by Elle Keaton
“Right? My dad was a long-distance trucker and had a whole other family in Ohio or someplace like that.” It was Ohio; Beto knew the address where his older half-siblings had grown up. “He was killed in a wreck, and the money stopped coming. I don’t know how my mamá couldn’t have suspected something, but maybe she thought he was the best she could get. At any rate, he died, we had nothing, and there you go. Another one who couldn’t choose me or my mamá as number one. Sounds pitiful, doesn’t it?”
Soren didn’t answer. Through the still-open front door, Beto heard more than saw the sirens and lights finally arrive. A horde of cruisers parked wherever they could, their lights left on, flashing across the neighboring houses, reminding Beto of the night he’d found Troy. The neighbors emerged to watch the responders. He could see them huddled in the rain, which was falling more gently tonight.
He gratefully allowed the EMTs to take over and do what they were trained for. Soren was quickly and efficiently given oxygen, packed with gauze, and loaded onto a gurney. Beto followed them outside to the ambulance.
Two uniforms had discovered the body of the pizza delivery guy on the far side of the garage, a bullet hole through his forehead. The rain and wind had covered any sounds that might have reached human ears. Freya was still missing, along with the shooter. And with a sinking stomach, Beto knew Carsten and Dany were gone too.
* * *
Once Soren was on his way to the hospital, sirens blaring, Beto made his way through the investigators to wash his hands at the kitchen sink, the red of Soren’s blood disturbing him as it washed down the drain. Finally he opened the door to his bedroom.
Nothing.
The room was as empty as he expected. Rain had blown in the open window, leaving a damp spot on the wood floor. Scuff marks showed on the windowsill where their shoes had caught as they’d climbed out the window.
Had Carsten gone willingly, or had Petyr coerced him? Had this evening had been an elaborate setup on Petyr’s part, or were both of them were involved? Or neither, a tiny voice whispered—what if they had been taken? He couldn’t worry about where the dog had gone; she would either come back or not. If she hadn’t returned by the time he could leave the scene, he’d take his car out after everyone was gone and look for her. He’d search for Carsten and Dany too, but instinct told him they’d gone to ground somewhere.
The responding officers were asking him questions, and Beto had no answers for them, other than Jorgensen had opened the door and all hell had broken loose. The underlying investigation was a no-go topic until he talked with Nguyen and his actual boss.
Nguyen, of course, had been notified immediately. She’d arrived on the scene within half an hour of the call. Even at nine p.m., she was impeccably dressed in a coal-black pantsuit with lines so sharp a person could cut their hands on them if they were foolish enough to touch, paired with sensible black heels. She shooed away the officers questioning Beto like so much useless humanity. Beto wasn’t sure if he was glad to see her or not, but at least the officers were gone for now.
“Tell me what happened. Every goddamned single detail; don’t you dare hold anything back. Why was Jorgensen at your house? Who could be holding a grudge? Aside from Dickson, that is. You’ve been here a year—who else have you pissed off? What haven’t you told me? I’m going to have to make a phone call to the mayor, and I don’t want to be fired at the end of it.” Her expression was grim.
They sat at his breakfast counter while SkPD officers and other responders processed the scene. It would be hours before they were gone. Any time an officer was shot, the system went into overdrive. Several officers left to canvass the neighborhood looking for the shooter, though they all knew what Beto knew: Whoever it had been was long gone. Beto hadn’t even seen what kind of vehicle he’d arrived in. Hell, they didn’t even know if the shooter was a man.
The shooting upped the stakes considerably. An SkPD officer was fighting for his life, a situation that united the station: Everyone wanted the shooter brought to justice. The local fed team had let Beto run the investigation from inside the SkPD, but now they were going to insist on being involved, especially since the incident occurred at the home of a federal investigator. Nguyen didn’t have a choice; Gómez was going to take over. Beto wondered who would show up from the local office and how long it would be before they arrived. He knew he wasn’t going to be waiting long.
