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“I know,” he said. He glanced out the front of the van, toward where the guard was. “We’ll get out of this soon.”
“Where’s Corey? And Marc and the others?”
“They’re in a different room back at the Sargent Jasper. They aren’t hurt. Raven was the only one I know got injured badly, and it was a fight just to get him to settle down enough they could drug him. He was so angry…” He looked back at me. His eyes were dim, with dark circles underneath. His face was covered in a short beard, darker than his natural hair color, shadowed in the dark. “They had to be called in, you know?”
I raised a brow. “Did they?”
“She almost had you two,” he said. “I told Axel, last resort, if the last of us get caught, one of us should make the call. Apparently, he felt he needed to.”
“Are they the cartel you interrupted their drug trade from before? The one that sent poison to this city?”
“Their rivals did that. Wanting to give them a bad reputation by killing off the clientele. You don’t kill off your buyers. It was a dumb move.” He leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees as he looked at his feet. “I didn’t believe them for a while, but they were pretty upset with my interfering already anyway but considered what I did was a favor to them --getting rid of the last of the bad drugs-- it’s what they would have wanted. So maybe we give them some cash for saving us? It’s not the worst deal. They went for it, at least.”
“I can’t believe they got us all,” I said, rocking my head back and gazing at the ceiling of the van. “Even my own brother. Alice…she…”
Blake pursed his lips. “It’s my fault.”
I picked up my head to look at him. “What do you mean?”
He pushed a hand to his cheek, rubbing at his scruff. “I’ve been looking for him, since you’ve been in the hospital. Like I promised.”
“You were?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Only, when I found him, he didn’t trust anything I said. I didn’t know why. It was like he thought he knew me. So I told him I knew you. I was trying to get him to you because you were worried about him.” He bit his lower lip. “He said he needed to think about it. And when I left him, my phone was gone out of my pocket…I hadn’t even noticed…”
My eyes widened in surprise. “He stole it?”
“Gave it to Alice, obviously. I swear I didn’t know she’d gotten to him. I don’t know how…”
My heart raced. My lungs filled with air and I held it until it started to hurt. My own brother. Wil. No wonder he was talking funny, surprised to see me.
What lies had she told him?
How long had Alice been sitting with that? Holding my brother to use against me at some point?
I rolled my head back, pressing it to the side of the van. “Are you sure they aren’t going to kill us? These cartel?”
“I pinkie swear.” He picked up my hand. “This time, it’s the lesser of two evils. Don’t shoot me again, okay?” He kissed the knuckles. “Why do we care where two billion dollars ends up? If we’re safe, it doesn’t matter.”
I didn’t want to say it, because I wanted to say it didn’t matter, like them. Only it did bother me. “Because if it lands in with a cartel, it’s not going back where it belongs. Are we going to end up with more drugs because now they are well funded? Or worse? What if they do kill people? If they’re just as bad, we might as well let Alice have it. They are holding us hostage. They wouldn’t let the pregnant woman go until it was critical.”
He made a face. “But they did let her go. And it was Alice that made her that sick. Trying to get people to tell her where Murdock was. This group just wants us to sit quietly so no one can go to the police and stop them.”
“We can’t support a group that’s slightly better than Alice and her team. We’re just funneling the money from one set of bad guys to another.”
He sighed with his mouth still on my skin. “Sometimes I hate your damn moral sense.” He picked up his head and looked at me. “Especially coming from a thief.”
“I only ever took what I needed,” I said. “I’ll pay it back every day for the rest of my life. But who am I to just give stolen money to someone else?” I grumbled. “Just like I can’t kill anyone. Even Alice.”
“You were thinking about it?”
I pressed my lips together, grinding my teeth. “I’ve thought about it a lot. But I keep thinking about Corey holding a gun. About that look he gave me when I asked about it. We can’t turn into murderers. Our lives are on the line here. We’re taking a risk they won’t kill us after anyway.”
He pressed a palm against my back. “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t want to sit here.” I got up, bent over to slide into the front passenger seat.
This immediately got the attention of the guard. He came around to the window. “No funny business.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I want to help find Mr. Smith.”
“You should stay in the van.”
“He’s not here,” I said. I motioned to the house. “The inside is empty, and there’s no mail piled up in the box, the landscaping is bare. It might be in his name, but he doesn’t live here.” The more I spoke, the more I realized why Axel was here, and why we were still here. It wasn’t to scope out an empty house. It was a distraction. He was too smart to look at an empty house.
The guard lifted a brow. “You think you know where he’s at?”
“No, but there’s people who probably do. The rest of Nightingale. Some of them might even live in this neighborhood and might actually be home.” I motioned to the house. “You can tell the others. We’ll wait.”
He seemed skeptical but he walked around, heading inside the house.
These were street thugs. Newbies at best. How they managed to overtake Alice…that was beyond me. They must have surprised her. They had the numbers, and if Axel sent out a signal, knowing everyone was still at the Sargent Jasper, that was all they needed to bombard them and take over.
Which meant anyone in Alice’s group that wasn’t already captured, they might come back for her. We had less time to get out of this mess.
I scooted over to the driver’s side to start the van.
“What the hell are you doing, sugar?” Blake asked. He slid into the passenger seat. “You’re going to get us killed.”
“I’m not waiting for anyone else to save us,” I said. I broke open the steering column, looking for the right wires. “Get your seatbelt on.” I looked around. “Have a screwdriver or…”
He popped open the glove compartment and rummaged, finding a pocketknife. “Okay, that’s just stupid. They left us with a weapon in the car.”
I opened the pocketknife and I had the engine going, but the steering wheel locked up. I ignored it for now, using force to be able to back up out of the drive.
There were shouts coming from the h
ouse, but I ignored it all, jamming the knife into the key slot to break the steering lock. Once I could steer, I pushed the gas, peeling out of the neighborhood as fast as I could go.
Blake whipped around, watching behind us. “They’re going to be pissed. And we just left Axel.”
“It’s okay, they didn’t have any real guns. Axel can handle them.” I looked at him. “I think he wanted this. He knew. What kind of cartel are they? So far, they’re more amateur than me.”
He shrugged. “Might be just some locals ahead of the main team. It all happened pretty quickly. They didn’t need anything but a location and enough numbers to swarm the place.” He kept checking the rearview mirror. “Sweetie, I’m all for hitting the road, but they’ve got people. Your brother…”
“I know,” I said. “If they want this done, quickly, we can’t wait on the amateurs. Street druggies probably aren’t going to kill our people, but they definitely aren’t going to get to the bottom of this in a hurry.”
“More are probably on the way,” he said. “People a bit more…professional.”
“So we have to figure this out before they get here. But we’ve got a chance now to get our people out…my brother…” I wasn’t exactly sure where we were, but I just tried heading south and hoped we ended up on a main road back to Charleston. “They’ll have to steal another vehicle or find another way to get around. That’s if Axel doesn’t disable all of them somehow.”
Blake rolled his head back, shaking it. “What if I just give them my money? All of it. Think they’ll let us all go for… less than two billion?”
I threw him a sideways glare. “Maybe before someone told them there was two billion at stake.”
He held his hands up, palms open, showing me his hands. “You can’t blame me for trying. Where are we heading, anyway?”
“We’re going to call Avery,” I said. “He said before they were close to finding Mr. Murdock. Let’s find out if they’re any closer.”
??????
It was harder to find a phonebooth than I thought. We ended up not far from downtown, which was a problem for us if we wanted to avoid being picked up by police and questioned. We crept up to the edge of the city in the van but ditched it before we got to the tourist districts.
