Authors: Bryan Smith
“I’m maybe ninety-percent dyke, Casey.” Dez laughed. “But the other ten percent of me wouldn’t mind taking you for a test drive.”
Echo glared at her. “Not cool, Dez. You know he’s mine. Cut the shit.”
Dez kept her eyes on Casey. “He’s mine if I want him.”
“No. He isn’t.” Casey could hear the tension in Echo’s voice. She was fighting hard to hold back her anger and not go ballistic. “Take your feet off his lap. Now.”
Dez looked at her. “Maybe I’ll fight you for him. Who do you think would win?”
Though her tone was playful, Casey detected a hint of something more malicious under the surface. And if he could discern it, Echo sure as hell wasn’t missing it. This was an interesting and unsettling development. The bond these women shared was maybe beginning to fray a bit around the edges. This disturbed him for reasons beyond the current moment of confrontation, mostly because it indicated Echo’s faith in their ability to help him with his sister wasn’t founded on anything much.
Echo sighed and adopted a slightly more obsequious tone. “Dez…please take your feet off my boyfriend’s balls.”
“Oh? So he’s your boyfriend again, is he?” Dez glanced at Lana. “Hey, who was that chick we were talking to last night? Black hair. Bangs. Pale skin. Very pretty. Said something about wanting to blow out the brains of her scumbag ex. You remember that? Who was that chick?”
Lana shrugged and took a drink from a bottle of beer that was wet with little beads of condensation. “Maybe I recall something like that. But relationships are complicated. People change their minds about the people they’re banging all the time.”
Dez nodded. “But it’s a hell of a leap to go from wanting to blow a motherfucker away to suddenly reconciling. Am I wrong?”
Another shrug from Lana. “It’s like I said. These things are complicated.”
Dez slid her feet out of Casey’s lap and sat up straight. “Whatever.” She cut a look at Echo. “Chill, bitch. It’s like you said, I’m just messing with him. You know that. Why so uptight?”
Casey could see the tension drain from Echo’s features as she let out a breath. “I’m just tired. A lot of intense shit happened this afternoon. We need to talk about that thing I was telling you about.”
“You mean about his sister?”
“Yeah.”
Dez nodded. “Right. We’ll get to that. But first things first.” She slugged Casey in the shoulder. “You’re not getting out of this.” There was a gun at the edge of the table. She picked it up and aimed it at his chest. “Now snort up or I’ll do what Echo was too softhearted and sentimental to do. You’ve got five seconds.”
Casey’s aversion to drugs yielded to pragmatism. He bent to the table and snorted half the line Dez had cut for him with the credit card. A quick glance her way told him that wasn’t good enough, so he finished the line. “There. Could you please not point that at me? It’s making me nervous.”
“One more line.”
“Oh, come on.”
“One more.” She cocked the hammer on the gun for dramatic effect. “Or I put a bullet through your heart.”
Casey sighed and made no effort to hide his frustration.
But he did the second line.
And just as he was finishing it, he heard a soft sound of suffering issuing from somewhere else in the house. “What was that?”
Dez’s smile was all patently false innocence. “What was what?”
The sound came again.
Casey knew Dez wouldn’t give anything away—she was a world class bitch who enjoyed playing mind games far too much for that—so he shifted his focus to the other girls. Lana looked at him evenly when his gaze shifted in her direction. She took another swallow of beer and said nothing. Echo’s expression was slightly more troubled, but she also opted to remain silent for the moment.
He pushed the chair back and got up from the table when he heard the sound a third time. Someone in another part of the house was whimpering in a way that suggested intense discomfort and/or pain. There was a familiar quality to the sound, one he’d heard before in hospitals and hospices. It was an expression of distress unique to the dying.
Casey walked out of the kitchen and into the dusty living room, where he stopped for a moment and listened. The girls were close behind him. The next whimper was followed by a pitiful fit of muffled crying.
There was a hallway on the opposite side of the living room. Casey directed a quick glance at Echo before starting in that direction. Her mouth was a tight line of tension. It was clear she wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of him locating the source of the cries. It wasn’t an expression of shame, not exactly, just apprehension.
The girls followed him down the hallway until he stopped at a closed door on the left. The door had been decorated with markers of various bright colors. Written in large block letters were the words
FUN ZONE!!!
Surrounding the words were various crude renderings of people being executed via guillotine, hangman’s noose and a bullet to the head.
Casey looked at Dez. “Your work, I guess.”
“It was a team effort.”
Lana said, “We were tripping balls that night.”
Casey grimaced. “Lovely.”
He opened the door and went inside.
A bruised and bloodied young man sat bound to a chair. The girls had used a combination of duct tape and electrical cords to secure him firmly to it. His clothes were in filthy, blood-stained tatters. His shirt was so shredded it barely clung to his body. Through the many rents in the fabric, Casey could see countless raw and oozing wounds. Some looked infected, which suggested he had been held hostage a significant amount of time, weeks or longer. The stench arising from his soiled clothes supported this theory. Nails had been driven through his knees and through the tops of his bare feet.
The man was awake as they entered the room. His eyes pleaded with Casey as he came closer and bent down to look at him more closely. There was something wrong with his tongue, something that made closing his mouth difficult and rendered speech impossible. It was hugely bloated and gray. Casey suspected a failed attempt at excision. The bloated wedge of infected flesh looked like a dead thing living inside his mouth. The splintered remains of his teeth made the sight even more stomach-churning. Someone had bashed them out with a hammer. There were bloody tooth fragments all over the floor in front of the chair.
He turned away from the poor bastard in the chair. “Someone want to tell me what’s going on here? Why have you been torturing this guy?”
