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“WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR face and neck?” Rowe said the moment Carlo stepped out of the car.
The bleeding had stopped, but Carlo’s face, neck, and his Spandex shirt were nevertheless stained with blood. “A cop happened to it.”
“A cop?”
“Don’t worry—nobody followed us here. We’re certain of that.”
“How can you be certain?”
“Do you really think that Gia or I would corner ourselves in this building if we didn’t know better? We’re not going to prison for you, Stephen. And we’d never do anything to put you in that position either. Trust me—we got away.”
“After they shot the hell out of your car,” Rowe said as he stepped over to look at it.
“Getting Jones wasn’t easy,” Carlo said. “Gia and I knew that it wouldn’t be, but neither of us expected a cop to be around us when we took her. Shit happens. But she’s with us now, and she’s ready for you. That’s what matters.”
“Carlo, give me a hand,” Gia called from the backseat. “She’s still unconscious. She’s already dead weight. I can’t lift her on my own.”
“Then let me do it,” Carlo said.
Gia slipped out of the car and looked in horror at her brother’s slashed face and neck, as Carlo bent inside, took Jones by her feet, and then pulled her toward him. Jones was so out of it, she looked like a rag doll to Gia. But with a yank and a heave, Carlo nevertheless tossed her over his broad shoulder, walked around the SUV, and sat her down in the chair Rowe had waiting for her.
“Get the cuffs, Gia,” he said with his hand pressing against Jones’ chest so that her back touched the back of the chair. “And the rope. She’s going to fall over otherwise.”
Gia retrieved the cuffs from the car and tossed them over to her brother, who snagged them in the air with his right hand, and then cuffed Jones’ wrists behind her back and locked them to the chair itself. The rope was to the left of the chair. Gia handed it to him, and he bound her feet around the chair’s legs. When he was finished, Janice Jones sagged forward. Drool spooled from her mouth and into her lap while Rowe licked his lips, took a step toward her, and watched her.
“How long will she be out?” he asked. “I have a plane to catch. I need to get out of here soon. You know that.”
“I’m actually surprised she’s still out,” Carlo said.
“I’m not,” Gia said as she walked over to them. “I used a shitload of that crap on her. I had no choice.”
“Then how do we wake her, Gia?” Rowe said. “Because before I open her throat, I have a few things to say to her. And I want her to know that it was me who killed her—not either of you.”
“Do you want her to communicate with you? Because if you do, she’s only going to start screaming, Stephen. And that will put all of us at risk.”
“I plan on being the one doing the talking, Gia.”
“Then let me get the duct tape.”
When she returned from the SUV with it, she bit off a piece, slapped it across Janice Jones’ mouth, and then went for the hose.
“Step back,” she said to Rowe.
“What are you doing?”
“Waking her up.”
She turned on the hose and poured the cold water over Jones’ head until something in her mind broke. She suddenly came back into herself, and then reared back in the chair with wide, terrified eyes as a haunted moan sifted through the tape.
Gia would have felt something for Janice right then if she hadn’t known just how far Jones had gone to betray Rowe. On the Internet, she’d seen the video of Jones burying him in that press conference. And as much as she couldn’t stand Rowe, what she hated even more was the kind of betrayal Janice had handed him.
You might not know where you are now, Janice, Gia thought. But even I have to agree that you have this coming to you after what you did to him...
She turned off the water, replaced the hose, and joined Carlo on Jones’ left. Dazed and confused, Jones looked from Gia to Carlo and finally over to Rowe. When she saw him, Gia knew that she didn’t recognize him at first—with his bald head and blond goatee, he looked completely different from the man she’d once loved—and then successfully destroyed. But after a moment, it occurred to her exactly who he was. And when the truth of that struck her, she started to shake her head violently at him even before he lifted the switchblade and pointed it at her heart.
“Hello, Janice,” he said. “Have you missed me?”
She didn’t move—not one muscle. Instead, her gaze remained fixed on the knife, the blade of which was glinting in the iridescent lights humming and crackling above it.
“And here you thought you’d won,” he said as he walked over to her and used the tip of the knife to flick her ponytail off her shoulder. “Here you thought that you’d had the last word.” When he said that, he immediately leaned down and got into her face. “Guess that’s not going to happen, sweet pea, is it? No, you already know that it isn’t, don’t you?”
Like a cat out for a kill, he moved deftly in front of her, stopping once to press the back of his hand against her wet face before moving out of her line of sight and standing directly behind her.
And it was at that point that Jones started to shake in fear.
“You know what’s coming, don’t you, Janice?” he said.
Her only answer was a muffled sob.
“But before we go there, we’re going to run down why you’re here now. Would you like that? No? Well, I would. So,” he said with his lips pressed against her right ear. “Let’s do it. Let’s take that unwanted walk down memory lane...”
At that moment, she screamed.
Tried to scream.
