Page 23 of Live for Me

“You throw any kind of fit you want, but if you touch her at any point during this process, you’ll wish I’d just killed you in that parking lot,” I said and leaned down to push him to his back so I could grab his shirt and pull his face up closer to mine. “Clear?”

He didn’t respond with so much as even a fucking blink.

So, I slapped the bitch right across his cheek and felt way better when he squealed.

“Okay. I’ll take that as ayes, we’re clear.Come on.”

I kept my hold on his shirt and dragged him the rest of the way across the room to the plastic.

“Oh, no, no, no. What is this? Whatever it is, we don’t have to do it this way,” he cried out and started to struggle the closer we got to the plastic.

“Yeah, but we’re for sure going to do it exactly this way,” I said, and used both hands to grab his shirt that time to get him upright before I pushed him down into the chair.

“The tape, angel.”

Memphis placed the roll of duct tape in my hand the very moment that I held it out toward her, before I’d even looked in her direction. I took a second to try to gauge the look on her face after that, but she was remarkably expressionless in that moment.

“Who are you?” Samuels asked. His voice was already quivering. This might not take anywhere near as long as I’d expected.

“Listen, I’m all paid up,” he said. “I don’t owe any more money. And I can’t go back to owing him. If that’s what this is about, he’s got his numbers messed up.”

I wondered how many different things he might confess to if I just stayed quiet long enough.

“Look, you obviously already know I’m a detective. I can help you if you let me out of this. I can make records disappear. I can?—”

“Records,” I repeated and laughed. “You hear that, baby? He can make records disappear. Do you have a record?”

I didn’t bother to stop taping his legs to the chair to look at her. She didn’t bother to answer. It was all part of the game.

“No,” I answered for her. “Shedoesn’t have a record.Idon’t have a record. Records aren’t kept on people who don’t exist anymore. You, sir, are perfectly useless as a detective.”

“Then what do you want?” he asked.

I raised up to smile at him and put my hand on the side of his face. “Explanations. I want explanations.”

I smacked his cheek another time before I backed away. I went to where I’d propped the golf club against the wall and picked it up by the head.

“You fucked up an investigation a few years back,” I said while I looked that golf club over from one end to the other. “An entire family was murdered. A child.”

He shook his head slowly and looked from me to Memphis, then back to me again.

“I—I don’t know?—”

“The Andersons,” Memphis added. “Elizabeth and Faith.”

He shook his head another time and an absolute fireball of rage exploded inside me to realize that he’d done so many terrible fucking things that he didn’t even remember the details around them anymore.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

memphis

Ihad to look away when Utah walked right at him and swung the golf club until the head connected with the detective’s left ankle bone. His pained screams were unpleasant to listen to, but I was uniquely prepared to withstand disturbing sounds. His squeals couldn’t even come close to the sounds of several girls crying themselves to sleep every night.

“The fact that I have to stand here and tell the story back to you makes me want to kill you before you even have the chance to explain yourself,” Utah said to him. “So, just be aware of that now. This is me showing great restraint.”

Utah paced around for another moment, casually swinging the golf club while he walked. I wasn’t sure if he was actually deep in thought, if he was truly putting effort into holding himself back, or if he was just fucking with this man for the fun of it. He was nearly impossible to read when he wanted to be that way.

“Everyone believes Elizabeth Anderson used a firearm to murder her in-laws. She was said to have used that same weapon on her own four-year-old daughter before she turned it on herself. All while Vance Anderson was deployed overseas. She struggled with depression for most of her life. Probably pretty simple to let the whole thing fall on her shoulders after that. And Vance was devastated to come home to that kind of news.”

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