by Anne Malcom
They were raw edges. Everything was harsh and loud and there was too much expected of them. Orion was glad for Shelby’s parents. She’d met them. They were tired, emotional, wearing mismatched clothes and definitely confused, but they hadn’t let go of Shelby the entire time she was in their presence. And they went on and on and on about how thrilled they were, how long they had looked for her, how many nights they’d cried themselves to sleep. Shelby had been alternating between panic and relief. They were like April. Another reminder of who they’d been. Girls who died in a dingy basement. Women who remained as nothing more than shells. The time between an abyss of what ifs and darkness.
April looked from the door to the room. She bent down to her purse, rifling through it. “Okay, parents are asleep. I’m guessing there are one or two things the cops didn’t deem essential for you ladies coming out of a fucking nightmare into another one called reality.”
She pulled out a flask and a joint, holding them up in the air like fucking Lion King. She smirked. “Luckily, I’ve got you bitches.”
Jaclyn suddenly decided she liked April, smiling wide.
Orion frowned. “April—”
“Heck yeah!” Jaclyn interrupted, taking the flask from April and drinking deep and long. Almost immediately, she coughed and spluttered.
“What is that?” she asked, wiping her mouth.
“Fireball,” April replied, grinning.
“Fire what?” Jaclyn asked with a furrowed brow.
Something moved on April’s face, too quick for Orion to comprehend. “Cinnamon whiskey. Drink up. It’s good for ya.”
Jaclyn nodded, going in to drink again.
“Go easy, Jac,” Orion said, stepping forward. “You haven’t had a drink in . . . how long? And your body hasn’t been full of this much food in about the same amount of time. How about you pace yourself?”
Jaclyn rolled her eyes. “It’s two shots, Mom. I think we deserve a little something to take the edge off, considering our . . . situation. Don’t you? Here you are ready to kill a guy and you’re bitching at me about some booze.”
“Kill a guy?” April asked, brows scrunched.
“Jaclyn!” Orion narrowed her eyes. She then looked toward April. “She’s an idiot.”
April took the flask from Jaclyn and offered it to Orion.
Orion considered it for a moment but shook her head. She wasn’t ready to try everything the first night back. Wherever this was, she wanted to process it all with a clear mind.
“And you’re a bitch,” Jaclyn retorted playfully.
“Sounds like us back in the day,” April said, chuckling, but she carried sadness in her features. She eyed Orion for a beat, her gaze soft and full of pity. She kept the flask out in front of her.
Orion didn’t break, waving her off.
April nodded, turned to Shelby.
Shelby eyed the flask, and then took it, surprising everyone in the room.
Orion stepped forward, put a hand up. “Shelby, don’t.”
Jaclyn glared at her. “Orion, you’re not her mother. Shelby can make her own goddamn decisions. She needs to be able to do that. To know how to make up her own mind. To not be told what to do every waking second of her life.”
Orion lifted her brow, though she didn’t disagree. “Says the woman pushing it on her.”
The two women glared at each other for a beat until Shelby lifted the flask to her lips. As soon as she tried to swallow, her face screwed up, eyes bulging, a spray of whiskey spreading over the cheap comforter. She scrambled up and all but sprinted to the bathroom, the sounds of retching reverberating through the room.
Orion glared daggers at Jaclyn, who was merely grinning wickedly, taking her next drink from the flask, a little smoother than last time.
“Welcome to womanhood, Shelby,” Jaclyn said after she swallowed. She looked at Orion, caught her glare. “What?” she asked. “We’ve been deprived of all traditional coming-of-age type things, of everything, and becoming very well acquainted with the toilet bowl and just how terrible whiskey tastes happens to be one. She’ll have to learn what she likes and what she doesn’t.” Jaclyn took another swig, and then handed it back to April, running her other hand across her lips. “I happen to love that shit! Definitely not like any whiskey I ever tried before.”
April returned the flask to her purse and extended a hand, presenting a joint between Orion and Jaclyn like some kind of olive branch.
Jaclyn zeroed in on the joint with delight, and so did Orion, but for a different reason.
“Just try it, Ri,” Maddox urged, smoke billowing from his mouth.
April was already staring at the television and eating Cheetos by the handful.
Ri bit her lip, staring at the joint, at Maddox’s outstretched hand. She didn’t want to seem like some kind of wuss . . . some kind of child. The last thing she wanted Maddox to see her as was a child. Smoking weed was what the cool girls did. The pretty girls who knew themselves, were comfortable with themselves.
Ri did not know herself beyond the fact she loved horror novels and did not want to live in a trailer park when she was an adult. And she was certainly not comfortable with her gangly limbs, tiny boobs, and the period that was yet to signal her entrance into womanhood.
She also knew she wasn’t sure if she was ready to risk turning into a version of her mother and father if she somehow became addicted to weed.
“Ri,” Maddox urged.
She snapped out of her head and met his eyes. Despite the weed, they were clear. Lucid.
“You’re safe,” he said. “You can trust me.”
Ri blinked a couple of times then took the smoke.
“Jac, no!” Orion snapped, back in the present, where things weren’t safe and no one was to be trusted, especially not some ghost from her past who now worked for the state.
