InnocenceForSale.com/ Bree, page 9
Up ahead was one of the first bends in the road that was more than a minor kink. Unfortunately, it was also at the top of a slight hill that I couldn’t see over. I didn’t know this road well enough to remember whether it was straight again on the other side or if there was another bend, so I slowed down again.
“Faster,” said Andrew. Then again with more urgency, “Faster!”
I pushed it as hard as I dared, but the headlights behind us grew closer and closer. Just as I turned the corner, their car bumped us on the right rear side and our back end fishtailed out slightly before regaining grip and straightening out.
“Faster!” Andrew yelled.
The road was dead-straight again in front of me, so I put my foot down and felt my seat pressing against my back with reassuring strength. Andrew shot again and I saw a brief spark in the rearview mirror just above the chasing headlights.
“Dammit! Who taught you how to drive?” Andrew said.
“You did, asshole!” I screamed over the rushing wind.
Andrew laughed and put his hand on my shoulder, giving it a squeeze. The road was straight and flat as far as the eye could see now, and my heartrate slowed down just enough to feel the separate beats again.
“A little slower,” he said. “Just a little.”
I pulled off the gas a fraction of an inch.
Andrew set his gun down on his lap and opened the glovebox to pull out a big white rag. I wished I had known about it when I was wiping the windows with my hand.
“What are you doing? What’s Midnight in a Mineshaft?” I asked.
“You like magicians?” he responded.
“No.”
As if I’d responded in the affirmative, he continued. “Half of the trick is in distraction. That’s why they always have a beautiful assistant. So the crowd is looking over there at the plunging neckline of that sparkly dress, while over here the magician is doing his thing.”
“Are you calling me a magician’s assistant?”
“No.” He tied the white rag around the gun. “For my next trick…this is my assistant.”
Andrew checked the distance of the car behind us and put his hand back on my shoulder. “Steady. You’re doing good. Steady, whatever happens, keep this speed.”
My heart picked up the pace again, feeling Andrew’s tension increase through his grip on my shoulder. Just as we were coming up to a crossroads, Andrew reached over and flicked the lights off.
The road ahead was plunged into darkness and I suddenly had to rely on the headlights of the car behind us to see anything. Even the sliver of moon had disappeared behind a cloud.
Andrew threw the gun and rag out the window on his side as hard as he could. I caught the flash of white material out of the corner of my eye. At the same time, I saw something dark moving towards me out of the corner of my other eye, on the driver’s side. Something big.
Then we were through the intersection. A split-second later, something came between us and the headlights behind, and the sound of the most sickening metallic crunch imaginable cut the headlights off completely, momentarily drowning out the wind and the Camaro’s engine.
Sparks glared in the rearview mirror and then all was black again. Andrew turned the headlights on and I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding as I welcomed back my forward vision.
“OK. Slow down. Turn around. Let’s see what we’re dealing with here.”
I let my foot off the accelerator, but couldn’t immediately bring myself to apply the brakes. My legs were trembling. Andrew squeezed my shoulder.
“You did great, Bree. Let’s find out who just failed to kill us.”
Somehow, I wrestled the car to a legal speed and then did a three-point-turn to head back in the direction we’d come from. At the intersection, our headlights lit up a big semi-truck, painted from top to bottom in matte black paint that rendered it almost invisible in the dark. Even the wheels were matte black. When we pulled close enough and stopped, I could read, in thin swirly lettering on the door, barely visible because it was in glossy black, Midnight in a Mineshaft.
Andrew
As soon as the wheels stopped, I undid my seatbelt and put the car into park for Bree, who was still gripping the steering wheel with intensity. With a couple of fingers, I pulled her head in my direction and kissed her again. Pulling away, I took her hands from the steering wheel and clasped them in her lap.
This wasn’t my first car chase or gun fight. It wasn’t even my first combined car chase and gun fight, but the thrill of being back in the thick of the action instead of safely back in my fortress in Pulbridge was only magnified by sharing it with Bree.
“You did great,” I repeated. “Hop over to the passenger seat and stay here. This could be messy.”
I circled around the front of the huge reinforced tank of a semi-truck that was Midnight in a Mineshaft. When we built it back in the early nineties, it was with the same school of thought that Don Mancini’s engineers had with Cammy, except the truck had a bigger frame and more space to add reinforcement to.
The car was fucked, but Midnight was almost entirely unscathed. My old friend and trusted employee, Mike, who looked after my interests in this area, was peering into the mangled cabin with a gun in his hand, checking on the occupants. I didn’t immediately head towards them, instead going for my gun that I’d thrown out the window, but from here I could already see some groggy movement from in there.
It was easy to find, with the white rag tied to it. Certainly, it had been easy enough to spot seeing it fly out my window to the right at the exact moment when our pursuers should have been looking left. It may have made all the difference in them spotting the pitch-black truck before it was too late.
With the rag untied and tucked into my pocket like an unneeded surrender flag, I leaned over and rested one elbow on the bent door in the gap vacated by the smashed window on the passenger side.
