by Isabel Wroth
Outraged, Ripley grabbed a stray jelly bean from Nasa’s desk and threw it at his head.
“You put cameras in my photography studio? My clients do nude shoots in there!”
Nasa slanted a look at her, lips quirking slightly. “I could have put the cameras at the other end, facing the women. But I opted to put them where they would shoot the doorway, windows, and only the rear profile of the women. I turn them off when I know you’ve got clients doing their nude shoots.”
“Wait, how do you know when I have clients doing nude shoots?”
Nasa gave her a look, the one all the guys gave her when they thought she was being slow. Cute, but slow. He waved his hand at the bank of computers as though to say, ‘what don’t I know?’ and went back to work.
Grumbling under her breath, Ripley turned back to watching herself moving around the spa, then to watching Jerry when he had first come in to repair the bullet ridden walls. Scrutinizing his every move, down to the way that from one day to the next, he went from unashamedly scratching his balls with his right hand- literally every five minutes- to using his left hand.
“Nasa?”
He rolled his fancy chair over to her, his voice a harsh bark in the dim light of his basement room. “Find something?”
“Maybe. Do guys usually scratch their balls with the same hand or alternate?”
Nasa guffawed and gave her this look like he could not believe she’d just asked him that. “Depends on the guy, I suppose. Why?”
She pointed the ruined tip of her fingernail at the screen. “Jerry goes from scratching his balls with his right hand, every five minutes like clockwork. Next day he switches to his left hand and like every two hours or so. Might be nothing-”
“It’s something.” Nasa leaned in closer and watched the previous day’s footage at an alarming speed, then slowed down when Jerry switched his right hand for his left hand.
“This is not Jerry.” he said of the left-handed ball scratcher. “He gets up and down too easy for his size. Ghost hasn’t ever weighed five hundred pounds before. He can watch the movements of a heavy person, but he can’t make the movement genuine. You fucker!”
Nasa hissed at the screen. But the more they watched, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Ghost Jerry would occasionally glance up at the cameras, whip his hat off and scratch his fake, bald head like he was confused by the sight of them, then go back to work. He didn’t go back into the treatment rooms but once, and he used the toilet a few times.
Making a big deal about using air freshener as he came out like he’d just taken a huge dump in her feminine bathroom. Gross.
Nasa sped through some frames, slowed down through others, until Ripley gasped and almost shouted at him to stop.
“Go back. Farther, look!” It was the middle of the night and the cameras caught the strip of light that shone from under the closed bathroom door turning on.
“Son of a bitch!”
The light in the bathroom was on a motion sensor, so when the door opened or a body moved past the sensor, the light tripped. The timestamp on the video said it was just after two in the morning, which meant there was no reason for that light to be going on. Or off.
Hope dug cruel claws into her chest as she remembered Wren’s insistence that Ghost would keep Saint and Damon close to the place he had taken them from.
“Nasa?”
The techo-king shoved away from her to start whacking away on his keyboard, half turning to bellow up the stairs for Roar. Her knees knocked as she pushed up from the chair he’d planted her in and went over to stand behind him.
The speed at which he was able to pull up city building plans, sewer lines, and the blueprints of her spa and surrounding buildings was mindboggling. And he had it all before the sound of boots pounded down the stairs.
“You find him?” Roar demanded.
Stone came barreling down the stairs next, then Top, and all of them started talking a mile a minute about logistics, the sewer system, how it was possible for Ghost to have moved two full-grown men after knocking them out, and Nasa not having seen it on the security monitors.
They figured Ghost had somehow tapped the feed, which threw Nasa into a whole new realm of pissed off, the likes of which was impressive and frankly terrifying if it would have been directed at her. Stone was barking out orders for extraction and reconnaissance, clearly falling back into military mode, all four of the men now completely ignoring her, until her phone trilled from the pocket of her dress.
