Unfiltered & Unsaved (14 page)

Skinner had a gun to his head.

And Solomon was sitting with the bag unzipped, a thin pile of money on the couch beside him. The rest of the contents were dumped on the floor.

“You fucking bitch,” he said. It was almost conversational. “Newspapers and magazines. You padded it out with salt on top. Classic con move. I’d have checked if I didn’t read you for a Praying Polly.”

“I pray,” she said. “But I’m not stupid. I didn’t bring the money.”

“You have about ten seconds to tell me where you stashed it, or Elijah’s meeting his maker. I’m done fucking around, and Skinner’s bored. When he gets bored, he kills things.”

“It’s a hobby,” Skinner said. He did something to the gun that made an audible click. “Six seconds.”

She felt sweat break hot on the back of her neck, though she felt ice-cold, watching Skinner’s face. Not a flicker of emotion there.

She couldn’t look at Elijah. She just couldn’t.

“I’ll give it to you,” she said to Solomon. “But first you have to let Elijah go free. Give him the van and let him drive away.”

“Do you think I’m kidding?” Solomon spat. “
Give me the money!
“

“I’ll tell you where it is. It’s almost a hundred thousand dollars, and it’s yours,
if
you give him the keys and cut him free and let him drive away.”

“Hope, don’t,” Elijah said. “He’ll never let us go.”

“I didn’t say us,” she said. “I said you. Just you.”

“A hundred thousand? Chump change, sweetheart, I make that a week selling off my old magazine girls,” Solomon said. “How do I know you’re being straight with me, anyway? Maybe there is no money. Maybe it’s another stall.”

“I’ll go with you to get it,” she said. “And then you can put a bullet in my head if I don’t deliver what I said.”

“Don’t,” Avita said suddenly, and grabbed for Solomon’s hand. “Baby, don’t do it. Don’t trust her. Just take what we’ve got and let’s get the hell out of here, okay? We’ve got enough!”

He hit her. It was done so fast Hope almost couldn’t process it—a quick, backhanded blow that rocked Avita back on the cushions and made her whimper and press a hand to her mouth in shock. “One thing you’d better learn, the people we deal with will take most of what we’ve got. So an extra hundred thou comes in real handy. Just shut up and do what I tell you. Go check on the girls.”

She scrambled up and walked down the hall. There were keys hanging on a hook at the end, and she grabbed them and unlocked one of the three closed doors.

The girls.

There were more people here. And Solomon had said,
we’d damn well better get a decent price for her.
As if she herself was merchandise.

He was selling girls, his
magazine girls
. Slave trading.

Hope felt sick, and shaky with anger. Her priorities had changed from just getting away to something else. Something better. She wanted to make sure they never, ever hurt anyone again.

But first, she had to save Elijah.

“I have a hundred thousand dollars,” she told Solomon again, in a calm, low voice. “I’ll take you straight to it. All you have to do is let E.J. go.”

“He must be a hell of a fuck,” Solomon said, and after a tense second gestured to Skinner. “Cut him loose. Give him the keys.”

“Boss …”

“Don’t give me any damn grief. Do it.”

Skinner shrugged, holstered the gun under his coat, and took out a switchblade that he flicked open to cut through the plastic restraints with a sharp tug. Elijah fell forward, caught himself on his freed hands, and looked up at Solomon. If looks could kill …

“You hurt her and I’ll make it my mission to find you,” Elijah said. “Swear to God.”

“You heard your girlfriend,” Solomon said. He dug in his pants pocket and tossed a key ring at Elijah, who caught it in cupped hands. “Get the hell out and don’t come back. Count yourself lucky. I ever see you again, you’re road kill.”

Elijah stood up. For a terrible instant she thought he’d ruin everything and jump Skinner, but then he focused on her face and stepped close to her. Kissing close.

“I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving you with him.”

“You have to,” she said, and kissed him. It wasn’t a long kiss, but it burned like lightning, and she felt everything pour between them—all the fear, the anger, the frustration. She put her lips very close to his ear and whispered, “I have a plan, and you have to go, Elijah. Just trust me.” Then she pulled back, licked the taste of him off her lips, and said, “Please go now.”