17
Carsten
* * *
Carsten led the way to Beto’s bedroom. The light was off, and Carsten was moving to flick it on when Dany grabbed his wrist, pushing him back against the wall, simultaneously shutting the door behind them.
“Who’s that?” Dany whispered, pointing out the window.
One of the windows in the room looked out toward the street, while the other looked out onto a funny little alcove between the house and the garage. Dany stared out the front window. Carsten tried to see what he was watching. The delivery guy hurried up the walk with two large pizza boxes in his hands. Carsten didn’t envy him delivering on another rainy night when no one wanted to go outside. He started to point out that obviously their dinner had arrived, when he spotted the darker, larger figure behind the delivery guy.
“Shit,” Dany murmured.
“Nooo,” Carsten whispered, knowing what was about to happen.
The second figure stealthily slipped behind the delivery person and covered his mouth with a gloved hand, dragging him off to the side of the alcove. There was a muffled pop, and a moment later, the dark man—his face partially obscured by a scarf—reappeared and started toward the front steps.
Before Carsten could call out to Beto, the dog started barking and snarling. The sound was terrifying. Beto’s and Soren’s voices rose above the barking, while simultaneously the front door opened, letting a stream of light out onto the front porch.
Everything happened in a single instant. Carsten didn’t think he would ever be able to separate out the individual strands of sound, action, vision. There were gunshots, muffled by a silencer but still audible over the rain. Freya sounded like a hellhound. Out of the corner of his eye, Carsten saw the killer’s shadow stretching toward them, his profile lit by the light from inside the house.
“We have to get out of here,” Dany whispered.
“What about Beto and Soren?” Carsten was trapped between wanting to go to them and wanting to run for his life.
“He has a gun, C, we have nothing. He’s here to kill. You saw him take down that kid—if we want to survive, we need to run!”
Dany moved first, racing to the other window in the bedroom. This one was set higher from the ground than the front window but wasn’t impossible to reach, and it was just large enough for two not-very-large people to squeeze through.
“You go first. Shit, C-Carsten, you’re not wearing any shoes. Go, go, go,” Dany urged.
Carsten scrambled up, hitting the windowsill first with his stomach before pushing himself all the way out and nearly landing on the body of the pizza man. He would’ve screamed or thrown up if he hadn’t been so scared he was about to die himself. That they were all going to die, and everything he and Troy had done would be in vain.
The body was no one he knew. The red hole in the middle of his forehead seemed surreal—if it hadn’t been there, Carsten could have imagined he was asleep or passed out. With a smack, a pair of black leather loafers landed next to him, and then Dany was beside him.
“Run,” Dany whispered frantically. “Run!”
Carsten grabbed the shoes, clutching them in one hand as he ran as fast as he could. Dany was in better shape—he hadn’t had the flu and a migraine recently. He drew a little ahead of Carsten before reaching back to grab his arm and pull him, trying to help him move faster. At the end of the sidewalk they swung onto an unpaved alley. Even with socks on, Carsten’s feet were aching from the rocks, sticks, and other debris he stepped on in the dark. He couldn’t hear anything over the pounding of his heart and his own har
sh breathing.
They came to the end of the alley and turned right, still running. The street they were on now ran parallel to a larger street with mixed-use zoning. There were businesses and apartments, and maybe a mile away was the Perk. If they could get there, they would at least be somewhere dry and safe. They could think, plan what to do next. Catch their breath.
The café wasn’t scheduled to open for another week, and no one would be there at this time of night anyway. One of the shoes he’d been carrying slipped out of his hand as he ran, landing in a puddle next to a fence. He tossed the other aside, hoping Beto would forgive him—if he was still alive; shit, he couldn’t go there—he was sure they’d been expensive, but there was no time to stop and retrieve the first. The open, lifeless eyes of the delivery guy kept appearing in his vison, and he had to forcibly shove the image away.
