Her instincts turned out to be partly right. It wasn’t Vince and his crew. But it wasn’t Wyatt and Reggie, either.
That was confirmed as soon as she heard someone speak.
“I’m gonna kill the little bitch.”
The voice wasn’t quite the same as she remembered it, but she knew who it was.
Joseph was back.
Not exactly who she was expecting. Jane figured Joseph and Logan were out of the picture indefinitely while Joseph got patched up at the hospital. This was not a welcome development, particularly considering that there was no indication Reggie and Wyatt were here. Sure, maybe they were going to kill her anyway, but Jane believed Reggie might be quicker about it.
She was not confident Joseph would be merciful.
She heard running down the stairs. Then, seconds later, she sensed the door opening. A quick rush of air.
Before a word was said, someone grabbed hold of the hood over her head and yanked it off. The lights in the room had been turned on, and it took Jane a few seconds of rapid blinking to become accustomed. She’d been in darkness for hours now.
God, what a sight he was.
There were splotches of dried blood on Joseph’s shirt, his neck, his cheeks. If he’d made any attempt to clean himself, he hadn’t done a very good job.
Then there was the nose itself.
Jane couldn’t see much of it, hidden as it was under a wallet-sized wad of gauze and white medical tape, much of it smeared with blood. Jane wondered whether the emergency room doctor had been blind. This was the worst example of first aid she’d ever seen.
“I’m gonna enjoy this,” Joseph said, standing a foot away, waving a finger in her face. He sounded as though he had the world’s worst head cold.
Logan appeared at the door, stepped in, and placed his hands on his brother’s shoulders, pulled him away.
“Just hold on, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “You’re a goddamn fool, you know that? A goddamn fool.”
“I’m gonna do her,” he told him.
“Yeah, yeah, I get that. It’s all you’ve said the last two hours. What the hell were you thinking, walking out of the ER? Another ten minutes and someone would’ve looked after you.”
“I took care of it,” Joseph said.
“Oh yeah, right.” Logan looked at Jane. “You see what he did? Bought some bandages and shit and tried to patch himself up because he couldn’t wait to get back here and take care of you. Damn, why’d you have to go and do that to him?”
“Get out of my way,” Joseph said, although it sounded more like, Geb ou da my may.
He lunged at Jane, went to put his hands around her neck. He got his hands on her for half a second before his brother ripped him away.
“Listen to me!” Logan shook his head in exasperation. “I get why you want to do this. If it was me, I’d want to kill the bitch, too. But you can’t! Okay? You just can’t. We don’t know if the time’s right.”
“Let go.” Leb doh.
“Listen! They’re not back yet. Until they’re back, we don’t know if everything’s gone down okay.”
“It’s been too long.”
“Not that long. Maybe they ran into a complication. Maybe Fleming was late, had trouble rounding up the money. But here’s the thing. They might still need her. Like, maybe the guy says he’s got the money but he gets a bug up his ass about being able to talk to her on the phone before he hands it over or says where it is. Something like that. So what happens if they phone wanting us to put her on and you’ve already gone and wrung her neck? You want to fuck that up? You want us to lose out on the money? We’re this close, Joseph. We’re this close.”
“She broke my nose,” he said.
“I know, I know — I understand. I’m sure, when the time comes, Reggie’ll be okay with letting you do it. But you can’t do it now.”
“Call them,” Joseph said.
“What?”
“Call them and see if they’ve got the money. If they’ve got the money, I can do it now.”
“I’m not going to call them,” Logan said. “We wait to hear from them.”
“What if something went wrong?” Joseph asked. “What if the cops got involved? What if they got picked up? Maybe the cops are on the way here. That’s why we need to take charge. We need to do her now, because she needs to pay for what she did to me, and because we don’t want her talking to nobody about what she knows.”
Jane made desperate noises behind the tape. She wanted to make some kind of deal. Tell them something that might get them to change their minds.
“Shut the fuck up,” Joseph snapped at her.
Logan was thinking. That last part Joseph said, about the possibility that something had gone wrong, was worrying him.
“Okay,” he said. “Here’s what we could do.”
“What?”
“Well, we were never going to kill her here. We talked about taking her out in the woods, doing it there. We could start heading out that way. Get her out of here, put her in the back of the Lexus, make the drive. Sooner or later they’ll call and say it’s done, and we can finish her. And in the meantime, if they need her to say something on the phone, we’ve still got her.”
Joseph’s entire body seemed electrified, like someone who’d had far too much caffeine. He was so itching to do this.
“When you said ‘we finish her,’ you mean me, right? I get to do her. I’m the one who gets to do her.”
Logan smiled, nodded slowly, tried to calm him down. “You’re the man, Joseph. You’re the man. Let’s get her out of this chair.”
Joseph managed a tortured smile under all the gauze and blood. “You’re a good brother, Logan. You really are. I don’t tell you enough.”
Sixty-six
Terry
“You happy?” Reggie asked. “She got away. So we’re good.”
Vince stepped into the downstairs bedroom to examine the empty chair and the bits of rope while I stood, gun in hand, in the rec room, watching Reggie and Wyatt.
“There’s blood,” Vince said.
“That’s from Joseph,” Wyatt said. “He was gushing it. Your girl broke his fucking nose when she head-butted him.”
Vince came out of the room, looked over at the table supporting the computers and tax files. A landline phone was sitting on it. Vince walked over, picked up the handset, put it to his ear, then hung it back up.
“Dial tone,” he said.
“So?” Reggie said.
I knew what he was getting at. “Jane would have called,” I said.
Vince glanced my way. “Yeah. If she’d got loose, she’d have called my cell, let me know.”
“Maybe not,” Reggie argued. “More likely, she was scared, wanted to get out of here as fast as she could. She didn’t want to take the time to do it.”
Vince raised his arm, aimed the gun at Reggie’s head. “Bullshit. You’ve got five seconds to find out where she’s gone.”
She didn’t blink. “How the fuck am I supposed to know? When I left, she was here.”
“Four seconds.”
“You remind me of my father,” she said coldly. “May he continue to burn in hell.”
“Three seconds.”
“For Christ’s sake!” Wyatt shouted. “It has to be Logan and Joseph.”
Reggie looked at him. “They went to the hospital.”
Wyatt looked at Vince. “I’ll call him. I’ll find out. Just put the fucking gun down.”
“Before you call,” Vince said, “here’s what you’re going to say.”
“Tell me,” he said.
“Say there’s been a hitch. Tell them I’m ready to hand over the money, but not until I see Jane. Not talk to her on the phone. See her.”
“I don’t even — I don’t even know for sure they’ve got her,” he protested.