Page 94 of Wicked Me
I risked a glance around the shelf to where the two men had been sitting. They’d taken their guns with them but not the money. So they were just going to leave it lying around while someone prowled through the warehouse shouting for Alex. Smart, real smart. Something was definitely up. I wouldn’t find out what by playing catch with steel beams.
“Alex?”
Closer now. Close enough to hear the guy’s panic.
I inched out into the open, facing the direction the camera aimed, away from the approaching stranger and toward the money table. The hair on the back of my neck lifted with uneasiness. I fingered the gun hidden by the back of my jacket. Its weight didn’t give me jack for courage, but I kept going as quiet as I could anyway.
The closer I drew to the table, the more the shadows that were out of reach of the single overhead light bounced. And the harder the blood beat between my ears. Metal walls stretched in both directions from the ends of the table, and from my view, everything around both corners was hidden. Maybe Hill lurked behind one of them. Maybe the two men who had left the money who may or may not know I was coming were around the other.
This could definitely be an ambush, maybe even the apocalyptic kind, but Tony had already been shot at once. Yeah, I’d lied to him. No way was I drawing my best bud farther into this herpes zoo called blackmail by asking for any more of his help.
I drew the gun, the feel of it in my hands drying my mouth to desert-like proportions, and pointed it at the ground.
“Alex?!” the guy yelled. Even closer.
Backed against the nearest wall, I darted a look around it at the stacks of money on the table. The rusty smell of the warehouse thickened into a copper penny I could taste at the back of my throat. Behind the reaches of the light, shadows jumped. The roof creaked. And it sounded like someone was...crying?
But I couldn’t see anything.
One steadying breath. Then two. On three, I swung around the wall my back was to and lifted the gun. A metal wall closed in the space ten feet in front of me, almost a dead end if not for the door that led somewhere I hadn’t had the pleasure to explore yet.
“Please...” The whisper crawled across the metal and concrete from all directions, desperate, pleading.
I whirled around, aiming the gun across the table toward an area too crowded with shadows to see anything. My stomach clenched when I drew a little closer. This didn’t feel right. At all.
“You’re not like them,” the voice hidden in the dark in front of me said. A strange, sort of familiar voice. “I can tell.”
Quick cracks echoed along the ceiling and shook down the walls with a gust of wind. They matched the speed of the piling doubt in my gut. But I crept closer, close enough to see.
“Alex!” the guy screamed.
Alex. The ladyman who’d given me her donut at the corner of 131stand Chestnut now sat bound to a chair near a wall that dead-ended behind her. Bruises and gashes crisscrossed everywhere, over and around leaky eye-makeup, underneath the strands of her lopsided blonde wig, and behind the short, reddish beard that had grown from her chin. Not reddish. Red, from blood. It soaked her front. It dripped steadily from a large tear in her jeans, caking the thick, curly hair that grew on her leg from a meaty hole in her flesh.
My stomach rolled. My hands shook the gun aimed at her. What happened? What was Alex doing here?
I didn’t know if I asked the questions aloud. I didn’t know if she could hear me over all the confusion in my own head. But I had no trouble hearing her.
“I wasn’t going to shoot you that day I stole your money.”
I blinked hard, fast. My senses sharpened with that thing called understanding.
Heavy panting. Footsteps. A metal door creaking open behind me.
A gunshot. Not from my gun, even though it was aimed at Alex. Even though she slumped forward in the chair.
Not me. It wasn’t me. I stumbled backward into a metal chair that screamed. A deranged scream that wouldn’t stop. Movement flashed to my right.
Slim, the Texan fat guy I’d delivered rat poison to. He was charging, his gun lifted at eye level. He fired.
