by Rachel Rust
Chapter Twenty-Four
Minutes ticked by like seconds. The death clock moved a hell of a lot faster than the school clock ever did. The Barber was leaned against a desk across from me, handgun on his lap, telling me tales of his time in the Yarborough County jail. I didn’t know where Yarborough County was, and I was certainly not in the mood to make conversation. He liked to talk, so I listened, willing to do anything to keep him content, and distracted.
The emergency exit was less than twenty feet from me. But it was past The Barber and around a table, which looked like an employee break station. Even if I managed to get past The Barber—unlikely—the zig-zagged run around the table would slow me down. And the door probably led to an alley, which would leave me vulnerable to flying bullets. Plus, there was a rogue redhead out there somewhere. She looked innocent enough, but if the night had taught me anything, it was not to assume too much about people. Brody the hot guy was a bad guy. And Victor the bad guy was FBI…and kind of hot.
And late in saving me.
Where was he?
The Barber was laughing at his own unfunny story when someone knocked on the front door of the cafe. He peered around me, through the doorway leading to behind the counter. “We’re not open yet!” he shouted.
The knocking stopped.
The Barber stood up. The barrel of the gun pointed my direction and I looked away, unable to handle the sight of that little black hole. The doo-wop song blared from his phone again.
“Yeah?” he answered. The muffled voice on the phone was hard to hear, but I knew it was Eddie. “Not we,” The Barber said. “Just you, Martinez. Alone at McNally’s. If I see even one hint of a police presence, your girl will be handed over wrapped in plastic.”
More murmurs.
“You’ll have to take my word for it,” The Barber said with a chuckle. He winked at me. “She’s all good. Keepin’ me company, easy on the eyes, too.”
“Put her on,” I heard Eddie demand.
The Barber rolled his eyes. He held the phone out. “Tell him you’re all right.”
My mouth opened, but no sound came out. Saying I was all right would’ve been a hell of a lie. Alive, yes, but definitely not all right.
The Barber kicked my thigh and I cried out. “See? She’s fine,” he said.
There was a pause. I could practically see Eddie’s jaw tense up through the phone.
“McNally’s,” I heard Eddie say. His voice was still muffled against The Barber’s ear, but had increased with intensity. “Thirty minutes. No tricks or I put a bullet between Brody’s eyes.”
“What would Uncle Sam think of that kind of behavior from one of his finest?”
“Don’t fuck with me.” Eddie ended the call.
The Barber looked at his phone with raised eyebrows. “Quite a temper on that one. He and Brody together must be oodles of fun.” He punched in another number into his phone. “It’s me. Thirty minutes, McNally’s.” A pause. “Yep.” Another longer pause. “Go now. Take everyone. You see Martinez, take the shot.” He closed the phone.
The final words pierced into me. The Barber didn’t only want his nephew back—he wanted Eddie dead. His motivation was clear: kill the guy who had stealthily invaded his operation and was one swift move from bringing it all crashing down. I took a deep breath to calm my escalating fear and powerlessness. There was no way to warn Eddie about the hit out on him. But Eddie was smart. He had to know The Barber would retaliate. Which meant Eddie had a plan. A good one, I hoped. ‘Cause we were gonna need it.
The Barber pushed his phone into his pocket. “Well, we got a little road trip ahead of us. Are you hungry? A cinnamon roll?” He laughed. “No worries, I’ll get ya a fresh one. Would never make a lady eat food off of a floor.”
I scoffed. “You’re a real gentleman.”
“Ahh.” He knelt down in front of me. “I figured there was a smart mouth in there somewhere.” From his pocket, he pulled out a straight razor and flipped it open. My entire body shuddered. Hot tears pooled in my lids. He placed it flat against my cheek. “Your dad’s a surgeon, isn’t he?” I didn’t respond, fearful anything would be the wrong thing to say. “He spends a lot of time looking at the insides of humans, huh? It all starts to look the same, all that tissue, blood, and bones. One becomes desensitized to seeing it after a while. So, I wonder what it would be like to see his own daughter like that.” The dull side of the razor moved down my face until it rested against the front of my neck. My face clenched. “Maybe I could send a different piece of you to him each day. I wonder if the flesh and bones of his daughter would look different than all the other hundreds of other people he’s seen.” He removed the razor, snapping it shut, then pointed the gun to the middle of my forehead. “I’d start, of course, by sending your head. Dads do love their daughters’ pretty little faces.”
