Between the Cracks and Burning Doors: Book 2 of The Extraction List Series (6 page)

I could see why Maureen thought she was untouchable—it was true.

“So yeah, each person I meet with and when is in there. All I,” he laughed, “well, you, have to do now is meet at that time each week. Pretty easy, actually.”

Sure, except I was going to have to ask these people for double what they were paying before. Not likely to go over without a fight, and I wasn’t sure I was prepared for one.

Or dozens.

Surprisingly, I didn’t have to fight anyone until the fifth meeting. Tom Billinger, who was a fireman for fifteen years and not afraid to tell me so, thought that he would just go to another drug dealer. He ran his sweaty, round belly right into me, nearly knocking me over. “You’re trash, you know. Just trash.”

I asked him what that made him since he was buying something from me. That’s when he shoved me.

That’s also when I drew a knife to his throat.

Nick stood a few feet away, eyes wide as he saw the twinkling metal whip from my hand. Tom threw both his hands up in surrender. I stepped back to give him a chance to grab a second wad of cash out of his pocket and add it to the first. I threw a bag of heroin at him as he dashed away.

That night, Nick walked next to me in silence as we made our way back to the church. He didn’t speak again until we were safely locked inside. “Hey Jack?”

“Yeah?”

He stepped real close to me. “Would you’ve killed that guy? If he hadn’t given you the money?”

I paused. To be honest, mentally, I hadn’t really gotten past the knife at the throat. “I dunno, dude, I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

It felt good to be honest for a change.

I was just tossing my coat on the banister when we both heard a frantic knock at the church door, loud enough that each knock seemed to bend the wood in toward us. I told Nick to stay back and went toward the peephole. A little girl with thick blonde curls and a pink dress was standing on our porch. I couldn’t believe she could knock with that much force, until she did it again while I was watching. I guess when you really wanted something you found strength from somewhere.

I was still watching her when Nick shoved me out of the way. I was about to scold him when he started yelling at me. “Open up, that’s Heather. She’s one of Maureen’s. We gotta open up.”

I undid the locks as quickly as I could and shuffled her inside. Heather’s clothes dripped all over the entryway and she took short, fast breaths. She had a wet piece of paper in her hand. “Maureen told me to give you this…to bring it here as fast as I could…you gotta come over right now.”

I took the note from her. “What does it say?”

“Don’t know. She told me not to look at it, just to get it to you right away.”

I kept my eyes on her for as long as I could while I unfolded the tattered paper. I lost my breath as I took in every word:

Cain Foley, I know who and what you are. I need your help. –M

Without telling Nick or Heather why, I shoved them out the door and locked it behind us.

This time, Nick had to sprint to keep up with me. I flew up Maureen’s porch steps. I hardly noticed them sagging under my feet, like they could cave in at any moment. Only one thing played over and over again in my brain, screaming at me with every step:
How does she know?

I threw open the door and was greeted with silence. Nick and Heather were close behind me. I looked at Heather. “There’s no one here.” That’s when I listened closer and heard it: faint crying from the basement.

I took the stairs two at a time, with Nick and Heather following close. Before I reached the bottom, Maureen blocked us. “They stay upstairs.” By the time I turned around to echo what she said to Nick and Heather, they had already ran upstairs and shut the door behind them.

Seven girls were sitting in the middle of the room, ashen and shaking. One sat in the middle of them, leaning against the others while a girl dressed in a red corset held an icepack on her head. The girl in the middle was covered in blood.

Behind them, the body of a man lay dead on the floor.

A pool of blood under him grew before my eyes. I looked over at Maureen. It was only then that I noticed her clutching a butcher knife in her hand, so hard that her knuckles had lost all color. She must have never put it down. “What happened?” I reached to gently take the knife from her, but she just grasped it tighter.

“I was upstairs in the kitchen when I heard the girls screaming. Clients get rough sometimes, but not like this. I could tell that what was happening was on a complete other level. I grabbed the knife to protect myself, just so I could talk to whoever was causing trouble.”

