CHAPTER NINETEEN

Dre

We all have pasts.

Some good. Some bad.

For the longest time, my problem had been trying to keep the past behind me where it belonged. But when your past was pocked with scars, much like my arms were, it was hard to forget what I’d been through.

What I’d done.

But that’s the funny thing about pasts. No matter how far you think you are ahead, it’s always there, nipping at your heels, clawing its way forward until it is in your face, baring its teeth and you’re unable to ignore it.

As cheesy as it may sound, the thing that finally chased the past back where it belonged, was love.

The notion of romantic love was something I’d always thought belonging to prior and much older generations of people. My parents had it. So did my grandparents. But I believed it was something that had faded with time, each generation less and less capable of the kind of love found in romance novels.

Until Preppy.

Because of him I knew love wasn’t a myth because suddenly my heart felt so full it was going to break. Love wasn’t just a notion. Our love was practically tangible. I felt it moving around between us. A zing. A connection tethering us together even when I thought he was dead.

Preppy’s love wasn’t ‘romantic’. It was beautifully painful. It was the storming-the-castle, take-no-prisoners kind of love and I never wanted to escape from it.

From him.

I didn’t think I had any room left inside my heart but when Bo came along he taught me about an entirely different kind of love. One I thought I was never going to be able to experience.

The kind of love between mother and child.

Just when I thought we were beginning, it was all being taken away.

I was being taken away.

Again.

I’d been blindfolded. A sizzling pain continuously shot from the base of my spine, shocking me every thirty seconds or so. It caused my back muscles to spasm and go ramrod straight as if I’d been poked with a branding iron.

There would be no popping of the emergency latch this time. No escaping. I couldn’t feel my legs or arms. Couldn’t move.

Couldn’t scream.

Paralyzed in both fear and body.

Suddenly, I was ripped from the familiar trunk of the car I’d been shoved into by someone reeking of overly musky cologne. My adrenaline spiked and my heart started to beat a thousand miles a minute, sending alarms ringing throughout my body.

Alarms I couldn’t answer.

Unable to put up a fight, I was dragged until unceremoniously dropped. My head clanked against the hard floor, yet I still felt nothing.

Nothing but fear.

My blindfold fell down to the bridge of my nose. That was the very moment I knew I’d been wrong about finally leaving the past where it belonged because it wasn’t behind me at all. It was standing over me, glaring down at me, a sly grin on its cleanly shaven face.

East?

At first I didn’t understand. What reason would East have to want to hurt me. But then he cocked his head to the side and his grin turned upward into a full cruel smile. The smile was full of newer whiter teeth but there was no doubt in my mind that I’d seen that smile before.

Up close.

While he was raping me.

Recognition came barreling into me as he started to laugh. The same laugh that haunted my sleep night after night. The same laugh that filled the air the first time he ripped through my virginity while Conner held me down.

He ran a finger down my cheek, but I couldn’t move. Couldn’t get away.

I was right. East, the realtor, had no reason to hurt me.

Eric did.

“And here I was afraid you wouldn’t remember me,” Eric said, clapping his hands together proudly. “I know I look a lot different now. It’s amazing what getting clean, body and soul can do for your appearance.”

Shit.

If I didn’t see my arms and hands with my own two eyes I wouldn’t have known they were still connected to my body because I couldn’t feel them. I couldn’t feel anything besides the shooting pain in my spine that left me seeing stars.

“I clean up good don’t I, Dre?” Eric asked, gesturing to his white button-down shirt and crisp pressed black dress pants. He lowered his voice to a suggestive tone, eyeing me up and down. “Not as good as you clean up, of course. I knew a little meat on your bones would do this ass good,” he said, a slapping sound echoed through the room and I was grateful I couldn’t feel his hand on my body. “I’ve been sober now for nearly three years.”

My jaw began to tingle. “Wha...why?” I managed to ask with a slur, my tongue hanging heavy and useless in my mouth. Unable to lift my neck, my lips moved against the dirty floor. Drool pooled out of the corner of my mouth.