Fresh tears squeezed from my tightly closed eyelids at the thought of pieces of me showing up on my dad’s doorstep. And from what little I knew of The Barber, his threats were not empty. He’d have the balls to actually do it. And my family didn’t deserve any of it.
The cold tip of the gun slid down my nose, brushed my lips, then traced a cold path along the front of my neck. He pointed the barrel to my sternum and smiled with his eyes on my breasts. “Although, I may have other uses for a girl like you.” He scanned me head to toe and nodded a bit. “Yeah, you’d do just fine. I could get a pretty penny for a cute little thing like you.”
There was another knock on the front door and I jumped. The metal of the gun bumped my chest and I half-screamed. He pressed it harder against me. “Shut up! Don’t make a fucking sound.”
The knocking continued.
“We’re not open yet!”
The pounding stopped. And then it started right back up again, harder, more persistent. The Barber grabbed my arm and yanked me up. We moved up front to behind the counter. The sky was orange now and the cars in the parking lot were easier to see. It wasn’t very full. Besides my car, I could only make out three others, and still none of them were Eddie’s gray pickup.
The knocking on the glass had stopped. No one was at the front door, but there was a movement off to the side, in front of the large window. The Barber leaned us both forward to get a look, but the knocker had vanished from sight.
A wall-shuddering thud came from the back room. Then a second thud. On the third, the thud was accompanied by splintering wood and crashing metal. The Barber whipped around and hooked an arm around my neck, pulling me closer to his side. He smelled of soap and cologne, not how I had imagined a madman would smell.
The commotion in the back room ceased.
The muzzle of the gun pressed into my temple. He shuffled forward, keeping me in front of him like a human shield. At the doorway leading to the back room, he paused, glancing around the corner. He jerked us back.
“Guns down,” he said, “or the princess goes down.”
There was no noise and no movement.
He lumbered us forward, his knees knocking into the back of my thighs, making me move like a clumsy marionette. We slowly made our way around the corner into the back room.
No one was there. No one under the table. No one crouched down by the cabinets. The emergency back exit door had been busted down and was now lying flat on the floor, having taken out one of the wood chairs at the employee break table with it. The doorway leading to the sunlit alley outside was empty. No Eddie. No cops. Nothing.
The Barber’s head whipped around in all directions, looking for something. Someone. Some kind of movement. He turned to look back out toward the front of the store. But there was no one there either. Just the absence of a threat.
His phone crooned. “Answer it,” he said, not releasing his grip around my neck or on his gun. “Front pocket.”
My face squished with disgust as my hand fumbled around his hip looking for his pocket. My fingers shoved down into the denim. The moment my fingers wrapped around the phone, I yanked it out, eager to have m
y hands out of his pants.
I flipped the phone open. “Yes?”
“Put him on,” Eddie said.
I held the phone up. “He wants to talk to you.”
The Barber didn’t release me or the gun. “Put it on speaker.” My fingers fumbled with the little buttons until finally landing on the speakerphone option. “What?” The Barber asked.
“Nice of you to send your men away,” Eddie said. “Makes things easier for me.”
“Listen, you bastard, whatever it is you’re trying to pull—”
“Brody’s in the alley.”
The Barber stared at the busted open back door before replying. “Bring him inside, we’ll make the exchange.”
“Send her out first.”
“Sure, with a bullet in her skull.”
“Whatever you do to her, I do to your daughter.”
“My dau—” The Barber’s entire body tensed. “What are you talking about?”
“Red hair, sitting in her car right now, under the watchful eye of one of my associates.”
“You—don’t you touch her!”
“That’s up to you,” Eddie said. “It’s real simple. Let Natalie go unharmed, your daughter goes unharmed. Hurt Natalie, your daughter gets hurt. That’s a promise.”
