Bad Bitch (14 page)

The night was rainy, a lingering winter chill in the air. I caught a cab and went to Thai, one of my regular haunts. I wasn’t hungry, would probably wind up vomiting back up every last noodle, but I needed to at least make an effort. I had the cabbie wait for me as I ran in to pick up my order. When I emerged back into the wet gloom, two men approached. I froze. They were large and didn’t seem to care about the soaking rain. One had a silver pistol. They grabbed my elbows and hustled me into a waiting car. My cabdriver watched through his windshield, his mouth agape at the scene.

I didn’t have a chance to scream or fight. The car sped from the curb, out into the traffic and away from the familiar lights of the courthouse. The men on each side of me hemmed me in, their heft keeping me wedged between them. They were clearly the muscle and smelled like stale cologne and alcohol. Two more men were in the front, a driver and a passenger.

The passenger took a drag from his cigarette and blew the smoke into the car. His hair was dark and greasy, and his thin mustache made him somehow more effeminate. He watched me with dark, beady eyes.

I watched the pistol in his left hand. It was a light gray with a shiny barrel. It had mesmerized me from the moment I saw it pointed at me as I was shoved into the car. One of my captors took my purse from my frozen hands and searched it before tossing it onto the floor under his feet.

I was in shock or something close to it. I realized what had happened to me, but it was still only now becoming clear that I was in mortal danger.

“Wondering why you’re here?” the stranger asked, his voice an unpleasant falsetto.

I tore my focus from the gun and looked him in the eye. I didn’t answer, just gave the same stare back to him. I already knew I wasn’t here to talk. I’d been brought to listen, at least until we reached our final destination. Then all bets were off.

Rain coated the car and slid down the windows in heavy drops and runnels. The driver had a preordained path, heading south, toward the Brooklyn Bridge. But then where?

“Well, I’ll tell you. Mr. DiSalvo isn’t too happy with you right now. You’re a problem, see?” He asked it as if I would agree with him.

Even though I knew there was no other explanation, the mention of DiSalvo’s name caused dread to erupt in my heart. It swallowed up the shock and every other emotion I was even capable of producing. It was as if I were still sitting in Clarence Sherman’s cell, his fetid breath filling the air as he made the darkest threats I’d ever heard. But now the promise of harm, of death was even more immediate. DiSalvo had sent these men to kill me. I shuddered.

The stranger kept his eyes on me. “Now, you’ve been very good to Mr. DiSalvo in the past. That’s why we’re going to do it easy. None of the usual stuff. He told us not to cut anything off or touch you”—his gaze slipped down my body and then back up to my face—“or do anything like that. Just a bullet to the back of your head. Real quick, simple. No pain, see?” Again, like I was supposed to agree with him, to thank him for being so generous by not torturing or raping me prior to snuffing out my life.

He turned back around and whistled as the car sped over the bridge. The men on either side didn’t look at me. They just stared straight ahead. Other cars were next to us on the bridge—a couple in a red car arguing, a solitary woman driving a beat up sedan, a church van full of teenagers. I watched them as the rain streamed between us. It was like watching some sort of boring movie, the actors phoning it in even though I was fully invested in every move they made. None of them saw me through the tinted windows. They were living their lives while I was living the last moments of mine.

I wanted to fight, to cry, to scream. But there was nothing I could do. I could barely move, much less try to escape from a speeding car while surrounded by hit men.

I was going to die.

I didn’t have any questions. The stranger had already told me everything I needed to know. My death was ordered by DiSalvo. He had been a father figure for a time, when he needed me. Now I was a liability, expendable, as good as dead.

I should have guessed from his phone call that he had something planned for me, that he was just testing to see what my plan was, what I thought I could accomplish without incriminating him. It was foolish, but I believed, right up until the moment the stranger with the mustache and the gun said different, that DiSalvo actually cared for me, not much, but as much as a man like that was capable of. And maybe he did, in his own sick way, by ordering the hit men to off me quickly.

I continued to stare around for help that would never come. The whir of the tires on the bridge turned into the steady hum of a long smooth roadway. The slick hiss of the rain lapping at the wheels was like a needle in my ear.

The car was silent for a while, only the sound of the stranger inhaling and exhaling as he chain-smoked breaking through.

My mind raced. I thought of how Vinnie would react when I never showed up in the morning. Would he try to defend the case with Wash? Without me? Jena would be relieved I hadn’t shown up to bitch at her for whatever she’d done wrong. And who else would miss me? No one. There was nobody. No family. Not even a dog, cat, or so much as a fucking parakeet. My apartment would sit quiet and untouched. No one would even know I was gone until I’d been dead for days.

Even when an alarm finally went out, they’d never find my body. I’d be stuffed, in pieces in a fifty-gallon drum at the bottom of some muddy inlet on Long Island. I could see it in my mind. I looked down at my hands, imagining them drained of blood, stiff and broken, shoved down on top of other disjointed parts of my body.

