The Ivy Nash Thrillers: Books 4-6: Redemption Thriller Series 10-12 (Redemption Thriller Series Box Set)
Page 19
“And Cristina. Is she okay?”
I looked at my ECHO cohort, who was trying to mouth something to me.
“Cracked ribs. Not much to do other than wrap them and stay on the down-low for a while.”
“Ivy…”
Cristina had given up trying to mime and was now riffling through the jar that held the tongue depressors. Hearing the seriousness of Zahera’s tone, I turned to face the framed picture on the wall.
“What’s going on, Z?”
“While I was surfing the Internet, I found another post from Pearl Griffin.”
My throat got dry. “And now what? I haven’t even had enough time to go after her for libel for slamming me and Stan. Hell, Stan doesn’t even know that his reputation has been dragged through the mud.”
“I know, I know. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It’s like she has a secret contact on the inside of the SAPD. There and at the hospital.”
The thumping on the side of my neck became more pronounced. “Wait a second. What did she write about this time?”
“All of this crazy shit that just happened since last evening. I don’t have a clue how she found out about it.”
As I fought to keep my emotions at bay, I wondered if there was any possible way for Pearl Griffin to have an insider working at the police department. “It’s like she’s being funded by some type of secret government agency out to soil my reputation.”
“I know you’re joking, but it’s so bizarre. I don’t know what to think.”
I blew out a frustrated breath. “Send me the link. If I can’t sleep, then I’ll read it later. And based upon what I’m hearing, I think you might want to call back your good-looking lawyer friend, Ozzie what’s-his-name. But no promises. Maybe, hopefully, I’ll wake up and realize that this verbal attack really means nothing, and I should spend my time worrying about things that really matter. She’s probably a lonely cat lady anyway.”
I heard nothing on the other end of the line. “Z, you there?”
“Here.”
“I’m tired. Any other good news to share?”
“It’s Cristina.”
“What about her?” I glanced over my shoulder to see her pocketing about twenty tongue depressors.
“It’s about her. The blog post.”
“What the f—” I stopped myself short.
“The word is fuck, and it’s quite appropriate to use right now.” Zahera sighed and then continued with, “If you want me go find her and kick her ass, just say the word. That woman has crossed the line.”
“What did she say?” I could feel tightness in my shoulders.
“You sure you want to hear this? You may not sleep for three days.”
“Hit me, dammit.”
“She drew a comparison between you and Cristina, saying that death follows her just like it follows you.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose so hard I may have bruised it. With my voice shifting to a whisper, I said, “She doesn’t deserve any of this. This woman will retract what she said or else.”
“You just laid down the gauntlet, girlfriend.”
There was noise from the hallway. I leaned out to see a throng of the band members jumping around and yelling while a couple of men in scrubs tried to hold them back. The Scrubs looked like clean-cut bouncers. Only these bouncers were trying to kick the band out.
I told Zahera I’d call her later, after I dealt with Pearl Griffin.
“Let’s get out of here.” I put my hand on Cristina’s elbow.
“I tried telling you that I need to stay here, see how Nikki’s doing.”
“But I’m leaving now. I’ve got stuff to do.”
“What stuff?”
The hollering and singing grew louder. “It’s nothing. Adult crap.”
“Go ahead.”
“Cristina, you’re injured. You need your rest.”
“I’m not a little girl. I can make decisions on my own. I want to be here for Nikki. I’ll get a ride from Leo.”
She had a look of determination on her face. It was the same thing I felt, but for an entirely different reason.
“Okay. Call me.”
“I can’t, remember?” She started heading down the hall. “But I’ll borrow a phone.”
“Buy a new one and call me. We’ll expense it to ECHO.” She gave me the thumbs-up as she disappeared around the corner just as I was engulfed by the mob. Clutching my purse under my arm, I tried to fight my way through the mayhem. I bounced around like a pinball. Just before I cleared the scrap, I felt a prick on the side of my arm.