Headlights appeared behind them, coming from the street in front of Beto’s house, heading the same direction they were. Dany’s grip on Carsten’s arm tightened, dragging him behind a huge rhododendron bush on the corner. As they crouched, hidden, a black SUV peeled around the corner and thankfully passed them by without slowing. Carsten saw the man in the driver’s seat, though; a streetlight lit up his face as he drove, as well as the distinctive baseball cap he wore.
Carsten knew that face. He’d seen it when a stranger poured gasoline on Garrett’s cabin and tossed a match on it, he’d seen him at the hospital where Troy was, and now, shit, Beto and Soren.
The red taillights disappeared around the corner. Dany stood, and Carsten did too.
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
“That was close,” Carsten panted, trying to catch his breath and keep from losing his shit right then and there.
“No—well, that too, but I mean the dog.”
Carsten turned, and Freya was waiting behind them.
“Get rid of it,” Dany hissed.
“How am I supposed to do that? I can’t unless we go back.” Why had Freya followed them? He didn’t know what to do, but he couldn’t just abandon her—not to mention he didn’t have any way to keep her from following them anyhow. He breathed in deeply, trying to calm himself down. It only succeeded in making him even more lightheaded.
“We can’t go back. For one, we were witnesses, and now they want to kill us even more, and for two, I don’t want to die.” Dany’s voice was ragged.
“I don’t want to die either. Did you recognize him?” Carsten didn’t want to say the word killer, didn’t want Dany to know it was Carsten’s fault that he’d brought the killer to Beto’s front door.
“Can we talk about this later? We need to find a place to hide out so we can figure out what we’re going to do.”
Sirens were starting to sound. Somebody had called the police. They only had a few minutes before the entire area was going to be overrun by officers out looking for the shooter.
“This way.”
Carsten led Dany down another alley and then behind several small businesses, the dog trotting along behind them. The city was quiet except for the screams of responders’ sirens heading toward Beto’s house. Darkness and rain gave them an advantage, and as far as Carsten could tell the man in the SUV had disappeared. Had he known who was in the house? Had he killed everyone? He tried to quiet his thoughts as they half ran, half walked down the dark alleys and streets leading to the Perk.
After an eternity, they finally arrived. The building was dark, as Carsten had known it would be. Although it would be just like Sara to be there late working on the menu, putting together more of the furniture that had finally arrived, or rearranging the art on the freshly painted walls. But when they’d last talked, she hadn’t said anything about planning on working late.
“Where are we?” Dany asked as they approached the older brick building.
“I’m helping open this place—it should be empty, we’ve got another week until the soft opening.” If he wasn’t dead before then.
Carsten fumbled with the alarm, entering the wrong code once before disarming it and then keying in the unlock code on the door. His hands were shaking so hard he was surprised he managed it at all. He opened the door slowly and quietly for Dany and the dog, and they slipped past him into the building.
“The office is in the back, down that hallway on the other side of the counter. We won’t have to turn on any lights until we get there.”
The office, along with everything else, was unfurnished and filled with boxes, along with the first order of flour and whatnot for baked goods. The room wasn’t large, but it would fit the three of them. He shut the door behind himself and turned on the light. Dany looked terrible, bedraggled and muddy, his clothing torn from crawling out the window and hiding in bushes along the way.
Carsten knew he didn’t look much better, plus his feet were a mess. His wool socks had protected him somewhat, but his feet ached and Carsten knew they were cut up. Freya’s thick coat dripped mud onto the floor, and Carsten hoped Sara would forgive him. He leaned against the door, trying to get his mind around everything. Instead he kept seeing the profile of one of the men who’d been haunting him for years.
Dany found a box and sat down on it, still breathing hard, his normally pale face flushed from exertion. The dog paced around, sniffing boxes, before plopping down on the floor.
“What happened?” Carsten’s voice sounded loud in the small room. He had the urge to whisper, as if someone could hear them talking from outside the building.
