Love Beyond Words (City Lights: San Francisco Book 1) (37 page)

“It doesn’t work that way, David,” Marshall said. “Now, put the gun down and we’ll talk about it—”

“Will we, Marshall? Will we talk? You didn’t seem so eager to
talk
when you were slamming your fist into my face. In fact, I seem to recall you saying you were
glad
.” David sniffled. “I don’t want to do this. But I don’t have a choice. Natalie did this to you, Marshall. This is all her fault. I hope you know that.”

“David, wait…Don’t....”

David’s hand trembled badly and the gun felt like it weighed a hundred pounds.
No! I’m not this!
But what choice did he have?
None.
He cocked the hammer.

Marshall squared his shoulders. “Julian can’t love a murderer.”

David jerked his shoulders in a shrug, tears falling. “Who’s going to tell him?”

He pulled the trigger.

#

Julian careened his rental car—a Mercedes SLK350—from SFO back into the city, all the while cursing David’s name and muttering colorful threats under his breath. Easier to do that than consider what might have happened—or be happening—to Natalie.

Things were falling into place. He couldn’t see the entire picture yet but he saw enough.
The missing money. It has to do with the missing money. Natalie knew David was up to no good. She knew it and I let him off.
The thought of what that mistake might have cost him was too terrible to contemplate.

His curses grew louder and more imaginative as he hit every red light along 19
th
Ave. He arrived at Niko’s Café a little after six o’clock, double-parked the rental, and raced to the wrought iron gate. He buzzed her intercom several times. No answer.

Work. She’s at work. She feels better and is at work. Or school. You’re flipping out over nothing.

But the person at the counter wasn’t Natalie but Niko.

“Julian, my boy,” Niko said. “I hope you’re here to tell me how my Natalia is doing? She calls in sick three days ago and I hear nothing since. Not like her.”

Julian opened his mouth but nothing came out.
Three days...

Niko’s face went pale. “Oh no. It is bad? Oh dear, oh dear.” He fished a key out of his pocket and pressed it into Julian’s hand. “I own this building. You check on her, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Julian’s pulse pounded in his ears as tore up the stairs to her apartment, and turned the key in the door. “Natalie!” Her place was small; it took ten seconds to determine she wasn’t there. It wasn’t ransacked, either, though Julian didn’t know why he expected it would be.
Because something is terribly, terribly wrong.

Back downstairs, he told Niko that Natalie was likely at school and that he’d go look for her there.

“Julian?”

He spun around at the sound of a woman’s voice. Not Natalie; a black-haired woman in a baggy green sweater, her kohl-lined eyes wide with fear.

Julian took the young woman by the arm and steered her out of Niko’s earshot. “You’re Liberty, right? Tell me what happened. Where’s Natalie? She’s been missing for three days?”

Liberty furrowed her brows. “No. She’s been holed up in her place, afraid to leave in case you called. But now she won’t answer her phone.”

“She’s not there now, I checked,” Julian said. “Just what the hell is going on?”

Liberty wrangled her phone from the oversized sweater pocket as a text came in. “Marshall. He’s followed David to a place called Club Orbit. In the Tenderloin.” She looked up at Julian. “You know it?”

“No,” Julian replied. “I don’t know a goddamned thing.”

“I’ll fill you in on the way.”

Julian stopped at the counter. “Niko, if Natalie comes back, tell her to call me. Or you can call me if you hear anything.” He scribbled his number on a napkin and slid it over to the man. “And if you think you should…”

Niko nodded solemnly. “I know, young man. I call 9-1-1.”

The drive was a rumble of an engine beneath her; a nauseating, dizzied excursion Natalie experienced from the back seat of the Escalade, her blood dripping onto the leather seats. Night fell outside the windows and Garrett was an ugly, hulking shape in the front seat, laughing loudly and singing badly to the radio. Natalie’s awareness came and went. Pain was her only constant; an ache in her head kept time with her pulse.

Finally, she felt the tires beneath her crunch gravel and then he was there, clutching her wrist and yanking her from the car.

His breath was sour beer and smoke. “Nice and quiet now, thatta girl.”

She registered a parking lot behind a dingy white building. A door and sign,
Club Orbit parking only. Violators will be towed at owner’s expense.
Then she was inside. Linoleum, buzzing fluorescents, the distant thump of house music. Then a storage room that was two walls of cement and two walls of chain-link fence. Garrett dumped her inside among the toilet seat covers and boxes of cleaning supplies.

He loomed over her, a giant in the dim lights. His eyes were stupid, his leer obscene. If someone cut him open, Natalie thought, maggots would spill out.

He adjusted the bulge in his jeans. “You ready for me? I’m going to break you in half.”

Natalie scrambled backward on her hands and heels, knocking over a wall of individually wrapped toilet paper rolls. “No,” she breathed. “No!
No! NO!”

Garrett kicked a roll out of his way, huffing a low laugh. He knelt down in front of her, reached for her, and then a shape crashed into him, grabbed him, wrestled him on to his back.

“Are you out of your mind?” A blond man straddled Garrett. “No way, man!
No way!
”

“Jesse! Garrett! What the hell?”

Natalie’s panicked gaze swiveled to another man—a fatter, older version of Garrett—standing outside the cage of the storage room. “That’s her, eh?” he said, and ran his hand over his mouth as if he didn’t quite know what to make of her. He turned to the men, his gaze hardening. “You two. Get up. This isn’t Romper Room. We got shit to talk about. Where the hell
is
David?”

“Still at the bar.”

“Get him.”

