by Nicole Fox
“Get under the bed,” he hissed at her. “Hide your face.”
That way she wouldn’t see what he was about to do, or what anyone else might do. She’d already seen far too much. That poor little girl would need years of counseling to get over all of this. Lord knows, Hunter needed it and never had it, and it messed him up big time.
He had a unique position on the floor. The element of surprise was already fading, though, and he needed to make his next move quickly. The men in the other rooms were all either dead or severely injured. The chances of one of them getting up or someone new coming in were slim, so it didn’t matter too much if he put his back to the door. It was still a place of possible vulnerability and if nothing else, he should shut it so he didn’t have to think too much about it.
The thug was closest. He was worried about Jeremy killing Vanessa while he fought the other man, but he could only focus on one at a time. If he put his attention on Jeremy primarily, that would leave the thug wide open to do whatever he liked. It seemed like Jeremy wasn’t too good with a gun, or he wouldn’t have hired so many killers to do his work for him. That made things clear.
Hunter lunged forward from his position on the ground. He grabbed the leg of the thug and sent him crashing to the ground. He didn’t drop his gun like Hunter hoped. Hunter crawled over the man and wrestled with him, trying to get the gun. But this guy was better trained than most of the others he’d fought.
Hunter’s knee pressed in the man’s groin, but the man turned and bucked him off, then punched him in the jaw. Hunter shook away the pain and rolled on top of the man’s gun.
He put his full weight on his shoulder, using the hard bones there to press into the man’s wrist, causing him to loosen his grip. The man let go of the gun, but positioned himself on top of Hunter.
With two free hands, he started quickly pummeling Hunter with punches. His jaw, his cheeks, his stomach. It didn’t take long for Hunter to push the man off, though. He reached up and punched him in the throat. The man gasped for air and in the second it took him to put his hand to his throat, Hunter tackled him.
The gun that had been on the floor was now in Hunter’s hand. He pressed it against the thug’s head and squeezed the trigger. His body jerked when the bullet tore through, then lay still. Hunter got up, gun still in hand, and turned to Jeremy.
Jeremy stared back, horrified. Hunter hoped he realized what a predicament he was in. That the man he’d hired to kill his wife was now turning on him, and all the other thugs he’d hired to protect him and go after Opal and Vanessa were now also dead. Hunter glanced at the bed. He couldn’t see Opal, so she must still be under there. Vanessa was in the chair, slumped over, but still breathing and moving. Now was his chance to take out all the anger he felt toward Jeremy for what he’d done.
He walked past him and kicked the door shut. Jeremy was frozen. Hunter pulled out his gun and shot him in the foot. Jeremy screamed in pain and collapsed to the ground.
Hunter stood over him, looking down with an evil smile. “You’ve hurt Vanessa for a long time, in a lot of ways. Now, it’s time for payback.”
Jeremy looked up at Hunter with real fear in his eyes. The look sent a thrill through Hunter to know he would make Jeremy suffer like he’d made the woman he loved suffer. He wanted to enjoy this as much as possible and make it hurt as badly as it could.
Hunter took out his knife. Jeremy wasn’t going anywhere with an injury like that. He could barely even fight back. Hunter made several long slashes across his chest, arms, and face. With each one, Jeremy cried out in pain and tried to hide from Hunter’s knife, only to receive another slash.
“What’s the matter? You don’t like it when people mistreat you?” Hunter kicked him several times in the ribs, making sure to hit hard enough to break them.
The slashing started to bore him, so Hunter pointed his gun at Jeremy’s knee. He pressed the gun directly against his knee cap and fired. Jeremy screamed again and Hunter immediately shot out his other knee cap.
“Stop, please,” Jeremy begged, whimpering and crying, clutching at his knees.
“Did you stop when Vanessa begged you to?” Hunter kicked him in the jaw. Blood dribbled from his mouth and he turned his head to spit out a tooth.
“Did you?” He kicked him again.
In the moment Hunter was deciding which way to hurt Jeremy next, he heard Vanessa make a noise. He looked over at her and froze. She was still slumped over, but she didn’t look good. Spittle dribbled from her mouth and her eyes were rolling back in her head.
She needed him more than Jeremy needed to be tortured. Hunter stuck his gun at Jeremy’s temple and pulled the trigger. Blood exploded over the floor. He turned to Vanessa. She fell to the side, her and the chair crashing to the ground.
# # #
The drugs hit Vanessa like hot butter being poured over her body. Her head immediately drooped forward and she couldn’t keep it up or straight. Her mouth felt loose. She’d never done drugs. The occasional pain killer from the dentist was about all the experience she had. This felt very wrong and very scary, but very good all at the same time. She was warm and pain-free and felt like everything was going to be okay.
She thought back to her happiest times. Meeting Hunter and how she’d been unsure of him at first. That made her smile. To think she almost walked away from the best thing that ever happened to her. Silly. But the way he was with Opal from even the beginning, winning her the bear at the fair. He was good guy.
