Oh shit, what’s going on with her crazy ass now? “Gia, what the fuck?”
“Some guy…” She’s out of breath.
I’m not in the mood for her bullshit. I know she tried to get help but maybe it didn’t work. “Gia, I gotta go find Jade.” I try to walk away but she grabs my arm.
“A guy just threw her in his car. I tried to chase them, but…” She stops, trying to catch her breath again. I can tell now she’s crying. “He did something to her before he shoved her in.”
I brace my hands on her shoulders. “Gia, what did the car look like?”
“Dark grey, a BMW.” I pull her toward the door and outside.
“Which way did he go?”
She points in a direction. “I tried to run after him. I’m so sorry.”
Grabbing my phone from my pocket, I start calling Jade’s phone. My heart sinks once I hear it in the parking lot. My next call is to Huck.
“Man, I need you NOW!” I all but scream into the phone. “Come to Greene’s! I have to call the cops.”
Once I hang up on him, I dial 911 and try my best to explain to the operator what’s going on.
Within thirty minutes, a few deputies are there along with Huck. Huck’s face gets ill when he sees Gia. “Gia, what are you doing here? You aren’t supposed to be anywhere near a bar.”
I put my hand up. “She came to apologize to Jade and me. She’s actually who saw the guy throw her in the car, she came inside and got me.” I’m rambling with the cops trying to listen at the same time.
I see an older man come forward. “Huck, what’s going on?”
Huck’s face looks like he’s found some relief. “Mack! Thank God.” Huck turns to me. “Gibbs, this is Mack, he’s a detective and he was a friend of Chelsea’s dad.” Mox, Gia’s brother, steps up beside the Mack guy. Mox has been doing some ride alongs since he’s getting his degree in Criminal Justice.
Gia and I explain everything that happened tonight and I explain the stuff from the threat she received to Gavin filing a complaint against her. Mack just nods and jots stuff down. “Okay, so we don’t know if it was the doctor or someone out to get you, but from what Ms. Moxen here is describing, it sounds like the doctor. We’ll put a BOLO out on his car. If anything else happens, here is my card. You call me directly. We are going to find this girl. I have the station searching nearby traffic cams to see if they can spot the car.”
Mox pats me on the arm. “Man, we’re going to find her. The city got some really badass new cams with a grant a few months ago.”
Mack gets an alert on his phone. “A traffic cam spotted the car speeding down Fairview, into the warehouse district.”
I start for my truck but Mox grabs my arm. “You can’t go, man. I’ll be there. You stick with my brother.”
“No, I’m gonna kill that little prick.” Huck grabs my shoulders and forcibly moves me to my truck.
“Sit. We will be close by so you can get to her, but I can’t let you lose your head over this,” he says quietly.
“I failed my parents, I’m not going to fail her, too!”
I see Mox hugging his shaken sister. As much as I’ve hated her the past few months, I hope this doesn’t set her back.
Suddenly, Marco is at my side. I don’t know where he came from. “Son, sit down. We are going to get her, but you have to keep it together. I know it seems like a lot to ask, but you gotta do it. I had to send Elaine over to Sly’s to sedate Kara and Lox went to get Eve,” Marco grunts out.
Shit…Eve and Kara. “Kara,” I croak out.
“She’ll be fine. Elaine gave her something, just calm down, son. Think smarter, not harder.”
Mack appears beside me. “Okay, so we have a connection. It seems Dr. Asshole is related to Mike Juarez. Gavin’s mother is Mike’s little sister. She and her husband raised all of their kids in a little shithole town just outside of Pensacola. Mike helped Gavin through school.”
So this was all about me. “Fuck! You have to let me go there. They want me, not her. I’ll give them whatever.”
A deputy comes running over. “They found the car!”
Mack and Mox take off running and squad cars all go flying out of the parking lot. Huck shoves me further in my truck. “We’ll follow but at a distance. If you try to get out of this truck, I’ll have them tase you. The only reason I’m doing this is because I know where you’re at.”
