14. FRANKIE

After we tied the men up, we had to be fast getting out. Cal seemed to freeze for moments at a time. I tried to assure him that his knife wound wasn't fatal, but I was only telling him that to try and keep him from breaking again. The sound of their cries was muffled from the fabric in their mouths and the tape wrapped around their heads.

I cleaned Cal of all the blood and told him he had to be strong. Nobody was going to get him, at least not while I was around. With a large bag of our clothes, and as many weapons as I could gather, we headed downstairs to the car.

At the front door, Cal stopped. "It happened so fast," he whispered, staring down at his open palms. "But I could do it again." His voice petering off into a chuckle. "I really think I could."

"Baby." I took his hand. "I know you could do it again. I'm not asking you to. All I'm asking of you right now is to get in the car, fasten your seatbelt, and—" I didn't know where we were going. I knew the family had safe houses, places to go if we were ever being chased, but those were probably on lock right now, and the first place my father would send men to check. "Call Sutton."

"Sutton?"

"Yes. Do it in the car." I threw our things into the back seat. "We need to find a place that's been foreclosed and isn't due to be sold for a while."

Cal locked eyes with me and nodded. "Ok."

I didn't want to leave the city, and we had no aim. We were just driving around trying to keep ourselves from being found while also trying to find where we had to go.

The moment Cal talked to Sutton, he changed. Confidence took over. I told him not to mention anything that happened, but we were in trouble and needed a place to stay for a little while. Sutton knew immediately what we were getting at. He said he'd search for us and send over some details.

It was in my nature to be wary of giving information over the phone, or even texts. Sutton, on the other hand always boasted about secure call lines and making sure nobody had tapped any of the lines he used.

After thirty minutes of driving around on the outskirts of the city, we were given an address. A large house with a pool, recently foreclosed in a fancy neighborhood. This was where dressing in a suit and looking like a businessman came into play. Nobody was suspicious of someone doing business, a suit was like a hi-vis jacket, people seemed to respect it.

"It's been foreclosed for about three weeks," Cal said. "Auction sites states its due to go on the block in four weeks."

"Hopefully we'll only need it for a couple days while we sort this out," I told him. "I'm sorry this happened. But it makes sense."

"It's ok."

"No, it's not ok. I should've been looking into the associates the family brought in. It was never my business," I grumbled. I didn't even know the name of the man he'd killed, or the two men on the hallway floor of the apartment. "I wonder how long he'd been part of this."

Cal shook his head. "I—I'd never have even noticed anyway," he said. "I never saw anyone. You know that."

I felt his urge to go through it again, but it was like reopening an old wound, again, and again. It wasn't something I enjoyed seeing him go through. He'd met someone online who wanted to create a website for their illicit dealings, but before he met anyone, he was ambushed—assuming it was them who'd taken him. I didn't probe with questions about whether the website was set up, but I assumed not, otherwise we would've had an early lead.

At the foreclosed house, there was a giant wood plank across the front door with the words ‘foreclosed' stamped on the front of it. The house itself had large bushes at either side of it. I parked as close to the side of the house as I could, hiding the car in the bushes.

We sat in the car for a moment.

"What if there's someone already in there?" he asked.

I took my gun and smiled. "I'm sure they'll leave. Also, next time you shoot someone in the street, make sure to put the silencer on. People heard, that's when they saw you leave. We might've been able to play it off as gang violence against us. Still not ideal, but it would've meant we weren't on the run."

He sighed. "You blame me for all this mess, don't you?"

"No. I blame me for not teaching you properly," I told him. It was the truth. I should've been more proactive in teaching Cal about what to do if he came up against the person responsible for what happened. But it was also safe to say that the man he'd killed wasn't the one who'd been in charge. "Stay here. I'll go make sure it's clear." I gave him a kiss before leaving the car.

I noticed a little blood on my shirt. I went into the trunk of the car for a suit jacket. It was these types of neighborhoods where people were always watching. And if they were watching me, they'd see someone in a suit and hopefully assume I was a realtor, and hopefully not notice the gun.

The house was in ruins, since it had gone into foreclosure, nobody had been around to keep it clean. Going through the back of the house to enter, I saw the pool covered in leaves and the water was green. It seemed dangerous to have kept the water in there, especially when it didn't look like there was any filter or cover.

The backdoor was locked, which seemed to be a good sign that there were no squatters. I twisted the silencer onto the end of my gun and shot straight through the key slot. The door was still a little stuck. I tugged hard and as I opened it, the lock fell to the ground from the handle.

Walking in through the kitchen, there were empty boxes everywhere. And surprisingly, it didn't smell. There was still a bed and a mattress upstairs. And there was still electricity running through the house. They must not have shut off the power yet.

Cal was standing in the doorway of the kitchen when I was coming back to give him the all-clear. He had his laptop under his arm, and a duffle bag over his shoulder. "Is it safe?"

"I told you to wait."

He shrugged. "I wanted to be with you. You make me feel safe."

