Fool's Gold: A Kisses and Crimes Novel Page 14

“No… but it’s still an answer. Maybe your family wasn’t involved in Audriana’s disappearance.

  “But then who was involved?”

  “I don’t know… Someone with a whole lot to gain, that’s for sure.”

  In a white button-down and black slacks, I take Dani’s hand and cross the street, leaving behind the Grand Hotel Central.

  The sounds of a nearby party rage throughout the cover of the night. For a three AM on a Saturday night, these festivities are definitely on track to last for the rest of the night.

  Because Barcelona is a tourist town.

  Young Americans in bikinis came to party, get some dick, pussy or both. And from the looks of the college-aged students on the corner, they also came to puke their fucking guts out.

  I pass on the theatrics, holding Dani close to me as I try to hail a cab.

  Any cab that will get us out of this area. Any cab that will take us away before Isaac the mouse and the sleeping Slovenian can escape the restraints we wound up tying them in.

  I find one almost immediately.

  Under the warm summer air, with my hand caressing a small sliver of sweat on Dani’s back, I guide her into the backseat of the taxi cab.

  Once inside, I experience a tiny feeling of simultaneous despair and triumph. We may have eliminated one major suspicion in Dani’s hit attempt, but now we’ve opened the floodgates to a million others.

  And I can’t get over what Isaac Duvall insinuated about me…

  I wish I could figure this shit out, but before I can speak in my usual half-Spanish, half-shitstorm to the cabbie, Dani takes the reins.

  Worldly and educated beyond her young years, she directs the cabbie in flawless Spanish to the corner of el Passeig de Garcia and el Carrer de Valencia, where our temporary room is based.

  The Majestic Hotel and Spa.

  It’s majestic as they say… but even their four-star restaurants and outdoor spa won’t calm my nerves. The only thing capable of that seems to be the beautiful woman sitting right next to me.

  I put my hand on her smooth, silk-sheathed thigh.

  “You did wonderful tonight,” I tell her.

  “Thank you.”

  “Really, I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “What, so you couldn’t pretend to be a bisexual, partner-swinging nympho at the bar? Shocker.”

  “Yeah,” I laugh. “Well, let’s just say you sure shocked me.”

  I kiss her, but I can see the distress in Dani’s eyes. Her playfulness has turned serious. Fast.

  She touches my hand.

  “Think there’s any truth to what Duvall was saying about what happened to me?”

  Her pretty eyes are glassy, and in that moment, I want to comfort whatever concerns are bringing her worry.

  But the sad part is… that I can’t.

  I open my mouth to respond, and as soon as I do, the driver makes a sharp turn. We head down a street I don’t recognize at all, and before I know it, Dani is speaking quickly to the driver.

  “Está tomando nosotros a través del camino equivocado,” she says to him.

  I make out some of the words (something about where he’s taking us?), but not the rest. All I know is that the streets have gotten a lot quieter, so has the driver, and Dani seems to be in distress.

  I grab her elbow to get her attention.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know… but this doesn’t seem right. We seem to be taking the long way or something. I tried to tell the driver, but he’s not listening… or doesn’t understand. He may speak Catalan instead of Spanish, but even so, he should understand me. Spanish is the second biggest language here.”

  The rising panic in her voice unnerves me.

  I turn towards the black-haired driver.

  “Oye!” I yell in Spanish. Hey!

  “Did you hear what the lady said? She said put us back on the quickest path.”

  My Spanish isn’t too great. I use the words I know most.

  The terms I’ve mostly learned are the worst type of curse words, but they come in hand. They’re convenient and necessary at times like this when I need to get my point across.

  I rip the cabbie a new one from the back seat.

  “Motherfucker, can’t you hear? Stop the car. The lady and I want you to stop this fucking car right now.”

  Several seconds pass, and then he answers.

  He answers in perfect fluent fucking English.

  “I heard the lady,” he says sarcastically. “The purpose of my job is to make sure that you get to your final destination. And I want to do that… except I have very specific orders about what your final destination should be...”

  My throat goes tight. The protest dies on my lips.

  I take a look at the doors and realize that the back ones don’t seem to open from the inside. This thing is like a police car… and we’ve walked right into a fucking trap.

  I pull my gun out.

  “Pull this shit over, motherfucker, or I will blow the back of your…”

  The black and yellow cab jerks suddenly, and I am thrown.

  My heart hammering, my head goes slamming into the left-side window. Without seatbelts, Dani and I are slung like rag-dolls across the seats.

  My gun goes flying. And just as I regain my wits, we are jerked again, this time to the other side.

  The cabbie is playing Pinball with us in the car (and we’re the balls). It is only a matter of time before we end up dead. It’s clear that he is one of Duvall’s unsavory sort of men.

  I grapple for the gun again.

  Through the beautifully surrounded streets of Barcelona, we speed at a blinding pace. The sudden swerving makes it nearly impossible to get my bearings, and every time I think I can stay upright, the driver floors it.

  He turns corners at a sickening pace. He starts and stops enough to make a passenger go ill.

  My stomach dips and drops and gives.

  I can’t even hold on to Dani the way I want to.