The immediate silence following the text alert was enough to raise the hairs on Ripley’s neck. Four pairs of powerfully pissed off men rotated around to her, watching while she pulled her sparkly pink phone and turned it over to see the text had come from Saint.
Hope and a stupid willingness to believe there had just been a misunderstanding had her bouncing on her toes to announce it was from Saint and voom, all four men surrounded her in an instant.
“STONE! Damon just texted me!”
Stone’s head whipped up towards the stairs as his tiny woman came streaking down them to show him the same exact text Ripley had just opened.
-Are you alone?
Nasa leaned over to check something on his computer screen and made a hissing growl.
“It’s not from their phones. If it was, no matter where they were, I’d be tracking their cells right now. It’s him. Both you girls, put these over the camera lenses, plug this into the audio jack, and text yes.”
Nasa handed them a band-aid and one of those things that looked like a Square card reader. It was apparently some kind of device Nasa had designed to prevent someone from accessing the microphone of the phone to listen in on a conversation.
“But won’t he know-” Dani’s lip quavered even as Stone put the band-aid over Dani’s phone camera.
Nasa gave a tight shake and circled his finger in the air.
“I’ve got an electro-magnetic field put up around the perimeter of the compound. Strong enough to keep anyone from spying on us or using our GPS signal through the cell phones to tag our location, but not strong enough to prevent us from getting messages. It’s complicated. Just do what I say so I can ping the cloned phone.”
Ripley hadn’t hesitated the first time, so she got Ghost’s reply before Dani did, and almost sank to the floor in horror. If Top hadn’t been standing right next to her to catch her, Ripley would have gone down.
Ghost had sent her a picture of Saint.
The image was in shades of green, white, and black. Like those pictures of animals taken at night. It was slightly blurry, but there was no mistaking the fact that Saint was hanging by his hands from some kind of pipes in the ceiling above him. Somewhere dark and dirty looking, and the expression on his face was one of rage. In pain, shirtless, bleeding from the wound in his side that looked as fresh as it had the day he’d first been shot.
“Mother fucker!” Roar shouted. Top was squeezing her to his side so hard Ripley saw spots. Or maybe that was the sickening dizziness from staring at Saint, hanging from the ceiling like a rack of beef. But he was alive.
Dani made a keening sound of agony from across the way, but Ripley was too busy staring at the image of her own love being tortured.
“Nasa?” Top bit the brother’s name from between clenched teeth.
The enormous biker was hunched over his computer, his hands whacking away on five different keyboards. “Hacking into the phone company records now. Got the images, cleaning them up.”
Ghost’s picture was followed by another message.
-If you want to see him again, come to the Buford Tower at four pm tomorrow. Come alone.
“Where the hell is the Buford Tower?” Roar growled.
From across the circle, Stone hissed furiously, “East Cesar Chavez, between South First and Congress. He wants Dani to go to the Raddison parking garage at five. He’s traveling east, at the beginning of rush hour on a Friday. What the fuck is he thinking?”
While th
ey were deliberating the sanity of an already known psychopath, Ripley texted back.
-I’m surrounded at all times by bikers. How do I get away without them noticing?
Ghost didn’t hesitate to send a reply. -The brothers are going to be busy putting out fires in a few minutes.
Ripley showed Roar the text and his face went white when the sound of glass breaking sounded from somewhere upstairs, followed by Raid shouting-
“GRENADE!”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Saint wished he couldn’t feel his arms anymore.The constant radiating pain of the metal cuffs biting into his wrists and the agony of his shoulder joints burned like acid. The frigid temperature of the room they were in didn’t help at all and, to make matters worse, the stench of the four bodies sitting up like macabre marionettes to his left was so thick Saint could taste it.
Rotting meat and loosened bowels on top of the ungodly stink of the entire city’s shit running through the sewer nearby. He and Damon both had puked their guts up several hours ago upon waking up down here. Wherever here was.