She grinned widely and thought of their first date, how it’d been a little awkward, but she was so attracted to him. And of course, that made her think of their first kiss and first time together. She thought a little too much of that and it got her all warm and excited. She wanted him. Where had he gone, anyway?
She tried to pick up her head to see him, or turn, but it was difficult. Her head weighed a hundred pounds. But she heard gunfire. He must be killing someone, then. Oh good. She saw the side of him come into view and heard him ask Jeremy a question. Something about how he hurt her. Aww, he was defending her. Hunter was so great.
No wonder she’d fallen in love with him. She thought of the conversations where he’d said he wanted to kill Jeremy for her and that he’d do anything to protect her and her daughter. Oh. Where was Opal anyway? Oh well, she was fine, surely. Hunter would make sure she was okay because that’s just what he did. He took care of them. He was there and he protected them. No wonder she loved him. She was lucky he loved her back. He could be like Jeremy and decide that she was no good. And that would be no good because she really liked—no loved—Hunter. Maybe, when this was all over, she’d even marry him.
As she pictured their wedding, she was seeing it bathed in bright white light, shining from above, like heaven calling to her. She started to let herself drift toward the light, but had a vivid realization. If she went to the light, that meant she was dying. She couldn’t be dying. Not now. Not yet.
Suddenly, she was panicking. Where was Opal? What was happening to her? Jeremy had been about to murder her. Had he succeeded? Jeremy had Opal. Jeremy had her. Jeremy had injected her with something. Something that might be killing her. And if she wasn’t dying, she might face a worse situation being alive if her daughter was dead. No, she couldn’t go toward heaven. She needed to face this hell happening on earth. She had to be here for Opal.
Where was Opal? She tried to see her. Tried to squint through the light blinding her, tried to keep her eyelids open. She called for her, but it came out like a weak groaning sound. Not an audible word at all. She had to wake up.
Vanessa tried to will herself awake. To pick up her head, to open her eyes fully. I have to save my daughter! she screamed in her mind. No matter what she did, nothing seemed to help her. Her head grew heavier still, her eyelids wouldn’t open, and now she couldn’t swallow.
Her saliva bubbled up, spilling over her lips. Her tongue wouldn’t work. The light started to fade to darkness. She felt herself falling, but she wa
sn’t sure where she was going or where she would stop.
Before she hit the ground and lay still, she heard Hunter’s voice, loud and frantic, calling out her name.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Hunter
It didn’t take long for the sirens to reach him. When Hunter had called 911 and said he thought Vanessa had been drugged and was overdosing, they’d promised to be there immediately, and it looked like they were keeping that promise.
“Hunter?” Opal’s little voice came from under the bed. She peeked up at him through teary eyes. “Is my mommy dead?”
“No, honey.” Hunter gently pulling Opal from under the bed and covered her eyes.
He cradled her against his chest and ran from the room. Had she peeked and seen something she shouldn’t have? He hoped not. The kid had been through enough.
The smell, though. He couldn’t hold her nose and cover her eyes. But the place stunk. There was blood everywhere and the distinctive smell of a body dying—like feces and urine and vomit. He’d smelled it once or twice after a hit, but never in this quantity. He dodged the bodies on the floor and hurried to get Opal outside.
He took the stairs, climbing down them as quickly as was safe. When his feet hit the ground floor and he burst out through the emergency doors, he saw swarms of police and the ambulance.
Someone else must’ve called about the gunshots. Someone in the hotel, maybe. They might even have surveillance. His running caught the cops’ attention and several of them charged at him.
“Freeze!” they shouted.
Hunter stopped. “I have no weapons.” He’d left them all in the room. He walked closer so he was in earshot. “Listen, please. I called 911. There are a lot of dead bodies in there, but the emergency is the woman in the back bedroom—my girlfriend. She’s overdosing and she needs help immediately.”
One of the officers nodded to another and he took off toward the EMTs standing near the ambulance.
“I acted in self-defense,” Hunter continued. “There were a lot of men up there shooting at me and the child and her mother. I killed the men in order to protect them.”
He went to the closest officer. “Take her, please, and get her to help. I have to go check on Vanessa.”
The officer met his eyes. Hunter could only imagine what he saw there. Panic, terror. He didn’t have time to think too much about it. If they weren’t going to chase him down and throw cuffs on him, he had to get to Vanessa.
“I’m going back in to check on her.” Hunter turned and ran for the door, not pausing as he yanked it open and took the stairs two at a time.
By the time he reached the bedroom where she was, EMTs were already there, working. He couldn’t get close to her. As much as he wanted to hold her, he didn’t want to get in the way of anything that would save her life, either. He prayed that they would be able to save her.
He stood back, watching helplessly. They shouted things to each other that Hunter didn’t understand. Codes and long words that sounded too scientific and medical to be anything but medications or processes. It sounded like a loud clatter of words and was a dizzying blur of actions.
