Unleashed (28 page)

He expected sirens any time in the next few minutes.

“Listen man,” the new guy said, taking charge, his fake smile showing off gold capped teeth. “Why don’t you forget about what you saw here today, and go tell your friends at the neighborhood association that everything here is all good.” He gave Danny a not so friendly squeeze on his shoulder and pulled a roll of bills from his pocket. “You understand the need for discretion.”

Danny grinned and reached for the cash. “Consider my lips sealed.”

The guy gave him a pat on the back. “Hey, maybe you want to stay and watch?”

The thought made Danny want to barf, but he needed to stall. Where the hell were the police? “That might be, uh, kind of cool,” he stammered. He met Curtis’s eyes and subtly shook his head. Curtis nodded back. Yeah, he got it. No performance, not today.

“Hey, she seems kind of out of it,” Curtis said. “Maybe we should wait for her to come around a little more.”

The thug next to Danny dropped his smile and leveled a hard stare at Curtis. “We’re not waiting on anything. Camera’s ready, lights are going, let’s get down to business.”

Curtis shook his head. “No way man,” he said, casting a look at the girl, who was trying to sit up on the bed, only to be pulled back down by the weight of her own head. “I didn’t sign on to fuck no corpse.”

The thug walked over to Curtis and pulled up to his full height, which was a good six inches less than Danny and a couple inches shorter than Curtis. But the sidearm that peeked out when he pulled aside his jacket leveled the playing field. “You’re a hired dick. You signed on to fuck when we say fuck, not—” he was cut off by the ring of a cell phone.

As he listened intently to the man’s quick, monosyllabic conversation with whoever was on the line, Danny’s internal alarm system started to shoot off in sharp bursts.

Something was up there, a suspicion confirmed when the man hung up and gave Danny a slow, evil grin. He pulled his Glock out of his shoulder holster and pointed it straight at Danny’s chest. The other three thugs followed suit as Curtis jumped back into the corner. “It appears Mr. Neighborhood Watch isn’t who he appears to be.”

Fuck. He’d been made.

Caroline
. Panic squeezed his chest. Fuck, they’d gotten to her, and that was why the police weren’t there yet. Every instinct screamed for him to charge out the door and find her. Images of Caroline hurt, maybe even dead, ripped through him. He couldn’t lose her, couldn’t let go of her again, couldn’t…

Couldn’t lose his focus, or he’d end up with a bullet in his brain and no help to her at all. He forced the terror down deep and shut it up in a black box. The mission. Only by focusing on the mission could he get everyone out alive.

Every muscle tensed in readiness as Danny held up his hands in mock supplication. “Oh yeah, what did they tell you?”

“Just that they need you taken care of. That’s all the information I need. Now turn around and walk to the kitchen with your hands on your head. I don’t want no bloodstains on the carpet.”

“What the fuck? You can’t just kill him!” Curtis said, a panicked note entering his voice. The two unarmed crew members looked away, on board with whatever needed to happen.

One of the gangsters leveled his gun at Curtis’s nose. “You do your job and you don’t worry so much, kid. Then you won’t end up dead like him.”

Danny caught Curtis’s terrified gaze. They both knew Curtis was as dead as Danny was whether he did his command performance or not. Before Danny turned around, he gazed around the room, quickly cataloging every armed man’s position and body language. They all held their guns out of the holsters, loosely at their sides. It was clear none of them were fighters; they all let their guns, not their muscles do the work for them. A fact Danny planned to use to his advantage.

“Go.” The thug prodded him in the back with the barrel of the gun.

Dammit. He really wasn’t in the mood to kill anyone.

Danny took a half step forward and pivoted, taking the thug by surprise as he caught him with a sharp blow across the forearm, sending his gun skidding across the floor. At the same time, Danny caught him in a leg sweep that landed him flat on his back.

He heard shouts, curses, and out of the corner of his eye saw one of the other guys raise his gun. Danny grabbed the thug off the floor and rolled to one knee, using the guy as a shield as the other guy pulled the trigger, catching his buddy in the shoulder. Danny dropped his shield and pulled his own Glock from his ankle holster in one seamless move. A shot, a scream, and the thug’s gun hand was hamburger.

The third thug aimed his gun at Danny. Danny iced him with a side kick to the jaw. The wounded man lay groaning on the floor, and Danny fired at the one guy left standing. His shot went wide and he rolled to the side to avoid return fire. The guy turned and made a run for the stairs.

Curtis came out of his panicked daze as he stepped into the guy’s path and clocked him with a sharp jab to the face. Before the guy could recover enough to lift his gun Curtis caught him with a punch to the back of the head, hard enough to render the guy unconscious.

