Ripped (30 page)

Tag
, it read.
You’re it.

Shit. That wasn’t much to go on.

* * *

Shell

Ice took me to an abandoned daycare center with boarded up windows. Inside, there was one big room, and I could barely see that the walls had been painted with jungle animals and rainbows. I wasn’t sure that really went together, but maybe that was why the place had been shut down. Because of the murals. Oh, there was a dragon on that wall. Yeah, that didn’t make any sense thematically, either.

He was carrying the shopping bag from the drug store, and he held my arm as he looked inside it.

When he took out the pregnancy tests, he was quiet. He let go of me and started to pace, holding them.

I thought about making a run for it. He wasn’t looking at me, and maybe I could get to the front door and get outside and run.

But it was hot out there, and we were out in the middle of nowhere. I might get free, but I wouldn’t be able to run for very long before—

Seriously?

He was going to kill me, what was I thinking?

I made a break for it.

He turned immediately and snatched my wrist.

I tripped over my own feet and fell flat on my face. My chin glanced against the floor painfully.

Groaning, I rolled into a ball.

He knelt down next to me. “Why’d you buy these tests?”

“I get a kick out of peeing on plastic,” I snapped. “What kind of question is that? I would think it’s pretty obvious.”

“You think you’re pregnant.”

“I don’t know.” I sat up. I looked at the door again.

“Don’t even think about it. I will shoot you in the back,” he said. He looked back at the tests. “With Cade’s child. It is Cade, yes?”

I nodded. “Yes. But I don’t know if I am or not.”

He slammed one of the boxes into my hand. “You need to find out.”

“What does it matter to you?”

His nostrils flared. “You take the test.”

I looked around. “Okay, well, I need a bathroom.”

He dragged me to my feet and yanked me to the back of the room. There were two doors here, one with a girl tiger painted on it and one with a boy tiger. He took me into the boy tiger room, not that I guessed it mattered. There was a window inside, and bright sunlight illuminated the small room.

Inside was a tiny, child-sized toilet. No water in the bowl.

He shut the door, closing us both inside. He gestured.

I turned the test over in my hands. “You going to give me some privacy?”

“Don’t be stupid.” He leaned against the door, arms over his chest.

“I can’t go with you in here,” I said. “Besides, it might not be accurate at this time of the day.”

“What does the time of the day have to do with it?”

“Well, sometimes you get a false negative if the urine is too diluted,” I said.

He took the box from me and ripped it open. He took out one of the tests, which was wrapped in another packet. He ripped that open too. He handed it to me. “We’ll stay in here until you take the test.”

“I can’t…” I shook my head. “I can’t have you watch me.”

Ice giggled. “Does it bother you? Good.” He reached out and unbuttoned my pants.

I backed up. “I can do it myself.” I didn’t want him there, but if he was going to be there, then I definitely didn’t want his hands on me. I managed to undo my pants and squat over the toilet while still hiding most of my body from view. I hovered there, holding the test down below myself.

But there really was no way that I was going to be able to do this with him watching. No fucking way.

* * *

Cade

I paced in the parking lot, holding my phone against my ear in one hand and the slip of paper from Ice in my other hand.

“I’m just going to come out there,” said Sable on the other end of the phone.

“No, no, no,” I said. “That’s a bad idea. You’re in hiding. In fact, you need to get the fuck out of dodge. You need to get in a car and start driving, and I’ll get in touch with you when I know where you should go.”

“It’s just Ice, Ripper,” she said. “He’s not going to sell me out to the Gallo family.”

“He’d do it in a heartbeat,” I said.

“I thought you liked this guy.”

“I never liked him,” I said. “I just… I thought we understood each other.”

“So, if you understand him so well, what’s the note mean?”

“Well, if I knew that, I’d be there, kicking his ass, not calling you for help.”

“You want my help or want me to run?”

“Both.” I kicked a rock, sending it skittering over the pavement.

“Calm down, Ripper.”

“You calm down, Sable,” I said. “I have no idea what he’s doing with her. Maybe she’s already dead.” No. No, he wouldn’t have killed her already. He’d want to drag it out. But that might mean worse things. He might be hurting her, cutting her… I thought of all the things that Ice had told me he wanted to do to women, and I started to shake.

“He said tag, right?” she said. “There’s an abandoned laser tag place out by Route 27. It never caught on. Too far from anywhere touristy, you know? Maybe he’s there.”

“No,” I said. “That’s too obvious.”

“Why leave you a note at all if he didn’t want you to figure it out?”

I stopped walking. “It’s not laser tag.” Tag, tag, tag. Why would he say it? I started walking again. “Okay, see the thing is, tag is a game that children play, and he’d say that, he’d reference that.” Because that was something we had in common.

Ice lost his mother too, see. When he was a kid. He was younger than me, so young. Three and a half. He said it was his first memory, the most clear thing he could remember from his early childhood. Watching his father beat his mother to death.

When he told me that, I remember that he wouldn’t look at me, but he talked about how it made him feel. How helpless he was, stuck there, watching. He said he was crying, and that he even tried to pull his father off, but his father stuck him in his playpen, shut him up there, and that Ice looked through the bars, screaming…

“It’s something about being a kid,” I said. “Are there any rundown playgrounds? Schools?”

“Um, not that I know of off the top of my head,” she said. “Let me get my tablet. I’ll Google it.”

I knew that helpless feeling. It was the way I felt when I watched my mother die. It was deep, stuck inside me, somewhere locked away. Helplessness. Anger. So much anger.