“What was that?” I said as the wild group carried on, moving past me. No one responded. I was invisible, it seemed. I rubbed my arm and slowly made my way through the maze until I found the exit sign. Once outside, my head began to spin. I thought I’d clicked on my Uber app. But I wasn’t sure. It felt like some unseen force had just lifted me into the sky and carried me away.
34
Present Day
I staggered into the dark room, and what light that had existed was quickly sucked into oblivion. Each step was a test, my knees ready to buckle at any time.
“Where are we going?” A rush of emotion had altered my voice to the point I didn’t recognize it.
No immediate response. I tried to pull my hand back, but he gripped it tighter. My heart fluttered. My flight instinct kicked in. I tried to stop in my tracks, but my legs didn’t get the right message. I stumbled to my knees, banging my head against something metal. Reaching out with my free hand, I felt a wire cage.
Then I heard a sustained growl. Before I knew what happened, a dog barked from inside the cage. I felt sharp teeth clamp down on my fingers. I thrust myself backward, scraping my fingers from the razor-like teeth. I screamed, or at least I thought I did.
“Ivy, we must not waste time here any longer.”
The man was at my side, trying to lift me up, his hands at my armpits. I didn’t offer any assistance; I only blinked my eyes, waiting for them to adjust to the pitch black.
“What are you doing, woman? You can’t just sit there. Do you have any idea what will happen?”
I swallowed as my eyes began to finally adjust to the darkness.
“Are you hearing me, or are you still hallucinating?”
Hallucinating. That word stuck with me. “What are you talking about? What happened to me?”
“You must have taken some LSD or something like that. You went crazy, said you wanted to kill Pearl Griffin for hurting you and your friends, Stan and Cristina.”
Stan. He was a cop, a nice person who helped people. Cristina, a teenager who’d been in trouble. They were my friends. Pearl Griffin wrote a blog that tried to hurt me and my friends. That fucking bitch hurt my friends!
A surge of emotion enveloped my body, a combination of seething anger and utter sadness. I gritted my teeth and tried to push it away, but the emotion wouldn’t be denied.
“Why am I here?” I asked through tears.
“More questions.” He sounded annoyed, then continued to pull me upward. “Do you not understand that I’m trying to help you?”
I quivered more and more with each passing breath, but my mind couldn’t stop wondering what I’d done. “Did I…?”
I could hear him blow out a frustrated breath. “Did you what?”
“Did I kill Pearl Griffin?”
He cleared his throat. “You can’t fall apart, Ivy. Time is running out. If you want to live, if you want to ever see your friends again, we’ve got to get you out of here.”
“Did I stab that woman in the other room?”
A somber sigh. “Yes, you killed her. You had your reasons, but you killed her ten times over. Let’s worry about the details later. If you want my help, you will come with me. I can give you your life back. But you must trust me.”
With tears streaming down my face, my heart ramming my chest, I couldn’t think of what to do next. I just gave in. “Okay. Take me with you.”
35
The man grunted as he pulled me back to a standing position, but he never turned around. Now I held on to the man’s hand for dear life. A warm wind whipped against my face. Fresh air. I blinked a couple of times while shuffling forward. A full moon illuminated clothes that were clipped to a line flapping from the breeze. Beyond that, an enormous garden. Vines of tomatoes sprawled through every crack and crevice of strained metal wire.
I looked down and stared at the man’s hand. It was as big as a baseball mitt, hairy. So much hair. You could have curled it with a curling iron.
An image flashed in my mind. Stringy, greasy hair that hung from a bowling-ball head like stalks of celery. I started feeling queasy. In a split second the picture disappeared before I could attach it to a moment in my life. If it were real.
Sirens split the nighttime air. I looked left and right, trying to slow my pace. A rusted car was up on blocks, a wooden dog house had missing planks, and a garden hose wrapped around a sagging tree. The man trudged ahead.