“A promise, huh?” The Barber said with a grunt of a laugh. “Either you don’t know who you’re talking to, or you got balls of steel.”
“I know exactly who I’m talking to.” Eddie’s voice seemed unfazed by The Barber’s self-importance. “I’m talking to a man who foolishly sent all his men and guns on a wild goose chase and let his daughter walk right into my path, unprotected.”
“You little jacka—”
“Look on the table.”
The Barber and I both glanced over. In the middle of the back room table, sitting pristine beside the wreckage of the trashed door nearby, lay a small silver handcuff key. It was so small, it made sense that I hadn’t seen it at first. But now that I knew it was there, its reflectivity was hard to miss, as though the brightest and biggest thing in the room.
“Here’s what’s gonna happen,” Eddie said. “You’re gonna leave the girl inside, take the key, and go find Brody. He’s cuffed to a dumpster in the alley. He’s all yours as long as you don’t touch her.”
The Barber’s legs hit the back of mine and we walked toward the table. “Pick it up,” he said. With one hand still holding the phone up, my other arm stretched as far as it could. My fingertips dragged the key toward me until I was able to pick it up. “Here’s the new plan,” The Barber said. “Princess and I are going to find Brody together. Once he’s free, she’s free. And if you hurt my daughter, I not only put a bullet in your girl’s skull, but I will hunt you down and put one in yours, too.” He paused, then said in a mocking fashion, “That’s a promise.”
“Suit yourself,” Eddie said with no emotion, then ended the call.
My eyes widened at his casual response. I rather liked the original plan where The Barber was supposed to leave me inside the café and then walk out the door, out of my life. But now, like a puppet, I was forced to walk up and over the metal door lying on the floor. Shards of splintered wood from the door jamb were splayed in every direction. Part of the drywall had also ripped away, leaving a coating of dust. The cold air of the morning rushed in through the doorway.
Just before the opening, The Barber halted. Gun up, he peered both directions out the door. Then we moved outside, me in front. The human shield.
The alley was empty except for three dumpsters lined up directly across from the door. But there were no cars. No people taking out trash. No garbage men on an early morning route. It was void of humans except for a pair of legs sticking out from beyond the last dumpster twenty feet down. The legs, dressed in dark jeans and expensive brown shoes, were definitely Brody.
Our path to Brody wasn’t straight. First, The Barber shuffled us from the doorway to the blue dumpster straight across the alley. Then we stood there while he apparently listened and waited for an ambush.
It never came.
We moved down to the second dumpster. Still no ambush. No police lights or sirens. No Eddie.
The last dumpster was Brody’s. We shuffled closer. Brody’s back was turned to us. His head was slung down and his sandy hair had fallen flat. He had on a Kennedy High jacket. I didn’t know he even owned one and couldn’t remember ever seeing him in it before.
“Brody,” The Barber said quietly, nudging his back slightly with a knee.
Brody didn’t respond.
The Barber looked all around before lowering his hand holding the gun to check for a pulse. He didn’t freak out, so that meant Brody wasn’t dead, only knocked out. Maybe he had been forced to sip his own tainted water supply.
The Barber’s arm around my neck let go. I had little time to relish the release before he pushed me forward. My legs didn’t move as fast as my upper body and I crashed down onto the asphalt.
“Unlock the cuffs,” he said, gun pointed at me.
My fingers fumbled with the small key, ignoring the pain of my skinned-up palms from where I had tried to slow my fall. I had never used handcuffs before, and under the pressure of a gun, I was pretty sure it would require trial and error. Brody’s left hand was cuffed to a small metal rod welded on to the side of the dumpster. It looked like a mechanism used by garbage trucks to lift the big receptacles, given the scratched up paint.
I grabbed his hand, and then immediately dropped it. Something about the hand was off. They were too wide and way too tan. I had studied Brody Zane closely in the last three years, and I knew his hands, and these were definitely not his. They were the hands of someone older, not of an eighteen-year-old guy. I leaned down, pretending to fiddle with the handcuffs, but really it was an attempt to get a look at his face, which hung into his chest.