The two men in the front looked pretty fucked, but I wasn’t a doctor or about to take their pulse. They may have already been dead for all I knew. The guy in the back looked as shell-shocked as anybody who had engaged in the trench warfare of World War I, looking around with blood trickling down his face, barely aware of his surroundings.
“Hey Champ. It’s not looking too good here, is it?” I asked, reaching in to pat down the pockets of the unconscious man closest to me.
The guy in the back blinked and slowly focused on the source of the voice, me, as I pulled out his friend’s wallet. He wasn’t able to muster up an answer before I opened it and found an FBI ID.
I whistled. It looked real to me. That added a whole other layer to the false-self-identification-as-you-burst-through-a-door trick.
“Call… Ambulance…” he said.
“Hmmm. That’s not really the kind of thing I do,” I said.
“Mother…fucker, you’re under arrest,” he panted.
“I’ve never heard that version of the Miranda Rights,” I said, “but then, you’re not here on official FBI business, are you?”
“Everything you’re doing is only digging a bigger hole for yourself.”
“Maybe, but I need answers and sometimes when you want answers, you’ve gotta dig. That’s where you come in. You’re going to tell me everything I need to know, right?”
“Fuck you, motherfucker.” He was becoming more coherent with every exchange.
“I wouldn’t waste time, if I were you. This car looks like it might catch fire at any moment.” I glanced over at Mike, who was now stuffing a rag of his own into a big red plastic gas can. “Why were you at that house tonight?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
I looked away from him to the two slumped forms in the front seats. “You think your friends are still alive?”
Before he could answer, I stood back a little and held my gun an inch from the head of the closest passenger and sent a bullet into his brain. I leaned down again.
“How about that one?”
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck you! Fuck! OK! OK! Don’t shoot! He’s old friends with Antonio.” He pointed to the man in the driver’s seat. “Antonio had him add your known license plates to a list of cars being tracked in one of his other investigations. Unofficially, you know?”
Mike had set the gas can down beside me and was now moving the truck to a safe distance.
I nodded and spoke above Midnight’s engine and the slow screech of metal as the truck moved away from the car. “Go on.”
When the back of the truck moved out of the way, Cammy’s headlights shone on him like the hot lamp of an interrogation room. “So, he got this automatic notification that your car was on the move, and in Antonio’s direction. He told Antonio, and Antonio offered him some money if we could…take care of you, if you showed up.”
A briefcase was sitting awkwardly balanced between the dead passenger and the potentially living driver. Maybe it had been flung there from the back seat in the impact. I reached in and pulled it out, setting it on the roof and opening it.
I leaned down again. “This looks like only half a million bucks. I’m insulted. That’s only, what? A hundred thousand each? Five guys, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Was it worth it?”
He didn’t answer, and this wasn’t a line of questioning that really mattered anyway. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to answer that one. Where’s Antonio now?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Where…the fuck…is Antonio? Now.”
“I don’t know.”
I shot the unmoving driver in the head and the man in the back screamed in terror.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know! I swear I don’t know! He was gone by the time we arrived. A few hours at least.”
“Fuck.”
I circled around and retrieved the wallet and phone from the driver, all the while holding my gun on Mr. Conscious.
“I’m gonna need your ID. Give it to me.”
“I can’t. Seatbelt is jammed and my arm is broken. Sternum too, I think. You’ll let me go, right?”
I switched my gun to my left hand and reached through the window to wrestle his wallet out of his pants pocket. I opened it up.
“Agent Greene, huh?” I asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“I sure do like your change of attitude,” I said.
Mike returned and I circled around the car again to meet him. “Good job. Perfect timing as always.”
“It’s the only timing that works. Been a while since Midnight did something like that,” said Mike.
I pulled out stack after stack of bundled bills and handed them to Mike, who stuffed them into a bag of his own as I spoke. “A little something for your trouble, for the damages, and for the cleanup crew here and at 1765 Frosty Lane.”
“What needs cleaning up at Frosty Lane?”
“Two bodies. One in the house, one got hit by the car and flew into the fucking bushes from the lawn just outside the house. There’ll probably be cops all over the place soon, so you’ll need to pull strings with your local contacts fast and I’ll need to know everything that’s in that house, in case there’s any indication about where they went.”
“Frosty Lane, right?” Mike rubbed his chin.
“Yeah.”
“That’s the shithole part of a pretty much fucked city. Cops…uh…they know they’re not allowed there without being invited. We’re good.”
“Hey! Hey! You’re gonna let me go, right?” Agent Greene yelled.
I closed the briefcase, latched it and pulled it off the roof of the car before leaning on the door again. Sucking air through my teeth like a mechanic estimating the cost of repairing this fine vehicle, I gave him some bad news.
“Well, Agent Greene, I thought about it. I’d like to. I was going to…but then I thought…you shot at my girl. I can’t let that slide.”
Mike handed me his lighter as I picked up the gas can. I lit the rag before shoving it through the window to sit on the lap of the corpse closest to me, out of reach of Agent Greene. His screams fell on deaf ears as Mike and I returned to our vehicles.