Danny ignored the pain in his shoulder as he surveyed the damage. One wounded, one out cold, one cradling a broken jaw, and the fourth screaming as he clutched his hand and looked at the bloody gap where two fingers used to be. The two crew members had run at the first shot.

“Chill out,” Danny snapped. “You’ll live.” He sent Curtis to get a rope while he kept a gun leveled on all four.

Danny and Curtis quickly secured them as the girl stirred on the bed. He had a lot of questions for those assholes, but first things first.

Caroline.

The panic he’d managed to beat back earlier surged back with even more force. He forced his hand to stay steady as he handed Curtis a gun, who took it with a little too much eagerness and not a shred of skill. “You ever shoot one of these?” Danny asked.

Curtis shook his head.

“Hold it like this, not like in the movies.” Danny did a quick lesson in operating the Glock. “Keep your thumb on the side, or the slide will kick back and snap it.”

Curtis swallowed hard and gave him a dubious look. “Anything else?”

“Make sure you only shoot the bad guys,” Danny said before he darted out the front door.

He skirted around the house, cut through the neighboring yard back the way they’d come and arrived at the car.

No Caroline.

He wanted to believe she’d fled to safety. But he knew she would have come back to the car to call the police like he’d told her to, and she hadn’t been there.

Christ, someone had her, he knew it. Someone had her and he had no idea who, no idea where, and a very bad idea of what they meant to do with her.

C
aroline came to with a nose full of dust and a sensation in her head like someone was in there with a sledge hammer.

She started to sit up and found that her hands and feet were bound by plastic flex ties. She rolled to her stomach and managed to wriggle her way into a seated position. She jerked her head to try to get her hair out of her face, wincing as the motion sent a stab of pain through her head.

Marshall had kidnapped her.

Her husband’s former associate had pressed a gun in her back and knocked her unconscious and taken her…where?

She pushed through the pain in her head and forced her vision to focus. It was dimly lit, wherever he’d taken her. She shifted so she could get a three sixty view, taking in the thick wooden slat walls and and the gate at one end. She was being kept in a stall in a barn. It must have been vacant because she didn’t hear any animal sounds or smell any evidence of livestock.

None of that information was important, but cataloging the details helped to calm her. And distract her from what was happening to Danny, and that poor, drugged out girl who obviously wanted nothing to do with whatever moviemaking those assholes had planned.

Danny
. A sick feeling grew in the pit of her stomach. Danny outnumbered five to one, and at least three of them had guns. Sure she’d seen him slip his own gun in his ankle holster, but what were the odds that he’d be able to take out three armed men on his own?

Her chest seized at the thought of losing him. In the past week and especially in the last few days she’d done everything she could to downplay the connection between them. Tried to convince herself that what they’d resurrected was nothing but old chemistry sparked by being thrown together in a highly charged situation. But then she thought of the way he’d reached out to her, the way everything in him had needed her. The way everything in her had needed him. God, she’d never gotten over him, never stopped loving him. And she was going to lose him before they could get a second chance.

Hot tears leaked down her cheeks and a keening sob rose up in her chest. It froze there as she heard the squeal of the old barn door being opened, the sound of masculine voices arguing and getting closer.

“I don’t see why you think that was necessary.” She recognized Marshall’s sharp, clipped voice. “There was no reason to bring them into it.”

“Shut up,” another voice, another shockingly familiar voice growled. “This isn’t your operation—it never has been. I make the decisions.”

No, it couldn’t be.

“I think Gates would have something to say about that.” Caroline could hear the sneer in Marshall’s voice.

She stared through the bars of the stall gate as the muffled footsteps came closer, hoping against hope she was wrong. Praying her ears had played a trick on her.

Her stomach bottomed out as a ruddy face topped by thick salt and pepper hair appeared between the bars. “Patrick,” she managed to choke out.

St. Luke’s
. The insignia flashed in her brain.
We all gave birth at St. Luke’s
, Lauren had said. Caroline saw the physician’s coat hanging in Melody’s closet, clear as day. Too late, her brain made the connection that had been floating around back there, waiting for Caroline to take notice. “Are you going to kill me now?”

His mouth stretched in a smile that didn’t reach his blue eyes. Eyes she’d always seen as glowing with humor were now flat and cold as ice chips. “Not yet. First you’re going to tell me everything you know, and how much damage you’ve done in your idiotic quest to clear your name.”

“Who are you working for?” Danny said to the thug in charge, whose name, Danny discovered when he pulled out his ID, was Antonio. He and Curtis had moved the three stooges to the couch. The fourth was still on the floor where he landed, unconscious. The girl had finally managed to haul herself into a seated position but was still too out of it to do more than stare at them in a slack jawed daze.

