Page 47 of Kill Me

“She’s clever. She gets them involved just enough that they would face criminal prosecution themselves, and then they have no choice but to comply. From what I’ve read, the few people who have tried to—one was paid off, and the others disappeared.”

“I can’t wait to take this bitch down.” X looks contemplative. “We have to do something about her.”

“I agree. And we will. But my priority right now is Quinn.”

He nods. “So, Batman, what’s the plan?”

I laugh. “Right film, wrong character, bud.”

“You can laugh, but between you being called Harley and being a therapist, and your girl being called Quinn, you’re like two halves of a whole that becomes Harley Quinn, the psychiatrist and love interest of The Joker. It’s like it was written in the stars when the Batman universe was born.”

I ponder his words. He’s not wrong. “To be fair, the night we met she made a joke about the fact I was called Harley, and she was a Quinn. If we’d have met under any other circumstance, she’d be the girl of my dreams.”

“And why can’t she be the girl of your dreams?”

“Because right now she needs a doctor, not a boyfriend. She needs someone who wants to help her get better and receive nothing in return.”

“If history books tell us anything, H, they tell us that love conquers all. Whatever you do to put those boundaries in place, love will win over everything else. And if I can offer one piece of advice to you, it would be to follow your heart at every turn. Life is too short to not take a chance at love when it’s quite literally standing in front of you. She may not be in the safest place to make that decision now, but you have to trust that when she makes that decision, she knows what she wants.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. For now, we just need to get her out of there and away from that family.”

Ted moves off of his spot and comes over to nestle his nose into my lap. I look at him and count my lucky fucking stars that I found him at the rescue. He’s my soul dog. Without him, I don’t know where I would be.

“Okay boy, let’s go and save our girl.”

We wait for the sun to go down and the darkness to settle in before grabbing our supplies and heading to the left-hand side of the property. We saw the heat signatures moving from the outhouse earlier, and the third person was taken to the back building before the other two headed back to the main house. Dr Stephanie left an hour ago, oblivious to us in the van.

That was her first mistake. Always pay attention to your surroundings.

I put my rucksack on my back, which has rope inside and other equipment I may need. A knife and a taser are attached to a belt around my waist. During extractions, we like to keep things as non-violent as possible, but somewhere along the line Lulu managed to come to an agreement with our local police force. Knowing her, the leverage she used was top-notch, so until new people take over the roles, that relationship is set—as tentative as it is.

It’s not lost on me that we aren’t in the vicinity of our local area. We are, in fact, well out of bounds. So we need to get in and out and leave no evidence behind.

I pull my hat over my head and my mask over my mouth, leaving only my eyes on show. I haven’t found any cameras on the front or the side, and there was no evidence of camera footage in her cloud account. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any.

X is covered in exactly the same way, and we are dressed completely in black, with a bulletproof vest over the top because it’s better to be safe than sorry. Ted trots alongside me, his lead connected to my waist and an all-black harness with a handle that makes it easier to grab onto him in case we need to abort our mission. We both put in our earpieces and test them to make sure they’re working as needed.

We check the building to the left to make sure that there is no one inside. All the lights are off, but a glance through the window confirms my suspicions that it’s the treatment room. Shivers run through my body at the thought of what people have experienced in that room. With our heads on a swivel, we make our way, low and slow, to the fence on the side.

“Moving,” I say to X so that he can cover my movements as I do. Ted and I stop, and I crouch so that I’m covered by the longer grass.

“Moving,” he repeats back to me as he does the same. We continue the process until we reach the fence. Based on the tread patterns in the grass, there is a pathway that they’ve followed back into the main property. “Sit,” I instruct Ted as I pull the rucksack off my back and grab my torch. He does as he’s told while I shine the light around the edges of the fence, looking for separations in the wood where a gate may be. I brought a blanket to help counter the damage that could potentially be done by the barbed wire, but if I can find easier access, that would be best for Ted.

“Bingo!” I cry out as I spot a worn partition on the right of the planks of wood, and I push on it. There’s little resistance, which leads me to believe it could be a gate. I focus on a few slats to the left, looking for a glint of metal that could indicate hinges. I continue to push on the worn part, and as the movement builds momentum, the top part of the gate opens. I peer around the side and see a spring-loaded lock at the top that wasn’t locked properly.

“I’m going to climb up and see what I can see,” I say to X.

“Be careful. We have no guarantee that that fence isn’t live.” I unlatch Ted from my waist and instruct him over to X.

“When I was a kid, my dad used to take me camping. He taught me a trick once when we got lost on a walk and ended up in a cow field with electric fences surrounding it. If you take a long, fresh piece of grass and touch the tip to the wire.” As I’m describing the process to him, I lift the tip to touch the fence. “If you feel tingly vibrations, then the fence is live. If you feel nothing, then it’s off.”

“What do you feel?”

“Give me a sec.” I try to focus, my heart pounding as I do so. There’s no tingling.

“The fence is off.”

“Are you sure?”