Jaclyn scowled at Orion. “Why the hell not?” she asked. “I thought the whole bloody murder, grand escape thing meant we were free. Free to do as we please.”
Orion ground her teeth.
“It’s legal here now,” April interjected. Her voice was even, warm, a little shy. She was tentative, but she was trying to push a connection. A friendship.
“What do you mean, legal?” Orion asked, voice not at all tentative, shy, or warm.
April blinked vacantly for a beat, then understanding dawned on her face. She didn’t have much of a poker face, realizing that they hadn’t been around to know such things—drugs becoming legal, childhood friends growing up, getting tattoos, guns and badges, the world continuing on without her.
“Um, it’s medically legal . . . in Illinois,” she explained. “But I have a guy who brings it into Missouri for me. In states like Washington and Nevada, it’s fully legal
recreationally.” She shrugged as if she didn’t know what else to say. “It’s only a matter of time before all states legalize it. Plus, everybody smokes these days.”
Orion narrowed her eyes as the smell of skunk filled the room. She didn’t like the scent and the memories it brought her. She didn’t need this. She certainly didn’t need April here with her kind eyes and her need to bond.
“You smoke this for medicine?” she clarified. She may have been gone for a decade, but she remembered the drugs were touted as bad and people were locked up for it. It was crazy that the whole country had changed their tune in a decade.
April smiled nervously. “I mean, I don’t. But a lot of people do. And it’s gonna be on the ballot here in Missouri really soon.” She took it from Jaclyn to extend the joint—or was it an olive branch—to her.
Orion waved it off and pretended she didn’t see the little look of hurt on April’s face. “I’m fine,” she said, and she made her way back to the bed, plopping herself down on it.
April looked to Shelby, who had emerged from the bathroom pale and sweaty. Orion had expected her to make the sign of the cross in front of April and anything else she might offer. But she was biting her lip with indecision much
like a thirteen-year-old Orion had.
Jaclyn smiled, lazily and easily, unlike she’d ever done in Orion’s memory. “It feels good, Shelby.” Her voice had that same languor.
“Jaclyn, stop!” Orion demanded. “Stop trying to influence her.”
“It won’t hurt her,” April offered.
Orion didn’t look at her. She was trying to help, she knew this. But April had no idea what they’d gone through. Where their minds were now. How damaged they had become, and how close Shelby had been to completely breaking just a day before.
“I’ve never done it,” Shelby said, voice small and curious.
Orion stiffened. “Well, I’ve done it once.” She narrowed her eyes at Shelby. “And it did hurt me. When I had no reason to be hurt, it made me freak out. And become paranoid.” She looked at Shelby, her features softening. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, Shelbs.”
“That’s not a normal reaction, though,” Jaclyn said, as if she knew better. Jaclyn had come from a background similar to Orion, was exposed to many of the same things. But she was eleven when they took her. Even then, she’d been drinking for some time, dabbled in drugs. She found comfort in them.
Orion scoffed. “Just let her make up her own mind. You saw what the whiskey did.”
Jaclyn ignored her. Didn’t even flip her the bird. She just shrugged. Orion had never seen Jaclyn back down from an argument, with her at least.
“What is a normal reaction?” Shelby asked April.
April smiled. “Like . . . you’re floating. Music sounds better. Food tastes better. Movies are funnier.”
Like they’d heard music, tasted good food, or watched a fucking movie in the not so distant past.
“Okay, I’ll do it,” Shelby decided, uncharacteristically brave.
Orion realized she didn’t know who Shelby was out here. She knew who she was in The Cell. Shelby was the girl who made herself as small as she could. Who submitted to abuse rather than make it worse by fighting. She cried herself to sleep and hadn’t quite understood what reality was.
Orion didn’t know who any of them would be in this new world with windows, locks, food you could order on a phone. Drugs and alcohol at your fingertips.
She especially didn’t know who or what she was apart from angry. So angry she could feel it coursing through her body.
Orion glared at all of them, angry for no reason other than they were brave enough to try something as new and normal as booze. Furious that they were acting like normal twenty somethings when they were anything but.
“Well, do it somewhere else. I don’t want the room to reek of skunk. And I want to get some sleep.” She made that clear by yanking the covers back, and then wrapping them around herself, facing away from them with her eyes out the window.
“We can’t go outside,” April said, in that small, hesitant voice. “The cops are out front. And back. There’s even one chilling in the lobby. He was pretty hot.”
Protecting them. But yet a knockout blonde carrying drugs and booze managed to barge her way in. Small town cops and their small town ways.
“We can just open the window,” Jaclyn said. “We won’t get any smoke in here and won’t alert the uniforms outside. Win, win.”
Orion turned back to face them, sighing loudly, a wrinkle of disgust on her face, but Jaclyn paid her no mind.
She opened the window in question, a crisp breeze filtering in the room. Orion should’ve liked that. The fresh air, the ability to breathe something that wasn’t recycled, damp, and reeking of sadness and death. But she didn’t. It unnerved her. Scared her, though she wouldn’t admit that out loud with a gun to her head.
April moved toward the window, stuck her head out with the joint between her lips, and sparked it up.
