AllFreeNovel
Share Us
A wordless cry of protest made Jem scan the room. It took him a moment to spot the disturbance: a girl being strong-armed toward the door behind the stage. She wore a tight dress with cut-outs to expose part of one breast, her stomach, her hip. The man forcing her toward the door was another of the no-neck variety. It was obvious she didn’t want to go, and it was obvious, too, that she was on something. Watching the guy maneuver her with practiced ease made the hair on the back of Jem’s neck stand up.
Something—a sixth sense, maybe—told Jem he wasn’t the only one watching. He spotted a clean-cut guy in a t-shirt and jeans who was tracking the girl as she was forced out of the room. And then Jem spotted the second man—blond, big, with a MAGA hat and a ragged denim vest—who was watching Jem. When the girl cried out again, Jem tore his eyes away from the man, but he was too late. The girl was gone.
And then the hillbilly laughed again. “Swear to Christ, man: tits like a hog.”
All the voices in Jem’s head snapped off, and he slid out of the booth.
It took him a moment to spot the gambit. The big guy in the biker’s cut was coming back from the bathroom, and he was moving with that wired, twitchy energy of somebody who’d just hit the pipe. Jem took out his wallet, dug out a twenty, and then launched himself out of the booth. He dropped the bill on the floor as he passed the table with the two redneck jerkoffs. When he passed the biker headed in the opposite direction, he twisted his body to give the man plenty of room to pass.
Then he turned around and called, “Hey.”
The biker spun around, fists tightening, eyes wide. Whatever he’d smoked, it had him good and amped up. Jem displayed open hands and smiled. Then he threw a look at the jerkoffs.
“I think you dropped some money,” Jem shouted over the music. “That asshole is picking it up.”
The biker turned. He saw the fallen twenty that Jem had dropped. The rednecks had enough time to flush, push their chairs back, struggle to get out of their seats. One of them said, “Wait a minute—”
The biker broke a chair over the closest guy’s head, and he went down like Jem saw in the movies sometimes. The second guy tried to throw a punch, but he got himself tangled in the legs of his chair, and all he managed to do was fall forward and sprawl across the table. The biker crashed into him, and both men—and the table—went down.
Screams and shouts erupted throughout the club. The biker’s friends decided to join in, and more fights broke out. A redhead behind the bar was screaming, “Donny! Donny! Somebody get Donny!” Jem focused on the door behind the stage and ran.
For the first fifteen feet, his path was clear. Then a big, bearded guy loomed up in his path, swinging a bottle at Jem’s head. Jem deked him, cut right, and the big man stumbled as someone punched him in the back. Another guy swam up at Jem out of the brownish darkness, this one with a knife. Jem kicked a chair into the man’s path and jumped onto the stage. The Black girl had her back to the wall, her eyes wide as she tried to get her feet under her—she’d broken a heel, a distant part of Jem noticed. Jem sprinted past her toward the door. He risked one last glance back at the brawl. He’d lost sight of the clean-cut guy who’d been watching the girl get forced behind the stage. But he spotted the blond man, the one who’d been watching Jem: he had his back to the wall, facing off with one of the college bros. He’d lost his MAGA hat, and he was saying something to the bro. The bro swung, and faster than Jem could track, the blond man popped him in the face. The bro fell into one of the chairs, face slack, and didn’t get up.
When the blond man started to look around again, Jem ducked through the door behind the stage.
On the other side, another cue-ball guy was rushing toward him, already shouting, “You can’t be back here—”
Jem cut him off. “Donny? Where the fuck is Donny? They told me to get Donny out there.”
The guy’s eyes widened, and he surged past Jem.
And then Jem was alone, and when the door fell shut, the sounds of the fight dropped to a series of buzzing thumps.
It was brighter back here—not by much, but enough that you wouldn’t trip over the loose carpeting or walk into a wall. Several of the doors were marked DANCERS, and behind them, Jem could hear women’s voices. He skipped these for now. He moved down the hall, found a utility closet, where the fiftysomething woman was rinsing a sponge out in a sink. Jem gave her a nod and shut the door again and kept moving. He stopped at a door that read MANAGER. Yellow light and the sound of TV voices suggested an occupant, but he didn’t hear anything that sounded like the girl who had been forced back here, and so, after another moment, he kept moving.
The next door was locked—no deadbolt, only a latch. Jem dug out his wallet, found his scratched-up UCCU debit card, and slipped it between the door and the jamb. He loided the lock on the first try, and the door popped open. The smell of cold concrete and steel and motor oil seeped out.
Voices from the direction Jem had come made him step through the doorway and pull the door shut behind him. He listened over the thud of his heartbeat, but the voices didn’t seem to be moving toward him, and then, after several long moments, he couldn’t hear them anymore.
When he turned on his phone’s flashlight, it gave barely enough light to make out the shape of the garage: a rectangular box with two roll-up doors, the walls made from the same corrugated steel as the rest of the structure. Shelves lined the walls, filled with supplies—paper towels, cleaning solutions, tampons, condoms, toilet paper. One of the roll-up doors was raised, letting in night air and the hum of crickets, and in the bay behind the door, a white panel van sat, its engine ticking as it cooled.
Jem moved toward the van, but he stopped again at the sound of a sole scuffing gravel. Then a familiar voice muttered, “I’m going to kill that cracker-ass motherfucker.” Jem held himself still, trying to gauge the sound. DeVoy must have been close, perhaps just on the other side of the roll-up.
Shouts erupted at the front of the club—the indignant, outraged cries of drunks with wounded pride. DeVoy swore again, and steps moved away, the sound of crunching gravel fading slowly as he went to investigate.
When the sound of DeVoy’s steps had been swallowed up by the shouts, Jem jogged to the van. He tried the front passenger door, and it opened. Stink—garbage and something rancid and a hot, animal smell—rolled out, and he pulled his tee up over his nose. A flattened McDonald’s bag lay in the footwell, with a crushed Big Mac box and a cardboard fry sleeve.
From the back of the van came a sudden whirring sound, the thrum of metal, and then a clatter.
Jem jerked back from the van, swearing. He caught himself. Then he worked the paracord off from around his neck, looped it around his fist, and let the hex nut bounce against his thigh. He drew the telescoping antenna from his pocket and held it in his other hand. The noise came again—the rattle, clatter, whir. His brain took him to a pet store. A bird, or birds, in a cage.
Letting out a shaky breath, Jem yanked on the handle of the van’s sliding door. It opened easily, running silently on its track. In that first moment, the interior of the van was a dark, gaping mouth. The ambient light from outside did nothing to break it up, and when the bird—or birds—thrashed again, the sound activated something prehistoric in Jem’s brain. Goose bumps ran up his arms. He lifted the phone and brought the flashlight to bear on the darkness.
Cages sparked and glittered under the light—copper-colored wire, stainless steel, some round, one as big as a doghouse. Dark eyes gleamed back at him. They were all inside cages—that was the first, automatic thing his brain checked—and then one of the birds, a bigger one he didn’t recognize, spread its wings and made a furious noise, and Jem took a step back. He steadied the flashlight, wiped his mouth, and let out a choked noise that he supposed was a laugh.
“Holy God,” he muttered.
After another moment to steel himself, he climbed into the van. It rocked under him, and its poorly maintained suspension groaned. The birds chittered and shuffled and battered themselves against the cages.
