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Someone is touching me.
Fingers running up and down my legs, digging in my pockets, cursing and muttering angrily.
I feel like cursing too, if I’m being honest. My head throbs, and I’m pretty sure that’s blood dripping in my eyes and mouth.
How? Why?
Oh. Grant. The ghost hunter.
I force my eyes to open, but they’re sticky, my eyelashes cemented together so it’s hard to open them wide. Blinking a few times, feeling the crust of blood along my eyelids, the ceiling of Old Man Barry’s RV meets my gaze. Rusted and stained, the interior lining losing its adhesive and drooping in places.
The place still smells like death.
Had they found the dead mice yet? If they had, someone had forgotten to put an air freshener in place, because the RV could double as an open-air meat market in Mexico at the height of summer.
I try to speak, but all that comes out in a throaty groan.
“Shut up.” Grant kicks my sore knee.
He looms over me, cell phone in hand, currently dialing a number with shaky fingers.
Grant lifts the phone to his ear, steps over me, and walks to the RV door, which he shuts firmly and locks.
“Roper.” He speaks into the phone. “Yeah, I got the keys. We can move.” Grant walks up the stairs and stands on the stained rug between two reclining chairs built into the RV. “Yeah. They saw me.” He hesitates. “Nobody important.”
Grant stares at me with his dead eyes.
I blink some more, trying to get my vision to focus.
My wrists and ankles are wrapped up with duct tape, and my circulation is already faltering. I twist my arms to loosen the tape, but it doesn’t budge. He’s put several layers down.
How long have we been out here? Has Gran started wondering where we went?
“Just the girl and her grandmother.”
My blood freezes at the chill in his tone.
The guy on the phone. He’s asking about witnesses. I catch my breath. He’s talking about me and Gran.
Grant’s expression hardens. “No.” He sighs. “Come on, Roper. The grandmother isn’t a problem.”
My heart lodges in my throat. Are they seriously considering killing Gran? What sort of monsters are these people? How could I have been willing to trust Grant like this?
And what does he even want? There’s absolutely nothing of value in this crappy old RV. It barely runs.
“Fine,” Grant says coldly and hangs up the phone.
He heaves a loud, long sigh and walks back to where I’m laying on the floor. He sinks into one of the chairs and stares at me.
“You must be really good at getting into trouble,” he says.
“You have no idea,” I answer, my voice slurring.
He sits back in the chair. “One more day. That’s all we needed. You wouldn’t have even noticed us.”
“Us?”
“Old Man Barry didn’t.” Grant barked a laugh. “We were under his nose for a year. His creepy son didn’t see us either. Barry’s creepy son only saw what he wanted anyway.”
I shake my head to clear it. “The squatters.”
Grant flexes his jaw.
“You’re with them,” I say.
He gestures to his shirt. “Well, I’m not a ghost hunter.” He leans forward, leering at me. “But your stupid friends were easy to fool. I just needed to get into the house to see what damage you all had done.”
My mouth is dry and tastes like death. “Damage? We didn’t damage anything.”
“You did more damage than you’ll ever know.” He runs his hands over his face.
I shut my eyes and try to breathe.
I can be calm. This is hardly the first time I’ve been in a situation like this. This isn’t even the scariest situation I’ve been in.
Or am I making that up?
No.
I glance at Grant.
No, Paisley Shirt Guy last summer was way scarier. Shoot, even Khaki Pants Man was scarier than Grant.
Geez, I really need to go home and rethink my life.
Grant sits up and smiles at me. “You’re lucky.”
“Am I?”
“Well, the old hag in the dining room is lucky.” He stands up.
“Don’t hurt my grandma.” I snarl, clenching my teeth.
Grant narrows his eyes at me. “And exactly what would you do to stop me?”
My lungs constrict.
I twist my wrists in the duct tape, but they’re not moving. The interior of the RV spins before my eyes, and my stomach threatens to turn itself inside out.
“My point.” He kneels next to me in the narrow walkway and palms the side of my face.
