Mace laughs, and his laugh is nice and low and rhythmic. It surprises Charlotte, but not in a bad way.
After what’s happened, the idea of a comforting man seemed impossible. But there’s a kindness in his caution toward her, in his smile and eyes and laugh.
Mace rubs his chin, the beginning of a beard more careless than intentional. “Well, it’s not your fault, but I wasn’t going to tell you that. Just wanted to sit.”
They’re quiet for a few moments.
“You only have the one recliner?”
“Yeah. And a microwave. Want some mac and cheese?”
“Not really.”
“That’s okay. I’d have to toast it. Microwave’s busted.”
Charlotte almost smiles at that, even if she suspects it’s true.
“You got family nearby?” Mace asks.
Charlotte studies him. “Not sure I want to go into that.”
“Okay.” Mace scratches his unkempt hair and a few gray strands blink out of the black. “I just meant, is there anyone nearby who can protect you?”
“I should get going.”
“Where?” Mace asks, startled. “You just said you didn’t have anywhere to turn.”
“I can’t put you in danger. And you’re in danger as long as I’m with you.”
“There’s no way anyone followed us here,” Mace assures her.
Their conversation is interrupted by a knock on the door.
Chapter Three
“Crap.” Charlotte glances around the room. Scared, she seems even smaller.
“It’s them,” she whispers.
“It’s probably just a neighbor.” Mace looks down at her hands. “Why do you have my toenail clippers?”
Another knock.
“Is there a place to hide?” Charlotte’s voice is still low.
“You don’t need to—”
She darts back into the bathroom, softly closes the door. He hears it lock.
A third knock.
Mace opens the door.
He doesn’t recognize the man on the other side. Tall, good-looking, brown hair, blue eyes, wearing jeans and an open leather jacket with a plain black shirt underneath.
The man smiles, shows Mace a shiny silver badge. “Officer David Baker. Baltimore County P.D.”
“One of the men who had me was a cop.”
Mace keeps his expression blank. “Okay.”
“We’re searching for a missing fugitive. Hispanic female. Late teens, dark hair, brown eyes, slim build. Five-foot-even. You seen anyone matching that description tonight?”
Mace shakes his head.
“Are you sure?”
“I haven’t been out all night.”
Officer Baker looks down at Mace’s feet. Mace follows his gaze, sees his own muddy sneakers.
Baker glances back up, studies him. Mace stares right back, keeping his expression blank.
Mace hasn’t suffered from cops the way some of his black friends had, but that’s largely because of his uncle. Any time he’d been stopped by a police officer, and Mace sensed the situation could turn threatening, he casually mentioned his uncle’s work with Baltimore County P.D., even after his uncle had suffered a heart attack and passed on.
Mace is about to mention his uncle, but Officer Baker leans close. “This woman is extremely dangerous. If she’s inside and threatening you…”
“No one’s in here but me.”
The cop gives Mace the long look black people are used to receiving. Then he steps back and smiles, baring big, white teeth. “If you see something, report it. Call the station and ask for me.”
Mace watches him go to the next apartment. Then he closes his door, locks it. He’s not breathing right, almost as if he’s forgotten how. He takes a few moments, then heads to the bathroom.
He knocks on the door.
Charlotte opens it, the scissors tight in her hand.
“Okay?” she asks.
Mace still has questions, but he has enough answers. The bruises on Charlotte’s face are enough. The red raw rings over her wrists are enough.
“Okay.”
Chapter Four
Will Hasting’s insides feel like a bag of cats being stomped to death. He hopes he doesn’t look that nervous, hopes his expression is calm while Frank, his older brother, talks on the phone and paces.
“How many more in the area?” Frank asks. “And you’re hitting every apartment? Every single one?”
He glances at Will, who looks down at his lap.
“Okay.” Frank hangs up the phone, stares at it like he’s going to hurl it into the wall. Instead he tosses it onto the bed.
