The Taken (34 page)

“It’s not funny, Courtney,” Grif whispered.

“Hey, you all right, man? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Paul laughed at his own joke, unbalancing his head again.

Bridget’s words from earlier that evening came back like a gut punch.
He’s a bishop in the twenty-ninth ward. He’s the head of his own congregation.

“You’re not talking about the women in the back room, are you? You’re talking about . . .” His mind raced, searching out the name. “Charlotte.”

One of my girls,
Chambers had said.

“The galas are a way of showing off the new merch to interested buyers,” Paul said. “That’s when the bids come in. The auction, though, isn’t until the following week.”

Chambers wasn’t controlling powerful men using high-class professionals. He was luring them in using sex, yes, but used his position in the Mormon Church—an institution rife with a host of virginal girls—to do it. He was using the church as his cathouse.

He was turning babies into hookers.

“I feel sick,” Grif said, and began to climb out.

Courtney edged aside for him, calling down to Paul, “Told you you’re rank, dude.”

“Hey! Hey! What about me? You can’t just leave me . . .” He motioned down at his own body. “Here.”

Grif whirled, pointing at the man who’d been rotten even before death. “You know, it’s sad that you left a good woman to go running with hookers. It’s beyond pitiful that you then got turned by one of your playthings. But to sleep with a kid because you figure it’s going to happen anyway is so far past tragic . . .”

“Even the Germans don’t have a word for it,” Courtney finished for him.

“When is this auction?” Grif asked, glancing at his watch. Today was Saturday, a full week after the gala. Charlotte could already be gone. No, Grif thought.
Taken.

But Paul said nothing.

Slowly, Grif lifted his gaze and pinned it on Paul. “I will keep you sentient inside that body long after your skull is hollowed out by parasites and your eye sockets squirm with maggots.”

Paul’s larynx dropped, and didn’t rise again. “It’s always midnight, a week after the showing,” he croaked.

The showing
. A memory of Charlotte’s open, trusting face as she gazed up at Chambers flashed, striking Grif so squarely that he almost missed what Paul said next.

“. . . in the casino Chambers was building. His pet project—he’s gonna splay his name across that big tower. Or he was until the financing fell through. That’s why . . .”

“That’s why he runs women and blackmails men. It’s how he plans to raise enough capital to finish it. Bribing, selling, killing.” Grif swore. “You said midnight?”

Paul nodded as best he could, but the Pure energy was fading. He wouldn’t be of any use much longer. That’s okay. It was just after ten now. Grif still had time.

“But the pre-show starts an hour earlier.”

“Pre-show?”

Paul’s careless shrug had his shoulders drooping low. “Yeah, you know. Like a warm-up act. Girls who might be a little used up but have volunteered for kink—tie ’em up, tie ’em down. It lets the Richie Riches play out their S&M or rape fantasies, the girls get extra coin, and no one gets hurt.”

Unless they were being tied down against their will.

You should teach her a woman’s place . . . or someone else surely will.

“Where, Paul?” Something in Grif’s tone snagged Paul’s wandering attention.

“Wait a minute . . . you think Kit . . . ?” Paul tried to access more of his maggot-laced brain, but quickly gave up. “No way. Why would anybody want her . . .”

“Where, you rotting meat suit?” Grif’s breath was full in his chest now, heart throbbing so hard it felt like it’d rip right through the flesh. “Tell me now or I’ll slit you back open, pop that bag of organs sitting in your stomach, and let the coyotes feed while you watch.”

“Jay-sus, Grif,” Courtney whistled, but Grif’s sight was red. Red as the blood that had once spilled from his body. Red as his wife’s nails had been when he’d allowed her to die. He wasn’t going to allow it to happen again. He certainly wasn’t going to allow this dead guy to damn Kit to death.

“At the old white elephant sitting in the middle of the Strip, man. The lot where the Marquis used to be.”

Grif didn’t hesitate, just growled at Courtney as he whirled away. “Re-bury him. Or don’t. I don’t care.”