Garrett nodded and turned to go, then suddenly swiveled and buried his fist in Jesse’s midsection. The air whooshed from the blond man and he crumpled to his hands and knees. Natalie watched, horrified, as Jesse coughed. Blood splattered the cement floor.

“Jesus, Garrett!” Cliff cried. “What that hell was that for?”

“He knows what for,” Garrett said. He hauled Jesse out of the storage room and dumped him on the floor outside. “I’m not done with you,” he told Natalie, locking the chain link door. “Not by a long-shot.”

A phone rang in a back room somewhere. Cliff gave Jesse a hesitant look then went down the hall in the opposite direction as Garrett. Natalie watched him walk away with her bag—Julian’s book inside—on his arm.

“I’m sorry,” Jesse said, wincing. “My daughter is sick. I needed the money. But I never thought Cliff…” He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“What’s going to happen to me?” Natalie whispered.

He looked at her and the answer was there in every pained line of his face.

“David?”

“Yeah.”

“Help me,” she pleaded. “Please.”

“I can’t. Garrett…I think he busted something in my gut. I can hardly move.”

“Do you have a phone? We can call for help…” Her gaze darted around frantically. “In my purse. A keychain…It has a thing… a panic button…”

Jesse shook his head and coughed. Blood splattered the front of his shirt.

Natalie recoiled, panic and fear racing through her. She searched around the small enclosure for something, anything. In front of her was a box.
Bleach cleansing spray, 24 count
. A sudden, fiery rage swept through her and dove at the box. Two fingernails ripped in half as she tore it open but she hardly felt the pain. She hauled out a spray bottle of bleach disinfectant and scooted back to her spot, glaring a challenge at Jesse.

“Don’t do it,” he said tiredly. “It’s just going to make it harder on you.”

A door opened down the hall and Cliff reappeared.

“Ah Christ, look at you, Jesse.” He shook his head. “You gonna fall in line or what? I checked over the book. Looks legit, for our purposes anyway. Three million dollars. Feeling a little more
positive
about what we’re doing here? Because I think Marietta might just make a full recovery if you can pay the docs that kind of money. Right?”

“Not this way, Cliff,” Jesse said. “Not like this…”

“Goddammit, I don’t have time for your—”

Cliff didn’t finish his sentence because at that moment another door opened at the end of the hallway. House music poured in and then became muffled again. Running footsteps sounded hollowly, and then Garrett and David Thompson were there. David’s gun was in his hand and his hand was shaking as if he had palsy.

Garrett chortled. “He’s fucked.”

“What happened, Dave?”

David’s eyes were wide and staring, his gaze roving all around the hallway. His coat was torn and dirty. “I killed him.”

“Who?”

He found Natalie, eyes round and disbelieving. “Marshall. I killed Marshall.”

Liberty told Julian everything she knew as he sped the rented Mercedes over the streets of San Francisco. As she spoke, Julian’s silence grew stonier; his hands clenched the steering wheel and jerked the stick as he shifted. Liberty clutched her cell phone in her lap in a vise as her own panic tried to swamp her. She battled it by talking.

When she was finished, she felt calmer, though not by much. Julian said nothing, stared straight ahead, and did what the rental’s GPS told him to do to take them to Club Orbit. Liberty glanced at him sideways. Extremely handsome with an artistic intelligence about him; masculine yet emotional. It was no surprise that Natalie had fallen for him.

“So you’re a writer, then?”

“Yes.”

“A real important one, right?”

He glanced at her briefly before returning his eyes to the road. “You’re trying to decide if I’m worth the trouble. If I’m worth the risks the three of you have taken on my behalf.”

“Something like that.”

“I’m not. If anything has happened to Natalie…” he waved his hand, “…it’s all shit. How’s that for literary? If anything’s happened to her I’ll never write another word.”

“Yeah, okay. I mean, I’m sitting here all calm-like but that bastard is with Marshall right now—”

“You should have called the police immediately,” Julian stated, his voice like ice. “For Natalie. Gotten her somewhere safe.”

“You think I didn’t say that, like, a million times? But she was too scared. She had a gun pointed
at her head
. That’s all she could think about…David doing the same to you.” She glanced out the window, remembering what Natalie had told her and Marshall that first awful night. “She loves your books, you know? I mean, obsessed. They helped her get through all that shit with her parents even when we couldn’t.
I
couldn’t. She never talked about it but I never asked. I wouldn’t have known what to do anyway. So she used your books instead. To escape.”

He said nothing but she saw muscles in his jaw clenching.

“But now, it’s different. She’s different. I know David forced her to say some shit she didn’t mean so don’t believe it. She loves you. I’ve never…I’ve never heard anyone talk about someone the way she talked about you. She loves you more than…more than anything, really. More than the books. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said, barely audible, and he took a hard right the GPS told him to take, tires screeching.

“And where the hell is Marshall?” Liberty demanded of her phone. “He’s supposed to call me after he’s got the cops on David.”

“What’s happening up there? Is that the club?”

An ugly, cinder block-looking slab of a club was rife with people milling out front, many clustering around a side corner. The wail of sirens could just be heard emerging from the distance.

“Oh my god, Marshall.” Liberty felt her heart plummet to her knees. “Let me out! Let me out!”

Julian brought the car to an abrupt halt on the street parallel to Orbit, and they both raced across, into the crowd.

“Let me through, dammit.” Liberty pushed through the bystanders and let out a little whimper when she overheard one say, “Some dude got capped.”

She rounded the corner to a dirty alley and found Marshall sitting against the wall, his chin resting on his blood-splattered chest. She shoved her way past more people and knelt beside him.