Authors: Bryan Smith
She stood there without moving for many long moments. She still felt nothing like remorse. Blaine was gone and it was as if his passing had lifted a mental veil she hadn’t known was there. She knew at once she had never really loved him. It was a thing she had fooled herself into believing because a great love was the kind of thing girls were conditioned into thinking they needed and wanted. The reality of Blaine came into stark relief in those moments. He was a slacker, earning barely more than minimum wage at his warehouse gig while expecting her to pick up the tab for virtually everything, including most of his music gear.
A sudden piercing wail from the other side of the bed made her jump. In the next instant she recognized the sound as a baby’s cry.
Aw…shit.
Lana kicked Alice’s corpse. “
You fucking sick-ass bitch! You had your fucking baby in the room with you while you were fucking my fucking boyfriend!? What the fuck is your problem, you fucking whore?
”
Each of these inquiries was punctuated with more kicks.
Alice, of course, answered none of them.
And the baby continued to wail.
Lana circled the bed and stared down at the creature. He was a wrinkly little thing in a Motley Crue onesie. She had given Alice shit about the onesie. Aside from middle-aged fat guys, who in their right mind listened to Motley fucking Crue in this day and age? Especially that goddamn “Girls, Girls, Girls” song, which they all had to hear multiple times a day every day at the Booty Boutique.
She set her gun down on the bed and knelt to extract the squalling brat from a detachable car seat. She cradled the little guy in her arms and began cooing to him as she sat on the edge of the bed. She had little practical experience with babies and suspected she would not be able to coax this one back to silence. Not unless she shot it. But she didn’t want to shoot the baby. Despite everything, she wasn’t quite ready to cross
that
line. So she kept cooing at him and rocked him gently in her arms. She was shocked as he fell silent and stared up at her with round, wet eyes.
She smiled. “Sorry I shot your mommy, baby. But she was a fucking whore and deserved what she got. One day you’ll understand.”
She returned the baby to the car seat and did some serious thinking. Time passed. What had happened in this room had been very noisy. She had expected to hear sirens almost immediately. But something like twenty minutes had gone by and there was nothing. It was a little strange, but not inexplicable. A lot of their neighbors kept odd hours and were frequently gone. It was possible no one outside the apartment had heard anything. After another ten minutes of waiting around, she was sure of it.
The law wasn’t coming for her.
At least not yet.
Which left her with bodies and a live baby to dispose of, as well as a hell of a mess to clean up. Except that she hadn’t the faintest idea how she might go about accomplishing those things.
Or…did she?
She leapt off the bed and hurried out of the room. The scrap of paper with Big Ted’s phone number scrawled on it was still in her purse. Before leaving the Booty Boutique, he’d reiterated his desire for that private date. But that wasn’t all. He’d leaned close to whisper something else, a remark that made her laugh and roll her eyes at the time.
“There ever anything you need, sugar, you just let me know.” She could still feel his hot whiskey breath against her ear. “And I do mean anything at all, no matter how big or small. You give Big Ted a ring and I’ll take care of you.”
Lana fished the scrap of paper from her purse and stared at it indecisively for a long, fretful moment. This was a crazy impulse. Maybe, in an odd way, even crazier than the murders she had just committed. She didn’t know this Big Ted person at all. Not really. Sure, he talked a hell of a big game, but a lot of guys like that did. And she had no reason to suspect there was even the remotest chance he might actually help her.
But Lana didn’t know what else to do. She gave a moment’s thought to going on the run, but figured the cops would quickly catch up to her after discovering the bodies. She was no experienced criminal. Until today she’d committed only the pettiest of offenses. You had to really know what you were doing to successfully live life on the lam. Lana just didn’t have the necessary skills.
Not then.
Despite her misgivings, a very calm inner voice insisted she take a chance on calling Big Ted.
So she delved into her purse again and pulled out her iPhone.
She braced herself with a last deep breath.
Exhaled it.
And called Big Ted.