“Wait!” Courtney called after him. “You’ll need me to navigate. You don’t know where you’re going!”

But Grif just broke into a run. He knew exactly where Chambers’s pet project stood. After all, he’d died there once before.

Chapter Twenty-Six

H
ow long had it been since she had been taken?

Kit turned her head from side to side, like that might help her see. Only hours. Not days. Not yet. But it was full dark now. She couldn’t see the sky, not inside what sounded like an empty warehouse, or from behind the folds of the sleek, thick blindfold, but she could sense the night lying atop the city like an opaque veil. Yet unlike her midnight drives along Vegas’s bowl-like rim, there was nothing comforting in this darkness. This was both an abyss and a dead end. It felt as if she didn’t get out of here soon, she’d be trapped in blackness forever.

Be positive, she told herself, lifting her chin and swallowing hard. It helped that they hadn’t hurt her. After she’d stopped shaking, after she’d muted the panic that threatened to crawl up her belly and through her throat in an inhuman scream, she’d heard Schmidt tell his partner that there wasn’t to be one mark on her. So maybe Chambers just wanted to scare her out of pursuing this story. To force her to back way off, and warn her of what would happen if she didn’t.

Yet when they were left alone, Schmidt’s anonymous partner had run rough hands along her limbs, too intimate and too long, claiming with a smile in his voice that he was just making sure she was in good health. She knew then that this was the same man who’d accompanied Schmidt to her home and attacked her the first time, and she shivered with the memory, though she knew that it could have been worse.

It might be worse yet.

As if she’d voiced these worries aloud, the door to her prison opened, and he was suddenly there. She knew his boot steps already, the same way a trapped mouse might know the slithering sound of a snake’s belly. She sensed his movement like she sensed the night. The man approached, footsteps deliberate and heavy, and stopped too close, his hot breath and cool attention squarely on her. Kit felt that, too. But if she could just get him talking, it might buy her time. And if there was a person alive that Kit couldn’t get to talk to her . . . well, she hadn’t met him yet.

However, just in case this one had more on his mind than talking . . . “I have to pee.”

“I don’t care.”

Despite the ice in his voice, Kit rose from the chair she’d been ordered to sit in and said, “Seriously, I really have to go. I don’t know how much longer I can hold it.”

“Fine.”

An immediate shove, like he’d been planning to do it anyway, and she crashed into a wall, hunching there until she was sure that was all he was going to do. Silence met her attempts to right herself and she fought the urge to scream. Instead, she patted at the wall, looking for a door, yet rammed into a table, and elicited a curse from behind.

“No bruises, you idiot.” Another shove and her blindfold was lifted. She blinked, though the light was dim, and peered up into a hard, stubbled, and
familiar
face. “Hitchens.”

No wonder she hadn’t been able to get the police to help. No wonder even Dennis had seemed deaf and mute to her pleas for prompt assistance and investigation. Was he in on it? Had he been party to Nic’s death? “Where’s Dennis?”

Hitchens laughed. “Dennis is too soft to be of any use to us.”

“But . . . he’s your partner,” she said feebly. She was having trouble ordering her thoughts amid all the latent panic and adrenaline and fear.

“
Chambers
is my partner,” Hitchens shot back with such vehemence she immediately knew he only wished it to be so. He also knew she knew it. His round jaw clenched. “I thought you had to piss.”

Swallowing hard, she looked around. A trailer, double-wide, uninspired. Typical. The bathroom was behind her. She’d run into a fold-out table.

“Oh, this is for you, too.” Hitchens pulled his other hand from behind his back and threw a wad of black material at her. Kit looked down at the strips of fabric in her hands, wondering what she was supposed to do with them. Wipe?

“Put that on when you’re done. Do it quickly and quietly or I’ll put it on you. And you won’t like that.”

Kit couldn’t help it. Her chin began to wobble.

“Don’t worry, I wouldn’t enjoy it. Your type isn’t even close to appealing to me.”