It wasn’t Brody.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Detective Novotny sat slumped against a dumpster, handcuffed and redressed in Brody’s clothes. His build was slightly lankier, and definitely older, but his hair was similar enough that it had even fooled me.
My heart hammered hard against my ribs as I tried to get the key into the small keyhole. My eyes darted around. Where was Eddie? How the hell was this plan supposed to work? The second The Barber realized it wasn’t his nephew, I’d have a bullet in my head.
“What’s wrong?” The Barber demanded.
“Nothing,” I said, trying to turn the key. “I’ve just never done this before.”
“Hurry up.”
“I can’t get it to turn.”
The Barber huffed loudly, then began to kneel down. I gave him the key and shuffled back a few inches, ready to run like hell the moment he noticed it wasn’t Brody.
But he never got the chance. The second his knee touched asphalt, a gun touched the back of his head. A wave of relief crashed through me at the sight of messy brown hair.
“Toss the gun,” Eddie told him.
The Barber tossed it a few feet away then put his arms up in a surrender position.
“Get up. Slowly.”
The Barber began to stand, but while still crouched over, he spun around, shoving an elbow into Eddie’s ribs. Eddie fell to the side. Before he could get back up, The Barber kicked the gun out of his hand.
From behind the first dumpster, Lip Licker stepped out, gun pointed at The Barber. A sly grin spread across his face. “Hands up.” Despite the FBI vest he sported, Lip Licker still looked just as creepy as he had sitting on Little Bobby’s sofa. He approached, slow step by slow step, as The Barber raised his hands. Near me, Eddie pushed himself off the asphalt. Lip Licker took his eyes off The Barber for just one second to check on his partner’s movement.
The Barber lurched forward and knocked Lip Licker’s gun to the side with one hand while striking the side of his face with the other. Lip Licker’s head rammed into the side of the metal dumpster. He collapsed.
The Barber leaned down, but Eddie
grabbed his ankle, tripping him before he could get to either of the guns now lying in the middle of the alley. As The Barber tried to regain his footing, Eddie’s shoulder rammed into his back, tackling him to the ground. The Barber did a push up, knocking Eddie off, but Eddie rolled and tackled him again before he could get up.
I scooted myself next to the dumpster as the ground wrestling went on, using both the dumpster and Novotny’s limp frame as a buffer between myself and flying elbows and punches.
Eddie made a dive for one of the guns, but The Barber jumped on top of him and grabbed a fistful of hair. Just before his face slammed into the asphalt, Eddie twisted his torso, sending a backhanded fist across The Barber’s face.
In the scuffle, one of the guns skidded toward me. It was only a few feet away. I had never used a real one before, but I had shot plenty of aluminum cans with Josh’s BB gun when we were younger. I hopped onto my feet, took a deep breath, and ran for the gun. The Barber saw me moving and shoved Eddie away, then lunged at me.
My fingers curled around the grip of the gun and I pointed it toward him. It bobbled a little as I got used to the weight of it…much heavier than the BB gun.
The Barber skidded to a stop, hands up. “Come on now, Princess. That’s a big boy’s toy. Put it down.”
“Don’t move,” I said.
He smirked. “You know you don’t have the guts to shoot me.”
“I do,” Eddie said, pointing the other gun at The Barber’s back. “Do not move because I will not hesitate.” His grasp on the gun was much firmer than mine, as if being in the FBI somehow prepped him for that moment better than my soda can practice in elementary school had. Go figure.
“I’d listen to him,” I told The Barber. “Rumor in school is that he’s sort of crazy. I heard he’s killed twenty-two people for the mafia.”
Eddie’s lip curled. “The mafia rumor was always my favorite.”
****
Once Eddie made one phone call, the entire block crawled with law enforcement. The Barber was handcuffed and placed under the watchful eye of not one, but five police officers who literally had him surrounded as he sat on the cafe floor near the counter. They were waiting on special transportation, as a regular police car wasn’t good enough for someone of such high caliber crimes.