With the duct tape over her mouth, all that came out of her was a weirdly throttled noise that no one would hear beyond these walls. And when Jones heard it herself—when she registered how weak it was and how powerless she was over this situation—she lowered her head and started to cry.
“I gave you everything, Janice,” Rowe said. “A swanky apartment overlooking the Hudson that you owned outright, a motherlode of expensive jewels, a Mercedes, all the clothes you wanted, and even elaborate vacations whenever poor dead Meredith was away.”
He lowered his voice. “For the two years that we were together, I changed your life for the better. You became the love of my fucking life, for God’s sake! And yet you had to keep pressing me, didn’t you? You had to keep demanding that I leave Meredith for you. You increasingly made things uncomfortable between us. You kept my feet to the flames. And in the process, when you didn’t get what you wanted, you ruined everything—for me and for you. Didn’t you?”
He paused in front of her as she looked up at him in terror, and then he placed the tip of his knife to one of her breasts. “I even gave you these,” he said as he pressed the knife against her other breast. “Far better than the ones you had when I first met you, aren’t they? What you had before were so cheap, it was as if a butcher had operated on you. But as we fell for each other—or, shall I say, as I fell for you and you used me—I gave you what you wanted most. A fresh pair of tits. Some you could be proud of. Some that weren’t lopsided like the ones you had before you met me—and were introduced to my kindness.”
Gia reached out for Carlo’s hand, and held it. He squeezed hers back. Finish her off, Stephen, she thought. Be done with this!
But nothing was hurrying him now—Rowe apparently had more to say.
“Look at what you did to me,” he said as she stared up at him in fear. “Just when I was this close to being CEO and Chairman of the Board at Wenn Enterprises, you decided to hold that press conference of yours and ruin me, not only in front of the world, but also in front of my friends, my family, and my colleagues. You secretly taped me when I threatened your life—which I didn’t even mean! You revealed that we’d made a sex tape—which was private and only ever should have remained between us! And you gave it all to the police and to the press knowing that both would take me down. It was as if all I’d done for you had meant nothing to you. Not a fucking thing. And that’s why you’re going to die today. That’s why I’m going to kill you.”
He turned to Carlo. “Hold the back of her chair,” he ordered him. “She can easily kick herself over, and she knows it.”
As Carlo walked behind Janice, Rowe unexpectedly stalked behind them and walked over to a small table at the rear of the warehouse.
What is he doing? Gia thought.
And then she saw.
He dipped his head down to the table, picked up a small glass tube, and started to snort what had to be cocaine. And not just one line of it. As Gia moved closer and watched him in shock, she saw him snort four lines before he lifted his head in a weird kind of triumph. Smiling at her, he wiped his finger beneath his nose, and then ran that finger along his upper gums.
“Sorry, baby,” he said to Gia. “I’d give you some if I could, but I just ran out.”
“Stephen,” she said to him.
He pointed the knife at her. “Not one word,” he said. “Not one fucking word. I’m finishing this now.”
Gia retreated and wondered what would come next. She glanced at Carlo—who was holding Jones steady, with his head tilted toward Gia in such a way that their eyes could meet—and then she turned back to Rowe. “If you touch my brother, I’ll kill you, Stephen.”
When she said that, Rowe stopped and stumbled in a kind of hysterical bewilderment. “Touch your brother?” he said to her in disbelief. “Why the hell would I want to touch your brother, Gia? You two have the Wenns to kill for me tonight! I need you both alive to do that for me!”
As the cocaine railed through him and seared his brain, he inexplicably fanned out his arms and twirled twice in the bluish haze sizzling above them. He then came up behind Carlo with the knife held low at his side. Gia watched his every move, preparing to jump him if he tried anything.
But he didn’t.
He slapped Carlo hard on the back, gave a hearty laugh as he pressed his cheek against Carlo’s shoulder—and then went absolutely silent as he grabbed hold of Jones’ ponytail and yanked it back, exposing her throat to him as she let out another muffled scream.
“How do I do this again, Carlo?” Rowe asked. “Where do I cut her so that she bleeds out as slowly as possible?”
“You cut her there,” Carlo said as he traced a short line across Jones’ throat.
“That’s all it will take?” Rowe asked. “Just a little slice right there, and then all of this will be behind us? Just one simple cut, and then I can get back on my plane, and get back to wherever I came from—which neither of you will ever know. Janice will be dead then, right? And then the Wenns will be dead. Everyone who hurt me will be dead. I’ll finally be happy and able to move on with my life!”
He looked at Carlo. “But life isn’t that simple, is it, Carlo?” he said. “Sometimes life takes detours. Horrific little detours that no one sees coming. Tell me—did you bring a change of clothes?”
Carlo furrowed his brow at him. But before he could ask Rowe what he’d meant by that, Rowe let go of Jones’ ponytail and came around to face her as tears streamed down her face and muddied her mascaraed eyes. With one brutal rip, he tore off part of the duct tape covering her mouth.