His hand comes away bloody.
“You’re tied up, and you already have a head injury.”
“Jerk,” I mutter. “You don’t actually speak Latin, do you?” I taste blood on my lips.
“Not a word. I mean, unless you count Pig Latin.”
I scoff. “I’m not afraid of you.”
He shrugs. “I don’t care. You’re a non-issue. You’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but fortunately for me you were dumb enough to give me what I needed from the start.” He holds up my keys and shakes them.
“There’s a broken window in the back, you idiot. You could have gotten in at any time.”
“Ha.” He pokes me in the shoulder. “But you’re the only one with the ignition key.”
My face falls.
Oh.
He rocks back on his heels. “Look. Trisha, was it?” Grant shakes his head, his eyes taking on a look of sympathy for the first time. “I got no problem with you or your grandma or your stupid little team of interior decorators.”
“Then why are you doing this?”
“Because there’s more money than you can imagine stuffed into the heads of those butt-ugly dolls from the basement.” He offers me a grin. “And now that’s all we have left since you and your stupid boyfriend walked into our operation last week.” He reaches behind himself and yanks a handgun out of the back of his jeans, pointing it at me. “And then you had to go and kill Jerry. The one person I’d been able to count on through this whole mess, and you ride him down the stairs and break his stupid neck.”
Looking down the barrel of a gun is terrifying the first time it happens to you. The second time—well, it’s still terrifying. The third? Oh, who am I kidding? It never stops being terrifying.
All thought of Paisley Shirt Guy and Khaki Pants Man fade to the back of my memory as Grant presses the gaping black hole of the handgun barrel against my brow. With those two, I’d angered them. Inconvenienced them. Made trouble for them.
Grant? I’d done all that and more. Apparently, I’d killed his right-hand man.
Am I breathing? I don’t think I’m breathing. Because when Grant pulls away, air rushes into my lungs like they’d been suffocating. So they probably were.
Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. I shut my eyes. This is not the worst situation you’ve been in.
“The old bag in the dining room doesn’t know anything.” Grant scratches the back of his neck as he stands up. “So she can stay put. Even if she did know anything, nobody would take her seriously. You, on the other hand.” He points the gun at me again. “You are the worst thorn in my side that I’ve ever had in two years of running drugs in this neighborhood.”
He laughs again.
“Do you have any idea what you stumbled into?” He kicks my hip.
Grant freezes and turns around at the center of the RV, peering through the front windshield. He curses under his breath and kneels.
I can’t see, and I don’t dare move.
I can only assume the cleaning crew has arrived.
Grant taps the gun on the side of one of the seats as he remains kneeling, muttering under his breath. He checks his watch and chews his bottom lip.
Voices.
I hear voices outside.
I start to lift my head, and Grant surges toward me. He claps his hand over my mouth and shoves my head down so hard I hear my skull crack on the carpet. His fingernails bite into the skin of my cheeks and jaw, and he taps the top of my head with the gun barrel.
“Shut. Up.”
He waits until the voices have faded before he breathes a sigh of relief.
“Okay.” He stands up.
I gasp for breath again. His hand had blocked off most of my airway. The RV is spinning once more, and I don’t think it’s just the head wound causing it.
Grant checks his watch again.
“Okay.”
He moves to stand at my head.
“What are you doing?” I whisper.
“Shut up.” He bends down and grabs me by the hair.
I yelp in pain, and he punches me again. More blood in my mouth. Great. Thanks. Just what I wanted.
He drags me to the back of the RV, partly by my hair, partly by my aching shoulders.
“I can’t just let you run off,” he says. “You know me. You saw the team. You know what we’re up to.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“You killed Jerry.”
“He was going to kill me!”
Grant kicks the back bedroom door open and flings me to the ground. My head bounces, and my stomach decides it’s had enough. I’m dry heaving on the floor, and my eyeballs are like pinballs in their sockets. Grant lets me choke and disappears for a moment.
When my heaving and sobbing has quieted, I can lift my gaze to see him peering out the plastic covered window.
