“It was easy. I had to watch a few videos to figure out how to get the picture of the boy on the ship, but after that, it was smooth sailing.” He laughed at his own joke.
“The title looks good too,” Beth said, admiring the cover. “I’m impressed. It looks professional.”
“Except I had to tape it onto the book,” Nicholas said, shrugging.
“Have you showed this to your Aunt Katie, yet?” Haley asked, taking the book from my hands as she flipped it over.
“Uh-uh. Why?”
“She’s designing a flyer for the year-end sale. Maybe you can help her.”
“Can I call her?” Nicholas asked, lighting up with a big grin.
“I think she’d like that,” I said, ruffling his hair before he ran downstairs. “Thank you, Haley. He needed that.”
“You’re welcome, but I wasn’t kidding. He’s good.” Haley handed the book back to me. “He has an eye for it. After he helps Katie with her year-end sale, maybe he can fix the graphics on the store’s website.” She pulled her blood pressure kit and wrapped a cuff around my arm, pumping it tight.
“Why is Haley checking your blood pressure, sunshine?” Hattie asked.
“Because Doc was worried about some chemicals I inhaled. How are you feeling?”
“Alert enough to know you’re not telling the whole story.”
“Do you want to hear the whole story?”
“No,” she said, sighing. “Not really.”
Sara giggled.
Hearing activity in the front yard, Pops walked over to the window. “Why is Whiskey parking a flatbed trailer in the front yard?”
“Likely that will be the spectator’s area for the relay race tonight. We have visitors coming to watch.”
Sara ran over to look out the window with Pops. “Can we decorate it?”
“As long as you help clean up later, sure.”
“Come on, Beth. We have decorations in the basement,” Sara said as she ran over and pulled Beth by the hand toward the stairs.
I fell back onto Hattie’s bed, closing my eyes.
“We have a few things we need to chat about,” Tech said, nudging my shoulder. “You can take a nap afterward.”
“But I’m so comfortable.”
“You woke me at four-thirty this morning. I have a right to mess with your mid-day nap.”
“Fine!” I whined, mimicking Nicholas when he was throwing a fit. I rolled off the bed and stomped my way dramatically down the stairs. I could hear Pops and Hattie laughing behind me.
Tech followed me with his laptop. At the bottom of the stairs, I stopped to figure out the best place to have a private conversation. Nicholas was in the dining room, talking to Katie on speaker phone while he worked on his computer. In the living room Bridget was working on her computer while her head bounced wildly to whatever was playing through her earphones. Abigail and her nanny would be in my atrium, so that wouldn’t work either.
Going to the basement, we walked through the gym quietly, hoping not to wake the security shift who were napping. We passed Beth and Sara who were pulling out decorations for the trailer before Tech and I turned into the furnace room to follow the tunnel down to Donovan’s.
“This is getting a little out of hand,” Tech said as we entered Donovan’s basement family room.
“Agreed. Now what has you acting so secretive?”
“When I was pulling the video for Hattie, I saw something odd,” Tech said, opening a video file on his computer and hitting play.
I moved closer, leaning over to see better. “What am I looking for?” The video was a wide-angle view of the gym at Headquarters.
“Watch Grady.”
Grady was leaning against the far wall, fiddling with his phone. His head was bent like he was watching the screen, but I knew him well enough to know he was scouting the room. “Who’s he watching?”
“Sebrina,” Tech said, pointing to the other side of the room where Sebrina and Shipwreck were talking next to one of the makeshift buffet tables.
Shipwreck stormed off and Sebrina wandered over to sit next to Donovan. She whispered something to him, leaning a little too close. Donovan stood, glaring at her as he walked over and sat beside Wayne. Sebrina winked at Donovan before she left to join another group of guys. Bones walked by, shaking his head at her as he passed. Grady shifted, turning to lean his good shoulder against the wall so Sebrina remained in view.
“Odd, right? If Grady’s so in love with Sebrina, why’s he watching her like that?”