“Oh good, you can talk again. This would be so dull if I couldn’t hear you scream.” Eric crouched down in front of me. His expensive gold watch gleamed as he smoothed a fallen strand of hair back over his head into his slicked-back do. “Why, you ask? Because I wasn’t done with you.”

“Noooo,” I said. My toes began to tingle and I hoped with everything I had that it was a sign my body was coming back to life. “What did you give me?” I groaned.

“You like that, huh? I had to make sure you couldn’t jump from the car this time, although kudos to you because I thought I’d planned for everything but you jumping from a moving car while tied in the trunk was not on that list. The drugs in your system are my own concoction. A little Ketamine, a little Chloroform. I shot that shit right into your spine too. You really can learn anything from YouTube,” Eric said proudly. “It’ll wear off in an hour or so, until then, we’re gonna have a little fun. Just like old times.” He giggled, covering his mouth with his fingers like a schoolgirl caught talking during class.

“You’re insane,” I said.

Eric ignored me. “I searched for you. I searched and searched until I figured you must’ve been dead. I thought that right up until I ran into you in that house by the cemetery. You walked right into my life again looking recently sober and very confused. You were looking to score some H. Remember that Dre? Remember how it felt to stick that needle in your arm? That first little prick of your skin before it hit your vein and the world went away?” Eric chuckled and stood, slowly pacing the small room. “Sometimes I lay awake at night just remembering how it felt to be oblivious to this cruel world.”

Insane is an understatement.

“The thing is, you weren’t alone when I saw you in that house,” Eric’s tone turned deeper. Darker.

Angrier.

“I saw you in the cemetery...with HIM,” Eric seethed, with extra emphasis on the word HIM. “The same guy who killed Conner. That’s right, I saw him that night. I watched from the bus station as he carried you out of the motel room. When I snuck in to search for Conner all I found was his lifeless body in the bathroom. And when I saw you again, in that cemetery and realized the two of you were together, I knew you’d played a hand in Connor’s death. Who knows, maybe you did it yourself.”

“I thought you were dead,” I muttered.

I wish you still were.

Eric pointed to himself. “I got high and jumped off a fucking bridge! I thought I was dead too! It was a miracle I survived. When I came to and I was still breathing I knew for certain then that I’d been spared for a reason. A higher power thought I was more useful here on earth. I got sober right after that and decided that part of God’s plan was exacting revenge for Conner.”

“I...I didn’t even think you liked Connor that much,” I said, my lips moving with slightly more ease. Conner and Eric were always arguing. About money or drugs or even whose turn it was to rape me.

“No!” he cried, slamming his fist through the wall, plaster fell in crumbles to the floor. He turned back around and stomped back over to me, sending one of his pointed toe dress shoes sailing into my stomach. I heard something crack and I couldn’t even fold in on the pain so I just had to lie there and take it. “You don’t get it. Connor was...he was more.”

“What?” I coughed. “Were you...in love with him?”

“I...” he started, pausing to take a deep breath to recollect himself. “That doesn’t matter. Not anymore.” Eric stormed over to a table at the far end of the room and picked something up off of it. It was only when he was crouched in front of me again that I could see the object he’d picked up was a black leather bound book. More specifically, a bible.

“You know, he’s going to come for me,” I said. “Preppy. He’s not going to let you get away with this. He’s probably almost here already.”

“I’m counting on it,” Eric answered with a calculating smile, seeming a lot less concerned than a man in his position should be. “You know that I’ve been fucking with him for years don’t you? I even blew up his car. By the time I was ready to try again, hopefully blowing something up with him inside, the news broke that he was dead and I can’t tell you how disappointed I was that I wasn’t the one to kill him myself, but then another miracle happened and not only was he alive but you had come back. My prayers had been answered.”

I tried to wiggle my fingers. I needed to get out of my restraints if I wanted any chance of escaping but they were still too numb.

“You see this?” he asked, holding up the bible. “This is what replaced Conner and my unnatural thoughts toward him. This replaced heroin.” He stroked the black leather cover lovingly. “I lost Conner, but I found someone much better.” He looked over to me. “I found Jesus.”

