by Faye, Amy
Coogan looked at her again, reconsidering. Weighing his options. "You're telling me to take you in?"
"I'm telling you to let him go, or to keep me. I don't expect you'd go for the first option."
Coogan let out a long breath, pushed himself up to standing, and then stepped around the chair to fix his sour expression on her a little longer. Weighing his options. He looked less like a gangster than an investor who worked from home.
"You'd be putting me in a bad position, you know."
"I know," she said. "But I'd be giving you something you wanted."
"And when the hospital starts worrying about why you haven't shown up for work?"
"Take me to work in the morning. Easy."
"So you can bring the cops back with you at the end of your shift?"
"You'd kill Shannen, if I did that, wouldn't you?" The idea seemed so obvious that it was hard to imagine that someone would do something as stupid as risk the possibility.
Coogan shrugged, his slender expression still fixed on her. He must've been eighty years old if he was a day, but he was sharp as a tack.
"Okay, fine. Done." He reached out and she took his hand. He was rough, she realized. For a man his age, he lifted her up easily. Then he carried her momentum further, pulling her by the neck of her shirt until she could smell his cologne. "You fuck me on this, and I guarantee, you will regret it."
40
"You fuck me on this, and I guarantee, you will regret it." The look on Coogan's face as he said the words drove them home even stronger. Caroline shivered without meaning to, and tried in vain to regain the confidence that he'd shaken in her.
"I promise," she said, though she wasn't sure that she could promise that. After all, it was relying on Shannen to keep up his end of the bargain, and there was a good chance that he would do no such thing.
After all, he'd done whatever he thought was best since the beginning. She hoped that seeing her would provide some sense of perspective for him, calm him down, let him know that these people could be negotiated with, without using your fists.
There was a chance, nearly as good, that she would prove to him that they could be safely and conveniently defied. Or perhaps he'd take her presence as a threat, and try to fight back against that threat, no matter the cost.
He could go a thousand ways, and she had to hope that he'd be willing to go just the right one.
The old man guided her out of the room. With her hands free, unwatched by anyone save for Coogan himself, and in what appeared at least ostensibly to be a public space, she might be able to escape now.
But if Coogan told her the truth, then she was going to leave here eventually, anyways, unless she should have proven herself a danger to him. Even then, she suspected that there were contingencies in place. Ways that any danger she might have posed could be dealt with easily and efficiently.
She waited by the door, uncertainty starting to grip at her. If Coogan noticed that she wasn't right behind him, she couldn't see any sign of it. He stopped at one of the four doors on the left side, opposite an identical door on the right, and then turned and looked at her flatly.
She waited a moment, uncertain what she ought to be doing, and then forced herself to follow. Once she was close he opened the door to allow her inside, and waited. His hand rested on his hip patiently, though it occurred to her after a moment that there was more to it than that. He had it near something. She guessed there was a gun secreted on his person, one that he was unafraid to use.
She turned to look inside the room. It was small, and the contrast to the former room made the size even more drastic. If she spread her hands to the furthest reach of her fingers, she thought she could probably brush the left and right walls, and it was only just large enough to permit a bed.
Calling it a bed was an insult to beds; it was little larger than a cot, and the mattress was little more than a few blankets laid out one on top of the other. Shannen blinked up at them.
"Inside," Coogan said. "Go on. I'm not leaving the door open all day."
She hesitated a moment and he put a hand on her back and pushed. It wasn't rough, nothing like a shove, but it left no room for arguing, either. Caroline stepped inside the room, too small for one, let alone two, and the door closed behind. On the other side of the door, Coogan made no effort to hide the sound of the bolt shutting.
"You look like hell," Shannen said, his lips twisting up into a halfway smile.
"You're an idiot," Caroline answered, doing her best to hide whatever positive emotions she might have been feeling at their reunion. She needed to drive home the seriousness of their situation, not encourage him to do something stupid like trying to escape.
"Yeah," he agreed. "Sometimes."
"No, not sometimes. This time."
He shrugged. "Well, that's fine."
"How's your side?"
He lifted his shirt to show a badly bruised but ultimately still-intact stitching job around the wound. It was impossible to be certain, but she was almost certain it was her own stitches, right where she'd left them.
"I can't get you out of here, you know," she told him. "They're pretty pissed off."
"So what did you come for?"
"I came because, in spite of my better judgment, I couldn't just leave you to get yourself killed."
"Well, there's your mistake," Shannen responded, his voice low. "You need to learn when to cut and run."
"Time's up," Coogan's voice from outside called in. The door opened behind her and Caroline felt herself being pulled out, the same gentle but insistent force being applied that had pushed her inside. "You ought to try to behave, you know, and listen to your girl," he said. His tone never changed from the contemplative one he'd used when he talked to Caroline. "You'll live longer."
When the door closed behind her, Caroline thought she could hear the sound of movement behind the door, but it was too quiet to make out and hint of what it was. She was halfway up the stairs when a noise followed it. The sound of something crashing against wood.