That’s true, Huck and Mack burst into Chelsea’s mom’s house to save her from a crazed ex-boyfriend. All I can manage to get past the lump in my throat is, “Thanks.” As he drives us to the warehouse district, I think about how much time we’ve wasted skirting around each other. When I get her back, and I will, she’ll be mine from then on.
CHAPTER 28
JADE
A few minutes after lights out…
I feel like an elephant is stomping on my head. I squint my eyes open enough to see I’m in a car on the road. To begin with, I don’t recognize the car, but I do the driver. I then realize I’m in an all too familiar BMW.
“Gavin, where am I?” I groan.
“Oh good, you’re awake,” he says, almost chipper.
“Yeah. Now, what the fuck is going on?” I say with my head giving a dull throb.
“Let me tell you a little story. Did I ever tell you about the little town I grew up in?” I slightly shake my head.
“No, of course not, because you’re only concerned with you,” he says angrily. “Well, I grew up in a small town just outside of Pensacola, actually it’s almost in Alabama. Pretty much everyone there is dirt poor, including my family, with the exception of my Uncle Mike.” Mike. Pensacola. Mike’s gym. Fuck! My mind is racing. “I wanted to be a doctor so I made somewhat of a deal with the devil to help me through school. As luck would have it, I ended up here. Now, they’ve called in their marker. If you had just stayed with me, I could’ve protected you. When they first sent Paul to talk to you, they already knew we were seeing each other. They knew you’d run right back to him, then everything was set into motion. If you had just not went to him, we could’ve stopped all of this. I’d hoped to get you fired so you would come to me willingly, but that bitchy old lady stopped that. So I had to take more desperate measures, and now here you are. I have to leave you with some people who are going to want a lot of money for you. If they don’t get it from Gibbs, there are so many other ways they could get it for a girl with a body like yours.”
“You’re a fucking doctor! You bring lives into this world! You took care of my sister and my niece!” I can’t get my hands loose from the binds they’re in. “You’re a sick, sick bastard! I hope you rot in hell!” He pulls up to a warehouse and stops the car. Getting out, he walks around to my side and pulls me out by my hair.
I stomp on his foot and kick him in the shin. He shoves me backward, causing me to hit the side of the car. He grabs my throat. “Where’s your whole ‘I know how to load more than a dishwasher’ attitude now?” Grabbing the front of my face, he slams my head back into the car. “Not so tough now, are you? You redheaded bitch.”
“This the only way you can fight a girl? With her hands tied? What a pussy!” I spit at him.
“Sobrino!” I hear behind Gavin. I think back to Spanish class. Nephew.
He turns to face the man. “Tio,” uncle, he says solemnly.
“Gavin, quit trying to beat her up.”
My hands are still bound, but I manage to pick my foot up and kick him from behind, knocking him away from the car, where he stumbles and falls to the ground. Bringing my foot back again, I kick him in the balls as hard as I can. “Asshole!”
I feel arms wrap around my neck. “Little lady, you need to stop.” He looks down at his nephew on the ground crying. “These redheads. I bet you she’s a hellcat in bed.”
Spinning me around so he has more control, he does loosen the grip on my neck. As soon as I find the air, I take a couple of deep breaths. “He wouldn’t know, he’s a boring fuck that put me to sleep,” I spit o
ut.
His uncle laughs. “Well, I couldn’t teach the boy everything.” He looks back down to Gavin. “When you decide to stop crying, you come inside.”
Dragging me inside the warehouse, I see two other men. One being the Paul guy who came to the hospital and the other a guy who looks like Uncle Fester from the Addams family.
He slams me down in a chair and I glare up at him. “What the fuck is your problem?”
“My problem, little lady, is I want what’s owed to me,” he spits out.
“Newsflash, asshole, nobody owes you a motherfucking thing,” I say before I think about it.
That gets me slapped so hard, the chair falls over. “Little lady, you’d do best to shut your mouth.”
“Funny thing, I’ve never been accused of being a lady.” I spit blood onto the floor.
“No, it doesn’t seem like you would. Clay’s mother was that way, too. All sass and fight, she was the night she died, too.” Oh my God. “Never the less, you’re going to make a phone call.”