He and Damon both had gotten shot with a taser, the last thing he remembered was heading into Ripley’s spa to get the bike Gee had built. They had woken up chained with their arms overhead, naked from the waist up. The ache from where the two leads had hit him in the chest were still burning. Ghost had taken their boots off too, like he’d known about the tracers.
Whoever had given the intel that Ghost’s features were ‘average’ was a dumb mother fucker.
Ghost was built like a linebacker, wide shoulders, narrow waist, muscled to show that he clearly worked out. Saint had come to and seen him from behind, squinting to try and see clearer through the bright lights shining down on where he and Damon hung.
Then he had stepped into the light, and as Saint’s guts turned to water, he remembered how and why it had been so easy for Ghost to take them.
“Toad.”
Ghost shrugged carelessly, his head shaved clean, eyebrows and jaw too, everything about his appearance lending to the sickening blankness about him. There was no spark of humanity to be seen in his expression. Nothing to say anyone sane was home.
“Toad, Sam, Jerry. Whoever I needed to be to get close to you and your people.”
“How long?” Saint managed to croak.
His mind rolling with images and memories of how many times Ripley had been alone with Toad. On a date with Sam. Working at the spa with Jerry. All the times she could have been taken, or killed.
“They’ve all been unfortunately dead for some time. Ernest ‘Toad’ Anderson has been dead for about seven months now. ”
While Saint struggled to cope with the truth, Damon grunted casually. “You sure took your sweet ass time, Ghost. We were getting bored wondering if you were gonna make a move or keep jacking off in the shadows.”
“Proper preparation prevents piss poor performance.” Ghost stated evenly, his back to them while he set up a roll of tools on a piece of canvas.
Damon scoffed where he hung beside Saint. “What is that? The Six P’s rule? Where the fuck are we? How’d you even get us down here?”
In rather cool, clinical terms, Ghost answered, “We are in what passes for the underground of the city. As for how I got you down here? Proper preparation and patience.”
Saint watched Ghost approach Damon, looking thoughtfully at Damon’s chest, almost the way an artist might look at a blank canvas. Only artists usually didn’t use disposable scalpels to paint with their subject’s blood. Saint hung there, unable to reach Ghost even if he were to kick out. Damon didn’t make a sound, silently bearing the pain, shooting him a look that spoke volumes.
Stay quiet. Save your strength.
The cuts Ghost made in Damon’s chest and arms were shallow. Enough to bleed and look ten times worse than they were, but not life-threatening. Once he was done with Damon, Ghost stepped back to critically look at his work, then moved back to get a clean scalpel and changed his dirty gloves for a clean pair. Least he was a hygienic lunatic.
“You killed Susan and Pike. Why?” Saint couldn’t bear not knowing.
Ghost moved in, his dead eyes stroking over Saint’s bare chest. “I was paid to do it.”
“I know that, fucker. I want to know why. They weren’t a threat to your gang.”
Ghost let his shoulder roll almost…elegantly. “Wexler thought differently.”
Wexler was the sicko in charge of the Leviathan’s. Had been for the last twenty years. “He felt threatened, like ancient history was coming back to haunt him. So he paid me to check out your people, and then clean up his mess.
“I told him it was a stupid idea. All you wanted was the traitor responsible for selling out the Tornadoes. Killing your people only put the Leviathans at the top of your list. Fifteen members went away, ten of those got shived in prison. But I don’t honestly care, I got paid. I got what I wanted.”
“And them?” Ghost looked up at Saint’s question, then over to where the bodies were sitting up in the corner.
Ghost gave a careless shrug and went back to laying out his tools. “I had to improvise.”
It made him sick, but Saint knew he had to keep pushing. Do something to throw this guy off. This sick, twisted fucker who had sat at the table the day Saint had come back from Nevada with news of the Leviathans having sent their hitman to take out Perdition. Ghost had been there, looked him in the eye, and Saint hadn’t even noticed what had been right under his nose the whole time.
