Page 98 of Pay the Price

Calvin Conlan spit out a tooth. “Why would I tell you anything when you’re going to kill me anyway?”

We’d grabbed him when he was getting into his car. It had been easy.

His shaved head had gleamed under the country club’s streetlamps, the duffel bag he used to carry his racquetball equipment slung over one shoulder as he’d approached the black Mercedes at the edge of the parking lot.

We’d waited for him to use the key fob to unlock the doors. Then Otis had slapped a piece of duct tape over his mouth while I’d slipped a hood over his head and Jace zip-tied his hands.

He’d been in Benji’s back seat with Otis less than thirty seconds after we’d approached him.

Now he was here, in one of the abandoned hunting cabins in the woods surrounding the Blades’ compound, far enough away from the main buildings — far enough away from everything — that no one could hear him scream.

“Because if you tell us what we want to know, we’ll make your death quick,” Otis explained, like Calvin was a student who didn’t quite get the lesson. “If you don’t, it’s going to be slow.”

“That’s not an incentive,” Calvin wheezed. “Either way, I’m dead.”

“You won’t be saying that when Wolf here really starts to go to work on you,” Jace said from the floor where he was working to clone Calvin’s phone according to Aloha’s instructions. He’d taken obvious pleasure at the pain he’d inflicted on Calvin with his fists, and he seemed oblivious to the fact that his knuckles were bloodied and bruised.

We’d been at it less than two hours and the man tied to the chair in front of us was hardly recognizable as the one who’d emerged from the country club. That man had been freshly showered, vital, fresh off the endorphin high of vigorous exercise.

This one was a mass of cuts and bruises, head hanging from a body that would have collapsed if not for the ropes tying him to the chair. His nose was broken, both eyes reduced to purple slits, and blood leaked from the cuts carved into his chest with my knife.

My mom’s voice had been there while I’d carved him up, while I’d removed fingernails and toenails.

Was it an honorable killing?

I’d had flashes of Daisy in the kitchen when it was just the two of us, the morning sun slanting over her face. I’d seen her when she slept, vulnerable and soft, and the way she looked when she laughed, like a kid on Christmas.

Then I’d seen all the girls who’d been taken, who’d been used in games like the ones that had been held in the woods around Aventine and who’d been sold for equally grotesque purposes. I’d seen them disappearing from a world that didn’t think theymattered, that hardly noticed what was happening to them every day, and one word had echoed through my mind.

Yes.

“Tell us how Hammond moves the girls,” I said, pacing in front of him, my hand itching to go to work with the knife again.

But Calvin just looked up at me and grinned, a bark that must have been laughter emerging in a wheeze from his mouth. “You have… no idea what you’re doing… who you’re fucking with.”

“I don’t know,” Otis said blandly from where he leaned against the cabin’s deteriorating wall, “it kind of looks like we’re fucking with a pussy who likes to hurt girls.”

Calvin issued a maniacal laugh.

“I got it,” Jace said, getting to his feet with two phones in his hand — one Calvin’s, the other a burner we were using to clone it.

“You sure?” An abyss of darkness had started to move through me as I thought about Daisy and the missing girls. I was itching to make Calvin hurt just a little bit more before we killed him.

“I’m sure,” Jace said. “We can ditch his phone and comb the data on the burner.”

“Hear that, dickhead?” Otis asked, inspecting his nails. “We don’t need you anymore. Not unless you want to start talking.”

“Killing me won’t stop it,” Calvin said.

“Maybe not,” Jace said. “But it’s sure going to feel good.”

“Fucking with Daisy was a mistake. You probably see that now,” Otis said.

“This is… bigger than her… bigger than you… than all of us,” Clavin gasped.

I looked him over, thought about the smug expression on his face when he’d come to drop off Daisy’s stuff, the way he’d talked to her.

Like she was nobody. Nothing.

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