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The man only ground his teeth.
I etched another few lines into the sole of that foot before moving to the next. The image of Madelyn fighting him off popped into my head again, and I had to tense my fingers to stop myself from slicing deeper—too deep. He deserved payback, but that wasn’t what we were here to deal out. Understanding this part of the mystery was far more important.
What was Madelyn making of the whole situation now that Logan must be walking her through the case? How much would he tell her? Would she be able to accept that the man she’d believed had died of an illness had actually been murdered in cold blood? I’d had years to delve into the mystery, and I’d had no preconceived notions, but for her, it would be bewildering.
Would she even want to continue working alongside the Vigil after this, or would she consider us psychopaths?
Another small part of me wasn’t totally sure that weweren’t. But at least we were on the side of justice.
Slade clicked his tongue and changed the subject. “You don’t want to talk about this place. How about that bar on Steuben Avenue—McGee’s Tavern. Do you hang out with the pricks who run that place at all?”
The man’s expression twitched, but the flicker of emotion left me resigned rather than hopeful. He’d looked puzzled. He didn’t want us narrowing down the possibilities, so he still kept his mouth shut, but I could tell he didn’t understand why we’d have asked.
Which meant he had no connections to the gang who’d stolen Madelyn’s car. Interesting. Was a larger force pulling the strings behind multiple groups of criminals? Or was the note directing us here only a coincidence? It’d been more than a decade since Evan Silver had died. The warehouse could have changed hands more than once in that time.
We were running out of time. Every minute that passed was another minute when his colleagues might show up and outnumber us. We needed him to spitsomethingout, or this would all be for nothing.
I edged around his body and grasped his bound wrists. The tip of my knife dug into his palm, and the man groaned. But that was the only sound he made.
“Your stubbornness is only drawing this out,” Slade reminded him. “You could be home with a beer by now if you were smart. Now tell us—”
The peal of a ringtone cut him off. It was coming from the man’s back pocket. I exchanged a glance with Slade, who dropped down to yank out the device. The man started cursing at him, and I yanked the collar of his shirt up over his mouth so I could clamp my hand there without him biting my palm.
“Who could this be?” Slade murmured, and tapped the answer button. With his experience at picking up languages with all their varied accents and tones, he was the best of us at imitating voices. He couldn’t mimic them perfectly, especially with a guy who’d talked as little as our captive, but he could work around that by keeping his answers short. And gruff, which suited this guy’s apparent personality just fine.
“What?” he muttered into the phone, deepening his voice to make it more similar to our captive’s. Whatever the person on the other end said, he simply responded with grunts and brief remarks like “Okay” and “Right.” His eyebrows lifted slightly. Finally, with a curt “Got it,” he hung up and gazed down at the bound man with a smirk.
“Looks like we got some answers without needing you to do any talking after all. That was a very interesting conversation. Kenneth was concerned about the shipment that’s coming in tonight. He wanted to be sure everything will go smoothly. I’d love to hear more about that. What kind of cargo are you expecting in this shipment?”
“None of your fucking business,” the man retorted in a ragged voice.
I moved back to his hands and sliced open his other palm, careful to avoid the artery that led to his thumb. But the man fell back into agonized silence. We’d learned something thanks to our efforts, but I was becoming increasingly sure that we weren’t going to get anything directly from his lips.
I could justify the violence to myself as long as I believed it was going to help us fix what was wrong. Slicing up a man who wouldn’t talk either way was just meaningless carnage, even if the jerk had attacked Madelyn. With a grimace, I wiped the flecks of blood off the blade onto the man’s jeans and pushed myself away from him.
Slade caught my eye and followed me over to the far end of the warehouse.
“I don’t think he’s going to talk,” I murmured to my friend. “He hasn’t budged at all.”
Slade sighed and raked his hand back through his dark hair. “I’m getting the same impression. It feels sadistic rather than purposeful to keep going. But what do we do with him now?”
That was the question looming over this whole situation. If we’d forced the man to talk, we might have been able to count on him being afraid enough of us and of the fact that he’d broken his employer’s confidence to keep his mouth shut about our involvement. But when hehadn’tbroken, he had no motivation to do anything other than run straight to the people who’d hired him and report everything he’d seen, including our descriptions.
There was an obvious solution, the solution the man in question probably would have gone with if the tables had been turned. Dead men couldn’t speak. But the thought of bringing my knife to his throat made me wince inwardly.
Before today, we’d only had to kill a couple of people in self-defense—and I didn’t look back on those necessary instances with any joy. It was the worst possible outcome of a worst-case scenario. And in both those instances and with the man in the other room, we’d been under attack, fighting for our own lives. To simply slaughter a helpless person, no matter what they’d done… The idea made me want to vomit.
Especially when it was my fault we’d ended up on as dark a path as we were already on. I couldn’t shove us into even worse places.
I wished Logan were here. He might not have had a better answer, but he had a knack for taking charge of any situation. I’d have at least felt more confident in whatever decision we made if he’d been able to weigh in.
My mind worked through the possibilities, trying to see this scenario as its own sort of puzzle. “Maybe if we made it clear that we could convince his boss that he talked to us, and that he’d be in even deeper shit if he—”
Before I could work out any more of that tentative plan, a scuffing sound from across the room drew my attention. My head jerked around in time to see our captive throwing off the bonds he’d managed to wriggle loose. As my heart skipped a beat, he charged toward us.
The man threw himself at Slade with a growl of fury. “You fuckers are going to pay!”
Slade tried to dodge, but the man managed to wallop him in the chest, throwing him off balance. As he stumbled, the man aimed a brutal blow at his head.
