a chair in the middle of it.

“But unfortunately,” he finally said, “we’ve run over on time. I have to go.”

Meaning, he was going to leave Angelo alive? This was going to stop?

He’d be left beaten, bloody, broken, without a tongue or some fingers…but alive enough to find out who this monster was and plan the most brutal revenge any man had ever endured?

“Oh, sorry to get your hopes up,” the man said, turning around and smiling at him, as if he’d read Angelo’s mind. “I’m certainly not going to leave you as you are now. It’s just that I seldom sleep more than seven hours a night. And it’s already been more than that.”

Nothing made sense. Was he trying to say he’d been sleep-walking?
Madre de dios
, if this was him when asleep, Angelo would hate to meet him wide awake.

The son of a bitch actually sighed and shook his head sympathetically. “I know. It’s very confusing for you. But there’s really no time to explain. Suffice it to say, in the extremely slim chance that I might decide to try to account for these hours, my last resort is to make it appear I was snug in bed with my eyes firmly shut. And I never sleep more than seven hours. You see?”

Loco
. He was totally insane.

Not waiting for an answer, the man rinsed out a rag, then reached down and began fiddling with a black backpack he’d brought with him, pulling out something long and snaky. An electrical cord. He dropped it on the floor, reached in again and grabbed some clamps.

Electrocution
.

Angelo didn’t think he had any fight left in him. But as his tormentor walked toward him, he began to twist in the chair, struggling against the chains, his instincts making him cling to life, even though minutes ago he’d longed to escape the pain of it.

“This might be a little uncomfortable,” his killer said as he affixed the clamps to the metal arms and legs of the chair on which Angelo’s naked, blood-smeared body sat. “I’ve heard it’s not exactly a fast death, either. But appropriate, I think. And even you would have to admit, the chair is no more than you deserve.”

The psychopath bent over, eyeing him, staring into Angelo’s wrecked face again, getting one last look. If he had any teeth left, he might have tried to bite those smiling lips right off.

“Not a very pretty picture anymore, are you?”

He could only groan.

“But what a picture it is. Oh, yes, indeed, you’re definitely going to get some attention. Smile pretty now…it’s time for your close-up.”