It was over, all of it. Silent tears slipped down my cheeks. As despair pooled in my chest, I closed my eyes. I saw a flash of Lincoln’s dark hair play across my eyelids. I hadn’t allowed myself to think of him, the real him, for weeks. I’d created a fiction for him, Prosecutor X, a nondescript adversary. I let that fall away as I focused on him, thinking of how we had started something that was real. I would never know if it could have been more. I’d never been in love. I didn’t think I was capable of it. And now the one chance I had was gone. I’d killed that chance as surely as these men were going to kill me.

Lincoln had seen through to the heart of me, and I would never know if he was the one. He would never know what happened to me, if he even cared. No one would know. And no one would really care. Sure, Vin would mourn me. But he’d move on. He had a family, a child on the way. I had nothing, no one. My own actions had made sure of it.

I choked back a sob. None of the men acknowledged my existence, much less my distress. How many times had they done this? How many hapless victims had taken this same ride?

“Here?” the driver asked as the car came up on an exit.

“Yeah, let’s do it at Gilgo,” the passenger said on a smoky exhale.

“Is the tide coming in now?”

“I don’t know”—taking a big drag—“it doesn’t matter anyway”—smoky exhale—“I never had a problem with anything being found yet. Remember that guy we tried the acid on?”

The driver laughed, a deeply unsettling sound. “Yeah, that was funny.”

“Ruining a seven-hundred-dollar pair of shoes wasn’t funny. The smell wasn’t funny.” The passenger’s voice rose.

“Oh, but seeing the way he turned into goo was. Looked like bubble gum. Pink bubble gum.”

The passenger nodded, his memory no doubt matching the macabre picture the driver had painted.

The car slowed and turned off the highway. We were in a more suburban area now, houses and small businesses flowing by on either side of the car. The images blurred as my tears kept coming.

The passenger turned his head again to look at me through the swirling cigarette smoke. He put his gun in his lap and pulled out a handkerchief.

“Frankie, wipe the pretty lady’s tears.”

The man to my left reached out a meaty hand and grabbed the fabric from the stranger. He went to wipe my face, but I took the linen square from him before he could touch me. I used it, intentionally smearing my mascara into the fibers. A petty act of defiance. I would still be killed. My mascara on his handkerchief would wash away, disappear, just like I was about to do.

The car kept going, oblivious to my tears and my fate. The area had just as quickly turned rural, trees bordering the road on each side, hiding whatever lay beyond. Twilight had passed, the shadows deepening into night.

I blew my nose into the handkerchief out of spite.

As the car hurtled closer and closer to my doom, the fear began to turn into anger. The anger began to take hold inside me like a tree with deep, twisting roots. More than anger, resentment. I resented the assholes in this car. Even more, I resented DiSalvo. I saved him from a prison cell time and time again. I made it possible for him to retire in Cuba and live like a king for the rest of his life. After everything I’d done for him, this is how he repaid me? Four goons taking me out to a backwater and putting a bullet in my brain? Fuck no.

The passenger had long since turned away from me, perhaps embarrassed by my tears. The meatheads ignored me. The smoke continued to swirl. The only movement was the driver—turning, slowing, accelerating. He was the one variable, the one part of the equation that I could change.

Then I did something rash, stupid even. I didn’t think about it. I just acted. I reached out and grabbed a fistful of the driver’s hair and pulled as hard as I could.

The next moments were nothing short of chaos. The car careened off the roadway and flipped down a grassy embankment. I didn’t have my seat belt fastened, but the meaty killers on either side of me provided a pillow of sorts as we somersaulted through the air. They crushed me and cushioned me, depending on how the car was positioned. None of us screamed. It was too fast for us to even muster a cry of surprise. The sound of metal crunching and glass breaking and the loud thunks as the vehicle landed on the dirt before taking to the quiet air again created a jagged cacophony in the enclosing darkness.

Lincoln

“Whoa!” the cabbie yelled as the black car ahead of us jerked off the roadway and went tumbling down a steep embankment. It rolled and rolled down the hill. Only one thought was in my mind—
Evan is in there.

“Pull over, now.” I heard the shaking in my voice, felt the chill of terror that slid down my spine.

The car slowed and stopped. I jumped out into the night and tore off down the hill after Evan. A man lay in the grass, twisted and broken. His dark eyes were open and his face covered in blood. His neck was at a wrong angle, giving his thin-mustachioed face a puppetlike appearance. His eyes saw nothing. Dead. I continued down the slope at a breakneck pace. The mangled car had come to rest upside down in a few inches of water. It had carved a path through the cattails that crowded the edge of a swamp.

