Page 64 of Jett in Jeopardy

The visceral pouring from his mouth fed the steadily gathering rage building inside me. If I got to him, if I got that gun out of his hands, he’d be begging for the police by the time I was done.

With his attention fixed on Jett, I took a step towards him. He must have caught my movement out of the corner of his eye because he swung his gun back and aimed it at my chest. “Don’t move! I swear I’ll kill you if you take one more step.”

“Isn’t that the plan, whether I take another step or not?”

“Shut up!” His voice was turning shrill. He was losing control of the situation, and he knew it. But before I could do anything else, Jett jumped to his feet and lunged toward a stack of boards piled next to him.

Before Simon even realized what was happening, Jett grasped one of the boards and swung wide. It pummeled Simon on the side of the head. He let out a furious yowl, stumbling sideways and swinging the gun toward Jett.

I launched myself at him, tackling him to the hard concrete floor and reaching to grab the gun in his hand. Simon’s eyes widened with panic as he tried to turn the gun towards me. We wrestled for a moment. A deafening crack exploded in the quiet, reverberating against the metal warehouse walls.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Jett

ThelastthingIremembered was the gun going off. Then everything was silent. I started retracing where I went wrong since Simon brought me to this place, as if I could change the outcome.

Simon pressed the barrel of the gun into my still bruised ribs, making me wince before he shoved me stumbling through the door into an ancient warehouse. Immediately, I ran my gaze over the dark, cavernous space, searching for a way out, or at least something I could use as a weapon to defend myself.

A thick layer of grime coated the windows, blotting out the daylight and turning the large space dull and shadowy. A soft click from behind me and hard white light brightened the gloomy space. I turned to find he had switched on a battery-powered lantern set up on a pile of old, mossy wood pallets. Next to the pallets was a narrow cot with a sleeping bag spread out on it.

“Have you been living here?” I blurted, without thinking. I couldn’t imagine spending the night in here. Between the wide expanse of space and the metal walls that did little to protect against the icy temperatures outside, I wasn’t sure how he hadn’t frozen to death.

“I did what I had to do,” he said, then smirked. “But I won’t be here much longer, and believe me, neither will you.”

He nodded to a folded blue tarp on the floor a few feet from where I was standing, a half dozen various-sized saws, and a large newly purchased red suitcase with the tag still on it.

Fear iced the blood in my veins. I could feel my pulse fluttering in my neck.

“Wha—What’s this for?” I asked, even though I was fairly sure I already knew the answer.

Simon grinned. “Once you’re dead, I’m going to have to cut you into pieces to fit you in that suitcase, then I’ll weigh it down and throw you into the bay. No one will ever find you. I doubt anyone would bother to look, anyway.”

I knew it wasn’t true. My friends would look for me, even if no one in my family did. Still, no point arguing with him over the details of his deranged plot. I had to focus on getting the hell out of here. While I was still recovering from the beating he’d already given me and despite him currently pointing a gun at me, I needed an escape plan that didn’t require me to get into a physical altercation with him. Or at least a plan that had me find a weapon, and until I came up withthatplan, I needed to find a way to stall him.

Over the past fifteen minutes, while he’d been driving me out here to this abandoned warehouse, he hadn’t been able to keep his mouth shut. When he wasn’t ranting about the kind of person I was, he was bragging about how he was going to kill me. While neither topic was a personal favorite, the conversation had proved one thing to me. Simon liked to talk, especially if it meant he could pummel me with insults the same way he pummeled me with his fists. If I could get him talking again, maybe it would stall him enough. I would just need to keep him talking long enough to figure out a way out of this mess.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked.

He rolled his eyes as if I’d asked him the dumbest question he’d ever heard. “Because you deserve it. You’ve had this coming to you for a long time.”

His eyes narrowed, and his voice rose. “Do you have any idea what you did to me, what you did to my family? What your lies cost us?”

“I didn’t lie,” I said.

He lifted his hand and pointed the gun’s barrel at my head. “Just for that, when I do kill you, I’m going to make sure it hurts. That you suffer. That you beg me to end it and just let you die.”

I snapped my mouth closed. Perhaps I needed to shut up and keep my thoughts to myself and not argue with him. The goal here was to stall him, to keep him talking until I figured a way out of this mess. Not piss him off and get him to kill me now.

“You have no clue what your lies did to my family, tome!” He jabbed the gun at me, hammering home his point. My heart pounded like it was trying to burst free from my chest. Cold sweat trickled down my back. But I gritted my teeth until my jaw ached, refusing to argue with him.

“After you and the others lied about my father, he went to prison. We lost everything. Friends and family stopped having anything to do with us. We lost the restaurant and eventually, our house. My mother couldn’t live with the shame. One night, she took too many sleeping pills, and then it was just me.”

Under normal circumstances, I would have felt bad for Simon. None of what happened to him or his mother was their fault. I could even kind of understand him refusing to believe me about what his father did, his insistence that I must be a liar. He obviously loved his father. It was probably hard to believe somebody he cared for and who cared for him could also be a monster to someone else, like he had been for me. However, that sympathy evaporated with Simon holding a gun on me, threatening to kill me and the people I cared for.

“Is that why you came to Bayside? Because of me?” I asked, trying to gauge how long and deep Simon’s obsession with me ran.

“Why else would I be here? I promised myself that one day I would find you, and I would make you pay for what you did to my family. When I first came here, I saw you at The Dunes. I saw youlaughingand having fun. I saw you leaving the bar with different men you barely knew. How could a lying sack of shit like you be having fun, fucking anyone with a pulse while my father rots in prison because of you?You ruined my life!”

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