What is he going to do? Run? Take me with him?
He turns and hurries to the closet door, ripping it open and reaching inside.
What is he doing? There’s nothing but junk in the closets.
He pulls out a box and drops it on the floor. Followed by another box. And another box. And another.
I stare in disbelief as one of them tips over and spills out onto the bedroom carpet. Its contents tumble onto the floor. Porcelain dolls with eerie glass eyes and frozen faces.
“You took the dolls,” I whisper. “You broke the window and hid them in here?”
Grant laughs. “What else were we going to do with them?”
“Why?”
“We were going to move them, but then you killed Jerry.” He drops a box on the floor and glares at me. “We didn’t know how much time we were going to have, and we still had to get the drugs out of the room upstairs. So we did what we could.”
“And you came back for them.” I lift my chin to look at him. “And for me, because I have the key.”
“That’s right.” Grant smiles.
He kneels and seizes my arm in a bruising grip, hauling me to my feet and hurling me inside the closet.
“What are you doing?”
“I could shoot you.” He shrugs. “But it makes a mess, and it’s hard to clean up. And I’m sure we can find some other use for you.”
I stare at him in shock.
“Don’t look too worried.” Grant shrugs. “We’ll kill you eventually, but it won’t be in an RV. Where someone can find you. No. It’ll be out in a field.” He waves the gun at me. “Kansas has lots of those. We’ll do it slow, too. Take lots of photos so we can spread them around in our little industry, so everyone knows what happens when people like you interfere.”
My lower lip is trembling, but I lift my head.
I’ve heard threats like this before.
“I’m not scared of you,” I whisper.
Grant blinks. “Oh, no, I don’t get my hands dirty.” He tucks the gun back into his jeans. “Don’t get me wrong. I’ll have a piece of you before we do it—for Jerry’s sake if nothing else. But no, we contract these things out.” He shrugs. “Real professionals, you get my meaning.”
My eyes are blurring with tears.
“You really should have said goodbye to your grandmother.” Grant smiles. “She isn’t going to know what happened to you. Nobody will.”
He kneels down and stares into my eyes. He pulls the gun again, waving it around in front of my face.
“If you ask real nice,” he starts, “we can send something to your boyfriend. Your ring finger, maybe? I’m sure he’d appreciate that.”
I must be out of my mind.
Either that, or I’m just tired of being the one who always gets tied up and threatened with various kinds of dismemberment.
Grant is in just the right position too.
I kick out my bound feet and catch his ankle, knocking it out from under him. He yelps and tilts forward, dropping the gun and smashing his face into the closet door. I can hear the cartilage in his nose snap.
I leap forward and try to grab the gun in my taped-up hands.
Too late. Grant is back on his feet, and now he’s kicking me. His pointy goth boots are like a jackhammer against my ribs. His fists rain on my head relentlessly. And he’s screaming too.
Finally he leaves me bent over and sobbing again, clutching my elbows to my aching body and gasping for air while he dashes the blood off his face.
He smirks at me, blood on his teeth.
“On second thought.” His eyes are black. “Maybe we’ll keep you alive for a while. You’re more fun than you look.”
I spit blood at his stupid boots.
Grant laughs and shuts the closet door, locking it.
I let myself collapse against the wall, tears spilling freely now.
Why me?
How does this keep happening to me? I’m a church secretary. Not a secret agent. Not a police officer. Not even a snappy dresser. How do I keep ending up in these situations? How many times can my nose get broken before it heals crooked? Will Aaron ever marry a girl with a crooked nose? Will I still be alive for Aaron to marry?
Oh, I can’t think like that.
I have to get out of here. I have to do something that will catch Gran’s attention. Or the attention of the cleaning crew at least. Surely there’s something I can do.
The RV rumbles beneath me, the deep, dark growl of the engine catching.
Well, that will get somebody’s attention.
But if the RV is running and Grant is driving, nobody can stop him now.
“What are we going to do?” I rest my bleeding face against the wall.
