AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Let me get it,” Griz said.
He pulled her gently away from the door as he rose up off of the bed. Becca suddenly felt much, much more sober as the situation started to dawn on her. Maintenance, at this time of night? They hadn’t made any sort of call to the front desk complaining of something going haywire in their room.
Her mouth quickly went dry. She looked around, feeling a little like a rat trapped in a cage. If this was trouble, there was no way out of here. Only the front door.
Griz stepped carefully toward the door, drawing a pistol out of the back of his waistband and holding it pointed toward the door. Becca realized she was actually holding her breath as she watched Griz creep toward the door, put his gun barrel right up against the wood, and then peek through the peep hole.
The whole room seemed to shake with thunder. Becca dropped her empty glass and screamed as the center of the door exploded inwards in a shower of splinters.
Griz fell backwards and landed heavily on his back, arms wide. His eyes were shut and he didn’t move a muscle.
Oh my God he’s dead, Becca had time to think, dropping to her knees next to his motionless body, when the mangled door crashed inwards under a heavy kick.
She scurried back on her elbows, away from the doorway, away from the man who walked through it and into the room holding a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun that was still smoking. She didn’t make it far before her back bumped up against the bed and she was stuck.
“Boo-ya!” the man shouted, looking down at Griz’s body. “Got you, you big motherfucker!”
It was Skinny, the creepy Death’s Head member from the other day at the police station. The same man who had threatened to gut her and her sister in that dark alley a few months ago, the same one who had confronted her at the police station with the steroid monster named Mal.
Now, he was standing just inside her hotel room with a shotgun, standing over Griz’s body. There was no way to run past him. She was trapped.
“Griz?” Becca whispered hoarsely. It was all the volume she could muster, through the shock and the terror that gripped her.
He wasn’t moving. She didn’t even think he was breathing.
“You can forget him, bitch,” Skinny said, grinning wide and showing his dirty teeth. “I gave him both barrels. You remember me, big man? Yeah, I remember you.”
He gave Griz’s body a quick kick from his booted foot to punctuate his words, which somehow pulled Becca out of her paralysis.
“Stop it!” she said. “Why are you doing that? He’s dead!”
“I’ll do whatever the fuck I want!” Skinny said, breaking open the shotgun. Two empty shells popped out and fell to the floor, and Skinny began fishing in his pockets for some fresh shells.
He kept talking as he searched for his shells, taunting Griz even though Griz obviously couldn’t hear him. “Still got a fuckin limp from where your boy shot me. Foot hurts all the time when it gets cold. Well, how do you like me now?”
Becca took advantage of Skinny’s distraction to look around the room. Her head was spinning, panic making all of her thoughts swirl around out of control, but she had to think of something if she was going to get out of this.
Griz’s gun. He’d dropped it when Skinny had shot him, maybe she could find it and…
No. It was nowhere to be found, and now Skinny’s ranting seemed to be coming to an end.
“Yeah, now I’m the big dog up in this…” Skinny started to say, then frowned as he continued to search fruitlessly in his pockets for more shells, “… where the fuck are my shells… fuck it. Fuck it.”
He abandoned his search and drew out a stout pocketknife instead, clicking it open with undisguised glee. It was serrated and hooked forward, and Becca recognized it as the same knife Skinny had used to threaten her and her sister back in that dark alley a few months ago.
“Just going to have to do this the hard way,” he said, turning the knife blade so that the light caught it.
All the same feelings from being trapped in that alley with Kate began to flood back into Becca. The terror. The helplessness. The feeling of being a wild animal caught in a trap, desperate to find a way out and finding none.
“Please,” was all Becca could think of to say. “Please.”
“Oh, please, please, please,” Skinny said, sneering at her. “Now you’ll all please, please, please. You weren’t before, though, were you? Hunh? When you were putting my boy in lockup by being a fucking snitch?”
“I didn’t want any of this,” she said.
“I didn’t want any of this,” he parroted, making a mockery of her voice. “Well, you got this. You’re gonna get all this.”
He started nodding, moving slowly closer to her.
