Chapter Twenty-Four

At least Lacy’s safe. Jake hoped.

He stumbled, vaguely aware where he was being herded. Whoever the ass was behind him with the gun barrel in his back, kept pushing faster than Jake could walk. It wasn’t easy walking with a plastic bag over his head. It had to be Rocky Rabbit back there doing the prodding. He always was a cruel bastard.

Ferret Face hadn’t spoken lately, not since he’d been dumb enough to show Poindexter what he’d found on Jamaal’s burner phone—enough evidence to put the real estate mogul away for the rest of his perverted, unnatural life. Poindexter freaked and swore, then slammed his fist into Ferret Face’s, umm, face. That was when the black plastic bag went over Jake’s head.

He lost track of Ferret Face because breathing became a little more important than worrying about a lowlife. But Jesus, Plunkett was a cold-hearted bitch. She’d plastered the bag against his mouth and nose long enough to make him believe she was going to kill him right then and there in Poindexter’s office. With his hands tied behind his back, all he could do was twist and kick while she’d suffocated him. For fun. When she’d lifted the plastic, he’d been pumped full of adrenaline and spitting fear, but not so badly that he couldn’t hear her laughing.

“My, my, but you’re a big boy when you’re aroused,” she’d purred as her stinking fingernails had raked over Jake’s crotch like she owned him.

“Not yet!” Poindexter bellowed. “Shit, Annette, I need him alive.”

Well, yeah, Jake felt needed all right, kind of like how fish guts on the end of a line were needed for baiting alligators or sharks. Please, God. Keep Lacy safe.

“I thought you called Manny to take care of Wright,” Plunkett snarked.

“You think I trust anyone to do their job anymore?” Poindexter bit out.

Besides their predilection for cruelty, Poindexter and Plunkett spoke in a language Jake didn’t completely understand as he stumbled along. Words like chest harness and carabiners usually had more to do with mountain climbing than real estate ventures. He kept going. Their curious lingo wasn’t the only puzzle of the day.

Where was Poindexter taking him, and how did he get from the halls of Poindexter’s building into what sounded like a tunnel in a cave? Wherever they were headed, it was underground, and he was walking downhill. The smell of damp stone wafted into his face along with a chilled draft, and it was okay. He’d lived in darker and danker places, but still. There were plenty of tunnels on the south side of the Potomac that runaway slaves had created before and during the Civil War. Was he in one of them now, or was this somewhere else?

He needed to focus so his mind didn’t slip away to the tunnels in Afghanistan. Above all, he needed to keep his bearings as much as his wits, but the air in the tunnel turned colder and damper. Finally, Rocky Rabbit plunked a heavy hand on Jake’s left shoulder, which was good. His feet had hit concrete again, or at least smooth stone. Wherever he was, he could hear gulls screeching and he could sense wide-open space up ahead of him. His nostrils flared at what smelled like snow. He was outside? That couldn’t be good.

“This is the end of the line for you,” Rocky Rabbit mumbled.

Someone pulled the plastic bag off Jake’s head, and he was hit with a slap of cold air and an extreme case of vertigo. No damned wonder. The toes of his dress shoes were nearly over the edge of a cliff that dropped a good twenty feet to the Potomac, most of it straight down. Bushes lined the bank, but damn, he could’ve fallen over the edge. One more inch or another shove from Rocky Rabbit and—

Jake took a full step backward and ran into the business end of Rocky Rabbit’s rifle.

“You ain’t going nowhere,” the bully growled. “Stay where you are.”

No shit, but what the hell? Leaning most of his weight backward, Jake peered over the edge. A slab of rusted metal sheeting lay vertical to the riverbank just below him. It had been there awhile, judging by the tendrils of Virginia Creeper vines grown over the rusty edges and the long orange rust stains that streaked the earth between it and the lapping Potomac. Shivers rolled over his shoulders and down his back. His fancy pinstripe jacket had been stripped from him when everything went south back in Poindexter’s office. A man in nothing but a cotton dress shirt and dress slacks wouldn’t last long in this weather.

Poindexter came to stand beside him and dropped a bag at his feet. “Ah, fresh air,” he said, his chest stuck out and inhaling a deep breath. He offered a thin smile that didn’t meet his black eyes. “You thought you and that little girlfriend of yours were pretty smart, didn’t you?”

Jake looked the man in the eye. He guessed Poindexter was of English ancestry. He had the look of an aristocrat, the bearing of nobility in all the photos Jake had seen of him. His immaculately trimmed hair was always precisely combed, his suits most likely in the thousand-dollar range. Not today. Up close he looked more like the spawn of Satan. The wind coming up the riverbank whipped at his hair. No light reflected from his eyes, not even with the gray light of a winter day at high noon. His complexion declared a serious case of acne at some time in his past life. His nose was crooked. The man radiated cold better than Mother Nature.

