The Hard Bounce - страница 68

“I have people. I have friends.”

“Who?”

“I have people I can call.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

“Who?” I said a little more harshly. “The piece of shit you’ve been staying with?”

“Don’t call him that. He loves me.”

“Guy’s got one twisted-ass idea of love. You look at your eye lately?”

She brushed her fingers lightly over her shiner. “I… I have other people,” she said, all teenage indignance.

“Who? Your dad?” I pulled the cell phone out and opened it. “Shit, I’ll call him myself. Remember? He’s the one who hired us to find you. The sooner he picks your little bitch-ass up, the better.” I held the phone out to her.

She froze, stunned by the rough card I’d just played. Her mouth opened and closed a couple times.

I tuned the aggression up a notch, pushing her back on the defensive. “What do you think we’re doing? Babysitting? Kidnapping?”

“I… but…” Was that a flicker of doubt that played across her eyes? The stun gun went down a notch. If I rushed her now, I’d get zapped right in the testicles instead of the chest.

“We were trying to find you. We thought that you were dead, that the fucker killed you.”

Oops.

I regretted saying the words the second they left my mouth.

With that, the flicker of doubt was gone, replaced with fury again. “You’re the animal. You didn’t have to beat him up so bad!” Then the pieces came together in her head. She realized why we thought she was dead. She shook her head. “No. Nonononono…”

Fuck it. I’d already crossed the line. It was time to plant my feet. “Yeah. We saw what he did to you. The guy who says he loves you. He fucking smacked the shit out of you and raped you.”

“No! That’s not how it happened!” Spittle flew from her lips as she started bawling. She was breaking down, caught between hysteria and denial.

“What happened, then? Was it a practical joke? What am I missing here, Cassie? Tell me!”

“He… he said it had to look real. That I had to be really scared. That’s why he had to do it that way. So they’d believe it.” She was having trouble speaking through the deep jags.

“‘They’ who?”

“The people who buy those DVDs from him. They pay a lot of money for them. Derek said he could sell just a few of them and make enough money to run away. Just us. So we could be together.”

Jesus. One of the oldest lines in the oldest book. “That was a lie, Cassandra. Derek is running a sick freak show, and you were his star attraction.” I made a quick mental note. Derek. Derek Bevilaqua. Now I had a full name along with an address to hand to Underdog.

I’d driven the knife into her heart. All I had to was twist it and she’d be broken.

I suck. I know. Fuck you.

“He never loved you. He used you.” I let the words hang.

She dropped Rosie and crumpled, wailing. I caught her on the way down and held her as she wept and beat her hands against my chest. I held her tight until she stopped struggling against it. I felt her go slack, all the fight in her evaporated. I put her down gently on the couch and sat to her side. She buried her face in my chest, crying it all out. I didn’t know what to do with her. Or my arms, for that matter. For lack of a better place to put them, I held them up over my head. I wasn’t comfortable in either my seating position or my role as comforter.

“Um… do you mind?” I fumbled for the right words. “Are you gonna bite me again if I put my arms down?”

“No,” she said softly into my armpit.

“Promise, Mad Dog?”

Surprisingly, she choked on a laugh. “I promise.”

I let my arms down around Cassie’s shoulders. We sat there until her sobs trailed off and her breathing evened into an exhausted sleep. My own eyelids grew heavy, and I let the fatigue wash over me. The last thing I heard as I drifted away was a great snore erupting from the floor where Junior lay sprawled.

It was the same snoring that woke me up. Everything hurt. I sat up slowly and stiffly, thinking of Nick Nolte in North Dallas Forty. My joints felt like somebody had dug them out with an ice cream scoop and replaced them with month-old taffy.

The sun was going down. Must have been more run-down than I realized. I’d managed to sleep a decent clip with Junior in the room. Most people have trouble sleeping while Junior’s in the same zip code. The guy snores like a Rottweiler choking on a bowling ball. I moved my tongue around my mouth and instantly regretted it. Besides tasting horrible, my tongue was still sore from the self-chomping it received.