Chapter Three
Nashville, TN
Present day
A lot of people were out and about as Casey Miller cruised down Broadway toward 2
nd
Avenue. They were mostly tourists cruising the many gift shops, bars and live music venues that dominated the area. At least it was the middle of the week. What he had in mind would be impossible on a weekend, when the milling throngs would achieve a density requiring the police to block off the street to traffic. But the area was nonetheless busy enough that he stood a good chance of not being spotted too soon. The “borrowed” car he was driving should also help matters. He was wearing dark sunglasses and had his unruly, long blond hair tucked under a black baseball cap. And though it was early summer, he was wearing a plain black hoodie with the hood pulled up and cinched tight around his face. It was a look any lawman might find at least vaguely troubling, but that was a risk he was willing to take.
Keely Miller’s life depended on it.
His sister was older than he was by a year, but their birth order may as well have been reversed. Given her troubles, it was hard not to think of her as the baby sibling. She had lost her way somewhere along the line. It had started with drugs. She had financial difficulties as a result and eventually wound up losing her job. Then she got pinched by the cops for petty theft. It was a first offense and she was lucky enough to get off with light probation. But these things weren’t the real problem. Legal and substance issues were things that could be dealt with via some pretty standard approaches.
The shit she was into now was a different deal altogether.
Casey eased into the turn lane where Broadway intersected with 2
nd
Avenue and turned on the left blinker, waiting patiently while the light turned red. The thing he had planned had to go off perfectly in order to succeed. And quickly. If he faltered at all or bungled any aspect of it, the mission would fail and Keely would remain in the clutches of those crazy assholes. The plan was simple—snatch his sister off the street, muscle her into the car and burn rubber out of there before anyone could do a damn thing about it.
But there was a complicating factor.
This would be his second attempt to grab her. The first had occurred out by the old ranch house compound outside the city limits where they all stayed when they weren’t out recruiting. He had gone there ostensibly just to visit. Their guard hadn’t been up that time, probably because he had been out there to see Keely previously. So he was able to get her in his car and start tear-assing away from the farmhouse. What fouled it up was the long drive back down the private access road out to the main road. He hadn’t known it at the time, but they had people in position as a contingency for exactly this type of scenario. Cars were blocking the way out before he got there. A big truck pulled into position behind him, boxing him in. Keely, who had been screaming at him and cursing him the whole time, promptly bolted from the car. The men who had trapped him brandished guns, keeping him there while Keely was hustled back to the farmhouse. These men said nothing to him. It wasn’t their place. But they made him wait right there until the head honcho came down from the ranch house for a word with him.
The man was maybe fifty. People like Keely adored him and treated him like a messiah. John Wayne de Rais had his followers believing a lot of dangerous things. A lot of doomsday nonsense. They couldn’t see the truth about him, but for Casey it was plain as day.
“You’re never coming back here again,” de Rais told him that day, smiling without any warmth in his cold, calculating eyes. “And, boy, you are never going to see your sister again. She belongs to us now. If you show your face around here again, my men will kill you and bury you deep in the woods.”
Casey didn’t reply. He knew he had to back off for a while and do some planning before making his next move. After the group’s leader waved his men off, Casey drove calmly away and returned to his house to do some serious thinking.
The light turned green.
Casey cranked the steering wheel to the left and eased into 2
nd
Avenue. Thick streams of people moved in each direction on the wide sidewalks. No one was paying him any mind. The car he had picked up was a dark-colored late model Honda. There were countless millions just like it. It would afford him an extra degree of anonymity that might prove crucial.
He spotted them a block down the street. Several of them loitered by a bench at the edge of the sidewalk. Like Keely, they were all young. And mostly attractive, despite their attire, which was a mix of hippy and slacker motifs. It all added up to a general bohemian vibe, which was their goal, a second coming of the peace and love era at first glance. But it was a sham. Most locals knew this, but a lot of the people visiting this place were clueless. And every now and then some young new recruit would get seduced by their bullshit.
