Page 99 of Wicked Me
I risked a look behind me. Several feet away, Slim knelt in the dirt. Red splotches grew from the center of his blue and white striped shirt. His pudgy face was slicked with sweat and dead pale. He held both hands out in front of him as if he wanted to stop the bleeding but didn’t know where to start. A wet-sounding gasp sprayed more blood down his multiple chins. And then he toppled face-first onto the ground.
My steps slowed. Had I done that to him or had it been the other bullets zinging around? Shit. There was nothing I could do. I needed to go.
When I dropped to my knees, night floated around the sun. A groan tore from my throat at the pain. Clutching my bad arm, I wormed and twisted under the fence. Inch by inch. It seemed to take hours. Halfway through.
But something gripped my ankles and dragged me backward.
I kicked. I squirmed. I flipped around to aim and shoot some unlucky bastard in the throat. Self-preservation—it was a tricky, guilt-ridden line to walk, but I wasn’t about to give up on life now.
A shadow fell across my middle, but the sun’s glare behind it dipped everything in blinding yellow. My brain, the prickly fuck, flashed me an image of zombie Slim, but the shadow was too long, too beanpole. No, this was another type of zombie. The worst kind. The live kind.
A fist slammed into my jaw before I knew where it came from. My cheek scraped against dirt while even more pain lit fireworks through half my head. Dazed, I kicked at the ground, still trying to escape.
Movement in the corner of my eyes. Instead of another fist, a white handkerchief plucked the gun from my hand. And fired.
I jumped then froze, willing the rest of my pain receptors to hurry the fuck up. Finally the realization came that I hadn’t been shot again. This was much worse.
Hill’s head blocked out the sun. He stared down his long nose from eyes that seemed unnaturally deep inside that domed head. The handkerchief wrapped carefully around my gun rippled around his black suit jacket sleeve with the wind and blended into his white glove. The matching gloved hand gestured as if signaling for a table for two at an upscale restaurant. Somehow, while lying in the dirt with a gunshot to my shoulder and a dead drug dealer feet away, this struck me as funny. A laugh slid out of my mouth in a hiss because it hurt. Everything hurt. I had to wonder just how much blood I’d already lost to make me think this was anywhere near funny.
“Is something on your mind?” Hill asked.
“The usual,” I said and groaned. “Just wondering what you’re like on a dinner date. Do you do what you just did there? Signal across the table to the lady you’re trying to woo so the waiter won’t hear? One finger for one hit of H and two fingers for two hits? Do you have to get them high first so they’ll have sex with anyone,includingyou?”
Sure, dis the guy with the gun. Since the upper half of my body lay slanted inside a shallow grave, I must’ve been leaking a shitload of blood. Either that or I figured I didn’t have a lot to lose. Even though I really, really did. I just wanted out of here so I could get to Paige.
“Ah.” He nodded down at his hand. “No, two fingers doesn’t mean two hits. It means V for victory.”
“Who won?”
He met my stupid question with a toothy grin that slimed up my insides. “I think we both know.”
My gut clenched at how much truth filled that single statement. “So...how does this end?”
“End?” He shrugged. “I let you go.”
Let me go? I nodded as if I expected nothing less, because surely there was a catch. “Seems fair.”
“I thought so, too,” he said, pulling a cell from his suit pocket. “I’ll call the police first, of course.”
I glanced behind him at Slim’s hulking dead body and then at my gun in Hill’s hand. The gun with my fingerprints all over it and minus two bullets. Two bullets, one for each new hole in each dead body.
Holy shit. He was framing me for murder. Alex and Slim. Panic flared through my chest, sticking my lungs together, because this had the very real potential to be so much worse than death.
“It’s your word against mine,” I said.
Hill shook his head slowly as if he was sorry he was such a dirty lunatic. “We have it on film. You aiming at Slim’s sister. A gunshot. Your struggle with Slim. I conveniently don’t have a camera aimed in this direction, but once the police find the bodies, they’ll think you finished Slim off, too.”
He’d been videoing me like I’d been videoing him, but the problem was I had no idea if I caught anything that would help clear my name. And what if Hill or his employees found the camera? I didn’t exactly have a chance to grab it on my way out.
What would Paige say if she thought I was a murderer? Would she believe me when I said I didn’t do it or would doubt always itch at the back of her mind? And what about Rose? Would this drive her over the wobbly line into addiction again? This was all so fucked up.
I stood to face him. “Was this the plan all along? To set me up?”
“Drugs are big business. Politics is big business. In this city, they’re bound to overlap.”
“What the fuck does that even mean?”
“The Clearys have enemies in very high places, Sam, with some very deep pockets. They asked me to rake your entire family over the coals, but I hardly had to lift a finger to do it. Your brother asked me for a donation to your father’s campaign.Me. So I did, then on a hunch, I called the Federal Election Commission with an anonymous tip about campaign finance fraud.”