“Do you have video from inside the apartment building?”
“There’s a camera at the entrance and one in each hallway.”
“Pull up last night’s video.”
“I don’t have to,” Tech said, leaning back in his chair. “Grady and Sebrina shared his room last night. They went inside around eleven and didn’t come out until seven this morning.”
I wrinkled my nose but didn’t say anything.
“What’s he doing, Kelsey?”
“I don’t know. There are several reasons he could be watching Sebrina. Maybe he loves her but doesn’t trust her not to cheat on him. Maybe he’s not sure if she’s involved with Santiago. Maybe he’s faking the whole relationship. It doesn’t matter.”
“What if he’s faking it? What if this is all some misguided attempt to keep the family safe? Can you forgive him?”
I thought about the question before shaking my head. “I don’t think so. Maybe I could find a way to forgive him for cheating on me, but how could I ever forgive him for hurting Nick? He broke his heart.”
“We both know Grady wouldn’t intentionally hurt Nicholas. He loves that kid.”
“Like he loves me?” I asked, pointing toward the video. “Damn it, Tech. I can’t trust him.”
Tech nodded. “Sorry. I guess I’m feeling betrayed by Grady, too. I just want him to be innocent of all this. I want to believe he was the man we all thought he was.”
“You’re not the only one,” Donovan said, entering the room. “He’s been my best friend for nearly a decade. I keep searching for an excuse that would make his behavior somehow excusable.”
“Why are you home so early?” I asked, wiping a stray tear away.
“Tyler assigned me the task of feeding the prisoners lunch,” Donovan said, holding up a brown paper bag.
“I’ll go with you.” I looked at Tech. “Anything else I need to know?”
“No. I’m screening all the videos for Sebrina and Daphne, but so far everything has been as expected.”
Donovan looked at Tech. “One of these days, you’ll burn out working these crazy hours with Kelsey. If you worked for me, you’d have steady hours.”
“I’d die of boredom,” Tech said, smirking as he turned his attention back to his laptop.
Chapter Thirty
I practically ran from my thoughts of Grady as I followed the tunnel to Alex’s. Exiting the other side, I looked around the room. I walked toward the small kitchenette, peeking around the corner, but no one was there. A closet spanned the other end of the room. I walked over and opened all the doors.
“What are you looking for?” Donovan asked.
“No one. Nothing.”
“No one? As in someone?”
“I feel like someone’s been in here,” I said, turning around in a circle, looking about.
“You mean other than Alex, Carl, Bridget, Haley, and Tyler?”
“Ignore me. I’m not making any sense.” I walked down the short hall and unlocked the deadbolt. After opening the door, I stepped back and held my sleeve over my face. “Oh, holy. That stinks. I’ll get the gloves so I can empty the buckets.”
“Damn. What are you feeding them?” Donovan asked, stepping away from the room.
“Wild Card likely gave them ex-lax again.”
Donovan took a deep breath and entered the room. I went to the kitchenette to get a pair of gloves. When I returned, Donovan was relocking the door.
“What
are you doing?”
“We have a problem,” Donovan said, leading me by the elbow back into the family room. “They’re dead.”
“What?”
“Their throats were slit.”
“Are you messing with me?”
“Not in the slightest. Who knew they were here?”
“Shit,” I said, sitting on the love seat. “I don’t know. Tyler, a few of the Devil’s Players, Nightcrawler, Shipwreck, Wild Card, you, Alex, the girls…”
“Too many people. Anyone could have talked about it and been overheard.”
“We’re practically stacked on top of each other lately. It’s not easy to find somewhere private to talk.”
“Tyler checked on them this morning,” Donovan said. “That means in the last five or six hours, in the middle of the day, someone snuck in here and killed them while we had guards posted everywhere.”
“Head back to the main house. Call Katie and tell her to close the store. Keep everyone safe until I get back.”
“What are you going to do with seven dead bodies?”