He didn’t want to, she could see that; it was ripping him apart, and she saw his instincts screaming at him to stay. She gave him a single, calm nod.
It’s okay. I’ve got this.
He understood, but even then, she wasn’t sure he’d agree until Skinner shoved him toward the front door.

He hesitated in the doorway for a long minute and said, “This isn’t over.”

“No, it’s not,” she agreed, and somehow managed to smile for him. “I promise.”

She waited until she saw him climb into the van, start it, and turn it back down the dirt road.

“That was sweet,” Skinner said, once the engine’s thunder had faded to a rumble. “I’m overflowing with emotion. Problem is, that emotion is mostly nausea, so let’s get this show on the road. Time to put out, princess.”

She nodded. “The money’s in a rental car,” she said. “I thought you might search mine, so I switched and put the money in the trunk of the rental. I’ll tell you where it is. The car key is in the ASU-RV bag you’ve got, in the bottom.”

He fished around and came up with a tagged car key, grunted, and tossed it to Skinner. “Where’s it parked?”

“Back where you picked me up. Main parking lot behind the University Center.”

He nodded to Skinner. “Bring her,” he said. “If she’s lying to us again, you know what to do. No hesitation.”

“No problem,” Skinner said. “What about the others?”

“Leave them,” Solomon said. He stuffed the small amount of cash back in the ASU-RV duffel and zipped it closed. The magazines and newspapers he left on the floor. “We’ll come back for them later, especially Avita. I already got buyers for that baby. It’s going to make us very, very rich.”

Skinner grabbed her elbow and towed her toward the door. Hope glanced over her shoulder to see Avita coming down the hall; she’d missed the conversation, and she hurried toward Solomon and demanded to know what was going on.

He shoved her down the hall and into a room, slammed the door, and locked it. Avita knocked on the door, then hammered. Then she screamed, as the truth really dawned on her.

She wasn’t a partner. She was just another victim now. Hope almost—almost—felt sorry for her. She definitely felt sorry for the baby.

“Let’s go,” Solomon said, and pushed past Hope and Skinner to leave the house.

“You can’t let him just leave them to starve,” she said to Skinner. “I know you’re hard, but …”

“They’ve got food and water in those rooms,” he said. “We fill them up every week. We’ll send a truck back for them in a couple of days. Now you’d better worry about yourself, because if you lied to him, you’ll wish you were one of them.”

There was another car parked behind the house—Skinner’s car, the one he’d used to chase her and Elijah. That seemed like a lifetime ago. She didn’t even know who that Hope had been, or the version before her who’d been so terrified and traumatized by the killing in The Coffee Cave. She certainly had almost no connection to the Hope before
that
, the one who thought she understood the world and her place in it.

It was as if she’d broken through a thin spot of the world and plunged into another level, and then another. It couldn’t be hell, because it had Elijah in it, but it also had Skinner and Solomon and Avita, and the sad, desperate girls she hadn’t seen behind those doors, and she suspected that their worlds were even lower and darker than her own.

When she’d set out to do good with her stolen money, she’d had no idea how much bad there was to repair. It had just been a concept, not a fact. Not a hard, sweaty man shoving into the back seat next to her who’d just locked his pregnant teen girlfriend in a cell, intending to sell her to the highest bidder.

Hope did the only thing she could, as the car started and began to rattle over the rough gravel surface of the forgotten road.

She bowed her head, and prayed.

###

It was a long, silent drive back to the campus in Flagstaff. Now that she had a view from the windows, it wasn’t much more pleasant, even though she cracked the window to get a hot breeze on her face. Solomon didn’t bother to talk to her, and Skinner was his usual silent self.

She wondered where Elijah had gone, and hoped it was far away.

The desert seemed to pass endlessly, until suddenly it was gone and they were in Flagstaff, and things seemed to be rushing at her with breakneck speed. Oddly, though, Hope felt free now. Peaceful. She’d made her choices and she was happy with what she’d decided, whatever happened to her. She’d wanted to do good, and somehow she thought this was the best she could aim for—not just for Elijah, but for so many more she’d never even met.

Skinner turned the car into the NAU parking lot. “Which way?” he asked, and his eyes met Hope’s in the rear view mirror.

“Let’s go,” Solomon agreed. “Point it out.”

