By the time the driver had us in front of RH Shoes, it was almost dark outside. I knew that I didn’t have much time. Seb and I loaded our guns and tucked them inside our coats as we slipped out of the car. On second thought, I reached back in and stared at the driver.
“You take care of this dog back here,” I said sharply. “I know a certain woman who’s going to be over the moon to see her dog again. You understand?”
The driver frowned. I knew that having a pet in a company car was a breach of protocol. But who gave a fuck? After all, I was the goddamn CEO. I should have been able to fill the whole back seat with dogs if I wanted.
“Don’t let anything happen to her,” I warned again. “Or I’ll make sure you won’t be able to get another job in this city until you’re eighty years old.”
The driver nodded and gulped. Satisfied, I rapped on the window and snuck into an alley where Seb was waiting.
The storefront of RH Shoes was dark, and I wondered if anyone was inside.
“So, boss,” Seb said with an ironic grin on his face. I had to roll my eyes. For all his talk about not wanting to get arrested or involved with anything shady once more, he was doing a great fucking job at being a hired villain. “What’s the plan?”
“We break in from the back, then scout for Hodges and Audrey,” I said. The store was connected to a warehouse with all of the windows painted black. “She could be anywhere inside, and she’s small, so remember to check everywhere you can find.”
Seb nodded. He shook his head and grinned. “I never thought I’d be saying this, but this is kind of exciting, isn’t it?”
I rolled my eyes. “Seb, this is dangerous. Hodges is a fucking lunatic. Just shoot him if you see him, okay?”
Seb nodded. I mouthed, “One, two three,” and then slammed my body against the back alley door with all of my might. The metal creaked and groaned but didn’t give. Then Seb and I counted down once more, and both body slammed the door at the same time. It worked. The door creaked open, sagging on one of its hinges.
“Bingo,” Seb said. He held his gun in his hands and darted inside. A second later, I darted in right behind him.
The store was dark and seemingly empty. I frowned as I stepped through the piles of shoeboxes. Lone shoes were scattered on the floor, making it look like a tornado had whirled through the store.
“What the hell?” Seb whispered. We were creeping alongside one of the walls with our guns held high. “Looks like we’re not the first people to break in here today. Did the cops already check this place out?”
I frowned and shook my head. Remembering that Seb couldn’t see me in the dark, I spoke. “No,” I murmured. “No, they haven’t been here. Look at this dust.” I pointed down at the floor. Our feet were disturbing a fine, thin layer of gray—it almost looked like ash, like a volcano had exploded and then settled over everything inside. Our movements, though slight, were stirring up some of the dust and I felt an insane itch begin to build up in my sinuses.
“Shit,” I mumbled as I buried my face in the crook of my arm and sneezed. Seb let out a muffled laugh, and I glared at him.
As we made our way to the front of the store, I tried to look for anything unusual, but the problem was everything looked unusual. If I didn’t know that Richard had Audrey locked away somewhere, I would have guessed that he was trying to leave the country or make a hasty getaway.
My heart sank when we got to the front of the store. The registers and computers were gone, and I could tell that someone had been here very recently judging by the large footprints in the dust that looked almost as fresh as my own. I swallowed.
“She’s not here,” I said to Seb over my shoulder. “We need to check the warehouse.”
He nodded, and we turned, then ran in the other direction. The back of the store was dark and made it hard to see where the door was. I ran my hand along the wall, searching for a partition or a material that didn’t feel like drywall. Finally, I noticed a smooth, almost imperceptible groove.
“Here,” I whispered excitedly. “Here, we just have to break this open.”
Seb joined me, and together, we started pushing and knocking on the wall. But after a few minutes, we’d made no progress, and I was starting to feel panicked. The sun was almost all the way down—I could barely see the street through the distant front windows of the store.
“Shoot it,” Seb said. He clapped me on the shoulder. Sighing, I raised my gun and fired it at the partition in the wall. Sure enough, the force of the bullet pushed the partition back just far enough for me to stick my fingers in and shove with all my might. As the wall gave way, I held my breath. Irrationally, I was terrified of what I’d find behind the wall. Audrey’s dead body? A team of thugs waiting for me? Hodges himself?
Moving the wall kicked up a lot of dust, and Seb and I were coughing and sneezing as we waited for our eyes to adjust. It was still pitch-black when I opened my eyes, so I took my cell phone out and turned on the flashlight. Sweeping it across the floor of the warehouse, my jaw dropped.
“Holy shit,” I said to Seb. “It’s dark as fuck in here. You see this shit?”
Seb cleared his throat and coughed once more. Then he stood next to me, peering into the darkness. The beam of my cell phone’s flashlight held suspended particles of dust, and as I moved the beam to the floor, I gaped.