  I grip for life onto the leather seats.

  Options run a racing course through my mind. On the one hand, I can reach over and incapacitate the driver. But if I do, the likelihood is high that he will crash.

  And if he does, we all die.

  I’d put my money on the fact that Duvall’s driver would like to stay alive. If I can just reach my gun… I can bargain with him…

  I stretch my fingers towards the floor.

  Reaching. Scrambling. Scraping as my limbs are sent soaring each way.

  My errant foot goes crashing through a window, sending glass spewing everywhere. Dani screams.

  And I find the butt of the gun.

  I brush it with my fingertips… and hear Dani’s angry voice, seemingly disembodied and rasping. Screeching at the driver as she holds her revolver at his neck.

  “Don’t fucking move!”

  She shoots a warning shot through the broken window.

  The tires screech as the cabbie hits the brake to halt the car into a sliding stop, and before the man can run, I reach over, throwing the front gear in park before dragging the man face-first into the backseat.

  I nearly choke him to death with my own hands… before I recognize his face.

  He’s one of the men I shot at outside of the hotel. The night that Dani was shot. That night that everything changed.

  Reeling in a sense of panic, I unwittingly rasp the first thing I can think of.

  “You’re not one of Isaac’s…”

  The cabbie’s face turns a million shades of red before it shakes, swiveling quickly in a seizure-like fashion. His skin turns purple right before my eyes.

  I nod towards the front seat, urging Dani to take it.

  “Go,” I tell her, and she moves.

  Behind the wheel, Dani puts the car back in drive. I instruct her to pull over to the closest parking spot she can find, and she obeys.

  She puts us in park in front of a closed-down pharmacy and we wait.

&n
bsp; I let the cab driver’s throat go, allowing him to cough and gasp. I let him think that he has time to breathe before cutting off his air supply with my hands once more.

  I squeeze until my fingers almost ache.

  “You hear that? Listen closely… That is the sound of your death.”

  I squeeze until my knuckles begin to crunch.

  I whisper.

  “That is the sound of me crushing the life out of you.”

  The man begins to break out in a rapid sweat, and unbelievably I find myself breaking out into a smile.

  Killing a man doesn’t always have to be the first resort. You’d be surprised what you can find out with a good choking… or a few well-placed bullets lodged in well-placed… places.

  You don’t become “the Crow” by using violence.

  You become “the Crow” by mastering the threat of violence. And I’m a goddamned surgeon at what I do.

  “Now, I am the fucking Crow. And if you have any fucking sense… then you know what that means. You can die here in the back of this stinking ass cab or you can die in the comfort of your home when you have no teeth and your balls are grey. Make a choice.”

  I pull him to me.

  “Now.”

  I look towards the front seat and watch Dani go pale.

  “Bishop… don’t…”

  “Don’t what?” I rasp.

  “Don’t kill him. We’re better than that.”

  “Yeah? Well, if he moves… you have my permission to put one between his eyes.”

  She nods grimly at me, her face filled with determination and underlined by a layer of fear.

  Dani backs up out of the space and proceeds to head in the direction of our hotel. My gun recovered, we decide to take our little guest somewhere where we can question him without witnesses.

  I keep him facing me, praying that Dani won’t see or recognize his face. I don’t want her to panic any more than she already has.

  I whisper again.

  “You’re not one of Isaac’s men. Tell me who you’re working for…”

  The man flinches under my grasp.

  “I can’t,” he wheezes. “She’ll have me killed...”

  I loosen my grip around the driver’s neck, feeling my blood run ice cold. What did he mean “she’ll”…?

  But I don’t have time to think anything else.

  Just as we round the next corner, our cab is rammed violently from behind. A car to our left suddenly pulls up and we are sideswiped, nearly knocked into oncoming traffic.

  Tires squeal. Metal crushes metal, and just as I look for answers in the choked man’s eyes, his dark irises fill with fear and reflect back the alarm that I can practically feel in the cab’s now blaring horn.

  He takes a labored breath.

  “We are dead already.”

  I stop breathing. We’re in a goddamned ambush.

  And then the shots ring out.

  Loud. Close.

  Burning in my ears, and then burning in my chest as a rush of fire travels to my arm, making my vision turn blurry from the acuteness of the pain.

  My grip loosens on the half-dead man in my arms, and as his body is riddled with bullets flying through the window, shattering the glass, I feel my own body slump across the seat.

  It doesn’t even feel like my own.

  Nothing belongs to me anymore. The only thing that feels like it belongs is the angelic voice that calls out to me. It tells me to “hold on.”

  It talks to me, reassuring me in sweet, beautiful tones until finally I slip into a deep sleep.

  THE AWFUL TRUTH

  DANI

  The dream from the city streets returns for another re-run.

  A darkened city. A gown made for glitz and glamour ruined beyond repair.

  The panic.

  I can feel it in the air. All around me. Suffocating me. Dragging me into their dreary depths.

  And here they come.

  The pursuers. The chasers. The bad men come to take me away.

  Only this isn’t a dream; this isn’t a memory.

  Not anymore.