One of the girls, the one dressed in a low cut black sequin dress, interjected. “She saved Emily’s life. The bastard was gonna kill her for sure.”

“When I got downstairs the blue room curtains were ripped down. All I saw was his fists flying. A couple of the girls tried to get him off but he shoved them away.”

I don’t know why, but I gently put my hand on her shoulder. “I just charged at him. I was just going to injure him, just enough to make him stop. But before I knew what happened, the knife ran across his throat and he just stopped moving.”

I looked down at her to find that I had pulled her tightly against me. Even in the circumstances, she still smelled like roses and summer. I took a moment to glance behind her, and noticed that the dead man looked like he’d be at least six foot five, and had a neck as thick as a tree trunk. “That guy’s huge. I’m surprised she’s still alive.”

Suddenly, she pulled away from me. “Help me get rid of him.” We both walked toward the body. When we were out of hearing distance, she smirked and whispered, “I figured you’d be the one to call, since you have experience in this sort of thing.”

I could feel my face tingle, and probably turn red. I forced my expression to remain steady so that the girls wouldn’t notice. But I did need to tell her the truth, because it was about to become obvious anyway. I whispered back, “Actually, no. I don’t know what you think you know, but I’ve never buried anyone before.”

Maureen looked at me quizzically. Then suddenly her expression changed. I guessed that she had picked up on my word choice. I said I’d never buried anyone, not that I hadn’t killed anyone. “Ah. Well you better help me figure it out then.”

She still had the knife in her hand.

I looked at the girls who were sitting on the couch and gestured to the injured girl. “Take her upstairs. One of you go first and make sure all the kids are in their rooms so they don’t see anything.” I wasn’t sure how I felt about taking the lead, but the idea of children as young as Nick seeing someone so swollen and bloody made me shudder, and the girls didn’t seem like they would be thinking that far ahead.

Before they obeyed, they looked at Maureen. She nodded her consent.

After we were alone, I finally had a chance to ask her. “Okay, so how do you know my name?”

She laughed. “Not even going to try to deny it, huh?”

“Would you have believed me?”

“Not even a little.” She knelt down next to the man, studying him with her eyes. She didn’t seem to care that the long, satin red dress that she was wearing soaked up some of his blood. “When Nick brought you hear, I knew you looked familiar. Just couldn’t place it. Then I saw the news. You’re the spittin’ image of your father, you know that, right?”

I felt lightheaded. “Wait, you knew my father?”

She stared at me. “You didn’t know, did you?”

“Know what?”

“He used to come in here once a week. The girl in the green room, Esther, she was his favorite. He always had a thing for the black girls. If it couldn’t be Esther he insisted it be Johanna, my Hispanic girl. Racist prick.”

I couldn’t figure out why, but Maureen started removing the dead man’s shoes. “When they said he was missing and I figured out you were using a fake name, I did the math. I gotta ask though, if you didn’t bury him, who did?”

I followed Maureen’s lead and started unbuttoning his shirt. “Honestly, I don’t know. I ran out of there as fast as I could. Mom told me to go and never come back.”

She finished with the shoes and tossed them in a pile a couple feet from us. “Aren’t you curious? What if she messed it up? They’re already looking for you.”

“Trust me, I know.”

After we stripped him, we took the clothes to the fireplace at the far corner of the room. Maureen was about to light a match when I stopped her. “You’re gonna have to burn that too.” I pointed to her dress.

Her eyes locked on mine. “Damn, you’re right.” Slowly, she slid her sleeves down her shoulders, her long fingers caressing her skin as they went. The waist was fitted, and when she removed her arms from the sleeves, they hung loosely at her sides.

She faced me, never taking her eyes off mine.

The polite thing to do would have been to look away. The polite thing to do would have been to cover her back up and insist that I leave the room, or bring her some new clothes.

But I didn’t do either.

I’d never seen a woman’s breasts live and in person before. I’d never seen many, period. Somehow, I knew her round, milky breasts were absolutely perfect. Maybe everybody thinks the first breasts they see are perfect, but hers actually were. The fire crackled next to us, and there was still a dead man lying on the floor across the room, but all I saw was her.

