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I kissed him. God, I was so happy to see him alive. All I had to do was get us out of here in one piece. And that started with getting the ropes untied. I holstered my gun and worked on his feet as he started to wake up, moving to his hands next before coming back to a crouch in front of him. He looked like he was coming back from whatever had knocked him out. He rubbed the back of his head, red eyes welled over with tears.
Those same eyes snapped to something behind me, terror pushing those tears out and turning them to rivers on his cheeks. “Behind you,” he said, his voice constricted and face ghostly pale.
In one fluid movement, I twisted and stood, gun directly aimed straight ahead, barrel pointed at the chest of none other than—
“Sheriff Pope?”
The sheriff, a shotgun raised and almost comically larger than my pistol, motioned for me to drop to the ground.
“You should have left Blue Creek when I told you to,” he said, a wicked grin twisting his face.
30
Charlie Marsh
The blindfold came off, and I blinked against the fading darkness, expecting to lock eyes with my captor again.
Instead, it was my savior: Austin. He’d come. He had rescued me. I felt a rush, like we could fly straight into the sky right now. We were going to be ok—
My heart plummeted all over again. “Behind you,” I was able to say past my clamping throat. Austin stood and faced Sheriff Giles Pope, a standoff that was clearly one-sided. All Pope had to do was press the trigger and we’d both be done for.
Austin put his gun down on the floor and raised his hands. I wanted to throw up. This had to have been some kind of fucked-up nightmare. Maybe it was from the new preworkout drink I had started—I knew I should have read the warning label a little better.
The sheriff’s face twisted into a maniacal sneer. He wore a plain black shirt and black pants, with black leather gloves on his hands and a black cap on his head. Looked like the fucking grim reaper and seemed to want to act like it, too. He spat into a moldy pile of sawdust and said, “I was hoping I could handle one loose end at a time, but since you decided to show up, I guess I can take care of the both of you at once.”
“The same way you tried handling Charlie when you pushed him off the cherry picker?” Austin asked.
It hit me, a flash of light through the blank spaces of my memory.
The sun was bright, but it was still cold with the early fall chill. It felt colder up on this stupid-ass cherry picker. Why did I ever agree to Hank’s idea? And why hadn’t Hank come and installed these cameras himself? Yes, I had the landscaping gig that gave me some cover, but still, he could have borrowed my shirt… whatever, it didn’t matter. There was so much that was at stake, I didn’t necessarily mind doing this. I had to catch the sheriff meeting with Killian Mast, and I had to prove that Pope and Mast were working together on one of the biggest sex-trafficking rings on this side of the globe.
Operation Rome, we had called it. After Roman White, one of the sheriff’s first victims. The pope being a bishop of Rome also didn’t go unnoticed.
As I fiddled with the camera, trying to get as much of the sheriff’s massive estate in frame as I could, focusing mainly on the private garden surrounded by wall-like hedges, I didn’t even realize another car had pulled up next to mine until it was too late.
“Need help up there?”
I froze before I started to panic. I looked down over the edge of this metal bucket and stared straight into the eyes of the sheriff.
“Those trees always give the landscapers trouble.”
I didn’t know what else to say except a cheery “Uh yeah!”
I lowered the machine. I let him in. I didn’t realize just how grand of a mistake I had made until the very moment the sheriff’s hands pressed against my back, pushing me over the edge and down, down, dow—
“You and Killian,” I said, the memories unfolding like torn-up pieces of origami, the pieces slightly out of sync but still creating a whole. “You two were working together. Cary let it slip to Hank, and Hank went around asking people. His own dancers—you were siphoning them off. You tried getting Evan to help, but he denied you.”
“So I guess your memories can come back, huh? I should have made sure that fall ended you.”
“The same way you ended Hank, huh?” Austin said. He moved slightly, and I realized he was positioning himself between the shotgun and me. I was about to stand and face the end with Austin together, but that’s when I realized something. My hands and feet still appeared bound, even though the knots had all been loosened enough for me to pull free. Maybe…
