“What—?”
Wes grimaced as Brooks violently shook Davenport. Davenport was by no means a small man, but Brooks clearly had some kind of offense training under his belt. “Did you swallow the locket?”
“Get off me, Brooks!”
“McAllen, block the camera,” snarled Brooks as he backed Davenport against the cell wall.
Wes obeyed, moving into the camera’s line of sight so that Brooks’s tussle with Davenport was hidden from view. Then Brooks took hold of Davenport’s chin, forced his mouth open, and stuck two fingers down his throat. Davenport retched, his hands scrabbling at Brooks’s wrists without finding purchase.
“Come on, Davenport,” urged Brooks. As Davenport gagged again, Wes backed away. He didn’t want to be in the line of fire. Besides, the sound at the back of Davenport’s throat had already brought the taste of bile to Wes’s tongue.
With one last probing from Brooks, Davenport leaned forward and vomited. At first, all that came up was stomach acid. Then the clink of metal hitting the concrete floor of the cell caught Brooks’s attention. He motioned to Wes, who stifled a groan and knelt down to sift through the mess with his baton. Davenport slumped against the wall, panting, but Brooks kept a firm hold on his collar. Wes unearthed the locket from its vile location, collected it with a plastic baggie, and tucked it into the pocket of his police jacket.
As Wes stood, Brooks shoved Davenport to the cot and moved behind Wes so that he was blocking the camera. “Finish him, McAllen.”
Wes stared down at Davenport. For weeks now, Wes had viewed Donovan as a major pain in the ass, but seeing Davenport drooped over the metal cot with his hair askew and his face shining with sweat, Wes marveled at the fact that just hours before, he had been scared shitless of the younger man. The time had come to enact justice, to give Donovan what he had been threatening to give Wes ever since he had been kidnapped that morning. Except it wasn’t justice. It was revenge. And the two words never seemed so different to Wes than they did in that moment.
“What are you waiting for, McAllen?” Brooks shoved Wes in the back so that he stumbled toward Davenport. “You want to stay alive? Follow the Morrigan’s orders. Get rid of him.”
“I can’t believe you, Brooks,” rasped Donovan. His voice was hoarse. “Best friends since your freshman year. I brought you into the Raptors. I made you what you are now. And now you’re going to let some no-name, blue-collar cop take me out?”
Brooks looked down at Donovan, his face emotionless. “I am loyal to the Black Raptor Society and to no one else. McAllen, do it now or else the Morrigan gets you as her new plaything.”
Wes knelt down on level with the cot, taking Donovan’s already wrinkled shirt in his fist. He stared into Donovan’s eyes, looking for something—remorse, guilt, penitence—but Donovan looked straight back at him with nothing but confidence and pride.
“Do it, McAllen,” hissed Donovan, but his fingers pried at Wes’s hands in a desperate attempt at freedom.
Wes drew a switchblade from another pocket of his police jacket and flicked the knife open. In the metal, he saw the reflection of Brooks behind him, waiting impatiently for him to carry out Flynn’s orders. As Wes moved the blade closer to the artery in Davenport’s wrist, Davenport bucked recklessly. Wes’s police training kicked in. With both hands, he pulled Davenport forward then slammed his head against the cell wall with all of his might. Immediately, Davenport went limp. He wasn’t unconscious yet, but his eyes glazed over as Wes addressed him.
“Is this what it feels like?” whispered Wes. “Is this what it’s like to a Raptor? Did the illusion of power course through you every time you held someone at gunpoint, Donovan? Did it make you feel special?”
Davenport’s head lolled to the side. There was no telling if he could even comprehend Wes’s speech. Wes pulled on his collar again, straightening him.
“Because I don’t feel special, Donovan,” Wes went on, pressing the knife to Davenport’s throat. “I feel empty. Vacant. That’s what the Raptors have done to me. And I swear to God, if Nicole winds up hurt or dead because of your damned pride, you will feel my wrath in hell. Do you understand, Davenport?”
Davenport was in no condition to answer. For a moment longer, Wes considered his options. He still gripped the knife in one hand, his knuckles white. With one flick of Wes’s wrist, Donovan Davenport would cease to exist. Yet for some reason, as the blade quivered above Davenport’s throbbing carotid artery, Wes couldn’t do it. With a defeated sigh, Wes released Davenport and stood.