“So it’s not you, it’s Jesus who wants you to kill me?” I asked through the pain in my twisting guts. I wanted to keep him talking as long as possible to give Preppy time to find me.

HOW he was going to find me was another story.

I didn’t even know where I was.

Eric clucked his tongue and shook his head slowly from side to side. “I’m not going to kill you. Well, not right away. Now that I’ve found the Lord, I’ll need to exorcise your demons from your body first. Free them from your inner workings.” He held his arms out to the side and looked up to the ceiling with his eyes closed, breathing in deeply as if he were smelling something other than the mildew and dust permeating the room. He opened his eyes and lowered his gaze. “I’m going to save you, Andrea,” he whispered.

“You’re gonna save me, with that?” I eyed the bible in his hand.

He slammed it shut, stood and walked back over to the table. Eric rolled his eyes. “No, stupid girl. Not with the bible.” He picked up a knife with a thick black handle, its long serrated blade glinted against the light as he turned to inspect it, running a finger over the sharp edge. His smile fell, straightening into a flat line. He pointed the blade my way.

“With this.”

––––––––

Preppy

I tracked Dre from the app on my phone, telling Bear where to turn until we found ourselves an hour from Logan’s Beach in a town called Estero Springs, driving the van through a gate with a sign that announced we were entering a State Historic site.

“I still can’t believe you GPS’d your wife,” King said.

“You can tell me what a stupid fucking idea it was after we find her,” I barked.

“Fuck, no. I’m gonna stick one in Ray’s neck the second we get home. Shit, maybe the kids too.”

“I lost signal!” I grunted, tossing my phone to the floor.

“What does that mean?” Kevin asked from behind me.

“It means that it stopped working,” I said.

“How?” Kevin asked. “It’s a chip in the back of her neck. The only way it would stop working would be if someone cut...”

Bear shot him a look and Kevin’s voice trailed off.

“She’s got to be around here somewhere,” I muttered as we parked behind a neat row of rounded trees. “Stay in the fucking van,” I ordered Kevin who was in the backseat. “Call us if you see anything coming or going. We moved deeper into the park. “The last trace was somewhere right in that direction,” I pointed north.

I pulled my gun. The unfamiliar terrain was the only thing stopping me from running full speed into the dark to find my girl.

King, Bear and I made our way quietly through the trees in the dark. There were a dozen or so small buildings around the perimeter of the property. “All of those houses are at least a hundred years old,” King said. “What the fuck is this place?”

“It’s the Koreshan State Historic Site,” Bear answered. “Some quack physician in the 1800’s started a cult and this was supposed to be his utopia. All because the motherfucker electrocuted himself one night and had an epiphany that the entire universe existed inside a giant hollow sphere. Wacky shit, huh? Guess most people thought so too, considering this place is now a state park that rents kayaks on weekends and hosts Mother’s Day brunch.”

“How the fuck do you know all that?” King asked.

“It says it right there,” Bear said, shining his light on a stone in the ground with a metal plaque fixed at an angle to the top.

“Did you hear that?” King asked. The leaves on a nearby rustled for a moment then stopped.

“Probably a snake or rodent,” Bear said.

“Shhhhhh girls. I think that’s where we need to go,” I said, pointing to a large two story yellow building beyond the clearing in front of us. I crouched down and used the beam of my flashlight on the ground so we could see any obstacles in our way without shining the light right through the windows and announcing our fucking presence to whoever the cocksucker was who had Dre.

I ground my teeth.

“How do you know that’s where she is?” Bear asked. “There’s a shit ton of buildings around here. Could be any one of them.”

“Because of that,” I said, lifting my light to the license plate of the familiar newer model Honda Civic parked along the side of the building. The trunk wide open and empty. The What Would Jesus Do bumper sticker glowing in the dark.

“I know who took her,” I growled.

“I called the brothers. They’re on the way. We’re gonna need more backup than your kid brother...” Bear’s voice trailed off in the distance because I was already halfway across the clearing.

I was going to get my wife.

Then I was going to burn East alive.

I’m coming, Doc.