My first thought was Cops! and I ran into the corridor. Shouts filled my home, and I trembled and shook as I rushed toward the back door, but loud footsteps grew close, and hands grabbed me. I was hurled forward into the door and hit my head against it. Dazed, my vision sparking with flashes of light, I was manhandled roughly and punched in the back.
These weren’t police.
I glanced around to see faces I recognized. Horrible, monstrous faces I thought I’d escaped. Frankie Balls, Cutter, Curse, and the rest of their crew. How had they found me?
Cutter had me by the shoulders, and he dragged me back along the corridor into the living room. He swung me around so I was face-to-face with Frankie.
“Peyton fucking Collard.” Frankie’s breath stank of old cigarettes. “You really think you could hide? Maybe if you’d gone to Mars. But in fucking LA, you’re mine.”
He slugged me in the gut, and I groaned and crumpled.
“Stay with us,” Frankie said, slapping my face. “Nice place. Zebra, get to work.”
A large man, with a face that spoke of nothing but anger and hatred, nodded at four others, and they started ransacking my place.
“Please don’t,” I said.
“Don’t what?” Frankie asked. “Collect our money? You owe us, Peyton. We’re here for dollar dough, my man.”
There was well over $600,000 somewhere in my home, and these jackals were set on finding it.
“You tell me where it is and things will go easier.” Frankie sounded as though he was giving mortgage advice to newlyweds, all friendly with a kind heart made of sugary best interests, but he punctuated his words with a knee to my groin.
“I don’t have any money,” I gasped.
Two punches; a left and a right.
Tears filled my eyes and blood ran from my nose down the back of my throat. I gasped for air and swallowed.
“I don’t have anything.” I almost choked on the words.
“We know you do,” Frankie yelled.
He pulled a pistol from his waistband and forced it into my bloody mouth. The barrel scraped against my teeth, sending a shudder into my bones.
“You still don’t remember me, do you?”
I stared into his eyes but drew a blank. Had we been inside together? Served in the army? I had no idea who he was, but he clearly thought I’d wronged him or owed him.
“You took me down with you, Peyton fucking Collard. This is restitution,” he said.
I had no idea what he was talking about. Who was he to me? What was this connection he kept talking about? How did he think we knew each other? He was confusing me with someone else?
“Tell me where the money is, or I’ll blow your fucking head off,” Frankie snarled.
How did he know I had money? Now and before?
His face was twisted, like a king of devils. His demons were working up a storm, tearing my home apart, searching for my fortune.
You’re going to die here, Walter’s ghost said.
I know, I agreed, and quietly accepted that I had nothing to lose.
This man would probably kill me whether I handed him the money or not.
He pressed the gun farther, until I was almost gagging on the bloody metal.
One bullet.
That was all it would take to leave this world behind.
Whatever hell waited for me had to be better than this, and if there was nothing that would be fine too. Oblivion would be a step up from hell. Toni would find the money, using the instructions I’d mailed to Anna Cacciola on my way back from Best Buy. I’d thought I had to make plans for being busted by the cops. It never occurred to me to worry about Frankie, at least not so soon. How had he found me?
The devil’s crooked path takes him into every nook of the world. I’m pretty sure one of my Sunday-school teachers had once said that.
At least Skye would live the life of her dreams and become a doctor if I kept silent.
And the evil that seemed to follow me around would end, and all the bad I’d ever perpetrated would be avenged. Wrongs would be righted, not by law and order, but at the hand of the worst of all villains. I suppose it was a fitting death.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Frankie said. “Better to eat the bullet. Only you ain’t got such a nice end ahead of you, Peyton fucking Collard. If you don’t give me the money, I’ll put you in a wheelchair and roll you to the corner of Wilmington and Alondra, where you can spend your nights watching your daughter turning tricks for me in a roach motel. I’ll work her day and night, Peyton, and when she’s birthed a litter of degenerate bastards I’ll raise as my own, turning them dark and metal hard, like these men, I’ll execute her in front of you.”
I burned with hatred and the anger and self-loathing of impotence and struggled against my captors.
“Then and only then I’ll give you a bullet to eat,” Frankie said, pulling the gun from my mouth.
“There’s nothing here,” Zebra yelled.
“You have two days. I want fifty grand for starters,” Frankie said.
He whipped me with the pistol, and after the second blow, my mind gave up.