33

Hanger’s hand arced through the air, catching Soothe flush in the chest, and sending her reeling back.

“How the hell could you let this happen?”

She looked up at him.

“I didn’t know what she was doing. She seemed fine.”

“Fine,” spat Hanger. “Does she look fine to you?”

Soothe knew better than to say anything more. Hanger was crazy when he got like this. He was capable of almost anything. He’d killed a girl before. Right in front of her. She was only a little thing too. Maybe four feet eleven and like ninety pounds. Hanger had beaten her until she started bleeding from her ears and then left her for dead.

“This is all kinds of bad,” he said. “You know we got people chasing us down because of her. You know that, right?”

“Here?”

“Yeah, here. They were in at Gilman’s right after you left. They had a picture of her.”

“Cops?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Maybe worse than cops.”

“So, what are we gonna do?”

“I’ll tell you what we’re not gonna do, and that’s stick around here. Help me get her down to the car.”

Soothe looked down at Kristin, laid out on the bed, her wrists wrapped with strips of bed sheet to staunch the bleeding, her eyes still almost rolling back in her head.

“Like this?”

He drew his hand back again. She flinched, and he relented, dropping it back down by his side.

“Yeah, like this.”

“Where we going?” she asked as she walked around, grabbing Kristin’s ankles as Hanger hooked his hands in under the girl’s armpits.

Together they lifted her off the bed and staggered to the motel room door.

“I don’t know yet,” said Hanger.

“We could just split, leave her here. Someone will find her,” said Soothe.

Hanger kept moving out of the door. He seemed to be weighing the idea.

“No,” he said, out of breath as they staggered with Kristin out onto the walkway. “No one’s going to find her. Not until I’m done with her.”

They could hear sirens in the distance.

“Come on, hurry up,” said Hanger, hustling down the stairs to his BMW. “Man, she is really going to make a mess of my car.”

“You could move her on,” said Soothe.

By move, she meant sell. It happened when girls had become more trouble than they were worth. Guys like Hanger would pass them over to someone new. For a fee. Usually someone who had a reputation as a gorilla pimp, a man who relied exclusively on fear and intimidation to keep his girls in line.

“Maybe,” said Hanger, unlocking his car with a simple click of a button. “Or maybe I could give her to The Freak.”

Mention of The Freak sent a chill running over Soothe. She wished now she hadn’t brought up the idea of moving Kristin on.

Hanger opened the back door and together they shoved Kristin into the back seat. She started to come round and put her hand out. Hanger slapped it away.

“Maybe I’ll give you to him too,” he told Soothe.