She opened her mouth as if to speak, but her lips just hung loosely parted from one another. My whole body tingled, waiting for my brain to tell me what to do next. Despite the cool basement, I felt sweat glistening on my forehead.

The brave thing to do would have been to sweep her up in my arms and kiss her like she’s never been kissed before, throw her on the floor and give her my virginity right then and there. The romantic thing to do would have been to admit that in that moment, not before, and not after, I was in love with her. The heroic thing to do would have been to tell her I wanted to be there and protect her always.

Again, I did none of those things.

Suddenly she ripped her skirt down the rest of the way and slowly glided toward one of the girls’ rooms. I could only watch her hips sway away from me as I watched my opportunity for—I don’t know what—slip through my fingers.

She seemed to take her time rustling through one of the girls’ drawers, dragging her hand through the mounds of lingerie, nylons, and shirts several times before she finally pulled out a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. Silently, she made her way back to me and the fireplace and tossed her dress into the flames.

“So what do we do with him?” She nodded her head toward the dead man on the floor.

“You’re a drug dealer, aren’t you? Don’t you have people who handle this stuff?”

She scoffed. “Yes, Cain, my ten-year-old sellers are going to come down here and help us bury a guy. That’s exactly what’s going to happen.” She rolled her eyes.

“What about your supplier? You can’t tell me you make this shit upstairs in your kitchen?”

Maureen turned away. She stared at the dead man for a silent moment, arms folded across her chest. “I don’t know who it is.”

“Come on, you have to know.”

She’s bullshitting you again, walk out now.

“I don’t, I swear.”

“Tell me the truth or I’m leaving right now.”

She just stared at me. I turned toward the stairwell. I got about halfway up when she spoke. “Fifteen minutes.” I turned to hear what she was saying. “I missed my parents by fifteen minutes.”

“What do you mean?”

“I had just turned fourteen. I was on my way home from school early to celebrate my birthday. When I got there, I couldn’t find my parents. Neighbor said they had been there fifteen minutes earlier. I found a note in my dresser from them. They said somebody was after them and they’d contact me when it was safe for us. The note called me sweetie and said they loved me.” She took a deep breath. “I haven’t seen them since.”

I reached out and took her hands, the same way she did mine when we’d first met. “I don’t know why I did it. When a delivery guy came with their next supply of heroin, I took it. I decided to hand it out to the sellers as if everything was fine. Normal. The supplier always gets their cut so they never ask questions. Been doing it ever since.”

She laughed nervously. “Hate to disappoint you, but I don’t have any magical body-disposer connections. Fresh out.”

I paused. “Well, how about a car?”

It took us awhile to get him in the back of her blue Ford Focus. Maureen covered the back in plastic while I had one of the stronger girls help me get him up the stairs and into the garage. We heaved him into the back like the carcass that he was, not caring if we hit his head on the side of the trunk in the process.

Maureen and I both wore gloves.

We drove two towns over to a wooded area on the border. I backed the car off the side of the road nose out so that we could take him straight from the car and into the woods. We carried him over our shoulders, holding shovels in our free hands.

Sharp bushes sliced through our legs as we walked, but we couldn’t stop. We had to get rid of him before the sun came up, and get back to town before anyone noticed. The girls would never talk, but a nosy neighbor could mean the end of us.

By the time he was in the ground, our muscles ached and our skin burned. It took all the strength I had to push the gas petal. I looked over at Maureen in the passenger seat and discovered her eyes shut tight, and her breath escaping from her lips made a soft and steady rhythm.

At least
someone
could sleep at a time like that.

Trying to distract myself, I turned on the radio.

As far as using it to take my mind off my troubles, it was a big mistake.

The news was in the middle of its crime segment. Apparently, there was a new man on the top of the Most Wanted List: Cain Foley.

I no longer had to wonder what happened to my father’s body, or how thoroughly my mother had screwed up my life. According to the report, she had dragged his lifeless body from the basement into the garage, and loaded him into the passenger seat of her car.