Behind him, Brooks rolled his eyes. He snatched the switchblade from Wes’s hand and leaned over Davenport’s cot. “Bitch,” he spat at Wes, and without even looking at his prey, Brooks plunged the knife into Davenport’s throat.
The spray of blood caught Wes off guard. He turned away, but not soon enough to avoid seeing the knife sticking out of Davenport’s neck at an odd angle as blood gushed out of the wound. Clogged coughing sounds made their way out of Davenport’s mouth, and he slouched to one side, spilling crimson blood across the thin, white mattress of the cot. Brooks wrenched the knife from Davenport’s throat and shoved Wes out of the cell.
“Move it,” ordered Brooks as Wes stared openmouthed at Davenport’s convulsing body. “We need to get out before that bitch at the front desk comes looking.”
Brooks strolled away from the row of holding cells. Wes, his mind blank from the shock, followed absentmindedly behind him, leaving Donovan Davenport to die alone.
22
When Wes and Brooks returned to the warehouse, they found Flynn pacing back and forth between the locked reinforced trunk and the metal folding chair. As Brooks slid the warehouse door shut behind them and shoved Wes forward, Flynn turned toward them, her palms splayed out in a gesture of expectation.
“Well?” she demanded, pausing her frenetic patrol near the trunk.
“We got it,” reported Brooks. He grabbed Wes by the collar of his police jacket, reached into the pocket, and extracted the baggie containing the locket.
Flynn rushed forward, snatching the plastic bag from Brooks’s grasp, a triumphant grin plastered across her sharply angled features. However, when she saw that the locket was encased in a mucous layer of vomit, she grimaced and handed it off to Wes.
“If you’d be so kind, Officer McAllen,” she said. Wes rolled his eyes, accepted the bag, and headed toward the bathroom, listening with a keen ear to the conversation that continued to echo through the warehouse behind him.
“Donovan?” asked Flynn in a low voice.
“Taken care of,” replied Brooks. “Although your plan to have McAllen do it fell through. He chickened out.”
Wes heard Flynn’s exasperated sigh as he lifted the handle on the sink in the bathroom, carefully coaxing the locket out of the baggie so as not to make contact with any of Donovan’s leftover stomach bile. As the tap dribbled and frigid water from the cold pipes flowed out over the gold locket, Wes listened closely.
“To be honest, I didn’t expect him to go through with it,” admitted Flynn. “He’s far too moral. It had to be done, of course.”
Brooks grunted in agreement. “I believe you made the right choice, ma’am. Donovan’s greed and rash actions were becoming a hazard to us. I apologize again for my involvement with the cop’s abduction. Donovan told me that you had cleared it.”
“Worry not, Ashton,” cooed Flynn, her voice smooth and soothing. It made the hair on Wes’s arms stand up. “Though Donovan’s little revenge jaunt into Nicole Costello’s apartment wasn’t precisely planned, it worked out to our advantage, wouldn’t you say? For thirty years, I’ve been searching for the key to open that damn trunk. Now, I can finally be free of that nasty woman’s hold on me.”
Her tone had darkened at the mention of Nicole’s mother. Absentmindedly, Wes scrubbed at the locket then pinched it open. Inside, the pictures of Nicole and him beamed innocently back at him. A small smile touched his lips. He remembered the day they had taken those
pictures. It was one year after they had graduated from the same state school, and the day had also marked the first full year of their relationship. To celebrate, they had gone to Peru and embarked on the hike up to the ruins of Machu Picchu. When they reached the citadel, drenched in sweat and impossibly out of breath, Nicole had insisted on taking pictures to commemorate their adventure. When she’d put the pictures in the locket, covering up the faded photos of her mother and father, Wes had protested at first. He had asked her why she wanted to use the pictures of their flushed, sweaty faces rather than the nicer, posed photographs that they had taken at their university graduation a year prior.
“Because this is real,” she had replied, trimming the edge of one picture to ensure that it would fit in the miniscule frame of the locket. She held up the photo of Wes’s red face—he was grinning from ear to ear. “This is the product of hard work. It’s true emotion. We made the journey together.”