“Seven?” I asked. I didn’t wait for an answer. I followed the short hall to the room and unlocked the door. Stepping inside, I counted seven bodies. “Son of a bitch.”
“What?”
“There were eight of them.”
“I’m heading to the main house!” Donovan said as he jogged toward the tunnels. “You armed?”
I pulled my gun as I shut the door. “Go! I’ll be there when I can.”
Wild Card and Bones walked through the tunnel as Donovan was running toward it.
“Where’s the fire?” Bones asked, but Donovan didn’t stop to explain.
Wild Card watched me and slowly pulled his gun. “What do I need to know?”
“The same guy who escaped last time is missing.”
“He knew about the tunnel to Donovan’s.”
“Go! Search Donovan’s. I’ll search the rest of Alex’s house.”
A scream sounded from upstairs, followed by a loud thump and glass breaking. Bones led the charge up the stairs. We found Bridget standing in Alex’s dining room over the body of our missing guy. He was knocked out cold from the vase that lay shattered around him.
“He hurt you?” Bones asked as he moved to Bridget’s side.
“He came out of nowhere and tried to grab me. Alex is going to be so pissed when I tell him I broke his vase.”
“I’ll buy him another vase,” Bones said, pulling her into his body.
Wild Card checked the man for a pulse and nodded that he was alive.
“Roll him over,” I said, keeping my gun pointed at the man.
Wild Card rolled him over, and sure enough, he was covered in enough blood to convince me he had killed the others. Still gripped in his hand was a long-handled hunting knife.
“I stripped him of his clothes,” I said, holstering my gun. “How did he get out of his cuffs again? Where did the knife come from?”
“The better question is, how’d he escape from the storage room?” Bridget asked. “The new lock has a plated cover on the inside of the room. It can only be unlocked from the hallway side.”
“Are you guys saying he had help?” Wild Card asked.
I dragged a hand through my hair. “Bones, find Whiskey and have him send his contractors home. Wild Card, get this asshole downstairs and tie him up for me. We’ll have to move him somewhere secure. Bridget, I need you to clean upstairs.”
“What are you going to do?” Bones asked.
“Clean the mess downstairs.”
Bones rubbed a hand down his face. “What kind of mess is down there?”
“The kind of mess you’re thinking is down there.”
“Fuck,” Wild Card said.
~*~*~
I called Goat and asked him to bring one of the freight trucks through the field to Alex’s house.
Goat laughed. “Should I throw in the large rolls of the plastic wrap we bundle the clothes with?”
“That would be handy,” I answered. “I could also use a dolly, a dozen extra-large totes, and some bungee straps, too.”
Goat was silent for a few moments, but when he spoke his voice was low and serious. “Call off the security team surrounding the houses. The fewer witnesses the better.”
I tucked my phone into my pocket and turned toward Wild Card who was just finishing tying up our remaining bad guy. “Pull security for a meeting in my garage. Keep them busy going over the plan for tonight. I need at least an hour.”
“What are you going to do?”
I took off my cardigan and tossed it onto the couch before sliding the couch and recliner toward the far wall. “I’m going to get the bodies out of here before whoever’s working against us calls the cops and has us all arrested.”
I heard someone coming through the tunnel and held my finger up to stop Wild Card from responding. Haley stepped out, followed by Tyler.
“Bridget called me,” Haley explained as she tossed me a set of coveralls, then tossed a set to Tyler. “Wild Card, you should go. Do as Kelsey said and keep the guards’ attention away from us.” She opened a package and started stepping into a pair of bibs.
“Haley—” I started to say as I quickly pulled the coveralls on over my clothes.
“Do you have a plan to get the bodies out of here?” she asked, interrupting me.
“Out, yes, but I’m not sure where to take them.”
“I sleep for less than two hours,” Tyler grumbled, “and all hell breaks loose.”
“If only we could clone you, Tyler.” Haley grinned as she slid on a pair of elbow-length gloves and looked at me. “We need to hurry. I told everyone you were taking a nap at Lisa’s house.”
