“I-” She shook her head, forgetting that he couldn’t see her. The words didn’t want to come. This was crazy! She’d never, ever do the family wrong.
“You listen to me. You got maybe three days to get back here with my money, little girl, before they have to drag your skinny little ass out of the river and plant you next to your momma.”
His words had sounded like hammers inside her head and she’d started crying right then and there, like a little baby. She couldn’t help it. She was so scared, more terrified than she’d ever been in her life.
She hung up. After two minutes, she pulled the battery from the disposable phone and then threw the phone as far as she could into the scrubby bushes behind the motel. Just in case they could track her. She’d heard about that sort of stuff. People tracked by their cell phones. She wasn’t ever letting them do that to her.
Then she’d come back to the room and gone to sleep.
She seemed to be sleeping a lot. More than was healthy. Normally Tina slept for maybe six hours a night, but lately she was losing extra hours. Maybe it was grief. Maybe she was just shutting down. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? She’d heard that grief was like that. She’d never known anyone who was dead, not until now. Well, except for her dad and that had happened when she was just a kid.
She’d watched the news and tried to see if there was any news about Tony Parmiatto. There was nothing. She was starting to worry too much about that. If Scarabelli was waiting to talk to her and waiting with Tony, it maybe meant he blamed Tony for the money. And that could be bad for Tony. If he was dead, there should be something. If he was alive, he might be one of the people who came looking for her and he would be so angry Someone knocked on the door very hard. “Tina Carlotti? I got a telegram for you.”
Tina’s heart hammered in her chest and she sat up fast, barely even aware of whether or not she was dressed decently.
She opened and closed her mouth half a dozen times without saying a word. No one knew she was here. She’d signed the register as Anna Smith, and that was all she had put down.
She stood up and made herself go over to the door. Her hands shook, but she forced herself to be brave. If someone knew she was here, well, there had to be a reason for that.
She opened the door and looked up at the man standing there. He was young, somewhere close to her age, but he was dark and he was muscular and he was handsome. His eyes looked her over from head to toe and he flashed her a smile that was too short lived to be sure she’d even seen it.
“You Tina Carlotti?”
“Maybe.” He handed her an envelope. His eyes took her in and he must have decided she was as broke as she looked because he turned away, not waiting to see if she would offer a tip.
Just as well, really. She wouldn’t have.
After she’d relocked the door, Tina opened the envelope and read the contents.
It read: Tina,
You have questions.
I have answers.
Meet me in Boston, at the Stevenson Hotel.
Bring enough money to get here. Hide the rest.
A Friend
She read the note several times and then threw it away. Then she paced the room like she was doing laps.
Twenty minutes later, she pulled it out of the trash and read it again.
She really had very little to pack.
Thirty minutes later she left the dive behind and started walking. Most of the money made it as far as the bus station in town. Once there, she locked it in one of the lockers you could rent and shoved the key in her jeans. Four thousand dollars, mostly in twenties, wound up in her pockets and the insides of her shoes. If there was one thing she was certain of, it was simply that money would spend, even if it smelled like her feet.
She bought another disposable phone while she waited, and ate food because her stomach reminded her that she hadn’t for almost two days. She climbed aboard the bus and stared at the other people already there, making sure to meet each of them eye to eye. No fear. Not ever. Fear got you killed or worse.
There was nothing left for her but to maybe get some answers. And really, it beat the hell out of waiting for something to happen.
Most of the people on the bus couldn’t have cared less about her, but there was one guy, sort of cute, who checked her out as she walked toward the back of the long vehicle.
Tina closed her eyes, tired for no real reason, and when she opened them again, the bus was just pulling into the station in Boston.
The cute guy was gone. Typical.
Getting to the hotel was easy. She handled it the way she handled everything, with a hard look in her eyes and a big bluff about how confident she was. Down where it counted, Tina was a wimp. Up on the surface, she could fake it with the best. So she did. The Stevenson was a big, sprawling affair with the sort of architecture that the oldest parts of Camden had. Classy, expensive. The difference was that Boston was alive and Camden was too stupid to know it was dead.
She shook her head and pushed her grief aside. Her mom was dead. She couldn’t fix that. Her life sucked. She was working on fixing that part. Crying about Mom wasn’t going to help, but getting angry would. Getting pissed off about all the crap going wrong in her world would go a lot further than dealing with the blues, so she set her face and walked into the hotel with long, fast strides and a calm expression on her face.
First person to mess with her was getting kicked in the nuts. No more Ms. Nice Guy.
Chapter Twenty-One
Hunter Harrison
The hotel room was different this time. Much nicer. Also, there were clothes, real clothes, the sort he could wear without having to hold the jeans up. They were in his size, or close enough that it didn’t matter.
Hunter looked around the room warily. If there was one thing he’d gotten used to, it was being played by the man who was keeping him enslaved. He wanted to be angry, but it was hard. He couldn’t keep the fury going. Instead he was tired, and much as he hated it, he was getting used to his life in hotel rooms.
