Page 19 of Dirty
So fucking stupid.
We were back on the road before Sera woke up, which was concerning since, as far as I knew, people who fainted generally woke up quickly, but she’d obviously suffered quite a shock. Her body, her mind, must have needed a little time to reset itself. I heard her stir, and then within a second she was scrambling at the door handle, trying to open the motherfucking door. Thankfully, I’d taken precautions to lock them all before I’d started driving again.
“We’re doing eighty. Wouldn’t recommend a tuck and roll right now.”
“Let me out of the car, Fix. Stop the car right now and let me go.” She was frightened, and I couldn’t really blame her for it. The last thing we needed was her losing her shit while we were moving, though. I pulled over to the side of the road, hitting the hazards, and I snatched up the brown file that I’d placed on the passenger seat, ready for this moment. Opening it up, I grabbed the first photo from within the file and thrust it over my shoulder, snarling under my breath. It was Holly, the girl Franz had so brutally assaulted, covered in bruises, her mouth split open in so many places that her lips resembled mangled meat from a deli counter. She was naked in the picture, and the bite marks and burns all over her skin, her breasts, her thighs, and her stomach were livid and purple. Horrific to behold.
“This is what he did,” I snapped. “This is how he left her, when he finally released her. Seventy-two hours, he kept her in that basement, Sera. Seventy-two hours, where he tortured her, and raped her, and sank his teeth into her skin. He gave her hepatitis, for fuck’s sake.”
Sera didn’t take the photo from me. She stared at it, shaking, her eyes filling with tears. A car burned past us on the road, way faster than the speed limit, and the truck rocked from side to side in its wake. Sera just sat there, staring at the picture of Holly, unmoving. I tossed the photo into her lap and grabbed another from the file: an image of Holly’s buttocks, which were flayed raw and covered in blood. I tossed that one into Sera’s lap, then followed it with another, and then another, each one worse than the one before. “If you’re gonna try and tell me that sick bastard didn’t get what he deserved, then you’re going to have a very difficult time.”
Quietly, Sera began to cry. “I don’t…I don’t know what to think. I just…please. Please don’t kill me.”
I’d already figured she would think that—that I was going to kill her. Her desperate plea still made me feel sick to my stomach, though. “I’m not going to kill you, Sera. Why the fuck would I kill you? You’ve done nothing wrong.” My stomach tied itself in a knot.
She stopped crying, her body going still. She raised her head, looking me in the eye for the first time since she’d awoken. “Then…what are you going to do with me. Why won’t you let me go?”
“I need to know you’re not gonna call the cops. I need to know, the moment I let you go, you’re not going to send the authorities after me.”
With fumbling hands, Sera gathered the photos of Holly’s battered and broken body and threw them at me, sending them falling into the foot well. “Do you think I’m stupid? I wouldn’t breathe a word of this to anyone, Fix. I fought long and hard for the life I have right now. I wouldn’t risk it by snitching on a clearly very fucking deranged and dangerous man.”
Ouch. The dangerous part I could handle. Deranged, though? That was uncalled for. I turned around, gripping hold of the steering wheel, sucking in a deep breath through my nose. “I’m sorry if I don’t believe you right now, but it’s been my experience that people will tell you anything when they’re scared for their lives. You heard Franz, right?”
Silence.
I blew out my breath, huffing. This wasn’t going well. None of it was. I’d formulated a plan in my mind. It was fucking nuts, completely against what I was supposed to do. I already knew Sera was going to balk at it, but fuck. I couldn’t handle the alternative. If she didn’t like it…
“Just let me go, Fix. Please. I don’t need this, and neither do you. All I wanted to do was get to my sister’s wedding. After that, I wanted to go back to Seattle and get back to work. This doesn’t change any of that.”
She sounded sincere, and honestly I was inclined to believe her. “I’ll take you to your sister’s wedding,” I said evenly, restarting the truck’s engine. “Then I’ll go with you back to Seattle, and everything will be normal again. So long as you keep your mouth shut and say nothing of what you saw this morning, everything will be fine. Do you understand?”
I pulled back out onto the road, waiting to see what she would say. I didn’t have to wait very long.
“You’re holding me hostage?” she asked quietly.
“No. I’m not holding you hostage. I’m going to monitor the situation, until I’m certain you won’t bring the sky crashing down on my head. That’s different.”
“You’reinsane.” I could hear the panic in her voice, but it wasn’t as bad as before. She was gradually regaining control over herself, believed I wasn’t planning on murdering her to tidy up my loose ends, and that was progress. “You’re going to drive me to Alabama, and then what? You’re going to watch me like a hawk? Pretend to be a waiter at my sister’s fucking wedding? Keep tabs on me, and take me out if it looks like I’m losing my cool?”
“Why the fuck would I pretend to be a waiter, Sera? Jesus. It’s a wedding. You have a plus one, right?” I glanced in the rearview mirror to look at her, and the expression on her face was more than a little incredulous.
“My plus one? You want to be my plus one? You just killed a rapist, slit his throat from ear to ear, and now you want to bemy date to a fucking wedding? I can’t…I just can’t make any sense of what’s happening right now. I feel like I’m having a bad trip or something. The worst trip in the history of drug abuse.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic.”
“Melodramatic? You think this is melodrama? You kill people for money, Fix. You stab them, and you shoot them, and you…you do god knows what else to them. I saw you do it with my own two eyes, and I’m being melodramatic when I don’t want to spend time with you at my sister’s wedding. You havegotto be kidding!”
“A couple of days. All you have to do is make me believe I’m not gonna find myself in handcuffs, and I’ll let you go. It’s easy, really. If you hadn’t come investigating like fucking Miss Marple, then we wouldn’t be in the position in the first place.”
She laughed a cold, hard, derisive laugh. “If you hadn’t killed Franz, we wouldn’t be in this position.I think that trumps the fact that I walked into a building, looking foryou.”
“Hadn’t you better be texting your sister right now, instead of yelling at me? She’s gonna to want to know you need someone adding next to you on her seating plan.”
“Fuck, Fix! You’re just as bad as Franz was if you think it’s okay to keep me with you against your will.”
I sent her a sharp, narrow-eyed glare behind me, trying to tamp down my rising temper. She was the fucking crazy one if she was comparing this to what Franz had done to Holly. I saw the moment in the rearview that she realized how wrong her statement was. She didn’t take it back, though. She set her jaw, lifting her chin in defiance, and slumped back into her chair.
“All right. Fine. You can come with me to the stupid wedding. You can escort me back to Seattle like the naughty little girl that I am. But the second it looks like you’re going to hurt me, or do something I wouldn’t like, then I’m going to start screaming. And trust me…I can scream really fucking loud.”