“How the fuck did they lose Charlotte?” he asks Will.
Will shrugs. “I mean, I wasn’t there.”
“They told Dave someone attacked them in the woods and ran off with her.”
That piques Will’s interest, despite how uncomfortable he feels. “Really?”
“No fucking idea.” Frank walks to the other side of the room, puts both hands flat against the wall, leans his forehead against it. Will stays on the floor, too nervous to say something and incur Frank’s wrath.
He’s not sure why his older brother intimidates him. They share the same height and build: both about five-ten and a hundred sixty pounds, sandy-blond hair, thin limbs, narrow faces, lines for lips.
Then again, he’s never seen Frank this agitated.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have…” Will’s voice trails away.
Frank turns, stares him down. “Shouldn’t have what?”
“Nothing.”
“Shouldn’t have what?”
“Shouldn’t have gotten involved with this stuff.”
The stare turns hard.
“We were doing fine,” Will adds.
The gaze softens. “Well, don’t worry about it because, chances are, we’re not doing it again. No way Barnes is trusting us with this shit anymore.”
“What happened to his two guys? Are they coming back here?”
“Dave has no idea. Doesn’t even know where they are.”
“I didn’t like them.” Will says. He didn’t like the brusque way they showed up and took charge, or the sense of menace they carried, of blood and violence.
“Anyway,” Frank says, dismissively, “Dave’s hitting all the houses and apartments nearby, seeing what he can turn up.”
“What if he can’t find her?” Will hopes Frank can’t hear the nervousness in his voice.
He hopes Frank can’t tell part of him wants Charlotte to escape.
Frank rans a hand through his hair before he speaks. “We keep looking. Find her, finish her off.”
“But if we don’t?”
Frank gazes at Will and shakes his head. “Dave told me we need to wipe this place clean.”
Will looks around the little basement room. A small bed with chains and handcuffs looped over two hooks. The hooks are bolted into the stone wall on either side of the bed.
“There’s not much to clean,” Will observes. “You want me to wash the sheets?”
“We need to burn them. Dave said that if she gets to the cops and he can’t stop her, she might bring them back here. This place has to look normal.”
“Not like the kind of house where you hide kidnapped women?”
“Right. The chains have to go, too. We’ll leave the hooks up. Can’t get them out anyway.” He gives Will another hard look. “What?”
“It was easier when we were just selling weed to white kids in the ’burbs.”
Frank’s expression softens again. “I get that. But like Dave said, holding that girl for a month should pay what we make in three. Unless you want to try selling inside Baltimore. Fuck with those gangs.”
Will shakes his head.
“We can’t go back.” Frank reaches into his pocket, pulls out a pair of medical gloves, starts tugging one on. “All we can do is go forward. And cover
our tracks.” He pulls on the other glove. It slaps down on his skin. “Which means finding that bitch and covering her with dirt.”
Click here to learn more about The Unrepentant by E.A. Aymar.
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Chapter 1
San Francisco
The door to the construction shack swung open and banged against the wall, causing the overhead florescent lights to stammer off and on for several seconds.
Kurt Thorsen snapped his head around and saw the hulking figure and scowling face of Benny Machado, his lead foreman.
Thorsen jumped to his feet and slammed his coffee mug to the desk sending a spray of hot coffee onto the project blueprints. He was a tall, well-built man in his early sixties, his once blond hair now a silvery gray and worn in a lion’s mane style. “What’s up, Benny?”
“You better come with me, boss. I think we got us a problem.”
Thorsen grabbed a hardhat from a peg near the door and followed Machado out to the construction site.
It had been a cool summer, interrupted by a tropical storm from the Mexican coast that dropped several inches of rain on the city. Dark, cauliflower-shaped cumulous clouds dominated the sky. The bay waters were the color of gunmetal. The wind, stronger than it had to be, tossed food wrappers and old newspapers around like wounded birds. The air was filled with the smell of diesel smoke from the tractors, backhoes, and trucks lined up to haul away the mud Thorsen’s crew was moving to enable the placement of underground parking garages and foundation pillars.