“The way you improvised shooting up my woman’s business? Cowering like a bitch behind the shelves to throw suspicion off of yourself. Faking a broken leg just to keep Ripley from recognizing you, figuring out who you were. You could have taken her any time you wanted, why didn’t you?”
Ghost sighed as though he as bored. “Wexler took it upon himself to speed up my timeline by sending his peons to interfere with my work. I don’t like surprises, or people fucking around with my plans. But, it did offer me the opportunity I required. Which is why I only sent five of Wexler’s lackeys back to him in boxes.”
Saint tried to be as butch as Damon about the feel of Ghost cutting into his skin. The sickening sensation of his skin giving way to the blade, like the thick snap of a rubber band being cut, made him groan. The scalpel was sharp enough that at first he didn’t feel anything, but then came the searing pain, the burn of blood pouring down his belly.
“And Ripley, ah Ripley.” Ghost sighed almost fondly, “I required her assistance with a different piece of work, and access to her spa. She’s a lovely woman, Saint. A bit too trusting, but I suppose there are worse qualities to have. She cooks like dream.”
Looking down, Saint saw that Ghost had cut a small circular hole where his surgery incision line was to bleed him, then cold clocked Saint across the jaw hard enough to ring his fuckin bell. Ghost grabbed his face, humming almost thoughtfully, clearly not happy with the rate of blood on Saint’s face, because he sliced into the fresh cut and made that a little deeper too.
“It was sweet, watching you bleed out on her nice white floors, declaring your love for her even when moments before she had insisted you were no longer important to her.”
Damon snorted derisively, “Got all that while you were trying not to get a boner during the shoot out? Impressive. Just out of curiosity, how much are we worth to Wexler?”
From his vantage point, for the first time, Saint saw the barest edge of a smile curve Ghost’s thin lips.
“Two hundred fifty K per person, five hundred K for Saint.”
Though it hurt like hell, Saint spat out a mouthful of blood and laughed. “Five hundred thousand? Didn’t know I was that big of a threat. I feel all warm and tingly inside. I hope you got paid up front, cause Nasa has been systematically taking down every dirty money account the Leviathans have.”
Ghost didn’t even bother to look up. “Your concern is touching, but I don’t start hunting until I’ve been paid. You’re already dead, Saint. Living on borr
owed time. I always take down my prey.”
“Hunting?” Saint ground out, “Is that what you call it? Cause I’ve been studying your case files and raping helpless women seems more like your style.”
“Women are weak.” Ghost said, his tone conversational at best. Not even ruffled a little bit. “Easily overpowered. So…delicate. So breakable. I suppose it would be more sportsmanlike to take on a man one-on-one in a fair fight. But I prefer pain more lasting than that of a good beating.
“I’ve not met a man yet who hasn’t broken apart at the sight of his woman, his children, dead at his feet after I finish with them. They scream and they rage, beg to do anything to spare their loved ones. Sometimes I’m paid to take them up on that, see how far they’re willing to go. What they’re willing to do.
“My employers are often quite creative and enjoy their little videos. It’s rare that I’m given carte blanche with my victims, but since you’ve been causing such trouble Wexler let me have it. I will be honest and tell you, I had made all my plans so carefully, everything was in place and I was ready to get started.
“Then someone tipped you off, Saint, and everyone closed ranks. I had to start all over again. It took me quite a bit longer than I expected to get to all of you. I’m insanely curious to know who that undercover DEA agent is that’s infiltrated the Leviathans. But, problems for another time I suppose.
“Now, hold still. I want to get a good picture for your ladies. Too bad you weren’t as paranoid as Damon, Saint. Didn’t get more than a peek at his little lady this entire time. Hopefully by this time tomorrow, we’ll all be together.”
Ghost shot both of them a taunting little smirk as he sent pictures, proof of life as incentive to get the women out in the open. To get them to walk into Ghost’s trap so they too could be brought down here to this room of dead bodies and shit. The only relief Saint had felt was knowing not a single one of his brothers would let Ripley walk out of the compound alone. No way in hell.