She scanned the lot. Her heart was pounding now, and so was her head, and she thought she might be sick. There were four or five students, chatting in a group, and another two or three sitting on benches nearby. Typical, and peaceful.

“The maroon Ford, second row,” she said.

She saw another student in a ball cap striding across the grass. He was hunched over, hands in his pockets, but there was something familiar about him … and then she spotted the white van parked on the street.

Elijah.
He’d followed them.
She’d hoped he wouldn’t, but she couldn’t deny that seeing him made her feel faint with relief—and tense with fear, because if he decided to rush to her rescue things could still go very, very wrong.
Stay there,
she thought, and prayed that somehow he would get the message.
Trust me. Please, trust me.

“Let’s go,” she blurted, and pointed at the rental car she’d left. “I want this over with.”

Solomon frowned, but nodded. Skinner parked the car and “helped” her out, then kept a firm hold on Hope’s arm as he and Solomon walked her to the clean car she’d pointed out. Solomon took the key fob from his coat pocket pointed it at the vehicle and pressed the button to unlock it.

There was a soft click, and the trunk popped open a half an inch.

Solomon opened it and stared inside, then grabbed the Northern Arizona University duffel she’d bought, and unzipped it. Hope saw the stacks of cash inside, and felt a sharp pang of relief.

It wasn’t her problem anymore. Thank God.

“That’s not a hundred thousand,” he said. “What the hell are you pulling, bitch?”

“That’s all I had left,” she said. “I started with a hundred thousand. That’s about forty thousand. But it’s real. Take it and walk away.”

For a long second, she thought he’d do something terrible, something final, but then he nodded to Skinner as he zipped it closed again. “Fuck it, it’s better than nothing. Let her go.”

“You want to take this car?”

“No, idiot, it’s a rental. They chip these things now, and they’d run us down in no time. We’ll take yours. With this, we can buy ourselves something new and fast down the road.”

Solomon high fived Skinner, and oddly, it was in that moment that she realized they weren’t all that much older than Elijah after all, for all she’d thought of them as middle-aged. Thirties, maybe. Perhaps they’d come up through the ranks of the magazine slaves and started their own human trafficking business. Whatever their story was …

… their story was just about over.

Skinner let go of her, and she walked away on unsteady legs. She could see Elijah heading toward her, no longer just walking.

She also saw the innocent students who’d been loitering in the lot transform. They broke up and moved toward the car with long, loping steps, and they were all holding guns now.

The oldest one, Hispanic, got there first, and yelled out, “Police, drop the bag! Drop it now! Face down on the ground!”

Solomon whirled toward him, and Skinner went for his gun. They both froze when they saw the weapons pointed at them.

Solomon dropped the bag to the ground with a thump and looked past the cops to Hope, and there was murder in that stare. Raw, cold murder.

Then Elijah reached her, grabbed her, and lifted her in his arms to kiss her.

“We have to go,” she said, when she pulled back from that delicious, desperate embrace. “Hurry.”

He didn’t ask why.

They ran for the van, leaving Solomon and Skinner and the cops behind, ignoring the yells of the police to stop.

Elijah didn’t ask any questions until they were out of Flagstaff and heading out of town at a hell-bent pace the van wasn’t really equipped for. “What the
hell
was that?”

Hope sighed. “I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t—”

“Jesus, are you a Fed?”

She laughed. And then laughed some more. And couldn’t stop, though nausea twisted at her gut. Elijah watched her in alarm, but he didn’t say anything until she’d finally hiccupped to a stop. “No,” she managed to say. “No, I’m not a federal agent. Or a cop. Or anything at all, really.”

“Then how the hell did you do that?”

“Brittany,” she said. “She told them I’d found some men who were dealing drugs.” She reached into her waistband and dug the phone out of her underwear. “She gave them this number and had them track it. They knew where I was the whole time. They were waiting at the car because she told them where to find it, and told them I stole Solomon’s money.”

She took the phone, unrolled the window, and tossed it out into the desert.

“Not to be crude, but that’s a lot of trust to put in a girl who can’t remember the name of the last guy she fucked,” Elijah said. “Wait, so the police think you’re a thief now?”

“Well,” she said. “I kind of am a thief. We’re driving their van, aren’t we?”