“My type?” she parroted.

“Yeah, you know . . .” The depths of his eyes lit, a bare bulb of meanness shining right through to spotlight her. Kit expected the vulgar and the familiar—sluts, whores, bitches—so Hitchens surprised her entirely when he said, “Weirdoes.”

Slumping, Kit looked down at the “clothing” in her hands. She didn’t have to think now because there was nothing to figure out. She knew exactly what was happening here, and could pretty well guess what would happen next. In case there was any doubt, Hitchens held out a pair of black stilettos, too. Taking them, Kit bit her lip. She’d always told herself, and believed, that knowing was key because knowledge could keep you safe from harm and all the things you didn’t know. Not the easy answer, like her dad had said, but the truth.

The truth was that she might not ever step foot outside of this trailer again.

Tears welling, she looked back at Hitchens. “You killed Paul, didn’t you?”

“He was an asshole.”

Her fingers tightened against the thin silk. “And Nicole?”

“Nah, that was my bowling night.” Tucking his hands into his jeans pockets, he rocked back on his heels, and smiled cruelly through his lie.

Slumping, Kit swayed. “That’s awful.”

“Only if it happens to you,” he replied coldly, because they both knew it would never happen to him. “Now shut up and take your piss. And make it fast, weirdo. You’re up next.”

Kit entered the small bathroom, dull glaze moving over the dingy linoleum and dirty sink. No lock on the door, of course. No other exit but the . . .

Window.

It was tiny, glazed, but also half-open. Problem was, Kit could practically hear Hitchens breathing on the door’s other side. She looked around, gaze dropping to the sink’s press-and-hold faucet. Then she looked at the cheap shoes in her hand.

Hell if these were going on her feet, she thought, and pressed the heel against the faucet, pushing down, and wedging the toe against the wall, forcing a steady stream. If she were quiet, this just might work.

She thanked God for the winter chill, which had forced her into cigarette pants instead of a pencil skirt. The argyle sweater would also keep her warm once outside, provided she could get out of the tiny, rusted window.

“Hurry up in there!” Hitchens yelled, as she climbed onto the toilet.

“My tummy hurts,” she said, raising her voice to hide the window’s squeak. She only got halfway. “And I’m being careful not to put a run in the hose.”

There. But only her arms and torso were through the window when Hitchens’s voice rang out again. “I didn’t give you any hose.”

Kit pushed, the sharp steel scraping her hips as the door rocketed open. She squealed, pushed harder, and was falling before she could right herself. Hitchens’s face appeared above her, brows drawn down hard over his eyes. “Fuck!” He disappeared.

Kit fought to sit up, and against the stabbing in her chest. No time to relearn to breathe, she thought, wobbling to her feet. There was barely even enough time to run.

R
unning had left Grif breathless, nerves had him shaky, and if he didn’t already know where the Marquis had stood, he’d have bypassed it altogether. It was enclosed by a temporary construction wall hemmed in by a chain-linked fence so that no one on the outside could see in.

Apparently, no one could get in, either.

“I told you to wait for me.” Courtney appeared so soundlessly he jumped.

“Which way?” Grif said, not sparing her a glance. He felt like a lion pacing a cage, caught on the outside of the long, linked fence.

Courtney pointed the opposite way. “You passed the entrance. It’s the section that’s boarded, with a rendering of the new casino. It swings open to allow passage from the side street.”

Of course. Chambers and his band of merry child-rapists wouldn’t want to attract the attention of some annoyingly curious tourist. Yet he was still unprepared for the sight of a fleet of mostly foreign luxury cars once he’d passed to the other side. It looked, he thought, like the parking garage at the Ritz.

“Wow,” muttered Courtney. “Vegas is filled with rich sickos.”

The world was filled with them, Grif thought, wishing Nicole Rockwell were here to document it with her camera. “They could drive away in Pintos and it’d still be sick.”

“Yeah, but this is just salt in the wound.”