I stretched a pair of gloves over the sleeves of my coveralls, heading to the storage room. All three of us stepped back and tried not to gag when I opened the door. After a minute, Haley raised her head and pushed past us into the room. Tyler and I cringed, following her inside.
By the time we bagged the bedding, unchained the corpses from the wall, and emptied and cleaned the shit buckets, Goat was pulling the freight truck up behind Alex’s house. We wrapped the men with the long rolls of plastic, then lifted them one at a time into the rolling laundry bins that Goat had thought to grab. From there, we rolled each bin up the ramp and into the back of the freight truck.
Bridget came downstairs after the last bin was loaded. “I’ll help Haley clean the storage room.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “Tyler, move our remaining prisoner somewhere safe, but don’t tell anyone his new location.”
“You sure you don’t need me with you?” Tyler asked.
“She’s sure,” Goat answered as he looked over at me. “Come on. We’d best clear out.”
“Goat, I can handle it from here.”
“Get your ass in the truck,” Goat ordered, pointing to the passenger side.
I hurried around the truck and climbed inside.
“I’m guessing you don’t have a clue how to get rid of a body, let alone seven,” Goat said as he started the truck.
“I’m hoping as we drive down the road a brilliant idea will pop into my head. If I was in Texas or Florida, the wildlife would help me get rid of a body or two. But seven?”
“We can’t take a chance these men will ever show up on an autopsy table. That means we're heading somewhere no one else knows about. I need your word it will stay that way.”
I thought about Goat’s wife Marcy who disappeared, never to be seen again, after I assaulted her in a storage room at the store. “You have my word.”
“Good enough. Find us some music to listen to. It’s an hour drive.”
I did as I was told, pulling the long gloves off and fiddling with the radio until Goat started to sing along to a song. I leaned back into my seat and closed my eyes, wondering how my life had become so insane.
~*~*~
“Wake up! We’re here,” Goat said, startling me awake.
I op
ened my eyes, looking around. An old cabin with its roof half caved in sat to the far right of the property. Between the truck and the cabin, an assortment of old furniture and appliances were scattered about, rotting and rusting.
“Welcome to my weekend getaway,” Goat said, grinning.
“You don’t live here, do you?”
Goat laughed. “No.”
“Is the property titled in your name?” I asked as I climbed out and met Goat in front of the truck.
“Nope. Belongs to my uncle.”
“And where’s your uncle?”
“About twelve feet under that old refrigerator,” Goat answered, pointing to a refrigerator about forty feet away.
I raised an eyebrow at Goat. “I’m guessing the State of Michigan doesn’t know he’s deceased?”
“Miraculously, his taxes are paid by money order every year.” Goat steered me toward the back of the truck. “Come on. We’ve got work to do.”
“What if someone sees us?”
“There’s not another neighbor for almost a mile, but I leave this place looking like a horror movie to keep snoops away.” He opened the back of the freight truck and motioned for me to climb up as he pulled the ramps out.
It didn’t take me long to realize that Goat was a little too experienced at getting rid of bodies. He drove a front-end loader out of a rickety looking barn. After a closer look, I saw the inside of the barn had another support structure built to protect and hide the front-end loader. Goat drove behind the barn and dug a large, deep hole before returning and moving the bucket to the back of the freight truck. We emptied four bodies into the bucket before he drove them behind the barn. He returned a few minutes later, and we dumped the last three bodies into the bucket. While he drove off, I took the bottle of bleach from the back of the truck and started wiping everything clean.
Goat returned and motioned for me to follow him. He grabbed two white buckets and nodded to a third. I picked it up, grunting at its weight, carrying it barely two inches from the ground as I tried to keep up.
“Glad you still got your gloves on,” Goat said, stopping at the edge of the hole.
“Why’s that?”
“We need the plastic off them,” he said, nodding at the bodies in the bottom.
Hearts and Aces (Kelsey's Burden Series Book 7) Page 27