I walked over to him and gave him a hug, kissing him on the forehead. "That's all I want you to feel. Safe. So, we've got a mattress upstairs, and there's some sheets they didn't take from the closet. I can bring that down here and we can set up. It's better to just stick to this area than spread out."

"Ok. And I'm hungry too."

"You know, the first time I killed someone, I had that hunger. I went down to this burger joint, and I think I ate three double cheeseburgers. They were stacked, cheese, meat, onions. Devoured them." As I told him, I heard his stomach let out a little grumble.

"I could devour an entire pizza right now," he said, smacking his lips. "Do you think it's safe to order or are we gonna drive and grab food?"

Both options were risky. If we ordered to the house, they might see the sign and think it was a prank. But it was safer if we stayed here. The longer we were out on the road, the more chances they had at spotting us and calling my father on my whereabouts.

"I'll order in," I told him. "Go get set up in there, the electricity is still on, so charge your laptop, and your cell."

He nodded and gave me a kiss.

As much as I loved Cal, I needed to think, and I needed to be occupied.

After I called in the pizza for delivery, I paced around upstairs. There were several missed calls on my cell, all from different members of the family. I put it on silent and put it back in my pocket. I had other things to do right now than listen to people telling me Cal had to pay for what he did.

I gathered the mattress and whatever else I could find from the first floor. My thoughts were going around each other, ideas cannibalized one another.

People had infiltrated the family, they'd also been the ones who tried to undercut the family with their crack that was killing more people than it was making them addicts. Speaking as a business, it wasn't a good model. You needed to keep them coming back and spending money. They didn't have anything to gain by giving their addicts drugs that killed them on their first use.

Whoever it was, they were inside the family. It couldn't have been any of the actual family. Cal had been around them and heard them speak. He would've said something or taken my gun and took a shot like he did earlier.

I pushed the mattress down the stairs just as the pizza showed up.

I listened to Cal collecting it. "Yeah, we're just surveying the property, some people leave these places in such a mess," he said, chuckling. "It'll be an all-night job, and we need to eat, otherwise we could wildly underprice this for the market."

"Trying to find a house anywhere is expensive right now," the delivery driver said.

I pushed the mattress through the doorway into the living room, followed by the bed sheets and unused rolls of wallpaper.

Cal came back with two big pizzas, one just cheese, and the other with pepperoni. "You got two," he said, his face lighting up.

"I figured you'd be starving," I told him.

"I am." He placed the pizza boxes on top of a box in the middle of the living room. He was using it as a makeshift table. "Also, Sutton is trying to find the name of the guy. He's looking for any recent emergencies, or people dying in the area."

"You won't find them," I told him. I knew my family and their protocol. There wouldn't be any record of it, as long as they could help it. "I'll find it out for you. I just—I need to put my thoughts down first."

"Pizza might help," he said, opening the first box. He let out a throaty moan. "It smells so good."

"Save those sounds for later," I told him. Because I knew that after the hunger came that passionate sex drive, and I was more excited for that. I'd gone to a gay club after my first kill. Sure, I was only seventeen, but that didn't stop me from fucking this twink. It must've gone on for twelve hours throughout the morning until he asked if I wanted to go on a date. Looking back on that, I laughed about it. "But save me some pizza, I don't want to call a second delivery."

"I'll try," he said in a sing-song voice.

I found nails and a hammer in the kitchen under the sink. With those, I nailed the wallpaper to the wall, backside out. I had to get my thoughts down somewhere, and this was one endless stretch of paper that I could roll out across the wall.

On my search, I found a couple of marker pens to use. Most of them were dry. I used the last of them until they dried out, making a connection map on the paper. Adding names in bubbles and shooting lines off in all directions with all the connections I had in my mind. There were a lot of them. Anyone could've been a suspect. But someone had to have known. Someone had to have vouched for the man Cal had killed, and I needed that to know who was at the top of that chain.

I reached into my pocket for my cell and Cal gasped.

"What?" I asked.

"Sutton found him," he said.

"He did?" That saved me a call to my dad to try and clear some of the details up. But it also made me take a step back and see that I'd done something I knew would've got me in a lot of trouble. I'd made a map, my father at the head, and the entire structure of the organization.

"Yeah. We're looking for his connections now," he said.

In the light of the laptop screen, I could see all the sauce over his mouth. He looked adorable. Part of me wanted to go over and lick it from his lips, and another part of me couldn't stomach the idea of consuming food right now. I needed answers first.

The screen flashed a different color. Cal dropped the pizza slice in his hand. His face turned blank, his jaw slack, and his eyes glossy. "That—that—that—that—"

I went over to look at the screen. It was a rap sheet. "Grant Richmond," I read his name. "Recently paroled. Incarcerated two years ago." It was right around the time that Cal was found.

"Him," he said.

I hugged his shaking body tight. "It's ok. He can't get you. I promise." As I looked at his information, it became clear that he was the chemist of the operation, and probably even the one who'd been in charge. "Is there a current address?"

Cal stayed quiet. The moment had come. And it was just as I feared. He froze.