Someone knocked at the door and he realized that the sound was exactly what had awakened him. “Room service!” The voice was friendly enough. He walked over to the door and looked through the tiny lens that allowed him to see a distorted version of what was on the other side. A man was there, young, dark haired, with a uniform that spoke volumes for the sort of place he was staying in.
The man had a cart covered with dishes.
Close enough, he thought, and opened the door.
“Hey. Um, come on in.”
The man wheeled his cart into the room. Hunter caught the odor of the food under the sterling covers and his stomach made a rude noise. He was ravenous. He was almost always hungry these days.
A five-dollar bill in his pants pocket went to the guy who brought the food. He couldn’t remember if he’d ever had room service before, but the odds were he was supposed to tip and so he did. He signed for the meal, wondering who would be paying the bill.
There was a steak, medium rare and nearly perfect. There was a salad that he thought about ignoring and then ate anyway. There were vegetables and there was a thick soup in a bowl made of bread. He looked under the last lid and found a slice of chocolate cake that looked like it had been carved from heaven itself. He took his time and savored every last bite and patted his belly when he was done. After what seemed like months of little more than canned food and water, the food was amazing.
When he was done eating, he reached under the bed and pulled out the laptop. It was in the same spot as always. The difference was, this time when he opened the case and pulled out the computer itself, there was an envelope. Inside the envelope was a CD-ROM disc. Written on the disc was PLAY ME.
Despite the temptation to break the disc in half, he slipped it into the player and watched as it activated. The media player opened and showed him the darkly shadowed shape of a teenage boy. The form was bulky, with longish hair and a dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves.
/> The voice that came from the silhouette was as hated as it was familiar.
“Well, thought you might like a decent meal for a change of pace, Hunter. Thought you could enjoy some real food. You’ve earned it.” He sounded amused, condescending and self-satisfied. The tone of his voice was almost enough to ruin the meal.
The shape leaned back in a chair that was also lost in shadows.
“Here’s the thing. It’s time for me to keep my part of the bargain. I have information for you. Not just for you, but for a few others who have the same sort of questions. They’ll be meeting you at this room very soon. When all of you are together, there’ll be a limousine waiting to take the lot of you to one final destination. The answers to most of your questions are there.”
The shadow shape leaned forward again, close enough that Hunter could see the strong jawline and the sneer on the expressive mouth.
“See? This is what happens when you play by my rules, Hunter. Dinner and answers. We’ll talk again soon.”
The screen went dead.
He played the message a dozen more times, looking for any hint of the face that was hidden in the shadows. Whoever he was, the man made sure he couldn’t be seen clearly. Hunter hated him a little more for that.
He was thinking about watching the disc again when someone knocked on the door. This time it wasn’t room service. It was a thin, dark-haired girl dressed in tight jeans and a baby tee that said she was spoiled in glittering letters. She would have been cute if it wasn’t for the sour expression on her face.
She jabbed a finger in his direction like a dagger. “You got answers about my money and everything else, you better start talking. I’m tired and I’m having a really bad day, so you don’t want to make it any worse.”
That was how Hunter Harrison met Tina Carlotti. He did a great deal of fast talking to convince her to calm down.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Cody Laurel
Cody stared at the wall of the bus station and then fished in his jeans until he could pull out his cash. Almost two hundred dollars leftover from cleaning out his birthday money. He’d been planning on spending that on the new game system, but this was important. He couldn’t take the looks from his parents anymore. He’d thought being a possible drug user was bad, but being an attention-seeking whiner was worse in their eyes, even if they never said it.
“If this is someone’s idea of a joke, I’m gonna take lessons on blowing shit up.” He was careful to mumble the words under his breath. With the way his luck had been going, some loser would decide he’d been serious and call the Department of Homeland Security on his sorry butt.
The trip to Boston had been long and boring, but on the bright side of things, at least he got stuck sitting next to a fat man who didn’t believe in bathing and liked to talk about every bad relationship he’d ever been in. If he’d had just a little more courage, he’d have given the guy Dr. Keene’s number and sent him off to tell someone who cared in any way. Instead he nodded politely and tried to ignore both the stench and the words. He failed in both attempts. So now he was in a crappy mood and getting ready to take a cab across a city he’d never been to so he could get answers to questions he never even wanted to think about.
Good times, good times.
He waited for a few minutes before he finally got a cab. Once he’d sat down, he gave the man directions-the driver was pudgy, had tattoos up both arms like the sleeves of a colorful jacket and smelled of dubious smoke, but he was also quiet, which was a plus.
Cody didn’t want to think about how badly his folks were going to freak when they realized he was gone. A look at his watch confirmed they’d probably be finding out soon because they would both be on their way home from work.
They’d regret never giving him a cell phone like he’d asked.
He looked out the window as the taxi moved through the heavy traffic. It wasn’t quite time for the worst of rush hour, but it was close enough. Not that he had a set time for getting here. It didn’t matter all that much. He got to the hotel twenty minutes later and Hunter Harrison would still be waiting for him or he wouldn’t. If he was there, awesome- Cody could finally get some answers and maybe even a little peace. If not, well, either way his dad was probably going to blow a gasket.