“But we graduated together.”
“It’s different. We were just friends then. This was something that we consciously decided to tackle together.”
As Wes stood in the warehouse bathroom, recalling the conversation, he had a sudden epiphany. Nicole had been right. The pictures at Machu Picchu were far more emotionally valuable to him than the photos of their graduation, despite how exhausted they appeared. Since then, he and Nicole had always been a team. Often, Wes forgot to appreciate how effective their communication was with one another. If one of them faltered, the other was sure to show up and pick up the slack.
Their forced separation was no excuse to falter, Wes realized. Ever since the Raptors had abducted him, he had been trying to think of a way out. Thinking, but not acting. It was time to advance the concept of problem-solving to a full-blown execution of an escape attempt.
A frigid breeze ruffled Wes’s hair, and when he glanced up, he noticed that the Raptors had left the window in the bathroom cracked open to allow a little airflow in the small, musty room. The window wasn’t large, and it was set high in the wall, but with a little luck and determination, Wes was certain that he could wiggle through it.
The murmur of conversation wafted from the main room of the warehouse and into the bathroom. Flynn and Brooks were still preoccupied. Wes lifted the handle on the sink as high as it would go, hoping the gush of water into the basin would muffle the sounds of his escape. Then he slipped the locket into the pocket of his pants, stepped up on the toilet to reach the window, and lifted it open with a grunt. He shrugged out of his police jacket—it was far too bulky to consider leaving on—and shoved it through the window first. Then he hoisted himself up, using the toilet seat as leverage, and wormed his torso through the small opening.
“Oh no, you don’t, McAllen,” said a rough voice behind him, and a meaty hand seized Wes around the ankle and yanked him downward.
Wes anchored his palms against the outside of the building, but it was to no avail. He kicked out blindly, hoping to connect with a vulnerable part of Brooks’s body. Briefly, his antagonist let go. Wes lurched forward, desperate to clear the window, but Brooks tackled his legs, wrapping his muscled arms around Wes’s calves and dragging him back through the window with his full body weight. The tendons in Wes’s arms protested. Brooks was too strong, and Wes feared that if he struggled much longer, Brooks would wrench his shoulders right out of their sockets. Accepting that he had lost this battle, he folded his arms across his chest and allowed Brooks to wrench him back into the warehouse bathroom. The back of his head hit the window frame as he and Brooks fell to the tile floor, sending a fresh wave of agony over him. He groaned, his legs tangled up with Brooks’s, and cradled his head in his hands.
“Nice try, asshole,” panted Brooks. He detached himself from Wes and hopped up to the toilet to smash the window closed. The pane rattled, and the sound reverberated in Wes’s ears, signifying another failed attempt at returning to Nicole. Brooks roughly grabbed Wes by the scruff of his collared police shirt, hauling him to his feet. Still dizzy from his head wound, Wes staggered into the warehouse, and Brooks deposited him at Flynn’s polished, high-heeled boots.
“What happened?” she asked lazily. She looked almost bored, peering down at Wes with one eyebrow raised quizzically, as if she were merely the headmistress of a private school admonishing one of her students.
“He tried to get out through the window,” said Brooks, nudging Wes with the toe of his snow boot.
Flynn knelt down and lifted Wes’s chin with her index finger so that he would look her in the eye. “Oh, Weston. Did you think it would be so easy? What have you done with the locket?”
Wes jerked his chin away from her. To be in such close proximity to her face made him anxious. She rolled her eyes and patted him down, taking care to caress him in the most uncomfortable way possible, before she found the locket in the pocket of his pants.
“Thank you, my dear,” she said to Wes, stroking his hair with her free hand. He turned away from her, disgusted, as she opened the locket. “How sweet,” she simpered, taking in the photos of Nicole and Wes. “True love. Let me tell you something, Weston, and take my word for it. It never lasts.”
She strode over to the reinforced trunk, angling the necklace at the mouth of its lock. Without fail, the open locket slipped into the peculiar shape unchallenged, and Wes heard the unmistakable click of the locking mechanism moving out of place. As Flynn lifted the lid, battling with the protest of its rusty hinges, Brooks craned his neck to watch the process from his defensive position over Wes. As the lid finally thunked back, revealing the contents, Flynn braced herself on either side of the trunk and peered inside.