“Look at this,” I said, pointing. “Look, it’s the same statements I had printed out and gave to that cop.”
Seb shook his head. “This doesn’t mean anything.” He stepped inside the warehouse. The partition seemed firmly wedged open behind us, but part of me was afraid that, somehow, we’d wind up trapped. “All it means is that he knows he fucked up, and somehow he managed to leave the evidence behind.”
“Shit,” I muttered. “That’s no good.”
“Damn right it’s no good,” Seb replied. “Come on. Let’s keep looking.”
Cautiously, we stepped forward, holding our guns high. When the dust began to settle, I realized with a sinking feeling that the warehouse had been accessed much more recently than the store.
“He’s been here,” I said in a low voice. “He was here recently.” The warehouse was huge—I couldn’t even see the other end of the inside. “Look,” I said, gesturing at the ground. There was a sheaf of papers improbably fluttering even though there was no breeze in the building. “He must have been here, trying to clear out his tracks.” I picked up one of the papers and held my cell phone flashlight up, trying to read it. For the second time, I felt a sense of foreboding and dread. “Look, Seb, he was trying to get rid of the evidence.” The names and addresses on the paper had been covered with white-out and hastily typed over. I could still read snippets of the original, but it was clear that the file had been tampered with. “He was trying to lie about where all of the money came from.”
“He’s on to us,” Seb said, his voice a tone darker. “We need to get out of here, he may even have it rigged somehow.”
“That’s fucking ridiculous,” I snapped, crumpling the paper into a ball and tossing it on the floor. “We have to search the rest of the warehouse.”
I was starting to feel the sand running out of the hourglass, so I made Seb search one half of the warehouse while I searched the other. I didn’t find anything except for more papers on the floor and broken crates. There was no sign that Audrey had been here at all.
Curling my hand into a fist, I slammed it against the wall. “This was all for nothing,” I said, not caring how loud I was. “We did all of this for nothing. And we wasted so much fucking time!”
Seb walked over and shook his head. “We didn’t do it for nothing. We were looking for your girl, right? That’s something. Even though we didn’t find her, we still tried.”
I grabbed him by the collar. “We are not giving up,” I hissed out in Seb’s face. “Not at all. So if you want to leave, you can leave. But I’m staying until I find some hint of where Audrey was taken.”
Seb glanced down. “Lennox, this might be better left to the cops,” he said in a low voice. “We’re out of our league. We have no idea where this guy’s hiding, and you’re the one who told me what a raving lunatic he is.”
I swallowed hard. “I get that, but I’m not giving up until I know Audrey’s safe! Can’t you respect that?”
Seb frowned. He turned away from me and tucked his gun inside his jacket. “I know you wanna be the hero of the day and save her, but sometimes that’s not how real life works.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I narrowed my eyes. Anger welled up within me, and my skin grew hot. I took a deep breath, but it didn’t help. “Of course I have to help Audrey! It’s my fucking fault she’s in this mess in the first place.”
“I know that, Lennox. And I know you don’t want to hear this, but this could have been any girl! Not just Audrey. It could have been any of the women from the company.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “You’ve slept with all of them, right?”
“What the fuck are you saying, Seb?”
“I’m saying that you’ve already decided your company is more important,” Seb said calmly. “You told Hodges that you wouldn’t give it up to save Audrey’s life, and then you decided that you had to have your cake and eat it, too. Just walk away with your company, man, who cares about Audrey? Obviously, you don’t—not that much, if you weren’t even willing to give LennoxCo to Hodges just to get her back.”
“You’re a fucking asshole,” I spat out. “You only care about money and yourself, in that order.”
Seb held up his hands. The fact that he was managing to stay calm was enraging me all the more. “Don’t say that. I’m only telling it like it is. All you’ve ever cared about is your damn company, and you know that’s true. You didn’t prioritize her life, and now you need to let the professionals handle this.”
I swung back and punched Seb hard in the jaw. Flesh and bone cracked beneath my knuckles and a searing pain shot up my arm as Seb recoiled. When he stood up, rubbing his jaw, he eyed me ruefully.
“Don’t hate me for being honest,” Seb said. “I know you don’t want to think of the truth this way, but come on, Lennox. You didn’t even think about turning LennoxCo over to Hodges when he made his demands. You immediately said no.”
I closed my eyes as his words sunk in. I would have never admitted it, especially not to Seb, but deep down, I knew he was right. I wasn’t a good person. And even though I cared for Audrey, selfishly, I couldn’t have put her first.
“I’m a piece of shit,” I muttered, slumping against the wall. My gun fell out of my hand and clattered to the floor. “I don’t deserve to live.”