“Fuck you, man, I’m not telling you shit,” he slurred as blood seeped from the wound in his shoulder.

“Shouldn’t we call the cops or something?” Curtis asked, his eyes widening nervously as Danny pressed the barrel of his gun against Antonio’s cheek.

“Not till I get some answers.” As soon as the police got there, the whole thing would be locked up and lawyered up and Danny wouldn’t get anything from them. “Maybe you can tell me something,” Danny said, keeping the gun trained on the couch as he slipped his Randall Model One from its sheath on his right calf. He smiled tightly as the goon with the shot off fingers watched him twirl the blade.

Danny reached out and clamped his hand around the man’s wrist. The guy had no ID. Sticky blood soaked his wrist and the cuff of his shirt. The man struggled, but Danny’s grip was like a vice as he brought the knife closer to the raw, jagged wounds. “Come on, Stumps. Who are you working with? Who wants Caroline dead?”

“Don’t you fucking tell him shit, or I’ll kill you myself,” Antonio shouted.

The other guy was screaming and Danny hadn’t even touched him yet, while the third sat silently, his face ashen as he fingered his broken jaw.

Danny pressed the tip of the blade against a raw finger stump and twisted. The man screamed and thrashed. “You feel that? And I’m barely applying any pressure.” He dug in a little with the blade, twisted harder. The man twisted and moaned, but didn’t give up any information.

Time to try a new tactic.

He shifted his attention back to Antonio. “Maybe you’ll be more talkative if you’ve got something to lose.”

The man’s lips curled back in a sneer. “I’ve been shot nine times. You think I give a fuck about a couple of fingers?”

“Who said anything about fingers?” He nodded at Curtis to catch his attention. “Take off his pants and hold his legs.”

Curtis looked uncertain, but moved to obey.

“What the fuck?” the goon yelled, thrashing and trying to worm his way off the couch. It took some doing, but Curtis got him in a leg lock and wrestled the guy’s pants off his hips.

He screamed and froze at the first icy touch of Danny’s blade against his scrotum.

“No man, no,” finally the guy had lost some of his bravado. Now they were getting somewhere.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to cut the whole thing off.” The man’s scream was loud and startlingly shrill as Danny let the razor sharp edge of the knife barely kiss the man’s skin as the others looked on in horror. “Just the balls. You’ll still be able to piss normally and everything.” He pressed harder with the blade, enough to coax a tiny bead of blood to trickle down the man’s thigh.

“Please man, please don’t do this.”

“I’d love to drag this out,” Danny said, his voice turning deadly, “but someone I care very deeply about is in danger, and I think whoever you’re working for has something to do with it. Now tell me who he is and where I can find him, or come this Sunday you’ll be singing soprano in the church choir.”

“Gates!” the man yelled. “Please, we work for Esteban Lucero, but he goes by the name Gates. He moves women and drugs out of Sacramento.”

Danny eased up the pressure on the blade. “Why does he want Caroline Medford dead?”

“I don’t know, man, I swear. We’re just muscle, get called in on jobs when we’re needed. We don’t ask no questions.”

“Where can I find him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Wrong answer.” He pushed the tip of the blade against the underside of the guy’s scrotum.

Sweat poured down his face and his chest heaved in quick, panicked breaths.

“He’s telling the truth,” the third guy, who had remained silent up until then, slurred. The guy was staring at his buddy’s junk like he couldn’t tear his eyes away, his face even paler as he saw the smudges of blood on Danny’s blade. The thug swallowed hard like he was trying not to barf. “We get our orders on the phone. We never meet Gates in the same place. He could be anywhere.”

Danny put aside his anger, fear, and frustration over Caroline’s disappearance to take careful assessment of their reactions.

Through the stink of sweat, fear, and blood, he could smell the truth. He could cut their dicks off one by one, but that wouldn’t give him the answers he needed.

“Got the call, they told us to pick up the girl at the hotel to take her to the shoot,” the head goon said, now apparently in a talkative mood. “But Gates wasn’t there. He never is.”

“What hotel?” Danny pressed, scrambling for something, anything that might lead him to Caroline.

“The Motel Six off exit eight. It’s just an exchange point. I don’t know where they bring the girls from and I don’t ask. Usually we just make sure nothing fucks up the shoot and get the girl back to the hotel. But today the creeper didn’t show up, he just called to say you was sniffing around and we had to take you out. You ask me, he’s the one who has your woman.”

“The creeper?” Tiny hairs stood up on the back of his neck.