“What about—”
He yanked harder, and my teeth clanged together.
“Ow,” I said, bringing a hand to my jaw.
He didn’t say a word. I wanted to stop, ask more questions. My legs couldn’t pull back. I knew I was lucky to be upright at all.
The sirens drew closer. Why was I going with this man?
You killed Pearl Griffin, Ivy. You finally took action against the people who hurt you. Now you need to make sure you’re never caught and put in jail.
I stopped, pulling my arm back. A few more strides, and then he stopped. His hairy hand was under my legs. He lifted me into the back of a pickup. A thin mattress. I lay down. It felt incredible. He dragged a comforter and a tarp over my legs and torso, stopping at my chest.
“If you want to keep your freedom, you’ll be quiet and go to sleep. We have a long trip ahead of us.”
Screams echoed in my mind. Was that Pearl trying to fend off her killer—me? “But we can’t just leave her there. And her dog is in a cage.”
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life in jail? Do you want to be executed by the State of Texas?”
“No, but—”
“Premeditated murder, Ivy. That’s how they’ll see it. You’ll be on death row before you know it. You’ll be branded a killer by everyone in the country.”
Through streaming tears, my mind caught a hook. A memory. His face and funny eyebrows. His awkward head of hair, or toupee. His skin that stretched in the oddest places, while appearing like it had been kept under a roaster far too long. The timbre of his voice. His desire to help those in dire need.
It was Timothy, the man whose heart and wallet had to be made from gold.
“I’m so sorry.” I felt like I’d slurred the words, my tongue more than twice its normal size.
Why had I apologized to him?
“Sleep. And then we’ll piece your life back together.”
Sirens blasted like they were on top of us. I tried to lift my body, but I went nowhere. He looked over his shoulder, and he pushed me down. The cars with the sirens screamed by.
Where were they going if not to the house of the murder?
He played with his hand, then patted me on the shoulder.
I felt a prick. “Ow.” I rubbed the meat of my arm. Just before he covered my head, I caught a glimpse of his lips turning up at the corners.
Engulfed by darkness and the pickup’s engine rumbling under me, I floated into a sea of tranquility.
But somehow I knew it would be short-lived.
36
Water bubbled in the corner of my eye. But it wasn’t a tear.
I awoke abruptly, shuddering from the unknown source of the liquid. Was it water? What?
I blinked, while trying to turn my head. That was when I realized I couldn’t move. My head was wedged in the middle of a metal vice, my arms strapped to my side. My hips ached. I shifted my sights downward and choked on my own spit. My legs were spread a mile wide in stirrups, and I was naked. But that was not what nearly made me hurl. I was white. Everything was white.
“Hello?” My voice bounced off the walls, although I couldn’t really see the hard edges of a wall. Everything around me was stark white. The machine I was sitting in, the straps holding me in place. The walls, floor, and ceiling. My fucking skin was white! I flicked my toes, but I could not detect any movement in the sea of white.
Wait, did the ceiling just move? I blinked again, staring straight up. Something above me seemed to pulsate, almost like a puckering heartbeat.
If I hadn’t felt the rapid thump of my pulse, I would have thought I was in another world.
Maybe I was hallucinating. Didn’t that man suggest I’d taken LSD?
L-S-fucking-D!
His name was Timothy. The nice gentleman who had offered up the million dollars to help us bring back Drew Cooper. The same man who was building the funhouse with his own money and was all about making the lives of kids better. The same man who had pricked my shoulder and sent me into la-la land. Or had I created that memory out of vapor?
A drop of water landed on the bridge of my nose. I nearly went cross-eyed as it slid to the end of my nose and then fell off.
Was there a leak somewhere in the ceiling? I stared as hard as I could, until I felt a headache coming on. I closed my eyes, tried to even out my breathing. This had to be a dream or some kind of twisted joke.
What about Pearl Griffin? That bloody scene couldn’t be real. It had to be some type of strange mental seed planted in my memory. I couldn’t figure out how or why. I wasn’t a killer. I didn’t have it in me.