Eventually the cab stopped in front of a hotel that looked like it cost more per day than he had in his pocket, and Cody counted out the amount he had to pay and then added three dollars for a tip. He had no idea if that was enough of a tip, but it would have to do. The cabbie nodded his thanks and a minute later he was pulling away, probably off to fire up another blunt.
Cody had never once taken even a puff of marijuana, but at the thought of what lay ahead of him, he thought maybe he could take up smoking the stuff as a hobby if it would calm his nerves.
“Yeah, that would go over so well with the parental units.” He spoke only to himself as he entered the wide, posh lobby of the hotel. Marble floors. He didn’t even want to know what that would cost. The elevators weren’t hard to find. He snuck through the lobby, feeling like the people at the front desk were going to call him out for being there with every step he took, and slipped into the first open car he could find.
Just as the door was starting to close, a thin, feminine hand slid between the doors and triggered the signal for them to reopen. Long nails, painted a purple color that would look strange on an adult. The hand was attached to a gorgeous teenage girl who looked around his age. Gorgeous. He tried not to stare, but it wasn’t happening. She had dusty blonde hair pulled into a ponytail and exactly the sort of body that tended to distract him from thinking about anything more complex than breathing. She had eyes that were blue and shaped like she was maybe part Asian. Exotic and sexy as hell. The smile she fired at him was enough to make his heart stutter through a few beats.
“Sorry.” She smiled even broader and looked him in the eyes. Cody resisted the urge to see if there was somebody standing directly behind him. The mirrored walls confirmed that he was the only other occupant. As a rule, hot blondes did not look directly at him and smile. Normally they were actively ignoring his existence. He knew by the number of times he’d tried to actually speak to them back at school. That particular exercise always worked about as well as convincing his folks that he was sane.
“Sorry? For what?”
“For stopping the elevator. I hope you weren’t in a hurry.”
He shrugged. Under most circumstances, speaking to her would have been impossible, but he was already tired and anxious, and instead of worrying about how she would shoot him down, he was worrying about the explosion when his folks realized he’d cleaned out his savings account. Fear of imminent death had given him temporary courage, so he smiled back and dared the impossible. He said, “Listen, the day I’m having, stopping for a pretty girl is about the best thing that could happen.” Okay, it wasn’t much by way of flirting, but for Cody it was positively living on the edge.
He reached to hit the button for the eighteenth floor and checked himself as her hand moved the same way. Seemed rude to fight her for the right to push the button when he was so busy sneaking peeks at her perfect ass.
She smiled again and moved against the wall as the elevator started rising. The higher he moved, the more nervous he became. He distracted himself by checking out the blonde’s reflection again. Yep. Still hot.
All the answers were so close.
Maybe. Maybe they’re close. Maybe Joe Bronx is behind all of this. Hell, maybe he’s gonna sell me into slavery. He looked at his reflection in the mirrored interior of the elevator and smiled at the notion. Short, lanky, geek haircut with emo bangs, dark hair and a skinny ass face. He was pretty sure slavers had a thing for hot future pinup models like the one staring at the buttons on the elevator wall. The average skinny nerd was hardly going to make them rich.
When the doors opened, he let the girl head out first and then started looking for the room number he’d gotten from the message. The girl hea
ded the same way.
“You here to meet Joe Bronx?” He asked the question with an odd twist of nervous energy in his chest.
She looked back over her shoulder at him with wide eyes. “Are you him?”
“No.” He shook his head. “But the phone message said there would be more than one of us.”
The girl looked him over from head to toe, her expression unreadable. Finally she said, “I’m Kyrie.”
“Cody. Nice ta meetcha.” For lack of anything else to do with his hand, he stuck it out for her to shake. She took it and squeezed his fingers. Her hand was soft and hot and made him have the sort of thoughts that would have earned him a slap if she could read his mind.
He nodded to the door. “Ladies first.”
She swallowed and then knocked on the door to the hotel room.
Chapter Twenty-three
Kyrie Merriwether
Cody. She forced herself to remember his name. Not exactly the sort of guy she normally noticed, but he was nice enough and he was here to meet Joe Bronx and maybe, just maybe, that meant she had made a friend. Okay, a friend trying to undress her at every opportunity, but she was pretty sure he didn’t actually have x-ray vision and at least he wasn’t actually groping.
She needed a friend in the worst possible way. The last few days, ever since she blacked out on the way to a slumber party, had sucked.
Now she was here, standing in front of the room she’d been told to go to and waiting with a kid-Cody-who looked like he was one loud noise away from rabbiting his way all the way back to wherever home was.
The door opened after her first knock, and the guy standing inside the threshold made her catch her breath. Dark hair, dark blue eyes, a serious tan, and a nice suit. He looked the same age again, but with rugged features and dimples. She loved dimples on a guy.
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