I should have been careful, should have checked for bad guys or weapons before approaching the car. But I couldn’t. I needed to get to her, no matter the consequences. I saw no movement in the wreckage. My heart pounded in my chest, the rhythm of blood loud in my ears.

I got down on my hands and knees in the muck to peer inside. It was dark, but I made out two, maybe three bodies. I saw Evan’s hand hanging out of the busted rear window. A chunk of dark hair with scalp attached to it was clutched in her grip. Her skin was pale in the moonlight, too pale. I crawled around through the mud and took her hand. Her skin was warm, but she didn’t return my grip.

I pushed my hands in around her arm and shoved at what I surmised were the two large men I’d seen kidnap her. They had crumpled around her, trapping her smaller body between them. I pushed harder, ignoring a groan from one of them. It wouldn’t be his last pained moment. I would see to it. But I had to free Evan before I could deal out any retribution.

I moved my hands up her arm to her shoulder and pulled, yanking too hard. I couldn’t stop. I needed to see her, needed to make sure she was okay. She emerged from the wreckage as I pulled. Her head, torso, hips, and then her legs slid out, no shoes. She was streaked with blood, and her eyes were closed. I freed her from the crush of bodies and pulled her into my arms.

I fell back into the swampy water and felt something hard against my ribs.

I looked down. It was a gun barrel. Evan’s finger was on the trigger. She looked up at me, stark terror marring her face.

“It’s me, Evan. It’s me. I’ve got you.”

“Lincoln?” She blinked quickly, disbelief in her voice.

“Yes. I’ve got you.”

She dropped the gun in my lap and wrapped her arms around my neck. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

When the car had left the roadway and careened through the air, I thought I’d lost her. The relief of holding her, feeling her heartbeat, hit me in the chest near the spot where the gun barrel had rested.

“Are you hurt?” I pulled her away and searched her face, the blood still fresh. Garish streaks of crimson painted her fair skin.

“Yes, I mean no. I don’t think the blood’s mine. At least, most of it isn’t.” She touched a cut along her forehead.

The cut was ugly, and I wasn’t sure where else she was injured. I needed to get her away from here, fast, maybe even to a hospital, though I wasn’t looking forward to answering any questions. I pocketed the gun, lifted her into my arms, and trudged back up the hill. She started to fight against me, her weak arms nothing more than a light breeze against my chest.

“No, I have to kill them. You don’t understand. They’ll come back for me. DiSalvo will send them again. I have to kill them.”

The stark fear in her voice tore at my heart. And I knew about DiSalvo. If he was the one who had sent the killers, she was right. They’d be back to finish what they started.

“I don’t know if I can k-kill them.” She sobbed. “But I have to try. I c-c-can’t let them get me again.”

A tremor racked her body as I continued carrying her up and away from the carnage. I pressed her even closer to me, trying to comfort her any way I could.

“Shh, angel. Calm down. I got this.” They would never touch her again.

I laid her in the back of the cab. She curled into a ball, the picture of self-preservation and protection. She was shaking badly. I wanted to comfort her, but I still had some business to take care of. The rage inside wasn’t going to let the fuckers down the hill off so easily.

I took my suit coat off and draped the driest part of it over her. She looked so small, vulnerable. The flames of my rage rose higher. The ones who had taken her would pay.

“Hey, man, is she okay?” the cabbie asked. “There’s so much blood.”

“Watch her. I’ll be back.”

“She needs a doc—”

“I know what she needs. What you need right now is to shut up and keep an eye on her until I get back.” I didn’t hide the rage. I was consumed with it. It was meant for the men that had taken Evan, but I would use it wherever needed.

The cabbie blanched. He was innocent in this, I reminded myself, helpful even. He’d told me that he wasn’t supposed to leave Manhattan, but he’d acquiesced after he’d witnessed Evan’s kidnapping.

I softened my tone. “Please, just take care of her until I get back. I’ll take it from there.”

He swallowed hard and nodded. His silence was assent enough for me.

“Where are you going?” Evan asked. Her voice was weak, thin. “Please, don’t leave me. I’m so sorry, so sorry, Lincoln. Please forgive me. I’m so—”

“Shh.” I brushed the hair away from her face. Just hearing her apology was a balm on my spirit, but it did nothing to revoke my rage at the men down the hill.

“I’ll be right back, angel. Just stay here. No matter what you hear, understand?”

Her eyes grew wide, but she nodded. I pushed the door shut.

I opened the front passenger door and leaned in to crank the radio as high as it would go. Evan jumped at the sound but settled back down. Some Middle Eastern station playing a melodic tune with a female singer crooning in a high warble. Perfect cover. The less Evan and the cabbie heard, the better.

I took a few steps down the embankment so I was out of sight.

I took the gun from my pocket and checked the magazine. Full.

I pulled back on the action and checked the chamber. Loaded.

I headed back down to the wrecked car.