Mom would be worried. At least she thought so. Mom worried when she, well, when she was sober.
At first she’d considered going back to Camden. She’d even started walking in that direction, but the farther she walked, the more she realized she might be in deep trouble if she came home. She’d taken the time to count the money. It was almost two million dollars. Too much to hide, too much to carry and too much to leave behind. So she went up north. That was all the reason she needed. She wanted to get some distance from Camden and the guys there who might really own the money she was carrying around. Because if she went home, if she got stupid and walked back into her old life with that much money and it belonged to Tony Parmiatto or any of his buddies, she was as good as dead and she’d have bet every dollar she had on her that it would be a slow death and very painful. You don’t steal from the mob; you don’t borrow from the mob without their permission. It was likely that somebody was dead because of the blood she’d been covered with. That somebody was connected to the money. That meant the money was blood money and the mob always collected on those debts. Always.
The mob was not forgiving. She’d learned that when she found out the truth about why her father disappeared. Do the wrong things to the Mafia and they returned the favor. She didn’t know if she had done them wrong or not and wasn’t sure she wanted to find out, but she wasn’t gonna take chances until she talked to someone.
Her legs still ached a little from the long run to jump onto a CSX car as it slowly rolled past. She’d had to run hard, and yeah, running in flip-flops, not such a great time, slinging the bag with every step. Then the bag went onto the car and she followed it. She slipped once and there was a line of red flesh along with a few scrapes to show where her shin had banged against the steel edge of the train car’s wide door.
There hadn’t been anyone in the car already so she hadn’t had to fight anyone. The sort of people that jumped trains, according to her mom, were the sort that would kill you as soon as look at you. Having seen a few of the men in her time, she could believe it.
She took the time to count the money while she was traveling. Then she counted it a few more times to be sure. Just a little under two million dollars. Crazy money. The sort of money the mob would come for. She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She wanted to laugh because it was all so damned crazy.
Once Tina was clear of the railroad tracks and the commercial yard where she’d climbed free, she headed down the closest access road. It followed next to I-95 and let her keep her eyes on the prize, as her mom liked to say.
While she walked, she thought about Tony. He was cute and sweet in his way and she didn’t like the idea that he might be the one that the money belonged to. She’d have to call him. She had to know what was going on and how deep she’d stepped in it.
Half a mile farther along she came across a motel. The sign said there were vacancies, and she sat outside in the bushes and watched for a while before going in.
The man behind the desk looked at her through the bulletproof glass that separated them. “Help you?” He looked about as interested in her as he was in watching mold grow on old cheese. That suited her just fine.
“Me and my mom, we need a room.” She’d told more than her share of lies since she was old enough to walk.
“Got any ID?” He took the time to look at her for a second, like it was a big favor.
She crossed her arms and gave him a look that said he was wasting her time.
“Then you’ll have to pay a security deposit. A hundred dollars. It’ll have to be cash.”
The room cost twenty-eight dollars a night. She’d seen the sign from the road. But she knew the deal well enough. A hundred dollars was a fortune, literally more money than she’d ever held in her hand until earlier that morning, but it was also enough to guarantee that the man didn’t care about her and her mom. He probably thought she was there to hook or to meet up with some guy she’d met on the Internet. From the look in his eyes, he’d forget about her for a hundred extra.
She needed his amnesia, so she reached into her pocket and fished out the small stack of twenties she’d put there earlier. He took the money and slid her a room key. “Checkout’s at ten in the morning. Leave after that, pay for another day.”
She took the key and grabbed her duffel bag and found her room.
Before she did anything else, Tina took a shower. She felt filthy. The blood was long gone, rubbed off by her hands, but she felt dirty, so she used the little bar of soap they offered in the dingy bathroom and scrubbed until her skin felt raw. Then she got dressed in the same oversized clothes, hid her bag under the bed and walked two blocks to the closest convenience store. Forty dollars bought her a disposable phone. Twenty more bought her enough time to make a few calls on it. They had a microwave, so she heated up three burritos and took those along with the biggest Pepsi they had back to her hotel room.
It was time to make some phone calls.
She ate on the way back to the room and killed most of her Pepsi too.
Five minutes after that the phone was activated—she lied about her name and address, but mostly because she was scared it might lead Tony to her somehow—and she was ready to make her calls.
That was the plan. She was asleep before it could happen, exhaustion and nerves getting the best of her.
Chapter Thirteen
Hunter Harrison
HUNTER LOOKED AT THE diner up ahead and felt his stomach kick and roar. He’d been walking for hours, never slowing, never stopping because if he did, he might disappear again and he couldn’t stand that thought anymore.
He’d lost the bloody button-up shirt, using one sleeve to wipe the sweat from his face for a while before he tossed it into the trash can in front of the diner. His wrists were still red, but not nearly as bad looking as they’d seemed earlier.
The restaurant was covered in chrome and neon, which seemed to be a state law for the way diners had to look in Jersey. He hiked his oversized pants a little higher, reached into the pocket and found a wad of bills that had no reason to be there. So be it. At least he could eat.