Dez smiled. “Because it’s fun.” She looked at Echo, her expression expectant and domineering. Casey had a sudden insight. This chick was a bully. She had probably been pushing Echo around from day one. He wouldn’t have believed anyone could do that to her, but the truth was obvious. “Isn’t that right, Echo?”
Echo looked at the floor. “Yeah.”
Dez looked at Casey. “There you go. Anything else you want to know?”
Casey didn’t have the first clue what to do about the guy in the chair. Dez still had the gun she had pointed at him in the kitchen. She wasn’t pointing it at him now, but that didn’t really matter. Even if she didn’t have the gun, it would still be the three of them against him. When it came down to it, he knew Echo would be on their side in any kind of struggle. There might be some dysfunction here, but they were a gang, a tightly knit unit. He could see from Echo’s expression that nothing about their captive’s condition shocked or disgusted her. They had done things like this many times. She had told him in a general way about the murders, but minus visual proof of what that meant there had been a kind of disconnect from the reality of it.
That had changed.
Again, though, pragmatism had to rule the day. This guy was fucking doomed. It sucked, but there was nothing he could do about it. If he took any kind of action other than simply accepting that, he would be fucking doomed too.
Casey looked Dez in the eye and shook his head. “No. There’s nothing else I need to know.”
“Good.”
Dez pulled a slim object from a pocket of her tight denim cutoffs and tossed it to him. It landed on the hardwood floor with a clatter. He glanced down and saw a small folding knife at his feet. A spring-button on the side indicated it was a switchblade.
He looked at Dez.
She smiled. “Pick it up.”
He did as he was told. What other choice did he have?
“Wonderful. Now press the little button on the side and stick that blade in Micah’s neck.”
Casey stared at Dez. He didn’t press the button. “What?”
She raised the gun and pointed it at him. “Do it or you don’t leave this room alive.”
Casey believed her. He glanced at Echo in desperate hope of some sign of solace, but there was nothing there. Just a hard, resolute mask. Maybe she wasn’t thrilled about him being forced into this situation, but she knew there was no way out of it.
His gaze settled on Dez again. “I’ll do it. I know I’ve got no choice.”
“That’s right. You don’t.” Her expression softened some, but Casey figured that was just more manipulation on her part. “But here’s the thing. I know you think you’re being made to do something terrible for no reason, but that’s not true. Consider this an initiation. If Echo is serious about taking you back, I’ll have to respect that, but not until you prove yourself to us. Do this thing and you’ll be one of us, a part of our family. And as family, we’ll do whatever we can to help your sister.”
Casey studied her face. She wasn’t smirking and there were no obvious signs of deception. With someone like Dez, that didn’t necessarily mean anything. He had no clue whether her offer to help was sincere.
In the end, it boiled down to making a leap of faith.
A hugely fucked-up leap of faith, but it was all he had.
He turned away from the women and approached Micah, who started shaking and whimpering louder than ever. His shining eyes looked up at Casey. They were open wide and devoid of hope. All he wanted now was deliverance from this suffering. Casey didn’t need to read his mind to know that. He was afraid to die, but who wasn’t?
Casey pressed the button and the blade popped open.
He mouthed two words:
I’m sorry.
And then he plunged the knife deep into Micah’s neck.
Chapter Nineteen
De Rais Ranch
Six days after the shootout on 2
nd
Avenue
The raid everyone had been expecting finally happened. Thanks to his security team’s police connection, John Wayne de Rais was warned of it a full day in advance. It was more than enough time to craft a façade of harmlessness. There was nothing to be done about the bodies buried out in the woods, but de Rais was confident the graves would go undiscovered for now. The corpses were buried deep in areas beyond the borders of his property. By the time they eventually were exhumed, it would be too late to matter.
The law arrived in force early in the morning to serve the search warrant. The Order offered no resistance whatsoever, despite the brusque demeanor of the lead investigator on the scene. They had prepared for this and knew what was expected of them. There would be no repeat of the Waco standoff at the de Rais compound. The top cop’s frustration mounted throughout the course of the search. He had expected to find large caches of illegal weapons and narcotics. All he did find was a modest assortment of legally acquired handguns and hunting rifles. Excuses were manufactured to confiscate these along with several computers from the big house. A handful of Order followers were busted for possession of small amounts of weed and other substances. All the serious weaponry had been temporarily moved to another location, as had the hard drives of any computers containing genuinely sensitive information.
The search went on for several tedious hours, but John Wayne never became visibly irritated. He politely answered every question asked of him and even made occasional suggestions about where the jackbooted thugs might search for hidden contraband, which only further stoked the lead investigator’s ire.
The man was under a lot of pressure. The city was still screaming for a resolution to the mystery of the 2
nd
Avenue shooter. And now, mere days later, a rising country star and her boyfriend had been slaughtered in spectacularly grisly fashion in an upscale Nashville neighborhood. Melanie Montgomery’s killers had written on the walls of her home with her blood, things about revolution and a cleansing rain of blood. Most of the grislier aspects of the crime had been withheld by investigators, but news of the scrawled messages leaked to the press. This rattled an already spooked public and led to intense speculation about a possible link to the Order.
Which was all to the good.
John wanted people scared. He also welcomed the suspicion. He reveled in the idea of all those lips flapping to no effect. After years of writing him off as a harmless flake, the local power structure now believed he was anything but harmless and had set in motion plans to dismantle his organization. Of course they were fully capable of doing just that. John harbored no illusions to the contrary. But his enemies were hampered by the need to follow certain processes that would take time. And while the wheels of justice were just beginning their slow, methodical grind where he was concerned, he was already prepared to implement his endgame.