“That’s being unfair.” He squatted down next to me and looked into my eyes. “Look, brother, you may have gone soft in the head, but you’re still an alpha male. And you do what you think is best. But don’t start acting like a fucking martyr when we’re in this situation because you’re the one who put us here.”
My shoulders slumped, and the fear began to leave my body. “I deserve to die,” I said glumly. “You’re right. I thought I could do everything myself, but I can’t. I’m a piece of shit.”
Seb shook his head. “You made the best decision for you and your company. A lot of CEOs wouldn’t, but you’re a true businessman.”
I got to my feet and brushed my hands off on my pants. “Yeah, at the expense of another human life,” I shot back. “I can’t believe I didn’t stick up for Audrey. I should have done that.” Suddenly, I thought of her parents, poor and alone. “Goddamn it, Seb, people are counting on Audrey. Her parents, she helps her parents. And that damn dog!”
“So stop whining about it and go find her.” Seb gave me a little nudge towards the door. “We’ll look somewhere else. But you should call the cops, too.”
I shook my head. “Not doing that until we try a few more places. Hodges may have won this battle, but the war isn’t over yet.”
“That’s the spirit,” Seb said. He clapped me on the shoulder again, and I realized that I couldn’t stay mad at him. Seb may have been an old partner in crime of mine, but it took a true friend to say the things that he’d just brought up. I knew he didn’t think less of me for doing what I’d done, but I was starting to realize that after this whole ordeal was over, I was going to have to make some massive changes in my life.
We walked back into the shoe store and then left through the back door that we’d slammed open. The nighttime air was cold and smelled vaguely of fish and rotting garbage. Seb sniffed the air and then gave me a disgusted look.
“You ever think about how fucked up it is that this city reeks of garbage and fish year-round? Most places only have to deal with that shit in the summer. But we have it year-round.”
The skyscrapers of Chicago loomed above us like giant sentient guardians, and for a moment, I felt incredibly small.
“It doesn’t seem fair,” I said darkly as we climbed into the car. “It doesn’t seem goddamned fair at all.”
There was a buzz in my pocket, and I reached down and grabbed my phone, praying that it would be O’Brian. When I realized that it was an unknown number, a shiver of fear crawled down my spine.
“Enzo, did you really think you could get the best of me?” Hodges laughed before I had a chance to respond. I held the phone at a wary distance from my face, staring at the blank screen and imagining his smug pink face.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied. “Now where’s Audrey?”
There was a pause, then Hodges laughed again. “I don’t know why you have to be so demanding. After all, we’re not even working together, and you’re still demanding things from me. Don’t you know that you only get to act that way with business associates and colleagues?”
“Fuck you,” I spat out. “You kidnapped my fucking girlfriend; I’ll talk to you however I want.”
Seb’s eyebrows raised but I held up a hand and gestured for him to be quiet. The last thing I needed right now was another one of his smart aleck remarks.
“Oh, she’s your girlfriend now, is she?” Hodges chuckled again. “Well, if you want to hear her say hello…” He trailed off, and there was static as he lifted the phone away from his ear. I heard him yell something indistinguishable and then there was a bloodcurdling scream that punctured the air with horror.
Oh my God. He’s hurting her. He’s hurting Audrey. Panic bells went off in my head, and I felt like I was struggling to breathe underwater. Blood rushed to my face, and damp sweat broke out on my forehead as I waited in agonizing silence for Hodges to say something.
“Well?” Hodges chuckled. “How was that? I think she misses you, Enzo. You’d better hurry up and sign HodgesCo… Oops!” He chuckled again. “I mean, LennoxCo. You’d better hurry up and sign LennoxCo over to me, Enzo.”
“That isn’t happening,” I said through gritted teeth. “Where is she? And what the fuck do you want with her?”
“Well, she’s down hanging out with a couple of my friends,” he said, putting a cruel emphasis on the last word. “And they brought their dogs with them! She likes dogs, right? She kept asking about some stupid dog.” Hodges sighed, and I felt anger rise through my body like a tidal wave. “Anyway, some of my dogs are getting a little hungry. It’s been a few hours since they ate, Enzo. And even though your girlfriend is pretty skinny, I think she might make a nice meal for them.”
“Shut the fuck up. Where the fuck is she?”
“She’s down in a warehouse by the waterfront,” Hodges said casually. “And if you don’t come here soon and give me that flash drive that you stole, we’re going to kill her and throw her body into Lake Michigan.” He paused. “I mean, the pollution might be bad enough to kill her on its own. Or maybe we’ll feed her to the dogs after all. I haven’t decided yet. You’d better hurry up,” Hodges added. Then he hung up.
I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it in shock. “He’s going to fucking kill her,” I said to Seb. Then suddenly, I sprang into action and rapped on the partition. “Waterfront,” I yelled to the driver. “Now!”