Page 39 of Keeping Her Under
“He have any dogs?”
He glances at me suspiciously. “I don’t know. Why?”
“Take a fucking guess.”
He curses, then glances in the rearview mirror. I now know the man in the backseat is dying tonight. Asher was too quick to think about feeding him to the dogs as a distraction.
Hopefully, it won’t come to that though – not because I care about what happens to the man but because those dogs don’t deserve a final meal. They were going to fuck and eat my girl. For that, I’d rather castrate them and leave them to starve.
“He’s the guy with the ball,” Asher says as he parks on the street a block down from a basketball court. The sun doesn’t set for another hour, but the sky is too overcast for me to see his features. My cousin pulls out his phone, taps it a couple of times, then passes it to me.
A white man’s mugshot fills the screen. He has a series of tattoos running down from his left eye, but none of them are gang symbols. He’s nothing but a wannabe tough guy, trying to trick the public into fearing him by making them think he’s all about that gang life.
In reality, if he stepped into either Blood Fangs or Shadow Domain territory with that shit on his face, he would be killed for the disrespect. No wonder he’s living all the way out here instead of at Summer’s house, which is well within Blood Fangs territory. She might’ve picked a neighborhood that is full of monsters, but her monster couldn’t reach her.
Or he couldn’t have until she got on the road.
“He was picked up for armed robbery, released on a technicality,” Asher says. “A real gem to –”
Our hostage lunges for the door handle, hoping to get out while we’re distracted. Asher zaps him without even turning around. “I’ve got child lock on, idiot.
“– society, and they say we’re the ones making America bad.”
I don’t point out that we’re about to commit a kidnapping and a murder. Despite having been born in the US, the two of us were constantly attacked by “real Americans” when we were teens living on the streets. Asher took all those “scum,” “worthless,” and “go back to where you came from” comments pretty hard. He’d been hurt at home. Then hurt by his homeland too.
Perhaps that is when I lost the drive to make the world a better place – when I saw it curb stomp the only person I ever loved. Why should I want to help anyone when not one of them had helped him?
“Do you have an idea of what you want to do?” Asher asks as we watch the group of guys play ball.
I glance in the rearview mirror. Our hostage is panting hard as he lies slumped against the seat. My original idea was to just grab Lance, but now I’ll need to think of a way to get rid of this asshole too.
No one fucks with my family.
Passing the phone back to my cousin, I ask, “You know where he lives?” True scum like Lance won’t have his own place. He’ll have found another victim to leach off and ruin. A fucking parasite through and through.
“Yep. His girlfriend’s not far from here.”
A cruel smile spreads across my face.
As we pull onto a rundown street, Asher points at the house we’re going to. It’s nicer than Summer’s, but it could still use some fresh paint and a gardener to attend to the lawn – or at least a cleaner to pick up all the broken glasses and crumpled cans.
I twist around to face our hostage, making sure his seatbelt is on. He doesn’t have any fight left in him to even glare at me. The pain in his hazel eyes shines bright beneath his grey locks.
“We’re good,” I say through my Halloween mask. Asher and I put one on a few streets back, taken from the backpack at my feet. He’s wearing Jason; I’m wearing Michael. Both of us are wearing gloves.
He revs the car and aims straight for the mailbox at Lance’s girlfriend’s house. The crash shoves us all forward. The post cracks in half. An explosion of dog barks adds to the noise as he continues up the gravel drive. He parks in front of the door, then grabs the bag from my footwell.
As the two of us step out, multiple people on the street look over at us – only to immediately jerk their eyes away. Mothers hurry their children along the sidewalks. Doors open as parents shout at their kids to get inside. Even the men walking around pick up their pace and disappear. You keep your head down in this part of town. You see nothing, and you sure as fuck don’t say nothing.
As we walk to the front door, the dogs’ barking turns into snarls. The hostage stops behind me, but Asher shoves him forward. His feet drags through the gravel.
“They’re out back,” my cousin assures him. The barking is too sharp to be coming from inside, and I can hear multiple chains rattling across the ground.
“Hello?” I call out as I rap on the door. “We hit your mailbox on accident and want to pay –”
The door is yanked open by a skinny blonde in a red bra. “What the fuck –”
I shove her back hard enough to trip her over. She hits the ground on a scream, and I move in quickly so the other two can come in behind me. Asher shuts the door. The click of the lock is barely heard over the barking dogs.