He thought they’d been careful; between the weather and the darkness, there’d been no other pedestrians out and very few cars. All the police had been tied up with what had happened at Beto’s.
Beto. What if he was dead? What if Soren was dead too? “What if, what if” ricocheted around inside his head.
Out of steam, Carsten slid down to sit on the floor, not caring what kind of mess he was making. The adrenaline rush faded from his system, leaving him shaky and weak. Was Beto dead; had he been shot and rushed to the hospital in one of the aid cars they’d heard? Had both Beto and Jorgensen been killed while Carsten and Dany fled in fear?
He was a coward. This was why Troy was, had been, doing the hard work, gathering evidence against Troy’s father and the other men involved. The group allowed Troy close to them because he was “tame,” or so they thought. Carsten had been forgotten like so much trash when he got too old, when he stopped looking as androgynous as he had as a teen. Garrett couldn’t keep pretending he looked like a girl and deserved to be fucked like one. Carsten had always suspected Garrett planned to bring another boy to the cabin, but something had gone wrong. Maybe he really had been in an accident, or maybe he had betrayed the “club” somehow; regardless, he’d ended up dead.
“That was one of my grandfather’s lackeys. One of the more frightening models.”
Dany’s voice broke through Carsten’s thoughts, and his eyes flew open. “What?”
“That guy, the driver, was one of my cousins. We’re not close.”
“I didn’t remember him from your house.” He would have recognized Dany’s cousin, right?
“You never met him. I think Deda brought him over after you were gone, or maybe he kept a low profile. Stjepan’s a mean bastard. Something happened to him during the war and … he was mean before, I heard, but now he lives to cause pain. And sometimes just to kill people.”
“So … this was about you, not me?”
Dany cocked his head to the side, a gesture so familiar yet from so far in the past it took Carsten’s breath away. “Why would you think he was trying to get you?”
Carsten tried to pull his thoughts together, but he was cold, his feet hurt, and his head felt foggy. It was possible he was working up to another migraine. He shut his eyes again, wanting only to be in a safe place where he didn’t have to worry about who to trust. What if Dany had led his uncle to them on purpose?
“I don’t know,” he finally answered. “Why would your family try to kill you?” The Petyr family wa
s nothing if not loyal to their blood relations.
Dany let out a bitter laugh. “Remember how I said I was in a witness protection program without the protection?”
“Yeah, I guess.” Carsten’s head was pounding now.
“It’s the truth.” Carsten opened his eyes. The light bothered him, but he wanted to see Dany. When Carsten didn’t say anything, Dany continued. “I’m a nark.”
“Please explain. Everything hurts, and I don’t feel like trying to understand. Just lay it out for me.”
“I’ve been passing information to the cops. Deda is …” He shuddered. “After you left, were taken, I finally truly understood what terrible people they are. Franjo told me, if I wasn’t a good boy, what happened to you would happen to me. I was such a stupid boy if I thought family was protected. I remember he touched my cheek, and I knew he meant I wasn’t protected from him.
“I tried to figure out where you were, but you just disappeared—at least as far as I could tell. I behaved. Shit, did I behave. I behaved so hard it about killed me. I yes sirred and no sirred and waited and watched, and finally they started to treat me like one of them.”
It was Dany who shut his eyes this time. Carsten wondered what his friend was trying not to see. When Dany blinked again, his rainbow green eyes were haunted, filled with sorrow.
“Finally I was able to contact someone I thought I could trust and began to tell them what was going on, how not only were people being brought in from other countries to be sold into slavery but kids from our own town were being sold too. Kids who had no one to protect them, like you. I used you as an example, but my contact said that wasn’t good enough, he needed more examples, real names, names of people who were doing the selling and the buying.
“Stjepan was arrested, but he managed to get off on some technicality—or more likely the family paid someone off—and somehow Deda knew it was me who narked on him. I’ve been on the run ever since. The asshole who outed me was found dead in a back alley, but I’m pretty sure he gave up my name before he took that bullet.”
