Rules of Survival(71)
Mick ignored him and continued like he wasn’t even there. He was lost in his own world now. Swept up in a memory. “I’ve built up my resources over the years.” He chuckled. “I dare say I’m almost neck and neck with that fool Bengali. But Melissa had a talent for disappearing. That woman could drop off a grid like no one else.”
He thumped his chest and grinned. “She learned from the best. I got close quite a few times, but she always slipped past me. She always stayed one step ahead. Finally, I created John Jaffe and hired a collection of the best bounty hunters to do the legwork for me. Patrick was working for me all along, and the fool didn’t have a clue.”
“But why?” My voice cracked a bit. “Why not just leave her alone? She obviously wasn’t going to turn in the evidence.” Mom would have never gone to the cops. They would have arrested her for various other infractions, and with no family, I would have ended up in the system.
“Think about it from my point of view. That evidence was like a pendulum swinging back and forth over my head every damn day. Add that to the fact that she stole from me, and then left me. I gave her everything and she left me. She would have gone back to him eventually, and I wasn’t going to allow that.”
“Back to him? Back to who?”
Mick stomped his foot. “Patrick.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Wait—she and Patrick were involved?”
A fit of hysterical laughter overcame Mick. “Of course they were involved. Melissa was involved with everyone! That girl’s barn door was always open, so long as it got her where she needed to go. If not for me convincing her to get a DNA test done, we wouldn’t have any idea who your daddy was. You could have been related to that slob Bengali for all we knew,” he snapped as though I was a moron.
And really, I was. This entire thing had been about jealousy. Mom picked Patrick over Mick. He couldn’t handle it.
“From the moment she laid eyes on him, I was forgotten. Me, who’d been there since she was a kid. Me, who’d sacrificed everything for her. Me, who she claimed she loved!”
“So, she loved Pat,” Shaun said. I couldn’t see his face, but I could tell he was smiling. “You got her for a while—but it was by default, huh?”
Mick crossed the room in the blink of an eye and backhanded Shaun. The blow sent us both sideways. “She loved us both, she told me once. But I don’t share. And in the end I saw she just wasn’t worth it. Never had been.”
“And now?” Shaun asked.
“And now I wrap this up,” he said, retrieving a roll of duct tape from a nail across the room.
The tape peeling from the roll, and then the tearing sound it made as he ripped a long piece, echoed through the room. Without a word, he jammed the piece across Shaun’s mouth, then straightened to rip another.
“I have the evidence,” I screamed as he came at me with the tape. “If you kill us, then it’ll go straight to the police. I’ve got it all hooked up.”
Mick laughed. Not a short cackle or a lighthearted snicker, but an all-out belly laugh. When he finally got it under control, he sighed. “Just like Melissa. Never willing to give in. You don’t have anything.” He came forward with the tape again. “You didn’t even know about the evidence—or the truth.”
He smushed the tape across my lips as I tried once more to protest, and then hauled us to our feet. Once we were up, he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a small knife. Shaun tensed and I held my breath, but all Mick did was bend down to slice the tape around our wrists, and both our ankles so we could walk.
“Get moving,” he hissed, and shoved us toward the steps.
I could still smell the blueberries as we walked up the narrow stairs and through his living room. He steered us out the back door and around the right-hand corner of the house. Since the property was so far from the road and completely surrounded by trees, we were totally concealed. No one would see us being marched to our death.
“Move it,” Mick snapped when Shaun and I slowed our pace.
We were being herded down a thin wooded path and into the forest. Each step away from the house caused my heart to hammer just a little bit harder. Was he going to take us into the woods and shoot us like he had Mom? Stab us with that little knife in his pocket and leave us to slowly bleed to death? Maybe he planned to tie us to a tree, gagged with the duct tape, and simply leave us there to die from exposure and starvation. All the scenarios rampaging through my head were horrible and terrifying, but when we emerged from the path and I saw what lay several yards ahead, well, that’s when I really lost it.
I dug both feet in and started screaming. The noise was muffled and incoherent and anyone listening would probably write it off as an animal—because that’s what I sounded like. A crazed animal. Shaun must not have seen what I did at first, but when he did, probably remembering how I’d acted when I’d seen the pool outside the first hotel, he freaked, too.
In that moment, getting shot or stabbed or left for bear bait tied to a tree sounded like heaven compared to what it seemed Mick had planned. Ahead, on a short wooden deck, was a rope, a couple of cinder blocks…and a really big lake.
He was going to drown us.
Shaun kicked at Mick in one last desperate attempt for escape. It didn’t do much good, though. All he managed to do was catch him in the shin, which caused him to stumble and curse—not let go.