Orion watched her every move, growing more agitated by the second, but she also came to the realization that she was outnumbered, and as pissed off as she had become, she was also tired. So very tired. And she didn’t have the energy to fight them anymore.
As she turned back toward the wall and shut her eyes, and the laughter between the three other girls grew, Orion felt truly alone for the first time.
The had always been held together by the chains on their ankles, forced to bond in a way unlike any other. But now they were free. Nothing was keeping them together anymore. And Orion was hit with the sick feeling as she quietly cried herself to sleep that night, that without the chains, one day, they would drift apart for good.
Six
Maddox’s palms were sweating. Same with his back. It hadn’t drenched his T-shirt yet, but it was only a matter of time. The AC in the hotel hallway was blasting, cool air assaulting him. But that didn’t matter. He was sweating bullets because he was nervous. He hadn’t slept a wink because he’d been thinking of her all night long. The four cups of coffee he had before eight o’clock weren’t cutting it.
He’d pored over the case. The files. The evidence. He’d started with a pizza and a beer, but he’d barely gotten through the first page before he abandoned his half-eaten first piece, too sickened to chew and swallow, too immersed in the gruesome details.
He didn’t have a weak stomach. You couldn’t be a detective with a weak stomach. He’d been able to eat through much worse. Fuck, he had breakfast of donuts and bagels regularly at crime scenes.
But this was different.
The leg manacles. What they’d found in the rooms in the house. The photos, hundreds of them, explicit and sickening. The videos of abuse, of murder. The bones found in the backyard. The man on the loose.
Javier Del Rio. Convicted sex offender. Armed and dangerous.
His thick arms could be seen in most of the snuff films, the unmistakable black hair that covered every square inch of his body, the prison tattoo on his forearm.
He had killed plenty of girls, how many exactly, they still weren’t quite sure of. What they did know was that a killer was on the loose, and every cop in the state of Missouri and half in Illinois were out looking for him. It was only a matter of time.
Maddox thought about what it’d be like to get his hands on him, whether he’d even want it to go to trial. The stuff he’d seen had sickened him beyond comprehension and not even a case of beer could numb the pain.
Ri.
Ri had lived through this. In this place. For ten fucking years.
How did she still look like that? How could she sling insults and sarcasm and walk upright after that? Maddox knew that human beings were resilient. He’d seen them survive many things he thought seemed impossible.
But this . . . this kind of torment.
This was the reason why he was sweating, jittery, and unable to comprehend the sheer magnitude of what lay before him. He had to interview these girls, his girl, the one he’d looked for for ten years. The one he’d failed. And he had to make them recount the horrific things they experienced.
Eric had knocked on the girls’ hotel room door, skillfully not commenting on the sweat coating Maddox’s brows, or the many other nervous tics.He’d knocked a good three minutes ago and had gotten nothing. No sounds of shuffling, of any life at all.
Maddox’s stomach, already churning, dropped about three stories with the silence. The worst had already happened to them, he knew that. But he also knew that life didn’t have a cap on misery. Worse didn’t have a ceiling or a bottom. Scenarios ran through his mind to explain this silence, none of them good.
Maddox lifted his sweaty hand, balled it into a fist and knocked again, hard.
Eric leaned in closer to the door, inhaling pointedly, then looked toward Maddox with a smirk.
Maddox sniffed too.
It was faint, the smell of weed and booze.
He knocked again, with his purposeful, bordering on aggressive “cop knock” that April had teased him about mercilessly. Thinking of his sister, something clicked inside of Maddox, something resembling fury.
The door opened. Jaclyn, with hair in a bird’s nest and a squinty scowl on her face, star
ed at them. “Christ almighty, could you knock any louder?” she groaned.
Maddox’s hands were in fists at his sides. “We told you eight o’clock.”
She made a sound resembling a grunt and turned on her heel, walking back into the hotel room. She was wearing the same baggy sweatshirt they’d given her the day before, her long legs bare. Bare and covered in faint scars.
Maddox took the open door as an invitation and had to pause for a second at the wall of smell that hit him once he crossed the threshold.
The smell—booze, weed, and fast food—came from the person stirring from her slumber on a desk chair in the corner of the room.
“April, what the fuck are you doing here?” he demanded, glaring at his obviously hungover sister.
She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, smearing her black makeup further. “I’m waking up and asking why you’re not holding coffee cups,” she muttered, voice husky.
Heat built in the base of his stomach. It wasn’t unusual, considering his hellion little sister made him furious on a regular basis. She had gone off the deep end after everything with Ri. She didn’t know how to deal with it. The grief. Pain. Uncertainty. Neither of them did. And both of them did what teenagers do best when feeling things they can’t understand—they rebelled in the most predictable and cliché of ways.
Maddox had somewhat reformed from most of that, had to for the badge, but April had inked it on her body forever, protested college, and made it part of her identity. She worked at a diner, partied hard and often, dated guys their dad hated. And sometimes, their dad’s age. April made an art out of recklessness.
But this, it crossed the line. It crossed the line because it was an active investigation. Because they hadn’t caught that dirtbag yet. Because this could be the biggest case he or his precinct had ever handled.