The place was crowded and smelled like heaven must, full of food and coffee. He didn’t even know when he started liking the stuff, but these days he was happier if he got his caffeine. He ordered a burger, rare, and a cup of his favorite drink. He’d knocked back two cups before his burger showed up. After that the coffee didn’t matter nearly as much as feeding his face a ton of hot fries and grilled cow.
The waitress looked a few years older than him, maybe eighteen, with heavily dyed red hair and light makeup. She smiled when she looked at his plate. “Somebody was hungry.”
“Still am. Can I get another?”
“Of course you can! Keep it up, you’re gonna fit into those pants real soon.” She laughed and looked him in the eyes. He wasn’t used to that.
“Well, that’s the idea. Need to build up my body.” He flexed, meaning the gesture as a joke, and was shocked by the size of his arms. No matter how much time had passed, he still had trouble with the changes. Muscles flexed and rippled smoothly and his bicep bulged. It looked damned near as big as his thigh used to be before his world went crazy. He could remember looking in the mirror and brushing his teeth while Mom watched him, her eyes smiling, and went over his homework answers with him.
The waitress laughed again and patted his arm, her fingers lingering for a second and her eyes taking on a different light. “Don’t change too much, hon. You’re looking pretty good to me.”
She left to take care of his order before he could open his mouth and say something stupid. The way things were going, he’d never get good with talking to girls. He couldn’t even find his way home.
He felt the skin on his scalp crawl and looked around at all the tables. People laughed, they talked, they snuck fries from each other’s plates, hell, one couple sat together and read different books as they ate, but they were together. He envied them for that.
At a
few tables other people ate alone, but even they seemed more relaxed than he did. Every nerve in his body was telling him that he was being watched by someone nearby. He looked everywhere, even shifting around enough to see the people behind him, but there was nothing, no one. They couldn’t have cared less about him. He might as well have been invisible.
Was it someone outside, maybe? He looked out the window, but all he could see was a line of cars with the sun flashing from the windows and windshields. The day was too perfect, and the resulting glare made seeing anything in the cars around him impossible. They could be staring at him and there would be no way he could prove it.
He could be staring, the bastard who’d locked him away. Or had he? His heart raced at the thought.
He rose on shaky legs and moved toward the men’s room as the waitress was bringing his next burger. He had to get away, now, before something horrible happened. Before someone broke down the doors or the police came swarming in or something even worse.
He pushed into the men’s room, drawing in the chemical smell of air fresheners trying to hide the stench of what happened in toilets, and almost knocked a man over in the process.
“Hey!” the older man squawked, indignant.
“Sorry.” He mumbled the word, already too busy to even acknowledge the man. His voice shook, sounded stranger than ever.
“You need to watch where the hell you’re going. You almost knocked my teeth out.” The man’s voice grew softer and his face lost its angry edge and grew worried. “Say, are you okay?”
No! He wasn’t okay! His heart was hammering crazily, his throat was dry and his skin felt like it was baking in an oven.
He opened his mouth to warn the stranger away because that feeling, it was worse than ever and something was happening, something bad.
“Mister—”
The darkness swallowed him whole, ate his mind and tore him into shreds, and something else came with the darkness, ripping him apart and throwing away the pieces.
He tried to speak and—
His head hurt, throbbed with each pulse of his heart, and he knew without even opening his eyes that it had happened again.
Hunter opened his eyes and stared at the stucco ceiling above him, studying the cracks in the plaster and the water stains that ran in odd patterns from a few different locations.
“No. Not again.” His voice broke, sounding more like it was supposed to than it had in a long, long time. “Not again, please. Just let me have my life back, okay? Just, please, God, let me have my mom and dad and everything else again.”
He didn’t cry, exactly, but his vision broke up as the tears ran to the edges of his eyelids and stuck there. He closed his eyes and wiped them angrily, hating it when he felt like crying. His dad had always looked at him like he was a loser when he cried, and he hated disappointing the man.
At least he thought he did. He couldn’t remember for sure, but it felt right to think that way.
Hunter sat up and listened to the mattress under him creak and groan. His head throbbed and he clutched it, holding on and hoping it wouldn’t shatter.
There was a new, clean and starched white shirtsleeve covering each arm to the wrist. He looked himself over for a moment and saw the charcoal gray slacks, the polished black dress shoes. He didn’t know anything about suits.
There was a wallet on the dresser in front of him. It was stuffed with bills and a driver’s license that had the name William Carter, along with an address for an apartment in Alexandria, Virginia.
He looked at the picture on the ID. It looked nothing like him.
“Okay, this is just crazy now….”
There was a suitcase on the battered dresser in front of the bed. Above the suitcase, there was a message written on the stationery pad he saw to the left of the suitcase and taped in place.
It said: BEHAVE YOURSELF. NO MORE GAMES.