  The city streets are replaced by white hallways and blue tiles. The pursuers… are scowling nurses in blue scrubs.

  When they chase me, this time they catch me. They drag me away from the swinging double doors. They subdue me into a seat decorated with dangling straps.

  Because they don’t believe me.

  A botched robbery. A jealous ex-lover coming to seek his revenge.

  These are the only scenarios people believe.

  They don’t believe me when I recount the horror of the taxi driver-kidnapper that picked me up earlier tonight. They don’t believe my account about the band of international assassins that threatened our very lives.

  They only believe the horrors they themselves have come to know.

  And how could I blame them?

  If I wasn’t me… I might not believe it.

  Hell, I was me and didn’t believe it.

  Blood clot, my fucking ass.

  I now realize that my memory loss was more psychological than physical, the need to obliterate memories a result of damage more horrible than just a freak bullet could even inflict.

  Like the nurses surrounding me in this hospital, I squelched the real horrors of the world, tried to combine them in this neat little box so that so my version of madness wouldn’t extend beyond the things I didn’t know.

  Truth is… I don’t think I wanted to know…

  Because to know would make me Dani—a woman who’d seen things no person should ever see… and she was the last thing that I wanted to be.

  I understand why the nurses don’t understand me. But it isn’t going to stop me from trying to make them.

  I beg out loud.

  “Por favor,” I cry in Spanish. “Please let me see him. Who told you not to let me see him?”

  One female nurse chimes in.

  “The doctor’s working on him right now, Miss. I don’t know what you’re…”

  “That’s bullshit!” I scream out loud in tears. “Someone told you not to let me see him. They received specific instructions. I overheard him talking about it!”

  I point at a shocked male nurse who’s just been caught.

  “Miss, we have no idea what you are saying. This is untrue. Now, do you have anywhere to stay or…?”

  “I’m not leaving this fucking hospital,” I growl in my chair.

  “Miss,” the deceitful male nurse steps forward. “We realize that you’ve just been through a traumatic experience. We understand your hysteria… Would you like us to give you something to help you calm down?”

  I sit up.

  “Try it and you’ll walk out of your shift with one less ball.”

  He looks at a third male nurse who pipes up.

  “If you don’t cooperate with us, we will be forced to sedate you. You’re proving to be a danger to yourself and to the patients by continuing to run into the E.R.”

  He pauses.

  “Now, we can call the police or…”

  “Call the police,” I declare slowly, though, the thought is daunting. After Annecy, I no longer trust the police. I no longer trust the nurses.

  I don’t trust anyone… but Bishop.

  And he’s one hundred and fifty feet away… fighting for his life.

  I stand up once more, and the nurses take stances as if to brace for a battle. I flip my hair over my shoulder and clench my fists.

  “Look… I’m going in there whether you like it or not. And I will take out however many of you I have to with my fists.” I look around at them all. “Who wants to be the last one standing?”

  “We will strap you down,” the first nurse says.

  “I’d like to see you try. It’ll be a cold day in Hell if I give into anyone without a fight, so take your fucking best shot because I…”

  And then I feel the pinch.

  A sharp pang bites into the side of my neck and I go down, falling in half at
the knee. I try to turn around to see what’s caused it, but all I see is the needle.

  Bright and gleaming.

  Floating over the front of my face.

  My fuzzy gaze falls on the man behind it who has somehow turned into a blob of blurs, and I reach out towards him, trying to touch him. But my vision goes black.

  And then I collapse.

  ***

  The beeping around me is interminable.

  It feels like I am swimming around in a sea of sound, and I can’t seem to do anything to stop it.

  I’d open my eyes… but the sky seems bright.

  Too bright.

  Even under the protection of my eyelids, I can still sense its gleam and shine. I can still make out its fluorescent glow.

  Groggy, I keep my eyes closed for what it feels like forever. Until I can’t take the anticipation anymore and my anxiety gets the best of me.

  I open my eyes.

  And there, laying beside me, still as stone… is Bishop, looking more serene than I have ever seen him.

  Except he’s not serene.

  He looks almost dead.

  And he’s not laying beside me in the sense that any normal husband and wife would, no.

  He’s lying in the bed next to mine.

  His mouth is frozen, his body motionless. Facing upwards, his chest and arms stiffer than boards, he appears nearly unreal.

  I’d try to touch him… but I fear he could be almost made out of wax. And on top of that… my own arms are strapped to the sides of a white-covered bedspread.

  I couldn’t reach out to my own husband if I tried.

  I open my mouth to scream.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

  I glance at my feet and find a man walking in behind the closed curtain that cordons off Bishop and me from God knows what else. Eyes squinted, my mouth pinched in the corners, I scan the man’s face for signs of the male nurses.

  He is neither of them.

  But all the same… I hate him on sight.

  I ball my fingers.

  “Who are you?” I whisper, finding my voice shockingly hoarse.

  “A friend,” he responds.

  “A friend of who?”

  “A friend of Bishop’s.”

  I scoff. Harshly. “The same friend who knocked me out?”

  He smirks at me—actually fucking smirks, and the corner of his eyes crinkle like wrinkles in a fine fabric.