For a moment, Flynn remained motionless. Her back was turned to Wes so he couldn’t see her face, but she seemed frozen in time. Then, with a slow, deliberate movement of her right hand, she reached into the trunk to sift through whatever lay inside. Her shoulders rose, tensing, and when she turned to face Wes and Brooks again, it was not with an expression of exultation as Wes had expected, but with a fury that burned like a wildfire behind her blazing, black eyes. In that instant, Wes feared for his life, for a woman that possessed such an intense rage was sure not to spare him.
“Where… is… it?” she asked, the words leaving her mouth one at a time as though she did not have the control to form any longer of a sentence.
“Where’s what?” asked Wes.
“The footage,” hissed Flynn. She crawled across the floor to where Wes still knelt on the cool, polished concrete. With one manicured hand, she gripped the front of Wes’s police uniform, bringing his face within an inch of her own. “The security footage. The tapes that your girlfriend’s damned father so exquisitely captured my first murder on. The tapes that your girlfriend’s mother stole from the Black Raptor Society’s clubhouse in order to put me in an early grave! Those tapes, McAllen! Where are they?”
She shook Wes violently, and he took hold of her hands in an effort to remove himself from her grasp. She was surprisingly strong. Her rage rumbled through her and into Wes. In his weakened state, he could only hope to hold his head still enough to not inflict any more damage as she rattled him like a rag doll.
Brooks inched forward to inspect the contents of the trunk. He reached in and pulled out a handful of VHS tapes. Wes caught a glimpse of them; bright, primary colors splashed across the jacket sleeves, displaying bubbly font and animated characters.
“They’re kids’ videos,” said Brooks, disbelief evident in his tone. He shook one tape out of its cover, examining the tape itself, then dropped it back into the trunk and took out another. “They’re all just kids’ TV shows. What the hell?”
Flynn’s fingers tightened at the collar of Wes’s shirt. “McAllen,” she breathed, so close to Wes’s face that he could smell her minty mouthwash. “Let me make myself perfectly clear. If, after all this time, I am not in possession of that security footage and you have no idea as to where the real tapes are, then you are of no further use to me. Your life has no value to me.
You become obsolete. With this knowledge in mind, contemplate your response to me very cautiously before you reply to my next question. Where are the tapes?”
Wes only stared into Flynn’s obsidian eyes. He could see his own reflection in them, the projection of his pale, defeated expression gazing blankly back at him. He had no idea where the tapes were—he had no idea that they had even existed before his time in the Raptors’ warehouse—and he was certain that Nicole did not know of their existence either. Anthony and Natasha had left a mess for their daughter to muddle through, intentionally or not, and now Wes and Nicole had to pay the price. Wes felt numb, but the lack of any emotion served to quash the despondency that rose underneath.
“McAllen,” she warned. “Tell me.”
“I don’t know,” whispered Wes.
“Pardon?”
“I don’t know where the tapes are,” he repeated in a stronger voice.
Flynn inhaled through her nose, her nostrils flaring. “Then you give me no choice.”
Her hands encircled Wes’s neck, and she pressed her thumbs to Wes’s windpipe. He coughed, pushing at Flynn, but Brooks approached him from behind, captured his hands, and held them behind his back. His vision blurred, and fireworks of light began to play at the edges of his perception. This was it then. He couldn’t breathe… couldn’t move. He allowed his eyes to flutter shut. Nicole’s face appeared before him. They were back at Machu Picchu. She whirled around, her arms wide as if to welcome the massive expanse of blue sky into her very soul. A laugh echoed through the mountains around them, and Wes could hear it now. The warehouse vanished entirely, and as his lungs surrendered what was sure to be his last breath, he gave himself over to unconsciousness.
“Catherine!”
Suddenly, the pressure around Wes’s throat disappeared, and he keeled over, resting his forehead on the cold concrete and drawing in a desperate, rasping gasp as the blood returned to his head. Footsteps echoed around him as Flynn got to her feet, and Wes heard the warehouse door sliding back into place.
The Professor Page 24