Or did I? If pushed and prodded, I knew deep down inside there was one person I wanted to bury. Milton Weber. But from all indications, Stan thought he was probably already dead, possibly at the bottom of Lake Buchanan. Or, if he’d been lucky enough to figure out how to escape, he was scraping by in Haiti or Brazil or some country where he wouldn’t be recognized as the menacing vulture that he was.
But could he actually still be around here, breathing, walking as best he could on one foot, hunting his prey?
Stop tormenting yourself, Ivy. That maggot is probably rotting in the ground on another continent. You have enough shit to deal with right now.
Another drop of water plopped onto my cheek. This one slid to the edge of my lips. I slurped it up. Didn’t taste funny. What was even stranger, the white substance on my face didn’t come off. It was as if the pigmentation of my skin had somehow been altered. What type of transformation had my body gone through? Had I been exposed to some type of biological weapon that was in the process of devouring my body? But then there were the white walls and chair. I couldn’t wrap my mind around any of it.
My eyes blinked just before a drop of water landed squarely in my right eye. It stung for a quick second. I tried moving my head down, but it wouldn’t budge. My body was positioned in the chair at a forty-five-degree angle. Why not just lay me flat down on a table?
Another drop found its way into my other eye. It felt like it carried shrapnel with it.
“Dammit!” I said, squeezing my eye closed.
Don’t be distracted. Block out all of this crap and think, Ivy.
If the scene back at Pearl Griffin’s rundown home was indeed real, then how did I end up in this all-white room? Timothy was doing everything in his power to help me, to keep me out of jail until he could help me piece my life back together. Those were his words. I could feel his sincerity. Why would he lie? He could have just left me there. Like he said, it wouldn’t take long before I’d be thrown in jail, convicted, and put on death row.
Another quick image crossed my mind. I was on a mattress in the pickup. I just wanted to sleep, to ma
ke it all go away. He said the ride would take a while, to sit back and try to fall asleep. And then I’d felt that tiny stab in my shoulder. I’d drifted off.
Maybe I’d imagined the prick to my shoulder. I was barely coherent, emotionally drained from waking up with blood everywhere, the sight of Pearl’s blue body stiffly resting in the chair. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. Timothy had been my savior.
Had someone hijacked the pickup? If so, where was Timothy? Had they killed him? Who could have done it?
Another drop of water splashed off my forehead. It was getting annoying.
The kidnappers. The surfer dude and the muscle man who’d abducted Drew and teamed up to take Timothy’s money. What if they hadn’t taken the first plane to Canada once they had the million-dollar ransom? Maybe they were greedy and wanted more. Maybe they had Timothy in another room and were using a similar white-out approach on him. They could be trying to force him to share all of his secret passwords to his bank accounts. Or they could be hurting me to try to convince him to talk. That had to be it. Shifting my sights all around, I scanned the vast space for a camera. They had to be watching everything I was doing, how I was responding to this bizarre form of submission.
I couldn’t see a camera, but knew that didn’t mean much. Water splattered into my eye. The drops were falling at a quicker pace. I channeled all of my energy into my shoulders and neck, wrenching left and right, trying to loosen the grip on my head. Hoping to free myself from this thing. What was all this? Some sort of Chinese water torture?
Another drop hit the bridge of my nose, and I flinched. It was working. My reaction to the water slowly dripping onto my face was getting to me. I could feel my shoulder and neck grow stiff, bracing for the next blow.
But it’s only freaking water, Ivy. What’s the big deal?
The next drop exploded onto my forehead, sending a rippling shockwave throughout my body.
My eyes stared at the ceiling. Incoming! Another water bomb landed right in the center of my eye. I screamed, blinking like a mad woman until the muscles around my eye socket were so tired they could barely move. One, two, three more drops of water plunked my forehead, and each one felt like it was delivered with a sledgehammer.