Bree
Andrew never hid his work from my mom and me, but watching him shoot two people in the head and torch another one alive where he sat, I saw how sheltered I’d actually been while growing up. The danger was always kept at a distance, even if the truth was freely shared.
Now, I’d been brought into his world at my own insistence. As far as I knew, I’d been closer to Andrew’s work tonight than my mom ever had been.
Hell, if that guy who got sideswiped by the car was dead, then I was guilty of vehicular manslaughter. Manslaughter! The slaughter of a man. Me.
Oh my gosh, things could take a turn for the insane mighty quick in this world.
Back at the distribution hub, Andrew’s friend Mike cleared out the break room for us and was in and out for an hour, giving Andrew updates on what was going on. In between updates, he left for his own office to coordinate the cleanup crews at the two sites, as he and Andrew called them.
From what I could gather, huddled on a chair letting a hot cup of coffee keep my hands warm, Mike had all manner of city officials, emergency services and city workers on the payroll for Andrew. It was just like my mom and Antonio said, you never knew where Andrew’s eyes and ears were.
Andrew made a few calls of his own as he rummaged through the briefcase, trying to find anything in there that wasn’t money. To my surprise, one of the calls seemed to be to somebody in the FBI itself. Andrew instructed the person on the other end to look into Agent Phelps’ current workload and delete any reference in “the system” to Andrew’s cars or anything that might have brought Agents Phelps, Greene and Tamblin to Frosty Lane that night. He’d said that was enough to start and he’d call back with two more names when he had them.
As the adrenaline wore off, my hands shook a little more, my lips were tingly and I felt a little light-headed. The gravity of the situation, how close to death we must have been, and how many times, sunk in more with each passing second.
The coffee wasn’t helping on that front, but you could pry it from my cold dead hands as far as I was concerned. The only thing that helped calm me down were Andrew’s hands on me.
Those hands were big, strong and completely steady. The way he touched me seemed to say so much. It was the touch of a protector, a man who would kill or be killed to protect me from anything the world could throw at me.
And it said more than that. He’d always been a protector, but now the words he’d spoken out on the road were ringing in my ears. He’d said I was his girl.
Maybe it was just some throwaway line to say to the guy in the car before Andrew killed him, but it was a phrase right out of some of my earliest fantasies. I’d signed up with Innocence For Sale for quick cash. Were all my dreams going to come true instead?
Unfortunately, over the course of the hour, Andrew’s mood took a downward turn. He muttered obscenities while waiting for Mike’s updates and sat on one of the other bright orange chairs around the table I was sitting at with my coffee.
Heavy footsteps came up the stairs outside the breakroom and Mike entered again.
“The mysterious car fire on the Henday Trail has been put out. Police are not regarding it as suspicious,” he said.
“Good. How about the house on Frosty Lane?” Andrew asked.
“I got a new guy, young cop in the local department. He told me the neighbors are all sayin’ they didn’t hear a thing! I told you they got no love for cops in that part of town. I got ten guys ready to take care of everything there. I suggest we take everything out of the house and sift through it here, then torch the house.”
“I agree, but before they burn it, I want them to tear that place apart, you know? Walls, floor, ceiling, everything. Leave no stone unturned, I need to make sure we don’t leave anything that might be important behind.”
“Gotcha, I’ll take care of it.”
Mike left again and I stood to walk around to Andrew’s side of the table to sit on his lap and rest my head on his shoulder. It was mostly for my benefit, but I was flattered to feel the tension in his muscles relax too.
“What now?” I asked.
Andrew took a deep breath and shook his head a little. “I don’t know. This is the closest I’ve ever been to finding that fuck and now…”
The sound of voices approaching outside caught Andrew’s attention, but they walked past and receded into the distance on the other side.
“It’s frustrating,” he said. “We don’t know what car they fucked off in, so I can’t pull the kind of trick on them they pulled on me to track them down. I have to hope my money is hidden in that house somewhere and-or they left something behind that gives me a hint about where they went.”
My brow furrowed for a while as I thought about it. “Um…what about… how about I just, you know, call my mom?”
You could have heard a pin drop in the breakroom for a few seconds. It was so quiet that it was legitimately startling when the half-size fridge in the corner kicked into life.
Andrew turned his head to face me and leaned back to look at me carefully. “Uh… where exactly does she think you are right now anyway?”
“Math camp.”
“Math camp?”
“Yeah. I made up this math camp story, said I’d been selected for this math camp course thing to help promising students who needed extra help to get into the courses they wanted. I’d been promised a full ride including flights,” I said.
“They believed you needed help with math?”
My heart sank again, remembering the growing sense of hopelessness as I was expected to teach myself every topic for the past couple of years. Then there was that fateful day when my exam results came back.
I sighed. “I’ve been basically homeschooling myself since we left. I really needed help. That’s why it was believable enough. They jumped at the opportunity to get rid of me for a week or two.”
“That’s why you said you thought the ship had sailed on engineering?” Andrew asked.