And when Ice looked up at me after explaining it all, we gazed into each other’s eyes, and we knew. We were brothers. We were the same.

And now…

Fuck it.

“There’s a daycare,” said Sable. “It’s been closed down for nearly three years.”

“That’s it,” I said. “Tell me where it is.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Shell

“I cannot pee with you watching,” I said through clenched teeth. I was sweating from the effort of keeping myself in a squatting position. Not only that, it was hot in this fucking room—sweltering. The sweat was dripping down my forehead, getting in my eyes.

Ice put his gun to my head. “Maybe I’ll have to scare it out of you.”

I shut my eyes. I was going to start crying. “It doesn’t matter. I just… it’s not going to work if you’re here.”

“I’m not leaving, bitch,” he said, kneeling down next to me. “So, you’d better figure out a way.”

I kept my eyes shut.

“I will shoot you. Don’t think I won’t.”

“Wouldn’t that rob you of the chance to torture me?” I said, opening my eyes, my voice a snarl. “Isn’t that what you get off on?”

“I wouldn’t speak to me that way if I were you.” He cocked the gun.

Terror flooded me. Holy fuck, he was going to do it. He was going to shoot me.

And suddenly, the fear made my bladder let loose.

“I knew you’d figure it out,” said Ice.

When I was finished, he backed away, allowing me to stand up and pull up my pants. I still felt violated in some horrid way. He didn’t have the right to be here during something so private.

He held out his hand. “Give me the test.”

I glanced down at it. There were no lines yet.

He snatched it from me.

I bit down on my bottom lip. “So, now what?”

“Now, we wait,” he said.

“Why do you care about the test?” I said. My legs felt shaky and sore from having squatted for so long. I shook one of them out.

“Don’t you worry about that,” he said.

I shifted on my feet, watching him.

He was staring down at the test, not looking at me.

I thought again about trying to run. Sure, he was blocking the door, but maybe if I moved fast, I could dart around him and—

He looked up at me, sneering. “The instructions say we have to wait two minutes. So, we’re going to wait, and then we’ll see what this test says.”

I felt anxious. Was I pregnant or wasn’t I? And what did Ice care, one way or the other? Why was he making such a big thing out of this?

It had to be because something with Cade. He didn’t like the idea that Cade would be having a child or something, because Ice had some kind of weird obsession with Cade. But if it came to that, it wasn’t as if Cade wasn’t weird about Ice as well. Cade would kill all kinds of other people without even thinking about it, but he didn’t want to kill Ice.

I didn’t know why that was, but I wished that he had.

When Ice broke into Cade’s house, if Cade had shot him in the head instead of leaving him tied up on the porch, that would have been much better.

I’d be safe now.

I stuck my hands in my pockets. “What’s the test say?”

“Nothing,” said Ice. “It’s barely been thirty seconds.”

“Oh come on,” I said. “Sometimes, you can read it earlier than that.” I’d taken pregnancy tests before. A couple times in college, I’d had some scares. Both times, the test had been negative.

Ice glared at me. “Maybe you should just shut up.”

I decided it was better not to make him angry. So, I looked down at the floor. It had once been a cheery yellow tile, but now it was grimy and dirty. Dead leaves had blown in through the broken window overhead, and they gathered in the corners.

Next to me, there was a painting of a little bear who was standing next to a sink with suds all over his hands.
Don’t forget to wash your hands
, it read in faded blue writing.

God, why were we here? This place was creepy as hell, even creepier than the abandoned mental hospital. Why did Ice always have to hang out in places that were decrepit and falling apart like this?

I supposed I could ask him, but he wasn’t likely to answer me. He’d probably just be annoyed.

But he did seem to be waiting on the results to the test for some reason. Maybe he wouldn’t hurt me if he didn’t know the result yet.

Hmm.

What if I could work it so he didn’t know the result at all? Maybe I could grab the test and run? Maybe he wouldn’t hurt me, even if he caught me?

But that wouldn’t work, because he’d just make me take it again, and…

Still, if I ran very, very fast, maybe I could get away.

I eyed him. He had the test in one hand, and he had his gun in the other. He wasn’t currently looking at the test. He was looking out at the window.

I was going to do it. I was going to jump at him and snatch the test out of his hand and—

He looked down at the test again. “Damn it,” he said.

Why was he saying that? Was there a result? If there was a result, then my plan wouldn’t work, because he would know if he was going to hurt me or not.

“Damn it all to hell.” He turned and aimed a kick at the wall. He looked absurd, like a toddler who was throwing a tantrum. He turned back to me, angry, and he shoved the test in his pocket.

If he wasn’t looking at it anymore, that
did
mean there was a result. Was I pregnant? “What?” I said. “What does it say?”

He leveled the gun at me. “Face the wall. Don’t struggle, or it will be worse for you.”

* * *

Cade

I threw open the door to the daycare center, and went in gun first, like I was on one of those cop TV shows. “Ice?” I called. “Frazier?”

There was no answer. Inside, the place was empty, full of shadows. I could see the paint job on the wall—peeling lions and tigers.

“Ice!” I called again.

He melted out of the shadows, a devious sort of smile on his face, something almost cartoonish, which only made me feel more worried. He saw the world the way a child did sometimes. He didn’t seem to quite fathom the fact that other people were more real than a game or a story. He saw this all as a nasty little game we were playing. He didn’t understand, and I wanted to strangle him.