“Creepy dude who likes to watch the shoots,” Curtis said. “He told me he was a producer, but he just gets off on watching.”

“Who is this guy?”

“He said I could call him John Smith,” Curtis said.

A fake name if Danny had ever heard one.

He reached for the goon’s pants, which were still down around his thighs, ignoring the yells as he rooted around in the pockets. He quickly scrolled through the calls received list. Maybe he’d get a break and at least get a cell phone number to connect to John “Creeper” Smith.

Unknown Caller

Unknown Caller

Over and over again until the list of stored calls ran out. The list of outgoing calls had been cleared, and no names were stored in the address book. Same with the other two phones.

“How the fuck am I going to find her?” he asked the room at large.

He didn’t expect a small, wavering female voice to answer. “I think I know how to find Gates.”

“Why are you doing this, Patrick?” She still couldn’t quite believe what was happening, that she wouldn’t wake up and realize it was a very bizarre, very bad dream.

But the hard look in his eyes was real all right, as was the hard metal gun in his hand, currently pointing straight at her.

Marshall stood a little behind him, dressed more casually than Caroline had ever seen him in a fleece pullover and jeans. Still, the jeans sported a knife like crease and the pullover boasted an expensive designer label.

And what the hell was wrong with her that she was noticing details like that when Patrick was pointing a gun at her face?

“Why don’t you tell me, Caroline? Why don’t you tell me everything you know. Why you and Taggart were nosing around the Harmony House, and how you ended up on the set of Gates’s latest production?”

“Why does it matter what I know if you’re going to kill me anyway?”

She didn’t think Patrick’s stare could get any colder, but the reptilian smirk that pulled at his mouth sent a chill straight to her soul. “I can also keep you alive, wishing you were dead, for as long as I need to.”

Caroline swallowed back a surge of bile. She could see in his eyes he wasn’t bluffing. This man, a man she’d considered a friend for the last decade, was fully willing to torture her to death if necessary.

“Now, I need to know how much damage you’ve done,” Patrick said, and for the first time a flash of emotion flickered in his eyes. “If you’ve ruined everything or if I can still salvage something.”

“I’ve ruined everything?” Caroline scoffed. On some level she acknowledged how stupid it was to argue with someone holding a gun to her head, but the certainty that he was going to kill her regardless made her bold. “You ruined it yourself. You and James. Forcing girls like Emily Parrish to give up their babies for adoption—”

“Those poor girls were very well compensated, and the kids ended up a hell of a lot better off than if those teenage sluts had kept them. We did a great thing for everyone—”

“Like Emily Parrish? And Anne Taggart? What great thing ended up with them both dead and buried for the past eighteen years?”

“Anne never should have been harmed, but she couldn’t let it go. Just like you,” he sneered. “It was her own damn fault for following James up there. We couldn’t let her leave after she saw where we were keeping Emily.”

“So you and James killed her?”

“We did what we needed to do.” Why had she never seen the icy core that lay at his soul?

“And Emily?” Her voice thickened as she imagined the pregnant girl at the mercy of this man. This monster she’d never realized was lurking behind his genial facade.

“If Emily had been smarter, things would have gone differently. But instead she stupidly listened to Anne Taggart, and let her talk her into backing out of the deal. If she’d listened to us she would have walked away with a lot of money, enough to start a new life and have as many babies as she wanted. But we couldn’t risk her telling anyone the truth. We did what we had to do to protect everyone involved.”

Caroline swallowed back another surge of bile.

“Now tell me what else you found,” Patrick said, once again leveling the gun at her. “How much more do you know?”

She raised her chin. “Why does it matter? The police already know about Anne and Emily. And the Taggarts will make damn sure the truth comes out.”

Patrick’s smile was a vicious baring of teeth. “And right now the only one they can pin it on is James. Unless you found James’s so called insurance policy that tells a different story.”

Sweat beaded on his forehead and she could see the gun start to waver. He was scared. He had no idea what they knew or how many people knew it. For all he knew, her death was all the insurance he needed.

She thought of Danny, Toni, Ethan, and Derek. All the people who might be endangered if she told Patrick the truth.

She’d told herself she was done taking care of everyone else when she’d married James.
I guess my martyr streak runs deeper than I thought.

“The only thing I ever found was Anne Taggart’s personal calendar,” she said, figuring she’d be more convincing telling a partial truth than an outright lie. “That’s what led us to the shelter and to Emily. But there was never any mention of you.” Not in the calendar anyway. She still had no idea what was on the flash drive they’d found. “The calendar is at my house, in James’s desk,” she lied. “You can get it yourself, and you’ll be in the clear.”