I shake my head. “Who do you want me to call, 911? Because I’ll call them. Just give me the address to this place.”
I can see he’s getting irritated. He tries to shove the phone to my face but I shake my head. “What, you don’t know how to work a phone? Why don’t you get Uncle Fester over there to help you out? I’m sure between the two of you it can be figured out. Better yet, go get your piece of shit nephew out of the parking lot. All of those years of college should be worth more than sticking his hands up women’s vaginas.”
He lets out a deep chuckle. “I like your smartass mouth. Now shut it before I find something else for you to do with it.”
Uncle Fester sits me back up in my chair. My lip is throbbing and I feel the warm trickle of blood running down.
My sister always said that if someone kidnapped me when I was little, they’d have brought me back in an hour because I annoyed the shit out of them. Now’s the time to try.
“Well, Mike, that wouldn’t be a great idea. Why are men so dumb when it comes to their dick?”
He laughs. “Do tell.”
“Men always threaten to shove a dick in some girl’s mouth to shut her up, but they really could just succeed in getting their dick bit off. I mean seriously, that’s the dumbest line I’ve ever heard. ‘I’ll find something else for you to do with it blah blah blah.’ Just dumb.”
He chuckles. “Well you certainly have opinions, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do, and get over that shit because most of the time they’re right.”
“I can see you being a handful,” he says, walking away. You have no idea, motherfucker.
I’m going to start singing the most annoying damn songs ever on the planet. “There’s a hole, there’s a hole, there’s a hole in the bottom of the sea. There’s a log in the hole in the bottom of the sea. There’s a log in the hole in the bottom of the sea.” I keep singing until I can tell I’m getting to them. Once I finish that song, I start a new one.
“I like big butts and I cannot lie. You other brothers can’t deny.”
“Please shut up!” the Paul guy begs.
I ignore him. “From the windows to the walls!”
Uncle Fester comes running in. “Grab her. Cops are up the street. We have to go with Plan B.” They drag me from the warehouse and throw me in a van. The warehouse explodes as we are driving away.
Shit. He’s going to think I’m dead.
CHAPTER 29
GIBBS
Thirty minutes later, they’ve figured out which warehouse they’re in. I see shithead Gavin’s car from here. We stop down the street but before the SWAT and other deputies can get close, the warehouse blows. A huge orange ball of fire erupts. I jump out of the cab of the truck. “Jade!” I scream, falling to my knees in a sob.
My heart hurts, feeling like it’s being torn into a million shreds.
I jump up and run toward the building, being taken down by Huck. I’m close enough to the deputies that now I can hear one of their radios. “A van just barreled out of the back parking lot. Took out two cruisers.” You can tell the guy on the other end is out of breath. “Dark green panel van, damage to the front.”
Half of the vehicles squeal from the parking lot, going in the only direction the van could’ve went. Fire trucks speed into the parking lot, getting set to put out the fire.
Huck pulls me up from the ground. “Wait just a minute. We don’t know that she’s in there.”
My phone rings. I look down and see an unknown number. Huck runs and grabs Mack as I answer the phone on speaker. “Hello.”
“Tell the cops to back off or else I will kill her,” a cold, stoic voice says over the phone.
“What do you want, Mike?”
I hear the phone fumbling around on his end. “I’m gonna kick your ass, motherfucker! You hear that, Gavin, I’m gonna rip your pencil dick off and feed you your own balls!” Then another voice moans in pain.
Yep, my girl is fine. “Can you stop her from killing my nephew?” he says to one of the other guys in the van obviously. Turning the conversation back to me, he says, “As you can hear, she’s fine right now, but not for much longer if I don’t get all of the money that’s owed to me. She’s a fighter, just like that mother of yours was. Do you want the same fate for her? ”
I want to give him all of it, just so I can get Jade back safe and sound. But if she’s not being a pussy, which I can still hear her fighting like the redhead she is, I can’t either. “What the hell makes you think I owe you a motherfucking thing?”