“Where is she?” Jake asked.

Poindexter lifted his left shoulder with indifference. “You mean Lacy Wright? It doesn’t matter where she is today. It only matters where she’ll be tomorrow, and what she’ll see when she closes her eyes every night for the rest of her life. You know how it is. Some images tend to stick in our heads. I’ll bet you saw plenty of guys get blown apart when you were over in Iraq or Iran or wherever you were.” He leaned closer, his voice gravelly and deep. “Tell me, Weylin. Does that bloody, gory picture in your head ever go away? Don’t you still wake up covered with sweat and screaming because of all the guys you lost over there?”

Poindexter seemed to be waiting for an answer, but Jake closed his eyes and took in a deep lungful of the winter air. Poindexter had already given him what he needed to hear. The rat bastard didn’t know where Lacy was.

A wave of warm calm swept over Jake. He had no doubt that whatever happened next would scar Lacy. But scars were one thing. Death was another. He was thankful to the core of his worthless soul that Lacy wasn’t there, that she’d been spared. She might hurt for a while after he died, but she was tough. She’d find a way to endure, and hell, maybe she’d paint him on one of her canvasses. Maybe he’d get to feel her sweet breath on his face one more time after all.

The notion of her soul reaching out to him after he died soothed Jake in a way he’d not expected. Lacy would remember him. He hadn’t gone through all he’d gone through in vain. She would love him long after he was gone because he’d mattered to her. Maybe she’d get her oils and brushes out and they’d have a good long chat together before she painted him—home.

That profoundly special word brought another level of calm to the edge of the precipice. Somehow in the circuitous ways of destiny and fate, he’d been meant to be with Lacy, if only once. Lacy was his home, his comfort at the end of a tough, hard life. She’d opened up her apartment, but more, she’d opened up her heart. She could paint him home all she wanted, but he’d never leave because she was his home.

He stiffened his spine and took another deep breath for the task ahead, the task of dying without her. Even that brought a measure of peace because now he knew. Lacy wasn’t here on the edge of life with him. She was safe. She would live.

“You see, Weylin,” Poindexter said as he looped the rope through a metal carabiner, his voice almost conversational. “I’m a very ambitious man. Do you know what accolades come after my name when I’m offered speaking engagements at college graduations and business conferences? They introduce me as the entrepreneur of the year. They say I’m driven and bound for success in everything I do. Even after all these years, they say I’ll go far.”

Plunkett busied herself by being a tramp. She trailed the tip of her tongue over the top of Jake’s ear while Poindexter watched. Jake turned away from the treacherous woman. Connie really needed to do some serious job hunting.

“Stop playing,” Poindexter snapped as he jerked the rope in his hand, dropped it, and proceeded to do the same with another section of the nylon coil and another carabiner. “They call me fearless and ambitious, Weylin. I’ll bet you didn’t know I own more high-end real estate property than any other person in the entire United States, did you? Hell, probably in the entire North and South American continents, and do you know why?”

Jake remained silent. Nothing good ever came from arguing with a fool.

“I’ll tell you why.” Poindexter stepped up to Jake with a switchblade in his hand. With one twist of his wrist, he flicked it open. “Because I’m a better man than everyone else, that’s why.” He reached around to Jake’s back and cut the ties that bound his wrists, brought the wicked blade into sight again, and with another twist of his wrist, snapped it closed.

Rocky Rabbit grabbed Jake’s arms then, straining his shoulder sockets until he had no choice but to lean over the edge. Gravel and dirt clods fell to the rusted slab of metal below. The damned thing had to be several inches thick. How it came to be there was one of those details a dying man wondered about, but didn’t care about at the same time.

Cold-Hearted Bitch had taken position on the opposite side of him. And there he was, standing on the edge of insanity with a psycho to his left, one to his right, and a freaking moron on his six. He contemplated jumping. Breaking his neck in the fall might be an easier way to die.

Jake could’ve sworn he heard his buddy’s words drift on the wind. It ain’t over ’till it’s over.

Not sure what your idea of over is, Zack, but this sure feels over to me.

“So I’m making you a one time good deal.” Poindexter chuckled in his demented, twisted way. He tossed one of the ropes to Rocky Rabbit. “I’m going to let you live.”