Caroline froze. Coogan didn't. He turned on his heel, his face still as calm as ever, and grabbed her. This time it wasn't polite but firm by any stretch. He dragged her behind by an ear, and she allowed it, keeping as silent as she could, suspecting that things would only get worse for her if she tried to speak up.
The bolt slid open easily and Coogan pulled the door open. He was rough and violent without a doubt, but she could see he hadn't lost his temper. He'd decided what to do, and he was doing it.
"You don't get it, do you?" Coogan twisted Caroline's ear and this time, in spite of herself, she did cry out, reaching to try to slacken the force he had on her, but there was nothing to be done. Out of the corner of her eye, Caroline could see him thinking about what to do next. "You screw up, and she pays for it."
Something cold, hard, and steel pressed against the top of her head, and she didn't need any help guessing what it was. The sounds that Caroline started to make sounded pathetic, even to her own ears, but there was no stopping them.
"Jesus!" The panic rising in her gut reflected in her voice. "Please put that away!"
The steel continued to press into her hair, in spite of herself, and Caroline suddenly realized exactly how big a mistake she'd made thinking she was going to do anything to fix the mess that she'd found herself in.
41
Caroline's head hurt. The beds were better than the one that Shannen was no doubt laying in right now, if things weren't even worse than that. But that didn't mean they were good, and it didn't mean that she managed to get a good night's sleep with no trouble.
On the other hand, there was the matter of her work, which he apparently wasn't doing. At the same time, with his injuries, that might have been for the best. After all, the alternative was that he practically ended up killing himself in training before Coogan and his men could get around to it. Before she could figure out a way to avoid any of the killing from coming to fruition.
In the mi
ddle of all of it, something she didn't like to think about for several dozen different reasons, was the fact that if she wasn't careful, Caroline would find herself on the receiving end of some of that killing, as well, and she was less than prepared to accept being murdered for the cause.
Shannen had been right to walk away, and Harry had been right to tell her to leave it. The big screw ups were the original ones, not the recent ones. Caroline should never have talked about Coogan in the first place, and Shannen should have known better than to get involved with gang violence of any description.
Everything that had come along since then was the inevitable fallout of those two decisions. Caroline forced herself to relax as if that were going to work, slipped into the seat, and let them cover her eyes. It made it easier to relax, in a weird way. After all, the alternative was to stay sitting up, letting the light bleed into her eyes and making her already screaming headache that much worse.
If she wasn't going to accept that, then she was going to have to accept the alternative. In this case, it was having her head covered. It was safer for them, as well, which made it safer for her. The middle seats of the big SUV, leaned back, couldn't have been any less comfortable than the beds, either way.
She needed the sleep more than she needed to feel like she was in control of things. Until she figured out how to get them both out of the situation, she had to play the waiting game. To think the situation through, she had to be sharp enough. To be sharp, she had to be able to think, and that meant getting enough sleep to fix her foul mood.
Caroline didn't think that she fell asleep on the drive, but when they woke her, she couldn't deny that it felt as if only a few moments had passed since she'd closed her eyes, and when they pulled her hood off she found herself looking over at a door, slid open and waiting for her to step out and into the waiting house.
She did what she was expected to do. There wasn't much other choice, anyways, and she wasn't looking to get herself killed. Particularly not on this little thing, when there were so many more pressing issues that she had to deal with coming up.
She let the men lead her into a spare bedroom, past a half-dozen men each big enough to dwarf Shannen. Most of them also had broad bellies that didn't fit him at all, but it meant that their disparity in weight was all that much greater. Then she was in the room that she'd been sleeping in the past three days, and she started to relax.
The bolt in the door closed, the noise echoing through the room and reminding her, not for the first time, that there was no way out of there. She was trapped, and she would remain trapped, until she either chose to let them bully her out or she figured out what the hell she was going to do. Neither option seemed particularly forthcoming.
One of the big guys called from the other side as Caroline started to strip off her work clothes, not the least bit worried about anyone spying on her. "Dinner in ten."
They weren't worth much as cooks, here, but at least they tried, and she had to give them credit for that. Caroline's mother hadn't even gone that far, when she was alive. And of course, Dad never showed any indication that he knew how to do more than boil water.
Caroline laid down on the bed and slipped under the covers. The bed was lumpy, too soft for her body, and she never managed to get a full night's sleep, but she had to admit one thing: the blankets were warm. She let out a breath and tried to slip into a cat nap waiting for dinner to arrive at her door, so she could eat it in silence, before her nightly meeting with Shannen.
She wasn't sure how she was supposed to feel about being used the way that she was. The way that they had co-opted her as a reward for being good. It was dehumanizing, for both of them. For Shannen, it meant being treated like some sort of dog. For her, it reduced her to a squeaky toy.
Worse, though, was the size of the room. The bed was the only thing in it, and it immediately drove home thoughts of what sort of things that they could do in a room that only had a bed in it. She wasn't exactly full of ideas how to get out of the situation that they'd found themselves in, but she could think of a cure for her boredom.