Thorsen had to hand it to his employer, Cinco Construction Company, for having the guts to build a sprawling fifty-seven-story Art Moderne-style complex, featuring a hotel and conference center, along with retails stores, office space, and high-priced condos, in this undesirable section of the city—eleven acres of raw, deserted land, parts of it running right alongside the bay, consisting of crumbling, rat-infested piers that were once attached to thriving shipyards, abandoned commercial hot houses with every single pane of glass missing, and railroad tracks that had sat idle for fifty years.
Before accepting the job, Thorsen had checked out Cinco with people he trusted in the construction game. Cinco had built complexes similar in size and scope to this one in cities up and down the East Coast. Six months ago, the firm was taken over by a man by the name of Henry Chung. Chung was Chinese, via Brazil, having run a construction firm in São Paulo for several years. He was a nervous nail-biter who spoke Cantonese, Portuguese and English with equal ease. According to Chung, Cinco was well-financed and committed to the project. There would be no worries of work stoppages from banks or insurance carriers due to a lack of funds.
Thorsen hurried to catch up to Machado. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on, Benny, or am I just supposed to guess? Don’t tell me it’s another garden snake.”
His last big job, a high-rise on the peninsula, had ground to a halt when a single garden snake, an endangered species, the size of a licorice stick was found under a rock.
“No snakes, boss. Bones. Lots of them. Over on section A-six.”
The construction site was divided into sections. A-six skirted the bay’s shoreline.
“Bones? What kind? Cats? Skunks? What, Benny?”
Machado, a hatchet-jawed man with a thick neck and the heavily muscled shoulders of a wrestler, increased his pace, the hammer in his tool belt slamming against his thigh like a cowboy’s six-shooter. “Human.”
A ring of workers—laborers, carpenters, electricians and plumbers—were standing around the end of a ruler-straight foundation trench, four-feet wide, ten-feet deep, stretching out some fifty yards. The dark green backhoe that had been digging the trench stood silent, the tilted digger-bucket at the end of the two-part articulated arm looking like a yawning, prehistoric animal.
Thorsen peered down into the trench and swore silently. There were several ravaged bones and small skulls lying in the clammy, foul-smelling mud. He sat down and dangled his feet over the edge. “Give me a hand, Benny,” he said, holding his arms above his head. Machado grabbed both of Thorsen’s wrists and lowered him into the trench.
Thorsen landed in a heap, dropping to his knees before righting himself. All three sides at the very end of the trench were layered with bones of various shapes and sizes, exposed when the backhoe had taken its last gulp of mud. There was no sign of coffins—just bones. He looked up at the ring of faces staring down at him like mourners at a funeral. Only these guys weren’t mourning for the dead. It was for their jobs.
Thorsen removed his hard hat and slapped it against the trench wall. “Okay,” he shouted out. “We’re through here for the day. You’ll all get full pay for your shift. I’ll get in touch with you and let you know when we can get back to work.”
He squatted down near one of the skulls. It was small, mud crusted, no sign of teeth. He stood up and wiped his hands on his pants.
There was a thudding noise and Thorsen turned to see Benny Machado placing the butt end of a ladder down into the trench.
“I got a hunch,” Machado said from above. “This many bones, I think they’re Indians. A burial ground maybe.”
“Indians? Like in cowboys and?”
“Yeah, but from before the cowboys. The Bay Area was home to a lot of Indians—then the missionaries came around and killed them. I worked on a job in Oakland and we found an Indian burial ground there.”
“What happened to the job?” Thorsen wanted to know.
“Scratched. Some tribe from up north claimed the land. I think it’s a trailer park now.”