“Convince me to stop, Janice,” he said to her. “Convince me why I shouldn’t kill you.”
“Because I’m sorry!” she blurted out. “Because we were once great together! Because I made a terrible mistake! Because I’m still in love with you, for God’s sake! Don’t you know how much I love you? You must know!”
“Liar,” he said as he got in her face. “But you’ve always been a liar, haven’t you, Janice? You’ve always been nothing but a former stripper hustling to get off that pole. You never loved me. You don’t even know what those words mean. Instead, you just betrayed me, like the cunt you are. And here’s what you get for it.”
Before she could respond, he slapped the duct tape back over her mouth as his eyes grew huge with the thrill of a pending kill. Gia watched him lift the knife high above his head before he plunged it deep into one of her breasts, leaving a viscous mixture of silicone and blood to seep onto her white Spandex shirt and spill down her torso as she reared back in pain.
With ferocious speed, his knife sank into her other breast, but this time, he twisted the knife hard as he pulled it out slowly in the vacuum of a thick, sucking thwap. Carlo tried his best to keep the chair as steady as he could as Jones bucked, hurling her body from left to right as her life was chiseled away from her.
“Last June, you thought you walked away free, didn’t you?” Rowe shouted at her. “You thought that you’d ruined me! You thought that you’d won!”
“Stephen,” Gia said.
“Shut up!” he said to her. “If you want my money, this is how she dies!”
With his mind riding high on the toxic fumes of cocaine, Stephen Rowe turned away from Gia and started to hack into Janice Jones’ body.
Realizing that this brutal attack was what he’d been planning all along, Gia found herself speechless. She watched him cut her throat to the point that he severed her trachea. She watched him stab her deep into the abdomen and then rip the knife upward toward her sagging breasts, gutting her. She watched him criss-cross the blade across her once pretty face, turning it into something that resembled mincemeat. He didn’t stop until he hit an artery in her neck and a funnel of blood hit him and Carlo squarely in the face, sending each of them reeling backwards. Rowe fell on his ass as blood ran into his eyes, and Carlo crashed hard against the warehouse’s back wall.
“She’s dead!” Gia shouted. “Enough!”
“Take her pulse!” Rowe demanded as he wiped the blood from his eyes. “I want to know for sure that she’s dead! Take it!”
She looked over at her brother, who was flinging the blood off his face and chest. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“Take her pulse,” Rowe said in a low growl of anger. “Do it before I lose my temper.”
Although Jones clearly was gone, Gia still went through the motions in an effort to end this madness. She took Jones’ limp right hand into her own and felt for a pulse that she knew wouldn’t be there. She looked at Stephen, who was getting to his feet.
“She’s dead,” Gia said.
“Are you sure?”
Is he fucking kidding me...?
“Look at her, for God’s sake. Look at what you did to her face—to her breasts. To her abdomen. I think it’s fair to say that she’s dead, Stephen. But please, if you insist, feel free to check on your own.”
“I’m not touching that bitch,” he said as he started to remove his clothes. “I’ll take your word for it.”
Gia stared at him as he pulled off his shirt, then his pants, and then his underwear. He was standing naked before her when she said, “What are you doing?”
“You’re going to hose me down, Gia. Then, I’m going to change into that clean set of clothes you kindly told me to bring with me. And after that? I’m going to get the hell out of here, because if you remember, I’ve got a plane to catch.”
He held out his hands at his sides.
“Do it,” he said. “Wash her blood off me. When you’re finished, I’ll dress and leave.”
When Rowe was clean, dry, and dressed, he nodded at Jones, whose lifeless, slaughtered body hung slackly in the chair. “Do whatever you want with her, but don’t let her get in the way of what comes tonight,” he said. “I expect you to finish off the Wenns. I want this over with.”
“We do nothing until you wire the rest of the money to us for Jones,” Carlo said. “I’m giving you two hours to make that happen. If you do, then we’ll take care of the Wenns for you, Stephen. But not until you’ve paid us for this job.”
“You’ll get your money, Carlo. But don’t expect a dime from me if you fuck up again with the Wenns. Tonight ends our relationship.”
“We’ll kill the Wenns,” Carlo said. “But just so you know, Stephen, expect to be hunted down if you don’t pay us for those kills. If you stiff us, Gia and I will root you out and kill you ourselves. You can bet on that. You can also bet that your death will make Jones’ death look as if she died in her sleep.”
“Whatever,” Rowe said. “The money is yours—just get the job done.”
He turned to leave.
“I’m out of here,” he said as he moved toward the warehouse’s side door. “Sorry if I didn’t stick to the script today, but she deserved everything she got. If you’re upset with me for misleading you, I have a feeling that you’ll forgive me for all of it once the money hits your account.”
He opened the door and squinted into the daylight before leaving.
“Don’t disappoint me tonight,” he said over his shoulder to them. “You’ll get your money.” He shrugged at them as he walked away. “All you need to do is kill Alex and Jennifer Wenn.”