They injected something into her arm. Apparently, they expected it to do something different than what it did. They didn’t seem happy. He heard one say that it wasn’t enough, she needed more. What had Jeremy given her and how much? Was he trying to kill her?
“Do you know what she took?” one of them asked him.
“She didn’t take anything. She was forcibly injected with something.” Hunter pointed to the needle lying on the floor by the bed, where it had rolled in the commotion of all that had happened since Jeremy injected her.
The EMT picked up the needle carefully, turned it over in his hand, and held it to the light, then sniffed it. “Test kit,” he said.
“More naloxone,” another called EMT. “We’re losing her.”
Hunter’s mouth ran dry. All he could think was no, no, no, no. She couldn’t die. Not now, not after everything. Not now that Jeremy was dead, and she and Opal were finally and forever free.
The EMT injected the next syringe full of liquid and Hunter held his breath. Vanessa coughed. An eruption of shouts broke out among the EMTs and in seconds, they had loaded her onto a stretcher.
“Vanessa,” he called out as they whisked her from the room, but he doubted she could hear him over everything.
He followed the stretcher out into the hall. Someone had already pushed the button for the elevator and they wheeled her on as they kept working on her. The last thing he saw as the elevator doors closed and she disappeared with the EMTs, was a bag of oxygen being squeezed into her mouth, forcing her to breathe.
He wasn’t going to wait for the next elevator. Hunter ran back to the stairs, this time able to fly down, hanging onto the railing to keep from falling. He could move much faster not carrying Opal. He was out the door in seconds.
His feet took him right to the ambulance, but he was too late. The doors closed and it drove off as he stood there, watching her go, wondering if he’d ever see her alive again.
# # #
“Excuse me, are you Hunter Perrin?”
Hunter turned to the officer asking him the question and nodded.
“We need to speak with you. We need to take a statement, and we may have a few questions.”
“Where’s Opal?” Hunter asked.
“She’s with another paramedic, being treated.”
The officer pointed and once Hunter saw her, he gave his attention the man in uniform.
“Can you tell me exactly what happened in there?”
The cop wrote as Hunter spoke. He started at the beginning, explaining how Jeremy had hired him, how he’d discovered the truth, but then CPS had come. He told them about the set up and how things had started to go wrong. Then he gave them as many details as possible about the day. Finding Mari’s parents and the Kevlar vest, killing the thugs there, who had pulled guns on him and tried to kill him—even if that part was a slight exaggeration since he’d fired first.
He described in the most detail the scene that had taken place upstairs in the hotel, since it was the freshest in his mind. He didn’t leave out killing Jeremy, how he’d tried to kill him and Vanessa and had hired people to come after them. He had to make it clear that this was all self-defense.
“And the best part is,” Hunter said. “There are hidden cameras all over that captured most of this.”
“You set up cameras?”
“Nicholas, the man from CPS, and I set them up in the hotel room where I was staying, where Jeremy confessed to hiring me; where I shot him. Though he was wearing the vest and didn’t die.”
The officer reviewed his notes. “Looks like that matches up with what Nicholas Johnson said in his statement.”
“Yeah, it matches because that’s the truth.” Hunter had to remind himself to be polite, that he was on the same side as the cops right now. He was a good citizen, doing his duty, and acting as protector. At least, he needed it to come across that way. He couldn’t afford to get rude or lose his temper.
The officer gave him a look that warned he might be pushing it. Hunter changed his tone.
“I want you to have the complete truth so that you can let justice prevail. A very bad man was taken down today, along with many of his hired guns. There may be more out there, though. I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess.”
“If only you’d left one alive to talk to us.”
Hunter thought he was being sarcastic, but it wasn’t too obvious. “Well, I couldn’t take the chance that one would be alive to kill us. And the video should help.”
“Those and the video from the hotel here should give us a clear picture.”
So there was surveillance in this hotel, too. Hunter nodded. “Good.” But it was anything but good. It would show him killing the thugs, sure. At least then, they had pulled their guns first. That was self-defense, easy. But when it came to Jeremy, it was less obvious. Time to make a calcul
ated move. “I’ll tell you right now that I might have taken things further than I needed to with Jeremy. It was certainly self-defense when I killed him, but I drew it out longer than I needed to. I’ll admit it. I just want you to know that upfront, before you even review the footage.”
The officer inspected him for a moment. Hunter tried to look innocent, whatever that looked like. He hoped this was the right move. They’d see on the video what he’d done. There was no talking his way out of it. He’d shot Jeremy many times in places that wouldn’t kill him, then slashed him up and beat him. It might be harder to prove self-defense. But admitting to it should make him seem more trustworthy and honorable. He hoped.
“You’re free to go,” the officer said. “We’ll ask you to stay in the area the next few days. There’ll be a massive investigation, and we may need to get more details from you.”
