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"Cover inside," I whispered to Mookie. "Go left when we go in."
She nodded. I took a deep breath, turned the knob, praying that it would not make a noise. To me, the twist of the metal was loud as cymbals, but no one appeared at the gap in the boxes to investigate. I pulled the door open and Mookie went in low, rifle at the ready. No one shot her. No one shouted. I went in after a second, dropped to a squat right inside the door, letting it ease shut against me.
Mookie was crouched behind a chest-deep pile of stenciled boxes. An array of huge metal shelves, all labeled and aligned, loomed ahead of us. To our right, across the aisle left open for passage to the back door, was a rack of camouflage jumpsuits in the colder, grayer, green and black of winter camo. There were more rows of shelves in front of the rack.
I could hear voices now, the raucous laughter of men high on their testosterone. In the middle of the laughter there was a cut-off yelp. Jack.
I was ready to kill now. I worked my hands, getting the stiffness and cold out of them. Mookie eyed me with some doubt.
"Which man is yours?" she asked almost inaudibly.
"The one who yelled," I told her. Her eyes widened. "He's got long black hair." She would need to know which one was Jack.
"We'll work our way up there, see what happens," she breathed.
That was as good a plan as any. We ducked around the boxes and concealed ourselves behind the next row of shelves.
We could see through the gaps in the stacked goods. Darcy was there, Jim was there, and Cleve Ragland, Tom David Meicklejohn. About who I'd expected. There was at least one person I couldn't see; I noticed the men turn to their right a few times, addressing a remark to whoever sat there.
They were torturing Jack.
As we worked our way to the front of the storage area, I saw more and more. I saw too much. Jack was tied to a chair, a wooden one on rollers. His arms were tied to the chair arms. He had the begi
Darcy turned away from cutting Jack right under the nipple. The knife glistened with blood. I would kill him first, I thought, so consumed by the thought that I could not reason, could not plan what I should do. I had forgotten Mookie's existence until she nudged me. She pointed a slim finger to a man sitting on his haunches in the shadow of a shelving unit, a man I hadn't seen before, and I thought I would vomit. I recognized the pale floppy hair instantly. Bobo. Darcy said something to him.
Bobo raised his face to look at Darcy, and I saw tears on his face.
"I gotta ask you, boy, where you went just a while ago," Darcy said genially. He raised the knife so the light caught the part of the blade that was not red. Bobo stood up. His shoulders squared.
"I'm hoping you didn't betray your family by telling anyone what we'd caught here," Darcy said, waiting for Bobo to answer.
When the silence dragged on, everyone turned to look at Bobo, even Jim Box. Jack was taking advantage of the respite by closing his eyes. I saw his hands working under the tight cord around his wrists. He was biting his lower lip. There were a dozen cuts and burns on his chest, and they'd reopened the bullet wound. Streaks of blood clotted his chest hair.
"Did you go tell that blond bitch?" Darcy asked, quietly. "You tell that gal her little bedmate was in trouble here?"
Bobo didn't speak. He stared at Darcy, his blue eyes narrowed with turmoil. Something hardened in his face as I watched.
"I hope she does come looking," Cleve said suddenly. "We get to reenact her worst nightmare."
Darcy looked at Cleve in some surprise. Then he realized what Cleve meant. He laughed, his head thrown back, the overhead light scouring his face of any sign of humanity.
Jack's eyes were open now, all right. He was looking at Cleve with a brand new nightmare for Cleve in his eyes. Cleve looked down, flinched. Then he seemed to recall that he was in charge.
"We can give her a real good time right here," he told Jack. "You can watch, Bobo. Learn how it's done."
Tom David's eyes were slitted in distaste. He was looking at his coconspirators as if he'd just learned something about them that he didn't like. Bobo's face said he couldn't believe what he'd heard. He was waiting for some other explanation of the words to occur to him.
"This is going to be a pleasure," Mookie said in my ear. She pulled a knife from one of her pockets, handed it to me.
"I cover you, you cut him free," she said. "We get out the best way we can."
I nodded.
"Or maybe I'll kill them all," she said, to herself.
"They killed Darnell?"
"Yeah, I do believe. My mother got some calls after Darnell's death, anonymous, nasty really explicit about Darnell's injuries. They came from this store. She has caller ID," Mookie whispered. "Dumb shitasses didn't even think about a black woman having caller ID. Get ready."
She stepped out then, her rifle up at her shoulder.
"Okay, assholes," she said. "Down on the floor."
They all froze, Darcy in the act of bending over to put the knife to Jack's chest again; Cleve had the arrow in one hand, the lighter in the other. Beyond them, Tom David was still leaning against the wall, his arms crossed on his chest. Jim Box was beside him. Bobo, who'd been close to the door into the store, turned and stepped through it, and the clunk as the heavy door closed behind him made Cleve jump.
In that flicker of time, Darcy threw the knife at Mookie and dived to his right. Mookie fired and ducked to her right. Her bullet hit Jim Box, who'd been beyond Darcy; I glimpsed a red flower blossoming on his chest. And the knife missed her, but got me. I felt the sudden cold where my shirt sliced open, felt the pressure, but I was ru
I knelt by the chair, cutting at the cords binding Jack. I was awkward about it, but Mookie's knife was sharp. I heard a rush of feet, light and quick, and then the pow! of the rifle.
Mookie passing by, doing God knows what damage. I thought I heard the door again.
I could pay attention to nothing else while I was using the knife, and when I'd sawed through the second set of bonds and I could look up, everything had changed.
I saw no one, at least no one moving.
Cleve was down for good. I felt a flash of satisfaction. Jim Box had vanished, but there were drops of blood on the floor where he'd been standing. I saw there was a chair in the shadows, across from Jack's. It was empty.
Jack whispered, "Help me up."
I jumped to my feet, held out my hands. To my horror, I could not meet Jack's eyes; that seemed worse, much worse, than what I'd done to Cleve Ragland. Jack made an awful sound of pain as he pulled himself up on me. There was a discarded brown coat, Bobo's, lying on a nearby shelf. I grabbed it. I had in mind fleeing through the rear door, trying to make it through the back lot and hole in the fence to my house, calling—someone. Fleetingly, I thought of the FBI men, who might still be at the motel where they'd been camped since the bombing.