Rocky Rabbit jerked Jake backward and made quick work of wrapping the rope around his wrists, only this time in front instead of behind his back. And then Jake understood how bad it would get before it was over. His surroundings jolted into clarity. He saw the sunken dock below in the cold gray Potomac clearly. He was standing at the edge of an abandoned shipyard. A heavy-duty engine hoist stood behind him just beside the cave entrance, its boom extended over the edge. The damned thing was as rusty as the iron below. Mounted to the boom was a chain and hook. He debated jumping again.

Rocky Rabbit’s left lip lifted into a sneer. “Want you to look pretty for your lady friend,” he muttered as he grabbed hold of the hook and pulled it down. Poindexter and the cold-hearted bitch held Jake between them while Rocky Rabbit secured the hook beneath the bindings and worked the hoist lever. Inch by inch he lifted Jake until he was nearly off his feet.

Then the fun began. Cold-hearted Bitch stepped forward with her idea of a knife—a box cutter blade. “I hate to waste a good man,” she said while she pressed the lever at the side of the cutter, pushing the razor into view. She pulled his shirt out of his pants and stretched it tight, creating a taut surface between them. Very slowly, her blade bit through the buttons on his shirt. “But I’ve already got a good man. What would I do with two?”

With Jake’s chest now exposed, she took another step forward. The damned bitch winked at him like she was all hot and bothered, and this was all in fun. She lifted the razor to his throat.

Jake tilted his chin upward and stared at the gray clouds overhead, hoping she’d nick his carotid and he’d bleed out quickly. But no. She started at the hollow of his throat and cut one single slice down the centerline of his chest over his belly to his belt. He shuddered with the fiery pain, hissing against the words that sprang to his tongue. She hadn’t cut him deeply enough to go through the muscle, just enough to part the skin and make him bleed. Shaking from the assault, he gritted his teeth and shook it off. He wouldn’t give her the pleasure of uttering one word.

With his hands bound over his head, Rocky Rabbit shoved Jake backward off the cliff and Jake prepared for the worst. The terror of being suspended over thin air almost made him scream, but he chose to bite his lip and stare his murderers down instead.

That damned Zack had something to say about freezing to death, too. Deep breath. Exhale slowly. Don’t get mad. Get even.

Shut the fuck up, Zack! You get even. You aren’t the one hanging over a river and about to die, are you?

The wind caught him. His body swayed like a side of beef hung in the butcher’s freezer. Poindexter had the oddest smile on his face. Cold-hearted Bitch lifted her fingers to her lips and blew Jake a kiss. He spat to his right, so there was no doubt what he thought of her.

Rocky Rabbit cranked the lever that lowered the hoist’s boom. Inch by shivering inch, Jake dropped below their line of sight. Poindexter disappeared momentarily, but only long enough to return with a long wooden pole. He grinned from his higher position on the bank, stuck the end of the pole between Jake’s arms, but only enough to turn him one hundred eighty degrees until he faced the river.

“Smile pretty,” Rocky Rabbit cackled.

“Shit,” Jake growled under his breath. He was lowered until he was directly in front of the rusted slab of iron. Inch by inch, his body was cranked backward. Shivers raked him at the frozen touch of skin on metal. One more crank and he came to rest, spread out on his deathbed.

“Die well, Jake Weylin,” Poindexter called from high overhead. “It has been a pleasure matching wits with you, but as you can see, I always win.”

Jake didn’t bother to look up. His heart turned to Lacy. This would hurt her more than it would him. He shivered. The Potomac in December was a damned cold place to die, but it would be quick. Even the slice down his belly didn’t hurt anymore. Maybe it was shock setting in. Maybe he was just numb like he’d been since he’d left the Corps. Who knew? He sure as hell didn’t.

“You’re a lucky man,” Poindexter called over the edge.

Jesus H. Christ, why don’t you just leave?

“You will be glad to know that I’m on my way to place an anonymous call to all the newspapers on the East Coast. I’ll be sure to tell them where to look for you. I’m sad to say you’ll be dead by the time they get here, but rest easy. You know how they are, Jake. They’ll print every last picture of what they find, and they’ll bring the television crews with them to take more pictures of your dead body.”

Bits of dirt and gravel rained down on Jake as Poindexter monologued. “Birds and rats may already be feasting on you by the time they arrive, Jake. After all, animals like things that bleed, and you are bleeding, true? They’ll be here before I fly off in my private helicopter. But think about this while you hang there and bleed to death.” More gravel rained over Jake. “What’s the last thing your precious Lacy Wright will see every night for the rest of her life? What will she dream of?

The bastard laughed. “You might have outed me to the world, but I’m not finished yet, Weylin. You are.”