Thorsen took out his cell phone and began snapping photographs. The mass of bones hadn’t been buried very deep. Three feet, maybe less. He was about to climb up the ladder when something caught his eye. He moved cautiously, then dropped to one knee and gently massaged the mud from one long bone, a leg, with the foot still attached at the bottom of the ten-foot-deep dig. There was a thin link chain encircling the ankle. As he picked away at it with his fingernail he realized it was gold. An ankle ID bracelet? He moistened his finger with his tongue and carefully wiped at the piece until he saw two initials: a V and an A. Thorsen didn’t know much about native Indian tribes, but he was certain they weren’t into gold ID anklets.
He took several more pictures and then climbed up the ladder and onto relatively solid ground.
A sudden crack of arrowy lighting was followed by a drum roll of thunder. Raindrops the size of nickels began falling as Thorsen headed back to the construction shack.
“What are you gonna do, boss?” Machado asked.
“Call Henry Chung, call the cops, and get drunk. But maybe not in that order, Benny.”
“Chung’s already here. I saw his car coming through the gate when I went back for the ladder.”
“Good, I’ll let him handle the police.”
Chapter 2
Beverly Hills, California
San Francisco Police Department Homicide Inspector Rick Jarnac pulled the airport rental car into the same Reserved for Guests stall at the Carlomont Nursing Home that he’d parked in earlier that morning. It was evening now, a few minutes after six.
He opened the car door and was greeted with a wave of heat. He straightened up and rubbed both hands against the small of his back. Jarnac was tall and slender, with a lean, angular face and strong jaw. He was in his shirtsleeves, which were rolled up to his elbows. His collar was unbuttoned, his tie at half-mast. He sighed, rolled down the sleeves, slipped into his suit jacket, buttoned his shirt and cinched his tie. It was oppressively hot, but he felt the least he could do was look professional when he delivered the news to an elderly woman that her missing daughter’s remains had been found and that she had been murdered some forty years earlier.
Jarnac walked along a herringb
one patterned brick path bordered by a head-high privet hedge. He noticed an elderly man in a light blue bathrobe leaning back against the hedge, one hand cupped around a cigarette. He had a bald pate and his face was a grainy white color, like boiled rice. He inhaled with cheek-sunken concentration. His eyes got that deer-in-the-headlight look when he spotted Jarnac.
Jarnac nodded a hello and the man held a vertical finger to his lips and said, “Shhhh,” before giving Jarnac a conspiratorial wink.
The front entrance to the pink stucco, four-story nursing home was guarded by a stand of towering royal palm trees.
He trotted up the steps and into the lobby. The walls, ceiling, and the carpeting were in various shades of beige. Plush chairs and couches in pale floral designs sat empty. The smell of freshly popped popcorn hung in the air. The only person in sight was a young dark-haired woman sitting behind the check-in counter.
Jarnac figured her to be in her late twenties. She was wearing a beige blouse with a plastic tag on the pocket that identified her as Sherry.
“Can I help you, sir?” she asked.
“Yes, I’m here to see Janine Ashcroft.”
“Oh, how nice,” the woman said. “Are you a relative?”
He slipped a business card from his coat pocket. “I was here earlier this morning and spoke with Mrs. Ashcroft.”
“Is there something I can help you with?”
“No. I just have to speak to her again.”
Sherry picked up a phone and did some whispering. After she cradled the phone she took a deep breath and said, “Mrs. Ashcroft is on the east patio.”
Jarnac found Janine Ashcroft sitting comfortably in a wicker chair that was positioned next to a small glass-top table. Misting fans situated under the veranda overhang sprayed tiny droplets of water into the air which evaporated immediately. She had a tall iced drink in one hand. When he’d spoken to her at nine-fifteen that morning it had been in her two-room suite, which had a view of the Beverly Hilton Hotel. She was eighty-six years of age—a thin, elegant looking woman with snow-white hair. It was obvious that she’d once been very beautiful, but now her sun-damaged face was stitched with wrinkles.
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