Which did nothing to rebuff the fact that there was no way she was going to do anything like that in what amounted to a prison cell in the basement of a crazy man's house. She was many things, but she wasn't insane, and she certainly wasn't a crazy slut.
Her eyes shot open when the knock, already expected, came at the door. She took her food, thin-sliced pork loin piled beside a heaping helping of mashed potatoes and gravy. They weren't starving her, at least. They were treating her, as far as Caroline was able to tell, as well as they could. If the bed were any nicer, she might not even care when she was able to leave. That was a lie, of course, but it wasn't so far off.
When the plate had been emptied she knocked at the door. A big guy appeared on the other side of the door, another one barely visible a little ways down the hall to act less as a deterrent and more as a response team. The first guy, he was the deterrent. That and the big gun that he wore outside his hips.
"You're finished?"
"I'm done, yeah. Thank you. Dinner was great today."
The guy nodded. "Tell him that for me, if you will."
"I will," the guy said. She didn't know his name, because in three days he'd never offered one. But it was the same guy every time, and she was starting to almost feel comfortable with him, in spite of his namelessness. "I'm sure Johnny will appreciate hearing it."
"What's that?" a voice called over.
"Shut up," the big guy said back, his voice raised. He lowered it back to a comfortable volume when he turned back to her. "We'll let you see him in a few minutes, so just hold up here for a minute."
She didn't need to ask who 'he' was in this case, and she didn't have to ask why she needed to wait. They needed to ask the old man what to do, but the routine was such that nobody had too many doubts about the expected pattern.
When she went down, Shannen had a strange light in his face. One that Caroline herself had to admit worried her, more than usual. He'd tried to escape twice, that she knew of, and he'd made it further the first time than the second. After the first day, though, and the gun being held to her head, he seemed to get the message, and it didn't go over Caroline's head that it was because she was getting in his way.
"What are you planning?"
He looked at her flatly. "Planning? Oh, I never plan."
"Sure you don't," she agreed. "How could I ever have thought that?"
"Exactly. You're giving me too much credit. I never plan anything."
"I noticed," Caroline chimed in. "If you planned, then maybe you wouldn't have gotten yourself into so much trouble."
"Be fair now. If you planned, you wouldn't have gotten yourself into it with me."
"Don't be dumb," Caroline told him. "I planned to get into trouble. I just didn't think you'd be in so much of it."
"Oh, good. That makes it so different. Well, either way." He heaved himself up and sighed. "I've got a plan, so it doesn't matter either way."
"So you were planning something?" A thousand half-baked plans formed in her head in a minute, plans that relied on Shannen punching his way to the nearest exit, and she knew instinctively that it wasn't going to work.
"I was, and I am. Now give me a minute, maybe cover your ears."
"No, Shannen, don't..."
"Coogan," he bellowed, loud enough to hurt. Caroline slapped her hands over her ears after all. It managed to muffle the noise just enough to take it from 'hurt' to 'discomfort.' "I want to talk!"
42
Caroline's ears hurt bad as Shannen let out a shout loud enough to shake the foundations of the house. At least, loud enough that it felt as if it rattled the bed frame underneath her. "Coogan! I want to talk!"
The nurse rubbed at her head and waited. Shannen stepped back, behind her, until he was far enough from the door and with enough between him and it that there was no way he could hurt anything or anyone from where he stood. The door opened out tentatively, the lock
-chain still clasped.
"You want to talk?"
The guy whose eyes peered through the crack in the door weren't the old man's. If anything, they were the eyes of one of his boys, waiting for something from Shannen, hoping that he would take the chance to attack so that they could gun down the big man in cold blood. But he didn't, and they didn't get their chance. Apparently, just killing him where he stood was off limits.
"I have a business proposition for him," Shannen offered. He looked like he'd lost weight, she saw now. The shirt hung off him, and though his wounds were starting to close up he looked nearly as bad as she'd ever seen him. "You go tell him that. Go on. I'll wait."
Caroline looked at the door as it closed and looked back at the fighter. "What the hell are you thinking? You can't just kick the shit out of Coogan. You know they're going to be watching you. It doesn't work that way, you can't just invoke the right of a duel, or something. That doesn't even exist."
"Who says I was planning on attacking him at all?"
Caroline looked at him, incredulous. "You've been doing that from the beginning, why stop now?"
He sat down on the bed and pressed one foot against the poorly-erected wall opposite. The wall looked as if it sagged under even that weak pressure. "'Why stop now?' Because it didn't work up to now. Why should I keep doing something that won't work?"
The question was so obvious and so unexpected that Caroline had not response to it. Her jaw hanging slack felt good, eased her headache just enough, so she kept it open even after she could have shut it again or said something more. Then she knuckled the joint until she felt herself start to relax, and her headache receded just a bit.
"What's your plan, then?"
"My plan? Talk to him. Get him to see how I could be of use to him."
"I think it's a little bit past being useful. He seems pretty pissed that you stood up to him."
"And there's that, as well," he agreed. "I'll have to convince him that I can bend the knee when needed."