A lot of things had changed in Hunter’s life. Okay, almost everything had changed, but at least one thing was the same. He recognized the handwriting. It was the same as he’d seen on hotel mirrors and the occasional note for a long time now.
Oh, the rage that seared his mind was huge. He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth and tried his best not to let the anger out again.
“How do you keep doing it? How are you finding me, you bastard?”
No one answered. No one could. He was all alone. Again.
Chapter Fourteen
Cody Laurel
CODY PACED IN THE waiting room, his entire world revolving around a blood test. He wished Jeremy was there. Or Will. Anyone he could talk to.
He’d gone back to school after his folks took him home, and nothing was quite right. First, Hank and Glenn were avoiding him like the plague, not that he was complaining, and he heard from Jeremy that the same night he disappeared, they got their asses handed to them in a big way. The proof of that was in the casts they were wearing on their hands. Matching casts, only Glenn’s was a little bigger. Since then, every time he saw them in the hallway, they did their best to avoid him.
That didn’t help make his life much easier, though. His folks were still having trouble with the whole idea of him just losing four days. So now they were looking into other possibilities, like maybe whether or not he’d started experimenting with hard-core drugs.
He knew he was innocent, he knew the test should be negative, but he wasn’t stupid. Just because he didn’t take any drugs didn’t mean there weren’t any involved. He’d heard the stories from time to time. It was always possible someone had slipped him something at the football game. He couldn’t think of anyone who would—or why—but you never knew. His friends weren’t that stupid and neither Chadbourn nor Wagner had the brainpower to come up with the idea—but it could have been someone else or even a random thing, so yeah, he was worried.
And right now his parents were talking with the doctor who’d taken the test. Not Dr. Talbot, the usual physician they saw, but a different man, a specialist who’d been hired to give him a full battery of drug tests to make sure that he wasn’t a hardened drug freak. He’d heard his parents talking at home about how much the tests would cost, well, arguing really, about whether or not they could afford to get them done at all because apparently insurance didn’t cover paranoid exams of your son’s blood for illicit substances.
His dad had been against it. His mom had insisted. In the long run, Mom won. Mom always won. It had always been that way.
He kept pacing, worrying, doing his best to ignore the constriction in his chest and the fact that his lungs wanted to whistle. Asthma sucked. He wished he’d brought his Game Boy.
The door opened and his parents walked out with a man he’d never seen before. He had to guess the stranger was their new friend, the doctor.
“Cody?” The man walked forward and offered his hand. He had a very strong grip and a smile that looked like it belonged on a politician. “I’m Dr. Peebles. I’ve been talking to your parents about your blood test results.”
Cody looked at his mom first; her face was set and worried. Then his dad, who seemed a little more relaxed but only a little.
The doctor was still smiling when he looked back.
“Yeah? What was the verdict?”
“Well, there’s no evidence that you took any illegal drugs, and aside from a few tests that are very painful and cost prohibitive, I doubt we’d be able to check any more thoroughly than we already did.”
He nodded. He didn’t like the man. He didn’t trust the man. Everything about the guy just rubbed him wrong.
“I get the idea there’s a but in this.”
The doctor blinked. “A but?”
“Yeah, you know. You seem all good, BUT, we have to consider this or that other thing.”
The man nodded and got a serious look on his face. Cody had to wonder if he practiced the expression in the mirror to make it look so sincere.
“Well, Cody, the thing is, we have to consider blackouts very carefully.”
> “Blackouts?”
A nod from Dr. Sincere. “Yes, blackouts, or fugues, or amnesia. The fact of the matter is, you lost four days of your life and we can’t figure out why.”
Cody swallowed hard. This was about to get bad, he could feel it in his stomach, like the way he felt at the top of the first roller-coaster hill when he knew the car was about to take a giant plummet downward and there was that chance that he was about to crash into the ground.
“The thing is, Cody, we’ve checked your head for possible causes, we’ve done examinations of your electrolytes for possible imbalances . . . and you’re in remarkable physical shape.”
He shook his head. The man had to be looking at someone else’s medical records. “No. I have asthma. My mom is always telling me I’ve got health problems.”
Another smile, but it was fast and lacked conviction. The doctor looked to his mom for a second and she in turn looked down, like she was guilty of letting out a shameful family secret. What the hell?
“Well, you’re in better shape than you think. At least physically.”
“What do you mean?” And there it was, that feeling like falling. The roller coaster was dropping fast and hard and it was a doozy, too.
“There are no signs of drugs, no physiological signs of trauma, and Cody, that only leaves one alternative that we can think of.”
Cody stepped back and looked from adult to adult, his eyes widening in his head. His mother and father looked away. Mom had a fretting look on her pretty face and Dad, well, Dad was looking about as happy as he probably would if Cody suddenly decided he needed to get a sex change. “You’re kidding me. You think I’m mental.”
“We just need to take a few more tests to make sure that the fugue state was just a fluke, a one-time thing.”
“Oh, hell no.” Cody shook his head. “I am not going to a mental ward.”
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