“Your father owed me a lot of money when he died, the money he made was mine.”
“And that’s my problem how? Don’t think you can bully me, you fucking pussy. That firecracker in the van has more balls than you. As far as asking the cops to back off, fuck that,” I bark into the phone.
I hear more fighting and screaming, a loud crash with the sounds of metal against metal, just before the call is dropped. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as helpless as I do right at this moment.
“All units, please be advised, the panel van crashed into a power pole in the South bound lane of Blighton Avenue,” the officer closest to the crash relays through the radio.
“Huck, get me to her.”
Mack motions for us to follow him and Mox to his SUV. My heart feels like it may blow apart. I just hope to God when I get there that she’s okay. I don’t think I could live if she wasn’t. Something I’ve realized tonight is that I loved my parents with everything in me, but it would be totally different if I lost my Firecracker.
Arriving on the scene, I see the van has rolled several times and glass is everywhere. Everyone tries to stop me, but they can’t. I run straight to the van. “Jade! Firecracker!” I hear a soft, pitiful moan.
Climbing in through a broken window, I see her pinned under a seat. Gavin is bleeding, along with some weird looking guy. I’m pretty sure the driver and Mike are dead. Huck reaches in and grabs me, pulling me from the wreck. “Get out of the way so they can help them.”
Everything around me seems to move in slow motion while they cut the vehicle open, trying to get them out. Once she’s out and loaded into an ambulance, Mox comes over to us. Looking at Huck, he relays, “You need to call Sly, get Kara and her mom to the hospital.” He turns to me. “Are you riding to the hospital with her?”
“Yeah.” I run to the ambulance.
Looking at her body all cut up and bruised chokes me up. I grab her hand without thinking. “Baby, I love you. Chelsea was right the other day. You get through this so I can tell you that every day for the rest of our lives.”
She tries to mumble something, but then all kinds of alarms and beeping noises go crazy. At that same moment, I feel like I’ve been kicked in the gut.
~*~*~
Sitting in the waiting room of a hospital has to be one of the coldest, most stressful places on the planet.
Jade coded in the ambulance and I immediately fell apart. Her mom and sister
are sitting here. Kara is still somewhat dazed from her sedative.
The paramedics were able to bring her back. For the past two hours she’s been in surgery for all kinds of injuries. As are the assholes Gavin and actually Mike, who I thought was dead.
A doctor steps through the doors. “Chambers family?”
We all jump to our feet. Sly has an arm around both Kara and her mother, Eve. “I’m Dr. Macon. It’s been touch and go because of some of the bleeding. There is an orthopedic surgeon in there now resetting some broken bones and a few other things he’ll explain. I had to remove her spleen and repair a laceration to her liver. We also have to keep her under close observation for any brain swelling. She’ll be in the hospital for a while and I’m sure she’s going to have to do some physical therapy for the broken bones. That’s something Dr. Reagan will talk to you about. For now, though, just stay strong for her. She’s going to need some support. She’s been through a very traumatizing evening.”
Eve hugs him. “Thank you so much.” I hear her sigh. “She’s my baby, I don’t know what I would do without her.”
An hour later, Dr. Reagan comes out to chat with us. “The right side of her body took most of the impact during the crash. With her hands being bound, she couldn’t really do what our body normally does to protect itself from a fall. Several of her ribs were fractured, we will keep those wrapped. Her right clavicle was broken, along with the right humerus in her arm. Her right tibia was broken, so she’ll have that in a cast for a few months. She’ll have to be in a wheelchair since the arm injuries will prevent her from being able to use crutches and she’ll need therapy for a little while after the casts are removed. As for right now, she’s in recovery and will be moved to ICU to keep check on the brain, as Dr. Macon told you. She should be moved within the hour. I know it sounds like a lot but she’s a lucky girl. She could’ve been paralyzed or worse.”
I shake his hand while Eve hugs him. I say, “Thanks, Dr. Reagan. I’ll be taking care of her, so she’ll get whatever she needs.”
Gaining Gibbs (Marco's MMA Boys #4) Page 12
