10. Utah

CHAPTER TEN

utah

I was making her terribly uncomfortable.

With pretty much everything I did.

That much was obvious.

But I couldn’t stop myself once I was close to her. She gave me the tiniest inch of just wanting to be in the room with me last night, of wanting to touch me and talk to me, and I immediately wanted ten more miles to get us to the point where I could bury myself inside her as deep as I could get, so I could erase every other male who might’ve existed in her memory.

One fucking step at a time, though.

The number of times I’d had to remind myself of that was infuriating.

She wasn’t comfortable. She wasn’t ready. Something in me made something in her hesitant. Trying to make her meet me in this place of fucking uncontrollable desire before she was prepared for it would just push her further in the wrong direction.

I had so many other things to focus on for the moment, anyway. I didn’t normally have accomplices physically present for these jobs. While it added the pleasant aspect of company, it also added a tension to my neck and shoulders to have the company of someone who didn’t do this side of the job. She might’ve watched New Jersey do things similar to this through a screen, but she probably hadn’t stood behind him and watched him torture a man into speaking. Being present to watch me do such a thing up close and personal might devastate that uncontrollable desire that I wanted her to feel, too.

Indy had been on top of Detective Samuels for several weeks now. He knew everything that cop did and on which day he did it all. Samuels worked odd hours doing odd things, but it would very much play out in my favor when it came time to snatch him out of his routine. The beauty of crooked cops was that most of them ended up being pompous assbags who believed they were too important to be knocked the fuck out when they weren’t paying attention.

Samuels seemed to end this particular workday each week by leaving his desk, going to some little pool hall with two other detectives, and then he went to the opposite end of the city to stop in at a bar where he spent no money that was traceable and didn’t even stay long enough to drink anything. All things that led me to believe he was still on the crooked side of the spectrum.

That bar, though, with its lone security camera over the front entrance, would be my best chance to grab Samuels between the building and his car, even if it did have to happen right in the middle of the fucking day with the sun shining bright.

I’d already shifted everything from the truck bed into the backseat, had the extra lock for the bed cover, kept the handcuffs and the brass knuckles, and explained to Memphis very thoroughly that she was not allowed to move from her seat inside that truck regardless of what she saw anywhere in that parking lot. I put the radio in my ear and was blessed instantly with the sound of Indy humming along to whatever he was listening to back in Indiana. It made Memphis smile, though, as the sound was also coming through the speaker on the computer in her lap.

As soon as Samuels’ car pulled into the lot, I jumped out of the truck and stood in the open door to place my gun in its holster in the front of my jeans, added a ski mask that covered everything but my eyes, and pulled the hood of my sweatshirt up.

“I’ll be on the other side of the building,” I said to Memphis. “I’ll wait there until he comes back out so I can catch him from behind. I’ll be bringing him straight over here once he’s unconscious.”

“What if—?” Memphis tried to ask before I interrupted her.

“Do not get out of this truck for anything. Don’t.”

“We don’t disobey Daddy, Memphis,” Indy added.

She definitely didn’t smile at that. I imagine the look in my eyes told her clearly enough that Indy could say whatever he wanted, but nothing about this was a joke.

“Lock the doors,” I ordered before I closed her in and made my way to the back of the building. “Someone time him,” I whispered. “Let me know when he’s likely to be on his way back out. Give me a couple seconds notice to be ready.”

“You got it, hoss,” Indy said in my ear.

It said way too much about me that there was no adrenaline rush while I waited for the word from Indy to tell me to move. The girl in my truck could turn me into a burning heap of uncontrollable hormones who occasionally forgot how to speak in her presence, but preparing to bust some guy’s head open to toss him into my truck bed? Just another day at the office.

“You’re up in three…two…go, now,” Indy said, and I was on my way around the corner as Detective Samuels was opening the door to leave. He turned to his left, toward his car, without even a glance in my direction.

Cops who thought they were gods.

Always easy targets.

It took one clean, very hard punch to the back of his head with those brass knuckles for him to topple right to his knees, and then the rest of the way forward until he was face down in the gravel. I dropped down on top of him with one knee in the middle of his lower back and pulled the handcuffs from their latch on my belt to get his wrists bound behind his body. I’d done it so many times that this was a routine now. Then I was right back on my feet, hoisting his limp weight over my shoulder to haul him back to my truck. I dropped him to the gravel again at the back of my truck to get the cover open and the tailgate down. I lifted Samuels onto the tailgate and forced my hand between his jaw and his shoulder to make sure there was still a heartbeat happening in there, then I rolled him further back into the bed so I could close the cover and the tailgate to lock them both again.

Memphis unlocked the truck doors as I reached for the handle. I pulled the hood from my head and the mask off as soon as I was inside.

“Leave through the drive behind you,” Indy said. “The camera might pick up your truck if you go forward more than a few feet.”

The urge to ask Memphis why she was quiet for the entire drive back to that empty school was overwhelming in the worst way. From some of the stories, it sounded like she’d watched New Jersey do worse things just to Triss, so I didn’t imagine she was upset about seeing what I’d done. Even if their jobs had been a little different in terms of outcomes, the means to getting there were probably pretty similar.

Which led me right to wondering if the tension-filled air in this truck maybe had more to do with New Jersey in general than anything I had done or would do. One of the men responsible for letting our President destroy New Jersey’s life was currently bound and in the bed of the truck. That was probably all it took to pull out some pretty intense emotions for her.

I stared at her until she looked back at me uncomfortably once I had the truck parked in front of the school.

“You don’t have to go in there, angel. You can wait out here. Just keep the doors locked until I come back out.”

She shook her head. “I do have to go in. He’s not here to hear the explanation. It’s the least I can do. Hear it for myself to be able to offer it to him someday.”

“Let’s just see what there is to find out before we worry about saying anything about this to New Jersey. One thing at a time.”

“Are you going to kill him?”

I smirked. “One thing at a time, baby,” I said again.

She started to put her computer away and I killed the engine to get out and go to the truck bed.

“I also have that question, but I’d like to word it more appropriately,” Indy said in my ear.

“Proceed.”

“You’re killing this motherfucker, right?”

“Unless he’s got the most convincing reason I’ve ever fucking heard for not doing something about the murder of a toddler, he’s already dead,” I said quietly.

“Good boy.”

Unfortunately, my captive was already coming back around when I unlocked the cover and the tailgate.

“Can you go in ahead and prop the doors open on your way?” I called up to Memphis as she got out of the truck. “He’s waking up. I’d like to get him in there quickly before he’s awake enough to be annoying about it.”

I grabbed him by an ankle and dragged his body to the edge of the tailgate so I could hoist him back up over my shoulder. Samuels groaned at how unpleasant I imagine it was to have my shoulder directly in his gut, but he didn’t put up a fight. At least, he didn’t put up a fight until we were just outside the door of the classroom where I’d set up his special little area.

“What the fuck is this?!” he screamed, almost directly in my ear.

“I am right here, man. I can hear you just fine. No need to yell.”

He started squirming then.

Flopping like a fish out of water.

It probably wouldn’t have been a big deal because we were pretty much where I needed him anyway, but he nearly kicked Memphis in his flailing. When she shrieked and jumped to try to get out of the way, I heaved his body up off my shoulder and just hopped out from under him so his cranky ass could fall all the way to the floor.

He broke his fall with his face since his hands were cuffed behind his back.

“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 a yes, 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. “ She doesn’t have a record. I don’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.