It was. You had to be birthed with a sense of entitlement to think you could get away with this. How many of these men were considered upstanding? They paid their taxes, went to church, built their companies . . . and raped someone else’s child in their off-time. And they
did
get away with it. “Come on.”

“I can’t, Grif.” She pushed some of the hair from her face when he turned, and sighed. “You know I can’t.”

Grif swallowed against the lump that rose in his throat. “She’s in there, isn’t she?”

Her answer was silence, a returned blank stare, and he knew that Katherine Craig—the woman who grounded him and moved him and was more chatty and energetic and deliberately blissful than anyone he’d ever met—was already surrounded by death-telling plasma.

Ignoring Courtney’s heavy stare on his back, he broke into a jog. It wasn’t going to be Kit, he thought, slipping into the building’s shadows. Even if it had to be him.

From the outside, it looked as if jumbo construction trailers had been welded together to create a giant, enclosed octagon. It wasn’t something that would go unnoticed—why would someone create a makeshift space in what was already a makeshift space?—yet the construction crews were long gone, and the abandoned hotel project was as dark and forbidding as an underground cave.

And of course, there was nothing left of the Marquis, where Grif had died. He didn’t even try to picture the old resort. His was an old death, and had nothing to do with tonight. Besides, there was plasma purling in the sky, and the soft, effervescent waves were quickly narrowing into threads above the makeshift dwelling, and slowly sinking inside. He had to hurry.

Grif spotted, and ignored, the prominent and single steel door. No point in announcing his presence to the muscle undoubtedly stationed there. Toeing the shadows, Grif spotted windows on the conjoined trailers, all dark but for a small one that gaped wide. Too small and high for him, he thought, and looked instead for some sort of construction defect. A simple corner that hadn’t been sealed tight, or a place of escape that only someone like Chambers would know about. He’d already proven he had backup plans for his backup plans.

Yet the walls were welded tight, not even a proper peephole to establish the layout inside, so Grif turned his back to the clustered trailers, and spotted the crane. It loomed near the rusting scaffolding of the abandoned hotel, and he might have considered it neglected, too, were it not for the shiny black Mercedes parked, nose-out, right behind it.

“Damned foreign cars,” Grif muttered, but he was already connecting the dots—car to crane to ladder to trailers. Crouching low, he rushed the vehicle.

But there was no driver inside, only keys, which he naturally pocketed. At the very least, someone was going to have a hard time getting out of here tonight.

Leaving the car unlocked, Grif turned . . . and nearly threw a punch at the figure rushing him.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked, yanking her behind the giant crane.

Bridget Moore jerked away, and almost toppled backward. “You called me, remember? You wanted my help finding your girl.”

He’d left two messages on her voice mail before heading to the graveyard. “If you knew about this place, why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I didn’t know. I called . . . my mother.”

“Your long-estranged mother told you that Chambers was selling off Charlotte’s virginity tonight?” Grif didn’t believe it. Kit had claimed Mrs. Chambers was in such denial she was damn near comatose.

“No,” Bridget—not her mother’s daughter—shot back. “But she said this is where he comes for his boys’ night out. I’m the one who figured he was doing more than playing poker.”

Grif jerked his head. “Get out of here, Moore. This is no time for revenge fantasies. Kit is in there.”

Bridget grabbed his jacket as he tried to climb up into the crane, tugging him back down. “And so is a little girl who’s scared out of her mind. I was.”

“Don’t try it. I don’t trip over guilt.” He began climbing again.

“You can’t be two places at once,” she called out, her whisper hushed but harsh. Grif paused before he could stop himself. Bridget hurried on. “You save the girl, and you might lose Kit. Or vice versa. Bet you won’t be able to sidestep your guilt if one of them dies because of you.”

Jaw clenched against a curse, he dropped back down. “And what if something happens to you?”

Her hard expression unexpectedly softened, and for a moment the girl she used to be peered from beneath the tough facade. “That’s sweet, Shaw.” Her eyes glittered in the dark. “But nobody’s taking anything from me ever again.”