This was his third trip down the avenue this week. Cult members had been present every day, but Keely had not been among them. They rotated the recruiting crew on a daily basis. Casey kept his head down as he drew near them, but he observed the group of smiling young people from behind his dark sunglasses. His heart lurched as he spotted Keely among them. She was facing away from the street, engaged in an apparently spirited conversation with a tourist in a cowboy hat.
Keely clutched a stack of propaganda leaflets in one of her slender hands. Some of her friends were handing out leaflets too, while still others waved signs and engaged in obnoxious chants that conveyed vague messages of love and enlightenment while also exalting their glorious leader. One of the signs read,
HONK IF YOU LOVE JOHN WAYNE
.
Every now and then some idiot would actually honk, either a clueless tourist or some sarcastic local joker. The tourists didn’t know they weren’t honking to signal affection for the late cowboy actor. The “John Wayne” referred to by the sign was John Wayne de Rais, alias of the leader of the Order of Wandering Souls. The name of the group made it sound like they were advocating some benign stripe of neo-hippy foolishness. But Casey knew better. The truth was right out there in the open, for anyone with a brain to see. And it was a sick, sick joke. Most of de Rais’ followers were very young people. Gilles de Rais was the name of an infamous child murderer from the middle ages. Casey was no history buff. He knew this because he had looked the shit up. And when he’d made the connection, he knew right then he had to get Keely free of the cult no matter the cost.
Even if it meant his life.
This was it.
The moment of truth. Do or die. Everything was riding on what happened in these next few minutes. His sister’s future was hanging in the balance. It was up to him to see to it that she had a shot at some kind of normal life someday down the road. She would be furious with him now, but hopefully she would thank him later.
He eased the car to a stop and engaged the emergency brake. This was another carefully considered element of the plan. A sudden squelching of brakes would have alerted the hidden security team to possible danger too soon. In a situation like this, even an extra second or two could mean the difference between success and failure.
He was out of the car and racing up onto the sidewalk in a flash, brandishing a 9mm pistol. Cult members and pedestrians reacted predictably, with shouts and shrieks of fright. It was a natural reaction to seeing a hooded man waving a gun about in a public place. But the excitement was lost on Casey, whose sole focus was Keely. Her back was to him as he hit the sidewalk, but she turned toward him as she heard the shouts. He had her firmly gripped by an arm before she could take even a single step back. A male cult member with long, stringy hair attempted to intervene, but Casey was having none of that. He slammed the butt of the pistol into the center of the guy’s face, breaking his nose and sending him squawking to the sidewalk. Then he waved the gun again, backing off several other cult members as well as several random would-be heroes. The latter concerned him almost as much as the cult members, because they didn’t see a guy rescuing his sister. They saw a black-clad thug trying to abduct a young woman.
Keely was thrashing and screaming at him as he dragged her toward the car. Casey got her around to the other side, got the back door open and started shoving her inside. A number of people had edged close to him again from all sides, but they backed off some as the barrel of the gun whipped toward them. No one wanted to get shot. And he had already shown he would hurt anyone who got in his way. Those were factors that, thus far, were working in his favor. A couple more moments and he’d be on his way, mission accomplished.
Unfortunately, one pivotal factor did
not
work in his favor. And that was the utter disregard for human life de Rais’ men had. A glance over the roof of the Honda showed a burly, bald guy dressed all in black aiming a big handgun at him. Casey ducked an instant before the man squeezed the trigger of his gun. The gun made a big bang and someone behind Casey fell over dead in the street. Casey popped back up and fired a shot of his own over the roof. The slug took the big man in the shoulder and spun him about, but in his place were two more black-clad men with guns. Casey dropped to the street again as they opened fire, watching in dismay as more pedestrians on the opposite sidewalk sprouted wounds and went crashing to the ground. While he was pinned down, Keely took advantage of his momentary helplessness and slithered out of the car. He swiped a hand at the hem of her skirt, his fingertips brushing futilely over soft fabric as she made good her getaway. He screamed then as an immense frustration welled up inside him.